The Living Force of Star Wars: A Victory for All Time
An era-spanning look at Star Wars, written in the final days before The Force Awakens
Yoda: To the end we are coming now.
Mace Windu: Did your journey give you insight on how to win the war?
Yoda: No longer certain that one ever does win a war, I am. For in fighting the battles; the bloodshed; already lost, we have.
Yet open to us a path remains, that unknown to the Sith is. Through this path, victory we may yet find.
Not victory in the Clone Wars.
But victory… For all time.— The Clone Wars, Lost Missions Season 6 Episode 13. Sacrifice.
In a few short days, a film series that had before been a sporadic saga driven by its original visionary will become a continual tale, designed by many and crafted to go on, it seems, for as long as there are films. As has been said elsewhere, “You won’t live to see the final Star Wars movie.”
I realized the other day that I’ve come to think a number of things about this imaginary galaxy as it exists to this stage. If I do not write about my experience of Star Wars right now, in this week before The Force Awakens, I will never have the chance again to see it with these eyes. So I am writing, just to remember, and to put a few pieces together. To capture a moment and a thought, before it changes forever…
I remember my first Star Wars by chance.
Born in 1972, I was five when it was released. I have seen it so many times since that first show that I think I might not remember my first show at all, had we not been late into the theater. Perhaps delayed outside, perhaps in the line to seat, I now carry a stark-vivid memory of looking up at the massive screen to see a golden metal man, slowly making his way along the length of a massive, ancient skeleton. . .
This image would be for me what Stanley Kubrick called a non-submersible unit: A stark and vivid memory or moment, around which the mind fills in a story entire.
That image and its blend of the old and the new, the mysterious and the magical, stood for the whole. Star Wars was a seismic charge going off in my five year old psyche. So personal, it felt as if I were the only one to feel it. Of course, I know I was not; and part of its magic is the fact that so many others who felt the same shift felt also feel its meaning as if only for themselves.
Rationally, today, I understand that this was just a movie — and countless toys and doodads speak to another side of its impact. Many other words have been written of the good and the bad of those toys and stickers and bibs and coasters and plastic blasters, and if I wrote with more time to spare I might add a few thoughts on the commercialism of it, or on how George Lucas knew to set aside the rights to sell that stuff as his way to fund the next films. But here, for now, my thoughts are on something else.
For me, those things were totems, small touchstones through which I could conjure a world of imagination from a few simple sparks. An impressionistic and immersive world had been painted in my mind, one which I could inhabit with the merest of nudges.
R2, in the form of an eraser? In a moment I could be far, far away.
The 2015 holiday PS4 commercials for the game Star Wars Battlefront do an embarrassingly effective job of conveying the truth of this feeling.
But what is this escape?
Another deep influence on me (though not til later), J.R.R. Tolkien, had this to say about escapism, and I’ve thought about it a lot lately:
“I have claimed that Escape is one of the main functions of fairy-stories, and since I do not disapprove of them, it is plain that I do not accept the tone of scorn or pity with which ‘Escape’ is now so often used. Why should a man be scorned if, finding himself in prison, he tries to get out and go home? Or if he cannot do so, he thinks and talks about other topics than jailers and prison-walls?”
— J.R.R.Tolkien, On Fairy-Stories.
The bright sheen of this truth is the fact that, if you have a story to roll around in your mind or your hands like a totem, no-one can ever truly take away your freedom.
A sharper edge can be glimpsed in a phrase I found in my head upon waking a few weeks back, sleepless over news of shootings and suffering migrants and this fragile world we all hold in our hands.
“Without stories, there’d be nowhere else to go…”
Mercifully, my own childhood was pretty happy, especially in my younger days. I was given freedom to explore, to create, to play, to roam. At one point, I was a living, breathing twelve year old with an actual back-acre woods to explore. I may as well have been a king.
To explore: And explore I did.
Especially during the heady days of Empire Strikes Back, a few years older than when first I’d roamed Tatooine, that pivotal age of eight and nine and ten, I was running and jumping through ditches in search of Dagobah, wiping mud rakishly on my pants as I scrambled up the banks, carving little tunnels in the snowdrifts that winter so that I could explore Hoth right there in rural Iowa, with my younger sister ever at my side.
