This ode, written by Percy Shelley, is one that tells a story of wishful thinking. The speaker uses the many functions of the wind to convey the power it has. He speaks to the fact wind drives away the autumn leaves, places seeds in the earth, brings thunderstorms and the cyclical “death” of the natural world, and stirs up the seas and oceans. He explains these functions in a way trying to connect with the wind. He pleas to the wind for it to act in the way it does, but on him. He wishes, with the help of the powerful force of nature, to have his ideas and works spread out and dispersed throughout the world. He wants the wind to be as harsh and real in his life as it is in the winter months. He knows the West Wind of autumn is wild and rough but is always followed by spring, a time of beauty and growth. He wants the wind to blow away all of the negative things in his life and create a new spirit in him, like it does for the leaves of the winter or the waves of the ocean. He wishes to be moved into a new version of himself, to fulfill his full potential.
In the beginning of the first canto he addresses the wind, describing it like a breath of Autumn. He talks about it as a magician banishing evil, the way it blows away dead leaves. He then says it carries seeds to their places around the earth and leaves them they’re until Spring comes for them. The wind burying seeds in the ground is like a charioteer taking corpses to their grave. He thinks of the spring wind as blue and as the cause of all revival of nature. He says it blows like a clarion and all the seeds bloom, filling every “plain and hill” with “living hues and odours.” The last few lines depict the speaker describing it as a “Wild Spirit” that’s omnipresent. It’s the “Destroyer and Preserver,” as winter brings death but gives way to revival of spring. He ends saying “hear, oh, hear!”, wanting the wind to hear his unknown request.
The second canto is a continuation of his description of the West Wind. The clouds, in his words, are scattered through the sky like dead leaves in a stream. The leaves fall from the trees like the clouds fall from the sky, all working together to balance our weather. This is all to indicate a storm that is coming. He uses the simile of clouds being like angels of rain and lightning. He then goes into a detailed description of what the West Wind is like during a storm. The thunderclouds, “locks of the approaching storm,” disperse through the West Wind or the “blue surface.” He says the thunderclouds to the West Wind are like the Mænad’s locks of hair are to the air. A Mænad was one of the fierce women who spent time with the Greek god Dionysus. Their hair was wild and crazy and that’s the point he used to connect the two. He then uses a melancholy metaphor to describe the power the West Wind has. He says it’s like a funereal song played as the past year comes to an end. As the storm comes, the thunder, lightning and rain will be like the tomb being rolled over the grave. He ends, again, asking the wind to hear him but we don’t exactly know what for.
In the third canto, he details the weird and strange things the West Wind does. The Mediterranean is awoken, making the wind and storm begin to come. This happens because the sea had been calm and still during the summer, while on vacation like the Romans. During the summer, the Mediterranean dreams and sees the “old palaces and towers” along Baiæ’s bay, overgrown and unkempt. The Atlantic then breaks itself into “chasms” for the West Wind. He uses all these words to say the wind disrupts the water, creating waves but is at the service and will of the West Wind and all its power. The speaker talks about how all the see plants hear the West Wind and become disheveled and go all over the place in fear and hurt themselves. The canto ends the same way the others have, with the speaker asking for the wind to hear him.
The fourth canto begins to reveal the request the speaker has for the West Wind, beginning with him wishing he was a “dead leaf” or a “swift cloud” the West Wind could carry or he wishes he was a wave that could be rocked by the West Wind’s “power” and “strength.” He has hopes of becoming free and as “uncontrollable” as the West Wind. The speaker will even settle with just having the same type of relationship he had with the wind when he was younger, when they were “comrades.” He reflects on when he was younger and was faster and stronger than the West Wind. He clarifies wanting to feel the same way he did in the past, youthful and strong, is the only reason for coming to the West Wind. He wants to be given the same treatment as the waves, leaves and clouds, saying “I fall upon the thorns of life! I bleed!” Time has made life dull and hard for him along with his spirit, which is no longer “tameless, and swift, and proud” like the West Wind.
The last canto depicts the speaker asking to become an instrument. He wants the West Wind to turn him into a lyre. During his time, the æolian harp, a type of wind chime, was a popular instrument during the Romantic era. The harp is played by simply setting it in the wind, which is what the speaker longs for. The speaker says he wants to be used by the wind in whatever way the West Wind wants to use him. He wishes to be blown by the Wind like the branches are, leaves attached or not. His pride has been stripped of him like the leaves on the trees, and both are dying.
He then goes as far as to ask the “fierce” spirit of the West Wind to take over his soul and live in him. His thoughts are like the dead leaves and if the West Wind could control them, maybe instead of dead leaves, they can be something that dies but can grow again in the springtime. The speaker suggests the words of his poems are being blown around into the world as “sparks” and “ashes.” The speaker describes himself as the “unextinguished hearth” the sparks come from, a fire that is slowly dying but still there.
He ends, returning to his wish of being played like an instrument, referring to himself as a trumpet the wind should blow its prophecy through. His last line is “If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?” This simple question holds more weight than meets the eye. He needs the answer to be “yes” because he knows he can’t take much more of the torturous winter that is his life at that moment.
This is composed in a set of separate sonnets brought together. It is formed so that one must continue reading to find out how the story ends. It leaves the reader on edge, going through everything in real time with the author. This has Romanticism seen all throughout it. Romanticism stressed strong emotion, imagination, freedom from classical art forms, and rebellion against social conventions. He provides the reader with the chance to envision what the wind is really like with all his analogies. He had been overtaken, he felt, by society and all that had happened to him and wanted the wind to free and renew him. It provides a sense of hope for things to come and is very optimistic.
From a Christian perspective, this is resonating with me due to personal struggles. In life, there are many ups and downs and as a Christian, it’s hard to believe God hears all my prayers. But, like the speaker had a hope, the faith like a mustard seed, and constant belief that better must come stays alive. God tells us, “Trust in the Lord with all your heart, and do not lean on your own understanding. In all your ways acknowledge him, and he will make straight your paths” (Prov. 3:5, 6). In this verse we can be reassured God will never forsake us and if we continue to praise him in the bad times He will always see us through. This year has been a series of highs and lows for me, and in the bad times I often want to give up and question why God is testing me in the way He is. But, when I get to my lowest point, I step back and think, who am I to be feeling the way I do, and what kind of faith do I have to believe God can’t get me out of my little situation. Trust in God is imperative, especially in the bad times. Even if you don’t believe in God, simply keeping a positive mindset will get you so much farther in life.
In the Bible, the greatest example of faith and hope I know is Job. He had everything he could possibly want and more: family, money, and notoriety. He served God but he had everything; it was easy to. God let Satan attack Job to just show him how strong his servant was. He had literally everything stripped from him even to the point where Satan took away his health and Job was dying. He was in the hardest time in his life, the worst season or the harshest winter. He still believed in God’s plan and the hope that tomorrow will be better than the day before. In God’s timing, he renewed Job’s health and gave him what he had and so much more for his faith.
The speaker in the ode may not have gone through what Job did but he still showed faith and hope and that is recognized. I appreciate this poem and the reminder it gave me personally to do as God says in John 16:33, “I have told you these things, so that in me you may have peace. In this world, you will have trouble. But take heart! I have overcome the world.”
Perhaps the most exciting aspect of heading into summer break is the welcome return of “world enough and time” to get back to more authentic leisure. Part of that anticipation is the opportunity finally to read the books we have been wanting to read for awhile, now that the daily obligations of math problems, required reading, projects, studying, and other important but time-consuming aspects of the typical school day are set aside for a time. True, there is still a paltry amount of required summer reading to be done, though that is not too much of a burden, now given the freedom to choose one book from a diverse list of high-quality options (the foreign language reading is already selected, but they are quite terse). Before you start to think you are the only ones looking forward to the time to choose what you want to enjoy, please note the teachers are as well. For some of us, the summertime looks to be even busier than the school year — hopefully this is only for a season, and soon we can all be-at-work only as much as we need to so we can fully be-at-leisure. Keeping in mind, of course, that genuine leisure is a solitary lifestyle of knowing and worshipping God, and that reading, discussing, and working are all aspects of life to help prepare for that, here is a list of things I’m hoping to read this summer. Feel free to use this as a more specific guide to help you choose what you may enjoy reading this summer for extra credit or simply for their own intrinsically valuable experiences. Don’t be too impressed, though — when the school year rolls back around, I’ll probably have only read two or three. G.I. Joe is not going to watch itself.
7. Madame Crowl’s Ghost and Other Tales of Mystery, Sheridan LeFanu
8. Voyages of Imagination, Jeff Ayers
9. Elfstones of Shannara, Terry Brooks
10. Several books on Humanities to prepare for next year’s elective
11. Remaining commentaries on Colossians and Philemon to finish up Prison Epistles work
12. The Demon Princes, Jack Vance
13. Slaughterhouse Five, Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
14. The Man in the High Castle, Philip K. Dick
15. Othello, William Shakespeare
16. Asking the Right Questions: A Guide to Critical Thinking, M. Neil Browne and Stuart M. Keeley
17. The Princess Casamassima, Henry James
18. Last and First Men, Olaf Stapledon
19. Where There’s a Will, Rex Stout
20. A History of Philosophy, Frederick Copleston, SJ, CBE
Like I said, this is an ideal list — undoubtedly the schedule ahead will not permit the time for enjoying all of these works, and that’s not so bad, either. The point is it’s important to have a plan when going into situations like this. Always have a book with you, wherever you go. Always keep your book list of what you want to get with you at all times. You never know when something will happen. Yes, spontaneity is a good thing in certain circumstances, but if you head into the summer thinking “well, I’ll get to it,” you won’t. Make a plan, make some lists, and keep them handy. Remember: leisure isn’t something you “make time” for— it’s a lifestyle and a lifetime of observing the world around you and getting to know God better so you can worship Him accurately the rest of your days.
Despite the sudden proliferation of “Pandora”-titled things this past year, none of them were the inspiration for the name of this scholarly journal. Similarly, before the theme of the 2010-2011 was announced to us as being about “redemption,” the title for this scholarly journal was already “in the works,” as the kids say. So though it may have appeared to be a combination of recent things, the name has its origin in older, far different sources.
The “Pandora” is, as you can probably suspect, the Pandora of classic Western mythology, especially out of Hesiod’s works (though you may have heard of her from other summary/anthology sources). Since she opened the jar (it wasn’t a box, really) out of curiosity and not malice, as an individual she doesn’t need “redemption” in that sense, as if she had willfully done something wrong and needed internal restitution, even though some accounts of her tale make her out to be somewhat tawdry. The history of Pandora, her story, and its variations is complicated — fortunately, though, the most genuine origin of the inspiration of the title does not really come from those literary sources (not directly). The real source of both parts of the scholarly journal’s title is the video game series God of War (the main trilogy, not the miscellaneous sub-stories). The God of War series is M-rated, for good reasons. We are not urging you to go out and play them, especially if you are under seventeen, and even then not without parental (and conscience) consent. There’s a lot of violence/gore, some unclothedness, and some intense scenes of ruthlessness — it’s definitely not for the faint of heart or young of spirit. The point, then, here, is to look at the story and explain why it’s so good (despite the saucy parts), good enough to supply the title of this journal.
Ares Unleashed
The first God of War game is mostly a flashback frame story: it begins about five minutes before the game is over, with Kratos (the…hero) giving into despair, believing “the gods on Olympus have abandoned me.” Throughout the game, various incidents and encounters trigger further flashbacks into Kratos’s history: once the proudest, strongest Spartan warrior, Kratos’s life was about to end at the hands (and hammer) of the Barbarian King. Before the Barbarian King can finish him off, Kratos appeals to Ares: if Ares will help him destroy his enemies, Kratos will become Ares’s servant. Ares responds by bestowing (after a fashion) the Blades of Chaos on Kratos, the weapons that allow for such rapid gameplay (much better than the button-mashing of street-fighting games). Kratos serves Ares for years waging a war on all of Greece until the fateful night Kratos attacks a village of Athena worshippers. Defying the village oracle, Kratos storms a hut and accidentally kills his own wife and daughter, whom he thought were far away. He knows Ares is behind it: Ares intended to use the removal of this final connection to humanity to make Kratos into a heartless, machine-like warrior; instead, Kratos renounces his affiliation to Ares. The oracle curses Kratos as the hut burns to the ground; the ashes of his family are bound to his body, turning him into the “Ghost of Sparta.” For ten years, Kratos serves the other gods in hopes they will remove his nightmares and guilt. They do not. Poseidon asks Kratos to kill the Hydra and save his seas; this is when the player gets control over Kratos and the game begins. After working through the first level and killing the Hydra (the first of only 3 bosses in the game), Kratos’s patience with the gods is at an end. Athena asks him to do one last favor and the gods of Olympus will finally forgive him: kill Ares, who is now out of control and destroying Athens itself. Kratos agrees, believing he will be able to avenge his family and finally be rid of his nightmares.
Kratos fights into, around, through, under, and above Athens for a good third of the game, sometimes aided by the gods and their magic/weapons (including an easy victory over Medusa). After a mysterious encounter with a gravedigger, Kratos meets Athens’s oracle, who tells Kratos the key to destroying rampaging Ares is finding Pandora’s Box, which is strapped to the back of mighty Cronos in the Desert of Lost Souls. Kratos wends through the desert, killing some Sirens along the way, and summons Cronos. After three days of climbing up him, Kratos comes to Pandora’s Temple. This is the majority of the game (at least it feels like it). Kratos fights through the many levels and tests of the Temple, solving puzzles and slaying monsters all the while. Once Kratos secures Pandora’s Box (a very large, intimidating box of fire), the player wonders how he is supposed to carry this all the way down Cronos and through the desert back to Athens. Ares solves that problem by killing Kratos, sending him down to Hades, and capturing Pandora’s Box for himself. Kratos struggles through Hades and is rescued by the mysterious gravedigger just in time to find he is too late to save the Athenian oracle. With a little bit more Olympian help, Kratos confronts Ares for the last time. Through physical and psychological battles, Kratos eventually conquers Ares…only to find the gods of Olympus forgive his blasphemy but will not take away his memories of his family, bringing us back to the beginning of the game. Athena prevents Kratos from ending his life and gives him new blades as the replacement god of war. Kratos takes his place on Olympus.
