#of course i obsess over ephemera yet again

[whiskeyswifty]

Taylor Swift's The Eras Tour Poster - Luggage Tag Redesign

[dellebecque]

In His Garden (rough draft)

Here’s a little snippet of what I’ve been working on--there’s quite a bit more than this, but this is the most complete scene available thusfar, though even this isn’t finished and revised and may change drastically in content before I’m done.

Who: WoL!Aden, and the specter of an old friend When: Post-Innocence, pre-Tempest.  Major 5.0 spoilers.

Aden surfaced from the vision on his back, head pressed against the cool scored crystal of the floor.  It’d worked this time, Thancred’s ridiculous suggestion about how to shift when he felt a vision coming on in order to fall safely should he collapse with no one around--but his chest ached as it always did after a vision, and he could taste the plastery white bile in the back of his throat, and he convulsed once with a spike of white hot agony that pulled a pained gasp from him unbidden--that had nothing to do with the vision.  For a moment all Aden could do was lay on the floor focusing on his breathing, on trying to find a calm center.

But there was no calm center.  It’d been shot in the back while trying to save his life.  He rolled onto his side before the second surge of thick white liquid filled his mouth and managed to spit it out, choking and gasping as his stomach clenched around nothing.  He felt so hollow, empty and wrung out and he needed to… to…

Aden pushed himself to hands and knees with a grunt of effort, gritting his teeth against the pain.  You are in his garden.  And even if he wasn’t here, this was his sanctum.  The specter of G’raha lingered everywhere here, and that was a comfort.  Even absent he offered Aden shelter in the privacy to be weak for a while, the safety of the tower.  If he turned here, it would take some time to make his way out, and Lyna would surely rouse the guard before he could….

He shook his head hard, and looked up, gaze darting frantically.  There had to be something in here he could use as a distraction--a book with a dark leather binding caught his eye, and Aden carefully pushed himself to his feet, made his way over to it.  Heavensward, it said.  Edmont’s memoirs.  He knew about them, even if he hadn’t seen a published copy yet, and put the book aside for what lay beneath--a little gray box, smartly folded, and full of yellowed letters that’d been treated with an alchemical substance to preserve them.  Dearest Paplymo--he put the box down, not reading any further.  He didn’t need to know Lyse’s innermost thoughts, had no right to pry into the grieving over her dearest friend.  Another box, this one full of alchemically treated newspaper clippings: articles about the theater troupe in Kugane and their forays into Rabanastre.  A serialized report about the war in Ala Mhigo.  A sketch of him talking to Raubahn in Castrum Oriens, done in a hasty style that made their conversation seem urgent.  Another from the rather ill-fated day of the first council meeting in Ala Mhigo--the only one he’d agreed to stand for, and others followed captured by quick hands he hadn’t noticed, all clipped from newspapers--and some he was certain had not yet been made.  There was a copy of a comic in the Doman fashion that seemed to bear a stylized likeness of him on the cover--he definitely hadn’t been asked about that, and would have to quiz Hancock when next he saw the man--and one of those thrice-damned books that’d beaten him home from the Steppes about a mysterious and powerful foreign warrior’s less than family friendly (and entirely fictional) misadventures. He put the box down, unable to process it all, and saw a familiar old book tucked away--his favorite travelogue, one written by a dragoon scouting in the hinterlands some decades prior, and one he hadn’t found a new copy of.  He opened it carefully, found each individual page had been treated with that same alchemical preservative, and on the inside cover in faded ink:

Sweet dreams, you heroic moron.  I’ll see you on the morrow.  -A.D.

It’d been a joke, something to defuse the terrible tension of knowing G’raha would shut those doors behind him, of the knowledge that he’d never see the man again--one of the few people who’d treated him like a man rather than a weapon at the time, and another step towards convincing him he could keep nothing and no one of value.  He put the book down, staring dumbfounded at the pile of ephemera.  Of course G’raha had needed to do research--to find out when to summon him from--he’d seen that, hadn’t he, in that strange dream the Echo had visited upon him?  As his eyes unfocused, overwhelmed by all this stuff, something small and dark tucked away beneath everything caught his attention, and Aden carefully moved the books and boxes of loose papers aside.  A very small, plain wooden box, no bigger than his palm, and when he opened it his heart stopped.

Inside sat a ring, dark as drachenmail and engraved with twining branches, a small sapphire and small diamond embedded side by side.  Aden choked, and it had nothing to do with the light.  He’d lost it in Rhalgr’s Reach, the first time he fought Zenos, and thought it gone for good.  But somewhere in the future someone had found his engagement ring, and somehow G’raha knew it for what it was. He slipped it onto his finger unconsciously, ran his thumb over the cool metal in what had once been a reassuring gesture.  It still worked.

Aden collapsed heavily into the only chair not piled with books and stared at the room.  You are in his garden.  The very center of it, perhaps, the seat of a hundred-year obsession with saving his life.  How much had G’raha done for these people, and how much for him?  Who had he thought of when he bound himself to the tower and ruined his flesh in exchange for enough time?  Had he thought then, I’ll see you on the morrow?  Aden couldn’t countenance that level of dedication, even faced with all the proof of it.  They had known each other for a matter of weeks while exploring the tower, and yet…

Five years ago it would've unnerved him, such all-consuming dedication. Two years ago it would have angered him, such an invasion of privacy.  Scarce  months, and it would have terrified him, with Zenos' obsession still fresh in his mind.  Yet now all he felt was a melancholic sorrow, a different kind of hollowness next to the gnawing ache of the light.

The Exarch had clearly faced a world without Aden's lasting mark and denied it. He had given everything of himself to secure a new future, a happier one, and though he had meant to die for it first he had lived for it.  He had surrendered himself wholly to Aden with zealous conviction, even with Aden two centuries dead and gone.

And Aden found he could do nothing less.  Despite the obfuscation and their terrible circumstances, the Exarch had offered him the time and peace to begin healing from--everything, and in every word and deed proven he was not so alone as he’d thought all these years.  Even if it were too late to save G'raha, he would ensure the man's faith had not been misplaced.  He swallowed back white bile, and slowly stood from the chair, rubbing his thumb against the cool metal of the ring.

No, that would not be enough. His hands clenched into loose fists, the ring heavy against his skin.  I will not lose this one.

[rosalind-of-arden]

Ash and Quill Reread chapter 1

Time to start on the next book. Just like the last two, I’m looking for interesting details involving Morgan, Wolfe, and Santi, and I’m easily distracted by worldbuilding and such.

