As of the time I began writing this post, there are seven unfinished drafts of posts in my queue, some years old, waiting for completion of the thoughts I began on the spot but failed to finish.
But right now, I think it is safe to say that I am probably going to close the chapter on this part of my life.
I began this blog the fall I started college, mostly because I intended to experiment with writing, opinions, and engaged myself in anime—which allowed me to write endless words of complaint and sort out my personal stances on subjects of various degrees of importance. And then I started pursuing politics on and off, which led to a political science minor that had never been part of the college plan.
In comparison to three years ago, I have to honestly say I am still just as bad in Japanese, but a little more fearless and a little less shameless with my use of the language. How can I get better if I don’t continuously make mistakes in using the language?
I have written surprisingly little about games, especially since my consumption of them has decreased significantly as classes and a part-time job have taken over my time. And for someone whose life once used to be consumed by the perfection of grades, I find it somewhat amusing how far behind I fell in my last school term. Yet that term is a bundle of neat memories—doing poorly doesn’t mean I did not enjoy my odd ventures.
I am still as inept in social and personal relations as I was three years ago; I am beginning to wonder if perhaps I am mistaken to think that people will actually mature in relationships.
I renamed this blog to “The Art of War” sometime two years ago. The reason for doing so is because, after studying Sun Tzu’s Art of War, I thought of it as applied to life: The Art of War is a text with hidden agendas hypocritical to its professed cause. I write in this way: to often have a brutally obvious and expounded opinion but with an underlying uncertainty. What this blog’s art of war is, isn’t the Sun Tzu version. It is a series of writings intended to illuminate some philosophy just outside of grasp, and that is the war that continues to wage in every heart: identity.
Three years of college have certainly changed my identity, but I have yet to be old enough to drink (yes, even now) and thus a longer way to go to find my logical and empathic opinions on everything.
Currently, I have a better idea of where I would like to go in life. I do not doubt I will continue writing. For now, I take a rest.
I am not writing as much lately as I would like to be. Considering that I recently (meaning three months recent) finished a number of good books and watched some good movies, even I would think I have something to write about.
Unfortunately, I do not seem to know what to write.
This is exceptionally bad, because I do need to get better.
Maybe it is the fault of having a backlog of games that I am determined to get through, or maybe it is the general feeling of listlessness that has plagued me for the better part of the month so far.
I also hate writing for the sake of writing, which is why I require a topic in order to spit out thousands of words.
Usually, I go through old posts to get a sense of how my writing was compared to now; despite the not-all-great material, I dislike deleting posts. For one, I generally do not post unintentionally; the viewpoints are calculated, and the post is my attempt to write from a self-imposed viewpoint. Naturally, I have to share some sentiment with the viewpoint in order to come across with conviction, but at the same time I feel vaguely artificial when I write with that limitation. The result is evident in faulty and stupid arguments.
That might also have to do with poor knowledge.
I think too often that I will never have all the knowledge I want.
Lately I’ve been writing thousand words spiels that I keep forgetting to snip, resulting in an unusually long front page.
Don’t seem to have posted much about games despite my desire to, and thus we begin a ramble on a game I finished yesterday: Silent Hill 2.
It’s my first Silent Hill game; I’m unfamiliar with the series, the series’ history, the developers—basically everything. And I had a slight inkling of what the story would be, due to an implied spoiler I read on a forum related to a different game. Not that the SH2 doesn’t end up implying it in every corner while you traverse the town of Silent Hill.
In order to appear the unlimited master of being, man must so delimit being that limitations are no longer evident. And why must this magic act be performed? The answer is: “If there were gods, how could I endure not being a god! Therefore, there are no gods!”
There’s a footnote for the quote that I can’t make heads or tails of, but the overall quote itself comes from Voegelin’s Science, Politics, and Gnosticism.
Voegelin, according to Wikipedia, is arguing against excessive promotion of self over god that results in disturbing influences on politics. Unless I read Wikipedia’s summary of his argument, I would have never understood what this man is trying to say through his obtuse writing. I imagine a large part of the problem is that I am not his intended audience for the essay, resulting in lacking comprehension of the jargon he throws around with immense frequency.
Unfortunately, I have a final essay due on this dude and this book, so I will attempt to hash out what I can understand from his writing here.
Of the profusion of gnostic experiences and symbolic expressions, one feature may be singled out as the central element in this varied and extensive creation of meaning: the experience of the world as an alien place into which man has strayed and from which he must find his way back home to the other world of his origin. “Who has cast me into the suffering of this world?” asks the “Great Life” of the gnostic texts, which is also the “first, alien Life from the worlds light.” It is an alien in this world and this world is alien to it.
