Fathers and Sons: Star Blazers - PART 1

On April 7, 1945, the flagship of the Japanese navy was sunk by US torpedoes off the coast of Okinawa. She was the heaviest and most well-fortified naval vessel the world had ever known. When she sank to the bottom of the Pacific ocean, she carried with her not only the lives of 3000 of her crewmen but also the hopes and dreams of an empire. She was the Yamato, and her fate and mine have been entertwined for the last 30 years.

I don't remember when I fell in love with stories, but I do remember when I discovered Star Blazers. I was six years old, and every day after kindergarten I would fly down the stairs to the basement, turn on the TV, fiddle impatiently with the rabbit ears, and settle back to let the sweet sights and sounds of black and white, monophonic science fiction wash over me. Though many of the plot's subtleties were lost on me at the time, I had a sophisticated enough grasp of the narrative to understand the basics:

It's 2199, and the Earth is under attack. The Gamilons, a race of humanoid aliens from distant space, have destroyed their own planet and set their sights on Earth as a replacement. From their base on Pluto, the Gamilons have deluged Earth with radiation bombs. The entire surface of the planet is uninhabitable, and the remaining Earthlings have evacuated to underground cities. In a little less than a year, the radiation will penetrate the surface, and all human life will be destroyed.

Earth's military forces have been obliterated. In fact, only one deep space battleship remains operational, and even it has been heavily damaged. Just when it seems that all hope is lost, Earth's commanders receive a mysterious message from a woman named Starsha on the distant planet Iscandar. She has a machine - the Cosmo DNA - that can remove the radiation from the planet. But Iscandar is light years away, and time is running out.

Only one hope remains. An old naval vessel, a battleship sunk in a long ago war, has been retrofitted as a starship. Starsha has sent the Star Force the technical plans for a new kind of engine that will allow them to travel faster than the speed of light. Will this new "wave motion" engine allow them to travel to Iscandar and back in time? Will they be able to defeat the Gamilons and save the Earth?

This is my story, the first epic I remember learning. It's possible that I had internalized some biblical epics by this point in my life, but they never had the visceral hold on my imagination that Star Blazers did. My sense of good and bad, of heroes and villains, of loss and honor, were all shaped by the fertile imagination of Japanese animator Leiji Matsumoto.

Though Star Blazers first aired in America (dubbed into English) in 1979, it was already well known and loved in Japan as Yamato. In 1974, audiences in Japan were thrilled and captivated by the story of the young heroes who resurrected the great battleship in order to defeat the enemy and his radioactive bombs. Though American audiences saw it as a well crated space yarn, Japanese audiences saw it as a love song for a fallen empire: the great Yamato - which, by the way, is a historic name for Japan - rises from the ashes of its destruction and soars off to glory once again. Less than 30 years after the twin bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the main cultural export from Japan to the US was the story of the Yamato, coming back from the dead and using superior technology to defeat the foe that had crippled them not long ago.

But all this cultural subtext was lost on me as a child. All I knew is that they were in space, they needed to save the world, and they only had 347 days left in which to do it. What did I care about resurgent nationalism and the ghosts of empire? Nothing.

Nothing, that is, until I introduced it to my kids last September.

More in part two.

Fathers and Sons: Star Blazers - PART 2

The trouble with me is that I can't just let a story be a good story. I have to pick it apart, analyze it, look under the hood, kick the tires, and then dismantle the manifold just so I can put it back together again. It's a frustrating habit, one born out of years of teaching students to do the same, and as much as I value this archeological approach to literary understanding, I sometimes wish I could just turn it off.

My family feels the same way.

We downloaded the first season of Star Blazers from iTunes last September. "This is so cool," I told my wife while I was forcing her to watch the first episode. "It's a show that both repudiates and celebrates Japan's imperialist heritage. By rebuilding the Yamato they are reforging their collective identity, one based on global, not national, interests."

She yawned.

"No, think about it," I continued, bouncing up and down a little bit in my excitement. "This came out 30 years after WWII ended. It's a new generation of Japanese, their equivalent of the baby boom. They've inherited their parents' pain and disappointment, and yet it's been tempered with the optimism of youth and a technology-based economy that's just beginning to thrive. It reminds me of this poem by...."

She grabbed my arm. "Did you get the mail?"

I hadn't. She sighed and got up without hitting pause.

The kids, I decided, wouldn't get off so easy.

"There are a few things you need to notice about this first episode," I told them a few days later when I'd managed to bribe them into submission. "First, notice the sense of loss permeating the narrative. Both Captain Avatar and Derek Wildstar are haunted by the loss of the son and brother, respectively. This is probably a reflection of the animators' own losses, or more likely, their parents' losses. If you look closely, the battle in which Derek's brother dies bears a striking resemblance to the final Japanese offensive at Iwo Jima, suggesting that...yes, Maggie?" Her hand was up.

"I want more popcorn."

"Just hold on," I said. She put her hand down and pouted. "Where was I? Oh yeah. The second thing you should look at is the soundtrack. While the theme song is reminiscent of a John Williams style fanfare, a style which actually dates back to the early adventure movies of the 1940s and the classic scores of Korngold, the Star Blazers theme actually predates Williams' most noted scores. Furthermore, the underscore of the show itself is a mix of disco and Wagnerian leit-motif. This is fascinating, because 1) it shows us just how much Western idioms had begun to influence Japanese art, and 2) it's all diatonic, which means that the composers rejected traditional Japanese harmonies in favor of a European chordal palette. This is especially important when considering the overall narrative similarities between Star Blazers and the Ring cycle. Specifically, the scene in which...Conor, where are you going?

