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Well, we did it. We put the book online.
My partners and I have been trying to get this comic off the ground now for three years. After two failed attempts, we’ve bowed to the inevitable and put the book online. It’s work we’re proud of, and we think it’d be a waste to let it languish on our hard drives and in boxes while we stubborn try to break into the industry. We’ve had enough of that, so guess the heck what? It’s now free for the reading, and we hope everybody digs it.
It’s called Stronghold, and it’s much more than a superficial description would allow. At the most superficial, it’s Power Rangers without the suck. Getting a little deeper, it’s a science-fiction superhero story. At its heart, though, it’s about meaning and identity in the heart of conflict, the nature and significance of belief, and man’s place in the universe. It’s personal and character-driven, although the first issue is just a big fight scene, and deeply invested in the themes I’ve been exploring on this blog for the last fifteen months. I hope you’re all willing to check it out, and I hope you’re willing to stick with me on it. Some of the areas we’re going to explore might seem a little controversial.
That said, we’re hoping for a one to two page-a-week publishing schedule, and we have a backlog of almost sixty pages still to be posted. So there will be stuff for quite a while.
Dig in!
Young German voters, it seems, are quite disengaged with their own politics. That’s right — the same country that saw two-million people come to see Obama speak are themselves utterly disenchanted with their own staid, solid system, which seems unresponsive both to new media and the needs of the nation’s youth. Drawing from the theatre of the absurd and staging dadaist protests — not so much protests, I suppose, as the rejection of caring — the young German voter is about as invested in the campaign as I am in Two and a Half Men: it should be mocked, but not watched.
I think TIME magazine, though, has failed to grasp what’s happening here. Young Germans want flashy Obama style campaigns? That’s the message? They want to be courted differently? The reason Obama was such a phenomenon was the stark contrast he held against Bush and his seemingly-impenetrable ability to capture the zeitgeist and exploit it. His campaign was personal, his message general, and his followers passionate. This is not something easily replicated. No, the disengagement of Germans — and Americans, too — from politics has less to do with a lack of internet-savvy campaigns as it has to do with the collapse of traditional class-based ideology and the rise of brutal identity politics.
Is it any surprise, then, that the party the article identifies as gaining in support, the Pirate Party, has its origins, not in any traditional ideology, but in something intensely close to the young person’s sense of identity, the Internet? The hunger isn’t for a certain style of campaign, but for political and cultural relevance, and if a government can’t present itself as relevant, it has no business governing at all.
So, I’ve been busy. It’s difficult finding time to blog, as I have to jam my entire life into the hours after work; I haven’t held a full-time job like this in two years, and even then, when I did, I was waking up at 9 and going to bed at two in the morning, so I suppose I wasn’t feeling it as much. I pretty much have a ten-hour day, my commute back and forth included. So I haven’t been able to find the time to put out too much here. I honestly don’t expect that to change, so either the form or frequency of my blogging is going to have to change.
That said, I’ve turned back to my great love: comic books. I will be, sometime this weekend or early next week, launching my comic book, formerly Sanctuary but retitled Stronghold due to SyFy’s Amanda Tapping vehicle, as a free, online webcomic. We’re still getting the files ready and tweaking the website, so I’m not launching it just yet, but expect it soon. Keep your eyes out!
I turned twenty-five today.
This can only be adequately celebrated by the Fifth Dimension.
The stage of the human drama
In the summer before my junior or senior year of high school (I forget which; my memory seems to insist it must have been 2001, and may in fact have been as early as 2000), my sister, my dad and myself went to go visit New York City. We hadn’t taken a summer trip to the city in years, let alone had the opportunity to play the tourist (a term I vehemently insisted did not apply to me), our trips into New York being largely restricted to the Howard Beach area of Brooklyn where my dad’s sister and her progeny live. In addition to taking a tour of Central Park hosted by my dad’s friend Billy Cobin in which he pointed out Jerry Seinfeld’s apartment building, we made a failed attempt to visit the Natural History Museum, after which we shrugged and went to visit the Rose Center’s Hayden Planetarium.
It was awesome.
The show was a multimedia presentation that bordered on the holographic to my fevered teenage mind, a detailed tour of the entire universe narrated by Tom Hanks, who for all I know may have been in the next room, cold-reading the script on a stool into a microphone, treating us to a secretly-live performance, but was far more likely to have been recorded in a soundstage in Los Angeles. Akin to the famous Powers of Ten sequence, it began on Earth, directly above the aforementioned Hayden Planetarium, and began slowly zooming out, and the building and the city and the island began to recede into the distance, and stars began to make themselves visible against the curvature of the planet. Earth itself grew smaller and smaller, diminishing itself as it fell away into the oblivion of space and we bucked and weaved our way beyond the moon. Eventually, it would just disappear.
