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I started reading Shakespeare around the time I was eight. Having only learned to read at all when I was five or six, in first grade, I’d say I made some rapid advancement, especially considering the insanity of English spelling. Of course, it would be impossible to say truthfully that I understood Shakespeare, but I would pour through my dad’s old college lit textbooks and read the Sonnets, my favorite being Sonnet 73, and I’d go with my mom sometimes to the library at her community college and struggle through Hamlet and Romeo and Juliet. I also read the Cliffs Notes for a large number of plays, ranging from Coriolanus to Timon of Athens, and, of course, A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
I was well-prepared, then, when Gargoyles premiered in 1994. If you read this blog at all, you know that I like television that takes itself seriously, regardless of its genre. I like cartoons that are oddly adult even when they’re made for children. And I like moody, atmospheric shows filled with dust and fog and love and betrayal. Above all, I like shows that are complex and literary, shows that tell a single story instead of many stories involving a single cast. Gargoyles, created by Greg Weisman, an English teacher with degrees in literature and mythology. Bored and disappointed by the lack of serious thought and imagination in children’s programming, he set out to create a show which would incorporate every myth in the world, with a story swirling around a castle in Scotland and Shakespeare’s fairy court.
Greg Weisman is my hero.
One-thousand years ago, the gargoyles, a race of beings who could fly and turned to stone during the day, were the guardians of a castle, until they were betrayed and most of the clan slaughtered while they slept, and the rest cursed to remain stone for a thousand years. In 1994, they revive in a fictional version of modern New York (natch), the castle having been purchased and relocated atop a skyscraper by a man who both looks and sounds exactly like William Riker, David Xanatos. Over the course of the series, the depth of the betrayal that led them there becomes clearer and clearer as they explore their world and their past, coming into contact with Macbeth, himself immortal, and Oberon’s kingdom, who is, it seems, the forebear of every mythic beast and god from Odin to Anubis to Anansi.
Oh, and it’s dark. It’s an unhappy world they inhabit, and Goliath, the hero, never quite recovers from the death of his clan during that Viking raid on Castle Wyvern, and his great love, Demona, has herself turned on him, is responsible for the disaster of AD 994, is brutal, violent, callous, and cruel. Complicating matters is his growing affection for human police officer Elisa Maza, his main connection with the outside after they abandon Wyvern and Xanatos. Also complicating things is all the magic and time travel. But that’s another post for another day.
Gargoyles is for me, then, as seminal, as important a show as Batman: The Animated Series. Both took their medium seriously, their characters seriously. Both shows existed in well-realized worlds where actions had consequences and trust needed to be earned. Their lives were complicated and full of the struggle for greatness. Most shows, most kids shows, anyway, feature heroes who either stumble into luck and power or have it conferred upon them from on high, and for whom there are few moral or even honest physical struggles. But in these shows, and especially in Gargoyles, things were hard, there was real and painful infighting, and the constant threat of discovery and destruction.
Also, Lexington was gay. But that’s another story.
It introduced me, also, to the breadth of the world’s ability to tell stories, that there was more to mythology than ancient Egypt, and that these stories were, not only still powerful, but still relevant, useful, and strong. I could delve into them, develop them for my own purposes, find in them meaning, and uncover the world within them. They are the primal tales of man’s dealing with himself and with divinity, and there is a vast and interconnected plan of space and time between them that’s worth exploring. From Gargoyles I learned about Anansi and about Macbeth and began the process of absorbing the world’s stories to fuel my own mythmaking (see my poem “Volcan Cotopaxi”, which I have expanded into a fifteen-page story called “The Ways of Things”).
I just wanted to honor my debt to it.
- This is digital poetry.
KeMiRo reporting… how is everyone?
*ahem*
In October of 2005, a game was released for the PlayStation 2 game console titled Shadow of The Colossus. I didn’t know much about this game, except that it was created by the same team who created a less successful title in 2001 called Ico (pronounced (ee-ko, not I-ko). My brother-in-law played Ico to death, utterly amazed at its raw, natural beauty, the gameplay mechanics unlike any game I’d played before.
In Ico, you play as a young boy, born with horns (and, being cursed, entombed alive by his village elders). He breaks free, and you, the player are charged with guiding him out of the castle. Early on in the game, you come across a blind girl in a suspended cage. Freeing her, it’s up to Ico to lead this girl, named Princess Yorda, out of the castle. Being blind, you have to literally hold her hand, call out to her, guide her, and protect her from ’shadow’ monsters who will steal her away if you leave her alone for too long. You might say, “well, what the hell good is she to have around,” and the answer? She inexplicably is able to open doors that have been magically sealed. 