He was hopping up and down, legs crossed. "I really have to go. Don't start it without me."

He ran off.

We waited. 45 minutes later I put in a Spongebob DVD for the little ones. By the time Conor emerged from the bathroom Maggie and Lucas were thoroughly engrossed in Spongebob and I was online, trying to find chat thread about non-linear narrative and its implications in post-colonial criticism.

It's a disease, I tell you.

So here's what I've learned about myself:

You know that dad who tries to live his football dreams through his kids? That's me. The mom who pushes her shy daughter into trying out for the cheerleading squad because that's what her mom did to her? Yeah, that's me, too.

I want so badly for my children to see the interconnections between art and culture. I want them to recognize that the creative act does not take place in a vacuum, that all art is bound by place and history, although great art transcends those bounds. I forgot, though, that what drew me to Star Blazers in the first place was the story. It's fun. Imagine that: a story can be fun. It doesn't have to be analyzed or dissected. It can just be enjoyed.

We did eventually watch Star Blazers. And you know what? They loved it. Absolutely loved it. Once their father stopped hitting pause to remind them that the clothes worn by the female characters both contributed to their objectification and served as emancipatory agents by freeing them from the bondage of 1950's gender roles, that is.

Incarnation, Part 1: Clocked

I love basketball. I'm not very good at it, but I love it nevertheless.

Part of me wants to take this opportunity to wax rhapsodic on the importance of seeking out opportunities to fail, and to fail spectacularly. But mostly, I just want to talk about scars and, more importantly, bodies.

I'm an academic. My days are spent lost between the covers of a book or poring over mountains of ungraded essays. I spend long hours debating the merits of Bahktin's heteroglossia or helping students recognize the difference between a iamb and an anapest. It's heady stuff, a cephalic feast, and yet at the end of the day I often have very little to show for my efforts other than the scraps and bones of half-gnawed metaphors and some stale prepositions. I live in the abstract, floating from idea to idea, and I've come to realize just how much I miss my body.

This is why I love basketball so much. I'm not good enough to play it with my head. For me, it's all elbows and sweat. I don't think (a truth to which I'm sure my teammates will attest). I'm the guy who remembers to pick but forgets to roll. No, I just go out there and run around. If they pass me the ball, I shoot. If not, I run around some more. Occasionally I'll set a screen on one of my own teammates. Like I said, I don't play with my head.

But that's why it's so cool that I got clocked. Loose ball on the floor. I dive. Other guy dives. Elbows and eybrows meet. Blood flows. He falls all over himself apologizing, and though I'm a little dazed, I'm just thinking how freaking awesome it is that I'm actually bleeding. I don't get to bleed nearly as often as I'd like, and now here it is, dripping on the freethrow line, leaving little red inkblots on the court. One of them looks like my mother. Someone drives me to the ER.

And so I'll have a scar, a little one, hiding in my eyebrow like a shy housecat. It's my red badge of courage, a tiny reminder of a life lived fully, at least temporarily.

Don't get me wrong. I'm not a sentimental advocate for "sucking the marrow out of life," a stance popular with Hollywood teachers and starry eyed English majors. Thoreau's injunction to live deliberately is sound, and yet it does not follow that all passions ought to be pursued with the same monomaniacial devotion. Nor do I endorse the testosterone fueled faith so disturbingly promoted in John Ethridge's Wild at Heart. If you haven't read it, don't. Ethridge attempts to make the case that American masuclinity is God's design for all men, that climbing mountains and shooting things and dragging women back to the cave by their hair (I am only slightly exaggerating) are all part and parcel of being made in God's image, that had Jesus been born today, he would have ended the sermon on the mount by BASE jumping off the top.

But this I do believe: our bodies are good. We're meant to use them. We're supposed to eat and drink. We're made to stand up and run and trip over things and skin our knees. This strange assembly of flesh and bone is made to jump and squat, to throw, to cry, to have sex, to type, to dance, to sleep. Though God gave us minds of incomprehensible depth and complexity, he also gave us bodies, bodies which are no less sacred than our most precious incorporeal creeds and beliefs, bodies which both house the soul and are the soul. The Platonic dualism that divides the body in two, condemning the flesh while exalting the spirit, is, for lack of a better word, dumb. Even Yoda, wise and wrinkled as he is, falls prey to this line of thought. In his desperate attempts explain the Force to Luke (who is, by the way, just about as obtuse as Jesus' disciples were), he finally grabs him by the arm and says "Luminous beings are we, not his crude matter." It's unsettling: nobody can mangle theology like a muppet can mangle theology.

