Leipzig & Dresden

From Wittenberg it was not far to Leipzig, an ancient market city whose name I still cannot properly pronounce despite hearing it said many times. From the hulking main train terminal, a bustling tram whisked me to an inner suburb, where I stayed with an apartment building where you hung your clothes up in the attic, in a climate so cold and damp it’s a wonder anything ever dries out.

Leipzig is a town filled with historical buildings, stone towers popping up at every turn, and yet one of the most striking building I encountered was this crystalline neogothic Paulinum, the oratory of the University of Leipzig, which replaced the university church which had been destroyed by the communist government of East Germany back in the 60s. As with every place inhabited this long, the beauty of the built environment is inseparable from destruction – but this building is very beautiful.

I did not come to Leipzig for the university, however, but to see the town’s favorite son: Johann Sebastian Bach. Bach spent much of his career as the cantor of Leipzig’s Thomaskirche, shown above, and it was here that he composed much of the music that still pervades and defines our world today. He was buried at the church, but over the years as Bach’s fame grew and the church was rebuilt, he was moved incrementally closer to the altar, until things finally reached the point where it really should be called St. Bach’s Church instead of St. Thomas’, since he occupies a position more prominent than most monarchs in other churches.

After visiting the great composer and walking past the former home of Schumann, another great musician, I fell into a sort of arts and crafts fair at the applied arts museum, which I acquired a ticket to by accident, since I did not really understand what was being said. I don’t have any pictures, but it was a fascinating thing to see a modern day bazaar continuing in this ancient market town.

The next day I continued on to Dresden, a town only familiar to me as a place we destroyed during the war. The famous photograph of the city I had seen always depicted the Cathedral of the Holy Trinity’s gargoyles gaping out over the blasted wreck of the city.

I don’t know if I can really unpack my complex feelings about the bombing of cities during the war. If I think about civilians on the ground, I become very angry, and I don’t think that’s wrong, but I also think it can be a manifestation of a proud desire for moral superiority, a sort of arrogant purity. Then if you bring in the victims of German aggression, and factor in the righteous fury that seeks to blast a rampaging evil, it gets even more complicated. At the same time, I think that we have to hold ourselves to high moral standards in war, or else what’s the point of fighting – but there’s always the Sherman argument, which was once articulate by a very dear old friend, who had lived through the war as a child in his native Japan, and who was personally grateful that the planned invasion had bene averted by the bombing. But of course he did not live in Hiroshima. I also think of my great-great-uncle who navigated his heavy bomber into Germany and set the bomb targets, and who was ultimately killed by his own payload in April 1944. But today Germany is free and no longer a terror, and Dresden is peaceful and beautiful, and you would not know it had ever burned, were it not for the blackened stones.

Entering the core of the city I was struck by the enormity of this mural, the Furstenzug, which adorns the outer wall of the castle and depicts the many rulers of Dresden. These were the Electors of Saxony, and if you’re wondering why a powerful potentate’s primary title would simply be ‘Elector,’ allow me to introduce you to the insane political contraption known as the Holy Roman Empire. For centuries the land we now think of as Germany was a loose confederation of over a thousand principalities, ranging in size from vast provinces like Dresden’s own Saxony to small towns and abbeys. These were ruled by people with titles like Landgrave, Margrave, and even Bishop and King, but the few Electors held enormous power, because they inherited the right to choose the Emperor. But even this was not straightforward; you see, one of the traditional Electors was the King of Bohemia, which is now the Czech Republic. But Bohemia was neither a German-speaking kingdom nor really a part of the Holy Roman Empire (although I’ve read contradictory views on that, which speaks to the messiness of the whole situation), and its King was also elected by the local nobility. For many years what typically happened was that the Austrian Hapsburg Archduke would be elected King of Bohemia by the Czech nobility, and he would then turn around and in his capacity as king of a country whose language he did not necessarily even speak, he would vote to elect himself Emperor.

At any rate, some of these Electors of Saxony loved collecting, and in their palace you now can view their enormous trove of delights. Here are a very few of the many I saw:

Understand that these ivory spheres had to each be carved in situ within the outer sphere, from a single piece of ivory.

This is a sculpture of a real individual who was a very popular court fool in Dresden. Apparently there is a removable panel on the cart which reveals his bare bum. It’s fascinating to think about something like this being commissioned from a master craftsmen, all as a sort of crass joke celebrating in mockery a living person.

This depiction of an oriental court is one of the most lavish miniatures I’ve ever seen, and if you’re ever in Dresden you have to see it.

I was initially drawn to this weapon because it’s a massive sword, and I was once a child obsessed with swords, but on closer examination it suddenly becomes very strange and arresting, because of the shrieking demonic face above the blade. I’m not superstitious, but I would think twice about killing someone with this.

This is a sample of the Electoral drip. Just imagine when this was all the rage.

After my time in the palace, I strolled through a city bustling with life in the gentle October air. The squares were filled with people laughing and enjoying themselves. Along the Elbe the sky drew down a lush curtain, even as some sort of calm march made its way into the city, preceded by the cobalt flicker of police vans.

The next day I spent hours in the Old Master’s Gallery of the Zwinger, but I don’t have any pictures of that, because I don’t take pictures of two-dimensional paintings. Then, I crossed the bridge through a mist of wind-driven droplets, and caught a train for the hills.   

Mitteleuropa: Wittenberg

It’s been longer than I planned since I last wrote. It feels as though I write this at the beginning of every post, and it also seems as though I begin each one with a disclaimer that I have very little to actually say. In this case it seems to actually be true: the main thing I have to offer is pictures, so this blog will be little beyond glorified captions.

So, picking up where I left off in last October, I rose early one morning, slipped out of the hostel and onto the U-bahn to the hauptbahnhof, and then onto a train headed southwest. As the country slid by under the clear autumn sun, my disillusionment with Europe and anxiety about social interaction in a foreign tongue slipped into the background, and I was once more captivated by the physical idea of Europe, which of course provoked its own sort of anxiety – an anxiety of longing. Looking out over the landscape, I saw exactly what I expected, and yet could not quite wrap my head around how a place exists that is open and flat, and yet is only covered in copses of trees and fields so green as to almost be teal. I’m from the American west, a place of famously vast open spaces, but where I live, the flat land is largely developed, and even in rural areas, it’s just not that green. It’s fascinating to see a place so settled and physically civilized, and yet also so agricultural and wet and mild. I struggle to think of anywhere else in the world quite like it, and I want to live there, and worry that I can’t.

After a couple hours, I arrived at Wittenberg, which some years ago changed its official name to Lutherstadt-Wittenberg, just so tourists and pilgrims wouldn’t be confused about where they should go if they want to see Marty. The town is small, ancient, and possesses the idyllic charm that I just cannot quite articulate or ever seem to hold on to. It’s less to do with the town, and more to do with it’s setting in the countryside, with the sun on yellow leaves as you walk from the station to the town, or maybe even just nostalgia projected back five months and colored by the new wave song I’m listening to right now. I think everything I start writing after about a paragraph turns into a recursive loop of chasing that sense of very specific yet indefinable longing, and with it the frustration that I can’t live there, and the embarrassment that I’m writing in circles yet again. I want to think that surfacing this thought process is interesting or truthful or artistic in some sense, but I’m not convinced it is.

