Celebrating The Prosaic: The Magnetic Fields' "The Book of Love" As Comedy

The vast majority of the time works of tragedy focus on one man, one central protagonist. This man is usually an important figure, perhaps a king. Assuming he doesn't die a horrible death (think Macbeth and Othello), this king must learn a lesson about pride by being knocked down off his high horse. He will probably still die in the end, but it will be a good death--one that means something (think Oedipus and Hamlet).

Works of epic literature nearly always focus on one man as well. He is also usually a king. Where Epic differs from Tragedy, though, is that the epic hero isn't just himself, he is the leader of a people, whose desires he represents and whose actions he undertakes. The true protagonist of any epic work is actually the people the epic hero personifies (e.g., Ithaca in the case of Odysseus and Rome in the case of Aeneas). Unlike tragic protagonists, Epic heroes fight to elevate themselves higher than everybody else. They must be the ultimate badass, the conquering hero on behalf of their polis.

In works of comedy we see something quite different. Comedies always focus on a group of people, at least two (a couple), and their relationships to one another. This group which consists of at least two people is in fact (or, at least, will become) a family. This family usually starts out in low estate; i.e., they usually don't matter much at the beginning of the work. By the end of the work, though, they have been elevated to the level of a royal household (like Nick Bottom in A Midsummer Night's Dream or Trygaeus in Aristophanes' Peace, both of whom "wed" goddesses).

Titania and Bottom, by Sir Edwin Landseer

Where in Tragedy the king must be removed from the high place which he won for himself (and which won him his pride as well), and in Epic the hero must do everything in his power to conquer on behalf of his people, win glory and honor, and establish peace and justice on their behalf, in Comedy the protagonists actually do very little.

That is to say, nothing is won or conquered by them. Everything they receive is given to them by some external force as a reward. A reward for what you ask? Being stupid. Silly. Dumb. Idiotic. In a word: humble. The entire action of comedic works is geared toward the celebration of humility--of the prosaic, the down to earth. When the goddess Titania falls in love with Bottom he is literally an ass. Trygaeus gains entry into Heaven and council with the gods by riding a dung beetle there.

Consider the following song by The Magnetic Fields. As usual the lyrics are included below. And here's the direct link to a music video in case the embedded audio doesn't work.

The book of love
Is long and boring.
No one can lift the damn thing.
It’s full of charts
And facts and figures,
And instructions for dancing

But I,
I love it when you read to me,
And you
You can read me anything.

The book of love
Has music in it.
In fact that’s where music comes from.
Some of it is just transcendental.
Some of it is just really dumb.

But I,
I love it when you sing to me,
And you,
You can sing me anything.

The book of love
Is long and boring,
And written very long ago.
It’s full of flowers and heart-shaped boxes,
And things we’re all too young to know.

But I,
I love it when you give me things,
And you,
You oughta give me wedding rings.

This is the prosaic, the humble, the day in, day out lifestyle that Comedy (and Christianity) extols. "The book of love is long and boring." Married life, real life, isn't bliss. Far from it. It's full of troubles, trials, and pain. There's nothing at all romantic about it. "It's full of charts / And facts and figures." In fact, oftentimes even the supreme expression of love--the marital embrace--must submit itself to charts, facts, and figures. The whole point is to work through it. To bring good from it. To infect the people and the world around you with your loving hard work. The point is to stick it out. To keep doing it every day. No matter how "long." No matter how "boring."

"No one can lift the damn thing." This line is reminiscent of a passage from Revelation that has to do with opening a book.

"I saw in the right hand of him who was seated on the throne a scroll written within and on the back, sealed with seven seals; and I saw a strong angel proclaiming with a loud voice, 'Who is worthy to open the scroll and break its seals?' And no one in heaven or on earth or under the earth was able to open the scroll or to look into it, and I wept much that no one was found worthy to open the scroll or to into into it. Then one of the elders said to me, 'Weep not; lo, the Lion of the tribe of Judah, the Root of David, has conquered, so that he can open the scroll and its seven seals,'" (Rev. 5:1-5).

No one can open, no one can lift the book of love, the Book of Life but the one who wrote it--the Author of life and love, Love himself. The book of love has always been his book. If we get one word in one footnote it's because he has given us everything we are, every insignificant bit of love we have been able to give to another.

"I love it when you give me things." Of course, this is the essence of real love. Action. Day-to-day, moment-to-moment giving. Of "flowers," "heart-shaped boxes," time, energy, foot rubs, and above all, self--body and soul. This is the self-giving love which leads naturally to "wedding rings." It is the self-giving love expressed ultimately in the marital embrace, the self-gift which, when complete, blossoms forth into a new creation, a child which could almost be said to be an incarnation of his parents loving gift of themselves to one another. But it is also expressed in those simple, boring, every day things like laundry.

