Someone once said, "Inner emptiness is not a void but an engine of possibility." I’m less sure. My hollow bones are no raging krayt dragon. Instead: a bleached skeleton in the Wastes. Destitute droids roam by in search of home while I lay thirsty and long since dead of any ambition, a desperate howl in the desert. What I need is a whisky Jedi to lend my corpse a cause, some damn fool idealistic crusade would do, anything to get my fighting blood astir. Maybe my Jundland is territory to be traversed? Could a broken old speeder carry my spirit to Eisley in search of a wretched hive of hope and potentiality? If so, come Lord Kenobi! Help me, as only you can! Together could we find redemption, a watering for our beleaguered souls?
I’ve been feeling very dead and dry inside lately. A lack of motivation rules supreme. For instance: today I slept most of the day. I didn’t feel particularly depressed or down, but I just couldn’t find that spark to get me going. I’m not proud of it, its just what happened. My sensei of sorts, Adam Savage, has a saying that “This is what is happening” which means that you need to embrace what is instead of inviting frustration or other negativity about what you wish could be. So I slept.
Having to work this afternoon kind of broke the spell of nothingness and got me going a little. I listened to a few upbeat songs just before my shift, and that got me going a little more. Then I started thinking. And then I wrote a poem in between working. I don’t know if it is a good poem, I don’t concern myself with that. I simply try to write the best damn poem I can at the time. And I don’t usually explain my poems, but I thought that maybe this time the exercise of explanation would do me good, so here goes:
I read a poem recently, and forgive me, I don’t remember where or I would quote and link to it. But the epigram for my poem is a paraphrase of that verse’s main idea. That poet said that our skeletons house a vast emptiness, but the turn was this idea that instead of being empty, we are full of untapped potential.
I feel dry inside. That always makes me think of deserts, those beautiful tracks of desolation that cover large portions of the rocky part of our planet. Deserts make me think of Tatooine, the all-desert planet from Star Wars. And from there my thoughts started to race with the Star Wars metaphors. My skeleton became that of the krayt dragon that R2-D2 and C-3P0 trudge past in the beginning of the first Star Wars film, A New Hope. “Wastes” refers to the name of that Tatooine desert, the Jundland Wastes.
That “desperate howl” is the noise that krayt dragons make when on the hunt, and which Obi-Wan Kenobi imitated to scare off the Tuskan Raiders who were assaulting Luke Skywalker. That leads naturally to Old Ben, who here is a “whisky Jedi”. That idea comes from Graham Greene’s The Power and the Glory, a story about a “whisky priest” that is, a drunk priest who struggles with doing his priestly duties and searches for redemption. I imagine that Obi-Wan is doing the same thing while hiding out on Tatooine and protecting young Skywalker. I wonder if, like he energized the bored Skywalker into his career as a Jedi, maybe Kenobi could do the same for me.
That phrase “blood astir” references another poem “Vagabond Song” by Bliss Carman in which the speaker says that “there is something in October sets the gypsy blood astir” by which is meant that the fall climate and trappings fires up the need to wander. I’ve always loved that poem, and here I bring in that idea that I need to be roused and my longing for an Obi-Wan Kenobi-type to set me ablaze.
From there I begin to wonder if maybe my desert, again the “Jundland Wastes”, is merely a time to be traversed and not a permanent dwelling. I call to mind Luke’s rusty X-34 landspeeder and the spaceport he and Kenobi raced to, Mos Eisley. I turn the tables though on that seedy city, a “hive of scum and villainy” as Kenobi calls it, instead reimagining it to be a hive of “hope and potentiality” as it really was a place that launched Kenobi’s resurgence and Luke’s emergence onto the galactic stage.
Finally, I liken Obi-Wan to a Christ-like figure of redemption, both his own as “whisky Jedi” (further tying in the religious aspect of The Power and the Glory) and mine from the desert inside my bones.
There you have it then. Just now, writing the poem and the explanation was exorcitive (did I just invent that word? I mean it was an exorcism of my soul). I feel loads better just having that out there and working through it in the writing for any who may read this poem and explanation. I don’t know, maybe it will do you good as well. I hope so.
a simple man 