While the title mentions gnosticism, it’s not until nine pages into the introduction in which Voegelin gives the above paragraph to describe ‘an aspect’ of gnosticism.
Wikipedia describes some of the main features of gnosticism to be:
- There’s a single dude that is the source of all things.
- As things ‘emanate’ from the dude, and things emanate from the first things, everything gets progressively further from the origin. In other words, it’s a game of telephone; the first guy whispers “It’s sunny down here” to another guy, but 30 guys later, it might be “Funny that thing we know there”. Except it’s not a change in words but a change in being.
- This is related to number 1, and that is that there is a supreme creator. Except he’s not supreme because he just comes from the first dude that is the source of all things. This guy (number 3) is what the gnostics would call a demiurge, which is essentially the ‘clockwork god’—the kind that makes shit and then shoves it in a corner and doesn’t care much for it afterwards. This guy creates underlings and the underlings keep super underlings from rising above.
- This features says that because of Number 3, this is a fake and crappy world, because those underlings create random obstacles that are just designed to keep the downtrodden down.
- The passage on Wiki for this feature lost me.
In other words, Voegelin understands a gnostic to be someone who believes this world is alien to human beings, and that through acquiring knowledge, human beings can create their own world and become their own gods.
Gnosis = knowledge. Hence, gnosticism (the ideology) and gnostics (the idealists).
Gnosticism is then an ideology in which humans think they can make a world of their own that belongs to them—if they gain the knowledge to do it.
If man is to be delivered from the world, the possibility of deliverance must first be established in the order of being. In the ontology of ancient gnosticism this is accomplished through faith in the “alien”, “hidden” God who comes to man’s aid, sends him his messengers, and shows him the way out of the prison of the evil God of this world (be he Zeus or Yahweh or one of the other ancient father gods). In modern gnosticism it is accomplished through the assumption of an absolute spirit which in the dialectical unfolding of consciousness proceeds from alienation to consciousness of itself; or through the assumption of a dialectical-material process of nature which in its course leads from the alienation resulting from private property and belief in God to the freedom of a fully human existence; or through the assumption of a will of nature which transforms man into superman.
The past two quotes come from the introduction. What Voegelin does with the above paragraph is fire his shots. The “dialectical-material process of nature” is Marx, the “transforms man into superman” is Nietzsche. Voegelin disapproves of their crazy, and that is what this book is about.
Voegelin proceeds to say that in modern gnosticism, since the prospect of a ‘real God’ is not incorporated into the salvation part of the ideology, modern gnosticism requires its believers to act to bring about salvation for themselves. Gnosis/knowledge is the instrument of salvation.
Agnoia/ignorance is what the gnostics believe brings about sin and affliction, so the obvious cure is the opposite of ignorance.
Self-salvation through knowledge has its own magic, and this magic is not harmless. The structure of the order of being will not change because one finds it defective and runs away from it. The attempt at world destruction will not destroy the world, but will only increase the disorder in society. The gnostic’s flight from a truly dreadful, confusing, and oppressive state of the world is understandable. But the order of the ancient world was renewed by that movement which strove through loving action to revive the practice of the “serious play” (to use Plato’s expression)—that is, by Christianity.
I would have agreed neatly with Voegelin if he did not shove that bit about Christianity in at the end. Neither religion nor gnosticism make for much order; both are men-made and run by men, and consequently too corrupt to adhere to their own ideas anyway. However, I think he’s not necessarily making religion = good and gnosticism = bad; at least, I hope not. It would be presumptuous to think so, considering history. Both religion and gnosticism have its good effects in the provision of morality and a way of life; those who take the ideologies of either too far are the ones who are ‘evil’, so to speak.
Though it seems like Voegelin sympathizes with the gnostic for his pained view of the world, Voegelin thinks the gnostic is running away from reality if he is trying to create a new, better world on Earth. And this is the part Voegelin considers ‘wrong’. Creating a new, better world means denying the current humanity and giving justification to the totalitarian regimes. Nazism, communism, fascism, and other ‘gnostic movements’ all have the ultimate goal of some paradise on Earth, and it is for these paradises that their followers can kill millions and commit terrible crimes to humanity.