Notice the balance in the refrain between "I" and "you," each given two lines, half a verse, parallel in form. Real love is a communion between two persons, each recognizing the other as a subject rather than an object from which something can be got. They are a person just as I am, and it is the relationship, communion, community of inter-subjective self-gift through boring, prosaic things in which love subsists. The song also mentions dance, which is a physical analogy for this kind of relationship.

It is the life that means nothing, that amounts to nothing that we all must hope and work for. Of course, it isn't actually nothing, for love, self-gift, and the new life that hopefully results are the most important things there are. They are what allow us to become like Love himself--who himself loved so much that he produced a Son from eternity, whose relationship of loving action with his Son produces a loving Spirit, in whom we have all been made able to share.

If you're interested, here's an amazing cover of this song by Peter Gabriel. Check it out.

Talk On The Anglican Patrimony

The Walsingham Society has uploaded the audio from a talk they hosted a couple of days ago. It was the first in a series of four on the topic of the "Anglican Patrimony."

Mosey on over to their iTunes store and download it for free.

Can't get a better deal than that.

I Don't Think Anybody'll Ever Top This

Just couldn't help reposting this one.

Where Do We Go When We Die?

"Now if Christ is preached as raised from the dead, how can some of you say that there is no resurrection of the dead? But if there is no resurrection of the dead, then Christ has not been raised; if Christ has not been raised, then our preaching is in vain and your faith is in vain. We are even found to be misrepresenting God, because we testified of God that he raised Christ, whom he did not raise if it is true that the dead are not raised. For if the dead are not raised, then Christ has not been raised. If Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile and you are still in your sins. Then those also who have fallen asleep in Christ have perished," (1 Cor. 15:12-18).

Fr. Tim Finigan over at The Hermeneutic of Continuity has an excellent post on the way many have come to treat death these days.

I knew a priest who told me a story once about when his father died. At the burial service, a family friend approached him and asked if he "knew where his father was," to which the priest responded, quite simply, "Yes, he's there in the ground."

In his work Mere Christianity, C.S. Lewis famously said that "we don't have souls. We are souls. We have bodies." This is simply mistaken. We are neither our souls nor our bodies. Angels are souls, "spirits," if you prefer. And rocks are bodies. We are neither. We are humans. Composite beings composed of two principles, one material, one immaterial--a body and a soul. Each is equally important, intimately bound up with the other, and dependent upon it.

At death, our souls are separated from our bodies. This is an unnatural event. It should not occur. Our souls are not designed to exist outside our bodies. The only reason it is possible is due to the grace of God. In a very real sense, then, when we die, that is us there in the ground. Of course, it is also us that goes, God willing, to be in Heaven. This lasting connection is why we mark graves, erect shrines, and venerate relics.

This is why death is both a time to grieve, and a time to take solace in the hope we have in Christ and his Church. Our loved one is dead. His body, his self, has died. Each death we experience throughout our lives is a reminder of our own death to come, and that the days we have been given to "work out [our] own salvation with fear and trembling" grow ever shorter, (Phil. 2:12).

Nevertheless, after death, by the grace of God, our souls continue to exist. More than that, we believe that one day this event will be undone. Our bodies will be resurrected from the ground and reunited with our souls as Christ's was on that Easter morning 2011 years ago (or so).

The Garden: The Decemberists' "June Hymn" As Lyric

It's incredibly interesting to me how music functions artistically. Somehow the meaning is contained in both the text and the music simultaneously, and the forms of each complement each other as a result. I have a theory that if a piece or song is musically beautiful, it must also be so poetically. That is to say, if a song touches my heart and mind with its music and fails to do so with its lyrics, it's likely due to my own lack of poetic sensibility and not the song's lack of poetry.

Take "June Hymn" from The Decemberists' most recent album The King is Dead. As usual, here's the direct link to the music video in case the embedded audio below doesn't work.

Here's a hymn to welcome in the day

Heralding a summer's early sway

And all the bulbs all coming in

To begin

The thrushes bleating battle with the wrens

Disrupts my reverie again

Pegging clothing on the line

Training jasmine how to vine

Up the arbor to your door

And more

You're standing on the landing with the war

You shouldered all the night before

Chorus:

And once upon it

The yellow bonnets

Garland all the lawn

You were waking

Day was breaking

A panoply of song

And summer comes to Springville Hill

A barony of ivy in the trees

Expanding out its empire by degrees

And all the branches burst to bloom

In the boom

Heaven sent this cardinal maroon

To decorate our living room

[Chorus]

And years from now when this old light

Isn't ambling anymore

Will I bring myself to write

"I give my best to Springville Hill!"