We begin with the Archivist and Artifex plotting again. They consider the Wolfe pack more dangerous than Wales. Also, the Artifex reports that the pack was seen by “one of the last librarians to flee.” That’s Naomi. The Artifex being the Artifex, did he have a nice, friendly meeting with her? Or haul her off to Rome? 

Again, here’s that personal dislike between the Artifex and Wolfe: “Christopher Wolfe should have been dead years ago, and none of us has managed to put him in the ground yet.”

Even the fucking Artifex thinks Gregory is vile. That’s really saying something. No mention of Gregory’s age here.

The Artifex claims to have had Eskander dragged out of his room. But in Smoke and Iron, no one can get past his wards. Does the Artifex have a way in or is the Artifex lying? Leaning toward Artifex is lying.

Next ephemera is from the Burner leader of London. Wasn’t that Kate? Is there someone above her? And wasn’t Kate going to Philadelphia?

No mention yet of where they landed in Philadelphia. Need to watch for this.

And we have a time change! “Jess’s head hurt fiercely in the glare of the sun.” Since it was night in London, and there’s a 5-hour difference, guessing late afternoon/early evening here (going from 9/10pm to 4/5pm maybe?).

Having lived near Philly for a fairly long time, I very much want to know which stadium this is, if it’s a real one at all. In general, I have trouble lining up the city in this book with the city I’m familiar with, which I suppose fits with the dramatically different history in America.

Wolfe is furious and trembling. Jess seems to think the tremors are rage, but that’s not what they’re usually a symptom of in Wolfe. And here’s angry, triggered Wolfe still taking a moment to comfort Jess.

Wolfe, once again, snarking in the face of threats.

Santi, equally snarky, just with a polite tone.

Let us just take a moment to swoon over Wolfe, turning Beck’s own words against him. “Silky, dark contempt.” Yum.

There’s a lot going on with Wolfe’s resistance here. There’s his stubbornness, of course. Belief in the ideals he just spoke of. Jess sees those well enough. But I don’t think Jess quite picks up on how much of it is strategy. Wolfe is drawing attention to himself as the uncooperative one, making the Burners angry with him so they’ll be less likely to pick on the others and potentially giving the others a chance to act while the Burners are distracted. This would be a brave thing for anyone to do, but especially so for Wolfe, who is so deeply affected by a traumatic experience as a prisoner singled out for abuse.

And speaking of trauma, I suspect that plays into this as well. As Wolfe says, the robe is a symbol of his position as a Scholar, which the Library has already tried, and failed, to take from him. He is not giving that up willingly. Also, when he was arrested, he would have been forced to take off his robe to change into prison clothes. That isn’t an experience he wants to repeat.

Wolfe’s poker face again: no change in expression while the Burner slices his robe off. This has to be bringing up some bad memories. He has very likely had clothing forcibly removed before, probably as a prelude to torture. Canon torture methods used on him include being cut. And here he is showing no response to something that would be upsetting even to a person without his specific background. I am torn between theories here. One, that the poker face is, itself, a trauma response, and he’s just dissociating here so much that he’s not even fully present mentally while this is happening. And two, that he has obsessively practiced keeping emotion from showing.

Now look at how strongly Santi reacts. A “murderous growl” and attempted violence. Nothing short of a concussion is keeping him from protecting Wolfe. And this has to be traumatic for Santi to watch: a knife that close to Wolfe’s body, Wolfe’s clothes being torn off (only the outermost layer, but still), and Santi can’t stop it from happening.

Santi’s reaction reads as purely emotional to me, but I will allow for the possibility that he, like Wolfe, is drawing attention to himself as a troublemaker to keep the heat off the kids.

Going to leave the Khalila analysis to @thegreatlibraryfangirl, but I just have to squeal about her awesomeness here. She takes the opportunity that Wolfe created for her and runs with it.

Philadelphia. “we are your brothers” “see how fraternal we can be”. *giggles* How does Jess not pick up on the joke here? Normally, I wouldn’t expect a kid from England to get it, but they’re all supposedly speaking Greek.

There are enough Spanish speakers in Philadelphia for there to be “scattered laughter” at Dario’s swearing. Totally expected for real world Philly, but interesting for Libraryverse. Do we have Spanish colonialism in the Americas here too? Or a decent number of folks from Spain joining the Burners? Or just increased multilingualism?

Jess observes Wolfe’s “brittle kind of stillness.” How triggered is Wolfe that even Jess can tell something’s wrong? But he still has some defensive sarcasm in him.

KHALILA!!!! (going to shut up now)

Glain seems to have made a full recovery from that injury from two days ago.

Jess must be good at deep throating. Just saying.

Wolfe and Santi submit to the search without trouble. Do they, as Jess suspects, know that Jess is up to something? Maybe. They’re both perceptive enough to catch Khalila slipping Jess a hairpin. But, as usual, I suspect trauma. Wolfe and Santi are both also very quiet. Wolfe doesn’t say anything for the rest of the chapter. Santi speaks only to give orders after Jess picks the lock. Consider how Wolfe reacts to being put in prison in Smoke and Iron: he loses his mind and spends a whole day sitting there shaking. Consider how he couldn’t stand to step into the cell in Paper and Fire. My theory is that Wolfe is pretty much falling apart here, and Santi is focused on taking care of him. Santi is paying just enough attention to the kids to intervene when they show signs of making trouble.

Other possibility: Wolfe and Santi are doing their own scheming, very quietly, and they avoid the “we’re all family” conversation because they are in denial about how much of dads they have become.

[serenedash]

With kh3 I’ve been forced to look back at all of the foreteller content I’ve made these past 2-ish years so here’s me reflecting on it all and explaining why I love these dorks so much. It’s lengthy I’m sorry but what else do you expect from someone who’s been stanning a fucking mobile game since it’s release. There’s some early art of the foretellers I did at the end too!

There’s kh3 spoilers you’ve been warned!

So upon starting KHUX you get a little intro that talks about the MoM’s 6 apprentices and how 5 of them were given books of prophecy. Immediately I was drawn to the mysterious 6th apprentice cause my dumb ass has always loved minor characters and my dumb ass also gets WAY too invested in shit. So time passes I kinda forgot about it until plot started to pick up in the game and I remembered Mysterious 6th Apprentice and I also learned KHX existed so of course I binged those sweet sweet cut scenes (at that point global was up to Ephemera clock tower shenanigans and JP hadn’t moved past where X had ended yet).

So like my whole thing with this was why wasn’t anyone talking about Luxu?!?!? Or even the foretellers for that matter!! Everyone seemed focused on Ephemera and Skuld at that point. And my dumb bitch ass was like “well if no one will care IM GONNA CARE AND I’LL MAKE THE CONTENT MYSELF” cause I’m very much “if you want something done, do it yourself” which is honestly the TL;DR of all of this.