Star Wars was far from the only creative influence or outlet I had as a burgeoning ten year old. I remember discovering Infocom games, marveling at the jeweled egg in Enchanter, eventually able to make my own world of words with a floppy disk (they really were) software package that I think was called Adventure Maker. Long since lost, those square-linked maps were another path to places far and wide.
I remember discovering and getting lost in my dad’s Beatles record albums. I remember discovering my own life-changing literature through Choose Your Own Adventure books, painstakingly saved up for, counting stacks of quarters on the floor in the bookstore.
I remember using my dad’s reel to reel tape recorder, in the weeks before E.T. hit theaters, to record my own interview with the little wayward botanist, having no idea what he sounded like or what the story was, speeding up the recording speed to make my E.T.’s voice sound low and slow on playback.
Again, these moments are lost in time, though clearly not forgotten.
The few I had understood. And always, Yoda was among them. Chewie had my back.
Think of it: I could look at a small hunk of plastic, and picking it up, find that somehow, I could fly.
Life goes on. We make our way forwards, doing our best, often (too often) stumbling. Getting up and doing our best one more time.
I do not have children of my own. But I do have a niece, and two godsons. Early this year, knowing what December would hold, I checked in with my sister. My niece, five now, they were pretty sure would still be too young for the movie at the time, so I made other plans — but they’re going for it after all, which makes the five year old in me overjoyed.
I am getting on a plane, later this week, to see it with my godsons, 9 and 11. Two years back I sent them the original six movies, and all of The Clone Wars. In May of this year I got to go watch the movies with them, and promise to get tickets to come back and see them in December.
And now I get to keep my promise.
These moments, they change us, living and breathing inside of us.
Even an experience anchored in a pop culture diversion can take you someplace real.
Luke, Leia, Han, Chewie, Threepio, R2, Lando, Yoda, Obi-Wan…
These characters are more than characters to me, and have been since I’ve known them. That is an amazing and mysterious thing.
The journey of discovery and triumph in the original Star Wars trilogy is emblazoned deep. This is something that perhaps most who are reading these words also share.
Bright and vivid in this recollection is an amazement with the nearly perfect film that is The Empire Strikes Back. The entire film puts our heroes through nearly every wringer. Threepio, one of our main points of view for the audience, is literally torn asunder. Countless things go wrong. All the hope that seemed so new an episode before seems lost.
But by the end of Return of the Jedi, everything has been brought back together stronger and bolder and wiser and greater than before. How was this done?
At one time, Jedi had seemed the weakest of the original three. Even setting Ewoks aside, Vader’s redemption and brief return to Anakin Skywalker felt secondary, almost unconnected to Luke’s journey. Given that this was the climax of the story, this was a little unnerving.
In Empire, we see a cast of friends who are in the same boat, however far flung they be. Argentine writer Julio Cortázar once said, “Tell the story as if it were only of interest to the small circle of your characters, of which you may be one. There is no other way to breathe life into your story.”
This intimacy of scale and concern is present still in Jedi, and can be viewed in contrast to the epic sweep of the prequels. Though for most this contrast forms an unnamed indigestible lump, for me it has come to form a kernel of tragic impact. Something that remains, and that is lacking if it is forgotten in the stew.
The meanings I’ve uncovered since that time have enriched and expanded Return of the Jedi drastically, and have come from the strangest of places.
An interesting thing has happened as I’ve grown older and delved deeper into the tale. In time I found that the truest and surest way into the tale as a whole included a strange sidestep into a less-beloved strand of the legacy. At first, and for a long time, my frustration with the prequel trilogy bordered on hate. It certainly had no problem with denial. The easiest route was to pretend they didn’t exist.
Eventually I realized indulging that allergic response to the way the prequels came out meant rejecting some aspects of the prequel’s meaning that I was better off retaining.
Two things brought me through and back to a much deeper picture of the whole. Two pathways back into the fading realm of the time before the story I loved most began.
The first was a particular order in which to view the trilogies.
The second was an animated series, taking place in the earlier era.
These together are a skeleton key, crucial to grasping the meaning of Star Wars. Crucial aspects of the original trilogy, as well as likely echoes of stories yet to come…
There is an amazing exploration of the structure of the original six Star Wars films, which looks and finds an underlying structure, in which visual and thematic links reflect between and among them. I’m a believer in this interpretation, which is called the Star Wars Ring Theory.
In it, Mike Klimo lays out a compelling argument for the presence of a deeply interlocking play between the original and the prequel trilogies, in which even individual shots and scenes reflect from one to the other. These reflections help reveal a deeper structure to the whole, and allow a richer understanding of its themes.