When we speak of scientific analysis, we wish to emphasize the contrast with formal analysis. An analysis by means of formal logic can lead to no more than a demonstration that an opinion suffers from an inherent contradiction, or that different opinions contradict one another, or that conclusions have been invalidly drawn. A scientific analysis, on the other hand, makes it possible to judge of the truth of a premises implied by an opinion. It can do this, however, only on the assumption that truth about the order of being—to which, of course, opinions also refer—is objectively ascertainable.
This is the point where my face turned into this >/. He’s discredited both formal and scientific analysis, with an exception for the latter. What Voegelin proposes has its element of truth: obviously scientific proof, hard evidence, outweighs that of some bumbling logic.
Problem is, though, for the next 60 pages, he fails to demonstrate exactly what is so scientific about his own reasoning. His ‘science of politics’ is just word analysis. There’s nothing wrong with that other than his pretense that it is science. What compounds the idiocy of his statements is his elevation of science as “therapy for society”. Only if your science is honestly valid can you call it a therapy, and even then it’s a stretch.
The opposition becomes truly radical and dangerous only when philosophical questioning is itself called into question, when doxa (opinion) takes on the appearance of philosophy, when it arrogates to itself the name of science and prohibits science as non-science.
This is one of the first arguments that Voegelin presents against Marxism/Communism. He states that “we are confronted…with persons who know that, and why, their opinions cannot stand up under critical analysis and who therefore make the prohibition of the examination of their premises part of their dogma”.
What he implies is that the gnostic has to deny reality in order to pretend his self-created system is possible. For instance, Marxism posits that men are at their cores productive animals, and this is the single premise on which all Marxist philosophies rest. Marx says history began through conflicts between ‘classes’ created after primitive communism. Voegelin notes that if one questions the exact origin of man, Marx will scoff and pretend the question does not exist.
Not having read enough of either to know if Voegelin is being presumptuous or if Marx is really a tad off, I’d say that damning a whole philosophy because it cannot answer one question is not exactly a good thing either. I read the Communist Manifesto and I found it hilarious that a man could be so candid about his opinions and assume them to be facts. While I don’t subscribe to Marx’s “humans as productive animals” and his general philosophy about economic classes dominating the progress of society and politics, I can feel, in a sense, his pain for what the downtrodden must have lived like during his time. Even today we have people who are exploited by those who care for nothing but profit, and it’s easy to see why people would be drawn to Marx’s ideas, because we like to consider ourselves equal and should be equal in what we get out of life, if everyone is born a blank slate.
Regardless of what Americans prize as equality and freedom, it’s easy to see that in reality, no one is equal.
Marx is a speculative gnostic. He construes the order of being as a process of nature complete in itself. Nature is in a state of becoming, and in the course of its development it has brought forth man: “Man is directly a being of nature“. Now, in the development of nature a special role has devolved upon man. This being, which is itself nature, also stands over against nature and assists it in its development by human labor—which in its highest form is technology and industry based on the natural sciences…”
Creating nature will also create man to his fullest being. So says Voegelin in his interpretation of Marx. And this is where Voegelin begins turning into fuzz. “The being-of-itself of nature and main is inconceivable to him, because it contradicts all the tangible aspects of practical life”.
….>/
What Voegelin argues is that in Marx’s construct of man continuously developing his existence, man will question where he came from in the first place, like where the first man popped out of. And Voegelin says this construct will collapse because of the question of arche/origin. He believes Marx would call the question of origin “a product of abstraction”, meaning that the question is designed to distract from the real shit. Hence Voegelin concludes that Marx is an intellectual swindler, because Marx cannot argue his theory but chooses to pretend all opposition questions do not exist.
Why is Marx an intellectual swindler? We move on to about 20 pages of how the gnostics hate god, as explained by Nietzsche.
Nietzsche speaks of the human desire to control, the desire to “feel itself master”. And because of this desire, humans resolve to be ignorant because they cannot tolerate the idea of not being in control. Unable to control high-level stuff, humans seek to control each other instead, using a “cunning and variety of masks” and deception. Man “wills to disbelief” so that he can become superman—and the obvious interpretation is that he wants to become God.
Hooray! Cue a couple of pages of quotations from a jumble of sources to prove Nietzsche is indeed saying man wants to become God.
With the three stages in the spirit’s action it is now possible also to differentiate more precisely the corresponding levels of deception:
- For the surface act it will be convenient to retain the term Nietzsche used, “deception”. But in content this action does not necessarily differ from another motive than the gnostic. It could also be an “error”. It becomes a deception only because of psychological context.