Fate Unravelled
Kratos has not done much better than Ares as the new god of war, and the gods of Olympus regret their decision. Kratos has been leading his Spartans against Greece again; during an assault on Rhodes and its Colossus, Zeus tricks Kratos into sacrificing his divine powers, eventually killing him with the same sword that he used to end the War of the Titans so long ago. In Hades a second time, Kratos meets Gaia and becomes a part of her plan to lead the Titans in revenge against Zeus. In order to do so, he must turn back time and conquer the Sisters of Fate: Lakhesis, Atropos, and Clotho. With Pegasus’s assistance, Kratos begins his next adventure. With the aid of Titans (sometimes at their expense), Kratos finds the Island of Creation, wrangles the Steeds of Time, and wages a one-man campaign against the myths of Greece: Prometheus, Icarus, Theseus, Perseus, Euryale (Medusa’s sister, but you knew that already, right?), and even the Barbarian King again all get in Kratos’s way…oops.
Kratos defeats Cerberus (after he finishes munching Jason) and filches the Golden Fleece out of his throat. After defeating Icarus (and taking his wings), Kratos encounters Atlas and learns more of Zeus’s story and why the Titans are against him. With his help, Kratos resumes his quest for the Sisters of Fate. At the Palace of the Fates, Kratos does some dastardly deeds, kills the Kraken, and resurrects the Phoenix, who takes him, finally, to the Temple of the Fates. After the most annoying bell-ringing sequence you’ll ever experience in your life, Kratos works his way to the Sisters of Fate, dispatching them in appropriate fashion. Once Kratos controls the Loom of Fate, he returns to the moment of Zeus’s betrayal, igniting the final boss battle of the game. During his multi-part confrontation with Zeus, Kratos learns from Athena that he is Zeus’s son! Zeus did not want his own son to usurp him like he did his father Cronos. This only motivates Kratos more. Returning to the Loom, Kratos travels back to the War of the Titans and brings them back with him to the present, setting the stage for the final chapter.
Pandora Unchained
The finale of Kratos’s story (or is it…?) came out for PS3, ratcheting up the graphics, details, gameplay, and, unfortunately, the sauciness. Some might be disappointed in that most of the “new” weapons in this game are just minor variations on the familiar blades; additionally, the story is much more vertical, in contrast to the widespread horizontal levels in the first two games (this is due, primarily, to the nature of the game being mainly an assault on Mt. Olympus, so it couldn’t be helped too much). The game is also shorter than the first two, which made the initial PS3 release price a bit of a challenge (though that shouldn’t be a problem by now). These niggles aside, it’s an impressive game. The creative studio is different from the first two, so the design and story changes are quite noticeable; we might never know fully what the original ending would have looked like had David Jaffe and the original team finished the story themselves; even so, the story and ending provided by the God of War III we have is a great gaming and emotionally-moving experience.
Picking up right where God of War II left off, Kratos and the Titans assault Mt. Olympus. The first twenty minutes of the game is as incredible a gaming experience (especially the Poseidon battle) comparable to the opening twenty minutes of Saving Private Ryan as any you’ll play (rivaling many individual scenes even of Final Fantasy VI, but not the entire game). During the early conflict, the Titans cast off Kratos as a means to an end. Having been completely betrayed by virtually the entire pantheon of Greek mythology, Kratos resolves to bring it all to an end. His final journal is started by a resurrected Athena — though she has changed quite a bit from the being Kratos once knew (the similarities to the end of Assassin’s Creed II are eerie). Along the way, Kratos returns to Hades, is tested by the Judges of the Underworld (Minos, Rhadamanthus, and Aeacus), climbs the Chain of Balance, and quenches the Flame of Olympus. He also encounters (read “kills”) Peirithous, Hephaestus, Hermes, Hercules, Hades, Helios, Hera, Poseidon, Daedalus, Perses, and Cronos himself. It’s pretty intense. During the mostly-vertical journey, Kratos learns that the key to final victory is, once again, Pandora’s Box. In order to get to it this time, he needs the help of a rather unlikely source…Pandora herself.
After each victory over a god of Olympus, Kratos makes the world worse: Hades’s death means the chaotic release of the souls in torment, Helios’s death darkens the sun, Hermes’s death results in a plague, Hera’s death is an end to plant life — it seems the game is about destruction, vengeance, and chaos…but it’s not.
Once Kratos breaks the Chain of Balance and raises Daedalus’s Labyrinth up to the heights of Mt. Olympus so Pandora can quell the fires of Olympus and open her Box, he realizes that the only way Pandora can “open” the Box is by her own death. With Zeus looking on and taunting them both, Kratos decides at the end to prevent Pandora from killing herself — he won’t let another innocent girl die because of him. Pandora, though, will not listen to him. In a chaotic scene, Pandora sacrifices herself for the good of others and the Box is opened again. This time, instead of giving Kratos the power to destroy a god, the Box is empty. Enraged, he assaults Zeus again. Gaia intervenes, resulting in her own death and seeming death of Zeus through Kratos impaling them with the Blade of Olympus. Before Kratos can depart, though, the spirit of Zeus sends Kratos into his own psyche. Feeling the weight of his life and crimes, Kratos sinks into despair again, only to be rescued by Pandora. She saves him and leads us to one of the most touching moments in video game history, the reconciliation of Kratos and his family, as he finally forgives himself for what he did. With this renewed self-awareness, Kratos frees himself from his past and can finally conquer Zeus once and for all.
…It’s About Hope
When it is all over, the mystical Athena returns for the contents of Pandora’s Box, refusing to believe Kratos that it was empty. We now learn why Zeus betrayed Kratos in the first place and the true nature of Pandora’s Box. Zeus sealed all the evils in the world in the Box; knowing it would be opened one day, Athena placed hope inside it as well before Zeus shut it. When Kratos first opened it against Ares, the evils of the world infected not mankind but the Olympians. Athena wants the hope back so she can rebuild the now-chaotic natural world and hold dominion over the mortals her way. Kratos will not let this happen; he plunges the Blade of Olympus into himself one last time, releasing hope and its power back for all mankind. Athena, enraged and disappointed, abandons Kratos as he fades away. After the credits, a trail of blood intimates Kratos may still be alive.
The story is all about hope. Hope is not for the weak, despite Kratos’s claim: hope, says Pandora, is what makes us strong, what makes us human; it is why we are here. There is a monumental amount of truth in what she says. Hope is one of the three key virtues according to 1 Corinthians 13:13. True, love is more important, but that does not mean we should ignore genuine hope. Hope is not a groundless, amorphous “gee, wouldn’t it be swell if…” emotion that flitters about willy-nilly. “Hope is the thing with feathers.” Hope is that ground upon which our faith is based, the assurance that God is Who He is, whether we see it (believe it) clearly in the moment or not.
“Babylon 5 was the last of the Babylon stations. There would never be another. It changed the future and it changed us. It taught us that we have to create the future or others will do it for us. It showed us that we have to care for one another, because if we don’t, who will? And that true strength sometimes comes from the most unlikely places. Mostly, though, I think it gave us hope, that there can always be new beginnings. Even for people like us.”
God of War is about hope. Redeeming Pandora is about hope, joining Pandora’s willing sacrifice to make hope a palpable part of who we are, how we think, how we live…and how we die. Being a Christian — being human — is about…hope.
Scott and Jean were not yet married (though she was still alive again). Cable was still a mysterious figure. We weren’t sure who Stryfe was. The newly-launched X-Men and X-Force titles had not-yet participated in a major X-Titles crossover. The New Mutants had recently become X-Force and were, in effect, part of the problem now. Bishop had just arrived from the future, and we still didn’t know what he meant to the team. We had so many questions, but we were certain that the future would be impressive — like the Edwardian Age, optimism abounded. What came next did not disappoint (not the real fans).
X-Cutioner’s Song is an oft-overlooked great crossover in the history of the Children of the Atom. Before Onslaught, the House of M, and Grant Morrison came along and changed everything (again and again), the revitalized X-Titles were hitting a new stride, despite the great talents of yesteryear (Chris Claremont, especially) no longer being a part of the process. A simplicity still existed that seems lost today. X-Cutioner’s Song, about to turn twenty years old, deserves a second look. As is our wont, we won’t reveal all the plots, subplots, and exquisite details that abound throughout the series — you should read it for yourself, even if you don’t know the difference between Cyclops and Havok.
Part 1 — Uncanny X-Men 294: “Overture”
Though this will sound rather hyperbolic, Uncanny X-Men 294 is about as close to perfect as a comic book can get. The better issues of comics, for me, fall in two categories: monumental (and believable) significant changes and laid-back, “day in the life” episodes — admittedly, two ends of a rather vast spectrum. UXM 294 has both. For most of the issue, we see various X-Teams going about their day: Scott and Jean are relaxing at Harry’s Hideaway; Bobby and Peter are shopping for groceries; Warren is on a date; Guido, Jamie, and Pietro are sitting down to watch Charles Xavier on television. Bishop and Rogue are on perimeter detail, discussing previous occurrences (it’s always nice when the characters remember events from previous issues), and so are Ororo and Remy (two unlikely pairings), all surreptitiously guarding Xavier as he prepares to address the gathered crowd about unwarranted mutant bigotry. As is often the case, these relaxed “day in the life” experiences are interrupted: Scott and Jean are attacked and kidnapped by Apocalypse’s Horseman and Stryfe (pretending to be Cable) shoots Xavier in front of everyone. Just like that, the relaxing day becomes the beginning of a very good and vastly underrated cross-over: X-Cutioner’s Song. The only thing that prevents this from being a full five-star great issue is the ambiguity of Scott and Jean’s kidnapping: one moment the roof is collapsing, the next we are told they have been spirited away — a minor confusion, but it is still confusing. Other than that, the issue is remarkable for its brief character moments and its scenes of conflict and tension.
Part 2 — X-Factor 84: “Tough Love”
A great deal of the success of this issue is the unique pencil work of Jae Lee. For the longest time, when first reading X-Factor back in ’92 when these issues came out, I could not tell why the artwork was so much edgier for the issues in this crossover than the issues before and after it; it was not until much later I realized (by looking at the credits, finally) the penciler, Jae Lee, did his only X-Factor work on the three issues of this event. Though his exaggerations of muscles (Bishop’s especially) can get a bit extreme, his artwork for this issue is admirably suited to the story; his penciling of the characters and their taut emotions both in their concern for Xavier and their anger at having to fight their own, albeit temporarily rogue, friends and former understudies is fitting. Equally fitting is Peter David’s writing. He has admitted to being a character-driven writer, and this issue exemplifies that important attribute of better comics, even in the midst of a story-driven multi-part crossover. Archangel’s moment of anger at Apocalypse, Strong Guy’s humor even in the most awkward moments, and Quicksilver’s lines throughout the issue are all great examples of Peter David’s skills. Being the second part of a series is a challenging role to fill, and X-Factor 84 does a remarkable job keeping the pace and tension going after Uncanny X-Men 294.
Part 3 — X-Men 14: “Fingers on the Trigger”
The cover of X-Men 14 is a bit misleading, considering Cyclops is in suspended animation during the issue, being transported by Mr. Sinister to the Mutant Liberation Front. Additionally, this issue suffers (though only slightly) in that it has to be a joining episode of a multi-part story arc essentially acting as the set-up issue to the exciting second part of the battle between the X-Men/X-Factor unit and X-Force, completed next in X-Force 16. Since it is a set-up issue, we have a lot of travelling panels, “here’s what we’re going to do next” conversations, and rapid oscillation among the various plot threads and teams involved. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, for the overall story, but it does diminish the enjoyment of this particular issue qua issue; however, some of the brief character moments make this issue worthwhile and surprisingly enjoyable even for a transition issue. Havok’s internal struggles over confronting and capturing X-Force are a great touch, elaborated on further in X-Force 16: he works for the government, but he is still a part of Xavier’s dream. The discussion of said dream is also one of the better moments in this issue, as Wolverine (ever the cynical one) intimates it might be time to give up on the “dream” and realize it is all a “nightmare.” Having to attack their former pupils (for attempting to assassinate their mentor, no less) certainly adds to the uncertainty of this time in the X-Teams’ existences and personal lives.
Part 4 — X-Force 16: “Jacklighting”
Underlying this crossover is Xavier’s dream: humans and mutants can live together in harmony, free of hatred and bigotry. In the previous installment, Gambit and Wolverine speculated it was past time the X-Men realized the dream was illusory and the pragmatic realities of their day should make them realize the world is a “nightmare.” The dream is tested in X-Force 16, as X-Factor and the Blue Team X-Men fight X-Force again. Cannonball’s leadership is also tested again: he knows they are no match for the older, more experienced teams, and he even has to leave some wounded mates behind in their tactical retreat; eventually he surrenders, knowing full well Wolverine would kill them to get what he wanted.
The changing nature of the X-Universe is furthered in the issue by Bishop’s confrontation with Mr. Sinister. Bishop’s lack of hesitation in pulling the trigger pleases Sinister, which is not a good sign for the Dream. Wolverine, Bishop, Cable — they and their interactions all point to the changes in Xavier’s dream in the years ahead, climaxing (for now) in the events of the Second Coming event and its aftereffects. The storyline of the X-Cutioner’s Song moves ahead with this issue: Sinister tells Val Cooper who is behind it all, Cable prepares to confront him, and Stryfe reveals himself to Cyclops and Jean Grey. The final page of the issue, though, is the best part: once X-Force is in captivity, Havok asks in desperation, “What do we do now?” He is clearly not just asking about how to save Xavier’s body — if the followers of Xavier’s Dream can’t even trust each other, how can the Dream survive outside of mutantkind?
Part 5 — Uncanny X-Men 295: “Familiar Refrain”
Part of the interesting nature of the X-Cutioner’s Song crossover is the relative newness of many characters we now take for granted, especially Bishop and Cable. Cable had only been around for a couple of years; we still did not know if he was Cyclops’s son taken into the future (or if Stryfe was). Before the traitor of the X-Men turned out to be Xavier (and later Bishop himself), Bishop was a mysterious young man from the future, like Cable, who didn’t yet fit in despite his commitment to them. With those mysteries going on, Archangel’s unresolved anger over Apocalypse’s transformation of him from the Angel adds to the tension of seeking out Apocalypse’s help to rescue Xavier, the father of the X-Men as a whole. Stryfe’s first encounter with Cyclops and Jean Grey in the previous installment of the crossover included him calling them his father and mother (in quotation marks), and now his revenge on them begins in earnest (though since his mother is Madelyne Pryor, not Jean Grey, his anger with her is misplaced) — all for the purpose of finding out why they treated him the way they did, sending him into the future (though it was actually Cable). Even before The Adventures of Cyclops and Phoenix, the effects of that series shaped the direction of the X-Men for a time. Though Stryfe does not become a major villain in the future of the X-Men, his existence is important here and now. The issue is fairly strong, especially with all of its sub-plots. The one irritating aspect of it is that suddenly Wolverine and Bishop have gone off to Department K, though we never knew they were going there. Their unexpected run-in with Cable is a little forced, but the humor sprinkled in the issue, especially from Wolverine, helps alleviate the slightly jarring plot progression.