The ring structure on display seems almost certainly to have been deliberately crafted by Lucas, and brings the story of Star Wars ever closer to the mythic or bardic heritage of which it is a part.
That said, it relies on a strictly sequential arrangement of the pieces. And that has become something many are loathe to do.
What is interesting about this is that as a viewer, even one accepting of both trilogies on their own merits, I have found myself at least as compelled by a very grassroots and kitbashed structure that can be applied to the series.
So it is that now, when I watch the two trilogies, I always watch them in some form of what is called the Machete Order. In this I am not alone.
It could also be called flashback order, as that’s the main effect. In this approach, you view A New Hope (IV) first, and Empire (V) second. You then view the prequels as a flashback between V and VI before rejoining the original story to view Return of the Jedi (VI) last. In the original machete order, you cut out (I) entirely.
I depart with the original logic in a few ways, depending on my mood. Sometimes I don’t hack out Episode I, and sometimes I skip through fair bits of Episode II. But Revenge of the Sith remains, always intact, anchored in that flashback gap regardless.
I am enough of a believer in an all-six version of this viewing order that I insisted on it with my godsons. All of the benefits described on the original blog, as well as some more subtle, were seen in full effect.
Example: one surprisingly profound effect of machete/flashback is to see the full arc of Yoda.
Moving back in time from the quirky wisdom immortalized in Empire, we then see him retrospectively, presiding as best he can over the crumbling of the Jedi order, and the heartbreak of 800 years of stewardship destroyed.
When he hops down into Senator Organa’s speeder at the end of Revenge of the Sith, having spent his last, best efforts seemingly in vain, his sense of utter failure is a secret glimpse that changes how you see the sparkle in his Jedi eyes.
“Failed, I have.”
Though he has not, as we will see, he cannot ever truly see the ways in which he’s prevailed.
We watched it this way in May. By the time Luke returned to visit his Master for the last time in Jedi (which now, remember, we were watching after Sith), upon seeing his hunched figure with Luke once again, the full weight of Yoda’s journey was there in one of my godson’s minds and he simply said, “He looks so sad…”
Yoda’s story is, in part, a tragic one, and this is harder to fully realize outside of flashback order. So also is that of Obi-Wan Kenobi, though both had tried their very best.
Without realizing how blind those two Masters had become the possibility of Anakin’s redemption, the intuitive leap made by Luke to trust in his compassion carries a fraction of its true weight. In their blindness towards Luke’s improbable approach, they also reveal their blindness to the chance that Anakin himself could ever emerge again from the wreck of the mask of Darth Vader.
The machete/flashback order brings into stark relief the strange blind spots of Obi-Wan and Yoda when it came to Luke’s insistence on compassion for his father, and the unlikely redemption of Anakin Skywalker. That Yoda and Kenobi had both come to feel the only remaining path to victory must involve the destruction of Vader reveals how far the trauma of Revenge of the Sith had clawed them from the light of understanding.
Both forced into exile, there would always be one path to victory that lay in their blind spots:
Victory over war.
It is the impossible glimmer, deep in the shock and awe of an endless conflict, of a secret path to peace.
Forgiveness, acceptance, of self and of other.
What role could stories play in bringing victory over war? And at what time-scales? These are questions to which we will return.
The phrase “Victory over War” is here drawn from the Denma Translation of Sun Tzu’s The Art of War.
There the authors have this to say about what they call, “taking whole”:
Taking whole means conquering the enemy in a way that keeps as much intact as possible … This is not merely a philosophical stance or altrusitic approach. Destruction leaves only devastation, not just for those defeated, their dwellings and their earth, but also for conquerors attempting to enforce their ‘peace’ long after battle has passed. True victory is victory over aggression, a victory that respects the enemy’s basic humanity and thus renders further conflict unnecessary. (xv.)
Twice, when confronted with the same kinds of fearful visions which turned his father to the Dark Side, Luke instead chooses victory over war. First in Cloud City, when after abandoning his training over visions of his friends suffering, he rejects Vader’s insistence by casting himself into the void; and again before the Emperor, after seeing in Vader’s severed hand a reflection of the self-same pattern recurring in himself, Luke casts away his lightsaber.
Much more could be said of Luke’s triumph here: it has to do with trusting the Living Force over any supposed destiny, in a way his father could not.