- In the second stage the thinker becomes aware of the untruth of his assertion or speculation, but persists in it in spite of his knowledge. Only because of his awareness of the untruth does the action become a deception. And because of the persistence in the communication of what are recognized to be false arguments, it also becomes an “intellectual swindle”.
- In the third stage the revolt against God is revealed and recognized to be the motive of the swindle. With the continuation of the intellectual swindle in full knowledge of the motive of revolt the deception further becomes “demonic mendacity”.
Voegelin says, “Yeah, Marx fills 1 and 2″ and then proceeds to explain how Marx fills 3. For the gnostic thinker, “reality must be destroyed…In its place steps the gnostic who produces the independence of his existence by speculation”.
Then there’s a quote from Prometheus Bound in which Prometheus says “In a word, I hate all the gods”. Voegelin says Marx used this quote out of context; he says in Prometheus Bound, the author intended to portray Prometheus as a madman when the dude says this.
For the gnostics, philosophy is the source of order and authority—if they gain the philosophy (GNOSIS/KNOWLEDGE) that is the right one, allowing them to create their own world. Gnostics also think that gnosis is inevitable, that ‘being’ will come inevitably.
As a result of this refining process, the nature of gnostic speculation can now be understood as the symbolic expression of an anticipation of salvation in which the power of being replaces the power of God and the parousia (presence) of being, the Parousia of Christ.
I suspect that Voegelin’s ending with religious references in the positive opposite and all his criticism of these thinkers for daring to think their way to Goddom means he is a religious dude. If he prescribes Christianity as the cure, I’m going to pop his head off. “Political science can assist in exorcising the demons—in the modest measure of effectiveness that our society grants to episteme (science) and its therapy”……He actually uses ‘exorcising the demons’.
Likewise, Voegelin defines parousianism as the expectation of deliverance from evil through the advent of immanent being. Given that right now I’m having difficulty grasping what ‘immanent’ is, I’ll have to take his word for it.
The aim of parousiastic gnosticism is to destroy the order of being, which is experienced as defective and unjust, and through man’s creative power to replace it with a perfect and just order.
To do that, guys, we gotta murder God.
Man cannot transform himself in a superman; the attempt to create a superman is an attempt to murder man. Historically, the murder of God is not followed by the superman, but by the murder of man: the deicide of the gnostic theoreticians is followed by the homicide of the revolutionary practitioners.
“The critique of religion is the presupposition of all critique.” God was never anything but a human product.
In the three cases of More, Hobbes, and Hegel, we can establish that the thinker suppresses an essential element of reality in order to be able to construct an image of man, or society, or history to suit his desires…the will to power of the gnostic who wants to rule the world has triumphed over the humility of subordination to the constitution of being…The constitution of being remains what it is—beyond the reach of the thinker’s lust for power…The result, therefore, is not dominion over being, but a fantasy satisfaction.
Voegelin argues that gnostic thinking is a safety haven because it provides certainty in the meaning of existence and knowledge of the future, and also creates a basis for action.
The thin thread of faith in God is not something everyone can uphold; because of that, people stray. Essentially, Voegelin labels modern gnostic movements as derivations of Christianity. People are unable to take waiting and praying for something that may not exist. They choose to have a here and now; “killing God” is really Voegelin’s metaphor for “killing reality” (so I think).
This post has been written in bits and pieces before, during, and after I completed my awkward essay. Thus, the comprehension of my thoughts is literally all over the place. Yet I think preserving my on-the-fly scribbles is better than rewriting, at least for this. It’s awkward to write about thinkings that you don’t agree with without criticism, and for the most part writing without much desire to write about it results in some super bland, clinical ‘definition’ writing—this means this, this means that.
There are some parts where I agree with Voegelin and some parts where I shake my head. Overall, though, I don’t sit into either gnosticism or religion. I’m 20 years old, and I’ve never been in a church my whole life. I’ve never read a single passage from the Bible. I don’t believe in God. But I don’t believe in wiping the current humanity to create a new one, because of one simple thing: I believe the current humanity is the best humanity.
It’s odd, isn’t it? Especially since our societies are always in some sort of disgusting trouble or another. We have wars, murder, rape, all sorts of terrible actions that men are capable of. But it’s these things that make me think, strangely enough, that this is the best. Not the ‘best we can be’, but best in the sense that these things have doubtlessly existed since the history of man (not including pre-historic, I guess) started. Yet look at the progress men have made in spite of crazy sin and crazy brethren. In the modern world, many of us still live like shit but a shit ton of us live better than a shit ton of us lived in 1900. It’s almost hopelessly optimistic about humanity to have faith in our continued ability to keep going higher, but that’s one of the precious few things I’m optimistic about.