[Chorus]

Lyric poetry is the most basic, most fundamental form of Literature; as such, it is the most difficult to understand. I think the reason it so easily frustrates so many is that it seems like the meaning should be self-evident, it's staring us right in the face, and yet we often can't see it. It's analogous to the way in which Metaphysics (i.e., the study of being in itself) is the most basic and fundamental branch of Philosophy, and yet, the hardest to grasp...at first. Once understood it contains the simplest, most obvious principles. In fact, it contains those very principles upon which the rest of Philosophy is founded. All of this is to say that, like Metaphysics in Philosophy, in Literature Lyric is last chronologically but first ontologically.

Unlike Tragedy, Comedy, or Epic, then, Lyric isn't saddled with the baggage of plots and characters. In many ways, Lyric simply is. Tragedy, the form of Literature closest to us (in our very hearts, in fact), overflows with exciting and dramatic events and over-the-top characters who do things like murder people and gouge their own eyes out. It's good stuff, and no less good or beautiful than Lyric. It is simply the earthy, gritty, concrete way in which Tragedy goes about incarnating those larger realities which all art does.

Lyric, on the other hand, largely steers clear of such complicated and individual concerns. A poem doesn't incarnate the life of one man as Tragedy does, but of all men simultaneously. Or perhaps we should say that Lyric doesn't incarnate the life of one man, but the life of Mankind himself. This is why every poem retells the story of Adam (who is Man) and Eve (who is Woman) and whose union together constitutes Mankind (and produces life). The usual way to speak about this phenomenon is to use the image of the Lover and his Beloved, the quintessential example of which we find in Biblical Wisdom Literature. All Lyric poetry deals with the Lover and his Beloved, and their union together. Always, too, this union occurs in the fertile Lyric Garden of Paradise.

"June Hymn" tells the uncomplicated story of a man and his wife and their prosaic life together. The vast majority of the song is spent describing the garden which surrounds their home. This garden that they have created isn't just a facade, however, they bring it into their very life, allowing it to penetrate every intimate facet of their being: "Heaven sent this cardinal maroon / To decorate our living room."

Theirs is a love which cannot be contained, like the "barony of ivy in the trees / Expanding out its empire by degrees / And all the branches burst to bloom." The garden is not a romantic ideal, though. It is never a dream, never ethereal: "The thrushes bleating battle with the wrens / Disrupts my reverie again." The garden is never a place to escape the world. It is the world, the world to which their loving union, so infectious, brings beauty and life. Their life together, in harmony with that of the world and their garden, produces beautiful music: "You were waking / Day was breaking / A panoply of song."

Though beautified, the world which they inhabit is still imperfect. We are not told exactly what "the war / you shouldered all the night before," but it is unimportant. All that matters is that these are lovers doing their best to  live a good life faithful to each other and the world, working through the pain and toil of everyday life. Like their life together, the garden too must be tended carefully and dutifully, lest it wither. They must sweat through the work day in and day out, making sure their life together bears fruit in themselves and in the world around them: "Training jasmine how to vine / Up the arbor to your door / And more."

This is Lyric. Life, Love, Beauty, "Heaven," the Garden, Paradise, the Divine, encountered in everyday life, in the smallest, most insignificant things you can imagine. Things like one's spouse, a home, plants and flowers in a garden, for that matter, a baby born in a stable, water, and bread and wine.

What Does Heaven Look Like?

Have you ever had a child ask you what Heaven looks like? Perhaps you remember asking your parents that question when you were a child.

At first, I might think to say something clever like, "There's no point in trying to describe it, because it's better than anything you can possibly imagine. You've never experienced anything even close, so you have no frame of reference." Of course, in one sense this is true. Heaven is on such a higher level than anything we've encountered that it's impossible to "understand" what it will be like.

I think, though, it's too easy in our sometimes over-spiritualized, over-intellectualized religion to resort to clever, cop-out answers like that one. We too easily forget that Christianity is and has always been the meatiest, grungiest, most down-to-earth religion there is. That's what it's all about, of course, God humbling himself to become Man—to be born of a little woman in a stable. The essence of Christianity is contained in simple, day-to-day things like a baby, water, bread and wine, and motherhood.

There are those who would try to convince us that Heaven is only a state of consciousness after death. Really, Heaven is whatever we want it to be. It'll be whatever makes us happy.

False. Remembering that Christianity is a nitty-gritty religion, we must never forget that we believe in the bodily resurrection of the dead. Every living soul will be reanimated at the end of time to inhabit either Hell or the re-created Earth—real, concrete places, just as solid as the ground you're standing on now. In fact, in The Great Divorce, C.S. Lewis' Heaven is even more solid than the Earth is now, not less.