After reading a recent interview with J.J. Abrams, it is clear to me that the single most important work of the upcoming phase of Star Wars will be to reconsile the rift between the way the Force is seen in the original trilogy, and the way it is seen in the prequels.
In that interview, J.J. incisively and poignantly says this:
For me when I heard Obi-Wan say that the Force surrounds us and binds us all together, there was no judgement about who you were. This was something that we could all access. Being strong with the Force didn’t mean something scientific, it meant something spiritual. It meant someone who could believe, someone who could reach down to the depths of your feelings and follow this primal energy that was flowing through all of us. I mean, that’s what was said in that first film! And there I am sitting in the theater at almost 11 years old and that was a powerful notion. And I think this is what your point was, we would like to believe that when s**t gets serious, that you could harness that Force I was told surrounds not just some of us but every living thing. And so, I really feel like the assumption that any character needs to have inherited a certain number of midi-chlorians or needs to be part of a bloodline, it’s not that I don’t believe that as part of the canon, I’m just saying that at 11 years old, that wasn’t where my heart was. And so I respect and adhere to the canon but I also say that the Force has always seemed to me to be more inclusive and stronger than that.
The good news is that, I believe, the heavy lifting has already been done: the parts are all there, and the main thing needed in the stories is to uncover the nature of the Balance of the Force — or perhaps, in restoring Balance to the Force through his death, Vader has returned us to a phase where the Force of the original stories, the Living Force, has returned to prominence after a thousand years (in the story) of over-emphasis on the Cosmic Force.
In canon, there is a thing called the Cosmic Force, which sits beside the Living Force. I believe, based on the quest of Yoda described later, that the much-loathed midi-chlorians relate mainly to the Cosmic Force.
For the Force as seen in the original trilogy, they are merely an unnamed and invisible bridge or conduit to something that surrounds and binds us all: the Living Force. And they may have more to do with playing out patterns than with finding a path. For that we have the Living Force.
If the Cosmic Force is a medium, then the Living Force is the message.
While here it is called by an earlier name, the article “The Living Force, the Unifying Force, and the Chosen One” covers this entire dynamic, and the blind spot of Yoda and Kenobi, in much more depth. I will also probably return to this topic in future articles or versions. It’s clearly one of the most important things for Star Wars to explore.
Many other things could be said of the boons of viewing in the machete/flashback order, but for this essay there’s too much else to explore.
It is left as an exercise for the Padawan, young or old.
I have a rare level of appreciation for aspects of the Prequels, it seems, for someone of my generation. Was I frustrated with them? You bet. Did they have the same magic for me? They didn’t. But I loved seeing so many Jedi, at the height of both their power and their hubris.
Still, I’ve never been blind to their stumbles, and I’ve kept a sense of humor about them all.
It’s interesting to ponder alternate universes in which someone with a warmer sense of characterization had directed Lucas’ story. I’ve heard conflicting reports that Spielberg offered, and Lucas turned him down, as well as the reverse. There’s no second-guessing worth doing.
Even so, the stiffness of delivery is there, to me, in the first two in particular. It eventually led me to a strange practice:
Sometimes, I’d watch the prequels in French audio.
Now, I do not speak French. I am not trying to learn. Rather, I have found that the expressiveness of the voice actors and their language, bolstered by a knowledge of the story, allowed me to just let go of a layer of attention and actually enjoy the prequels more.
But it was also the mode in which I realized that the prequels had something to say about power, and the risks of never-ending war, that was probably never going to be said as overtly (by Star Wars anyhow) again.
Anakin and Palpatine sit, high up in a regal opera booth. Slowly, assuredly, we see the measured, seductive confidence of immense power overtake any remaining resistance from a youth he could subdue, enslave, and wield then as a weapon. That booth, drifting in opalescence, a floating bubble of privilege, made me feel in that moment as if the roots of power were so deeply entrenched that the most this galaxy could ever hope for were periodic pendulum swings of peace in an endless flux of conflict.
Connected with that feeling, the sense of this story’s binding, blending archetypes: how soldiers and war were so woven into the tale, but at the same time were a skeletal mask for a truer tale beneath. (This I revisit in the conclusion.)
Of course, these were just feelings. But it was a prequel that made me feel these thoughts in this way, first generation Padawan and all.