There are two main historical churches in Wittenberg, and both are closely associated with Martin Luther. To reach them, or really to get anywhere in the old town, there are only two narrow, parallel streets along which the city stretches in a line.

There is, of course, a great central square, starring statues of Luther and Melancthon, as well as buildings that look like Herr Mendels’ confections. Here is the Stadtkirche, while further west is the Schlosskirche, with its great drum of a tower.

It is here, in the side of the Schlosskirche, the Castle Church, that Luther is said to have nailed his theses to the church door. While the exact form of this original protest is subject to some historical debate, the door possesses enormous symbolic value, so it’s a shame that the original was destroyed in a fire centuries ago. It has since been replaced by a great metal door, with all 95 theses stamped into the door itself – a reflection of how the outsider revolt of the Reformation quickly became the dominant religious power in the area.

The interior of the church holds Luther’s mortal remains, and like all these grand churches, when the light is right, it is a place of great Mystery. For me, Luther is a figure that I took for granted growing up, despite my protestant faith. Perhaps it was my aversion to making too much of particular church fathers, in the same way that protestants can be skeptical of saints, that led me to not care much about Luther. Or perhaps I just was more interested in military history as a child. Now, as an adult, my feelings on Luther are more complicated. I’ve studied the medieval world that preceded him extensively, and I love it, and don’t wish to discount its traditions and insights; but I also am enormously grateful that I don’t live in that religious context, with the focus on fear and works and a hierarchy on earth. At the same time, my struggles with my own protestant beliefs extends to a caution around the reformers of the sixteenth century, a fear of what they said – though that fear gains power from my belief that they are right in many ways. So, coming to the epicenter of that revolution in faith is like approaching the center of a vortex. Only now all is calm there, and the storm has long since passed by to other climes.

From the tower, you can see the town that birthed this great turning of the world’s gyre that ultimately led to the particular faith I hold dear. It’s a small and sleepy town, surrounded by a land of green trees and fields, and white windmills, beating out the march of time against the sky.

Mitteleuropa: Berlin

I am always revolving plans and ideas of places I’d like to go, spinning half a dozen plates at any given time, because it’s fun to check out guidebooks and digitally stick pins on google maps, and because I need to convince myself I actually will go everywhere – even though increasingly I feel myself running out of time.

This past year I had been contemplating a return to Japan, but the prolonged closure of the country led me to change plans at nearly the last minute, and pivot to a region I that had long fascinated me, and yet which I knew comparatively little about: central Europe, or Mitteleuropa.

Now, the idea of there being a central Europe is a little bit contested, since traditionally everyone breaks Europe into west and east, but I prefer to think of it as having a central core around the old Holy Roman Empire, the Hapsburg domains, and, of course, Poland.

I had been fascinated by this area because of the images I saw from it, pictures of castles, of green firs, a dark and cold climate like my home, and cities that were entirely grey. I love all medieval history, but my studies skewed to the west, to France and Britain, and even south to Italy. I knew very little of the eastern half of Charlemagne’s empire and had no real sense of how the Hapsburg concatenation had ever agglomerated in the first place. But I was fascinated with Germany, with the old Hanseatic cities, and with the dark primeval forest in which my ancestors once worshipped stocks and stones. And it was also the site of the Iron Curtain, and in my mind an image of a grey, rain-clean Berlin in the 80s had become associated with a strange nostalgia I had for the Cold War, for the music of the time. This of course is very silly, especially since I have no experience of this time or place, but it’s been in my mind with nostalgia since I was a child looking at old pictures in encyclopedias.

So, with all of that strange and unreal baggage, I boarded a flight to Berlin.

On takeoff, I looked down on Seattle and could barely see the duskling city; it lay trapped beneath what looked like a black mesh, but it was really a veil of smoke, the malingering spume of summer. I was glad to be out of that black air.

After transiting through Charles De Gaulle, an airport that did its best to play up every French stereotype, stuffed with chocolateries and perfumeries, and yet still stuffed with Starbucks (they did their best to make them seem extra-fancy), I arrived in Berlin. Immediately I became stressed about the trains, compulsively checking to make sure I had the right ticket, in case I got caught by a conductor. In this mood, weighed down by a lopsided pack and self-conscious that my (perfectly-good) mask was not quite the exact standard for German transit (despite the fact that I saw many Germans simply disregarding the injunction to wear masks altogether), I slid into Berlin on an elevated S-bahn line just as the sun was going down.

In the morning I exited my hostel and found myself in an excellent example of the typical street in every city I visited on my trip. All of central Europe feels like this; flush mid-height apartments in either this style, or an even blockier communist style if the site had been sufficiently bombed, with ubiquitous graffiti at street level. I was immediately charmed by all the folks cycling to work, the children going to school – in short, the American’s European fantasy of the walkable, person-oriented city.

However, I shortly encountered a problem that would plague me for the rest of the trip: I became anxious about entering restaurants, self-conscious about my lack of German. Over the course of the trip this would push me to avoid many restaurants, to prefer coffeeshops where I felt more in control because I knew exactly what to get, or even fast food places. This sort of self-consciousness at not speaking the language, the fear of being judged as annoyingly out of place, has only happened to me on this trip and when I was in Spain and Portugal. The rest of my travels have either been in English-speaking countries, or in Asia, where I am obviously a foreigner and there’s no sense I will out myself as one by opening my mouth. I actually felt more comfortable and at home in rural Japan than in a European capital. At the same time as I felt this social anxiety, I felt anxiety that I was wasting my opportunity to try good German food, and betraying all the planning and research I had done for my trip. This is something that I struggle with – I make plans, and then when the moment to execute them comes, I don’t feel like doing it, for a myriad range of reasons, which then in turn makes planning feel futile, and creates a feedback loop of discouragement and self-loathing. And all of this just over where to eat!

That first morning I did find a nice bakery though, which was very good indeed.

I will say this – I’m anxious now, writing this, because I can feel that my memory has warped in exactly the way I knew it would. When I planned the trip, I was full of excited anticipation, and romanticized Europe; while on my trip, I was frequently stressed, tired, frustrated and critical of the places I traveled, and desiring to be home; and now that I am home, I romanticize it again and remember all the good things. I knew this would happen while on my trip, and it worried me at the time, that my view of travel is never aligned with my experience. What is gained by actually going somewhere if your memory of it aligns more with the fantasy than how you felt at the time, and how do I enjoy my hobby of planning more trips if I know that actually I experience them more negatively while actually traveling?                                        

One thing that hovered over the entire trip was the awareness that despite Europe’s advanced level of development and centrality in the western imagination as a hub of civilization, violence is always proximate. You could see it in the bullet holes on buildings left from the fall of Berlin at the end of the War, in the many physical reminders of the decades of Soviet repression and brutality, and in the constant awareness of the current war in Ukraine – not very far away. In America it’s difficult to reconcile the idea of a war that impacts civilians with our conception of first-world middle-class life, because for the past century and a half those wars have all happened overseas, and even when these wars happened on American soil they were tempered by the shared culture of the combatants – we fought ourselves, we fought the British and Canadians, and we fought (mostly) between the ages of razing cities.