Part 6 — X-Factor 85: “Snikts and Bones”
Though this issue is another “transition” episode between major points along the X-Cutioner’s Song plotline, Peter David’s emphasis on character moments make this a much more engaging transition than X-Men 14. The unique (and dark) Jae Lee pencil work makes the melee combat scenes extra taught (especially Bishop’s muscles). Cannonball’s decision to help the X-Teams in their investigation into the Mutant Liberation Front is a good one (for his maturation), though I would have liked to have seen a scene of him telling the rest of the imprisoned X-Force that he is going out on a work visa. Wolverine is especially lucid in this issue, showing his open-mindedness in listening to Cable — which is also a good decision for his character, but it strikes as a little odd, especially with his “anti-Dream” talk earlier in the crossover. Cyclops’s scene of impulsive frustration (though after hours of solitary incarceration) is a sign of his tough-as-nails personality in post-M-Day issues a decade after this storyline, but it seems a smidge out of place here. His reaction to the realization he just optic blasted children and Jean is fitting with his character. It is a good coupling with Stryfe’s scene with Jean in the previous installment, but the episodes are too brief, especially since the crossover is now half-over. The most interesting scene is Archangel’s accidental decapitation of Kamikaze. Archangel’s reaction is apropos; Boom Boom’s reaction is likewise apropos for her character, and the juxtaposition of her immaturity and his maturity is remarkable — especially after all of Archangel’s talk about wanting to assassinate Apocalypse.
Part 7 — X-Men 15: “The Camel’s Back”
This may be the weakest link in the chain of X-Cutioner’s Song. It’s not that we expect non-stop action and major plot points throughout all twelve episodes in the crossover; the story is certainly allowed to transition from set piece to set piece with intervening respites. What sets X-Men 15 apart from other linking issues, though, is that it lacks the good character moments that bolster the story-movements in those other episodes. Though Colossus has a good moment pondering his brother’s recent actions, Strong Guy’s interruption does not improve the scene, even in a comedic way. Similarly, Stryfe’s moment of humiliation for Scott and Jean in this issue is too bizarre to provide a good continuation of his vengeance scheme. The dialogue throughout the issue suffers: Reaper is too casual at the beginning, Stryfe is too congenial with Zero, Beast is too easily angered with Moira, and Scott and Jean — despite being major motivations for the story — have again almost nothing to say. The X-Teams get beat up in this issue: Boom Boom’s jaw is broken (perhaps fitting punishment for her juvenile reaction to Kamikaze’s death in the previous episode) and Rogue is temporarily blinded. Stryfe’s quick dismantling of the Dark Riders begs the question — why would Apocalypse have such a weak team around him? Havok again has to ask someone for advice on what to do next — before it was a sign of his deep emotional struggle with their plight; now he just looks indecisive and weak. The story moves along a little bit, thanks to Stryfe and the dismantling of the Mutant Liberation Front, but little overall progress is made.
Part 8 — X-Force 17: “Sleeping with the Enemy”
Part of the impressive and enjoyable aspect of this crossover is that the “big battles” come in a progressive series: the story presents the one about to happen as the real climactic battle, but when it’s over, we know the next one is going to be even more significant. Such development does not happen as successfully in many crossovers. The battle between Stryfe and Apocalypse seems like it should be bigger, even though it occurs at the beginning of the issue. When it ends, we know that more important things are about to happen. Finally, we hear from Cable about his history with Stryfe — that he doesn’t even know yet why they have the same face is part of the creative atmosphere of the time: here was an interesting mystery in the X-Universe that did not require major retcons or total multi-series changes (Disassembled, Civil War, Dark Siege, etc.). The Stryfe/Apocalypse connection is also enjoyable, but a bit confusing if you are unfamiliar with their appearances/history. Why Stryfe is glad the Dark Riders so quickly turn to him is odd, considering his disgust with them in the previous installment for being so weak — perhaps having weak acolytes is acceptable if they are your weak acolytes. The comedic snippets in this issue are better than the attempts in X-Men 15: Wolverine’s struggle with Graymalkin’s anti-smoking programming is a highlight. Other character moments help this issue succeed: Rahne’s talk with her former teammates, Siryn’s realization she was involved not with Madrox but one of his duplicates, and Cannonball’s confrontation with Havok reminds us he (Guthrie) is fit to lead after all (Havok again comes off as a bit weak and thoughtless). Finally Scott and Jean get to do something again, though it’s only for a couple of panels. Their relationship is presented well as something good in this issue — the later destruction of it will forever be a dark spot in Marvel’s history. Archangel’s confrontation with Apocalypse at the close of the issue is a good reminder of their connection and just how integral Apocalypse was in the development of the X-Universe in the ’80s and beyond.
Part 9 — Uncanny X-Men 296: “Crescendo”
This issue does a fair amount with not much material, which is impressive considering the couple of flaws in it: the beginning is confusing, made more so by the incorrect footnote from Bob Harras on page one; when did Cyclops and Jean encounter the Dark Riders?; the missing footnote on page 22 (though the issue doesn’t have page numbers for some reason) — the references to years-ago back issues are more important than references to issues in the same crossover. It’s also a bit confusing how the Dark Riders got to the moon so quickly from Egypt, after Stryfe just swayed them over in the previous episode. Aside from those aspects, this issue does have some good moments. The “story thus far” recap by Bishop, Cable, and Wolverine is interesting enough to prevent being tedious. Cyclops and Jean’s kiss before they head into more danger is another great aspect of their good relationship in the good ol’ days, before more recent writers felt free to destroy one of the best things about the X-Men and Marvel Universe. It’s about time Scott and Jean finally got to do something substantial for the first time since the beginning of the crossover (before they were captured by Caliban). Stryfe’s reaction to their sacrificial response to his test is great, even though one could make the argument not enough time in the series has been given to him and them. Some might prefer his realization to be in subconscious thought bubbles instead of editorial rectangles, but that is not as important as the event itself. Stryfe is no longer certain Scott and Jean abandoned him…what has he left now?
Part 10 — X-Factor 86: “One of These Days…Pow! Zoom!”
So late into a crossover, one might expect an issue to drag any potential momentum down — not so with this final David/Lee match-up. This pair did great things with these three X-Factor issues, but Lee may steal the show here. The best moments in this great issue are wordless images from Lee. Few great authors would allow the images do all the narrating, even in comics — Peter David proves his greatness by letting Lee’s images tell everything we need, both in a comic scene and a heart-wrenching romantic scene. The image progression of Scott and Jean running out of oxygen and turning to spend their last moments embracing is one of the best moments in Marvel’s history. Later, the comic wordless scenes of Cable, Wolverine, and Bishop waiting for Graymalkin to recalibrate for the Moon are a great progression (especially Cable whittling a Domino statuette). David does get some great character lines in, though: Havok gets some leadership skills back with his humor, Strong Guy’s comedic moment is far superior to the weak scene with Colossus a few issues before, and Cable’s “hour and a half” line is priceless. Stryfe’s tearful confrontation of Cyclops and Jean is what the series (at least their section of it) has been waiting for — genuine emotion. That Storm and Havok listen to Warren in letting Apocalypse finish saving Xavier from the techno-organic virus is a good testament not only to their good leadership skills but also Warren’s strength as a character and original X-Man. This is a stupendous issue.
Part 11 — X-Men 16: “Conflicting Cathexes”
Admittedly, this issue suffers structurally, in that it is the final set-up piece before the grand finale of the crossover, so we shouldn’t be too harsh on it. It does have some good character moments: Cannonball’s brief confrontation with Cable and Archangel’s lines to Bishop are great — “His life has been marked by pain and loss,” says Bishop of Apocalypse. “And that’s an excuse, Bishop? Which one of us hasn’t gone through the same? You just don’t see us choosing to mark everyone else’s life with the same brand of hatred that’s inflicted on us,” replies Warren. That sums up ’90s X-Men, pretty much. By this point in their lives, all of the X-Men had gone through an awful lot of turmoil and heartbreak…but they were still there, fighting to protect a world that hated and feared them — even fighting against other mutants. It was never about sheer force, which Bishop acknowledges. That the beginning of the issue tries to reject that (in Wolverine) is part of why the issue is somewhat flawed. Other smaller scenes and tidbits detract from the issue as well, but it does serve its overall purpose of drawing the various plot strands and character groups together for the final act.
Part 12 — X-Force 18: “Ghosts in the Machine”
Sometimes the finale of a major crossover can be a giant letdown; sometimes the payoff is not worth the investment. Neither of these is true of X-Force 18: this is a marvelous conclusion, bringing us fully (and finally) to the heart of what Stryfe and X-Cutioner’s Song have been about from the beginning — family (one could make the case for “love” as well). In one sense, there was no “need” to bring in Apocalypse to the story at all. Stryfe could have certainly shot Xavier with a regular plasma gun or something, not a techno-organic virus only Apocalypse could cure. The reason he was brought in to the series seems to be the great scene of weakened Apocalypse and Archangel here: Warren declares (and possibly realizes for the first time) the true part of him that makes him himself was not altered by Apocalypse — he is not truly his son. Havok’s weak moments throughout the series are forgotten in his personal confrontation with Stryfe: he finally voices his perspective at being a Summers but not Scott Summers, and he seems to begin to cope pretty well (for the time being — he’s one of the worst-treated characters in Marvel’s history). Underlying this crossover is the question “who is Cable?” Is Stryfe or Cable the son Cyclops had to send into the future? Though this crossover was supposed to answer that question, it didn’t…which is much more satisfying as an ending, surprisingly enough. That Scott starts to suspect that Cable is, to Jean’s surprise, is a great way to conclude the song. Keeping the mystery alive (especially while delivering an emotionally moving conclusion) is far superior to answering the question and then having the writers retcon it all twelve years later (the current fashion). Some may think Stryfe’s desire for togetherness is too sappy of a motivation — they are mistaken. The epilogue, Stryfe’s “pox on all mutantkind,” is of course the release of the Legacy Virus. That later writers of X-Books did not know what to do with it is not the fault of this storyline. Sinister’s stoic response to being tricked by Stryfe is consistent with his equipoise throughout the series. X-Cutioner’s Song is a story about family, about belonging, being together, and how (much) the Children of the Atom have to sacrifice in order to do that, even a little. This is a great story that shows us the heart of many of these great characters.
Epilogue — Uncanny X-Men 297: “Up and Around
This is the best comic issue I have ever read. As an epilogue to a great crossover, Uncanny X-Men 297 has the perfect mood: quiet. Some might argue the issue needs Cyclops and Jean to reflect on what just happened to them: perhaps, but they already did that (albeit briefly) in X-Force 18. Now is the time for the other refrains of the song to reach their codas. Rogue and Gambit spend some time together as she recovers (on the roof) from her temporary blinding in the crossover, though in a way that finally allows Rogue to speak her mind about what she needs, her desire for Gambit, and her great disappointment (irately so) that they can’t be together: Gambit’s power is to charge up objects and throw them away — Rogue certainly doesn’t want that to happen to her; she’s a woman, not a thing. After some hours of separation, Gambit finally returns and offers Rogue what he can, a blanket and some reassuring words — for now, his presence is enough. The thread of Warren and Hank rebuilding Harry’s Hideaway is the greatest series of panels probably ever. What’s great about it, as with the entire issue, is the genuineness of the emotions and dialogue. Finally we get some reflection on where the original X-Men used to be, how things were in the old days before Hank and Warren turned blue (literally and figuratively). It’s so easy to forget they started out as students, as kids, writing term papers and struggling with their personal issues before Magneto, Apocalypse, the Sentinels, and the M’Kraan Crystal changed everything (again and again). Hank’s laughter and Warren’s reflection on his old attitude are superb. Better still is Hank’s encouragement to Warren, especially after Warren’s own confession to Apocalypse the day before: he has struggled through his experiences (we all have), but he has come through them truly human and mature. The final thread of the issue is Professor X’s moments with Jubilee, as he enjoys a few hours’ ability to walk again. That he spends them with Jubilee is a great touch — the two ends of the good X-Universe spectrum. The quiet scenes of his reflections on losing his mobility, gaining it again, and imminently losing it again are excellent character and narrative moments. The final two pages are some of the most moving in X-Men history, rivaling the great Cyclops and Jean moments earlier in the crossover. This issue shows us what Professor Xavier’s Dream is all about: it’s not about fighting evil mutants and bigoted humans; it’s about love.
Addendum – Stryfe’s Strike File
Being a completist, I had been searching for this comic since 1992. I finally found it for 25 cents in 2010. Shortly thereafter, I began finding it in every comic store I visited — strange how that happens. The issue serves its purpose well, and the writing, though defamed by some, is aptly written as the writings of the deluded and maniacal Stryfe. It’s challenging to view the X-world through the eyes of a recently-arrived crazy man. The first appearance of Holocaust is here; more notable is Stryfe’s comment that he isn’t supposed to be in this timeline — two years before the Age of Apocalypse. Similarly, Threnody’s first appearance is here, almost a year before she appears in X-Men 27. Before Colossus becomes an Acolyte, Stryfe says it’s coming. It’s odd to think of Bishop and Wolverine as lesser players than they think they are, especially considering Wolverine’s stratospheric popularity. Too bad Stryfe could not see Scarlet Witch’s future destruction of the X-Universe a decade in the future. His comments about Cannonball are perhaps the kindest things ever said about Sam Guthrie. The frame story of Professor X reading through these files is a nice narrative device, but it’s more impressive that, despite his desire to know what Stryfe knew, he purges the files — the X-Men will face the future, together, without the perspective and machinations of madmen like Stryfe.