Anyhow, although we proclaim the glory of God through what we think and say, the truth is that we could probably just shut up and let the wonder of the human body do the talking for us. Walt Whitman's ode to the human form, I Sing the Body Electric, confesses this to be true:

It is in his limbs and joints also, it is curiously in the joints of his hips and wrists;
It is in his walk, the carriage of his neck, the flex of his waist and knees—dress does not hide him;
The strong, sweet, supple quality he has, strikes through the cotton and flannel;
To see him pass conveys as much as the best poem, perhaps more;
You linger to see his back, and the back of his neck and shoulder-side... If any thing is sacred, the human body is sacred, And the glory and sweet of a man, is the token of manhood untainted; And in man or woman, a clean, strong, firm-fibred body, is beautiful as the most beautiful face....

My scar, therefore, is not a celebration of my hyper-masculinity. It doesn't make me bad ass or dangerous. It doesn't mean that I've lived deeply or that I've, heaven help us, seized the day. It just means that I lived deliberately and fully, with body and mind. And when I go to bed at night, I think about the science fiction that I love, about the projected futures in which we've evolved into pure energy, finally free from the shackles of flesh. And right before I drift away, I think scandalous thoughts, heretical thoughts, unforgivable thoughts. Just this once, I think, I hope they got it wrong.

Russia, Part 1: Packing

"The trouble with you," says my wife, "is that you don't plan ahead."

This is where she and I disagree. Let me give you an example.

I leave for Moscow in six days. That means I have roughly five and a half days before I need to pack. To me, this is self-evident, an a priori conclusion. It's a simple syllogism:

1) packing consists of tossing clothes and stuff in a bag
2) it will take me roughly ten minutes to put my clothes and stuff in a bag.
3) I don't leave for six more days
4) Therefore, I don't even need to think about packing until Friday afternoon (from 1, 2, and 3) and if I want to watch A-Team reruns all afternoon I will be perfectly justified in doing so.

Of course, the irrefutable nature of my logic does not move my wife. She shakes her head, giving me the same look she usually reserves for incompetent waiters and the Bush administration.

"The problem with your 'logic'," she says, making those little sarcastic quotation marks with her fingers, "is that it's based on a set of false premises."

I try to interrupt, mostly out a sense of self-preservation, but she holds up a finger and I stop, mostly out of a greater sense of self-preservation.

"In the first place, packing consists of so much more than 'tossing clothes and stuff in a bag.' Seriously, were you raised by wolves? Packing is an art, a transcendent activity. A well-packed bag speaks of the frailty and the nobility of the human condition. To toss some clothes in a bag and call it 'packing' is like tossing notes on a page and calling it 'music.'"

"That's me," I say, slowly backing out of range, "the Schoenberg of the suitcase."

She glares at me. "You can call yourself the Pollack of the Purse for all I care. It doesn't change the fact that you don't know how to pack."

She then goes on to assail my my second premise, claiming that although I can, indeed, throw random clothes into a bag in under ten minutes, I have utterly failed to account for the estimated two hours it takes to unpack those clothes, find the clothes I should have packed in the first place, wash them, iron them, and then repack the bag. I point out that since she is actually the one who does the unpacking, finding, washing, ironing, and repacking, it does only take me, in the most literal sense, ten minutes to pack.

This is not a wise thing to say.

There's no backtracking, so we both go our separate ways to cool down for a bit. She goes outside and tends to her garden. I stare in the bathroom mirror and wonder when my stubble began turning gray. I owe her an apology. I don't mean to take her for granted. When she comes back inside I'll tell her so. And in the end I will choose quality over speed, beauty over pragmatism. I will allow my wife to sculpt my luggage as she sculpts me, grinding down the rough edges and smoothing out the stupid parts. Because the simple fact is that she's really good at packing and I'm not, just like I'm really good at killing spiders and she's really good at standing on the dining room table and screaming. We each have our gifts. Neither of us can do it by ourselves. Learning this is one of the keys to a long, happy marriage.

So, you see, I am planning ahead, after all.

Russia, Part 2: Things I Wish I'd Known Before I Bought My Ticket

Shots. Five of them. In the arm.

I wasn't prepared for that.

It's not that I'm squeamish, or that I have a low pain threshold. It's just that that's a lot of shots, man. I suggest that maybe I could get some of them later; check myself into a little Russian clinic, disinfect the injection site with some Stolichnaya, and submit myself to the large but capable hands of Olga, the rather mannish Siberian nurse.

My doctor gives me a sidelong glance as he lays out the syringes.

"The Russian medical system oscillates between modern and medieval," he says. He chooses a syringe and frowns at it. "You never know what you're going to get. Now take off your shirt."

"But don't you think," I say as I disrobe,"that it's worth giving it a try? I mean, peristroika, glastnost, all that?"

He thwacks the syringe with his finger. "That was twenty years ago. Hold still."

So still I hold, betrayed by a country that can export cultural gold like Dostoyevsky and Yakov Smirnov and yet apparently not provide a tetnus booster. I am about to wax rhapsodic on the technological innovation of Sputnik when Dr. Cahn launches the first of five rockets into my arm.
I mutter and curse. I smite him with my eyes. I harbor evil feelings towards him. All the while, little Chernobyls are melting down in my tricep.

"Isn't there a pill for this?" I hiss, sending him as much bad mojo as I can muster.

He drops the empty syringe with a satisfied sigh and reaches for another. "Consider it pure joy, my brother. Now, for the love of God, stop squirming and hold still."

Yeah, right. Pure joy my приклад.