I had my own personal struggle as well. Shortly after arriving, I decided to declare war on Europe over a single, all-important issue: the serving size of coffee. Everywhere I went, I found it nearly impossible to get a decent-sized latte. Even a puny twelve ounces were hard to come by unless I gave in and went to a Starbucks, which I was loath to do. The coffee in Europe is great, but we must have more of it, and I don’t mean watered-down Americanos – I mean a simple increase in quantity. At home I drink a minimum of two litres of coffee with cream per day, and that’s a baseline. I think it’s time for a new crusade, it’s time for America to reinvade Europe and upgrade their culture on coffee sizes to something approaching what might satisfy a human.

The vestiges of communism were everywhere in East Berlin, and surprisingly quite prominent. They seem to have been embraced as part of a shared history, integrating the disparate experiences of the two Germanys – or at least that’s what this foreign tourist made up in his head without doing any research. Still, I was genuinely surprised to find Marx-Engels-Forum still prominently featuring its namesakes.

After visited the medieval quarter and a superb statue of lionized violence, St. George crushing the dragon, I visited the Pergamon Museum, a building housing entire structures taken piece by piece from the near East and brought to Germany, presumably by some of the same guys Indiana Jones used to fight. (Ok, that may be a bit uncharitable – in some cases).

Here’s a good reminder that wars have always been with us. And I also found a fragment of the Epic of Gilgamesh, a story in which a man of selfish violence seeks meaning in the wilderness of his life.

Speaking of the enduring power of words, I visited Bebelplatz, the square in front of the university, in which the Nazis held their infamous book burnings, philistine bacchanals born of the fear of the truth. Processing down the central street of Berlin, Unter den Linden, I was encouraged that things can be restored, and new growth can spring up: Hitler had cut all of the trees to replace them with dead stone eagles, yet here they are again in all their glory.

Next to the famous Brandenburg Gate is the vast Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, permanently impressed onto the center of Berlin.

Its sea of coffin-like blocks cedes an entire city block to the dead, and it draws you in, swallowing you. But now the memorial is full of children running and laughing, or silly teens on their phones, as tourists wander through it. Across the street in the Tiergarten is another memorial, much smaller and less prominent, to the many gay people murdered by the Nazis. A single block, cousin to those in the larger memorial, contains a tiny portal, within which a film of gay couples kissing plays constantly.

And, if you proceed through the Tiergarten, a vast and native expanse of green, you come to third, more shockingly incongruous memorial: the memorial to the Soviet troops who finally broke the Nazi regime at the fall of Berlin. Of course it makes sense they would have a memorial, not only because the Soviets occupied the city and built one, but because of their great achievement in defeating Hitler. At the same time, it’s strange to see a prominent and well-maintained memorial to an invading army who vengefully raped their way through Berlin. Even with the context of all the evil they were responding to, it still feels strange.

Nearby stands the center of German government, somehow still here after all the fire and blood that has washed over it: the Reichstag.

It stands amidst a beautiful stretch of park and Spree waterfront, surrounded by pristine modern government buildings erected in the postwar era of clean European architecture I have loved since I was a child.

Walking home, I found other shadows of the past: the New Synagogue of Berlin, for instance, and bullet holes outside a church whose leadership had been divided on the question of acquiescence to the Nazis, and which would later play host to Martin Luther King Jr. speaking for justice while in Communist East Berlin.

Over the four days I spent in Berlin, I visited a number of wonderful museums, and saw a vast amount of art and artifacts. If you view enough medieval art, you quickly become familiar with its memetic quality, as the same religious subjects and scenes are depicted again and again and again. This is one of the many many depictions of the deposition of Christ’s body I saw:

There were interesting figures like this one:

Strange relics like this Byzantine gambling machine:

And then there was, uh… this:

I have nothing illuminating to say about this one, sorry.

Above all, I spent a huge amount of time walking all over Berlin, ogling the architecture, which included a water tower that had somehow became an apartment building, and the many looming hulks of commie blocks.

And of course, here and there, I ran into bits of the wall, shadows of the line that once had cut lives in two.

This last image of the wall was taken from the boundary of a plot of land which now houses a museum, but which once contained a building that served as the shared headquarters of both the Gestapo and the SS. Inside, the exhibits detail the full, excruciating history of the Nazis arc in power, and constantly reiterate the message that their crimes would have been impossible, but for the acquiescence, on a variety of levels, of the German public. Germany had been, albeit briefly, a liberal democracy. These things can and do happen, and if you are not careful, you will be without excuse when they do.

I also visited a museum to the various German resistance movements, which is housed in the naval office building where the famous conspiracy to assassinate Hitler was concocted. Here, in the courtyard, the principal conspirators were shot.

That same day, I toured the headquarters of the Stasi, the East German secret police, who kept files on every single person in the DDR. In their attempts to intimidate those they viewed as dissidents, they emulated the Georg Cukor movie Gaslight, which gave its name to the term gaslighting – in the case of one activist, the Stasi would enter her apartment while she was away and rearrange various household objects.

Finally, I ended my time in Berlin with a sunset walk along the Spree, along a section of the wall which has been reclaimed as a colorful canvas for the freed city. After all that has happened to Berlin, life continues and grows in beauty.

Ave 2023

Another year comes, and here we are, now.

I wanted to post in the new year, in lieu of writing a Christmas letter (although I have actually never written a Christmas letter). The rule with such things is to recap your year, and to wish others good cheer. However, I’m too melancholy and my year has been too uneventful for that to work. Also, I’m not sure if blogging as an act of self-expression even makes sense in 2023, both because it’s so old-fashioned, and because it seems selfish to trick good folks out of a couple minutes when I don’t really have anything much to say. Ah well.

In January I was fortunate to get a new job doing administrative work for a small company that tests backflows on water lines. The people I work with are lovely, and I’m very grateful to have steady work after the disruption of the last couple years. In the spring my church merged with another local church, which meant I got to know many new faces, which has done me good. Finally, this last fall I traveled overseas for the first time since 2017 (which for me feels like an interminable gap). I’ll try to post more about that later, but I visited a series of central European capitals and historical sites. Two themes dominated: first, the Habsburgs, and with them the history of the Thirty Years’ War, in which neighboring potentates violently intervened in Germany to shore up their own political positions. The second was the holocaust. I followed its trail, from SS headquarters in Berlin, to the so-called “transit ghetto” of Theresienstadt, and finally to Auschwitz. When I left the camp and headed for nearby Krakow in southeast Poland, I found Ukrainians there, fleeing their own violent terrors. To paraphrase Eliot, “history is now.”

