Dak Prescott’s Everyday Bravery and Talking About Mental Health Issues
I really admire Dak Prescott. Sure, I grew up outside of Dallas and I’ve been a Cowboys fan for a long time. So, of course I’m going to root for the guy on the field. When Dak and Ezekiel Elliott joined the team in 2016, they supercharged the offense. I’m particularly excited for this season with the stocked receiver corp and new coach. But aside from all that, Dak is an admirable human being. The guy has been through a lot, and handles his adversity with strength and dignity. Just a few days ago he used his platform to attack the stigma that plagues mental health issues. And mental health issues are something that almost all of us deal with everyday, whether our own or those of our loved ones.
In anticipation of the football season, Dak spoke openly about his offseason struggles with depression surrounding the suicide of his brother Jace earlier this year. Jace had been the primary caretaker of their mom Peggy throughout her lengthy battle with colon cancer that eventually took her life in 2013. The Prescott boys—Dak, older brother Jace, and eldest brother Tad—were all extremely close, and were galvanized even further by their mother’s passing. But neither Dak nor Tad were aware of Jace’s struggle. I have two brothers too, and we are very close. The thought of losing my brother is unbearable. We all have siblings, family, friends. It’s likely that some of our loved ones are fighting battles we can’t see. And we can’t see those battles unless we show them to each other.
When Dak used his platform to describe his own struggle with depression, he helped to normalize the types of difficult conversations about mental health that we all need to be having. Because, none of us—not even the highest-profile athletes in the world—are immune to mental health issues. Many of us deal with depression, anxiety, and other mental health issues. And if we don’t, we almost certainly have loved ones who do. All of our lives are touched by struggles with mental health. I hope that Dak’s high-profile bravery encourages those of us who are struggling with our own mental health to reach out to our loved ones, and to seek help from professionals. And I hope that those of us who are needed by our loved ones have the grace and tact and empathy to listen.
The Prescott brothers: Jace, Dak, and Tad
The quarterback of the Dallas Cowboys has been a cultural icon for such a long time—Troy Aikman, Roger Staubach, Dandy Don Meredith. Last week Dak leveraged that cultural capital to model the type of everyday courage we all need to develop to speak openly with our loved ones about ours and their burdens. Because, Dak said it best:
“Our adversity, our struggles—what we go through—is always gonna be too much for ourselves, and maybe too much for even one or two people. but never too much for a community or never too much for the people in the family that you love. So we have to share those things”
The National Suicide Prevention Hotline:
1-800-273-8255
Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony and the Invisible Realms of Reality
“The title of the novel, Ceremony, refers to the healing ceremonies based on the ancient stories of the Diné and Pueblo people…I was conscious of constructing the novel out of many different kinds of narratives or stories to celebrate storytelling with the spoken as well as the written word.”
-Leslie Marmon Silko
There are those among us who are attuned to the invisible frequencies on the radio dial of reality. Many of these people become artists and create cutting-edge works that convey these extraordinary dimensions to the less delicately attuned of us. My favorite artists are almost always among these: the ones who tune us in to the invisible dimensions of reality. I am drawn towards their works as if by a magnet, and my love for these works paired with my desire to dive deep into them, and to share them with others has led me to my vocation.
“Ceremony is the greatest novel in Native American literature. It is one of the greatest novels of any time and place. I have read this book so many times that I probably have it memorized. I teach it and I learn from it and I am continually in awe of its power, beauty, rage, vision, and violence.”
-Sherman Alexie
Leslie Marmon Silko is one such individual who perceives more colors on the spectrum of reality. I’ve been thinking a lot about Silko and her awesome book Ceremony (1977) lately because this semester I have the privilege to teach Ceremony for the first time in my “Perspective in Artistic Eras” class. We will read Ceremony as a Postmodern novel while we also consider PoMo poetry, visual art, and music: all to get at the nebulous and wide ranging “conventions” of what makes a work of art characteristically “postmodern.” A difficult task, I know, and Postmodern characteristics are surely more divergent than they are homogenous. But, Ceremony’s narrative style strikes me as an apt piece to discuss one type of Postmodernism with my students. In her novel, Silko weaves together poetic passages that convey ancestral stories with fragments of prose narrative. The poetic passages are meticulously crafted, and there is a tension and conversation sustained between the poetic and narrative shards.
One of twenty-eight story-poems found throughout Ceremony.