So then I got to work on drawing my appearance head canons for the foretellers; KHUX had been out globally for about a year now and 2.8 was about to drop. I still remember when we first had Luxu speak in a trailer, hearing him say “but what about the others?” fucking GOT ME SO DAMN GOOD I WAS HEAD OVER HEELS FOR THIS BOY not romantically, like in a “I stan u and want to protect u” sorta way because it felt like all this mystery kinda just melted away and here was this kid forced to do something shady we knew nothing about.

So 2.8 drops in Japan, people hack the game for the english audio and the second that shit is on youtube I was watching it. Lemme tell you I have rewatched that damn movie so many times its not even funny and there are certain scenes that make me scream every time. Case of Luxu tho will always get me good of course and even in such a short scene I felt like there was so much about Luxu that was shown. He cares about the others, he’s a bit of a silly kid (I died when he yelled EW and also at the fact he legit thought the keyblade was called no name when mom was just like “idk it has no name”), he’s unsure of what to do and how well he can do it, but he’s dedicated to what he’s been told to do. I mean obviously between then and KH3 a lot has happened to him that’s definitely changed him but that makes me love him more but I already wrote a post about that.

I care about all the foretellers individually and have a lot of feelings on each of them but Luxu will always be the first one I was obsessed with. We knew so little about him and it was so interesting to me and since KHUX released I’ve been trying to read between the lines and figure it all out myself; creating content where there was none before. I could write an essay on like each foreteller and my interpretations of them but like idk who’d read that LOL I just really love them all!!!! I can’t really rank them in who I love most to least cause it’s basically like Luxu and then everyone else. Like I love writing fics with Ava, Aced’s character is fun to explore, Invi and Gula are like Made for shitposts I love them so much, and ngl I project onto Ira a lot I latched onto him for personal reasons oops

I guess in the end all there is to it is just I’m a sucker for minor characters and mysteries. When I talk about Luxu to non KHUX fans I always describe him as “the minorist of minor characters in a minor game.” I just love taking what little information we have and analyzing it over and over again, trying to figure out what it all means. My love for him hasn’t changed and I’m more excited than ever to see what happens next!!! Cause yknow its like sure there’s so much art and fics and whatnot for big major characters, but what about those other characters??? SOMEONE’S gotta love them!!! Someone out there finished kh3 and is like “huh I guess there’s people out here who like Luxu/the foretellers and they must be really happy” and THEY’D BE RIGHT

tbh I was totally convinced after the keyblade war in KHUX we were never gonna see the foretellers again and I was a little resigned afterwards but now I’m REALLY EXCITED cause I thought they were just like characters written to die and be forgotten about bUT SIKE THERES MORE TO BE DONE

ANYWAY HAVE SOME OLD ASS ART

^^^Luxu and Gula!! They were the first ones I drew :V I was high key invested in Gula at first because I love his personality. I call this phase of my art “I have no idea how NOT to draw bangs” rip in fucking pieces that old luxu hair (this is almost 3 years old maybe??) fun fact Luxu’s design is based off of one of the hairstyles in game for the male avatar

^^^My first full sheet of the foretellers!! As you can see Gula and Luxu look better and more like how I draw them now dsgfdhgfhgh I did this like right after back cover dropped. I should go back to drawing Invi with the swirly hair over the shoulder look tbh

^^^The first time I attempted drawing all of them digitally but I was very new to digital art :V I never finished this oops. I actually ended up finishing half of these I think but for the sake of uniformity I left all the hair blank for this post. I remember thinking Ava here was like the Height of my artistic talent

^^^And for comparison my latest drawings of the bunch I did about a year ago :D tbh tho I wanna redo this cause I’ve definitely started drawing them a bit differently (just a bit) also this was when I was still figuring out digital art and now I know what I’m doing lol  I did these over the span of a few months and I did Aced last bc I wasn’t really satisfied with his design-- I tried SO MANY hairstyles for him before I was like “fuck it you know what he’s the kinda guy that doesn’t do shit to his hair he just ties it up and forgets about it there’s nothing cool with his hair.” And I’ll always LOVE how invi came out here she looks gorgeous. Also fun fact is that I always imagined Ava being like everyone’s baby sibling so in her design I tried to incorporate some stuff from the others, mainly being same earrings as Ira and a braid like Gula. I’ve actually put a lot of thought into Ava’s design tbh?? Like she has the shortest hair out of everyone; as an apprentice she had long hair but when she became a master she cut it short to feel more “adult” in her view.

[This is a mini rant] Also something interesting is that I’ve gotten a lot of shit about Ava’s design specifically? Like yall REALLY hate brown skinned people and girls with short hair huh??? People really don’t like me making the majority of the foretellers not white (cause Gula is the only one I headcanon as being white) but I guess because Ava is the most popular people REALLY don’t like it when I do it with her. Tbh since then I’ve purposefully made her skin and hair darker out of spite cause I do actually have a faceclaim for her (Laurie Hernandez) so like take that racists

[spynotebook]

In 1993, before the magical girl anime Sailor Moon was released in the U.S., there was an alternate vision for it. It was an American vision. A total remake of the show with Saturday morning-style animation, intercut with footage of real-life, all-American high school teens.

“Politically correct,” in the words of its creators, the proposed Sailor Moon would star Hispanic, black, Asian, and handicapped Sailor Scouts. The girls rode surfboards that rocketed them into space, to the tune of a bubblegum pop soundtrack.

A little psychedelic, the miscellaneous artifacts of this Sailor Moon together form either a pitch-perfect vision for a ‘90s American children’s show or, to die-hard anime fans, an irreverent Sailor Moon funhouse mirror straight from hell’s grimy content buckets.

This red, white, and blue Sailor Moon plan never got into orbit, and in 1995, the original, Japanese Sailor Moon anime began airing on U.S. television. 25 years ago, the Americanized version was a narrowly-avoided disaster, but a disaster that apparently left behind a 17-minute pilot episode, which I decided long ago that I had to try to find.

A live-action scene from Toon Makers’ version of Sailor Moon.

Image: Renaissance Atlantic/ToonMakers (Sam Moreland)

Sailor Moon’s road to global success was a long and somewhat tortured one. In 1991, manga artist Naoko Takeuchi premiered a shōjo (girls’) comic called Pretty Soldier Sailor Moon in Japan. It follows the adventures of a group of teenaged girl superheroes who fight villains and save the world. They’re led by Sailor Moon, the alter ego of Usagi Tsukino, a ditsy but good-hearted girl with two meatballs of blonde hair atop her head and a feline companion named Luna. Usagi’s time is split between her extra-planetary adventures and typical teen antics, like playing video games, blowing off homework, and chasing cute boys. It was a runaway hit in Japan, and behemoth studio Toei Animation quickly adapted Sailor Moon into an anime in 1992. It ran for 200 episodes and so far has generated well over $5 billion in merchandise sales, including toys by Bandai—the company that explored an Americanized version, as a way to sell toys here.