What we may not realize, then, is that the best answers are those cliché, earthy, almost embarassing ones Holy Scripture itself gives us:

"golden lampstands," (Rev. 1:12),
"white garments" and "golden crowns," (Rev. 4:4),
"golden bowls full of incense," (Rev. 5:8),
"massed choirs singing," (Rev. 19:1),
"[walls] adorned with every jewel," (Rev. 21:19),
"[streets] of pure gold, clear as glass," (Rev. 21:21).

Sound familiar? In short, Heaven looks like this (I recommend clicking the button to watch it on YouTube so you can full screen it):

I was particularly struck by the arresting order to everything, especially the shot from 2:35 to 3:18. The architecture, the shapes, the structure, the colors, the materials, the light, the movements, the symmetry, the sounds—all of it comes together in harmonious order to worship and imitate the God who created this world in the first place, who himself hangs on the cross in the middle of it all, perfectly static and perfectly active at the same time, incessantly exuding love, more than anyone could ever need. A relationship of simultaneous and infinite giving and infinite receiving between God and Man, incarnated in the person of the God-Man Christ. It is the "marriage supper of the Lamb," (Rev. 19:9).

I was also struck by the people—the rag-tag assembly of low-lifes, who spend 99% of their time just going about their daily business, trying to get by, and will never do anything of note. These are the heroes of Christianity. These are the true Saints. The fathers who work tirelessly without complaining to support their families. The mothers who happily and lovingly sacrifice their bodies so that the world can be brightened by the faces of her children. The older siblings who willingly step up to become like assistant parents when 9 kids just gets to be too many for mom to handle without any help.

Heaven looks just like the world we live in now, except, everything will be what it has the potential to be, and more.

Linguistic "Affectation"

While vs. whilst, who vs. whom, split infinitives, dangling prepositions, farther vs. further, the list goes on and on. I know what you’re thinking. These are mere affectations having little to nothing to do with actual communication, what’s their use? Good riddance, I say! Hmm...

Here’s the question: Do such things contribute to the goodness and beauty of the language, or do they not? What is beauty in a language? It might be true that a certain combination of sounds determines something of a language’s beauty. It could also be that phonology is simply arbitrary, and a preference for the way one language sounds as opposed to another is simply a result of either taste or cultural conditioning. I don’t know, and it is beyond the scope of this post to probe into such an issue. We must, therefore, leave it aside for the time being.

At the very least, language is meant to serve a function—that of the communication of ideas from one mind to another. Like a chair, table, or anything functional, then, a language’s beauty is at least tied to its functionality; that is, how well it serves its function of communication.

Due to its unique and somewhat tumultuous history, contemporary English is home to a dizzyingly vast array of vocabulary as well as syntactical forms. These two elements which make up the matter (in the case of vocabulary) and form (in the case of syntax) work together to provide nuances of meaning to which other languages are simply not privy. To quote Bill Bryson’s The Mother Tongue: “English retains probably the richest vocabulary, and most diverse shading of meanings, of any language. We can distinguish between house and home (as, for example, the French cannot), between continual and continuous, sensual and sensuous, forceful and forcible, childish and childlike, masterful and masterly, assignment and assignation, informant and informer. For almost every word we have a multiplicity of synonyms. Something is not just big, it is large, immense, vast, capacious, bulky, massive, whopping, humongous. No other language has so many words all saying the same thing. It has been said that English is unique in possessing a synonym for each level of our culture: popular, literary, and scholarly—so that we can, according to our background and cerebral attainments, rise, mount, or ascend a stairway, shrink in fear, terror, or trepidation, and think, ponder, or cogitate upon a problem.”

Read it. I seriously  just saw it at Half Price for cheap. Ish. Do it.

Likewise, on the syntactical level, it is possible in English to distinguish linguistically between a person performing an action simply (“I walk”) and doing so continuously at this very moment (“I am walking”)—a distinction of which most languages are woefully incapable. This variability of speech is so because of the many and sundrous languages that have wielded influence over English through the ages, so that it has become a truly cosmopolitan tongue, having absorbed the best of those languages which were its progenitors (chiefly Anglo-Saxon and Anglo-Norman) and borrowed much good from many others with which it has had contact.

It is not true, however, that English has a monopoly on nuanced vocabulary and grammatical forms. A classic example in which English is deficient lexically is our word love. We use this one term to signify many different meanings. As I’m sure you know, the Greeks had four: eros, storge, philia, and agape, which stood for romantic love, the affection between a person and a thing or animal, familial love, and unconditional love, respectively. It is true we have terms which we might use to communicate these ideas. We could, for example, use “friendship” for philia and “affection” for storge, though these don’t usually carry quite the same meaning as the Greek words, and were we to translate them so, we would need to qualify in what exact sense they were being used.

This is the case grammatically as well. Vietnamese, for instance, makes use of a grammatical principle called “clusivity,” in which there are different words to indicate when one intends to use we inclusively (“You and I together did something.”) or exclusively (“This other person and I did something.”)