They will always carry forward something important to say within Star Wars. In the end, I felt like the tales of Palpatine’s seduction of Anakin, and the tragic betrayal of Order 66, were stories with messages on the deep risks of power that we still haven’t fully unpacked.
This is why the prequels and their era must be recovered — not only by those who’ve found ways to enjoy them, but by the whole of those who love Star Wars now.
Forgiveness and acceptance, if you will.
And this is why the machete/flashback viewing order matters.
As things turned out, the prequels would not be the one or only chance to explore that phase of the story. And the second run would be a kind of miracle.
Entangled deeply with them, a true and earnest part of them, it was The Clone Wars animated series that did so much to bring them into resonance with the deeper chords of Star Wars. It’s perhaps a bit bemusing (but also a relief) to find that, when freed to co-create these scenes as animations, Lucas found a way to truer vision.
The Clone Wars series is a pathway to the prequels, as integral parts of a tale much larger than any one director’s virtues or failings, and larger than any one viewer’s nostalgia or resistances.
And controversial as it may be to say, at times I have seen it said that The Clone Wars saved Star Wars.
Or at least, and much less controversially, renewed it.
When Disney bought Star Wars, the trilogies were there as they’d always been, but the mindset on the prequels had grown grim and unyielding for many casual viewers. Those who’d watched The Clone Wars mature over time (2008–2014) had another perspective, and when it happened I saw the fierce protectiveness of younger viewers who had grown through that pivotal age with The Clone Wars by their side.
For they were children of the Force as well, and they had grown up along with the tale of Star Wars’ first primary female hero: Ahsoka Tano.
By primary I mean this:
If the original trilogy is about Luke’s journey, and the prequels are about Anakin, then The Clone Wars absolutely owes its heart and soul to the coming of age of Ahsoka Tano. I watched it happen, season by season, and as anyone who’s seen her return in Rebels knows, she’s the real deal.
The apprentice of Anakin Skywalker, wrongly cast out of the Order before the fall, no longer a Jedi, now one of the first architects of the Rebellion.
Rogue Master, Ahsoka Tano.
Ahsoka bridges whole generations of Star Wars lore so effectively because she — and really all of The Clone Wars — is a genuine hybrid creation of a rock-steady creative team, headed by Dave Filoni while working in daily collaboration with George Lucas.
Filoni’s name and impact will be remembered right up there in the ranks of Star Wars directors who acted a guiding light through pivotal years. Given Disney’s legacy and eye for animation, I am convinced that without The Clone Wars, and without Dave Filoni (and Kilian Plunkett and Matthew Wood and Eckstein and Lanter and Kane and Taylor and Baker and the whole cast and crew), Disney might have missed the true depth of potential that lay in Star Wars’ deep cuts.
It was thus no surprise, yet still so immensely gratifying, to learn what the story group intended going forwards:
And of course it must be. Lucas himself toiled with this team over it for years, and their efforts were triumphant. Taken as a whole, The Clone Wars is as satisfying and sweeping of an arc as the original trilogy was, and every bit as starwars.
It has also been pegged as revealing quite well many of the pitfalls unique to modern war.
To summarize its stories here is unnecessary and redundant: the episodes exist, on disc, on Netflix, on iTunes, and elsewhere; and will remain on whatever media as long as media exists.
But one story arc in particular has changed the way I think about Star Wars itself, and merges with my feeling of anticipation for The Force Awakens and all that is to follow.
After The Clone Wars was cancelled by Disney to refocus on Rebels, the team was able to assemble and finish one last set of stories. Collectively called the Lost Missions, these 13 tales run the gamut.
But among them is a four story arc, largely about a vision quest of Yoda. (10, 11, 12, 13. The Lost One, Voices, Destiny, Sacrifice.)
In this epic arc, Yoda hears the voice of long-dead Jedi Master Qui-Gon Jinn, who leads him first to Dagobah, where Yoda learns of a way to cast forth one’s voice and visage beyond the span of one’s life.
This skill and secret art turns out to be the means by which we see the force ghosts of Anakin, Obi-Wan, and Yoda at the end of Return of the Jedi.
In his Star Wars Ring Theory, Mike Klimo points to the scene at the end of Revenge of the Sith (rightly, I feel) as the very heart and center of the original six-film cycle.
Here, the fate of young Luke and Leia are determined. But just as — or more — importantly, Yoda sets for Obi-Wan some training in his exile: to learn and practice this art, as he has learned it himself from Qui-Gon Jinn.