Decades later, the pilot for the American Sailor Moon show has achieved mythological status. That pilot—the only episode ever made—vanished into thin air, its remains scattered across the internet like animated ashes. Fans have labored to piece together the show’s history on Geocities-style websites with infinite-scroll Sailor Moon fan art and labyrinthine lost-media wikis. For over two decades, they’ve searched for its only episode with no success. I was unable to play bystander to a piece of lost anime ephemera. Immediately upon hearing about the legendary American Sailor Moon pilot, I knew I had to try to find it. I would not rest until I’d exhausted every lead.

After speaking with the dead show’s creator, animator, biggest fans, and haters, I think I have finally uncovered the full history of anime’s white whale. It involves a quarter-million-dollar unsuccessful investment, a drugged-up cat, no shortage of corporate intrigue, a Storage Wars-style drama, several eBay bidding wars, and, finally, a dusted-over DigiBeta reel in a retired millionaire’s Florida garage—which brought its own surprises.

Illustration: Viz Media

In the early ‘90s, American television was not fertile ground for Japanese animation. Sure, Japan’s most popular cartoon, the kid-friendly Astro Boy, had made its way over through NBC Studios in the ‘60s. But when it came to what we think of as anime today, mainstream America simply didn’t have an appetite for it yet. Thrice-ripped VHS tapes fell into the hands of small, passionate groups of enthusiasts who’d subtitle anime for friends and pen pals. It wasn’t until 1997, when Cartoon Network launched an anime programming block called Toonami, that anime began to resonate powerfully with American kids and teens. A generation of children—myself included—grew up alongside Dragon Ball Z, Mobile Suit Gundam Wing, Outlaw Star and, of course, Sailor Moon.

Japanese kids’ entertainment had made some major inroads into American kids’ culture, but it was live-action, rubber-suit superheroes, not animation. It all got started one day in 1984, when kids’ TV producer Haim Saban was relaxing in a hotel room in Japan on business. He flicked through the channels playing game show after game show until, as he told the LA Times, he landed on something that caught his attention. “All of the sudden there were these five kids in spandex fighting monsters. Don’t ask me why, but I fell in love. It was so campy!”

The show was called Kyōryū Sentai Zyuranger, and after 8 years of rejections, Saban was finally able to bring it to the U.S. as Mighty Morphin’ Power Rangers. He hired American actors, spliced in some of the original explosions and monsters, and aired it to an audience of millions. It was proof that in the U.S. there was an appetite for campy Japanese superhero television. (Saban, who is chairman of the board of Univision, which owns Kotaku, did not return requests for comment.) The American version of the show was produced by a company called Renaissance Atlantic, and its president Frank Ward was on the prowl for a similar hit.

Sailor Moon toys released by Bandai in the U.S. in 1995.

Photo: Ken Faught/Toronto Star (Getty Images)

Ward was the former president of Bandai’s American division. The Japanese toymaker was currently raking in American dollars from Power Rangers toys, and Ward saw similar dollar signs when he looked at the toys Bandai was making in Japan of Usagi and her sailor friends.

Ward was unflappably confident that Japanese cartoons would find an audience on American television—and, more importantly, a consumer base for merchandise. For Power Rangers, it worked; I possessed two complete sets of Power Rangers bedsheets as a child. In the ‘90s, Power Rangers paraphernalia was inescapable. Ward, age 50 back then, figured that he could do the same with Sailor Moon, a similarly campy superhero show with a girl audience in mind. At that point, American investors believed it was a big risk to air a girls’ superhero show on American television. Didn’t only boys like superheroes? Ward believed that wasn’t the case.

I had never heard of Frank Ward until well after I kicked off this investigation. He has essentially no internet footprint—on purpose, he’d eventually tell me. I only found his name at the end of a long, unraveling string of what felt like dead-end internet investigative work.

“I don’t think it’s been shown before. And may it not be again.”

I heard of the American Sailor Moon pilot scrolling through Reddit in a trance-like state one afternoon at work. Accompanying the post was an image of a whitebread Barbie-like heroine in the Japanese sailor suit of an anime magical girl. Huh, I thought. That’s wacky. I cover anime for Kotaku, but was never in on the Sailor Moon hype. It was not my thing as a kid, and Sailor Moon’s 2014 reboot, Sailor Moon Crystal, wasn’t my thing as an adult. It was always more of a curiosity to me than something I enjoyed watching. In elementary school, I’d occasionally stow away in the basement to peep an episode before tuning in for Dragon Ball’s Toonami slot with my brother. In my tomboy-kid estimation, the show was very girly, a little incomprehensible, and conflicted with my self-image. Unquestionably, though, Sailor Moon is powerful to a generation of American girls my age.

Sailor Moon fandom is unquantifiably enormous. Its most extreme end has obsessed over the American, live-action Sailor Moon show for decades the same way diehard Twilight fans might hate-read the entirety of Fifty Shades of Grey. On scattered Sailor Moon fan sites, true connoisseurs have collected the detritus of the never-aired show. It’s blasphemous. And it’s hard to look away from. Most infamous, and complete, is what appears to be a music video attached to it. The only time it was ever shown publicly was at 1995’s Anime Expo, a small convention held at the Los Angeles airport Hilton the year that Sailor Moon, the original anime, debuted on U.S. television.

It opens with a plucky xylophone pop beat, a pan through the solar system, and, suddenly, the white-toothed smile of some high school Betty, who we must presume is Sailor Moon. The theme song kicks in, and it is of that classic overexplain-the-plot type typical of the 90s.

Sometimes she’s a fun-loving 16-year-old girl

Sailor, Sailor Moon

Her animated incarnation then appears in the uniform of the Sailor Scouts, which she pirouettes from within a pillar of sparkles.

Sometimes she’s a superhero for the world

Sailor, Sailor Moon

Then—whiplash—we see her giggling with her friends at school. And, next, an animated cat with a moon on its forehead. The girls are gliding around space on sailboats. Now, blasting away monsters. The live-action Sailor Scouts, are doing the monkey dance next to their bunk beds. In the recording, the crowd laughs riotously.

“I don’t think it’s been shown before,” said the presenter after the crowd settled down. “And may it not be again.”