Russia, Part 3: The International Language

The lady sitting in front of me is yelling at me in Russian. I can’t understand most of what she’s saying, but I’m pretty sure it has something to do with the meal I just dumped on her head.

Let me put this in some context.

I’m somewhere over the Baltic Sea, halfway between London and Moscow. Dave, my traveling companion, is sitting to my right. He’s about my age, a social-studies teacher from the Poulsbo area, and he’s sound asleep with his mouth hanging slightly open. To my left is a young Chinese guy. He’s very cool: iPod, hipster glasses, Abercrombie wardrobe. He’s also asleep, but he’s cool enough to keep his mouth closed.

I’m in the middle, and I am wide awake. I wish this weren’t the case. I have tried using my tray table as a pillow, but it smells like fish. I think about leaning over and putting my head on Dave’s shoulder, but he twitches in his sleep, and probably wouldn’t make a very comfortable pillow. I briefly consider the hip Chinese guy but I quickly realize that the same rules that apply to high-school apply to Aeroflot: you don’t snuggle with your social superiors.

I’m about to resign myself to a sleepless flight, but then the stewardess comes by with dinner and it all looks so Slavic that I decide to eat. I have my choice of lamb or fish, and because the two look positively indistinguishable I just point to one. I’m pretty sure I’ve chosen the fish. I’m not sure though, because as the stewardess hands me my tray Dave twitches in his sleep, elbowing me in the ribs, and I drop my dinner on the head of the woman sitting in front of me.

This is when the yelling starts.

My one year of college Russian is limited to such useful phrases as, “I see the brown dog,” and , “What time is it in Minsk?” Nevertheless, it’s quite clear to me what she is saying. I smile weakly and try to help dab the tarter sauce from her hair.

It’s going to be a great trip.

Bikes and Books, Part 1: Hamlet

The two most important tools any motorcycle restorer must have:

1) a good socket set
2) a sledgehammer

I was prepared for the former, but the latter caught me by surprise.

Let me back up a bit. A few months ago I decided to restore a 1975 Honda 550/four. Like most foolish endeavors, this one has its genesis in a desperate attempt to impress a woman. My wife has a weakness for guys on bikes; I have a weakness for my wife. Put the two together and you end up with me in the (unheated) garage on a cold December afternoon trying to coax a rusty swingarm axle out of its socket.

Reasoning was to no avail, but I have three kids so I'm used to that. I tried to yank it out with a pipe wrench but it was so rusted that whenever I pulled or twisted the swing arm moved up and down as well.

After lubricating the axle with a few choice and very well-oiled words, I stopped to regroup. I'm not a mechanic. I'm not mechanical. I'm not even mechanic-ish. I'm the guy who opens the hood of the car and says, "Yup...that looks about right," nods a few times, scratches himself authoritatively, and goes back inside, forgetting to shut the hood or turn off the car. Without a manual, a clear set of operating instructions, I'm lucky to toast a piece of bread.

This must be how Hamlet feels after his father is murdered. Faced with a daunting task, a task for which he has no training and no natural inclination, he's left to fend for himself, a reluctant immigrant to the dark land of revenge. Though he's savvy enough to recognize the diseased state of this new world, he's seemingly powerless to change it. He knows he ought to avenge his father with speed and dexterity, that this is what sons do, and yet he cannot seem to stir himself out of his lethargy. This, by Elizabethan standards, is most unusual, and Hamlet himself bemoans his own unnatural response:

"How stand I then
that have a father kill'd, a mother stain'd,
excitements of my reason and my blood,
and let all sleep?"

And as I sat there in my garage, swearing at my motorcycle but actually doing nothing, I couldn't help but notice the uncomfortable parallels between myself and the Prince of Denmark. It would be so easy to postpone, to wait until I have just the right tools or just the right weather. But I don't want my enterprises of great pitch and moment to lose the name of action. I don't want to find myself on the stage of my life surrounded by the corpses of my supporting cast.

So I took a cue from Laertes, put a little poison on the end of my sledgehammer, and proceeded to beat the tar out of my swingarm.

"The time," I said, "The time
(WHAM!)
is out of joint. O cursed spite,
that ever I was born
(WHAM!)
to set it right."

It worked. The axle grudgingly slid from its lair and the swingarm collapsed to the ground, silent and still in defeat. I whooped and hollered until I saw all the rust, rust that I will have to clean, rust that will eat away at both my bike and my schedule.

Out, out, damned spot.

Bikes and Books, Part 2: Frankenstein

There's very little left of my bike now. At least, there's very little left of my bike that's actually on my bike. There's a lot left of my bike, and it's scattered across the garage: the engine is nestled up next to the deep freeze; the carburetor is hiding behind a few old cans of paint; ziploc bags of more or less accurately labeled nuts and bolts cover every other surface like rusty manna, little sacks of greasy grace.

Of course, it's one thing to disassemble. It's quite another to put it all back together.

This is where Mary Shelley comes in. As an eighteen year old she crafted what could be considered the most famous book on reassembly ever written. Frankenstein is part morality tale, part Gothic romance, part good old fashioned ghost story.