Nevertheless, I would argue that English is, on the whole, capable of far more complexity and nuance than most other languages. Evidence of this might be that children in other countries learn English partly so they can read Shakespeare in the original, whereas we read their literature in translation. Of course, it also might simply be evidence that children in other countries are better educated. Either way, all of this is to say that it is this very intricacy, in service to its function of communication, which makes English beautiful.

To return to our initial inquiry, it is true that there is room for natural development in a language, and that such development is a good thing. If there were not, the Middle English of Chaucer, though beautiful, would never have evolved into the Modern English of Shakespeare, also beautiful, though in different ways. Diversity itself is good, even in one language over time. Bill Bryson again: “One of the undoubted virtues of English is that it is a fluid and democratic language in which meanings shift and change in response to the pressures of common usage rather than the dictates of committees. It is a natural process that has been going on for centuries. To interfere with that process is arguably both arrogant and futile, since clearly the weight of usage will push new meanings into currency no matter how many authorities hurl themselves into the path of change.” The question, then, is whether or not a particular development contributes to the ability to communicate with clarity or does not. Let’s look at a couple of examples.

What about while vs. whilst and the other words that follow the same pattern: among/amongst, amid/amidst, and mid/midst? The “-s” in these constructions is a relic of the Middle English adverbial genitive. In other words, when adjectives were used as adverbs they were put into the genitive case, so that an “-s” was added as in our contemporary possessives. The “-t” is simply a parasitic particle formed in accordance with the old phonetics (but as they’re residual forms, it’s a package deal). That being the case, the list of these relics turns out to be considerably longer than at first glance, including: alway/always, toward/towards, backward/backwards, one/once, two/twice, three/thrice, here/hence, then/thence, when/whence, and others. It turns out, then, that these distinctions are actually of significant value, namely, to differentiate between a word’s adjectival and adverbial forms. Here’s a commonplace example in which we would never consider not making the distinction: “I walked to the store two times today,” as opposed to “I walked to the store twice.” In like manner we should say either “I walked forwards,” or “I walked in a forward direction,” but never “I walked forward.” After examination, the same conclusion can be reached for the distinction between farther and further, continuous and continual, between and amongst, and many others, albeit on different grounds. After all, an affectation is only an affectation if there is no reason to practice is beyond pretension.

On the other hand, a prescription like that against split infinitives is really pretty absurd. The idea is that in many languages an infinitive is one word (for example, that language most revered for centuries, Latin). Since it is impossible to split an infinitive in Latin, one shouldn’t in English. Other than that, though, why exactly is it better to say “to go boldly” than “to boldly go”? They mean exactly the same thing. Silliness.

In conclusion, one last quote from The Mother Tongue: “It seems to me there is a case for resisting change—at least slapdash change. Even the most liberal descriptivist would accept that there must be some conventions of usage. We must agree to spell cat c-a-t and not e-l-e-p-h-a-n-t, and we must agree that by that word we mean a small furry quadruped that goes meow and sits comfortably on one’s lap and not a large lumbering beast that grows tusks and is exceedingly difficult to house-break. In precisely the same way, clarity is generally better served if we agree to observe a distinction between imply and infer, forego and forgo, fortuitous and fortunate, uninterested and disinterested, and many others. As John Ciardi observes, resistence may in the end prove futile, but at least it tests the changes and makes them prove their worth.”

To put it simply, it seems to me the hermeneutic of continuity applies equally well to the development of language as it does to that of everything else.

Reality Trek

Once, a very long time ago, there was an amazingly inventive storyteller named Gene Roddenberry.

Gene was also an unabashed Progressivist.

That means he thought that Mankind (though he wouldn’t have called it that) is pre-determined to follow an evolutionary path of gradual progressive development, and that one day, we will “grow out of” war, poverty, and everything icky. We’ll get so smart that we’ll be able to solve all our own problems. (Of course, part of this “growing up” process will be realizing that God and Original Sin are silly superstitions and that Liberalism and Socialism have always been the way to go. You might also have noticed that there’s a healthy dose of Materialism mixed in there, so that our souls can evolve along with our bodies.)

Anyway, in 1964 Gene invented something called Star Trek.

Ta da!

Also, it was the 60s...

The effects were bad...

Did I mention the effects were bad?

The characters were hollow. The writing was obvious and preachy. It was clearly a platform for Roddenberry to tout his philosophical, sociological, and political agenda. As such, Star Trek's vision of the future was generally pretty short-sighted. I suppose we should cut him some slack, though. After all, it was the 60s...

I’m being too harsh. The Original Series has a lot of redeeming qualities. There must have been something there, or it couldn’t have launched a franchise which has lasted nearly 50 years! The Original Series should be discussed, absolutely. But not here. And not by me.