The Lost Missions take this lesson deeper, revealing Yoda’s journey to learn it in the first place. In doing so, to me it evoked a deeper message, also at the very heart of Star Wars:
It has to do with stories.
In outline, the story of the arc is straightforward enough.
After learning more of the Living Force and the Cosmic Force from Qui-Gon’s voice on Dagobah, Yoda travels to an ancient world with a living core (perhaps a form of ark), where the essence of life is seeded and preserved. Here he encounters a circle of five muses, or Force Priestesses.
They name themselves: Serenity, Joy, Anger, Confusion, and Sadness.
Enduring a series of trials, Yoda emerges with a meditative practice which will allow him to present his voice and visage to others, “for all time”. What this method entails is never quite clear, which is of course as it should be.
We do however learn, through Yoda, that this method is unknown to the Sith. We also know that the Sith rely on necromancy, or worse, when faced with death and their fear of it.
From all we can tell and speculate, that method is rooted in the sacrifice of others for one’s own ends. The Sith method of confronting and surpassing death lies in a drive to preserve the animate body, at whatever cost.
But some costs are so great that they cut the spiritual cord. When Anakin appears as a young force ghost at the end of Jedi, might it be because it was as a young man that he died?
Obi-Wan’s comments on Dagobah and Vader’s own words to Luke on the platforms of Endor in Return of the Jedi suggest just as much. Might the elder Vader be dangerously close to a walking, animate corpse?
There but for forgiveness and acceptance…
Be all that as it may, from the Force Priestesses or muses Yoda ultimately learns that behind their masks are voids of living light. The figures of Serenity, Joy, Anger, Confusion, and Sadness from which he has been learning are facets and aspects of an ancient who has long since passed on.
After his tribulations, Yoda returns to meditate at the Jedi temple tree, and is visited by Mace Windu and Obi-Wan. With Yoda’s musings on the futility of war, the story ends.
Yet when we go back and listen again to the words of Qui-Gon and the Force muses, another interpretation suggests itself.
What is a story?
Is a story its characters, its situations, its rise and its fall? Is a story its masks, its costumes, its roles, its environs? Is it all of these things, or none?
One thing we do know of story is that it has the capacity to endure, by changing as times change, by adapting to the challenges of its tellers and listeners.
What good might the story of Story do, in times of deepest need?
Here are some of the things both Qui-Gon and the Force Priestesses say of the Living Force, the Cosmic Force, midi-chlorians (prejudices at the door, please), and the role of the Jedi through it all:
Y — Here I am, ready for my next instruction, Master Qui-Gon.
Q — Yoda, My old friend. You have come at last.
Y — Why have you brought me here?
Q — Follow the light; the light will be your guide.
Y — How are you here?
Q — I am a manifestation of the Force. A Force that consists of two parts. Living beings generate the Living Force, which in turn powers the wellspring that is the Cosmic Force. All energy from the Living Force, from all things that have ever lived, feeds into the Cosmic Force, binding everything, and communicating to us through the midi-chlorians. Because of this, I can speak to you now.
Y — See the future, you can?
Q — I exist where there is no future and no past.
Yoda is shown a vision of the fall of the Jedi to come, in a cyclopean cave much like that in which Luke will encounter his shadow in Vader, years later.
He reels from the vision, in despair.
Y — Such darkness. Such evil. When will this happen?
Q — It is happening right now. It has always been happening. With each day the Clone War wages, evil is growing in its power. What you felt in the cave is merely a portion of what the Dark Side holds.
Y — Such power. Any hope that the Jedi can prevail, is there?
Q — There is always hope, my friend. Though it often comes in forms unlooked for. The key is knowing how to see it, and seizing that opportunity. I have been tasked with guiding you forward. There can be many outcomes. But your path is clear, Yoda. You have been chosen, as I was before you.
Y — For what chosen, am I?
Q — You will learn to preserve your life-force, and so manifest a consciousness which will allow you to commune with the living, after death. … Dark times are ahead, and forces of light must remain.
Yoda is sent on to a world whose subterranean depths shelter a luminous ecosystem, an origin and ark of thriving life in the galaxy.
He speaks to the Force Priestess there.
Y — What is this place?