By modern standards it's fairly tame. Victor Frankenstein refuses to go into details concerning the creation of his magnum opus, his patchwork person. He doesn't regale us with tales of crypt robbing or of "resurrection men." There are no gruesome surgeries, no electrodes, no hunchbacks drooling for lightening. In fact, the most tantalizing detail Frankenstein offers is to note that he has to make his creation over-large because his hands are too small to perform the delicate operations needed to attach limb to torso, vessel to vessel.

I know how he feels. My knuckles tell the tale of my attempts to unscrew the clamps holding carburetor to the air box. The Honda corporation either uses very small robots or Oompa-Loompas to put these things together. Or maybe Lilliputians.

Anyhow, the details of Frankenstein's operations are shrouded in mystery and only elucidated by imagination. That's as it should be, though, because the true horror of the tale is lost on most readers today. We look for the blood and the gore, the ooze, the hacking of limbs, the cruel and incessant dehumanization of the victim, what one critic calls "torture porn." The true horror of Frankenstein, though, is the idea of pure science, of science without moral or communal responsibility, of science divorced from any purpose other than self-aggrandizement. Victor Frankenstein builds his monster out of the spare parts of humanity simply because he can.

I'm looking around me now, looking at the bags of parts, looking at the heart of my beast rotting near the freezer, looking at the filters and manifolds of inhalation and exhalation, looking at the pipes and tubing of circulation, the rigid skeleton of the frame, the wires that carry the pulsing current all throughout the body. I, too, am hoping for a spark, hoping that this curious ball of metal and packing grease will become much more than the sum of its parts. Rebuilding a motorcycle is just a little bit like playing God. In this way, I am very much like Victor Frankenstein.

Of course, I very much doubt that my motorcycle will throttle my wife (throttle - Get it? Ha!) if I don't ride it often enough.

Bikes and Books, Part 3: Jane Eyre

This is my son, Lucas. He's five and completely ferocious. He's as rough and tumble as they come, the action star of the preschool set. There are many things he doesn't understand. For example, he's a little shaky on cause and effect. He's not yet managed to make the connection between putting jello in the bathtub and having a time out. He also doesn't understand the designated hitter. And I could start an entirely new blog on what he doesn't understand about women (although at last count he was engaged to three girls in his class, so maybe he's figuring something out).

But hear me when I say this: Lucas gets motorcycles.

I don't mean that he understands the ins and outs of sprockets and gears and torque. He doesn't know a thing about checking compression or balancing tires. But he knows that motorcycles are loud, and he knows that they're fast. He knows that twisting the accelerator doesn't just open up the throttle, but that it opens up adventure and possibility. Lucas knows that a motorcycle can take you places you've never been, and that when the engine throbs beneath you it's like the beating of your own heart. He knows that on a motorcycle the road before him will be shiny and smooth and endless, peeling off into the sunset like a great white ribbon.

Jane Eyre knows this, too. At eighteen she's ready to set out on her own, to leave the only world she's ever known behind her. It's an archetypal transition, one familiar to Luke Skywalker, Huck Finn, Odysseus, Moses, and countless other heroes. Jane looks out her window, sees the hills on the horizon, and her soul cries out:

"My eye passed all other objects to rest on those most remote, the blue peaks. It was those I longed to surmount; all within their boundary of rock and heath seem prison-ground, exile limits. I traced the white road winding round the base of one mountain, and vanishing in a gorge between two. How I longed to follow it farther!"

Jane's longing is part of literary (and human) tradition, though in 1847, when Jane Eyre was published, women were neither expected nor encouraged to voice such typically masculine desire. Gender roles were fairly rigid, though as the Victorian era progressed social structures that had been considered immutable began to dissolve. In one of the most striking passages in the book, Jane herself gives voice to the once unthinkable notion that women might want more out of life than "making puddings" or "knitting stockings:"

"It is in vain to say human beings ought to be satisfied with tranquility: they must have action, and they will make it if they cannot find it. Millions are condemned to a stiller doom than mine, and millions are in silent revolt against their lot...Women are supposed to be very calm generally; but women feel just as men feel; they need exercise for their faculties, and a field for their efforts as much as their brothers do; they suffer from too rigid a restraint, too absolute a stagnation, precisely as men would suffer...."

By allowing Jane to speak her innermost desires, her yearning for something more than domestic tranquility, Charlotte Brontë takes a poor, plain, and proud governess and inserts her smack dab in the middle of a literary tradition that has been more or less exclusively reserved for men. She makes Jane a human being, no more, no less. Because this desire, this tidal wave inside us thundering towards a distant shore, is part of what it means to be human. We all feel it, in one way or another. Emerson notes that "most men lead lives of quiet desperation." But Jane Eyre doesn't. She chooses, instead, the route chosen by Tennyson's Ulysses, who forgoes tranquility, opting rather "to strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield."

And when I look at my son on my motorcycle, I see Jane Eyre, eyes blazing, stepping on the carriage to Thornfield, heading for a new life, a new love, towards heartbreak and misery, towards joy and restoration, towards an indescribable future that's just over the horizon. I see him, like Jane, defiant and strong and yet at the same time, somehow fragile and timid, too little to get on or off the motorcycle by himself. He's such a contradiction, such a crazy nest of boy and man. And that, too, is part of being human. Even Jane, for all her fears of being domesticated, chooses to spend her life caring for the man she loves.

So hear me when I say this: Charlotte Brontë gets motorcycles.