Due to the aforementioned 60s-ish quality of The Original Series (not to mention the unavoidable continuity issues involved in a 20-year span between it and The Next Generation), it is fitting, I think, to recognize two Trek canons: one including Kirk, Spock, etc. and their escapades, and another including everything else (i.e., The Next Generation, Deep Space Nine, Voyager, and movies VII-X (or VII-IX if, like me, you think Star Trek: Nemesis was a huge waste of time. Remind me to go into that another time.)

Of course, now we’ve got a third canon (the best one) drummed up by the 2009 J.J. Abrams reboot, but that’ll also have to wait.

On 28 September 1987, Star Trek: The Next Generation premiered, ushering in a new era for the franchise. Next Gen didn’t exactly come out of nowhere. It followed right on the heels of the enormously successful (and actually really good) Trek movie “trilogy”: The Wrath of Khan, The Search for Spock, and The Voyage Home (a.k.a. movies II-IV).

Nevertheless, The Next Generation breathed new life into Trek like nothing else could. After 20 years, Star Trek was back on television, which was where it belonged. Roddenberry had originally billed Trek as “‘Wagon Train’ to the stars.”  It was supposed to be an episodic, romp-roaring, let’s go find new junk to almost get killed by (and I suppose find a way to get along with in the end). Given the freedom, a budget, and some new production technology, finally, Star Trek's take on science fiction could be realized. There was only one problem. It was the 80s...

Did I mention it was the 80s?

But, the fundamentals were there, and, more importantly, Next Gen (inadvertently) fought against its inheritance (of both The Original Series and the 80s).

At the end of Season One, Tasha Yar, Head of Security=dead...

Her death really was kind of a bummer at the time. Her death was totally meaningless. It was this Armus guy...

So, he’s like a sentient puddle of oil or something that incarnates pure evil and he bitch slaps Tasha to make an example of her and she dies before she hits the ground. That’s it. Goodbye. Crusher doesn’t even try to save her. Anyway, it turned out to be pretty awesome, though, ‘cause with her went one of the 80s-est elements of the show. That whole character was really poorly conceived. She was pretty much just a personification of Women’s Liberation. That should be clear from the hair alone really.

So Tasha was replaced as Head of Security/Tactical Officer by Mr. Worf, resident Klingon (a much more sensible choice for the position, obviously)...

Just look at all those forehead ridges! He must mean business.

Worf angry!

Season Three introduced new uniforms, with an all-new 90s cut...

Before:

After:

See how the collar got higher and more militaristic? Improvement.

Deanna's hair grew less permy as the seasons progressed, and in Season Six she finally abandoned the 80s catsuit...

...and put on an actual uniform. Look what she had evolved into by the time the movies came around.

It's kind of like she's an actual officer in the military or something. Crazy.

Oh, and they got that damned kid off the bridge. What the balls were you thinking Picard? This is freaking Starfleet!

Look at him. Look how dumb he is. Jesus. And the sweaters! He wants to be Bill Cosby.

At the beginning, Next Gen was even worse than The Original Series on the obviously-has-an-agenda-front. Picard never blew anything up, not even as a last resort. It was all talking and “there’s got to be another way.” Just look at the ships! Kirk’s Enterprise had been a tight, fast little boat with big guns.

Picard’s ship was big, bulbous, and, though actually significantly faster than the old ship, the new Enterprise looked like it might need a HoverRound to make it to the fridge.

If you listen really carefully you might be able to hear it farting.

Oh, and it carried families! Are you kidding me? Seriously? I mean, I get that Starfleet isn’t exactly the Federation Military, but it serves that function if it has to. That’s just irresponsible. Yeah, I wonder how many kids they killed when it crash landed at the end of the first Next Gen movie. Anyway. It’s all about that Roddenberry-esque optimism, I guess. Retarded.

But I said that Next Gen fought against its inheritance. Quite. Next Gen redid the Klingons (replete with forehead ridges, as we saw). Also they were a culture this time, not just hand-me-down Mongols. Next Gen paid a lot more attention to the “science” part of “science fiction”; i.e., it kinda started to make sense. Kinda. More importantly, the stories became compelling, not to mention their effect on the characters, which, as a result, became compelling in themselves over time. Of course, it's Star Trek, so the dialogue was still pretty preachy a lot of the time, but hey.

So you may have realized I'm of the opinion that Star Trek: The Next Generation was at its best when it (accidentally or otherwise) left behind Roddenberry’s progressive B.S. and made a realistic story about realistic characters with realistic conflicts (internal or external). You see, the universe has to be dangerous, and humans have to be imperfect. That’s what makes it compelling—it’s reality (given the premise that humans could travel through space faster than the speed of light and encounter alien species).