As far as anyone can tell, it was not. The only versions of this opening that you can find on the Internet are a handful of audience recordings, taken from odd angles, with crowd noises polluting the soundtrack.

Scrolling through an endearingly archaic site called MoonSisters, which tells the story of this rogue Sailor Moon in bold white text against a blocky blue background, I read an amateur cartoonist named Koriander’s retelling of the show’s creation. As she tells it, bootleggers in America were already dubbing the Japanese Sailor Moon show in the early ‘90s when an animation and advertising company called Toon Makers decided to make its pitch to get in on the Sailor Moon action. They made the pilot, which failed for unexplained reasons. Below the short history is Koriander’s salty commentary—she hates it—and some scans of animation cels that were created for the production.

An animation cel from Toon Makers’ Sailor Moon.

Toon Makers’ version of (L-R) Sailors Venus, Mercury, Moon, and Jupiter.

Toon Makers’ Sailor Moon, about to transform.

Sailor Mars on her sky flyer.

Sailor Mercury, who used a wheelchair in the live-action portions of the show, rode a sky flyer in the animated action segments.

Toon Makers’ take on Sailor Jupiter.

1 / 6

My first task toward uncovering the pilot was to call Toon Makers, the company whose name and contact information appears at the start of the video. It felt like a longshot that someone who’d worked on this short-lived, one-off novelty a quarter century ago would be around to pick up the phone. And yet, he was, and his name was Rocky Solotoff, the head of Toon Makers. It was the day before a long weekend, but Solotoff, in a hummy baritone radio voice, was still happy to explain his side of the story to me. Back then, he said, they called it “Project Y.”

Toon Makers created a 17-minute long pilot episode of the show, Solotoff said, something they could shop around to networks. “It was not for broadcast. It was literally proof of concept. We wrote it. We designed it. It was live-action and animation. It has lived longer than we ever thought it would,” he said.

Toon Makers was hired by a company called Renaissance Atlantic to cobble together a pilot, Solotoff said. (Sure enough, Frank Ward’s company name appears at the end of the video.) He found American actors and animators, although as was the standard in those days, some of the animation was created in Korea under the supervision of a man named Raymond Iacovacci.

Solotoff said that his crew scripted, designed, and shot the pilot, all as work for hire. He had 15 staffers, plus the Korean team, working on the pilot, which he said cost $280,000 in 1993 dollars. Solotoff spent six months making the proof-of-concept video. The video shown at the anime convention, he said, was a part of Toon Makers’ animation reel, something they’d send around to drum up new business.

“You guys are in for it. And if I break a nail, you’re really in for it.”

I wasn’t the first person to call Toon Makers asking about the pilot. Solotoff said that he receives two or three inquiries every month from Sailor Moon hunters hoping to track it down. Eventually, he just stopped responding.

Even if Solotoff didn’t have the video I coveted, I wanted to ask him more about the show. “It was a time when ‘politically correct’ became ‘politically correct,’” he said. “We just wanted to keep the flavor of Sailor Moon and make it something where people who had no idea what it was could identify with these characters.” Solotoff recalled designing Sailor Mercury’s character to be a red-headed girl in a wheelchair. “We created a flying machine for her when they went into the animated world,” he said.

One actor for this American Sailor Moon was a cat who played both Luna and Artemis, Sailor Moon’s talking feline guides. Working with cats on-screen is notoriously difficult. “They drugged the cat so much it kept peeing on everything,” Solotoff said.

“It basically just died on the vine,” Solotoff said of the show. “The people who actually owned the concept sold the rights for the original anime.” The powers that be decided that dubbing the original anime into English was the way to go, and the American version was summarily axed. But what Solotoff didn’t, or couldn’t, answer was nagging me. Who funded the $280,000 pilot? Who had the idea to do this in the first place? What was the intended audience? How did the animation cels for this never-aired project make their way onto the internet? And, finally, where the hell was the pilot today?

Solotoff said he didn’t know where the pilot was, and even if he did, he didn’t own the copyright and could not allow me to distribute it. Disappointed, but invigorated from having found Solotoff, I decided to take a more grassroots approach.

On Deviantart, I found Koriander, the curator of that Sailor Moon fan site MoonSisters. Shortly after, I gave her a call. Perhaps, I thought, her story of how she got the animation cels could lead me to the pilot.

“I remember seeing this and being totally aghast,” she said of the show. “But while my initial reaction was very negative, it was also very serious. It seemed like someone put a lot of effort into it. How many episodes were planned? What was the thought process for the design?” After reading about the show in a short blurb in Animerica, a now-defunct anime magazine, finding out everything she could about it “became an odyssey.”

“The television industry was all boys’ stuff.”

Koriander collected the cels in the same place everything turns up, these days: eBay. Around 2012, somebody on a Sailor Moon forum alerted users that the animation cels had hit the auction block site. Another fan who purchased some cels, Sam Moreland, told me he paid $100 for an image of Sailor Moon on her glider. Another cel, with images of Sailor Moon’s transformation, sold for $500. The owner of SailorMoonNews.com purchased some pages from the script, which he posted online. It opens on the moon.

We begin with Sailor Moon’s betrothal to Darian, the prince of the Earth. “Oh Darian, I’ve so looked forward to this day,” says Sailor Moon, who, according to the script, is “obviously in love.” “As have I,” Darian responds. At last, we will be together.” Then, a chill breeze. There’s a solar eclipse.

“Suddenly,” says a narrator, “the dark galleon of Queen Beryl appeared on the horizon.” The princesses hasten to their “sky flyers.”

“So this is what I missed the dance for?” asks Sailor Venus. “You guys are in for it. And if I break a nail, you’re really in for it.”

The script is completely bonkers. It’s impossible to picture the lines being recited without dramatically furrowed brows or evil-damning finger-pointing. The corniness is palpable. The world-building is questionable. And yet, if this aired when I was in elementary school, I would have eagerly tuned in, just as I tuned into Power Rangers.

The question remained: How did this stuff get out of Toon Makers’ vault? “From what I had heard, there was a storage locker that had been owned by Raymond Iacovacci,” said Moreland. According to his LinkedIn, Iacovacci is a writer, director, producer, and graphic designer who has resided in Los Angeles, Sarasota, Sydney, Manila and Seoul. After the project failed, Iacovacci was apparently made custodian of the cells, the script, the footage, and everything else, and put it all in a Los Angeles storage unit. Iacovacci apparently slipped up on paying rent, the unit was auctioned off, and the buyer sold the contents on eBay. I wondered whether they knew what they had.

For me, hearing that that everything left over from the American Sailor Moon show had been scattered to the four winds was immensely demoralizing. If the original tape of the pilot was in there, it could be anywhere, now. Iacovacci, proved impossible to reach. The Japanese corporation Toei, which owns the rights to Sailor Moon, did not return a request for comment. Saban’s company proved unhelpful.