Periodically, Mr. Hanks would make a fairly blithe comment about the planet that shrank away from us. By the time we reached Saturn, and the entirety of it had been reduced to little more than Carl Sagan’s famous “pale blue dot,” as pictured above. “You see that pale blue dot? That’s home. Everybody you have ever met and everything you have ever done is there.” And we marvelled — marvelled – at our smallness. But it wasn’t content to end itself there — at Saturn of all places. No, we had bigger places to go. Much, much, much bigger.
Soon, we left the solar system entirely, wended our way past Alpha Centauri and further and deeper into the Milky Way while the Sun itself — Sol in its entirety — became itself little more than a faint light against the brighter stars of the galaxy, the heat and light and fire that fuels all the life we have ever encountered struck down, its majesty stolen, the emperor’s nakedness revealed; the sun was little more than a pinprick of light amidst a chorus of greater stars. But we weren’t done yet.
Yeah, a lot like this.
No, the Milky Way was hardly sufficient to be our greater destination, when we had far more to see and do. The whole galaxy slipped away into and empty sky, itself the sole point — the entire galaxy, whose breadth we could never hope to span, made insubstantially minuscule. Eventually another galaxy showed itself along the edges of the dome, and another, and another, and soon, it was arrayed with dozens — which themselves slid together into gigantic galactic clusters. Which themselves soon dotted the screen — and then we saw clusters of clusters, superclusters covering millions of light-years, each one untold trillions of stars — and still we pulled out further!
It was all designed to show us the incomprehensible bigness of the world, and to imbue in us religious feeling. Let’s be honest about that — awe is a religious feeling. To walk out of that place unaffected was impossible.
As simply as it’s usually presented, it’s still intended to elicit basic religious awe, the wonder at the scale of the universe, while simultaneously convince us that our lives are insignificantly small in comparison — the purely materialistic universe at which we awe renders our lives meaningless in their brevity and scale.
A young Joseph Ratzinger wrote in his Introduction to Christianity of a worldview that “remorselessly reduces man and his history to a tiny grain of dust in the cosmos, that can see itself as the center of the universe only in the naive years its childhood, and now, grown out of childhood, ought finally to have the courage to awake from sleep, rub its eyes, shake off the beautiful but foolish dream, and take its place unquestioningly in that huge context in which our tiny lives have their proper function, lives that should find new meaning precisely in accepting their diminutiveness,” essentially making my point for me.
I read much Carl Sagan in my youth, and the man was precisely finding his religious experience — hismysteria religiosa – in material science, in the observable. As big as the universe is, for that vision, the vision about which he wrote so passionately, there is no place for God in all its tremendous wonder, and thus, in the vast scale of things in which we’re just microbes perched precariously on a speck of dust drifting aimlessly through an infinitely empty void, human life only finds its meaning in accepting that and contemplating infinity. The proposal is thus: the function of man is to sit and gaze in awe, not at our own navels, but at the stars.
But the question remains: what point, then, is there in wonder? If human life is entirely material, and not only material, but insignificantly material, why contemplate the universe at all? Isn’t is just as worthy an enterprise to go to the grocery store and buy some microwaveable French bread pizzas as it is to think hard about a universe that is ultimately beyond comprehension? In the world where our lives are insignificantly material, what matters whether we are war or at peace, whether we learn or do not learn, whether our lives are long and comfortable or nasty, brutish and short when, in the end, their span is less than a breath?
The Psalms consider this repeatedly — the very same question is invoked, in fact. How is it, the Scriptures ask us repeatedly, that on that scale — to the extent that they can consider it — that our lives have meaning? “Our span is sixty years, or seventy for those that are strong, and most of those are sadness and pain,” and again, in the same Psalm 90, “They are like grass that dies; it blooms in the morning, but by evening it whithers and fades.” And then, of course, there’s ornery old Qoholeth in Ecclesiastes, decrying the vanity and meaninglessness of life.
But where Sagan and his partisans seek meaning in embracing that meaninglessness — much as they’d be loathe to admit it — the Christian takes that scale and inverts it. Instead of our endless contemplation of the infinite, thoughtless Cosmos, uncreated yet creating, unbegun but doomed to die, we can look beyond the material. The material universe, taken apart from the moral universe or the metaphysical universe or the spiritual universe, utterly demands that life is simply and essentially without meaning, simply by scale. To exclude these dimensions is to acquiesce to that vicious vision of the human person. But we know differently, don’t we? We can look our our desire for justice, our gratitude, our moral force, our compassion, and see in these absurdity — hungers that can never be satisfied and are ultimately without meaning themselves, as Camus eventually admitted — or we can take them as evidence, the signature of God in our lives, a God who wishes our lives to be meaningful, to be just, to be compassionate, to be lived with moral force.
In fact, in the universe Christians propose, far from being an insignificant dot on which insignificant people life insignificant lives, the pale blue dot, invisible from far enough away, is proposed to be the very axis on which the entire universe turns — not its physical center, but its ontological and etiological core: God himself came down for those people living on that planet, to bring them to their full purpose and reveal the meaning written on their hearts. The triangle, then, is simply inverted.