Ceremony may be an apt example of Postmodern innovation, but it also stands out to me as a masterpiece by an artist who is attuned to the invisible dimensions of reality, and I think Silko’s formal developments are designed to reflect this extraordinary perception. When I first read it almost a decade ago, the book hit me like a lightning bolt to the forehead, and it stayed with me. I continually return to it, or rather it draws me back. It is an important book to me: so important that I included a chapter about it in my dissertation, and I’m refining that work for a book project. Ceremony is also a really important book in American literature, and teaches us a lot about interstitial identities in American culture; her protagonist, Tayo, is a mixed-race Native and white man who feels ostracized from both sides of his identity. But most importantly, this is a pivotal work of Native-American literature. Silko published Ceremony in 1977 and it is best known as a vanguard work of the Native American Renaissance.
I’m very fond of Native-American literature. In fact, I find this branch of the American literary tree riveting. Native-American storytelling began in orality, with stories passed down through generations. When we read Native-American literature we often encounter works whose authors have ingeniously adopted the conventions of western written literature to the purposes of oral storytelling. And so, throughout the Native American Renaissance, many Indigenous authors were at the cutting edge of genre-breaking formal conventions as the melded together Native traditions with western literary conventions to serve the objectives of oral storytelling in their written literature. An instance of this innovation occurs in Ceremony.
The book itself documents a healing ceremony conducted by medicine man Betonie and other spirit-helpers to heal Tayo of the witchery and dissociation that have plagued him since his return from World War II. Tayo survived the Bataan Death March and suffers from what we now know as PTSD. As Tayo’s ailment is novel—a product of his contemporary experiences—the traditional healing ceremonies—meant to address traditional ailments—no longer work. So Betonie fashions a distinctly Postmodern, hybrid, fragmented-yet-whole, intercultural ceremony for Tayo. Betonie’s ceremony mirrors Silko’s method of blending elements of her oral tradition with western literary conventions to tell a tale that suits her contemporary milieu.
In Ceremony Silko finds a way to maintain an important aspect of Laguna oral storytelling culture while shifting to a written medium, and I find it endlessly interesting. In an interview with Per Seyersted shortly after Ceremony’s publication, Silko informs us that when she was young and an ancestor would begin to tell a story, they would ask for someone to open the door, to let the spirits in:
“One of the older women—we called her Aunt Susie—who told me a lot of the stories, and who in some sense trained me, if that’s what you want to call it, helped me to love the stories and learn them—she always said when she told the stories that there was an old custom, long ago, where the storyteller would say to one of the persons in the room, ‘Go open the door, go open the door so that they can come in,’ and it was as if ‘They,’ being ancestors, can come in and give us their gifts which are these stories, and that through the stories, somehow, even though people may be dead or gone or time is gone a long way in the past, that through the storytelling there was a belief that it all came back very immediately, that it came right back in the room with you. And so the storytelling in that sense was an act of [Silko pauses] so that there wasn’t anything lost, nothing was dead, nobody was gone, that in the stories everything was held together, regardless of time”
In Laguna culture, a story being told is a conduit to the spirit realm. That realm is represented in Silko’s stories as “Time Immemorial.” But Time Immemorial is not “a long time ago,” or “far far away.” It is here and now. Always. The story being told softens the boundaries between physical reality and the spiritual reality of Time Immemorial. As the story ensues, the spirits join the party. This is one way in which the actual vocalization of a story is really important to Laguna culture. It is a sacred act. This tautological mindset is characterized by a mystic state of communion with the ever-present realm of spirits. Such communion is induced by the telling of stories. It defies “ordinary” temporality and spatiality. In their stead, a state of timelessness ensues and the membrane between the physical world and spirit world becomes discernably more permeable. So, how to replicate this sacred act in a written text that is unlikely to be read out loud? How can authors invoke the spirits from that invisible realm of reality that is ever present around us: Time Immemorial? Leslie Marmon Silko found a way, and it involves Ceremony’s innovative story-poem sections.