For our world, then, the year has been anything but uneventful. American politics remains both chaotic and goofy, simultaneously (un)/serious, and as fractious as ever. Mired each in our narratives, it’s hard to say what direction anything is really going. In Ukraine, we see a more bald-faced aggression than we’re used to, although this is in some ways simply more high-profile, or more noticed in our media; there are other countries were this violence is nothing new (Yemen, Ethiopia, DRC, etc.). And there is the great silence from Uyghuristan. And yet we cannot disengage with each other: western Europe can’t seem to do without Russian gas, the US economy can’t disown China, and there can be no national divorce here at home. Yet selfish nationalism, if I can call it that, seems rampart across the globe, and if it remains unchecked, it will lead to more sputterings of violence, smoldering away at the seams of our community. I feel that we must try honestly, for once, to live up to a set of moral, liberal international principles in our foreign policy, or else it will just be universal hypocrisy, and there won’t be any decent alternative.

But I feel a bit hypocritical myself. I say that nations must be selfless, but I myself want to save up money for myself, while others are in poverty around me. And that speaks to the tension I live with – I remain deeply committed in my faith, because without it there’s no real chance of hope beyond this broken world, and yet I am conflicted about what exactly it requires of me. I find myself often struggling between more conservative, traditionally orthodox theology, which I believe intellectually, and more ‘liberal’ Christians (for lack of a better term) who I often feel much in common with. It’s difficult to make emotional sense of truth at times. I’m trying to work my way forward, but I’m not sure if I’m making progress, or where exactly I’m going.

That’s really the takeaway from 2022: I don’t know where I’m going. I plan endlessly, but doubt I will follow any of them to conclusion, either from indiscipline or simply because they were never achievable to begin with. Progress seems too slow, given the speed at which life passes, and I’m unsure if what I’m doing is worthwhile. I feel as though things have turned a corner from the sense of broad possibility I took for granted in my twenties, and now the uncertainty of the future feels less like opportunity and more like doubtful mediocrity. Still, bearing up hope in the praxis of small steps, I move into 2023. I hope that it will be interesting. I hope that you shall all be well.  

A Far Better Thing

[Spoilers for a forty-year-old movie]

Look, I’m not going to be able to say anything about this movie that hasn’t been said many times over in the forty years since its release. I’m essentially just pointing at it and shouting that it’s great and you should watch it – but in all candor that’s mostly what this blog is going to be as a whole.

In my judgment I simply have no alternative but to take this opportunity to write about it, however. I grew up watching five films every single time I was sick as a child: Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, and the three Star Wars movies, and of those five, the first was always my favorite. In fact, I suspect I have seen this movie more times than any other in my life, although I cannot be sure – I can’t even remember the first time I saw it. Growing up, I knew it in its tape-recorded form, complete with fast-forwarded commercial breaks. On Sunday, for the first time, I saw it on a movie screen. But no matter how I watch it, it always holds up.

So, where to begin? Well, let’s start with the aesthetics. Of course, my feelings on this aren’t even in the same quadrant with objectivity, and so my aesthetic sense may actually just be a pavlovian response – for instance, the instant I hear that eerie, space-y sound come over the Paramount logo, I get chills. I react to the opening credits the way most people react to a Fast & Furious car chase.

Objectively though, the film looks amazing, which is impressive given how it was made on a reduced budget. There’s a very specific sort of dark-‘80s thing going on with everything from the lighting to the set dressing to the uniforms – weirdly exaggerated collars and jackets, but all in muted reds and browns. This film embraces the darkness of space, and I really enjoy the unusual choice to make our heroes always occupy the darkest, reddest environments, while cold, bright, blue light is reserved for the villain.

Speaking of the villain, Montalban is delightful, and he looks as if he crawled right out of Mad Max. People have made plenty of admiring jokes about his chest in this movie, but you kind of have to acknowledge the power of its rich Corinthian leather. Maybe I should get myself one of those Starfleet pendants.

The real star here are the ships. The Enterprise is of course a reused model from The Motion Picture, so the design aesthetic was set from go. Credit must go, then, to the production designers of the Reliant for coming up with a design that is both instantly recognizable as being made from the same Starfleet stamp as Enterprise, while also being instantly distinguishable from it. Many have pointed out that the Reliant looks intrinsically threatening, a squat boxer of a ship, with a compact bulk that gives it more weight than the Enterprise. Enterprise, on the other hand, is all grace, with the lines of a gothic flying buttress. I love spacecraft and space movies, and I’ve seen many, many spaceships. The USS Enterprise, as it appears in these six original Trek films, is easily the most beautiful spaceship to ever grace the screen.

Wrapping up the aesthetics, the film has a very disciplined color palette – everything is some variation of dark red or pale blue/teal. The liberal use of dark lighting and red alert make the rest of Trek look altogether too bright and clean during battle sequences. And my favorite bit of all is the Starfleet uniforms, which are better here than in any other Star Trek property. Even their 80’s kitsch is appealing, because it gives a certain sense of nostalgic innocence to this vision of the future.

Finally, the score (to which I am currently listening) is perhaps my favorite of any movie. That’s saying a lot, because film scores are the predominant genre of music I listen to. It’s just so rousing and propulsive, and it makes you feel ready to face even the Kobayashi Maru.

But there’s a great deal more to like this film beyond how it looks and sounds. For starters, as a former literature teacher, I love a movie that wears its literary allusions on its sleeve and essentially yells at the audience to go read a book. There’s a closeup of Khan’s bookshelf in the film, and we see there several familiar titles.

Inferno is obviously relevant to Khan’s personal situation on Ceti Alpha V, trapped in a hell from which he longs to escape. But Kirk is also feeling hopeless at the start of the film, and his catharsis is achieved only by descending deeper into pain, until he is able to pass through the encounter with death and see a new dawn, like Dante glimpsing the stars again. Paradise Lost is a reminder of Space Seed, the Star Trek episode this movie sequelizes, where Khan quotes Satan’s speech, framing Kirk as the deity casting him out of heaven. In a way, this only serves to heighten the contrast of Kirk’s loss of control in this film. He’s no longer the swashbuckling captain who laughs at death and always cuts a way through to victory in the end. Instead, Kirk is weirdly passive in Wrath of Khan, as the title reminds us – he is merely reacting to Khan, and ultimately the events of the film happen to him, and he lives through them, much as we live through things that happen to us. He doesn’t save the ship, and he doesn’t really even defeat Khan – Khan self-destructs out of sheer pride. Kirk is saved by being humbled, delivered by unmerited grace in the form of Spock.

Continuing, Lear is an apt choice for the shelf, although it applies to Kirk more than to Khan. King Lear is about growing old and losing control and having to live to see the consequences of your choices and neglect, all of which applies to Kirk. As Khan points out, Kirk never bothered to check on Khan, and thus bears responsibility for what ensues. Moby Dick is quoted several times and is a transparent matching of Khan to Ahab. But what’s not on the shelf is A Tale of Two Cities, which Kirk reads throughout the film. This work provides the poetry to explain the eucatastrophe of the film, how life the joy can emerge from tragedy and death. This redemptive turn is essential to Kirk’s story – it is how he comes to let go of his hubris and discover beauty and life beyond his own.