What's real is that humans never really change. We're still the same complicated, flawed, sinful, even brutal creatures we were 20,000 years ago. Just because we know more about stuff and how it works doesn't make us better people. Besides, otherwise, what’s there to tell? One time a ship called the Enterprise flew around and scanned a nebula? Isn’t it better when the Klingons (a.k.a. humanity’s violent, savage tendencies) de-cloak and wage battle to the death against Captain Kirk and his “enterprising” crew (who embody the virtues of courage, wonder at the beauty of the universe around them, peace, community, justice, and a desire for wisdom)?

Stay tuned for the next post in this series: the Top Ten Next Gen episodes.

It's An Animation Celebration! (sorry...)

I saw a documentary a while back called The Pixar Story (available on Instant Netflix). In an interview with Bob Iger (the new C.E.O. of Disney and Michael Eisner’s replacement) he spoke about the troubles Disney has had the past ten years or so.

While it is true Eisner presided over the production of some of the best work the Walt Disney Company has ever done, beginning around 1994 he began slowly driving the company into the ground. Eisner is responsible for the departure of Jeffrey Katzenberg (who left to head Dreamworks Animation), the shift of Disney’s focus to The Disney Channel (i.e., Lizzie McGuire, Even Stevens, Hannah Montana, and the like), and, as Roy E. Disney (Walt Disney’s nephew) said upon his Eisner-induced resignation, the devolution of Disney into a “rapacious, soul-less” company.

In the interview, Iger recounted how shortly after he took over, during the daily Main Street Parade at Disney World, he realized which floats were getting the loudest cheers. They were the classic Disney films like Snow White, Cinderella, and Pinocchio and the classic contemporary films like Beauty and the Beast, The Little Mermaid, and The Lion King (largely the work of the Jeffrey Katzenberger Eisner forced out).

The difference between these and some of the not-so-classic Disney features like Brother Bear, Oliver & Company, and Treasure Planet, it seemed to Iger, was quite simply the story-telling. Where Eisner had decided to end all production of traditional animation in favor of Pixar-style 3D, Iger realized the reason Pixar had been trouncing Disney at the box office from the beginning wasn’t the animation style, but that they knew how to create realistic, compelling characters and tell good stories.

Iger said that this epiphany is in fact what led him to end the Eisner-instigated Disney/Pixar feud and effectively merge the two companies, putting Pixar in charge of Disney’s creative side, leaving the current Disney people in charge of the marketing and business side.

Iger has it exactly right. I think (at least implicitly) we all recognize the two great eras in animation—the First and Second Golden Ages. The first includes the great early Disney features:

Tell me your heart didn’t swell as you scrolled past all those pictures.

Disney's work from Snow White in 1937 through Sleeping Beauty in 1957 (or perhaps One Hundred and One Dalmations in 1961) was the best it ever did. This First Golden Age of Animation was not limited to feature-length films, however. This is also the age of Looney Tunes and Tom & Jerry.

From then on Disney did good work, but it wasn't of quite the same caliber as what had come before (perhaps due to Walt Disney's death in 1966). This era saw the release of The Sword in the Stone, The Jungle Book, The Aristocats, Robin Hood, The Rescuers, The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh, The Fox and the Hound, The Black Cauldron, The Great Mouse Detective, The Brave Little Toaster, and Oliver & Company.

I know some of you are screaming at the computer screen right now. Many of these are near and dear to my heart as well (especially Sword in the Stone, Winnie the Pooh, and Fox and the Hound), but I think it is safe to say that, on the whole, they don't carry the weight of a Cinderella or a Bambi.

But we said there are two Golden Ages. In 1989 Disney released The Little Mermaid, ushering in a new era of classic animation:

Earlier we said that it was around the release of The Lion King in 1994 that Eisner began the downward spiral—the features got progressively worse: A Goofy Movie, Pocahontas, Hercules, Mulan, Tarzan, Dinosaur, The Emperor's New Groove, Atlantis, Lilo & Stitch, Treasure Planet, Brother Bear, Home on the Range, Chicken Little, Meet the Robinsons.

Granted, while a couple of these don't quite count as they're in 3D, and a couple are pretty good (like Mulan, Tarzan, and Lilo & Stitch), even to the point that I would include them as part of the Disney Renaissance. Nevertheless, it's the trend that's important, which peaked with The Lion King. It's no wonder Eisner decided to focus on The Disney Channel, direct-to-DVD sequels, and merchandise. Perhaps it is no coincidence that it was in 1995 that Pixar released Toy Story and began its seemingly endless stream of instant hits, filling the void Eisner created. All I can say is thank God Pixar has taken over.