David E. Hailey Jr. has shown that Silko literally embedded the spirits in the poetic Laguna story sections in Ceremony: “It is possible to demonstrate that in all the story-poems the texts… act as skeletons for a series of illustrations that provide the final ingredient necessary before Ceremony can become a ceremony; the spirit helpers” (Hailey Jr. 3). By tracing outlines around the skeletal story-poems, Hailey has shown that each of the twenty-eight stories forms the figure of a kachina spirit. “It is arguable that there is even more happening in Ceremony beyond the visible; invisible characters seem to move through the text, carrying with them totems of goodwill and evil” (Hailey Jr. 1 my emphasis). So, the invisible spirits who are traditionally ushered in through the door during a Laguna story are still present in Ceremony, but in a distinctly new way: enmeshed in the form of the book itself. For instance, Hailey points out that the Thought Woman poem that begins the novel, wherein Ts’its’tsi’nako, a prominent spirit actor thinks the story of Ceremony into being—actually forms two figures: both a spider, and a woman. Combined, they form the Thought Woman:
Hailey Jr.’s tracing around the Thought-woman poem shows the Ts’its’tsi’nako kachina.
By tracing around her skeleton to make her manifest, Hailey Jr. shows how Ts’its’tsi’nako is literally interwoven into the story. But, not all the spirits in Ceremony are benevolent, and not all the spirits fleshed out around the poem skeletons are either. Hailey Jr. shows that in stories evoking or describing witchery, the kachina figures appear upside down. In the Ck’o’yo (magic practiced by sorcerers throughout time to inflict disjuncture in a harmonious world) origin story, the kachina appears mirrored.
A mirrored Ck’o’yo kachina.
Hailey Jr. has shown that the conflict between witchery and the ceremony extends beyond the surface narrative of Ceremony into the spirit-world of Time Immemorial. The diversity of, and relevance of each fleshed out spirit-sketch to its skeletal story poem suggests the deliberateness with which Silko crafted her story-poem skeletons:
“Silko has added life to her novel, below the ink, with the ink… [T]here is no indication that anybody but Silko knows about the spirit helpers. Still, like the elders, she brings a conceptual form of life into the universe. Silko fills Ceremony with a new dimension of conceptual life. She adds more stories, being lived under the stories that are lived on the surface. These stories, like the ones on the surface, involve battle between witchery and the better way, and like the ones on the surface, some of the stories under the surface go the way of witchery. Because nobody ever sees them, the stories happening under the surface of the story-poems don’t in the usual sense add to the poems or the novel. But one needn’t see Laguna spirit-helpers to know they are there, doing their jobs; neither need one see the spirits under Silko’s Ceremony to know they are there doing their jobs”
Tayo’s journey in his physical reality accords with the dramatic unfolding of events in the spirit world. As he comes to understand this, he approaches the completion of the ceremony, and a return to wholeness (completion is a relative word here, for the ceremony is endlessly unfolding. Perhaps balance is a more appropriate word). As readers, when we come to perceive this delicate layering, we begin to see the novel, and the world blossoming in a new way. The spirits of our ancestors and loved ones are never far away, in the past or elsewhere. They are ever present around us in Time Immemorial which is here and now always. This perspectival shift is intended by Silko. The ceremony is not just conducted for Tayo; it is conducted for Silko, and it is conducted for the reader:
“In...all things related to the writing of Ceremony, I feel I was blessed, watched over, and protected by my beloved ancestors, and the old ones who told me the stories—Grandma A’mooh, Aunt Susie, and Grandpa Hank. May the readers and listeners of this novel be likewise blessed, watched over, and protected by their beloved ancestors”
Hailey Jr. illuminates a deeper meaning in Silko’s claim that she has adapted oral tradition into the form of the novel. From Aunt Susie’s perspective—inherited by Silko—the stories are not complete without the invisible spirit helpers that become present when Time Immemorial is evoked. This means that to adapt that oral tradition one must find a way to include the spirits, which Hailey Jr. helps us see that Silko has done.
Reed Woman kachina.
Works Consulted
Hailey, David E., Jr. “The Visual Elegance of Ts’its’tsi’nako and the Other Invisible Characters in Ceremony.” The Wicazo SA Review, vol. 6, no. 2, Fall 1990, pp. 1–6.
Seyersted, Per. Leslie Marmon Silko. Boise State University Western Writers Series, 1980.
Silko, Leslie Marmon, and Larry McMurtry. Ceremony: Anniversary edition, Penguin Books, 2006.
Thoreau, American Thinking, and Anti-Racism
“It is never too late to give up our prejudices. No way of thinking or doing, however ancient, can be trusted without proof. What everybody echoes or in silence passes by as true today may turn out to be a falsehood tomorrow, mere smoke of opinion, which some had trusted for a cloud that would sprinkle fertilizing rain in their fields. What old people say you cannot do, you try and find that you can. Old deeds for old people, and new deeds for new.”