Its all really a question of scale.
I’m taking a brief break from pouring through my bosses files in his attic trying to find the addresses to legal offices so we can send out change-of-address cards to client lawyers to say “hello” to all of you out there in Blogland. I know I’ve been neglecting my blog, and I felt you all, those however many dozens of you are responsible for the nearly eighty-thousand hits I’ve amassed in the last year, deserved an explanation.
The first is that I’m working, but I haven’t stopped thinking. I do have a full-time job now. That means I wake up at seven, hit the subway by eight, and get to work by nine. I get off work at five, and get home by six. While I could be blogging then, we run into the second problem: my internet connection is unstable until next week. I spent much of Sunday — a day I had intended to blog about this great article in TIME — completely unable to sign on. I should download one of those third-party blogging programs so I can still work even when I’m offline, but, ya know, woulda coulda shoulda.
The third is that, well, I’m in New York. It’s weird and exciting and ridiculous and it’s frankly distracting. Between all of that and having a new roommate to get to know and a good friend I haven’t seen since May swinging by this past weekend, well, I’ve been a bit behind on the blogging front. Please stick with me! We will resume normal operations shortly. I appreciate your prayers during this strange and exciting time of transition.
Until then, here’s Gladys Knight.
Also, my good friend True over at the Blarg has a great piece on Iran, another subject dear to my heart.
Alright, alright. Pictures!
The trip was long, the move arduous, but totally worth it. Totally, absolutely worth it. Thanks for all your prayers! I’m still trying to figure out how to balance work and blogging, but once I get that down…
Hoo boy am I tired.
I spent all day out and about in Valley Stream, a suburb of New York just outside Queens. It took me four trains to get there, but the commute was relatively brief, for which I am quite grateful. It was largely an orientation day for me at my new job, which starts Thursday. Much of the day was also dedicated to getting me better situated here in the city, establishing a bank account and whatnot, and learning the Subway/Long Island Railroad. All told, though, I was running for the whole day and now I can kick back and rest the rest of the righteous.
Righteous.
So, I have a friend who recently out-and-out said he didn’t consider Catholics to be Christians. Now, this fellow is a good and intelligent man, and he isn’t a blowhard. Unlike so many others, who are often thoughtless and unconsidering in their assumption that the Vatican is evil or that Catholics worship Mary, this friend of mine has an actual reason: he disputes the Catholic understanding of justification to the extent that he thinks it makes our baptism a hollow sham. At least he’s honest about it.
This guy’s a Calvinist, see, and as a Calvinist, he believes in total depravity, that man is incapable of seeking or knowing God on his own. He takes this idea very seriously, or at least has in the past, that nobody out there is actually after God, or hungers for God while simultaneously failing to know him, based on Romans 3:11, without, of course, considering that Paul, like so many rhetoricians, might in fact be using hyperbole to make a point, or rather considering the idea, but rejecting it outright. Essentially, he maintains, the Christian is converted solely and wholly and 100% unabashedly by the deliberate grace of God, which he cannot resist, and without which he cannot even contemplate knowing him. Essentially, God makes people Christians, and we have no say in the matter.
This is where he disputes with Catholicism. We believe a certain amount of cooperation is required. God can give man the grace to change all he wants, but the man has to be willing to change, and has to accept and embrace that grace. It’s akin to offering someone the entirety of their college tuition; yes, it’s a free gift that you did nothing to earn, but you do have to take the gift, accept his offer, receive the grace. Receipt is a deliberate action, the part of the work you put in, the striving of the race which Paul also talks about in Romans if I recall correctly.
But for the fellow in question, this is entirely unacceptable. It cannot be, he insists, that you and I have any role in our relationship with God beyond passive object to God’s active subject; we can only be declared righteous, never actually become righteous. For him, it seems, the slow accumulation of discipline and strength is essentially meaningless, and one doesn’t need to be a saint, so to speak. But I disagree.
What seems clear to me from Romans is that righteousness can’t come from observing the Mosaic law, but only through the grace of God. Now, I’m not a Pauline exegete. I don’t speak Greek. So call me ignorant if you want — I am ignorant of many things. But reading the text by itself, let alone in conversation with the Church, didn’t leave me with the impression that grace is something forced upon us, only that grace alone makes possible man’s salvation.
After a grueling process about which I’ll blog tomorrow, I’m officially moved into my Brooklyn apartment. I have a great view of Manhattan from my apartment — which kind of confuses me, actually, because I thought this apartment faced away from the city — but here I am, nonetheless, and happy to start getting my new life going. I thank everyone for their prayers over the last few months; hopefully my financial woes are at an end, and I can get this new chapter a-goin’ with a minimum of difficulty. The Lord delivered, that’s for damn sure. Just in his own time.
Till tomorrow, then; I haven’t slept more than four hours in two days, and I was up until five thirty in the morning. I’m about as tired as anybody can be, I warrant.