This game has such an artistic sense to it that it was breathtaking, and no other game has executed escorting an AI character from one objective to the next as well since, though few have attempted it; most escort missions in any game are at best irritating and at worst utterly insufferable. If you missed out on this game (a lot of people did, and I’m thankful to the most high God — and Sony — that Team Ico got to make another game), you missed out on one of the few games that is art. It’s a debate that sprouts up from time to time (*thumbs nose at Roger Ebert*), but I’m a firm proponent of the affirmative. They aren’t always, but they can be, and Team Ico’s games are prime arguments to that.
In Sony’s game production studios, they’re referred to by some as “The Olympic Team” because their games have only been released every four years. Fast forward to 2005, and we have Shadow of The Colossus. Hopefully by 2009, if we’re lucky, will mark the release of their third title, which I’m sure will captivate and stun me as much as the previous games they’ve made.
On to Shadow of The Colossus, which I will be referring to as SoTC for the rest of this entry. This game is a lot easier to find. If you play games at all, or have a friend who does, you need to experience this game in some shape or form. I implore you. Here’s the introduction. I just can’t help but mark how different a tone these games set, and themes they explore than most mainstream software.
You play as a nameless protagonist, referred to only as Wander (originally titled Wander and the Colossus in Japan), to emphasize what you do for fifty percent of the game. You wander. Your lone character with nothing but his wits, his loyal steed, Agro, a sword and a bow, traverses the landscape of this forbidden land, slaying sixteen enormous, mythical beasts, in hopes of bringing his lost love back to life. The slogan for the game approaching release was, ‘Some mountains are scaled, others are slain.’
There are no items. No power-ups, no weapon upgrades, no level scaling system. No towns to visit. No regular enemies to fight on your way to the ‘boss’ characters. No other story characters to interact with aside from Agro, and the ephemeral voice who claims to have the power to resurrect the girl, known as Dormin. Where most every other game I’ve played since I was a child has focused on putting in as much as possible, with filling the game with as much of everything, this game steps in and does something no game I’ve ever played has attempted or successfully executed: it uses negative space. The utter solitude and desolation of the world around you taps depths of the emotional register most people dare not approach in video games, focused mostly on visceral action and moment to moment catharsis.
Your character even has a straightforward and deceptively typical objective: Go hunt down a giant monster, and kill it, and you will be closer to reviving your love (freeing the princess, saving the world…..winning, just like every other game, right?). Wander holds his sword up to the light, and the light points in the direction he’s meant to go in to face the next colossus. These sometimes-giant, sometimes-docile, sometimes-sleeping beasts, composed of dirt, architecture and grass, are like looking at ancient majestic beasts. Some are more aggressive than others, but all feel threatened by the presence of this stranger, this boy, and make a point of defending themselves. What ensues are sixteen of the most memorable experiences I’ve ever had from a game, a book, a movie, or any work of art I can think of.
When you defeat each of these creatures, there isn’t a large cathartic fanfare, with the game patting you on the back for a job well done, or a stat sheet counting up all the gold and experience you earned with a very gratifying ringing noise. What follows is a somber, mournful sequence of the death of this creature that you have been tasked with slaying. The whole time I was asking myself, is what I’m doing a good thing? The game plays with moral ambiguity without the use of plot and exposition, but with the gameplay itself, which is incredibly powerful, and unique from most games out there. SoTC has very little exposition after the initial introduction and premise, aside from a short hint of a twist once you get about seventy-percent through the game to get your attention and make you scratch your head, followed by a heart-breaking twist of an ending.
Each colossus is a level in and of itself, requiring you to dodge, attack, climb, and run across their enormous bodies while they do their best to shake you off, to reach the goal, their weak points. Each one is unique and requires a level of problem solving skill and creativity that will have you going “Ohhhhhh, that’s awesome,” one encounter after the next. And after each one I thought, ‘how are they going to top that?’ Each one does, right up until the end of the game. Everyone has their favorites, but the game keeps you in awe from start to finish. In focusing solely on Wander, his horse, Agro, and the Colossi, players develop an emotional connection with the trusty steed. I remember in the second Colossus battle, being separated from Agro. Pressing the ‘call’ button, Wander shouts Agro’s name. Panning the camera around, I see this big black horse galloping as fast as he can to my rescue, sliding in on all fours, as this giant treading behemoth towers over me, ready to crush both of us into the sand. At that moment I felt a genuine emotional connection to the game, only the best movies are able to render.
My only and deepest regret about this game is that you can’t re-experience it like the first time you play it.
As an artist and aspiring game designer, I want to think about the kind of impact we can truly have with players, beyond the basics of reward and failure, catharsis and anger. In what ways can we use games to tap into the deeper registers of human emotion. If this game had any of the things it took out (lots of ‘basic’ enemies to whittle through, items, towns, etc), it would have taken away from its own thesis and made it a weaker experience. I want to think about how I can use negative space to make the existing subject matter more important in a work of art or a movie or a game. To make each part of the whole memorable and important. Using absence to create presence.