That’s frighteningly hilarious, since I’m jaded about everything.
Moreover, even though people continue to dream of a heaven of peace and tranquility and everyone happy-happy, I wonder if they ever account for what human nature is really like. Thing about humans, we like being happy and all that, and even if happiness is eternal in heaven—
That means it’s boring.
While I watched Char’s Counterattack last year in June, I did not really consider it to be watching an anime—it was an animated movie, and I think even now there is a difference between the episode format and the movie format. Episodic anime is often plagued with filler and extraneous scenes as well as drawn-out character issues, which cause audience fatigue of character drama. A movie, with the constraints of time, comes out concise and less impractical in storytelling, and generally ends up cleaner than an anime.
From then, the only ‘anime’ I could say I watched is a few sparse episodes of this ridiculous anime, although I didn’t watch more than three episodes and it was not something I actively sought out. The mahjong club played it on the room’s projector during our rounds. I admit I enjoyed its absurd humor; who wouldn’t enjoy the idea of international government leaders (and ex-leaders) duking out foreign relations with mahjong?
I imagine the above two probably still qualify as ‘watching anime’, so I cannot say for absolute that I did not watch anime for a year. The last full-length anime I watched and actively followed is Gundam 00, which I have actually not watched again since its conclusion in April 2009.
In a time like this, when I am approaching the conclusion of my junior year in college and logically should have very little time on my hands, being a part-time worker and also swamped with final projects and finals, it should be strange that I managed to finish a 26-episode anime in two weeks. Thinking about it though, it’s not particularly insane; back in freshman year, with a lot of time on my hands, I generally finished in four or so days, compared to the on and off watching I have now.
Part of it might have to do with how I came to regard Cowboy Bebop after six episodes. CB is almost purely an episodic anime; that is, its writing and stories are made for encapsulated, small substories winding around the same characters that suffer recurring problems. What CB does that is different from, say, a television sitcom or series or a soap opera, is that it does not adhere to a particular genre defining the overall anime. Some episodes share similar narrative structure, while others go into different territory: we have the usual mistaken identity leads to unintentional events culminating in explosions, but we also have the ‘detective’ episode, complete with background narration of the ‘detective’ and his solving of the case.
What is also unusual about ‘genre’ is the words within the show’s opening and showing up sometimes in the mid-time break cut: “The Work Which Becomes a New Genre Itself”. And in a way, it’s almost like CB does defy categorization into a genre, not only from the episode presentations but also from the content of its stories. Ultimately, it has an overarching theme that does give its story a particular taste, but the world in which the narrative takes place seems at once both science fiction realistic but also fantastical. You have your guns and the standard space battles using physics, but you also have a gravity-defying assassin making leaps and jumps and able to deflect bullets from his body, you have your hyperspace warphole controlled by feng shui, and you have your fridge breeding food into toxic goop that emit sparkles and have poisonous bites despite lacking teeth.
But there’s something compelling enough about the world, perhaps softened by the characters, that as an audience I did not care much if the logistics made sense and came together. Certainly, arguments of that sort are frequent for Gundam and I think those discussions are hilarious, but while CB takes care in crafting its settings and the objects of its settings, the focus is on the characters and their stories. The detail in setting fleshes out the stories better; there is an episode where we have sequence of scenes showing two of the main characters, Jet and Spike, just going down 27 floors of an old, ruined building. It serves not only the demonstration of their effort to get something at the 27th basement floor, but also showed the decrepit ruin of the location where they were at: an old Japanese department store, on Earth.
There’s also something to be said about an anime that never feels like it wastes a single second of its time. Nowadays there’s always fanservice and filler to groan about, as well as scenes that are written in for small-time appeal rather than for any contribution to characterization or to plot development. CB features only one character that provides fanservice, Faye Valentine, and she is an essential character, with a significant character arc. Bizarrely, I don’t even mind the moments where she is providing fanservice—there is something oddly tasteful about how the presentation does it. She is a woman who dresses sexy and is highly aware of her own appeal, so what is shown is less of fanservice and almost realistic in what she would be like normally, which is shamelessly sensual without being an overt slut.