Bikes and Books, Part 4: King Lear

Have you ever been stripped bare?

I have. A little over five years ago my wife took the kids and went back to Missouri to visit her parents. Our marriage was in shambles, broken beyond our ability to repair, and her "vacation" was really just a separation. She called me after a week and told me she might not come home, that she and the kids might stay and make a new life.

Like I said, I have been stripped bare.

This particular story has a happy ending. My wife and I are still together, by the grace of God, and things are really, really good between us. But I remember what it was like the night she called, sitting alone in the dark in our tiny house, knowing there was nowhere I could go and nothing I could do to escape the devastating and searing pain I felt. The state of our dis-union was due primarily to my flaws and failures, and while I desperately wanted the comfort of having been betrayed, I knew in my heart my fate was deserved, that I had brought this misery upon myself, that I was reaping the fruits of my own broken harvest.

I have been stripped bare.

Prepping the frame of my bike for powdercoating has brought all this back to me in a flood of memory and guilt. I began by stripping the paint with a spray-on paint remover. The paint bubbled and writhed under the onslaught, and then sloughed off like bits of dead skin. It turned out that the paint had been hiding a host of imperfections. Scratches and scars that heretofore had been invisible were suddenly exposed. Patches of rust, once hidden, stood out like cancerous flowers on the dull landscape of the frame. I attached a steel wire brush to my drill and began to grind away at the flaws, scraping away the scabs of rust, peeling back the layers of infected paint to reveal the metal beneath, naked and bare.

It made me think of Lear, the once mighty king, now buffeted by the storm, a storm of his own making. Having banished his daughter Cordelia for not stroking his ego, he is in turn evicted and rejected by his other daughters, Goneril and Regan, on whom he had bequeathed his power and land in exchange for words of "love." He finds himself stripped of friends and family, wandering on the darkened moor, accompanied only by his fool and the storm raging in the sky and, perhaps more importantly, in his own mind.

Gloucester entreats Regan to allow her father to stay the night, to take refuge against the howling winds. But Lear's plight is of his own devising, Regan reminds him, and therefore he deserves his suffering:

"O! sir, to wilful men,
the injuries that they themselves procure
must be their schoolmasters."

Her insinuation is that Lear can learn something from all this, that somehow, after enduring the wind and the rain, after wandering the unforgiving heath, after having his heart and his mind broken by the unnatural betrayal of his daughters, he will emerge wiser from the ordeal.

She's right, to a degree. Lear is a tragic hero, in the Aristotelean sense. He brought about his own downfall through his own well-intended, but fundamentally unjust, actions. Aristotle called this hamartia, and we see it time and time again in great men and women who are brought down not by external forces but rather through the natural consequences of their own actions: just think of Bill Clinton and Elliot Spitzer, not to mention the host of literary greats like Oedipus and Hamlet. And like all these characters, real or otherwise, Lear does emerge from his trials with a clearer sense of himself and his place in the world, but not before he's stripped bare, not before he's seen the death of all three of his daughters, not before he cries out that "heaven's vault should crack." This is costly wisdom. Oedipus was so grateful for his newfound insight that he gouged out his own eyes. Kurtz looked into his own heart and pronounced it "horror." And when federal agents finally raided Jim Bakker's palatial house, they found him curled in a fetal position under his desk, a reluctant witness to the truth in his own soul.

This kind of wisdom is no blessing. It is no boon. It is not the "sadder, but wiser" yearned for by Professor Harold Hill. This kind of wisdom is pain and destruction. It is a third degree burn, an amputated limb. It is death, the death of self. Does it result in wisdom? Yes. Is it worth it? I don't know.

And so as I scour the imperfections from my frame, knowing that each tiny scratch and cut left by the steel wire will allow the powdercoating to stick all the better, I feel like a torturor. The fact that I know that the frame will be stronger in the long run doesn't mitigate what I'm doing to it right now. As Christians, we often long for "the refiner's fire." But sometimes...sometimes I don't think we really know what we're asking for.

Like the maxim says: "That which doesn't kill me still hurts a hell of a lot."

Bikes and Books, Part 5: New Criticism

There are few things as depressing as a shower full of motorcycle parts.

Eventually, these parts will be scrubbed and cleaned, scoured free of rust and dirt. They'll be repainted and reassembled, pieces of an overgrown model kit for slightly older boys. All that's missing is the smell of the glue.

But for now, they're just filling up the shower.

I've got to admit, it's hard for me to see how it's all going to come together. Though I theoretically understand that the knee bone is connected to the leg bone, it's hard for me to visualize how all these seemingly random parts are going to come together to make a coherent whole.

This might be because I'm not a New Critic. New Criticism, in case you don't remember, is a mode of literary criticism that reached its zenith in the 1950s. It is, in essence, a positivist approach to literary analysis. The idea is that literary study is an objective endeavor, a hard science, like math or chemistry. Proper literary interpretation comes from a close reading of the text and the text alone. A text that sits on the library shelf for 100 years and is never read still "means" something, because the meaning is embodied in the lines and dots of ink printed on the page. Meaning, then, does not derive from historical context, authorial intention, or even the response of the reader. In fact, in 1954 Wimsatt and Beardsley coined the phrase "the intentional fallacy" specifically to refute the notion that what the author intended a work to mean should have any bearing on what it actually does mean.