P — All that surrounds us is the foundation of life. The birthplace of what your science calls midi-chlorians. The foundation of what connects the Living Force and the Cosmic Force. When a living thing dies, all is removed. Life passes from the Living Force into the Cosmic Force, and becomes one with it. …
At death, in order for you to preserve your identity, you must know yourself — your true self — and then, let go.
To know your heart’s tale fully is only half the work.
The storyteller must also let it go.
The longevity of a story, and its characters, depends on it. By becoming the mask (the character, the events, the situations played out over and over again), Story can communicate far down the line, and still be responsive to others by changing as their world changes.
We can guess that George Lucas had much to do with the dialogue above: after all, the midi-chlorians, those canonical elements so many love to hate, are unreservedly present.
If indeed he did, we can guess that he may have been grappling with some cues from his own voices.
At death, in order for you to preserve your identity,
you must know yourself —
your true self —
and then,
let go.
It may be that for Star Wars to truly endure — as a story, and as Story — it had to migrate to a form which could outlive its origin.
And so it may be for all tales.
Y — Died, have I?
P — In a way.
Y — Now, does my training begin?
P — The one you know as Qui-Gon Jinn will commune with you and guide your training. Like us, you shall learn to maintain your consciousness after death.
Enlightenment; Spirit; Balance:
There is another…
Skywalker.
What can stride across the skies, like stars, shaped and reshaped into constellations which tell and retell the lessons of the elder to the young?
This story, like all stories, is another Skywalker.
This fleeting moment, all its characters, are cast in a play and playing out their roles, so that Story itself can live on and on beyond their temporary suffering.
Perhaps to somehow help ease the suffering of others yet to come.
Through remembrance, story, and tale, those who are gone can speak on to the living, so the living might never feel quite so alone…
One of the strangest things about Disney’s acquisition of Star Wars is that by becoming an enclosed story, owned by one of the most copyright-intensive corporations to exist, it has paradoxically made of Star Wars an immortal collaborative tale.
We ourselves are not members of the Story Group, the team of creators who now collaboratively guide this story’s growth and evolution. We ourselves may not be able to fully take part in this collaboration, outside of the mental space surrounding its many artifacts.
But the collaboration is real, and is meant to be forever.
The world still needs for a truly open tale, an open source version of what Star Wars has become. I toil away on something like this myself, drawing on Creative Commons and Open Gaming License work as well as my own life’s lore; I’m sure I’m not alone in that kind of an effort.
But it takes a certain starry-eye to wonder whether anyone’s such work will ever again see the scope and scale of Star Wars. Perhaps nothing ever will.
But the seismic shift has been made.
Deep in the hearts and minds of many, a seedling is about to be transplanted. A seedling in the heart of popular consciousness just as full and bursting as it has been for decades in the singular minds of countless young explorers. A tale about the timelessness of tales, which is part of the self-same tale as always has been.
It is ironic to realize that though carefully guided, both before and now forevermore, the tale of Star Wars might just find the flexibility to thrive as the seedlings of countless small and tall tales have always done.
Star Wars is a crafted lore, shaped to remind us what living lore is like. It may not be what living lore has been, for the tens of thousands of years that made this story possible, but it could well be the seedling of living lore to come.
Whatever else may happen, whether a hundred or a thousand or ten thousand years from now, someone or something will gather round a fire, right here on Earth.
And it may or may not yet remember what a galaxy is, but I give it a better chance than not to begin its tale with something like:
A long time ago,
far, far away. . . .
Yoda: To the end we are coming now.
Mace Windu: Did your journey give you insight on how to win the war?
Yoda: No longer certain that one ever does win a war, I am. For in fighting the battles; the bloodshed; already lost, we have.
Yet open to us a path remains, that unknown to the Sith is. Through this path, victory we may yet find.
Not victory in the Clone Wars.
But victory… For all time.— The Clone Wars, Lost Missions Season 6 Episode 13. Sacrifice.
If the story now renewed in The Force Awakens does not at first seem to be about remembrance, as my hands-down favorite of the trailers suggests to me it is, then it won’t be long, I feel, until the larger tale of Star Wars arcs its way back to the root of remembrance all the same.
It is woven into the very fabric of Story, just as it is woven into all of us.
Truth is truth: War is cruel, and tragic.
Endless, cyclic war unfathomably so.
But Star Wars carries other tales beneath its battered armor, and always has.
And not all endless tales are of war.
War may be a reason to tell the tale, but it is not the story.
There is. . .
Another. . .