The Song Remains Supreme
The good news for you is we are living in an age in which Marvel has recommitted to releasing its classic crossovers and series in remastered hardcover and trade paperback sets (some at better prices than others if ordered on-line). Instead of trying to track down the separate issues in the various comic book stores around town, you can simply wait a couple of months and order the future hardcover release scheduled to come out August 2011 (with both Uncanny X-Men 297 and Stryfe’s Strike Files, you lucky duck, you — no waiting eighteen years needed). True, it might be more enjoyable to track down the issues and look at the advertisements for Aladdin the movie and Hook the SNES game, but if you are just interested in reading one of the better X-Men stories at a time before the crazy retconning and character destructions of the 2000s, getting a copy of X-Cutioner’s Song is the way to go. It’s a great story with some of the best character moments in X-Men history.
Isaac Asimov was an avowed secular humanist and a science fiction writer. Since worldviews will always color and form books and other artistic works, it is possible to trace themes of Asimov’s humanism in the first of his major science fiction trilogy, Foundation. Apart from the humanist strains, Asimov also worked in foundational elements of Marxism. The purpose of this paper is to explore the strains of Marxism within Foundation and find the comparisons between Asimov and Marx in religious, socially materialistic, and fatalistic ways.
The main component of any worldview is the religious component. The ideas of the metaphysical universe will color all the rest of the laws of the universe in Foundation. In order to understand the worldview of Foundation and the worldview of Marxism, one must understand how Asimov and Marx portray and discuss religion.
In Foundation, religion is brought up as an older belief, one that a scientific Empire like Trantor does not believe in. Religion is an explanation for what the inhabitants of Foundation cannot explain. For the Foundation itself, located on Terminus, religion becomes a tool by which the Foundation peacefully maintains its defense; it becomes a crowbar by which the Foundation holds sway over less intelligent and advanced empires. For the empires the Foundation deals with, such as Anacreon, religion contains all the technological knowledge they possess, entrapping the inhabitants within the technological mind frame the Foundation wants them to have, thus ensuring they cannot advance and threaten the somewhat defenseless Foundation.
This use of religion to dull down Anacreon’s desire to defeat the Foundation is similar to how Marxism views religion. “Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev said, ‘Communism has not changed its attitude of opposition to religion. We are doing everything we can to eliminate the bewitching power of the opium of religion’” (Nobel 68). As Doctor Nobel summarizes from the Marxist’s view of religion:
The idea of God, insists Lenin, encourages the working class… to drown its terrible economic plight in the “spiritual booze” of some mythical heaven…. Even a single sip of this intoxicant decreases the revolutionary fervor necessary to exterminate the oppressing class…, causing the working class to forfeit its only chance of creating a truly human heaven on earth: global communism.
(Nobel 65)
In Marxism, religion tones down the proletariat’s desire to revolt. In Foundation, religion keeps Anacreon peacefully dependent upon the Foundation. Anacreon is less willing to attack the Foundation because their entire way of life suddenly depends on the religious technologies and beliefs given to them. The religion infiltrated in by the Foundation destroyed Anacreon’s desire to rise up, be free, and seek to conquer new areas.
With Foundation and Marxism’s denial of the supernatural and religious aspects of reality, the laws of the universe are merely materialistic and mathematically quantifiable substances. This includes psychological history, economics, and sociology. The very roots of the Foundation are based in psychohistory, an idea that the actions of massive groups of people can be mathematically predicted and quantified. This allows Hari Seldon to predict the overall path of the Foundation and prepare its rulers in advance. This materialistic idea of psychohistory reduces mankind to a robotic and mathematical system, where only masses count and human behavior can be reduced to externally-influenced behavior, excluding the free will of individuals. With free will, the people would knock Seldon’s mathematical variables out of place. “[Seldon] worked with mobs, populations of whole planets, and only blind mobs who do not possess any foreknowledge of the results of their actions…. Interference due to foresight would have knocked the Plan out of kilter” (Asimov 3:2).
This idea of predicting the behavior of the masses through materialistic laws is foundational to Marxism. “Karl Marx says, ‘It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but, on the contrary, their social existence determines their consciousness’” (Nobel 412). Marx’s atheistic and materialistic worldview led to the belief that humans’ behavior could be materialistically governed and always worked on set laws.
Similarly, just as Seldon concentrates not on the individual but the masses, so — as Lenin says — “historical materialism made it possible for the first time to study with scientific accuracy the social conditions of the life of the masses and the changes in these conditions…. Marx drew attention and indicated the way to a scientific study of history as a simple process which, with all its immense variety and contradictions, is governed by definite laws.”
(Elkins)
This belief is necessary for Marxism. Communism is attained when the masses revolt together; their revolt is predicated by economic conditions that act as external stimuli to impact how they behave. For Seldon and Marxism, material forces are the causes by which humans act. The forces that govern humans’ sociological acts are materialistic economic forces that lead to social evolution.
The idea of man bettering himself over time through materialistic forces governing his way is entrenched in Foundation. The entire history of the Foundation is the story of its upward struggle for existence. On a large scope throughout the trilogy,
Seldon’s Plan predicts the fall of the decadent First Galactic Empire (read Roman Empire), the rise of the Traders and Merchant Princes (read bourgeoisie and nationalism), the growth of the First Foundation (read postindustrial, bureaucratic-technological society), its interaction with the long hidden Second Foundation and the eventual creation of the Second Galactic Empire, a civilization based on “mental science” (read Asimov’s utopian vision?).
(Elkins)
On a smaller scale, the Foundation shows its own social evolution. Within the social evolution in the first books, a major interplay between religion and economics takes place, much like Marx’s idea that economics propel history and erode away religion.
The Foundation’s original setup was for the preservation of materialistic human knowledge in Part 1, which moved next into preserving the Encyclopedia in Part 2. Part 3 brought in the idea of preserving the Foundation itself and the setting up of the first mayor, Salvor Hardin.
Salvor Hardin parallels the dialectic struggle in Marxism. While the Encyclopedists are content to focus on preserving the past and remaining entrenched in their present state, Hardin believes in progress and continual movement upward. “Have you ever thought of working onward, extending their knowledge and improving upon it? No! You’re quite happy to stagnate. The whole Galaxy is, and has been for space knows how long” (Asimov 2:3). Hardin understands the dangers of remaining socially stagnate.
Hardin’s idea is to dull the rebellious idea of the Foundation’s threat through taking over their enemies with religion. His emphasis on a peaceful takeover and the use of religion is partially contrary to Marxism. Marx would argue Hardin’s belief that “violence is the last refuge of the incompetent” (Asimov 3:1) as a deficient means to socially progress. The use of religion to dull down the social progression of opponents ties in with Marxism, as explained before. Even though Hardin sees non-Marxist peace as the means to social progression, the religious days of the Foundation have an end and are replaced by the greater workings of economics, as Marxism teaches.
The Merchant Prince Hober Mallow, in Part 5, represents the rising social progression of the Foundation through the replacement of religious power with economic power. Trading becomes the crowbar by which the Foundation maintains its weak defenses and impressive power of its enemies. Much like the dialectic clash found in Marxism, the Foundation’s clash of religion and economics (Marxist thesis and anti-thesis) leads to the next stage of the Foundation’s social progression (the Marxist synthesis).
The last streams of Marxism found in Foundation involve the overall sense of historical fatalism. “[Marx] writes, ‘Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past’” (Nobel 412). This is exactly the case with the Foundation. Hari Seldon has foretold the Foundation’s entire history through psychohistory, and now the masses will simply fulfill the materialistic equations Seldon deduced. The Foundation does not make history as they please, but are already on a programmed plan created by Seldon. “Circumstances directly encountered” have already been calculated by Seldon.
In Foundation and in Marxism, the individual and his choices do not matter in the long run. No one can escape the plan Seldon has foretold.
Asimov’s characters are not tragic heroes. They are nondescript pawns, unable to take their destiny into their own hands. There is no fear or pity to evoke a tragic catharsis. Instead there is complacency. The Foundation Trilogy ends on a note of one-upmanship. After all that has happened, history is still on its course and Hari Seldon wins again.
(Elkins)
In Marxism, no matter what happens, the world is predestined to socially evolve toward Communism. Every action only furthers the gradual progression toward a global Communist world.
Isaac Asimov’s Foundation is riddled with and internally structured by the ideas of Marxism, whether or not Asimov was an avowed Marxist. Religion is a means to subdue the social progression of Anacreon, just like religion in Marxism dulls the proletariat’s desire to revolt. Social progression and the history of humankind can be materialistically calculated through psychohistory, just like in Marxism social progression is pushed forward through materialistic economic processes. Foundation holds to a fatalistic structure that Seldon’s plan will be accomplished, no matter what, just as Marx holds to a fatalistic belief in the eventual victory of global communism. In religious, socially materialistic, and fatalistic ways, Foundation is elementally similar to Marxism.
Bibliography
Asimov, Isaac. Foundation. Bantam Dell, 1951.
Elkins, Charles. “Science Fiction Studies, #8,Volume 3, Part 1, March 1976.” Web. 4 Dec. 2010. Web.
Noebel, David A. Understanding the Times. 2nd ed. Summit Press, 2006.
Year after year, Summit seniors depart on what they think will be the adventure of a lifetime. Years of studying all lead up to this one, momentous event. Despite what they tell you, the “Grand European Tour” is not as glamorous as one would expect.
We started our trip with a seemingly endless, 3-hour bus ride to Dulles International Airport in Washington, D.C. Checking in to our airline gave us all our first taste of international experiences. Being checked in by a French airline attendant made the idea of this trip a little bit more real to everyone. Needless to say, I, along with the rest of my group, was excited to take flight to France.
Having never been into Dulles Airport, I had no idea what to expect. We embarked on our first tram of the trip. We made our way to our terminal and had a few hours to kill. We walked the seemingly endless terminal a few times, investigating the stores and getting a snack or two. Finally, it was time to board the plane. Our group could hardly contain our excitement, as we would be landing in Paris in a number of hours.
Every year the teachers will tell you this, but every year they are right! Try to sleep on the plane. I know it’s difficult, but it would make your life so much easier. We climbed off of our plane as it was dark and rainy in Paris, France. We were all so excited and, despite our lack of sleep, we were pumped and ready to start the day. This was the first time I had been to a place where English isn’t the primary language. When you land, be prepared to have a major culture shock. It’s different there. Going through customs was an experience, as for the first time I wasn’t someone entering my own country. The people working in customs didn’t speak English very well, so you basically have to just follow what everyone else is doing and pray that they know what’s going on.
After what seemed like a lifetime waiting in line, we headed to the baggage claim. We all waited, hoping that none of our baggage had been lost. Luckily, all of our bags made it. Then we left to meet our tour guide for the next two weeks, Paula. None of us really knew what to expect. Without Paula, we would have been completely lost the entire trip. She was our lifesaver! It was once we met her that our jet lag began to set in. She gave us all the opportunity to get money for the next few days. We had no time to be tired. It was go, go, go from here on. We were finally there. Everything was surreal. This was where we had to push ourselves to carry on.
We then found our bus to the hostel. Having never stayed in a hostel before, I had no idea what to expect. My first impression of our Parisian hostel was that it was rather nice. It has a modern feel to it. The dining room overlooks a canal. While we were there, we were to leave our things in the downstairs club, then to eat breakfast, and finally, hit the road. When I heard the word “club” I had no idea what to expect. I walked downstairs to find that in this hostel is an actual club. My opinion of the hostel suddenly changed. What once seemed clean, safe, and fun became dirty, loud, and smelly. The stench as we walked downstairs was overwhelming. There was obviously a party down there the night before, as a man was still passed out on the couch. The floor was sticky and stickers of popular rock bands covered the walls. This proved to me that Europe was going to be much different than anything I had seen in America.
After leaving our baggage downstairs, we had our first taste of a European breakfast. There was hard bread, cereal, and a variety of spreads to choose from. I decided to go for the bread with a pat of butter. I found it rather delicious. I believed that I enjoyed European breakfasts. But after two days of eating bread nonstop, I would have given anything for a piece of fruit. Still, to this day, I can’t eat bread. I’ve had enough! Also at this breakfast, I filled up my water bottle, as we had a long, strenuous day ahead. It was at this point that I realized that the Parisian water made me feel sick. When in Paris, buy the bottled water.
It was then time to head out for our first day of adventure. We were all excited. It was time for our first real experience in a foreign city — the Paris Metro. When I say experience, I mean experience. We walked down the road to the nearest stop. As we walked down the stairs, Paula stated that we were about to enter Paris from one of the best ways. When she said this, we all got a sudden burst of energy. We could only imagine how we were going to enter the city. Because of this, the dirtiness and smelliness of the metro seemed unimportant. I was too focused on being in a new and exciting place. After stopping at our respective stops and starting to get an idea of how the metro worked, we walked out into the reasonably fresh French air. It may have been misty outside, but we didn’t care. We then walked around a large building and caught a glimpse of the Eiffel Tower. We were all stunned. Everything felt so surreal. We were no longer tired anymore. We were in Europe. After getting our pictures, we made our way under the tower to our bike tour location.
The bike tour is something like no other. To tell you the truth, this was probably my least favorite part of the trip. It was cold and wet. We saw a number of really cool locations, but I found myself unimpressed with the French scenery. Everything was covered with dirt; I saw very little grass on the trip. The locals didn’t seem very nice, as one woman told us off for standing in her way. I had heard that Paris was the least favorite, so I didn’t have high expectations, but with this bike tour my expectations were proved correct. Everything in Paris looks the same. The buildings are all grey, everything covered with dirt. It’s all roads that all look similar, other than different-looking store fronts. The Parisian scenery was reasonably unimpressive.
After our tour, Paula gave us free time. With this “free time” she basically strongly encouraged we each tour some art museum. I can’t remember what it’s called, but I know it’s part of the Louvre. We saw Monet’s Water Lilies but other than that, I was too tired to really pay attention to anything else. No one really enjoyed the museum as most of us were only interested in one thing, sleep. It was at this museum that the jet lag really set in for all of us. It was at this point that I felt myself slip into a different state of consciousness. It was something I had never felt before. Never in my life had I been awake for 36 hours, and never will I do it again. I felt myself shut off. I was living in a fog. Everything just sounded like white noise. It was the strangest sensation I had ever felt. The pure exhaustion inflicted by this trip is difficult to push through.
Finally we were back at our hostel and in our rooms. The rooms were nice and reasonably clean. At that point, I didn’t really care what my room looked like. I woke myself up by taking a nice shower, as we were all covered with dirt and felt disgusting from our bike tour. We were forced to go to dinner, which was definitely not worth going to. It was a strange beefy substance covered with a strange sauce, all served over rice. Everyone ate only enough to be allowed to leave. We all hurried off to bed not long after dinner was served.
