Spirit

Poem Exchange on Statues

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I had an exchange with a friend several weeks ago on the tearing down of statues; we only wrote to one another, at first, in poems, and we wrote our poems in under an hour, so excuse us the flaws in our work. I offer it to you here as an interruption in programming, before the event recedes too much in the rearview mirror.

I am not an iconoclast, although I wholeheartedly endorse removing statues to Confederate generals and those whose purpose was wrapped up in the institution of slavery. This trend can, of course, go far past the original target. I feel this awkward need simultaneously to apologize for the poem and to explain it and even (at least in part) to justify it.

Here are the poems; I will say a few words of explanation after them. Continue reading →

The Pandemic, and the Question of Value in Nature

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Is valuing always a human activity (is it something relative to our purposes), or is value something — say some quality or class of qualities — to which we can become more sensitive? Do we project it, or do we discover it?

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More Reflections on Star Wars — Myth?

/ gregorystackpole / 2 Comments

I wrote a post about Star Wars. This is not my typical content.  I’ll post a few more. I may need some catharsis.

Here is one on the question of the mythic dimensions in Star Wars — or the question of whether, and to what degree, there are mythic strands in it. 

As I mentioned in the first post, were I to be responsible, I’d buy and read the recent biography of George Lucas before writing this (more likely, I’d listen to it on Audible). I’d look at the concept art books or the Ralph McQuarrie art boxed set or the storyboards for the original trilogy. I’d read the books that dealt with how the movies were made — volumes on A New Hope, or The Empire Strikes Back, or Return of the Jedi. I’d find and finally read my copy of How Star Wars Conquered the Universe, or any number of other texts that would give me access to the history of George Lucas, Lucasfilm, and the production dramas and decisions that resulted in so many of these films. (Buy those books! I’ll get a few pennies to spend on the coffee needed to keep writing blog posts.)

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Some Reflections on Star Wars — Is It Entertainment, or a Modern Myth?

/ gregorystackpole / 21 Comments

“Star Wars is too aware of itself”, a friend of mine once said. Now that the ninth and (presumably) final entry in the Skywalker franchise is out, Disney+ has released its widely-acclaimed The Mandalorian series, and other major Star Wars media are being announced, it seems appropriate to reflect on the cultural place of Star Wars for a moment. (Or maybe you’d prefer to watch a Star Wars fan make fun of people who would take Star Wars seriously.) 

TL;DR: I would not normally write about pop culture here, if it weren’t that I’m writing about Star Wars, and Star Wars is held by many (not all) to aim to provide a myth for the modern era, and to offer a means of re-enchantment. Does it? 

Star Wars as a franchise is still very profitable, but there are not a few who hold that it is feeding off the body of Star Wars as an institution, and who go on, further, to claim that Star Wars as an institution is in peril. These two positions –(1) Star Wars is only a pop-culture entertainment franchise and (2) Star Wars is essentially an institution which expresses mythological themes for the modern age– are incompatible. 

Some hold that the ultimate purpose of Star Wars is to entertain us while providing a reliable return-on-investment to shareholders; it is a comic book set in space, entertaining, and perhaps exhausted, nothing more than a jumbled inventory of familiar characters (it’s Lando! –it’s Chewbacca!), vehicles (look, it’s an X-Wing! –an AT-ST!), paraphernalia (look, blue/green milk! –carbonite freezing!), locations (look, Tatooine!), plot beats (look, Rebel characters dressing up as storm troopers to break into an Imperial base…again!), and overused lines (e.g., “I have a bad feeling about this”). This perspective takes it as essentially a  kitschy self-referential iconography. 

Others claim that its role is to give a pop-culture expression to the perennial issues found in the source material that made the saga interesting in the first place. These would say that if the brand does not identify its soul in the source material that inspired it (I’m not talking about recycling Ralph McQuarrie’s old pre-1977 concept art, but renegade Samurai wandering the landscape, looking for redemption, ethics drawn from Stoicism and Buddhist monasticism and Christian knighthood with a semi-Taoist cosmology), it will just be a bunch of familiar things — and, if that’s all it is, then this means that it is already exhausted. 

It is not entirely clear to me which of these two things Star Wars is, though I incline nowadays to think that it is essentially entertainment that dips into mythological themes — and it does dip into the mythological for at least the first two movies, even if the films on the whole do not qualify as a fully fledged myth. (The Clone Wars TV show has some serious searching of spiritual and ethical themes in many episodes, as I recall, but ethics and spirituality are one step subordinate to myth.) That does not necessarily mean we should regard Star Wars as an institution, even though it has a strong place within popular culture.

Were I to be responsible, I’d buy and read the recent biography of George Lucas before writing this (more likely, I’d listen to it on Audible). I’d look at the concept art books or the Ralph McQuarrie art boxed set or the storyboards for the original trilogy. I’d read the books that dealt with how the movies were made — volumes on A New Hope, or The Empire Strikes Back, or Return of the Jedi. I’d find and finally read my copy of How Star Wars Conquered the Universe, or any number of other texts that would give me access to the history of George Lucas, Lucasfilm, and the production dramas and decisions that resulted in so many of these films. (Buy those books! I’ll get a few pennies to spend on the coffee needed to keep writing blog posts.)

Continue reading →

Ben Lerner, 10:04

/ gregorystackpole / 7 Comments

I’ve just finished Ben Lerner’s metafictional novel 10:04, and I recommend you buy it. Not just because, if you buy through that link I just offered, I’ll get a ridiculously small commission that will pay for about one tenth of one mile of gas on a 24mpg car, but because it has made me think a great deal about a number of themes in my own life: the character of our relationships, our material connections to other people near and far, the character and value (and non-value) of art, the possibility of an individual and a shared future, the overlap between the past and the present (and the future), the ways that arriving futures can affect the nature of the history leading up to them (a history that fails to achieve realization can vanish like Michael J. Fox’s hand in Back to the Future – for which this book is named), and the redemptive possibilities within life and history.

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