Lead after lead turned up nothing, and things were looking hopeless. Unless, I thought, there was another copy. And perhaps, I thought, that copy might be in the possession of whoever helped fund the crazy thing: Renaissance Atlantic, the now-defunct production company that worked to bring over Power Rangers.

Renaissance Atlantic’s internet presence exists in small whispers and cursory mentions on film sites and aggregators. The only thing I could find with a name attached was a 1994 Los Angeles Times article about the Power Rangers toy supply chain, and that name was Frank Ward. Unfortunately, Ward turned out to have zero Internet footprint, no contact information, no personal website. One of the only other mentions I could find on the Internet about Ward was a children’s book that he’d co-authored called Moville, which was published in 1999 by Renaissance Atlantic. No copies were available on Amazon, but there was a scan of its cover, which credited one Stephanie Fortel as the book’s illustrator. She did have an Internet presence, and I emailed her.

One day later, I received an email in response—from Frank Ward.

Great detective work Cecilia.......you found Frank Ward, he of Sailor Moon infamy. I was the founder and President of Renaissance Atlantic and expended an enormous amount of time and $ trying to bring Toei/Bandai’s Japan’s hit series to the US. My concept was to produce a live action series to the US. Both Fox and Saban (with whom I had worked on Power Rangers....and other shows) were all for it and planning had progressed.........until we hit the great wall of Japanese intrigue and enigma.

Woah, I thought. Now we’re getting somewhere.

Ward and I soon connected on a call. Now a 77-year-old retiree, he resides in Florida, and makes a point to say that he lives near the former senator George McGovern, who famously said: “You know, sometimes, when they say you’re ahead of your time, it’s just a polite way of saying you have a real bad sense of timing.” Ward paraphrases McGovern slightly differently: “The worst thing a politician can do is to be right too soon. Sailor Moon was a case of being right too soon.”

As the president of Bandai America in the 1980s, Ward was like the Cassandra of anime: He saw the potential for the Japanese cartoon medium to spread its seed—and Bandai’s toys—in the U.S., but nobody who could help believed him. “Japanese anime was viewed as a joke here in America,” he said. “There wasn’t a network that would go near them.” After working on Power Rangers, Ward started looking at Sailor Moon. In addition to its being anime, Sailor Moon had another count against it in the eyes of American television networks: “The television industry was all boys’ stuff,” Ward said.

Sailor Moon cosplayers at 2014's Amazing Arizona Comic Con.

Photo: Gage Skidmore (Flickr)

Bandai had the rights to Sailor Moon toys, but no show to sell those toys in America. Ward wanted to share Japan’s beloved magical girls with superhero-obsessed American kids and sell Usagi dolls at Toys ‘R’ Us. He didn’t think simply dubbing the anime would work: Some scenes, like Sailor Moon in the bathtub, were too risqué for Saturday morning. A lot of cultural context would be lost. Also, Ward said, Toei wouldn’t agree to change anything significant in the show for American audiences. “We could take that animation or not. I just said no.”

“I had this bright idea to take that series, if I can get the rights, and work with Saban as a producer and make a show,” Ward said. “I went out to make a pilot all by myself and spent too much money doing it. It mixed live action with animation. You’re using real American girls doing American things—going to high school, talking to each other. When crises emerged in the world, they morphed into their animated versions.”

Ward contacted Rocky Solotoff at Toon Makers to make the proof-of-concept pilot—17 minutes of American Sailor Moon psychedelica. He says he invested $50,000 of his own money in it. Once the pilot was complete, Ward flew to Toy Fair in New York to air it. To hear Ward tell it, Fox was interested. Saban was interested. Bandai, apparently, was interested. Then, he says, “out of nowhere, came this little morsel from Toei: ‘Well, sorry, but we gave the animation rights to someone else.’”

That “someone else” was Dic Entertainment, whose name Ward relays with a small sigh. Dic, a familiar brand name to kids watching Saturday morning toons, would air Sailor Moon in its original form. It did make several changes—removing nudity, rewriting gay characters as straight, taking out some violent scenes—but by and large it was the real thing.

To Ward, this was a betrayal. He felt he’d been reeling in a catch potentially the size of Power Rangers, and had nearly gotten it on shore, but had the line cut on him for a cheaper option that he felt wouldn’t succeed. That was the end of Ward’s pilot, but it wasn’t a big success for Sailor Moon. The original airing of the show was a failure, cancelled quickly after low ratings and sluggish sales of Sailor Moon dolls. It wasn’t until later that the show became popular. Ward was surprised to hear that in the meantime, his own failure—the American Sailor Moon bastard pilot—was now a sought-after artifact.

“I do hope after all this there is something worthwhile on the film. Maddening if zip.”

After Ward described the whole story, I put the question to him: “Do you have the original? Do you have the copyright? If so, can we air it?”

It was possible, Ward said, that the pilot was sitting in his garage. And yes, he controlled the copyright. Gold.

Ward and I corresponded over the next few months via email. I checked in with him every week. Hey, hope you’re well. Did you find it? Hey, sorry to bother you. What’s the status on this? Eventually, he got back to me with good news: He’d found a tape reel in his garage that he believed contained the pilot. He didn’t have a player that could view it, but he planned to take it to a “local recording studio” that could transfer it to a modern format.

Kotaku could do the transfer, I suggested. “Much obliged,” he wrote back. “I do hope after all this there is something worthwhile on the film. Maddening if zip.”

A month later, Frank Ward and I met in New York City. He’d come up to visit his wife’s family, and brought the reel along for an in-person hand-off. Kotaku video producer Chris Person called up his media transferral guy, a video archivist, at whose office we all met up.

As Chris and I walked over from Kotaku’s office, we discussed the possible outcomes: Either it’s on the reel, or it’s not. If it was, that would be exquisite, a true victory for bullheaded journalists with dumb ideas and, of course, Sailor Moon’s hugely passionate fandom. If it wasn’t, we’d be disappointed, but happy to have met Frank Ward in person. Chris and I ascended the building’s elevator and, after opening a glass door, saw Frank Ward, a very tall and serious-looking man holding a tape with a hand-written label. This, he said, was “Project Y.”

Frank Ward.

Photo: Chris Person (Kotaku)

We shake hands. We filter into a back room stacked high with vintage video transferral hardware and three glowing screens. We pop in the tape.