The next day was definitely my favorite of the days in Paris. The weather was much nicer, and it was a bit warmer. After having a little more sleep, I had a bit more appreciation for the country we were in. This day we met up with our fabulous tour guide, Malcolm, and went on a tour of the Louvre. For those who haven’t had the opportunity to meet Malcolm, he is an elderly British man. He was full of life and so much fun. We had fun listening to his “ghastly” jokes about random artwork in the museum. He was definitely one of the highlights of the trip.
While we were at the Louvre, I was stunned by its size. It is huge! Our guide said it has over 8 miles of galleries. We had a tour that lasted a little over an hour and we saw many a quarter of a wing of the museum. There is no way I had enough patience to make it through the entire museum. It was really cool being there.
Later that day we had the opportunity to spend some free time shopping. I, along with 3 others from our group, walked from the Louvre down the Champs Elysees. We got to spend the afternoon exploring the street and investigating all of the expensive designer shops that reside there. It is like the Time Square of Paris. It is really long; trust me, I walked the entire thing! It was during this afternoon of shopping that we had our first experience with pickpockets. A girl on the metro tried to reach into a member of our group’s pocket. If she would have thought through the situation more, she would have been successful, but she decided to try it on a reasonably empty train. Paris was the only place we experienced issues with pickpockets. Everywhere else had much more respectful people.
That night, we made our way to the Eiffel Tower. After waiting in line to buy tickets, we boarded the elevator-like lift to the first and second levels. We stopped at the second level, as several members raced up the stairs to meet us. We got our pictures, and then got in line to make it to the top. Once we made it, it was pretty amazing being able to see the entire city from one place. Everything seemed so small.
It was while we were on the third and top level that an alarm started going off. Not being able to speak French, and unable to understand what the English voice was saying, we didn’t panic. We continued our business as usual. No one was moving as if there were a real emergency, so we didn’t really worry about it. When it was time for us to find our way down the tower, we stopped at the first floor. To our surprise, it was like a ghost town. There was absolutely no one there. The alarm was still going off, and there was no one in sight. Struck with confusion and panic, we didn’t know what to do. Luckily, we discovered that the restaurant on this floor was still open, the place where we were all to meet. Otherwise, we would have been stranded on the ground. From this restaurant, we watched the sun set over the city before heading down to watch the Eiffel Tower sparkle in the darkness. It was at this point that Paula handed us a strange pair of glasses. These glasses split the light into different colors so every time the tower would flash, bright colors would erupt from it.
The next morning we went on a tour of several churches in the area. It was sad that churches there had become places of tourism instead of places of worship. I realized here that Europe wouldn’t be the same as America, in the sense of Christianity. You don’t encounter churches everywhere that people regularly attend. Churches in Europe were mostly historical locations.
That afternoon we embarked on our second real experience of the trip — the overnight train to Rome. I definitely did not know what to expect going into it. In my cabin was Julie, Emma, Emma’s mother, Emma’s brother Drew, and his friend Stephen. It was definitely an adventure. After arranging our luggage, we sat down and tried to relax in our small room. It was three bunks tall, and I probably could have touched both side walls at the same side. The widows didn’t open, and it was poorly air conditioned. The boys claimed the top bunks and immediately began to set up their room for the night. They decided to have a “mixer,” consisting of only the two of them of course. Our rather peaceful ride through the countryside of France and Italy was interrupted by strange techno music and a flashing strobe light. Luckily, their party didn’t last long, as both of them were asleep in a number of minutes.
It was also interesting walking on the trains. You never know when you will hit curves and bumps and be easily thrown off of your feet. Good balance is necessary when spending a long amount of time on a train. When you enter these trains, make sure you are with people that you don’t mind spending a long amount of time with, because you are basically trapped with them for about 16 hours. Luckily, my group was a rather fun clan to spend so much time with.
We stumbled off the train, after having been relatively motionless for the past day. The weather was perfect — the sun shining, the temperature warm. We arrived at our home for the next few days. We stayed at a convent. The nuns were really nice, and they had delicious breakfast! Although, when you climb in the elevator to your room, you can only have one person and her luggage. A friend and I climbed in the elevator at the convent with both of our suitcases and it dropped. It was definitely one of the scariest moments of the trip. After that experience, I didn’t ride in another elevator until it was necessary. After dropping our things off, we climbed on our bus to “seize the day” — a phrase Paula used quite often. We stopped at the Coliseum. It was amazing! Being immersed in so much history was a phenomenal experience. We walked through the Forum and saw so many ancient buildings. Being surrounded by structures that were several times the age of our country was so amazing! It was almost a feeling unable to be expressed by words. All of those buildings could only leave you with awe. It was just amazing!
That night we walked around the city. We saw the famous fountains of Rome as well as the Spanish Steps. Rome at night is just like it is in the movies. There are little, quaint, roadside restaurants on the back streets. Live music is playing while the people eat. Rome was the first place that I went where what you see in Hollywood is similar to what you see in real life.
The next day we got to tour the Vatican. It was interesting to see all of the history of the church in one location. The Sistine Chapel was definitely my favorite part of the Vatican. It was different than I expected it would be. It was a lot smaller. I imagined it being long, but it was reasonably short. It was one big room with a bunch of people standing around. The details were so spectacular. It was really cool to see all of these paintings and structures that I had only seen in pictures, in person. Seeing all of them first-hand was definitely not something that I would trade for anything.
Everyone will tell you that the worst day for walking will be the first day in Rome, but for me, it was definitely this day. My feet were hurting so much from walking in Paris. Standing around in the museums made my feet really hurt. When you go on this trip, make sure you bring good, comfortable shoes that you don’t mind walking in for an incredible amount of time.
It was also this day that I had my first taste of Italian gelato. It is so delicious! That day I had so much gelato. That was definitely not one of my brightest ideas. The fruity flavors were the best, though. One of the only ways to make it through all of the heat and walking is with the gelato. The food was definitely one of the best things about Italy.
The next day, we sadly had to leave this beautiful city to head to Florence. Although it was beautiful and surrounded with lots of Renaissance history, Florence was not one of my favorite places. It was old and rather dirty. The buildings were tall and the roadways were narrow. It was definitely very different from Rome. I think the fact that we had just left Rome made this city seem less impressive that it would have been if we went to Florence first. In the main parts of the city, it felt very old.
One redeeming factor of the first day in Florence was the safety pin game. Although many gave up toward the end of the day, it was a very competitive thing toward the beginning. Paula charged us to stay positive throughout the day. We were each given a safety pin. If we were heard saying the word “no,” or any form of it, our safety pin would be taken away by the one who caught us, much like as if one were at a baby shower or something. It was very competitive at the beginning of the day and ended with our very own Emma McNally, victorious, with all of the pins dangling from her shirt.
Despite the rather old feel of the city, it was one of the best places for shopping. For those going on this trip to buy souvenirs, Florence is definitely the first place that has things worth buying. It is fun to bargain with the workers on the street. It is really busy, so be sure to stay with a group. The number of street shops is seemingly endless. It is definitely a place worthy of checking out.
The second day we stayed in Florence, we were bused off to a Tuscan vineyard. The experience here was beautiful. We were given the opportunity to take a tour of the vineyard, as well as the castle on the property. From the top, we could overlook the beautiful countryside. This was followed by a horseback ride through the hills of the beautiful area. After our ride, we all sat at a big table and ate an endless amount of fresh pizza. It was so delicious! This was definitely one of the high points of the trip. We all got to sit at a table and discuss what we had seen and experienced throughout the trip so far. We went back to the hostel relaxed and ready for the next day.
Venice was next on our itinerary. This was the place that I was least looking forward to. Having an irrational fear of boats, I was ready to get this day over with. Although having a reputation of being a beautiful city, I didn’t find it very enjoyable. The roads, if you can call them that, were all dark and not very well lit. There was little fresh air. The alleys were dirty. And to my dismay, boats were everywhere! There are no vehicles on the island. The only way to get from one place to another is by walking or floating, neither of which, at this point, I was very excited about. But, like Florence, Venice has another of the best shopping locations. Authentic Venetian masks and blown glass are everywhere. It was really fun to explore the street for an afternoon.
The day ended with the thing I was least excited for, the gondola ride. I do admit that my fear of boats is somewhat irrational, but when it comes to tippy boats, I completely freak out. I’m proud to say that I took the gondola ride well, despite my death grip on the side of the boat. I may have been the last one on and the first one off, but I attacked my fear of boats head on.
The next morning we were woken up early in the morning, after very little sleep, in order to board our boat to catch our train. The streets of Venice are why you want to bring a small suitcase. You will be told several times to bring the smallest suitcases possible. When you arrive in Venice, you will either regret your decision to not listen or be glad that you did listen. Venice is covered in cobblestones and bridges. After going up and down about ten flights of stairs, you will want a small suitcase! One thing you don’t think about when packing is that you have to carry everything with you everywhere. I had a duffle, a carry-on, and my day bag. I was dying after carrying my bags over like five bridges. So, when Mr. Rush tells you to bring a small suitcase, bring a small suitcase!
Finally after we finished our trek over the streets of Venice and boarded our boat, we arrived at the train station. This day was a day full of train rides, all leading up to the climactic 4-minute train transfer. We spent all day practicing getting on and off trains. Everyone had their doubts about making the train in which we had four minutes to transfer. It took us a good ten minutes at best to get off one train and on another. Finally, when it was time for our train, we made it! We had all been anxiously anticipating this train transfer, and, proudly, we caught our train. That was one of the best feelings of that week. We arrived in Rothenberg.
Rothenberg was definitely the most peaceful and enjoyable part of our trip. We were given a full day to relax, sleep, shop, explore. This old, walled town looked as if it came out of a Grimm’s Fairy Tale. It was like we were in a movie. The experience here was definitely one to remember. We stayed in a small bed and breakfast owned by Klaus and his father. They were so nice to us. The breakfasts they served were delicious. The rooms were nice and clean. The town was very quaint and safe. We were given the day to do what we wanted to do, free from chaperones.
That night we all met up to go on the Night Watchman tour. That was so much fun. He was hilarious and still gave us a good history of the city. We walked around in the icy cold as he showed us unique parts of the city. The tour with the Night Watchman was one of the highlights of the entire trip.
Germany was the country of bus rides. We took busses everywhere. Because of those busses, I learned to sleep in the most uncomfortable of positions. They were reasonably enjoyable, as they were often entertaining. Loud songs generally filled the back seat. The silence was often filled with those singing in the rear of the bus.
We took a bus to Wittenberg. This day was started off by stopping at Wartburg Castle. The death hill was terrible, as the air was cold and the dirt road was steep. Once at the top, we took a tour of the castle. We learned about the history and got to see the room in which Martin Luther translated the Bible into German. We then added onto our Luther experience by arriving in the town of Wittenberg. We saw Martin Luther’s house and much of the town in which he lived. The place in which we stayed was an old castle, and there was actually a historical dig going on in the back.
That night we all got a chance to sit around and play cards. We listened to music and got a chance to talk about what we had seen, and for the first time on the trip we got the chance to really spend time together. We just got to sit around and enjoy ourselves.
The next and final day, we headed into Berlin. We started it off with a tour of the concentration camp. It was really interesting to see where all of the devastation happened. It was surreal to see the place where so many people died and were tortured. Though much of the camp hadn’t survived over time, it was sad to see the buildings that still existed. We walked through the same gate that the inmates there walked through. It was strange to think that everyone knew what was happening in those camps, but everyone would pretend like they had no idea. I found it interesting how the people in Rome, during the early days of this world, were searching for knowledge. Everyone was looking to find answers. When we were in Paris, we saw that people were making answers for things. They got tired of wondering and created answers. They wanted that knowledge. And finally in Germany, once they had knowledge, like of what was going on in the world, they fought against and denied that knowledge. They didn’t want to know what they did know.
After our tour of the camp, we got on our bus and drove all around the city for the rest of the day. We stopped at popular points of interest such as the Berlin wall and Checkpoint Charlie. It was definitely much more relaxing than much of the other tours had been. We got to just sit and listen. It was probably the most enjoyable tour of the trip. Our guide was very energetic and excited about what he was telling us. Berlin was definitely very interesting, and I wish we had more time there.
We set up our rooms in our hostel, only to be torn apart again in a short number of hours. We woke up very early for our 7am flight to Paris. From Paris, we headed back home. I was definitely ready to step foot on the homeland. The entire past two weeks felt like a fog. Everything goes by so fast you aren’t given much time to appreciate what you saw. Now, having been home for a month or so, I can fully appreciate everything I saw and learned and do hope to return one day.
Believe it or not, this is just a brief overview of what happened on the grand tour of Europe. It obviously isn’t as glamorous as the itinerary makes it sound. Don’t take this as me saying that the trip isn’t worth going on, because it definitely is. But there will be times where you just have to go with the flow. Sometimes the day isn’t planned out fully. Complaining will get you nowhere. In the moment, you may be in pain, or cold, or hot, but after it’s gone, all of the trouble that you went through was totally worth it compared to the experience you will take away from it. One important thing I wish I took time to do on this trip was taking the time to thoroughly enjoy what I saw. “Seize the day” as Paula says, but enjoy the moment. The trip will be fast-paced, and there is absolutely nothing that can be done about that but take the time to take in what you see. Everything from those two weeks is kind of foggy because I didn’t take the time to take in the details about every situation. Also, take pictures of memories, not necessarily things. I have so many pictures of buildings and art, but I have very few pictures of things that I really want to remember. The Europe Trip is one that is really worth going on. Being introduced to other cultures was an experience that I wouldn’t trade for anything.
After the success of Selling England By the Pound, the follow-up album would be an important landmark in the direction of Genesis. Unfortunately, a variety of factors contributed to the end of the Golden Age of Genesis. For the first time, the creative process was changed: Peter Gabriel wrote most of the lyrics for Lamb apart from the band, as they wrote most of the music separately. When the two sides came together, the joining of lyrics and music was not as seamless as it had been before. Though some members of the band were somewhat relieved that the thematic content of Lamb was different from the mythical, mystical stuff that dominated so much of their previous albums (at least, for the most part), the collaboration process brought more frustration than camaraderie. Additionally, Gabriel was absent for much of the creative sessions, helping his wife during her debilitating pregnancy. Though this was admirable and certainly the right thing to do, it helped strain the relations of the band. Before the tour even began, Gabriel’s time with the band was technically over, though he did stay around long enough to complete the tour. This helped to further the rifts in the band, since Gabriel’s on-stage characters and costumes overshadowed, at least critically, the musicianship of the other band members. The lengthy Lamb Tour, in effect, finished off the Golden Age of Genesis. As he sings in “In the Cage,” the sweat (not sweet) has turned sour. They have come, in an odd, unfortunate way, full circle since From Genesis to Revelation.