This is where I think the film really connects for me. It speaks to the feeling that catches up with almost all of us at some point or another – that we have made the wrong decision somewhere, years ago, and now our life is wasted, that our best days are behind us. Khan is trapped there, in his trauma and his past. Kirk, meanwhile, is on autopilot, just going through the motions of living. But Spock’s life-giving death, his dictum that the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few, and his benediction to live long and prosper, all point to the reality, symbolized in Genesis: that beyond ourselves, even in our dying, there is new life and beauty and joy. When Kirk says he feels young at the end, he isn’t literally rejuvenated, and his circumstances aren’t changed a bit, except by loss. But he is not looking at himself anymore. He is looking outward, to new possibilities. That, I suppose, is the spirit of Star Trek: to search out new life-forms and new civilizations – to find life and joy and beauty beyond ourselves.

Live long, and prosper.

Futility & Futurity

Welcome back. When I started this particularly blog in December of 2020, I posted about how I had stopped and started blogging four or five times previous, and I felt this touch-and-go relationship would likely continue. I posted semi-regularly for about five months, and then stopped after April 2021. And now I’m back.

I have a checklist I use to track the status of various writing projects. It’s an artifact of the way in which I tend to plan constantly but execute little. Planning is more fun than actually doing – a theme I will return to. In that checklist, I marked this blog post as having been outlined, but in truth, I really don’t have a structure, and now that I’ve begun writing I feel the old anxiety – the sense that I really should stop and think about the organization of ideas, in tension with fact that I feel too lazy to do that. So instead, I’m acknowledging this part of the process here. This is something that some folks really praise in writers, a sort of meta-candor, but others find it insufferably pretentious. In my case, I think it may just be an excuse, throwing the aspect of intent over what is really just pure intellectual sloth.

But that tangent I just went on is in truth quite relevant to the rest of this post, because it provides a clear example of exactly the way in which I feel I am a barrier to myself ever accomplishing anything, both in the sense that I lack the discipline to push through, and also in the sense that I second-guess anything I do. And that’s what I want to talk about today: what my writing is and isn’t, and the relationship between what it has been, and what it will be.

I have never been very consistent. I show up to work and to church, to be sure, and I certainly never miss a meal, but when it comes to the creative projects I claim to hold as my dear priorities, my actions belie my words. In my defense, my life has not been terribly stable. After I stopped posting in April, I became busy grading final papers, and then I went through several part-time jobs in quick succession, moved back to Washington, spent several months looking for work, and then spent several more getting used to my new work schedule and learning the ropes at my current job. Now I’m at a place where I feel I have enough regularity in my schedule to get back on a schedule of posting. But I’m not very confident in that, because the truth is that I’ve always had plenty of time for this if I had made it a priority – I just seem slow about any project. At any rate, I suppose I should come to the point of this post.

I’ve been thinking a lot about futility recently. If I look at my life, I have made so many plans and so many beginnings, and most of them quickly trail off to nothing. There is a very real sense of futility haunting any creative effort, not because the work is too difficult, but simply because I have no faith in my future self to carry it to completion. This is based on long experience with my past. In some ways, I feel I have never really been a serious person in this respect.

I’ve also been thinking a lot about futurity, and where I want to go. When I was younger, I had a clear picture of what I wanted to do. Now, that seems much less clear, and the futures that seem realistic based on past experience don’t seem satisfying. There is, of course, probably quite a bit of both nostalgia and unrealistic expectations playing into this, and I know that it’s not a healthy habit of mind. Perhaps I will successfully unlearn this mental diptych of future desire and futile planning, but I’m not there yet. At the same time, actually posting here is at least a step toward writing more regularly, which is a healthy practice.

I do have other doubts. I feel that perhaps what I am doing is a selfish waste of time, both because I am spending time talking about myself, or about things that don’t really matter, rather than spending my time helping others or serving God, and because it seems unlikely that many people will read this, or that it will serve any useful purpose (I include beauty as a useful purpose, because beauty is an end to itself as well as a means of praise – but I don’t edit my blogging nearly enough for me to think it will be particularly great art). I’m also concerned that people will rightly point out that I am not saying anything original, which is true.

Originality, however, is not my goal. What I chiefly want to do is to satisfy the desire that led me into teaching in the first place – the desire to point people toward beautiful things that I enjoy and love. So, if I post about a movie I’ve only just seen for the first time, but which came out years ago and which people have discussed to death, I’m not even trying to be clever or original. I’m simply trying to set down my felt response to it, and to use that as a signpost to point others toward it. Frankly, and I know this will sound like an excuse, but originality is a very modern concept. Our ancient and medieval ancestors worried little about whether or not what they wrote had already been said before, and they by and large contented themselves with joining the long echoing hallway of human speech. So too with me.

I also worry that paragraphs like the preceding one are a symptom of pretentious narcissism, of spending too much digital ink and time talking about myself as if my perspective were particularly interesting or important. By the same measure, I am often driven to write about subjects I find compelling, but I am haunted by the sense that I have little to say about them. Some of these posts may end up very short. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if the longest posts are those like this one, dealing simply with myself, and the shortest are about actual substantive things.

At any rate, I actually do have things I want to say, if I ever successfully make time to write about them. But I wanted to begin here, by acknowledging the sense of futility I feel about the future. But I wouldn’t spend time writing this, if I wasn’t looking forward to some kind of turn into hope. 2021’s two best films, The Worst Person in the World and Drive My Car, both left me with the same feeling – that despite whatever life we have lived, it is important to come to the realization that, in the end, all shall be well. When I think about my writing and my career, I feel a little like Julie, the protagonist of the former film, who had constantly changed life paths, drifting between different beginnings without seeming to progress further. But we do progress, whether we see it or not, and regardless of narrative fit, the story moves forward. So, I am trying to begin again, again. And as a start, I am announcing that I will finally write a book. This is me throwing my hat over the wall. We shall see how I follow after.

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The Sense of Falling

The first thing I noticed about Death Valley was the impression of falling. First there was the sense that I was falling down into it. This is exacerbated when approaching from Pahrump, Nevada, because you cross a two-thousand foot ridge before plunging directly to well below sea level. I went downhill so long that I thought I had reached sea level long before I actually had. This sense of disorientation is not helped by the fogs and clouds which form over the descent.

The second sense was that of everything falling into the valley. To feel this, one has only to look up from the valley floor, and it becomes obvious that the walls are not, well, normal. I’ve grown up looking at mountains all my life; I know what a rocky slope is supposed to look like. But in Death Valley, the slopes look wrong. They aren’t solid slopes, but slow-motion slumps. You can tell just by looking that instead of assuming the shape of a fixed mountain, the rock has adopted the shape of a sand castle mid-way through the process of crumbling into the surf. But in this desiccated defile, the process is frozen, creating a sense of suspense. The world above looms over you, and you begin to feel that the rocks and hills may literally fall on you.

Finally, there is the sense of people falling, inevitably draining like water to the bottom. At the lowest point, Badwater Basin, a procession of tourists files silently off into the salty distance - pilgrims to the bottom of the world. The place is eerie, and I couldn’t help but be preoccupied with that same draw to the bottom as I stared southwest across the valley, searching the opposite wall for the canyon into which the fabled and tragic lost Germans had vanished twenty years ago. Then I turned, and began the climb back up.