-Henry David Thoreau, Walden
Painting by John Lautermilch
Today is Henry David Thoreau’s 203rd birthday. Thoreau is most famous for building a cabin on Ralph Waldo Emerson’s land at Walden Pond in Concord, MA and living in relative seclusion for over a year. Six years ago I was fortunate to spend a week in Concord—including Thoreau’s 197th birthday—staying at the Concord Colonial Inn, and participating in the annual gathering of the Thoreau Society. I walked from the town to Walden Pond three times, including one walk that followed Thoreau’s usual path from Emerson’s house along the railroad tracks to the Thoreau cabin site on HDT’s birthday. It was an exceptional week punctuated by many heightened sensory experiences.
While in Concord, I also had the opportunity to visit important sites of the American Revolution. I had toured Revolutionary sites in Boston numerous times, but this was my first visit to the Old North Bridge—where “the shot heard round the world” was fired (Emerson coined that one)—and the sites of the battle of Lexington and Concord, the first battle of the American Revolution.
In Concord, my experiences yielded me an overwhelming feeling of the symmetry and parallelism between the revolutionary birth of American freedom, and the philosophical birth of American letters. The important sites of both are in such close proximity in Concord that they often overlap. The Old Manse, for example, overlooks the Old North Bridge. The Emerson family owned the Old Manse, and from its windows and fields Ralph Waldo’s ancestors watched as the shot heard round the world was fired. Nathaniel Hawthorne later lived in and wrote at the Old Manse—his works written there include my two favorite Hawthorne stories, “The Birth-Mark” and “Rappacinni’s Daughter.” These places of our Revolutionary and philosophical history are so entwined that the experience of them is inseparable.
Thoreau’s Walden was written in Concord and the book is saturated with the ideals that were fought for in Concord and further developed by later American philosophers in the town. Thoreau was a Transcendentalist, along with Emerson, Margaret Fuller, Bronson Alcott, and others in Concord. And Walden is remembered as a classic of American literature and philosophy. When we remember Transcendentalism, we most often think about ecology and spirituality. We recall a distinctive brand of American consciousness that recognizes spirit imbued in the very material of nature. But another distinctive characteristic of Transcendentalism is equality. In this regard, as in others, the Transcendentalists writing and thinking in Concord developed a philosophical system of thought that was anchored in the founding ideals of America.
In his attitude towards enslaved people,* Thoreau took the equality promised in America’s founding documents—and fought for in the town where he lived—seriously. Thoreau was an abolitionist. In private, Thoreau supported revolutionary abolitionist John Brown who led raiding parties in Bleeding Kansas and later attempted to inspire an insurgence among enslaved people at Harper’s Ferry (where he was caught and hanged). Thoreau championed the cause of abolition and often wrote publicly about equality and casting aside prejudice, including the above quote, found in his most famous book, Walden: the same book that is a cornerstone of American literature and philosophy, which we remember for its ecology and spirituality, also affirms the necessity of equality and the foolishness of maintaining inherited prejudice. Equality is an American ideal towards which we continually strive. Thoreau knew this. It is foundational for his worldview and work, which in turn is foundational for American philosophy.
I’m not going to suggest any “if Thoreau were here today” hypotheticals because quite frankly, I dislike those types of arguments. We can’t know what Thoreau’s thoughts on America would be today. But we do know his thoughts, and actions, and the company he kept in his own time. We know that his thinking demonstrated those Revolutionary ideals of equality that not even all the founding fathers—or even Thoreau himself—were ready to embody in their time. Thoreau was an abolitionist, and an anti-racist. Walden—that cornerstone of American philosophy—is an anti-racist book. Happy birthday, Henry. America is still continuing the good work you did in your own time.
*Though Thoreau demonstrates an anti-racist stance in his thought and actions towards abolition and the plight of enslaved African people in America, the same cannot be said for his attitude towards “vanishing” Native Americans. While Thoreau thought he admired Native Americans, his reasons for this admiration are mired in tokenism and extend wholly from his imagined ideal of Indian-ness, and not from consideration for real Indigenous people. Thoreau romanticized Indigenous peoples’ “wildness,” and “spiritual insight” in a corollary to Edward Said’s “orientalism” known as “savagism,” here defined as a romanticization of Native peoples that is so thorough, the romanticizer only considers their own thought-formation, and mistakes it for a consideration of the people themselves. When we address Thoreau’s attitude towards Native peoples, we are addressing his attitude towards his own conception of Indigenous people and not the people as they are. This is a problem. For more, see Joy Harjo’s review of Robert Sayre’s Thoreau and the American Indian
At Walden Pond on HDT’s 197th birthday, 2014. Thoreau cabin site just to right of image
Emerson and American Individualism
“Trust thyself: Every heart vibrates to that iron string.”