A flute plays, bells tinkle. A jungle appears. Then, rainbow doves. “Created by Frank Ward,” a title card reads. The camera moves through the bushes and happens upon a glistening hot tub of angelic women in Greek-goddess attire. Suddenly, it cuts to two small girls playing in front of a speeding train. The women spring into action.

Wooo-ooooo

It’s time to fly

Team Angel.

“This is it,” Ward says.

This is not it.

Person and I stare at the video, slack-jawed and speechless. Just like in Sailor Moon, the women’ shoes, fingernails, jewelry and costumes transform into glistening magical girl attire. Now they’re saving a cat. Now they’re rescuing a family from a hurricane.

“We invented this music,” Ward says. The theme song, in classic Frank Ward style, sets up the plot and, of course, makes reference to numerous props and accessories that Ward could sell at Toys ‘R’ Us. Danger don’t scare us / We’ll keep our cool, use our magic gold dust, goes one line. Stop trouble on the double, be peace providers / Zoom to Earth on our Rainbow Rider.

It was vaporwave psychedelica, pastel-pink-washed weirdness so burdened in kitsch it hard to see anything else. Two minutes and forty seconds into it, the screen went black. “Copyright 1998 BANDAI AMERICA,” read a final title card.

My first reaction was utter bafflement. While this show was clearly inspired by Sailor Moon, it was clearly a separate project from the hybrid animated-live action show from 1993. Hell, it was an entirely different set of actresses. And the copyright date was five years later, after the Sailor Moon anime had already been aired, and cancelled, on US television. Frank Ward didn’t have what I was looking for. But he had something just as weird—something nobody on the Internet had ever even heard of.

“So that’s not the whole pilot,” I began.

“It was a promotion to try and sell the show,” Ward replied. “You don’t do pilots unless someone pays you to do them. This, we did on our own budget.”

“What do you mean, um… what do you mean that there’s no pilot?”

“A pilot, to me, is a complete episode,” Ward said.

“Uh, huh,” I said slowly. “Rocky said there’s a pilot. The fan community says there’s a pilot. You’re saying there’s no pilot. 17 minutes—Does this ring a bell?”

Ward sat back in his chair. “I don’t want to say that you’re wrong, but you’re wrong,” he said. “I would know. I did this. I don’t know what you mean by ‘pilot.’ This is what we had.”

But I had proof. I took out my phone to show Ward some of the American Sailor Moon animation cels that Toon Makers worked on. “I have no idea,” said Ward. I loaded up the YouTube recording of the American Sailor Moon show’s pilot from that anime convention years ago, the one that even has the name of his company on it. He said he’d never seen it in his life.

A scene from the Team Angel proof-of-concept video.

GIF: Renaissance Atlantic

“The only way we can clear this up is to call Rocky on the phone and say, ‘What in the world were you talking about,’” Ward offered. So, right then and there, we called Rocky Solotoff. Always dependable, he picked up. I put the phone on speaker.

“I’m here with Frank Ward,” I said into the phone. “Frank told me he had some artifact from the American Sailor Moon show you two worked on together. . .what we were shown is something completely different from the live-action-slash-cartoon show you worked on.” I described Team Angel to him.

“I don’t remember Team Angel,” said Solotoff. “The piece that was on my reel is on the internet. That’s what we did—what I did.”

“But you didn’t do that with Frank,” I said.

“Yes, I did. I did it for Frank,” Solotoff responded.

“Frank, have you seen that before?” I asked.

“No,” said Frank.

“Well,” I said, “Frank is sharp and has a good memory…”

“And great blue eyes,” Solotoff said.

“Yes, and great blue eyes,” I said. “So either Frank’s memory is very poor, or... ”

“Or mine is very imaginative,” Solotoff said.

Playing the theme songs to both live-action Sailor Moon shows over the phone, both Frank and Rocky agreed they didn’t know what the other was talking about.

The next morning, Ward called me up. “We’re talking about two different things,” he said. Half-asleep, I started taking notes.

“I must have tried to resurrect it as Team Angel. The Sailor Moon idea—we didn’t want to use that name. By 1998, maybe I was trying to talk Bandai into resurrecting it and we’d call it something else,” he said. While Sailor Moon’s then-small group of fans saw the show’s cancellation as a disappointment, Ward saw it as a vindication of his belief that the show wouldn’t succeed without a major revamp. So he thought he’d try again, six years later, with Team Angel, a live-action show produced without Toon Maker’s involvement. 25 years later, Ward had forgotten what he refers to as his “failure.”

One thing Solotoff and Ward could agree one: They didn’t know where the original pilot was.

“No one lies like an eyewitness,” Ward said, finally.

As I was walking Frank Ward down the street to help him hail a cab, I thought about the old Donald Rumsfeld quote about “known unknowns” and “unknown unknowns.” The Sailor Moon pilot was the known unknown, the thing we knew we didn’t have. Team Angel, though, was the thing we never even thought to look for, because we didn’t know it existed.

I embarked on this wild goose chase with the confidence and candor of a reporter who’s used to finding what she’s looking for, no matter how obscure. Court documents? Check. Interview subjects? Double check. I did everything right, and yet, I couldn’t find these 17 minutes of video no matter how doggedly I tried. The emotionally tidy ending here is “I didn’t find what I was looking for, but I found something just as valuable.” The truth is that, aside from Bandai’s $280,000, the value of the American Sailor Moon was granted solely by the anime’s fandom. Hell, even Frank Ward had forgotten about it. Is Team Angel as good a discovery, without the decades of mystery and ridicule that preceded it?

Waiting along 9th Avenue for a taxi, I asked Ward whether it was hard to know, deeply and with confidence, that anime would be a hit in the U.S., but to know it before there was a market for it. I wondered how it felt to know that American girls wanted a girls’ superhero show about friendship, about strength, about magic—but to misinterpret when, and in what form, they wanted it. He said it was very hard. I described modern anime conventions to him—not rinky-dink ones in airport Hiltons but massive events, packed with fans volleying between booths stacked high with anime figures, spending hundreds of dollars on Sailor Moon toys.

He’s been out of the business for decades, he replied. He said he’d never heard anything about that. I couldn’t tell whether it made him happy.

[es-ti-mulada-blog]

Code Unturned

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[corinthianmaid-blog]

Intro & First Post: Max Picard

On this site I will extend and deepen what is found in my book, Gnome, published in February 2017 by Black Sun Lit: annotations, contradictions, illustrations, tangents, outtakes, stumbles, experiments, and more. If you have something to contribute of relevance, Reader, please let me know.

*

It seems right to start with a post about the Swiss sage Max Picard (1888 – 1965). It was with his writings, somewhat hard to find in English these days, that I started my obsession with the face, and with its cultural contexts and ephemera.