Consider the following chart:

The red bars are those films which are generally considered to be a part of the Golden Age of Disney; the green are those of the Disney Renaissance; and the blue everything else. While there is definitely some overlap amongst the three categories (for example, Sleeping Beauty grossed less at the Box Office than Mulan, and Mulan earned less than Dinosaur, the general trend is pretty clear.

But Box Office earnings aren’t necessarily (certainly not on their own) the best indicator of a film’s quality. Let’s look at RottenTomatoes’ ratings for all the Disney films:

Here we notice a much denser sample, and even more overlap, but I would argue that these are anomalous ratings which could be reasoned out on a case-by-case basis. Nevertheless, here again, the average rating for each category obviously favors the films of the First and Second Golden Ages.

Of course, like the First Golden Age, the Second was not limited to the big screen either. The late 80s and 90s saw the best cartoons for television ever produced. It is these that we will consider in the upcoming sequel to this post: "Saturday Morning Classics."

A Traditional Temple

You may remember from the Inaugural Post that an analogy was drawn between this blog and the forum of an ancient Roman town. It was always the case that in this forum stood a Temple (usually to Jupiter) which cooperated with the other important buildings present in the forum in cultivating the good of the community. To complete the analogy, then, we must erect our own source of ethos and duty. I suggest that this be an ongoing deference to Tradition.

Temple of Vesta - Taken by the Mrs.

Tradition is something of a naughty word, isn't it? Our post-Modern ears are trained to burn at the mere mention of it. Now, it is altogether mistaken to be of the opinion that simply because a thing or idea is old it is necessarily better. Many things that are old are good, like farming. Many things that are old are bad, for example, the oldest profession on earth. Likewise, many new things are good, such as, air conditioning. Many new things are bad. That being said, even though it has taken somewhat of a beating lately, we are the inheritors of a great and wondrous Tradition, the product of millenia of intelligent men and women—a Tradition which would not have survived to this day were it of no value whatsoever. Over time old ideas were honed and perfected. Many didn't make the cut. Many may yet prove to be false. A distinction must be drawn between those elements of our Western heritage which are essential, and those which are not—those which are open to alteration, and those which are absolutely fundamental to the Occidental mode of understanding the Truth.

Tradition includes within itself the potential for continual development. Paragraph 23 of the Second Vatican Council’s Dogmatic Constitution Sacrosanctum Concilium says “that sound tradition may be retained, and yet the way remain open to legitimate progress.” BUT (that was a big “but”) this development must grow naturally out of that which came before. Speaking to the ongoing development of the Liturgy, the Council wrote that “there must be no innovations unless the good of the Church genuinely and certainly requires them; and care must be taken that any new forms adopted should in some way grow organically from forms already existing.” Pope Benedict calls this the “heremeneutic of continuity;” that is, the right way to interpret the past, in light of the present, looking toward the future. This is set in opposition to a “hermeneutic of rupture,” in which the past is offhandedly discounted as the folly of ignorants.

Let’s look at a couple of concrete examples of how this hermeneutic of continuity might be put into practice. The Western world once thought that there was a vein in the human body running directly from the fourth finger to the heart. To this day we tip our caps to this old belief when we wear our wedding rings on that very finger. Over time, more study of human anatomy revealed this to be false. It was, though, really pretty arbitrary whether or not that vein existed. I suppose there might have been some clan whose tribal worship revolved around that imaginary vein, and it might have mattered quite a lot to them. But, looking at the subject objectively it really doesn’t matter that much.

There are things that our Tradition teaches us which are not so incidental. From at least the time of Aristotle onwards Western Tradtion (both Classical and Christian) has taught us that there is a God who is Being itself that caused (and continues to cause) all that is to be. This is undeniable fact, proved according to the dictates of reason itself over and over again by countless philosophers and theologians through the ages. As such, and by virtue of the subject matter itself, the question of the existence of God strikes at the very heart of what it means to be human, for that matter, to be, human or not. This is an element of our Tradition which is absolutely fundamental. At the very least, it is one which one may be by no means cast off without considerable deliberation and investigation.

Nevertheless, it is possible to be an open-minded Traditionalist. By all means, open your mind, explore new ideas and new civilizations, boldly go where no man has gone before. But, as G.K. Chesterton said, “the object of opening the mind, as of opening the mouth, is to shut it again on something solid.” St. Augustine put it slightly less brusquely: “In essentials, unity; in doubtful things, liberty; in all things, charity.”

All of this is to say, we ought, as a minimum, to respect and revere the ideas and beliefs of our ancestors. We may doubt and question them insofar as there is room to do so, all the while understanding that to disagree with the consensus of our forebears is a risky proposition. It would frighten me to do so. In other words, if Tradition and I found ourselves butting heads, I would double-check my math before going any further.

You might have noticed this post turned out to be an excuse to discuss the nature and import of Tradition. Oops.