This is something I would like to explore and accomplish, and build upon in the future, as a creative person.
One love.
(This is a recycled post. I wrote it right at the beginning of keeping Saint Superman regularly, so I decided to bring it to my new, wider audience)
I love Cathedrals. I tend to love most church buildings, really; they’re one of the things I insist on visiting when I’m in another city if it’s at all possible. And not just the old ones, either; there’s even a few tacky, ultramodern parishes I get a real kick out of, like St. Mike’s in Glen Allen, with its Spartan decoration and it’s in-the-round orientation, which is the whole reason I find it so interesting. I know, I know, in-the-round designs aren’t liturgically correct, but I never said I endorsed it; I just said I get a kick out of it, and here’s why.
In Catholic churches, especially those with a face-the-people orientation (so pretty much all of them), there’s always a crazy tension right there in the middle, in the center of gravity between the altar and congregation. It is, to me, a terrifying, sacred space, that gap, and everyone seems to skirt around its edges. Nobody just brazenly walks through it. You get to the that place where the marble spreads into a wide square, you genuflect, and then you dance around it to your seat, or you avoid it entirely and go through the ambulatory. The only time anyone ever seems willing to spend time there is to receive the Eucharist, and even then, they dash out as quickly as they can. You do not linger there.
Nobody had to tell anyone this. The sanctity of that space is strong, tangible, as thick as a deep fog, and holy things are set apart by instinct.
St. Mike’s does not have that space, does not have that point of tension. The congregation comfortably envelopes the entire altar space, and there is no direction to it; it is cool, and it is breezy, and for the life of me, I can’t find that place where even angels won’t walk. That blows me away.
I sometimes worship, in addition to Sacred Heart Cathedral here in Richmond, at Tikvat Yisrael, a Messianic Jewish congregation a few blocks from me in the other direction, or at Congregation Beth Ahabah, a Conservative Reform synagogue a couple blocks over. It’s a very different experience, and I am again aware that their space has an entirely different point of tension, and its located in time rather than space. There’s a certain electricity, an excitement and gasping awe when they remove the Torah scrolls from their cabinet, comparable but not identical to what I described above, but certainly tense, holy; something here is present.
It’s said that if you want to find Judaism’s nearest analogue to Jesus, look at the Torah, not Moses. The Law is the ongoing, insistent presence of God, its dictates and commands the constant reminder of his sovereignty and power. The unveiling of the Torah is really the strongest moment in synagogue worship, the focal point, the axis on which the whole thing turns, the summit towards which it builds. In that, I can’t help but see the parallels to the Eucharist, which is itself brutally insistent, almost violent in its presence and demanding in its reception.
Worship without tension, worship that makes no demands, is little better than patting yourself on the back, and I’ll take that to the grave.
He can feel it coming in the air.
Tonight.
Well, it’s official: the Republicans have the BSG ticket, with Saul Tigh-lookalike John McCain and Laura Roslin-lookalike Sarah Palin.
This ticket excites me. I don’t buy into the whole “Bush McCain” thesis that Obama’s been hammering away, and I frankly think either men would be fine presidents. I also don’t really have too much of an issue with Joe Biden. But Palin is a politician I’ve been enthusiastic about for a while now. I’ve always liked shake-em-ups, those people who manage to overturn an entire political establishment, popular populists who are both classy and lowbrow and have real respect for their opponents.
Sarah Palin is a postpartisan Republican, and a strict reformer. She may well have just won my vote. Romney would have lost me. Huckabee would have been a big maybe. I would not have minded Lieberman or Pawlenty, but neither would have excited or enticed me.
But as both a non-partisan communitarian and a red-blooded young man who appreciates attractive women, I’m pumped.
Thomas writes:
Hi Brian, I’ve a follower of your blog for 3 months now, and I’ve probably counted for 30+ of your 6000+ hits. Please keep my cousin Paul in your prayers. He is a soldier in the Canadian military currently stationed in Afghanistan. Here’s hoping my cousin comes home safe.
Lord, have mercy.
Christ, have mercy.
Lord, have mercy.
This semester, one of the many, many classes I’m taking is English Drama: 900-1642, basically English drama pre-Restoration, exclusive of Shakespeare (who has an entire course devoted to him). We are, at this point, in the tenth to twelfth centuries, in a very Catholic England, and spending our time in the Wakefield mystery cycle.
Mystery plays developed all over Christian Europe as part of a general revival of religious observance and piety, a response to growing irreligion and a lack of adequate religious instruction. The plays which came into being covered most of the major events in the Christian cosmology, from Creation to Judgement, and were based on embellishments of the Scriptures and legends bound up therein. Over the course of the festival, the entire cycle of thirty-two short plays would be performed, spanning the entire history of the universe, and instructing the people in the story.