The Fear of Falling Rocks

From my base airbnb in Kanab, Utah, I entered Zion via the eastern portal. What this meant in practice is a harrowing drive through moderately icy defiles and a long, winding tunnel of darkness and nerves. I came back a couple days later for a second round.

Actually, I came back because I hadn’t realized the first time that you needed to reserve shuttle tickets in advance to really see Zion, so I had to postpone the sightseeing. By the end of the week, I had made the drive back from Hurricane to Kanab at least three times (it’s not short).

So, while I was waiting to see Zion’s main valley, I went to Kolob. Not the planet, the canyon - although it certainly looks extraterrestrial, with ziggurats of rusty stone looming at impossible angles over canyons plunged in gloom. While there I walked a couple of miles along a frozen creek, which the trail crossed innumerable times. Each ford was a bet that the ice - carved and knitted into writhing fibers - would hold firm underfoot. I turned back a little while past an old settler cabin, because I could look up and see the boulders perched loosely hundreds of feet directly above me, ready to fall - now or in a hundred years or so.

The next day I made my way up the narrow canyon of the Virgin River, avoiding the toxic water full of cyanobacteria. This meant sticking to the trail that hugged the cliff base, so once again I was confronted with the fear of falling rocks. Water dripped from overhanging ledges, and icicles clung to concavities, reminding me of the forces of winter prying away at the rock, all while thousands of tourists constantly cycled by below, many with small children in tow. It’s an interesting calculation in probability the National Park Service has made, or maybe we all make it for ourselves. I spent the whole time thinking, what happens if today the face detaches and the rocks fall?

Still, it was incredibly beautiful to visit the canyon in winter, with snow filtering down between the walls.

The Last Star Wars

The Last Jedi. This is the one I wanted to write about in the first place. Back in the day I made lots of notes about this film and what I should write about it. But I’m not sure they matter anymore (or maybe that’s my excuse for being too lazy to look through them). At any rate, when I first saw this film I really liked it, but parts of it didn’t work for me. Over the past three years, however, it has aged incredibly well. The fact that this movie actually has something to say elevates it beyond most other Star Wars films, into a beautifully cohesive picture, both thematically and aesthetically.

So anyway, I like this one.

The film is burdened by The Force Awakens’ incuriosity about galactic politics, and I used to count that as a weakness in this film, but no longer. Do I wish I understood more? Yes, but that’s on JJ. Maybe I’m biased because the backlash against this film rubbed me the wrong way. Maybe I’m just falling in line with my tribe. Oh well. The movie is still great.

A big part of what makes the film work is the production design, which is gorgeously photographed. In particular I want to shout out the very clean First Order UI.

Actually the white and red of the UI is typical of the film, which deploys color to distinguish the various settings and plotlines. The island on Ach-To is green, blue, and above all, grey - it’s neutral, on the fence, like Luke and like Rey. The casino planet is, fittingly, golden; at one point Finn and Rose race the police through the space equivalent of a wedding inspo pinterest board of golden lights.

And of course, there’s the films two dominant colors, two of my absolute favorites: white and red. These are everywhere, separate at first, but exploding together as the film progresses. Snoke’s red chamber is one of my favorite sets in the saga, and tremendous color discipline is exercised to render the rebel ship’s interior pale and wan in every respect. But once on Crait, the red salt explodes onto the white surface of the planet, like so much blood being spilt.

As for beauty, the location scouts outdid themselves with Skellig Michael, which is as beautiful as anything the saga has seen.

Ultimately, this film is hard for me to write about because I had a hard time making notes about it, I was so distracted by enjoying it. I also, to be completely honest, haven’t figured out my process for writing this blog yet. I haven’t been putting in the time or energy to properly edit it, so everything just sort of emerges as transcribed notes, hence the weird aggregate structure of these posts. I’m not entirely happy with this, because it makes me feel I am lazy.

You can see this in my inability to transition smoothly between paragraphs, something The Last Jedi does brilliantly - see “Where’s Rey” and “Where’s Han”.

If The Force Awakens was about meeting your heroes, this film is about losing them - or more accurately, moving on from them. Poe’s arc is designed to prepare him to lead once Leia is gone; Rey must move on from Luke and Kylo from Vader; Finn has to learn to be the hero himself, in the absence of Han. And of course, in meeting Finn, Rose comes face to face with one of her own heroes. Rose is a particularly important addition to the saga, precisely because she is normal. The series needed a muggle companion, and Rose provides that. Otherwise it’s all endless aristocratic battles, wholly disconnected from the lives of the galaxy’s citizens.

After all, isn’t Star Wars always going on about how the force surrounds and binds together all lives and all life? This description of the force - as something immanent in each person and in every atom of creation may be a fictitious religion, but like other fictitious manmade religions, it reminds us of the real spiritual dimension of things. In other words, fans who identify as practitioners of the Jedi religion may be wrong and lost, but the concept of the force reminds us of the need for something immanent, omnipresent, and transcendent, through which all things have their being and meaning.

It is fitting that we end up in the realm of faith, because The Last Jedi is, at the end of the day, a text about first deconstructing and then reconstructing faith. Rey’s faith is troubled by temptation and doubt in the face of Luke’s flaws, but she ultimately decides to embrace the Light. Kylo sheds his faith in the past, but recommits himself to the dark side. And Luke, of course, loses his way only to find it again.

Yoda expresses this in his speech embracing failure. The film is about victory in defeat, and strength in weakness. Perhaps that’s why it’s so resonant with me, as a Christian.

The only other thing I have to say is the sheer delight I felt in the theater when Rey and Kylo turned and began fighting back to back.

It's a pity they didn't make any more of these films.

At the Top of the Continent

So, I’ve sort of let things get away from me the past month or two. Work has been unusually busy, and with it I’ve either had less free creative energy, or have been held back by anxiety. But I’m going to try to get back into the flow of writing, since I think it will be good for me, even if I am irrationally (or otherwise) afraid of mortally embarrassing myself somehow in the process.

Fortunately I haven’t traveled any since December, so I’ve not fallen further behind on travel writing - if I can use the term.

At any rate, last December I made the very silly decision to drive into snowy Colorado in my 2004 Camry. I had no trouble reaching the silent Black Canyon of the Gunnison, which has to be one of the more underrated sights in North America, given how little press it gets. Not that there’s much to do there in winter, but the stark towers dusted with snow are more than enough to justify the trip.

No, my decision to drive became silly once I had to go from Montrose to Telluride, elevation 8,750 feet. I crawled along the winding mountain passes, constantly aware of the annoyance of all the 4WDs behind me. Thankfully the road was mostly clear of snow, and entirely free of ice, but a screen of falling flakes descending on a pass made for interesting driving.

Telluride itself is a lovely town, if a bit expensive for the likes of me. There was a bookstore, which was good, but it would benefit from exchanging some of its boutique shopping for several more bookstores, in my opinion. The coffee was good, however, and the scenery cannot be beat.

The next day I repeated almost the whole of the same drive, only to continue on to Mesa Verde in time to catch the sun dying on the city walls.