In order to give The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway an appropriate tribute and analysis, frankly, we would need an entire issue of Redeeming Pandora solely for that purpose. If you thought “We Didn’t Start the Fire” takes a lot of footnotes to explicate, that is nothing compared to the voluminous amount of annotation necessary to delve into the mysteries and wonders of Gabriel’s fecund erudition. Lamb almost makes Joyce and Eliot seem obtuse. Without trying to sound proud, I don’t even understand it all myself, though I’m doing my best. For the sake of time, and an attempt to give some semblance of respect to what is rightly considered one of the best concept albums of all time, we shall offer an admittedly superficial exploration of some of the main ideas explored throughout the album. If time permits (and the journal continues), look for a more elaborate analysis of this monumental work in the future. Certainly more consideration needs to be given to the fantastic musical aspects of the album in addition to the lyrical narrative outline with which we will concern ourselves for now. In the meantime, listen to the album (many, many times) and read Gabriel’s story in the liner notes to tide you over until we meet again.
Part One
Lamb is a concept album, as mentioned before. The concept is much larger and expansive than a simple declarative sentence can encapsulate, but the basic story is the journey of self-discovery of Rael, the Imperial Aerosol Kid, Puerto Rican graffiti artist in New York City, though he thinks he is trying to save his brother John. Against that basic frame story, we meet mystical creatures like Keats’s Lamia, Lilywhite Lilith, and the Colony of Slippermen. Sprinkled throughout this mystical, mythical tale, Gabriel alludes to Wordsworth (“I wandered lonely as a cloud”), Motown (“I got sunshine”), and classical comedy (“Groucho with his movies trailing”), and just about everything else under the sun and subway.
The liner notes tell us “a lamb lies down. This lamb has nothing whatsoever to do with Rael, or any other lamb — it just lies down on Broadway.” Eh. Maybe. It might not be Van Eyck’s lamb, but it probably means something (everything in this album does, right?). Rael emerges from the steam and shadows, spray-painting R-A-E-L, as part of his attempt to make a name for himself. Discontent with his seemingly purposeless life, and that no one notices him and his work Rael wonders if it might be better to be a fly waiting to smash into a windshield. Soon, mists arise and Rael finds himself in a cage. His brother John appears but turns away and won’t help him. The cage disappears, and Rael spins down underground to see the Grand Parade of Lifeless Packaging (mankind, obsessed with materialism and consumerism). He tries to save his brother John from turning into a lifeless advertisement, but suddenly he is back in New York City, at least he thinks he is. During his confusion, we get some of Rael’s backstory: his reform school days, his pyrotechnic tendencies, his time running with a gang, his commitment to being tough (pictured by shaving his hairy heart and cuddling a porcupine), and his first “romantic” encounter, which, despite the fine instruction he got from a book on how to succeed in such endeavors, ended in total failure. Romeo kissed by the book; Rael did everything else by it — neither ended well. These reflections come to a close; John is nowhere to be found.
Suddenly Rael is in a corridor with lambswool under his naked feet (far too many lamb references for it to mean nothing). One cannot hide from the present in one’s memory, Rael decides. He spots some people crawling along the carpet in the direction he must go, heeding the call: “We’ve got to get in to get out.” He follows the carpet crawlers (people, not bugs) up the stairs into a chamber of 32 doors. Looking at all of these doors, Rael ponders what he needs in life, deciding he needs “someone to believe in, someone to trust.” His whole life has been one of rebellion and individualism; it’s time for a change. It’s not about wealth: he can’t really trust either rich men or poor men. Countrymen seem more trustworthy than townmen, for diverse reasons. Every door seems to lead him back here, to a waiting room of fearful, solitary indecision. Priests, magicians, academics, and even his parents send him in different directions, “[b]ut nowhere feels quite right.” Rael decides that he’ll trust someone “who doesn’t shout what he’s found. / There’s no need to sell if you’re homeward bound.” Rael finally accepts he can’t live in fear anymore. He’s ready to trust — but whom?
Part Two
“The chamber was in confusion — all the voices shouting loud.” Rael sees Lilith, a pale, blind woman who needs Rael’s help as much as he needs hers. He leads her through the crowd into more darkness, and she leaves him to face his fear. “Two golden globes float into the room / And a blaze of white light fills the air.” Rael is blinded, tosses a stone in front of him in defense against an approaching whirring sound, glass breaks, the cavern collapses, and Rael is trapped in the rubble. This is where the album really gets weird.
Rael finds himself in the waiting room of the Supernatural Anaesthetist, who happens also to be a fine dancer. The gas he emits leads Rael down a long passageway until he enters a new magnificent chamber. “Inside, a long rose-water pool is shrouded by fine mist.” From the waters rise three Lamia, beautiful women with snake tails below the waist. Entranced by the anesthetic and their beauty, Rael “trusts in beauty blind” and enters the pool. Initially it seems the Lamia die and give their carcasses to Rael for food. Soon we discover it was all a trick. Rael glides along like the Lady of Shallott until the water around him “turns icy blue” and he arrives at the Colony of Slippermen.
The Slippermen are slimy, bumpy creatures — all victims of the Lamia’s ploy, and Rael is becoming one of them. The Slippermen point Rael in the direction of his brother John and the only cure for becoming a full Slipperman: castration by Doktor Dyper. Rael and John are reunited and quickly agree to the rather drastic “cure.” What’s left over after the operation is placed in “a yellow plastic shoobedoobe,” a storage tube, so what was removed can be used again in emergency situations. Suddenly, the dark cloud that first captured Rael in New York City returns, this time morphing into a giant Raven that steals his shoobedoobe. Rael goes after the Raven, but John abandons him again for the “safety” of the underworld. Rael is about to catch up with the Raven when he drops the tube into a river in a ravine. Rael watches it float away.
Rael decides to chase after it; just as he’s about to catch up with it, he sees the way out of this surreal underground prison: a window opens up back to New York City. Rael heads for the exit only to hear his brother cry for help down below in the ravine. Faced with the most important decision of his life, Rael plunges into action: abandoning the way back to freedom and home, he, like Huck Finn, risks staying “forever in this forsaken place” to rescue his brother. After an exciting and dangerous chase, Rael finally pulls his brother to safety … only to find he has not rescued John but Rael himself. The epilogue to the album, “it.,” intimates that “Rael” is a minor anagram of “Real.” Broadly speaking, the concept for this concept album is about living one’s life wisely and selflessly — but choose wisely, because the time to decide is now. Certainly some parallels exist to Pink Floyd’s The Wall, but enough differences exist for the two monumental albums to be considered separate entities, both of great value beyond diverse aesthetic experiences. The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway reminds us of important truths about the brevity of life and the importance of making wise and selfless decisions in the time we are given.
“It’s Only Knock and Knowall, but I Like It”
Lest they be taken too seriously, though, Gabriel closes the album with the last of his Genesis-era multi-layered ironies: “Yes it’s only knock and knowall, but I like it.” A subtle Rolling Stones allusion conveys Gabriel’s mission (if I may use such a weighty word) on not only The Lamb but also his entire Genesis career: satire (knock) and erudition (knowall) have been combined to present serious ideas in an enjoyable musical medium, combining great lyrics for slow, moving emotional songs and lengthy epic-like narratives (both apocalyptic and diverting) with masterful musicianship (far too often overlooked at the time and even today). The album and Peter Gabriel’s tenure with the greatest progressive rock band of all time fade out, putting a knowing smile on our faces. He wouldn’t have it any other way.
With Peter Gabriel’s departure from the group, the course of Genesis took a major turn to survive … but survive it did. Like M*A*S*H had to adapt to the departures of Henry Blake and Trapper John, Genesis adapted (as it already had, with its early line-up changes before the classic lineup) for a new time and a new direction. After a lengthy search and no suitable replacement found for Gabriel, Phil Collins became the official frontman of the band, and the rest, as they say, is history. The next two albums, A Trick of the Tail (one of my favorites) and Wind and Wuthering (influenced by Wuthering Heights), continued the concept album approach for which classic Genesis is so noted. It was not until Steve Hackett’s departure before …And Then There Were Three in 1978 that Genesis began to fully morph away from the king of progressive rock into the radio-friendly creator of pop rock smash hit singles in the 1980s many people think of when they hear the band’s name.
Hopefully this brief survey of the Peter Gabriel era of Genesis has inspired you to go back to the band’s progressive rock roots and hear for yourself (perhaps not for the first time) the creative beginnings of the band before it was defined by “Invisible Touch.” Genesis is one of the most enjoyable and moving bands (lyrically and musically) of the modern musical era, with a history far richer than you may have known. Start from the beginning, and work your way to the end. And then do it again. You will be glad you did.
An error that drifts around Christian circles is what I call “hyper-supersessionism,” which maintains that, not only is the Church the New Israel, the physical descendants of Abraham are essentially irrelevant to biblical prophecy. This is a false idea. The Church is the organic continuation of old Israel. The olive tree was not cut down and replaced, but those Jews who rejected Jesus as Messiah were cut off for their apostasy, and those Gentiles who accepted Jesus as Messiah were grafted into the olive tree and became sons of Abraham by their faith in Messiah.
With this in mind, read the words of Christ and Peter:
Acts 1:6-8: So when they had come together, they asked him, “Lord, will you at this time restore the kingdom to Israel?” He said to them, “It is not for you to know times or seasons that the Father has fixed by his own authority. But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you, and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the end of the earth.”
This seems to imply that the Lord will one day place the land back in the hands of Israel — true Israel. At the moment the land is possessed by the apostate Jews who were cut off from true Israel because of their rejection of Messiah. However, I believe that their return to the land does have some significance in biblical prophecy.
Zechariah 12:10-11: And I will pour out on the house of David and the inhabitants of Jerusalem a spirit of grace and pleas for mercy, so that, when they look on me, on him whom they have pierced, they shall mourn for him, as one mourns for an only child, and weep bitterly over him, as one weeps over a firstborn. On that day the mourning in Jerusalem will be as great as the mourning for Hadad-rimmon in the plain of Megiddo.
The Prophet Zechariah writes that at some point the inhabitants of Jerusalem will look on the LORD, whom they pierced, and they will mourn. They will plead “Lord, have mercy!” This implies a turning to God on the part of the ethnic Jews. Combine this with Romans 11:25-27: Lest you be wise in your own conceits, I want you to understand this mystery, brothers: a partial hardening has come upon Israel, until the fullness of the Gentiles has come in. And in this way all Israel will be saved, as it is written, “The Deliverer will come from Zion, he will banish ungodliness from Jacob”; “and this will be my covenant with them when I take away their sins.”
So, at some point, ethnic Israel will cry out to the Lord and repent for rejecting their Messiah. They will be grafted back into the tree of true Israel, and thus, the Nation of Israel will be converted to an Orthodox Christian state.
When you think of your children’s future, what comes to mind? Do you imagine them having a quality education, a successful career, a happy family, a safe home, and all the freedoms that we enjoy today? Do you imagine them as happy, healthy, and financially secure? Regretfully, while this is how we like to think of our children’s future, the truth is much more menacing. We often take for granted the many freedoms and privileges that we as Americans have, and if we are not more careful concerning the preservation of these freedoms and privileges, others will not hesitate to take them away from us. Currently America is headed toward a very unsightly demise, and we have to do something about it.
The current military expenditures of the United States Federal Government are not adequate to ensure the security of the United States. Despite the relative peace that Americans enjoy in the modern age, the choices made in the near future concerning America’s military budget have the potential to permanently alter America’s direction. With the rising national debt and the recurrent national deficit, well-intentioned reformers risk cutting the programs in the federal government that are most important to the well-being of the United States and that are most in need of federal funding. In the midst of the “War on Terror” many ill-advised officials are crippling America’s long-term security by stripping the military of its large-scale conflict capabilities in order to make way for a counter-insurgency focus. Despite inflation and the costly wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the military budget is left underfunded due to an alleged lack of funds while President Obama’s controversial health care plan, the trillions of dollars in stimulus money, and countless entitlements are funded without a second thought by many in Congress. Without a strong military, America is susceptible to countless threats in the modern world, many of which, while not openly hostile to the security of United States, are still a threat to American interests. If America cannot retain its current status as leader of the free world, there will be no free world. Thus, in order to avoid this grim prospect, it is imperative that the United States Federal Government substantially increase the federal military budget.
The purpose of this paper is to refute a few common misconceptions concerning the military budget. When the issue of increased military funding is brought up, several common arguments are made against such an increase. The first of these arguments states that because we are already spending more money on our military than the rest of the world combined, we do not need to spend any more. This argument is founded on the critically false assumption the amount of money spent by the military has a one-to-one correlation to both the quantity and quality of the forces produced and maintained by the military. In other words, people who make this argument often do not realize that the “higher-tech” something is, the more expensive it is, and thus, when the budget is limited, the military generally has to make sacrifices in quantity in order to attain the higher quality (and vice versa). Because of this trade-off, the military must maintain a balance between more expensive advanced technology and less expensive conventional technology — between technology and numbers. It is also important to recognize that, because there are multiple combat scenarios in which the United States may have to deploy its military forces, not all technologies are constructed for the same purpose. More advanced technology is often procured and maintained in order to fulfill very limited and yet very important roles. For example, certain military UAVs (Unmanned Aerial Vehicles) are outstanding for collecting intelligence and for eliminating certain targets, but currently they are not a competitive form of technology for air superiority; much less advanced manned-aircraft is still capable of out-performing modern UAVs in air-to-air combat. Because the United States Military has to maintain a careful balance between the quality and the quantity of its forces, because it has multiple roles to fill pertaining to defense, and because a unique technology is often required for each specific combat scenario, the current military budget cannot be assumed to be fully designated to one single aspect of its defense procurement. Thus, while the United States Military may be spending more money than all of the other nations on earth put together, it cannot then be assumed that America could, for example, easily be victorious in a war with every other nation, because not all of America’s military funding is spent on preparing for this one scenario. Most countries are not as committed to so many objectives world-wide as is the United States. Even if there were only one simple objective toward which every nation devoted its military budget, spending a specific amount of money in one nation is not going to bring the same results as spending that same amount of money in another nation. There are too many variables involved in the process to make such a simple comparison. These variables include the price of materials, the items purchased, the price of labor, the procurement process, etc. Thus it should be clear military spending cannot be correlated on a one-to-one ratio to military preparedness for every possible conflict, and thus, one cannot assume because we spend more money than any other nation on earth, we are also better matched for any conflict with any other nation on earth. One should not judge the benefits of any policy purely by the amount of money spent to achieve its end.