Catholicism is a pretty damn earth religion. It’s one of the things that has always appealed to me about it, that it respects the world and is unafraid of man’s sinful nature. It’s something to be resisted, to be sure, but nothing to pussyfoot around, nothing to speak softly about, nothing to deny. We are sinners, we do speak roughly and brashly. The world is full of dirt and grime, and we sweat when we work. We toil and we struggle and we fail and that’s nothing worth hiding our faces over because it’s true for all of us.
The Mysteries, too, are very much salt-of-the-earth sort of fare. There’s cursing and bitching about being a serf and complaining about tithes. The whole thing was originally handled by labor guilds, so there you go; Cain and Abel would be played by leather-tanners, and fishmongers, and woodworkers. Blue-collar guys, like in Goodfellas, but without all the murder. Ok, fine, there’s murder. It’s The Killing of Abel.
For modern Christians, especially protestants, this can come off a little funky. After the English Reformation, when the Mysteries were revived, most of the dirt and grime was washed off and everyone was clutching their hands in prayer. The villains became irredeemable and the heroes became parfait. All of this comes from the protestant reverence for the Scriptures. As much as we Catholics dig and respect the Scriptures, we’ve never held them in quite the regard as our protestant brothers and sisters. All the little embellishments, like Cain and Abel taking place in Wakefield of the high Middle Ages, with all the standard complaints of a serf, and the colorful speech, such as when Pickbrain, Cain’s farmboy, basically tells the audience to, er, “on his black horn blow a score…till his teeth bleed,” were revised or omitted entirely. It felt unseemly to mess with the content of the Bible even in adaptation, let alone with such language.
Catholics have always felt freer to jazz things up. We have saints clutching their own heads and boiling in vats. We paint our popes into Hell. And we have not refrained from trying to work with whatever we have on hand to try to get the truth across. In the Catholic mind, the Scriptures are gifts from God, his word, true, but not the implacable “basic instruction before leaving earth.” They are our starting point and constant measure, illuminating truth and beckoning us always to return to it. But it does not replace the human mind or the movement of the Spirit through the Church. Because, in the end, the Word of God is Christ, not the Bible, and his Church is his Body.
You know, guys, you are allowed to comment.
Mark Shea may be one of the most important Catholic thinkers of the twenty-first century.
On the other hand, some respond to the discovery of Jesus the Rebel as though it baptized every reactionary impulse to blow their way. A neo-Marxist reads the cleansing of the temple as a kind of religious imprimatur for class warfare. Many leftist theologians were enraptured with the Sandinistas and seemed to feel that the Millennium was about to dawn until a repressive Vatican rudely pointed out that Jesus and Marx did not see eye to eye. Conversely, certain right-wing “dominion theologians” read the Gospel as a license to engage in guerrilla warfare with the liberal establishment, bust secular humanist chops and seize theocratic power in the name of the Prince of Peace.
And somewhere in the middle, the rest of us Christians just want the whole question to go away. Rebellion, we feel, is just not nice. After all, the Gospel counsels submission. Submission to God and submission to earthly authorities. “Let everyone obey the authorities that are over him,” we plead, “for there is no authority except from God, and all authority that exists is established by God. Therefore, whoever resists authority opposes what God has appointed, and those who oppose it will bring judgment upon themselves” (Rom. 13:1-2). We just want to be good people and not get caught up in someone’s power grab. We do not want to be the next victim of truth cancer. Best to just let sleeping dogs lie. We feel that we are playing with fire even to consider the topic of rebellion.
And so we are. “I have come to set the earth on fire,” says Jesus, “and how I wish it were already blazing” (Luke 12:49). Indeed, we are not merely to play with fire, we are to be baptized in it. We are called to “be not conformed to this world,” to be “filled with the Holy Spirit,” and to call others to join the movement as well. Yet to do so will necessarily put us in conflict with the rulers, the authorities, the powers of this dark world, and the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms (Eph 6:12). In other words, fidelity to Jesus will, at some level, force us to be rebels precisely because of our submission to God. To adopt a safe, passive “Sunday Christianity” that accepts the status quo and never makes waves is to betray the Gospel. It flies in the face of the parable of the unjust judge and makes a mockery of the parable of the talents, wherein Our Lord counsels, not mild resignation to the status quo, but audacity and moxie. For all the dangers of truth cancer, we evidently cannot escape all hazard by opting for Maalox when the Christian tradition is serving strong meat. As C.S. Lewis says, “If I am sure of anything I am sure that His teaching was never meant to confirm my congenital preference for safe investments and limited liabilities.”