-Ralph Waldo Emerson
One cannot help but look around America these days without noticing any number of selfish behavior patterns masquerading under the misnomer of “American Individualism.” Emphasis on the individual is certainly a defining American trait within our culture, and our culture is so diverse and hard to pin down that defining traits stand out all the more. When selfishness masquerades as individualism, it paints the concept of “Self Reliance” as a pejorative, when in truth it need not be. And so, on this Independence Day—in a critical year of our evolution as a culture and as a people—I am drawing my mind back to American Transcendentalist and influential philosopher of American Individualism, Ralph Waldo Emerson, his essay, “Self Reliance,” and the paradoxical concept (stated above) at the heart of his philosophy. I hope that you may join me for a moment in between the hot dogs and fireworks.
When we approach Emerson’s maxim—“Trust thyself, every heart vibrates to that iron string”—we immediately notice the seemingly conflicting formulation of his sentence. What Emerson calls for is reliance on one’s self—yes—but not for the betterment of one’s self alone, or simply to exercise one’s freedom for the sake of being free. Instead we are called to trust ourselves because, “[t]he power which resides in him is new in nature, and none but he knows what that is which he can do, nor does he know until he has tried.” Emerson’s call for self reliance is a challenge to each of us to maximize our own potential in the hope of creating an empowered society of individuals in which each individual contributes the best that they have to offer as a result of cultivating themselves to their very highest nature. To trust in oneself—to follow one’s own path—becomes, not selfish, but productive, not just for oneself, but for all of American society: “Every heart vibrates to that iron string.”
Even more, the very conceptual difficulty of the paradoxical maxim lifts us out of the type of materialistic thinking that claims superficial concerns as the crux of one’s own “individualist” behaviors (e.g. wearing a mask). Emerson’s American Individualism is a call to better oneself pragmatically, psychically, and spiritually. Thinking of Individualism as a justification for a superficial aesthetic choices diminishes the legacy of our American philosophical transcendentalism. To really enact the type of American Individualism that Emerson challenged us all to in 1841, we must put aside our selfishness to become our best selves—rising above superficial concerns about our appearance, because our best selves rarely worry about such trivialities. We grow beyond our own selfishness when we individuate (to borrow a term from later thinker CG Jung) towards our spiritual potential. And when we individuate, we offer our best to the world around us, not just for ourselves, but for the betterment of all mankind. And to me, that goal is another cornerstone of American identity.
If you are an American and you haven’t read “Self-Reliance,” you can access it by following the link below. If you are an American who claims to live by the doctrine of American Individualism and you have not read “Self Reliance,” I highly recommend devoting a few moments of your Independence Day to reading a founding document of the philosophy you claim to believe (I know I know, “Don’t tell me what to do!”). Happy Independence Day! Grab yourself a hot dog.
On the loss of Rudolfo Anaya
“For me, the inocente is constantly in contact with the marvel, the beauty, and the mystery of life. So it seems that with the passage of time I am each day more in awe of creation. The simplest experiences take on a marvelous aura that reveals a deeper reality. It is that reality I try to capture in my writings.”
Bless Me, Ultima had a profound impact on me as an undergrad. As Anaya’s curandera (healer) Ultima helped protagonist Antonio to live a life of wonder, recognizing the transcendent endlessly enmeshed in the mundane, Anaya helped me shift my perspective towards the same end. Bless Me, Ultima was one of a handful of books that I wanted to spend my life reading, and so pursued a PhD in American Literature. It’s one of four books I studied in my dissertation. That chapter wrote itself, and went quicker than any other. I was thoroughly enriched by the experience. Every time I return to this book it has blossomed a little more for me. When a student asks me for a book recommendation, Bless Me, Ultima is always at the top of my list. It is truly marvelous, as was Anaya’s outlook on life. Rest In Peace, Curandero.