A second common argument some will present for why we should not increase military expenditures asserts that, because of our massive national debt and incessant national deficit, we ought to be cutting military spending rather than increasing it. While the national debt and the national deficit are certainly significant problems, that does not necessarily mean we should cut every government program. Instead we should carefully determine which programs ought to have their funding cut, and which programs ought to remain the same or have their funding increased. National security must not be compromised. We cannot risk the existence of the United States for the financial security of the United States. It would do us no good to save a large sum of money by cutting back our military budget in order to reduce the deficit if such an action threatened the existence of the United States as a nation. There are many alternative programs which can be cut instead of the nation’s already underfunded military program. Max Boot, in “Impact of Past Defense Cuts Should Warn of Risks” at washingtonpost.com argues that our current defense budget is “eminently affordable.” At less than four percent of America’s gross domestic product, he says, the relative amount of money which the United States spends on defense is significantly less than it has been throughout the past century. Citing the example of the “post-Cold War drawdown,” Boot also draws attention to the historical impacts of cutting the defense budget. While it would be beneficial to eradicate any truly wasteful spending within the military’s budget (though one must be careful what one classifies as wasteful), it is not feasible such an action would free enough money to cover all of the gaps in the military budget. Thus, in spite of the mounting national debt, we must still increase the funding for the United States Military.
Finally, the third counterargument makes the claim that, because the United States has been able to quickly develop new technology and prepare for conflict in the past, America should postpone any large military budgetary increase until a conflict which necessitates such an increase presents itself. The fundamental flaw with this argument is the fact it completely ignores the new pace of warfare that has developed as a result of the tremendous technological breakthroughs in the past century. While a purely reactionary defensive policy may have been sufficient to maintain security in the past, it is no longer a feasible strategy for the 21st century; warfare has developed much more of an emphasis upon preemption. In the past, America has relied largely upon its geographical insulation to act as a temporal buffer from conflict. Because the United States is separated from much of the world by the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, historically the United States has been either left alone or has had a substantial amount of time to prepare for battle because of the tremendous amounts of time it would take to cross the ocean by ship. In the modern world, however, America does not have the privilege of either remaining isolationist or of waging war purely on a reactionary basis. Because of the interconnectedness of the modern global economy and because of significant advances made in the technology of warfare, the American military must be ready to take action upon a moment’s notice.
American interests are so tightly interwoven with the well-being of countless other economies worldwide that America cannot afford to sit back and not take action when an ally or even a competitor’s security is threatened. In order to protect America’s trading options, the American military cannot wait until American soil is threatened, but instead it must always be fully capable of deploying anywhere in the world to meet any potential threat.
Modern technology also plays a role in the necessity to anticipate hostilities before they actually occur. Because modern technology enables quicker communication, quicker mobilization, better networking, faster calculations, faster vehicles, more precise munitions, longer flight times, more powerful weapons, and a whole range of other benefits, the pace of warfare is based upon much shorter time frames. For example, in World War II, in order for American forces to attack the Japanese homeland, American aircraft carriers had to sail within several hundred miles of the Japanese islands to enable a successful bombing mission. Because the aircraft had much smaller combat radii than modern aircraft, they had to be deployed much closer to their destination, and this took time. Modern aircraft, on the other hand, can fly around the world without having to land to refuel. This means we have to always be prepared to defend ourselves because we don’t have months to prepare while the enemy gets their forces into position.
The fact that technology was much less complex than it is now has significant implications for strategy as well. In former decades military weapons like airplanes and tanks could be designed, constructed, and sent to the battlefield fairly rapidly. The technology wasn’t very complex, and it didn’t involve nearly as many components as it does today. A single company could produce the machines of war largely within its own facilities with its own materials. In modern times, however, military weapons not only take much longer to develop, perfect, and produce, but the manufacturing process incorporates innumerable intricate, highly specialized parts which are produced by a large variety of companies. It is no longer reasonable to assume America would be able to design and construct such complicated machines of war on a purely reactionary basis after we have perceived a threat. It takes the military many years to develop the modern weapons of war, and to expect it to happen overnight is preposterous.
Proponents of this third counter argument may argue that instead of focusing on simply having the “best” technology, we should focus instead on obtaining the technology that best exploits the weaknesses of our enemies. While it is true taking advantage of opponents’ weaknesses is a valuable tactic in war, proponents of this theory, like Martin Van Creveld in Technology and War, often take it too far. They claim that because the fundamental principle upon which technology is founded is a system of consistent cause and effect in which an action will always create the same outcome, and because conversely war is founded upon the inconsistencies and unpredictability of one’s opponents, technology and war are fundamentally opposed in their natures (311-320). Proponents of such theories are not arguing that technology should not be used in war, but that the value of technology is strictly limited to the ability with which it can exploit the enemy’s weakness. This is not completely accurate, however. Clearly the human element of warfare adds a sense of unpredictability, but this does not mean anything which utilizes consistency is then necessarily opposed in nature. Though warfare often involves a series of variables, the laws of physics are constants that can be utilized by means of technology to predict and limit the impact of the variables. Most will recognize that though the formation of technology is based upon the uniformity of natural causes, the application of technology is more flexible. Therefore, technology and warfare are not fundamentally opposed in nature since technology can be used in harmony with warfare.
Because of technology’s unique ability to limit the impact of various unknowns in warfare, its applications are much broader than simply exploiting an enemy’s weakness. Often a superior technology is useful because of factors completely independent of an enemy’s weakness. For example, radar (when it was first invented) was not useful simply because it exploited a specific weakness of the enemy. It was useful because it provided vital intelligence concerning enemy positions. There wasn’t some fundamental flaw unique to the tactics or technology of the enemy that gave value to the technology of radar; it was a new capability all together that could be used by either side. Some might argue the very fact the enemy could be detected by radar was a weakness, but before radar this was not a problem. Instead, radar created this weakness in the enemy by creating an advantage for the developing nations. Thus technology does not have to only exploit enemy weaknesses, but instead it can actually create enemy weaknesses. Further, technology often has strategic military power completely independent of a specific conflict and should be developed preemptively in order to gain a tactical advantage. The only way these technologies can be adequately funded, though, is by increasing the military budget.
Though it may be hard for us to imagine a scenario where very desperate measures would be required of us, world stability can falter in the blink of an eye, leaving us in a situation in which we wish we had spent more money ensuring our security. The unthinkable has happened before. Remember Pearl Harbor? Despite the general complacency concerning our security, America was taken completely off guard. This time, however, we cannot afford to wait to begin preparation until we have been attacked. Because of the incredible advances in technology in the modern age, warfare is contingent upon much shorter timeframes. With the advances made in rapid deployment capabilities, precision targeting, efficient communication, and sophisticated weaponry, preemptive modernization is critical to the security of the United States. Thus, it is absolutely imperative that the United States Federal Government substantially increase the federal military budget.
I write to you equipped with the story of a phenomenon of nature that I will share with you — it is a keyhole through which we may peer into the nature of the human psyche, the nature of our minds, the nature of art and aesthetics, the nature of reality, and the truth about transcending the ordinary limitations of human consciousness. It is a story that has cyclically endured throughout history, from the era of Aristotle to the drastically different era in which we live today. It is a truth indicative of human nature, and it bequeaths unto us an essential, largely untapped understanding of psychology. It is a circumstance of nature that it is vital for you to know, so that you may fully understand and know yourself. Understand the nature of your mind and why things are the way they are. Allow your thought processes to flow as fluid, flexible, and unrestrained, and allow yourself to be enlightened — but don’t get too lost in yourself. Don’t lose touch with the outside world. Think too much and you might go crazy … or maybe you already were. Maybe you know what it feels like. Maybe it’s always lingering in the back of your mind, in that dark corner into which you shove all the ugly things you cannot let the world see. You loathe the lurid black hole monster that has taken up residence in your brain like a tumor that is not a tumor, but a finger — a natural part of you from which you cannot escape. You loathe that black hole monster. But it is he who sweeps you up in his storm of intoxicating emotion that leaves beautiful, elegantly-crafted sonnets behind as the rubble. It is his provocation that inspires the intricate sketches that fill your notebook. You lose yourself in him, or perhaps you truly know yourself, or perhaps you truly know some things about life that people were just not supposed to know. There is so much in your head, and it secretes as art. Maybe creation is the only tactic you know to help you stay sane. Creation is dangerously similar to destruction.
Creativity is dangerously similar to madness.
As the human race, one thing we are most classically ignorant about is ourselves — and what it means to be a human. This is a topic on which most of us know very little. The relationship between creative genius and psychological instability is obvious, but not completely understood by us at all. We find ourselves in a chicken or the egg scenario. Here I will explain both that the chicken and egg are of the same nature and exactly how they are related to one another. I will be exploring many different theories upheld by many different individuals, but I will not present you with my own personal speculation as a means of hopefully convincing you this is true. The case I present here will rely fully and completely on logical deductions and factual evidence, including over ten clinical studies conducted by highly educated, highly reputed psychological experts. Ultimately, I encourage you to view the case I will present with objective, unpresuming eyes, and take from it what you will. The verdict is yours, but I will lay the evidence before you, encourage you to trace the validity of my arguments, and I stand here fully confident that you will reach the same conclusion that I did myself.
Personally, I find any standard dictionary to be habitually ineffective at encompassing the full essence of a concept with its overly formal and unspecific definitions. I have drawn upon a few other sources that will give us a more complete grasp of the meanings of the two essential words I would like to clearly define for you — the first is “creativity,” or, in other words, “creative genius.” Dr. C. E. Shalley, author of the psychological journal article “Effects of Productive Goals, Creativity Goals, and Personal Discretion on Individual Creativity,” defined creativity as “comprised of three major components: the required ability or expertise in a particular field, the innate or intrinsic motivation towards further exploration and development, and the cognitive processes to conceive and synthesize novel ideas.” Dr. Prentky, a fellow psychiatrist featured in the same psychiatric journal, elaborated by saying that “the main primary traits of creativity are fluency and flexibility of thinking, originality, redefinition, and elaboration.” When he says “elaboration,” he is referring to the unconscious process of expanding, embellishing, and simultaneously extrapolating a minute detail, usually one of the repressed psyche. There are many components to creativity, but these two definitions are an accurate basic skeleton on which we may rely. I will expand more on its nature, its features, and its origins when I present my major points of argument.
The second term that it is essential we define is “madness.” In this presentation, “madness” may be interchangeable with the term “psychological abnormalities” or “mental illness.” These words can mean many different things, so I would like to define them for you as clearly as possible. Dr. Caroline Koh from the National Institute of Education at the Nanyang Technological University in Singapore is an expert at research on this topic, and she conjured up a very accurate and efficient explanation of these terms: “Madness is commonly described as an altered, abnormal, deviant state of mind or consciousness. The various forms of mental disorder are generally of two kinds. The first being the condition of neurosis, which describes the milder forms of mental disorders such as phobias, depressions, obsessions, compulsions and hypochondria. The second type of aberrant mental condition, psychosis, includes severe forms of mental illnesses, whereby the patient loses contact with reality and shows irrational and irresponsible behavior. Psychotic afflictions include delirium tremens, manic depressive disorder and schizophrenia.” In this presentation, we will be dealing more with psychotic afflictions than neurotic afflictions. However, both branches of psychological abnormalities are relevant and applicable to this case.
The relationship between creativity and psychopathology is tied together by artistic temperament, or, in other words, the moods, personality, and the way artists see the world. The artistic temperament, or condition of the artist, is what determines the psychological risk. You could call the artistic temperament the intervening variable of the relationship. An intervening variable is a hypothetical internal state that is used to explain the relationship between observed variables when they do not appear to have a definite connection, but simultaneously have no existence apart. In other words, we cannot say for sure whether creativity drives you crazy or if madness inspires you to be creative, but we can acknowledge the two are connected in a certain way based on the condition of the artistic temperament — if the artist is very mentally ill, she may also find herself bursting with creativity, or vice-versa, depending on other situational and circumstantial determinants in addition to her brain chemistry. The concept of an intervening variable is difficult to understand at first — a few other examples are intelligence, motivation, and intention, if that helps you to grasp the concept any better. Either way, the nature of this relationship will become clearer as we progress.
The correlation between madness and mental illness actually has a name: the Sylvia Plath effect. Psychologist Dr. James C. Kaufman coined this term in 2001 to refer to the phenomenon that creative writers suffer disproportionately from severe mental illness — more so than other types of writers, and more so than any other types of people. 2001 is fairly recent, but Kaufman was not the first to acknowledge this pattern in human psychology. Plutarch, Greek historian who lived from 46 to 120ad, described in his annals the Greek hero Archimedes from an intriguing perspective: “Archimedes was a combination of natural endowment, hard work, and divine inspiration — a personality which indulges in behavior which is distinctly unusual … in anyone else, we would be rather tempted to call it mad.” A fellow Greek, the great Aristotle, seemed to agree with Plutarch, writing, thousands of years ago, that “No great genius has ever been without some divine madness.” Almost two thousand years later, William Shakespeare echoes their tune: “The lunatic, the lover, and the poet are of imagination all compact.”
Enough with the quotations. It is simply a fact that a remarkably great percentage of our favorite innovative artistic geniuses have been afflicted with dark psychological pain. No expert on the topic will deny that. But now let’s get to the important part — why?
The first point of argument I will make is that the thought processes of exceptional artists and the mentally ill are similar in their operations and appear to be of a similar origin. I will prove this point by explaining the ideas of translogical thinking, conceptual overinclusiveness, Janusian thought processes, and homospatial thought processes. I will also touch on the influence of Dr. Albert Rothenberg, a psychiatrist who has published books on the topic and is considered an expert, and his colleague, Dr. Prentky. Finally, I will elaborate on a neurological study conducted at Harvard University and the University of Toronto in September 2003 that gives us a concrete biological basis for the connection of creativity to mental illness by testing something called Latent Inhibition. I will explain what Latent Inhibition is, how it works, and why it is incredibly significant to this case.