Part of how the anime manages its time is some clever conservation of budget while adding style, although this may just be preoccupation on my part. In the episode “Mushroom Samba” in which the resident hacker Ed is running off to hunt a bounty, there is a scene where Ed is before a watermelon seller drooling over the watermelon, when a sequence showing the seller’s face, the location, and a woman’s shoe stepping out of an opening car door ‘shows’ a woman arriving on the scene. These same frames are used for when she leaves, but slowed just a smidgen down. In a way, this made the woman even more stylish and cool than she already was (her car was a shiny black convertible, and she dealt suavely with the watermelon seller), because her departure was as coordinated as her arrival.
I’ve spent a thousand words waxing on everything except the content of the main story itself. I suppose my point here is, in Cowboy Bebop, the presentation is fantastic. It’s not fantastic in the sense that the animation is highest quality and the art style is unique and attractive to everyone. It’s not fantastic in the sense of scope and sheer detail. It’s difficult to pinpoint how the discreet elements pull together into something that feels very, very cool, while maintaining substance beneath that veneer of cool, which something that stylish anime often lack, resulting in pretty pictures and nothing else. There’s an element of daring with what the director and animators did in CB, because it’s not what anime generally does when it comes to sequences of images.
Of course, they couldn’t have pulled off what they did if not for the locked down underlying plot from the beginning. Something I find exasperating and terrible is how directors adjust their anime according to how it is received by the audience: a character will suddenly live until the end of the story despite no story relevance, or another nonessential character will suddenly receive more screentime merely because he or she is popular. It’s appalling to cater and destroy a set storyline with specific meaningful events just because of the fans. Even though they are paying, the work cannot be called anything but fanfiction by then, if you’re only writing what the fans want. A story is the vision of the person who has something significant to say, not the illusion of a pile of people who want more tits.
A theme of ‘home’. Or perhaps a theme of “can’t run from the past”? Perhaps another time, in a post less bloated?
Naaaaaaah. Let’s see if I can finish this one in less than two days. (After end note: Looks like YES I CAN)
“Home” and “Running from the past”, with the addition of “Living”, combine to meet with the central theme of Cowboy Bebop: freedom. The freedom CB is delving into, however, is not the conventional “freedom from tyranny” or “freedom from higher powers”, but rather personal freedom. Not necessarily freedom from the self, just freedom from the emotional burdens of a past, of an identity, and of personal fears.
Our cast consists of Spike, Jet, Faye, and Edward. Here, there be spoilers.
Edward is the kid of the group; neither age nor sex are explicitly specified, although the crew of Bebop take her to be a girl. She has the ambiguous look of neither male nor female because her design is that of an [EXTREMELY] eccentric child. Her addition to the crew is her hacking abilities, charmingly characterized by smileys everywhere in her hacking interface. The normal person has dots indicating the characters entered in a password field. Ed has animated smileys with colored ovals for cheeks.
Of the four main characters, Ed lives the most freely; she provides a stark contrast from the three burdened adults. As a child, she has yet to have much life experience, and thus doesn’t have a complex past. Even so, the manner in which she joins the crew of Bebop is telling: she picks their name at random from a list of ships, and extracts a promise from Faye to be able to join Bebop if she helps them secure a bounty. As oddball as she is, Ed is a drifter, moving from place to place with seemingly no real direction. She insinuates herself into whatever environment she finds herself in, but ultimately does not find purpose until nearly the end, when she encounters her father again.
Her father demonstrates appreciation for his child, but even he cannot distinguish if she is a boy or girl. It becomes painfully obvious that she will never be first in his priorities when, after reuniting, he scurries off to pursue his goal without thinking and leaves her behind.
Ed is not entirely fazed by this. She does, however, make the decision to leave Bebop because she wanted to pursue what she believes is important. To her, her blood father is family and ‘home’. Even if she is leaving a home without the secure knowledge of a new home, Ed does not bear scars of abandonment and therefore is still able to forgive her father. Of the crew, there’s no doubt Ed is the freest, being young and carefree. Her ties to the real world are loose, but she is strangely alive through her own bizarre happiness.
Jet is an ex-cop turned bounty hunter, with a metal arm. He is the cook and captain. Despite his hardy nature, Jet at the beginning has his own hidden past. Of the bunch, he resolves his issues quickest. His reunion with his ex-girlfriend reveals why she left him—she was searching for a way for herself to live freely, without his security governing her life. That meeting culminates in Jet discarding his past with her by throwing out the watch she left him. His reunion with his ex-partner reveals how he lost his arm and gained a metal one—his partner betrayed him and cost him his arm. That meeting culminates in the death of his partner, who tricks Jet into shooting him.