For meaning comes from the text and only from the text, sola scriptora style. We can't know what was going on in Shakespeare's head, but we do know what he wrote down on the page. And so New Critics study literary devices such as meter, rhyme, metaphor, syntax, diction, and the like because they're the building blocks of meaning, amino acids to a literary protein. And, because words on a page are static and quantifiable, the entire process of literary analysis is rendered objective. Furthermore, because of the sanctity of the text itself, it is unthinkable to separate meaning from the form in which it is packaged, a particularly egregious sin known as "the heresy of paraphrase." Form and meaning are inextricably intertwined in what New Critics call "organic unity." And so the method of analysis known as "close reading" (which is the method taught in nearly every high school in America) is a New Critical method; to understand what a text "means" it must be taken apart, analyzed piece by piece, and then carefully reassembled in order to construct meaning. If the job is done correctly, the pieces will come together, merging into a revelatory mass of form and meaning. This is what constitutes "good" literature: a perfect marriage of packaging and content.

There's a certain elegance and beauty to the New Critical approach, and as an English teacher I find myself daily indebted to the New Critics for their contributions to the field of literary analysis. Of course, New Criticism as an end in and of itself died a spectacularly fiery death in the 1960 and 70s with the advent of feminist, post-colonial, and other contextually-focused modes of analysis, and this is probably for the best. It has a tendency to promote the interpretations of a select few (read: white, male, educated, European) as the "proper" interpretations, and its internal logic doesn't hold up to serious scrutiny. But the tools given us by the New Critical establishment are good tools, very good tools, indeed. It is a rigorous and demanding approach to literary interpretation, and that rigor is now an integral part of the discipline.

But what does this have to do with the manifold in my shower?

If my motorcycle were a text, a New Critic would say that the literary elements - the pistons, the suspension, the wiring harness - all work together to create the "meaning," which is, I presume, to ride the darn thing. Without all elements working in harmony, the bike doesn't do what it's supposed to do. It is a very poor motorcycle indeed that won't take you from point A to point B, and it's a very poor text that doesn't have all its parts working together to mean something. I get that.

But is the purpose of a motorcycle to get from A to B, or is it something more? Is the meaning of a text merely a function of its constituent parts, or is it something more, something greater? What the New Critics can't account for is mystery and joy, or the wind-in-your-hair, sheer terror acceleration of a good book. They can't account for the hope and freedom of the open road, the searing loss of coming to the end of a multi-volume series, the quiet beauty of an open book, spine up, waiting for you on the kitchen table. And while none of these things are possible without the marriage of form and meaning, neither can any of them be so reduced.

So when I look at the pile of motorcycle droppings in my shower, I don't know exactly how they're all going to come together. What I do know, however, is that when they do, it's going to be more than any Yale educated, stuffy, uptight New England critical theorist could ever imagine: it's going to be magic.

Bikes and Books, Part 6: Sherlock Holmes

I've said this before, and I'll say it again: I have absolutely no idea what I'm doing.

Rebuilding a motorcycle didn't seem that hard when I first set out. Take it apart, clean it, fix a few things, put it back together. How hard can it be, right?

But I'm (still) lousy at labeling things, and so now my garage is overrun with little ziploc bags full of doodads and whatnots. The bags have little masking tape labels, labels like "left" and "don't lose" and "important." There's a bucket of parts that I'm pretty sure belong to my old Volkswagon but might be part of the front forks for my bike. A vat of rancid motor oil is hidden behind the deep freeze, because I keep forgetting to recycle it. The floor is littered with greasy rags. It is, in the words of my four-year-old daughter, "yucky."

I'm all thumbs, the Inspector Clouseau of engine repair. It would be funny if I didn't want to do this thing so badly.

There are people who just "get it." They look at an engine the way I look at a sentence. It comes naturally, the gears and pistons sliding into place like a series of prepositional phrases. A sticky valve is nothing more than a dangling modifier waiting to be nudged gently back into its rightful spot. I "get" grammar, but I'd kill to "get" engines.

This is, I'm sure, very much how Dr. Watson feels, watching with slight homoerotic envy as Holmes slips his way into yet another case, gazes icily around the room, and emerges, bored and triumphant. I bet that Watson would just love to see Holmes fail, to watch his eyes bulge, to see that little vein in the side of his neck beat desperately as its owner searches with increasing desperation for the last elusive piece of the puzzle. I'm sure he'd love to see Holmes' shoulders slump in defeat, to see him take an unchecked blow to the gut, to stumble, to fall. I know that's what I'd want to see if I were him.

But that won't happen. It won't happen because Holmes "gets" being a detective, unlike the rank amateurs who apparently congregate in the halls of Scotland Yard. Holmes, a man who turns to cocaine as a refuge against the dreary life of mere mortals, Holmes, who somehow manages to be rail thin and yet boxes like a whirling dervish, Holmes, whose mere interest can raise the coldest case from the dead, whose knowledge of foreign cults and soil samples appears boundless, whose spidery hands can coax the voice of God from a worn out violin - this guy "gets" it.