And I was happy with Ultima. We walked together in the llano and along the river banks to gather herbs and roots for her medicines. She taught me the names of plants and flowers, of trees and bushes, of birds and animals; but most important, I learned from her that there was a beauty in the time of day and in the time of night, and that there was peace in the river and in the hills. She taught me to listen to the mystery of the groaning earth and to feel complete in the fulfillment of its time. My soul grew under her careful guidance.
Rudolfo Anaya, Bless Me, Ultima
Musings on Force Dyads in the Star Wars Sequels
I’m spending a portion of my social distancing time reading the Tao Te Ching and watching & thinking about Star Wars (surprising right?) If you don’t care, or are a SW sequel hater, scroll on by.
George Lucas always lit shots very deliberately to convey the internal struggles of his characters, and so I was really interested in the way Disney continued this legacy. Specifically, I am really interested in the scenes where Rey and Kylo Ren are telepathically connected via the Force. We later learn that this connection is because the two are a "Dyad in the Force." In these shots there is an interplay between light and dark. For instance, in the shot where they touch hands in Rey’s hut on Ach To, Kylo’s face is darkened but he is shot against a bright white background, while Rey’s face is illuminated and her surroundings are dark. My first thought was that this reflects Kylo’s turn from his lightside (Skywalker) heritage to the dark, and Rey’s leaving behind her darkside (Palpatine) heritage for the light. But, it's cooler than that.
I’m spending a portion of my social distancing time reading the Tao Te Ching and watching & thinking about Star Wars (surprising right?) If you don’t care, or are a SW sequel hater, scroll on by.
George Lucas always lit shots very deliberately to convey the internal struggles of his characters, and so I was really interested in the way Disney continued this legacy. Specifically, I am really interested in the scenes where Rey and Kylo Ren are telepathically connected via the Force. We later learn that this connection is because the two are a "Dyad in the Force." In these shots there is an interplay between light and dark. For instance, in the shot where they touch hands in Rey’s hut on Ach To, Kylo’s face is darkened but he is shot against a bright white background, while Rey’s face is illuminated and her surroundings are dark. My first thought was that this reflects Kylo’s turn from his lightside (Skywalker) heritage to the dark, and Rey’s leaving behind her darkside (Palpatine) heritage for the light. But, it's cooler than that.
So I started digging around on Wookiepeedia, and I learned that Force Dyads are naturally occurring Force phenomena where two people are connected in the Force and that bond leads to a strengthened ability to wield the Force. Then, I learned that the natural Force Dyads are what led the Sith to create the “rule of two” where there are always an apprentice and a master, in order to try to create an “unnatural” dyad. This is where it gets cool.
The Sith rule of two could never produce a dyad, because a natural Force Dyad is composed of a blend of both light and dark. Ostensibly, this means that a Dyad is composed of one Jedi and one Sith—like Rey and Kylo. BUT, the blending doesn’t end there. Just as the Taoist yin yang shows light in darkness, and dark in light, the strength of the force dyad is the mixture of the two inseparably in both sides of the dyad. So, the way that Kylo and Rey are lit in the sequel movies shows us this blend of light and dark forces warring inside them. Which, as an aside, speaks to the imprint of Joseph Campbell’s Hero’s Journey motif on the Star Wars franchise. Campbell’s mythology considered myth as a psychodrama, depicting various psychological phenomena at play in the mind of an individual. Back to the point…
Even cooler, there is a mosaic at the bottom of the pool in the ancient Jedi sanctuary on Ach To that features a design called the “Prime Jedi.” The pool is featured prominently in several shots, but not explained. The mosaic design shows a figure seated in lotus position, wielding a lightsaber that bifurcates it. One side is made of dark pebbles, and the other side is made of light pebbles, but the dark side has a spot of light and visa versa. The Prime Jedi is the Star Wars galaxy’s version of a yin yang, and shows us that—despite the advances of dogma in the Jedi order through the generations—the earliest Jedi were aware of the interconnectedness of dark and light. The reoccurrence of a natural Force Dyad in Kylo and Rey reestablishes this initial, fundamental principle in the galaxy.
So I offer this up to say I’m having a lot of fun exploring the Star Wars sequels as I have the prequels and originals before them. The attention to detail is there, and it displays continuity in the use of mythological tropes, and philosophical depth (that is, if one is interested in that stuff beneath the surface). There’s also space wizards, space cowboys, and laser dogfights on the surface level too if one is not. Thank you for attending my TED talk. May the Force be with you.
[Originally posted on my Facebook page April 9, 2020]