Jet’s past is not heavy or mysterious, merely straightforward. Once he met his ex, Jet has already stopped running from his issues. The death of his partner grants him freedom, not because his partner is the remaining part of his past (his job) that he needs to let go, but because his partner tells Jet the truth about his arm, and the deceit in their relationship.
Ultimately, he is the only one of the crew who manages to absolve his baggage of his own volition, and as a result settles firmly into the new ‘family’ of Bebop as his home. His partner had offered to let Jet work in the police once again, but the partner’s death, brought about by Jet’s shot, is Jet’s killing of his last thread to the past. Jet’s stories are not particularly compelling, but they flesh out a solid character of decency and level-headedness. I suppose what I walked away with is the understanding that not even the oldest, most sensible people are exempt from troubles with life. Sometimes their confidence in their sensibility blinds them to issues, as well as their trust in their ability to discern character.
And sometimes, their trust in others hurts them when they are unable to use their sensibility to control events.
Faye Valentine is a woman with a past of debt and nothing else. Her problem stems from her years in cryogenic freeze, which she woke from with no memory of who she was. The doctor tells her she owes 300 million wulong for her freeze, restoration, and rehabilitation; on top of that, the man who acted as her lawyer after her awakening fakes his death and passes his debts onto her as well. The result is a chronic gambling problem, and her inability to place faith in people. Her other chief problem is her amnesia, which leaves her untethered and free, but also lost and missing identity.
Despite lacking a ‘self’, Faye has a good deal of sass and personality. Yet she cannot look at the future because she is unable to let go of the questions she has about her past. She joins Bebop uninvited after working with Spike and Jet twice, but continually throughout the series she has times where she runs from the ship, pretending she is leaving permanently.
What is different about Faye from the other crew members is that she literally starts out as a blank slate, yet because of her blank slate status she cannot move forward. She has witticisms underneath her superficial mask, and a character and personality of her own. The ability to fill in the gnawing emptiness of no identity is something Faye actually runs away from because she cannot see the possibilities of an identity and home on the Bebop, even though she yearns to return when she is away and hopes they will not abandon her.
But even at the conclusion of the series, she looks at Bebop as a second choice—Faye regains her memory of her past, but when she goes back to find it, nothing is left. She draws a box in the dirt where her bed was and lies in it. What she finally has to acknowledge is that she had been chasing empty dreams. Painfully she finally gains the freedom to decide what future she wishes to have, and she realizes the home she wanted all along is the Bebop. When Faye returns, however, she finds her ‘family’ falling apart.
Spike is a disinterested cowboy, full of attitude yes of a largely easygoing, distracted nature. His dialogue makes it difficult to discern his seriousness from his playfulness, so he maintains mystery until the first ‘story-related’ episode—when the name Vicious is first introduced, and Spike’s past with a criminal syndicate is teased.
Spike becomes interested in bounties only if he deems them dangerous and challenging. He engages in some bounties that are not particularly his type if only for money to buy food. Even though at times Spike seems to want to survive, his forays into death question his motive for his actions: is it for the challenge, or does he just want to die?
His past is that of a criminal under a syndicate, which he tried to leave by faking his death. He attempts to desert with the woman he loves, Julia, but in the end she never meets him at the appointed spot and he is unable to find her and ask why. Instead, Spike drifts into the life of a bounty hunter, away from his past, existing in a limbo where all he has are questions and the only thing that gives him any semblance of feeling alive is conflict. At the end, when he finally has to face his past, it has become uncontrollable, his partner aiming to kill both him and Julia, and injuring his Bebop comrades as well.
When Julia dies, she mouths certain words to Spike that we do not hear clearly until the last minutes. But her words reveal the problem Spike has with living: he clung onto the dream of being able to live freely with Julia in all his years as a bounty hunter. That is why he is unable to feel alive, because he feels like the bounty hunter reality he lived in was the dream, while his happiness with Julia could still be reality. Spike crafts this dream and cannot see a future without Julia in it, when it had already become his past.
Both Faye and Spike create their own burdens, their illusions of what freedom means to them. However, their illusions are unreal, but neither are willing to face reality. Faye dreams of her out-of-reach past being a possible home and place where she can belong, despite knowing that Earth had been damaged by a technological incident decades ago. Spike dreams of his happy life with Julia that could not exist because they were all persons of a syndicate that only allows living through syndicate laws.
Do not to let dreams cloud what is good and real for you.
