Episode 103: Barack Obama is My Horcrux
POP CULTURE SPIRIT WOW
EPISODE 103: BARACK OBAMA IS MY HORCRUX
Sunday is the feast of St. Ignatius of Loyola, founder of the Jesuits and all around sweet guy/alien abduction aficionado. (Totally true. Look it up. Saints are weird.)
It’s also the birthday of completely-fictional-character-except-in-my-memory-where-we-are-best-friends-don't-ruin-this-for-me-wizard Harry Potter. Our boy Harry will be 36 this year, if you can believe it. (Fictional time goes much faster than real time, except in the work of George R.R. Martin. TURN IN THE BOOK GEORGE.)
It’s been nine years since last we heard from Harry (or George, really...sigh), but that’s about to change. On Sunday the script for the new London play “Harry Potter and the Cursed Child” will be released. Set nineteen years after the last book (in other words, the same year as the epilogue), it tells the story of Harry, his son Albus, and an "uncomfortable truth: sometimes, darkness comes from unexpected places."
Hermione is totally going dark, isn't she?
You know she is.
I was thinking a lot about Harry not too long ago. There’s that concept of the “horcrux” that’s so important in the later books. A horcrux is an object in which a witch or wizard hides a piece of himself in order to keep from completely dying. Voldemort hides little bits of himself in seven of them in the novels, and the last book in particular is all about Harry, Hermione and Ron trying to find and destroy these objects so they can finally be done with noseless Ralph Fiennes.
I wonder if there’s a way in which horcruxes are a real thing – not in the sense of ways to achieve immortality and/or scare children forever, but as a way of talking about people, places or things that speak to us in such a significant way that we feel like we discover and/or leave a little bit of ourselves there.
Like, for me, there’s this football stadium in Melbourne, Australia called the MCG (short for Melbourne Cricket Ground). It's enormous, holds over 100,000 people. I went there for the first time in the winter of 2008, and I don’t know what it was, I didn't understand the game at all (Australian Rules Football is like soccer meets football meets rugby with some serious elements of basketball, and I am not even kidding), but sitting in those stands was like a coming home. When I’ve had the opportunity to go back to Australia, I’ve made a point of returning to it, almost always by myself, which probably looks weird or sad to locals, but for me, though I love the sport, too, it's like going to your favorite church or park. I just want to be there, let it all sink in.
I have no doubt that there’s a little piece of me at the MCG. Maybe it’s less or just as much a piece that I hid there than a piece I discovered when I went – but God, that would mean maybe we’re more in the realm of PokémonGO than Harry Potter, so can we just ignore that fact?
In my life there are a bunch of places like this, and probably people and things, too, like the dense Foundations of Christian Thought by Karl Rahner that I read for a class in the winter of 1996. I have never cracked the volume since, but I have brought it with me through every move (and there have been six of them!) because reading it that first time was such a rich and important experience.
(If you’ve never read Rahner, I can’t recommend it enough. He can be very slow going, but it's brilliant. It's like theological poetry.) There’s definitely a piece of me in there -- or again, that I discovered there.
Little pieces of us we leave or discover all over. And there to be found years later once again.
(Jesus I am talking about PokémonGO aren't I? WHAT IS WRONG WITH THIS WORLD.)
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Speaking of things that are wrong...we now live in a world where presidential candidates ask foreign nationals to break laws to win elections. Which I guess is nice, if you have “coup” or “hack” on the “How will the United States end?” bingo.
I really can't imagine dealing with four more months of this campaign. Again, it's July and we're already at "Have foreign hackers take out my opponent." Seriously, where do you go from there? A kidnapping? Look alikes? Secret pacts with aliens who NEED ALL THE IPHONES?
But the last few weeks have also had some great moments, too. Like this review of Bill Clinton’s attire on Tuesday, written as though he were the next First Lady.
Or this New York Times article on what Barack Obama does after dinner each night. (It has the great title of “Obama After Dark”, and features, among other things, the detail that Barack eats exactly seven almonds every night. He recent denied this, and one tweeter replied, “Voldemort: Ha, ha, no, I don’t really have seven horcruxes.”)
Or John Oliver’s great insight into the Republican National Convention that for Trump and his people, feelings equal and/or trump (yep) facts. (It’s not just true for Trump; let’s be honest, pretty much every politician wants to speak to your gut instincts. But still “trumpiness”, as Stephen Colbert calls it, is a very special snowflake.)
Though it doesn't apply to me, I also very much like this (which comes from @amyferris):
So I guess we'll just get through it, right?
(Right?)
(At the current rate of crazy you may be seeing this GIF every week.)
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After being out of town for a couple months, lots of writing and planning going on in my little neck of the woods right now. A couple pilots I'm trying to convince myself to finish rewriting -- always lots of anxiety about sending things out into the world...
And a couple feature ideas I'm trying to sketch out -- space probes, refugees, and Comic Con all on the menu yesterday. Maybe even a book on spirituality or pop culture if I can convince someone to let me write one for them.
The next few months should be interesting... #ChineseCurses
++ LINKS ++
A song to inspire you.
An interview with former astronaut Mike Collins, which includes this great quote:
The moon kind of surprises me sometimes. I’ll be out at night and I’ll see a nice moon, and say, “Hey, that looks good.” Then I’ll say, “Oh shit, I went up there one time!” Kind of surprises me. It’s like there are two Moons, you know—the one that’s usually around, and then that one.
Speaking of exploration:
Yes, that is a Fanta can at the bottom of the Mariana Trench. Because people.
(Thanks to Nicholas Meyer's Not Doomed Yet climate change newsletter for the photo and the interview.)
Here's the first chapter of wonderful modern fairy tale/webcomic "Nimona", about a shapeshifting child and the super villain she wants to work for. It won an Eisner on Friday.
You can find the whole comic on the web right here, or buy it in print form for $7.92 here. It is wonderful.
Author author Noelle Stevenson on Nimona and our sense of self:
What's your “true self”, anyway? Nimona is in a unique position of being able to literally shape her physical form into whatever she feels like, but does that mean it's her true form? Is she a monster, or a little girl? You can see Ballister trying to figure out which one to talk to, but the truth is she's both, and neither. We all are. People see parts of us and might assume that's the whole story, and they might be mistaken in thinking they know who you are just from that, but it doesn't make them entirely wrong either. That IS you - it's just not all of you. This becomes much more literal for Nimona. If she feels like being a monster, she's a monster. Ballister really doesn't know much about her, but he knows there's more to her than that, even if in that moment that's her reality. He's seen other sides of her, and the thing is, he doesn't even know if she was telling the truth about those other sides, but he hopes she is.
A ridiculous article I wrote last year on St. Ignatius and Fox Mulder. (I had spent the previous three months trying to watch all past episodes of 'The X-Files" in anticipation for January's mini-series. I got through about 80, which is not even half and broke me. This piece is either fun insights learned on the journey or a good example of self-imposed Stockholm Syndrome.)
AND FINALLY THE MOST IMPORTANT THING YOU WILL SEE THIS WEEK OR PERHAPS THIS ENTIRE YEAR OF YOUR LIFE:
503 DAYS
"It's the biggest adventure you can have, making up your own life, and it's true for everybody. It's infinite possibility." -- Lawrence Kasdan
Have a good week. Look after one another. Forget about despair -- it always sounds way more convincing than it actually is. It's going to be okay. Eat something.