That night I stayed in a tiny trailer refurbished as an airbnb. When I rose to leave at six a.m., I was amazed my car even started. It was three degrees above zero.

The Mouse Awakens

The Force Awakens has got something going for it that not even its ultimate successor can take from it: it got to be the film in which Star Wars became fun again. Younger people might not get this, but for a long time it looked like there really would never be any more Star Wars films (as ludicrous as that sounds in this Age of the Mouse). But prior to the Disney acquisition, I had no real expectation that sequels were ever coming. On the one hand, that was good, because they couldn’t mess things up more, but still, it’s always fun, in a very six-year-old way, to have more lightsabers on screen. So I remember the tremendous excitement I felt going to see this film by myself in the theater at Favore Mall in Toyama, which only grew as I enjoyed the film all the way through.

The trouble is, I really don’t have that much to say about this film outside of that nostalgic first viewing experience. Maybe I never had much to say about Star Wars in the first place. Maybe I shouldn’t have committed to doing a series, and should have just stuck to films I’m gushing to talk about. Or maybe, as much as I love film and adore the visual arts, maybe I’m just not that good at coming up with creative or interesting things to say about them, especially when writing with only the energy I have left over from teaching.

Or maybe that’s all this film is - a Star Wars ride. If you like Star Wars, you’ll have fun on the ride, but don’t try to do anything besides just enjoying the ride.

The film does have a couple things really going for it, besides nostalgia. For one thing, the core idea - that the film is about kids who grew up in the world of Star Wars finally getting to play at it for real - is a real mood that translates as honest. For another, the casting department knocked it out of the park. Finally, the film is just gorgeous to look at. I mean, look at these shots:

Especially the fight in the forest, which ranks as one of my favorite moments in the saga, mainly because of how it is lit.

The last thing I’ll say about the film is that I found Kylo talking his father into giving Kylo the strength to kill him compelling in a troubling way, because it reminded me of how I worry I talk to other people to get reassurance so that I can feel safe carrying out some sin (admittedly I have never done anything like murder a beloved character - it’s just an analogy).

A Strangely Small Finale

Return of the Jedi is clearly the weakest of the original trilogy, barring the throne room scene, and as such I probably have the least to say about this movie. Although as a child I loved it.

I’m not even going to comment on the most egregious changes Lucas made to the film.

I think the films biggest problem is shifting tones and the glue at the seems of scenes. To be specific, the opening sequence at Jabba’s Palace feels like a separate episode of TV, a prologue to the film - although maybe this is a situation they were stuck with coming off Empire. After that, the film diverges into parallel tonal tracks: on the one hand we have Yoda, Luke, and his conflict with the Emperor over Vader. And on the other hand, we have the ludicrous adventures of Han and Leia with the Ewoks. Shunted between these is one of the greatest space battles ever committed to film.

That’s really the extent of my thoughts on the film, unfortunately. Although I loved the introduction of the Emperor, and seeing it anew in the context of the prequels raises the question of which version is better: the Emperor as a mysterious, protean figure of darkness, or Palpatine as an upjumped politician with delusions of magnificence. I’m honestly not sure which I prefer.

I’ll also note that the Empire allows itself to be destroyed out of hubris, sheer unwarranted overconfidence.

The one choice that this film makes that I really love is that the stakes of the conflict between Luke and the Emperor are entirely personal - it’s just over Vader’s soul. The battle for the fate of the galaxy is won by the rebels without Luke. Tightening the stakes for the hero to just the personal and letting others win the war is a choice many other blockbusters are sadly averse to.

The Whole World Falls Away

I rose early and went to Arches when the park was still smothered in morning fog. The ground was dry, but every twig and stem was slathered in hoarfrost.

As the sun rose, the mist slowly began to clear, revealing a Louvre-worthy gallery of stone windows. Still, for all the awe it inspired, I couldn’t fathom why some folks were drawn to walk under the massive arches. How do you think they got to be that way in the first place?

Unwilling to navigate the ice on the downhill slope of road to the north end of the park, I left and headed for Canyonlands. After a long drive, including the harrowing passage of The Neck (exactly what it sounds like), I arrived at the cliffs from which the whole world falls away.

Over to westward, I could see the white mountains of Colorado, beckoning.

Lost in the Clouds

Empire Strikes Back is, aside from still being the best entry in the Star Wars saga, a film about consequences, both of choices in the previous film and in this one. Luke’s choice to take up the lightsaber and later to leave his training and Han’s decision to return to the Alliance and then to dally with them longer than he had too both have significant consequences for them personally. And for an older generation, the true apparition of the film is not the ghost of Kenobi, but Luke Skywalker, returned as if to haunt both Yoda and Vader with the spectre of their past mistakes.

It is also a story told more through the screen than the script, and the visual leitmotifs are as pronounced as anything in Williams’ score. Just as Empire is an in-between movie, the settings and visuals are restless and liminal: halls, tunnels, shafts, forests of trees and fields of asteroids wind our heroes in a maze of in-betweens. It’s a transient movie: the rebel base is quickly abandoned only for the film to end with the rebel fleet, and even the empire is seen only in their fleet, with no Death Star to call home. There’s no solid ground to be found, only ice, the flesh of the space slug, the mud of Dagobah, or the airy vastness of Bespin.

There’s also the mist. I think this film must have been the biggest payday for purveyors of smoke machines since the invention of the rock concert. All joking aside, it serves a real story purpose: the snows of Hoth, the mists of Dagobah, the clouds of Tibanna gas, even the starry cloud of the galaxy at the end, all emphasize the ephemeral, fragile position of the rebels, and their confused and lost way.

Let me end by saying that in a way, this film begins the process of redeeming the message of Star Wars from the great error of pure detachment. I mentioned this when I talked about Revenge of the Sith, but the galaxy needs a moral alternative to selfish passion or emotionless detachment. Luke begins to provide that alternative, as his failure - his unwillingness to set aside his link to his friends - is also the thing which allows Leia to rescue him. This will develop much further in Return of the Jedi and The Last Jedi, but it begins here.

Santa of the Slickrock

I stayed in Sandy, Utah, which was more snowy than what its name suggested. The next morning I cut my way through the Wasatch as the sun rose, and emerged in Helper to grab brunch at a local hole-in-the-wall. While in this town under the ramparts of the mountains I came across the following sign:

I love this, yet at the same time I feel I ought to point out that art itself is not the solution to reality, but that it points in His direction. Of course, feeling like I’m supposed to say that is itself problematic and smacks of a certain kind of insecure obligation that convinces no one and only puts people off. But maybe it’s useful to foreground this and be transparent about it, because I wonder if others feel similarly awkward-but-obligated about their seriously held religious beliefs.

Later that day I made it to Arches, after a long drive under a dry fog. I only have a photo of Delicate Arch (which you might know from the Utah license plate) from the distant lower viewpoint. I hiked up to the upper view, but was stymied by the icy, vertiginous ledge that was the only access point. I had just assumed that since so many tourists were making it up, including ones who were clearly inexperienced hikers and ones with small children, that it must be safe. On seeing the path, I realized that in point of fact we had very different ideas of ‘safe.’