Picard was a Jew who converted to Catholicism, and a physician who gave up medicine to write his lyric philosophy, if we can call it that. His most famous work – the one that is a bit less hard-to-find than the others (most of which have never been translated into English) is The World of Silence.

It was an essay by Galway Kinnell that brought Picard’s Silence to my attention, about 25 years ago. A few other mid-twentieth-century writers have made brief mention of the work, and of Picard, most notably Thomas Merton and Flannery O’Connor. When I find mentions, it’s usually in religious rather than literary works. Still, Picard writes an enchanting prose (at least it comes through that way in English) that measures out a starkly Medieval view of the world. His chief rhetorical frame is comparisons between a vague European and Christian past and our own Modern age – a fallen age, lost from God. But his pessimism, his fervent religiosity, is expressed through a simple but often captivating lyricism. I don’t know why more poets and lyric essayists aren’t reading him – I find that his books prime my own visions with great force.

I read Silence a few times over the years, and bought copies more than once, since I tended to hand mine over to friends. Luckily, a copy always turned up in a used-bookstore. Eventually I sought out his other works, and it was The Human Face that pulled me into my years-long researches into physiognomy and related topics.

Picard’s The Human Face is a bit harder to find than Silence. It offers a similar religio-lyrical approach to its topic, with many of the same figures: Now framed rather hopelessly by a vaguely Medieval Then, and multiple similes that establish what is essentially a prosopopoeial vision of the universe, within Picard’s sternly Catholic worldview.

It is hard to buy into Picard’s stark and near-absolute rejection of Modernity, and on occasion, his observations can seem not merely quaint, but ignorant or downright hateful. In America, his few translated works were published mainly by Henry Regnery, an old-school, mid-century Conservative along the lines of Russell Kirk or William F. Buckley. Perhaps this dampened enthusiasm among the broader potential readership. It’s a shame – Picard, whether he would like the appellation or not, seems to me a sort of surrealist, or at least, a fantasist. Anyway, the reader can be excused (I think) for taking him that way: an atavistic divine who, finding himself trapped in the twentieth century, conjures living emblems of the Old World (or some wistful version of it) to aid him in combating Godlessness. The drama of it, and the hopelessness, enhances the fantasia.

I will turn to the above-mentioned books in later posts; for now, having introduced Picard, I will provide a few passages from a third work,

The Flight from God, that revisit Picard’s keenness for the human face.

The dominant figure in Flight is essentially that people of today flee from God, and that they do so not as individuals (as was true, he says, of people long ago), but rather, as an abject mob trapped all together within this phenomenon called the Flight. “There seem to be no men outside the flight,” Picard laments. “A man lives; and living, he flees.” And yet, we forget that it is God we run from.

For the greater part of the book, Picard then studies how the Flight manifests itself in various aspects of modern human experience: in art, in cinema, in love, and so on. Here is how he commences the chapter on the human face:

In the face of the man of Faith, the individual parts, eyes, nose, mouth, are each created as though by a special act. Such is the perfection of each individual part, that it is as though for each a new creative act had been required; and each part is so perfect, so finished, that one does not anticipate a fresh perfection beginning where another ends. And though each part is exactly delimited, ruling its own appointed territory of the face as though it were a kind of realm, all the parts are nevertheless linked with each other in the communion of the Creator.

Asserting his chief figure of “such was then; but alas, now…” Picard next tells us:

In the face of the man of the Flight the parts are only linked with each other by and within the communion of the Flight; they are not created each one for itself but all together, simultaneously, as it were, by one single act of the Flight. The peculiarity in virtue of which each feature in the face of Faith stands out is obliterated. One part may very well still distinguish itself from another; an eye may very well continue to be different from a mouth. But each part is in itself no longer master: it is a bond-servant of the Flight and all the bond-servants of the Flight look alike.

This fallenness, and the horror of it, are Picard’s main theme in all his works. Through it, he generates his lyric perceptions. It is reiterative, perhaps too insistent; but that is part of the lyric beauty, for me – that he stays there in the desert hermitage of his mind, a pillar against the chaotic winds of change:

As soon as a man breaks his tie with God, the face loses the quality of the image: it falls apart. Those parts which, in the face of Faith, were held together within a unity which is over and above the sum of the parts, within the image of the face, are now related only externally, part lying beside part.

Or:

It is important that the face should be an image and not simply a grouping of parts. From the face which is an image a sovereign power radiates; it has not only compelled its own parts to come together within an image, it also compels the beholder to look at the parts, not separately and by themselves, but together as the image. Yet where there is no longer an image, only parts, the beholder is occupied now with this, now with that part; this one he can overlook, that one he can think important, just as it suits him. A man who deals in this arbitrary fashion with the face of another will deal in the same fashion with the whole man.

Or again:

The eyes are, in the face of Faith, two rivers of light, radiating the message: “Here is man! Here is man!” This they do that created things may find their way back to man and, through him as mediator, to God. In the face of the Flight the eyes are no more than a pair of faint lamps, lamps which no longer glow for a single soul, only for themselves as they pass along the road of the Flight. In the Flight these are the last things, the rear-lights in the procession. And there is the brow. In the world of Faith this is a white ladder mounting up to the divine in the expectation that the divine will descend upon it. In the world of the Flight the brow has become nothing but a flat blind which waits for the face to become quite empty, so that it may come down and cover it and that is the last of the face.

These passages say essentially the same thing, of course: the world of Faith – of the past – was unified and of God, but the world of now is torn asunder and apart from God. But in this chapter on the face as in all of Picard’s writing, there is a physiognomic grasp of things: of the way inside connects to outside, here to there, visible to invisible. Picard’s physiognomics is a cybernetics, I believe – but one that tries to account for the spiritual as central to its system:

What is primary is existence. The functioning of one part in the face of Faith does not proceed from its purpose: the eye is there not only to see – it is there, and so it also sees. In the world of Faith the face has more intensity of purpose. There is more being m each part, still more being in the whole, than can be accounted for by the purpose. The entire face, and yet again each part singly, lies within this superabundance of being. The eye in such a face sees, therefore, still more than the eye of the Flight: it not only takes something as it gazes, it also gives, in its gaze, something to the thing; it gives out of its superabundance. A human face lives upon this superabundance dwelling within it, and the things that are seen and summoned by it also live upon this superabundance.

I suspect this is my own hopeful reading, since I want such a system myself: a cybernetics of spirit and matter. For Picard, the Church is already there; there is no need to engineer, construct, or discover the formula or the machine. There I part ways with the Swiss mystic: I think we have to start over in making order out of the world, and out of ourselves – each of us, every day. It’s art that shows us how, including, but not limited to, the old religions.