What is freedom, then? Cowboy Bebop presents the ‘cool’ life of a bounty hunter, but everywhere in this lively world, people are in pain. Even the hunters themselves suffer from financial difficulties. But in the times where they were together, life is interesting and content, almost happy, providing a haven of brief happiness and camaraderie. When the end comes bearing down on us, an almost nostalgic filter comes over the episodes in which it was just fun and laughs.
Spike smiles at the end, when he finally resolves the last threads of his past. Despite how his end is to be taken, I believe the answer the show gives to its themes is not that the dreams are bad because they are too unrealistic, or that we should be content as people to have what we have, but rather that as people we cannot truly live freely and happily in our present without resolving our past. Dreams are fine, but they can only provide a temporary buffer. What we have in our hands should be cherished. We can pursue dreams because it is noble to live to pursue a goal, regardless of how unrealistic it is, but we should not define our existence by dreams. This pursuit, to a certain degree, can bring us happiness.
I think I’m getting convoluted.
CB pulls its elements together with a certain grace and style that will most certainly never be emulated to exception again. Twelve years later, we have moe. We have anime that satisfies our base desires to see T&A and big-eyed, flat-chested cute girls with stereotypical personalities enact some silly events of everyday life in animation. We demand that directors and writers write the show we want to amuse us, but fail to ask for something that speaks to the heart and not to the eyes. For something that is not entertaining but inspiring.
Then again, does Cowboy Bebop fit the bill?
I’m reading Eric Voegelin’s Science, Politics, and Gnosticism for my political science class.
Prior to this, required reading included Machiavelli’s The Prince (which I happily indulged in—again) and Marx’s Communist Manifesto.
The translation I chose by accident (meaning I chose one off the shelf) for The Prince, I believe, takes some liberties but also remains faithful, in the sense that the translator made Machiavelli sound contemporary and logical to the audience of this time. While I read that translation I imagined often Machiavelli sitting across the table saying what he wrote with a deadpan expression, being entirely serious but also entirely not. Hence now I am forever stuck with the image of Machiavelli as a troll—an extremely high level one.
Marx, on the other hand, wrote his piece in German (I think) and at its time it was translated already into multiple languages, since all his buddies wanted not just Germany (Prussia) in revolt, but for Europe itself to overthrow the capitalists. I don’t think I read the original English translation, but what is there is remarkably entertaining, in the sense that he is splendidly candid about how he thinks everyone else is a complete buffoon. Marx is not a troll; he is just too serious for the rest of us.
I think the church and religion is also too serious for the rest of us.
Prior to all of this I was given Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics to read, and while I liked it, I’ll be damned if I didn’t want to pick up a red pen and makes marks all over the paper in frustration. I have no sense of Greek, so perhaps I am wrong in wanting to clean up the bloody translation, but the excess verbiage is stiflingly obtuse. Running a multi-level spiral until you get to the point is not a good path to understanding.
Augustine is less obtuse but as a consequence inexcusably dull and boring, as every paragraph merits ‘God’, ‘sin’ or in whatever way he can call every system on this Earth flawed and shitty. His explanation for everything is God. Often I wondered during my reading that if he was so enamored with God and life in the next world why he didn’t just kill himself and get his life in this world over with. If the next world does exist, I hope he was disappointed by it.
At this point I stop and wonder if crafting a philosophy is like crafting a battle system: often needlessly complex or overly simple.
Voegelin, on the other hand, is 1968 material, having also lived and taught in America, close enough to present time to be contemporary and writing in English. My summation: he is a god-guy different from Augustine but worse because he makes the pretense of science. Voegelin’s science of politics and philosophy is really just a focus on semantics and taking the written words of philosophers to the literal extreme. The first part of his Science, Politics, and Gnosticism is a giant fart of quotations from everyone he wanted to accuse of something, but I still have no idea what his argument is because his own words are hidden under a mess of “these words here clearly mean these words and those words are particularly specific for these words”. For all his accusations of Marx’s wordplay, Voegelin himself suffers from wordplay as well, to the point where he becomes one of the things he accuses Marx of: an intellectual swindler.
And it is indeed possible for him to be clear in his writing, evidenced by his methodical (albeit still bleh at times) writing in the second part of his book, titled “Ersatz Religion”. But that stuff is also clouded by lists and rundowns and nowhere near closes in on his argument for a while. He spins so much yarn that by the time he gets to what he honestly wants to say, most likely you have to be listening hard to understand what he is saying. And I’d say his little essay is a bomb because he doesn’t say anything significant at the end at all.