Dr. Prentky is one of many psychologists who has devoted his career to the understanding of this topic. Like the others, he postulates that the creative and the mad operate the same way on a neurological level. “Creativity and psychopathology share a similar origin,” he explains, “hence the biological link; that creative individuals and psychotics have some common personality traits and thinking reflecting a predisposition to psychosis. One of them is vague, highly intuitive thought processes, and imprecise and inappropriate speech.” Other common personality traits Prentky could have mentioned are peculiarity, introversion and an inclination to solitude, rejection of common cultural standards, a tolerance for irrationality, oft-disturbed moods, and the tendency to connect concepts in an unusual or unexpected manner.
Prentky declares that the most significant similarity between creatives and psychopaths is the loose, unrestricted boundaries of their thought processes. In other words, their perception of the world is not restrained by the limitations of cultural prejudices that intellectually suppress most people in any given period of time. You could say our creatives and psychopaths think “outside the box.” This could be for many reasons. Prominent among possible reasons is the fact that both of these people groups are comprised of individuals very different from their peers in very important ways. Even if they manage to have healthy social relationships, they are still, always, unlike everybody else in their psychological tendencies and the way they think (or, brain chemistry). When one feels like an outsider, one is not sucked up into the blindness afflicting everyone who has bought into the massive ruse. Many “crazy” artists in the past have had ideas way beyond their time (for one example, Leonardo da Vinci), because, abstinent from the habitual worldviews and mindless conditioning of their neighbors, they were more in touch with their inner consciousnesses and were capable of perceiving truth and concocting ideas that others could not comprehend and would have, in no way, dreamed of.
A more technical and precise term for this unique cognitive process they have in common is the term “translogical thinking.” Dr. Albert Rothenberg concluded from years of studies that this is definitely a psychological trait creatives and psychopaths share. Translogical thinking, as you may have deduced from its name, is a type of conceptualizing in which thinking processes transcend the ordinary mode of logical thinking. It involves two different thought processes, the first being the Janusian and the second being homospatial.
Janusian thinking is the process of combining paradoxical or antagonistic objects into a single entity. The homospatial process is, in Rothenberg’s words, “the essence of a good metaphor.” It involves superimposing or uniting multiple, discrete objects. These two processes constitute the method of creative thinking.
Although the creative and the psychopathological share these significant traits, obviously, there are characteristics to distinguish them from one another, and they are important to note. The fundamental difference between the creative and the mentally ill is the amount of control the individual has over his or her thought processes. The creative thinker is deliberate with her thought processes and is capable of deftly managing them. The psychotic thinker’s thought processes are sometimes inexplicably capricious, and she is incapable of controlling them; rather, they can easily overpower her at any time.
This might sound like a dramatic difference, and it is, but creatives and psychotics have more fundamental similarities than incompatibilities. Perhaps the most compelling chunk of evidence for this argument is the 2003 Harvard-Toronto study involving Latent Inhibition.
Latent Inhibition is defined (by the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology) as an animal’s unconscious capacity to screen from conscious awareness stimuli previously experienced as irrelevant to its needs. You are surrounded by a near-infinite amount of stimuli at all times, and there is no way you could consciously take notice of all of those things. Toronto Psychology Professor Jordan Peterson says, “This means that creative individuals remain in contact with the extra information constantly streaming in from the environment. The normal person classifies an object, and then forgets about it, even though that object is much more complex and interesting than he or she thinks. The creative person, by contrast, is always open to new possibilities.” The lower one’s LI is, the lower the ability to filter out irrelevant stimuli that interfere with focused thought processes. Consequently, the study showed, the lower one’s LI is, the more exceptional cognitive flexibility he or she displays, which leads to creative achievement. This study was groundbreaking, because, for the first time, the scientists were able to conclude that highly creatives and people suffering from psychotic illness both were characterized by very low levels of Latent Inhibition. Instead of connecting thoughts by basic logic, translogical thinking comes into play, and their neurons transmit signals to several other neurons people would not normally associate with one another, and they interpret information a different way.
The low level of Latent Inhibition is a concept that explains so much about the relationship between creativity and psychological abnormalities. Low LI can also be a characteristic of many forms of psychoses, including the early stages of schizophrenia. As one’s LI decreases, one may become fixated on meaningless ideas that feel almost religiously important, and one starts to slip away from reality.
Harvard researcher Shelley Carson thinks this makes perfect sense. “Scientists have wondered for a long time why madness and creativity seem linked. Many of us hypothesize that Latent Inhibition may be positive when combined with high intelligence and good working memory, but negative otherwise. It seems likely that low levels of Latent Inhibition and exceptional flexibility in thought could predispose to mental illness under some conditions and to creative accomplishments under others.”
Low LI could explain someone’s unique ability to discover something beautiful or spectacular within what most people consider unremarkable or potentially not even notice. It explains the ability to perceive the world with intensified acuity, the ability to transcend the mental or psychological inhibitions of a culture or time, and the ability to interpret stimuli differently to extract unique abstractions from seemingly dissimilar concepts.
Pablo Picasso, the legendary Spanish artist from the early twentieth century, preferred to live amongst chaos rather than a clean, organized home environment. He attested his reason to be that objects, when strewn about, appeared to have unusual visual relationships to each other. Picasso considered this artistically stimulating, as he did not perceive his surroundings in a typical manner — a clock as a clock, or a shoe as a shoe, but instead, his brain interpreted the objects as they appeared to him at that time in color and form, not as objects purely related to the functionality of his everyday life.
One of his most well-known sculptures, Bull’s Head, was an arrangement of the seat and handlebars of a bicycle that Picasso envisioned as shaped like the head of a bull. He was able to transcend his mind’s human instinct to interpret handlebars as “rods upon which you exert force in order to control the direction or maintain stability of a vehicle,” and uninhibited by that instinct he was able to see the essence of handlebars for what they were — elongated cylinders. Out of their ordinary context, he equated them to the existence of other similar objects, such as a bull’s horns. This example parallels the science behind a low Latent Inhibition and a high creative ability to see the world in an abnormal way.
Anne Sexton, a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, practiced a similar albeit more abstract approach to transcending our natural instinct to overpass and not analyze stimuli that are not relevant for survival. Dr. Mary Baures, a psychologist who personally spent time with Sexton, recalls her methodology. “She taught us about images and metaphors. They were more powerful when you found connections between unlike things — a fist and a fetus, eyelids and riding boots, a tongue and a fish, flies and small black shoes, a girl curled like a snail. She showed us how to ‘image-monger’ by spewing out a torrent of metaphors in a process she called ‘storming the image.’ We would ‘unrepress’ by creating an unconscious for an object, like a can of Coke. The more we ‘unrepressed,’ the more rapid our associations became.”
Creativity is fundamentally dependent on communication with the inner psyche, although it is usually not conscious unrepressing. It brings you, in an artistic sense, to intelligence with your deepest, most unacknowledged, most primitive thoughts and feelings. Abandoning thought-association patterns ingrained by your environment simplifies and, in a way, purifies the way you experience the essence of a thing. Raw simplicity and awareness like this brings you back to the most basic, fundamental brain activity, to which every person can relate. The catharsis of connecting with and unrepressing these deeply repressed elements is what might make one feel “moved” by a particularly effective specimen of art or music.
This is also the idea behind the form of expressive psychotherapy called art therapy, in which the emotionally damaged patient will draw, paint, sculpt, write, or compose his own creative art to begin to heal and indirectly address the patient’s deeply repressed psychological tensions. Art therapy shows us that creative thought and emotional pain are deeply intertwined, which brings me to my second major argument.
Art and creativity require utterly consuming devotion and deeply personal contact with one’s primitive self (cravings, feelings, and emotions), which naturally puts one at the constant risk of walking the edge of sanity and insanity — because inner turmoils breed excellent, passionate art.
The twentieth-century poet John Berryman said it exceptionally well: “I do strongly feel that among the greatest pieces of luck for high achievement is ordeal. Certain great artists can make out without it, but mostly you need ordeal. My idea is this: The artist is extremely lucky who is presented with the worst possible ordeal which will not actually kill him. At that point, he’s in business. Beethoven’s deafness, Goya’s deafness, Milton’s blindness, that kind of thing. And I think that what happens in my poetic work in the future will probably largely depend not on my sitting calmly on my ass as I think, ‘Hmm, hmm, a long poem again? Hmm,’ but on kinds of other things short of senile dementia. At that point, I’m out, but short of that, I don’t know; I hope to be nearly crucified.”
This is a fact all creative individuals know very well. Tragedy results in excellent creative output. Even any amateur writer would admit that his writing is more poignant and powerful when he has been through an emotional disaster, or just had a bad day. Anne Sexton said, “Poetry led me by the hand out of madness.” Creativity is very healing for the mentally ill and is often a coping mechanism, but constant contact with one’s inner psyche and the total immersion in one’s work that is characteristic of both the creative and the psychopathological when involved in projects, produces an increased chance for one to slip out of touch with reality and into disillusion. Dr. Maureen Neihart elaborates, “Creativity involves a regression to more primitive mental processes, that to be creative requires a willingness to cross and recross the lines between rational and irrational thought. Inspiration always requires regression and dipping into irrationality in order to access unconscious symbols and thought.”
By nature, individuals in artistically creative professions must be more sensitive, unlike scientists, who work with logic. Art, on the other hand, is raw humanity. Creative individuals are more susceptible to a greater spectrum of emotions and perceptions, which makes them more susceptible to all emotions, especially the violent ones, because they are the ones that fuel artistic inspiration.
Skill is one part talent and ninety-nine parts blood, sweat, and tears. People who wholeheartedly devote their lives to creative endeavors might sacrifice just as much as people who devote their lives to Olympic sports. With creative work, it’s not obvious when you over-exert yourself or drive yourself crazy from isolation, pressure, and immersion in the fantasy world you are forced to inhabit. For child prodigies, or any adults who throw themselves into their work, it is easy to lose touch with the real world. If you are straining yourself mentally, your risk for danger is even more glaring than that of the Olympic athletes. If you damage yourself mentally, the consequences will be so much more detrimental. It’s all the same thing, except in this instance, the game is inside your head.
I would now like to refute an alleged objection to my thesis: the argument that creativity is a product of logic, and mental illness, by definition, is characterized by a lack of rationality.
At first glance, this argument looks like a reputable objection — until you stop and think about it. First of all, creativity does not come directly from logic. Logic leads to practicality, and if creativity was based on logic, it would be a function of practicality, which is incompatible with its primary concern being not survival, but innovation and aesthetics. Creativity is the ability to transcend the ordinary. Also, in complete contradiction to this point, it could be said that artistic creativity, in a way, actually stems from illogic — it is characterized by a disconnect with reality, and its lack of concern for logical things and greater interest in creating beauty serves no survival purpose whatsoever, which supposedly goes against our evolutionary nature as humans, which makes it perfectly compatible with mental illness.
Or, if you want to approach it in a slightly less brash manner, you could refute the statement “creativity is a product of logic” with the already affirmed statement “creativity is a product of translogic.” Therefore, even if mental illness does encompass irrationality, it also encompasses translogic, what is needed for creativity and what truly matters. You have to look at it from a broader perspective.
Another objection to my thesis that has been raised by many is this: “Not all creative prodigies are crazy, so there is not necessarily a correlation between creativity and being crazy.”
I would like to respond to this objection with the results of a scientific study performed by a certain Dr. J. Eysenck in the 1980s. After testing 21 males for a correlation between their level of creativity and their level of psychological abnormality, he found a mostly positive correlation, except not an exclusively positive correlation. Dr. Eysenck concluded that creativity and psychosis have a greater probability of being connected, but not in all circumstances.
“Psychosis” is the condition of being psychotic, but “psychotism” is the ability to potentially develop psychosis under certain situations. While psychosis and creativity were not always linked, psychotism and creativity absolutely were. Eysenck’s final word was that creative individuals are naturally predisposed to insanity, but they are not necessarily insane. Today this is known as “Eysenck’s P-factor.”
Obviously not all creative geniuses are mad, but that does not change the fact that a great percentage are, and the rest of them are at least genetically predisposed to it as a result of their exceptional creativity, whether it is active or not. Famous Impressionist Salvador Dalí knew this indeed when he said, and I quote, “The only difference between me and a madman is I am not mad.”
There is no consistent pattern of which one induces the other. Creativity and madness mutually reinforce each other, according to their natures as inherently related essences. Now, we have established that the processing styles of creative and psychotic brains are methodically similar and similar in origin, as understood by conceptual overinclusiveness, translogical thinking, and the evidence of the Latent Inhibition effect. We have also affirmed that the nature of art puts one in danger of intense emotional experiences, because that enhances art, so psychological vulnerability is and always will be an associated risk. I have refuted the objection that creativity and madness are not related because creativity is logical and madness is illogic by firstly explaining that creativity is not a product of logic, and by secondly explaining that creativity does not require logic but translogic. I also refuted the allegation that creativity and madness are not related because not all creative people are crazy, and not all crazy people are creative, so they cannot be intrinsically tied together. I shared the results of a scientific study in which they determined that creativity and madness, if you suffer from one, make you highly likely to be predisposed to the other, and that all the creative are not necessarily actively psychotic, but all of the creative are psychotismic — capable of developing psychosis under the right given circumstances. Therefore, the connection holds irrefutable and strong.
I would like to say I understand every aspect of this phenomenon, but the truth is, we actually only know so very little. And if these creative geniuses, these exceptional and elite, are of a higher consciousness than us average humans — who are we to judge the estate of their psychological health? We know so very little. But at most, we can cherish what we have learned about art, about suffering, and about humanity itself. And we can constantly strive to learn more. Not everyone gets to be exceptional, and you will never be the most beautiful poet, the most talented pianist, the most up-and-coming graffiti artist, and for a moment, that kills you inside. But, actually, maybe being a prodigy entails a whole lot more than I imagined. Marcel Proust said, “Everything great in the world is created by neurotics. They have composed our masterpieces, but we don’t consider what they have cost their creators in sleepless nights….”
The almost-prophetic whisper of the gifted novelist Janet Fitch reminds us, “Nobody becomes an artist unless they have to.” Yet each one of us secretly yearns to venture out into the sea of darkness, to explore what it might contain…
Be an artist. Fear no pain.
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Redeeming Pandora 