Watson, meanwhile, has to claw and scrape his way through life. He has no talent that we're aware of, no personality quirks, no peculiar habits, no offensive beliefs. He displays neither vice nor virtue, exceptional skill nor deplorable decadence. He's off white and bland. If he were oatmeal he wouldn't even be lumpy. He's the Walter Mitty of the late Victorian set.

And, what's worse, he knows it. He knows how he looks next to that statuesque bastard. He knows that at any moment, Holmes' brain might crawl out of its skull, slither across the floor, and hump his leg. He's a microbe, full of pseudopod and flagellum, signifying nothing.

And sitting right across the table from him, slurping his morning coffee, air whistling in and out of his cavernous nostrils, sits the man who solves with backhanded ease the very mysteries that Watson can't even fathom and yet of which he so desperately wants to be a part. They're Mozart and Salieri, an early pair of literary frenemies. Every once in a while Holmes tosses Watson an intellectual bone and Watson grabs at it, worrying it to the quick, accepting the gristle and marrow as a temporary substitute for Holmes' jugular. They're not partners, not friends. Watson can't pretend to know the inscrutable Holmes, and there's really nothing to know about Watson. Even if there were, Holmes wouldn't care, bare-knuckle boxing coke-fiend that he is. Because he "gets" it, and Watson doesn't. What else is there to know?

Which reminds me: my neighbor is pretty good with a wrench.

He'd better watch his back.

Bikes and Books, Part 7: Mars

Today I have a motorcycle. Tomorrow I won't. I'm not sure how I feel about this.

We're moving in about a month, and our new place doesn't have a garage. I would love to say that I'm abandoning this project out of necessity, that I'm altruistically sacrificing my dreams for the good of my family. Even my considerable tendency towards self-delusion has its limits, though.

The truth is that this grand experiment - my metamorphosis from mechanically useless literary junkie to engineering guru - has been an abject failure. Apparently, I'm quite good at taking things apart. The fact that entropy comes naturally to me is hardly noteworthy, however, and I would just as soon ignore my tendencies towards destruction and decay. The creative impulse, the drive to take the sterile and barren stuff of the earth and form it into a living, fire-breathing mess, is the drum that beats in all of our hearts, be we shapers of clay, metal, numbers, or sound. I had hoped that my skill with words would translate into an aptitude for pistons and gaskets, that I would be as adept with crankcases as I am with clauses. Alas, it was not to be.

Tomorrow a man named Joel is going to come to my house. He is going to give me $400 and I am going to give him my motorcycle. Like I said before, I'm of two minds about this transaction.

On one hand, it has practical appeal. I have neither time nor space for a project of this magnitude. My dissertation is gathering dust in a corner of my hard drive. It's time for me to let go and move on.

And yet, on the other hand...

Antony Reed, in Ben Bova's stellar (pun intended) novel "Mars," serves as the flight surgeon for the first manned mission to the red planet. Tony's medical skills and latent sociopathy, combined with the cold vastness of interstellar travel, drive him to the brink of insanity. With god-complex in full swing, he dispenses much needed vitamin tablets and protein gels as if they were the host. Mars, he figures, is in desperate need of a deity, and with a clear view of Mt. Olympus out his window, Tony settles in, pharmacological thunderbolts in hand.

Only things don't go as planned. Though he has granted himself extraordinary omnipotence (including control over the creative act itself by slipping libido suppressants into the crews' food), he is, to his utter amazement, unable to diagnose and treat the growing flu-like symptoms of the expedition team. As his teammates' health deteriorates, Tony fumbles for answers, finding none. Eventually, he is forced to call for help from the orbiting back-up crew, a decidedly un-godlike act of desperation.

When the mystery malady is finally identified as scurvy, Tony's failure is complete. Dr. Antony Reed, self-proclaimed sovereign of the skies, master of the meteor, is defeated by, of all things, a simple lack of vitamin c. Once the condition is diagnosed, and once it becomes clear that Tony himself is the unwitting cause (he's been unknowingly distributing tainted supplements), he scrambles to his teammates' aid. They're eventually saved, of course, and all's well that ends well: the team has discovered microbial life on Mars, and they return to Earth as conquering heroes. Everyone except Tony, that is.

The political powers back on Earth are clamoring for a scapegoat. "Scurvygate" is big news, and the finger-pointing begins even before the team leaves Mars orbit for the long trek home. The rest of the team initially tries to defend Tony, but surprisingly, Tony himself is eager to face the proverbial music. His experience on Mars was not what he expected it to be, and although he feels unjustly accused on one hand, he's secretly relieved. The accusation of incompetence lets him off the hook. Banned from subsequent Mars missions, Tony need not explain his reluctance to return to the stars, to the place where he tried to be a god and failed.

This is kind of how I feel about the move.

When friends and family ask how the motorcycle's coming along, I can shake my head and sigh a weighty sigh. "I wanted to finish," I can say. "I really did." I can explain how the logistics of the the move and the needs of my family forced me to abandon ship, how circumstances prevented me from following through on my grand and glorious mission. And the only person who needs to know how glad I am to wipe my hands of the entire process is me.

So on one hand, I'm going to miss it. But on the other hand, I'm looking forward to tomorrow afternoon when Joel comes and hauls away the greasy reminders of my failure, just as Icarus was glad to see the last of his feathers stripped away by the wind, right before he slammed into the wine dark sea.