Just as I was about to turn around and return to my car, something caught my eye, coming around the corner of the ledge.

It was a veritable Christmas miracle: the Santa of the Slickrock!

The Elan of Nostalgia

I’ll be honest, I was intimidated to go ahead and sit down to watch the original Star Wars for the purpose of writing about it. When I started blogging, the chief motive was to give myself an outlet for my impulse to point at great works of art that I loved and gush about them. So I was afraid to touch this movie, both because there’s really nothing left to say on it at this point (not that originality actually matters in art) and because I feared to waste my shot at writing about an all time classic. But I realized that I was unlikely to ever really feel conditions for creative engagement were ideal, so I chose to embrace my mediocrity and neutralize it by making it into the first topic of this blog. After all, that’s always been the redemption of mediocre writers.

Watching this film that I grew up with after years of prequels and sequels, the terrific work of the prop department is elevated into the realm of the otherworldly. I can’t look at R2-D2 as he originally was, after years of derivatives and slightly shinier versions, without a sense of awe at seeing the original as a new product, with all the DNA of its progeny already present. And seeing Darth Vader’s black carapace enter the screen for the first time feels like the film production design equivalent of glimpsing the carpenters and goldsmiths assembling the Ark of the Covenant. To paraphrase another space traveler, this is Star Wars, the definite article, you might say.

There’s definitely a wistfulness of nostalgia about this movie, about how things were in the beginning, and what could have been. Obi-Wan’s description of the Jedi as idealists on a crusade - unlabored with our years of baggage - feels far more appealing than what the Jedi become. And the binary sunset is wistfulness ascended to myth.

Ultimately, I was too engaged by the movie to keep consistently making notes all the way through it.

The Frozen Flats

In Idaho I drove out to find a natural formation known as Crater Rings - two well-defined craters immediately adjacent to one another. Tired of the intense speeds of the trucks on I-84, I took a respite by traveling directly over the frozen dirt roads between empty potato fields. As I went, the sun came up. A herd of pronghorn antelope turned tail and lit out for the mountains, and soon I was instead among their successors, the hefty cows.

I never found the craters. I mean, I found where they were, I just wasn’t confident of driving my sedan up an even rougher road, and I didn’t want to walk a mile in the cold.

Lightsabers Never Get Old

That’s the one thing I can really say for this movie. I loved the sheer volume of lightsaber action when I was fifteen, and I still love that about it. Unfortunately not even laser swords could make me excited to rewatch this film. This certainly remains the most watchable prequel (well, aside from Episode I, perhaps), but it’s the shadowy form of a Greek tragedy with all the content and good sense vacuumed out.

Sure, there are a few redeeming qualities. Ewan McGregor really comes into his own as Obi-Wan, and Ian McDiarmid is hilarious. And the lightsabers. But yeah, that’s pretty much it.

Padme’s character, in particular, is eviscerated, which is a shame not just for her but for the movie. She was ideally positioned to represent a moral third choice against the detachment of the Jedi and the selfish passion of the Sith - a third choice the saga sorely needs. Instead, she has basically no perspective or character.

The moral universe of Revenge of the Sith is actually more interesting than the film itself. In a way, it exemplifies the problem of people trapped in different tribal bubbles, with alternative frameworks for interpreting what is truth. Obi-Wan and Anakin’s falling out is, in its most interesting form, a political one. Anakin casts himself as the loyal patriot, unable to let go of control; the Jedi are likewise stuck, ossified and blind in their dogma.

Palpatine in particular seems resonant - his line that the Sith and the Jedi are almost exactly alike eerily echoes the rhetoric of ‘both-siders’ who equivocate between political factions based on the appearance of similar actions without regard for what cause those actions serve. This nihilistic axiom - that power is just power, without moral content, is the central lie that fascism uses to promise otherwise decent people a shortcut to whatever it is they want most. Palpatine’s seduction of Anakin, then, is also political, even if the object is personal. He even uses conspiracy theories to help Anakin justify the choice he already wants to make.

The lie of the Sith is also the lie of idolatry. Plagueis, we are told, could save those he loved from dying. This desire to save and to love is clearly good, but when seized through evil means, love of good is twisted into sin.

The problem is that the Jedi are a moral vacuum, and we are left with selfish nihilism set against impotent decadence and stagnation. This is why the story desperately needs a moral alternative, and Padme was the obvious character to introduce it - if she had been given anything to do.

The Frosty Badlands

I began my trip early, heading into the Columbia Gorge under cover of darkness. As I approached the eastern portal, the sun rose, and lit the fogs downriver to the west.

Unhappy with the direct sunlight in my eyes, and having seen Google suggest that I could make the trip to Nampa in eight hours without using the freeway, I turned south at The Dalles, pausing only to glance at its ludicrously rectilinear dam, before plunging uphill into Deschutes country on 197.

I was able to find gas at the one, tiny off-brand service station in Maupin, where a rotund chihauha trundled out from behind the counter to greet me, before I struck out toward Fossil and John Day, and into the badlands of eastern Oregon. This part of the drive was phenomenally stunning, and I didn’t have to deal with anyone riding my bumper - there wasn’t a car to be seen for miles. Maybe that should have disconcerted me more than it did.

I arrived at John Day in the mid-afternoon. At this point I began to realize that the road ahead went over a higher pass than I had anticipated, and I began to think about finding an alternate route. But I was already too committed to the southern road; every way out of John Day, except the road I had come by, led over a pass. So I went ahead on Route 26, over Austin Summit.

This is where I broke out my universal chains, which were supposed to work with any tires. As the sun set, I pulled over in the ice near the summit, expecting trouble on the downhill, and knelt to thread them through my wheels - only to realize that the type of wheels my car uses makes this threading impossible.

I was stuck. Well, not quite. I could still go forward, although for a few moments of spinning out I wondered if that would even be possible.

I crested the first of three summits, engaged my flashers, slowed to a crawl, and began the long descent over a surface of packed snow and ice. Just at that moment, the sun went down, and it began to snow.

I have no pictures of this section of the road.

It took over two and a half hours to go the fifty miles from John Day to Unity, where I arrived mercifully at a convenience store with a bathroom ten minutes before they closed. The entire way I had clung to the wheel, expecting to lose control and go sliding down the slope, yet in point of fact my Toyota performed admirably and never lost traction. The bigger enemy, it turned out, was drowsiness - it was exhausting to remain so tense at the wheel at such slow speeds.

Once I got to Unity and the convenience store closed its doors onto a parking lot of slippery sheet ice, I consulted my highway map, only to find that I was now well and truly entrapped - Unity was surrounded by five-thousand foot passes on all sides. There was no low road out whatsoever. So I had to go on, voluntarily entering another pass after I had just found relief from the last - and this time it was fully dark, past six p.m. in December.

Well, I got over, and I got to Nampa, bleary-eyed but living, and vowing to always take the low road from here on out.

American Carnage

The Capitol at dusk. Photo by @LeahMillis pic.twitter.com/MSzdmTKnMs

— corinne_perkins (@corinne_perkins) January 6, 2021

Turns out a spade was a spade all along.