THE WAY FORWARD: CRUSADES OF BLAKE
- Some thoughts on the zine
1.'A Word from the Heart'
In Pat Fenech's story, 'No Good Thing Ever Dies', Ravella recalls that it
was Blake who christened the Freedom Party. 'So like Blake,' she comments,
'a word from the heart.' The motif of the heart is one of the most recurrent
in this collection, used by different authors but essentially implying the
same meaning. It is a notion closely related to Blake's decisions and
actions, his chosen mode of living and his impact on others.
'The heart' covers much more than just one's emotional or intuitive response
to the world. In these stories, it is used to denote the core of one's
being, the deepest layer of psyche, the 'heart' of the self. The authors
often suggest that Blake is in thrall of this 'heart', hearing and obeying
the voice from the centre of being which determines his whole attitude to
reality. First and foremost, it inspires his feeling of obligation, his
persistence in the struggle against the Federation. In Sondra Sweigman's
'Proclamation of Principles', Blake writes that the urge to fight against
injustice comes from 'the one voice' which stands 'behind the many languages
of the Universe.' 'It is the voice of the heart and of the spirit.' 'If he
had a choice in this matter, he no longer recognised one', Jacquelyne Taylor
writes in 'Wind-up Toy'. After he has witnessed the massacre of Bran
Foster's rebel group, Blake is tormented by doubts about his sanity, his
conditioning and his past. Still, he returns to the Dome because his
conscience demands it. 'You do have a choice,' he says to Vila in Sally
Manton's 'Fellow Feeling'. 'And you don't?' 'It never feels like I have
one,' Blake replies.
'The heart' also refers to one's essential core of goodness and humanity
which (at least as some of the authors believe) is capable of withstanding
any oppression. Because Blake has managed to keep this core intact, he is
able to make his 'way back' and restore his former self. The deepest realm
of his being hasn't been affected by mind-manipulation. Sondra Sweigman
writes in one of her poems, 'If mind's so easily rendered dust,/ The heart
is all that's left to trust:/ A vault the torturer could not enter-/ A
solid, bright and blazing centre.' Pat Fenech expresses the same idea by
entitling her story 'No Good Thing Ever Dies'.
However, while Blake abides by the 'words from the heart', the resulting
decisions and actions collide with the wills of other people, and with his
own fears and doubts, often creating an impression that the world around him
is chaotic and that nothing in it makes sense. In Jacquelyne Taylor's AU
story 'Kayn's Hands', Kayn fails to save Gan's life. Blake, however, decides
not to carry out his threat and neither maims nor kills the surgeon.
Unexpectedly, this course of action triggers a whole chain of tragic events
which result in the deaths of his entire crew. What Blake thought was a
correct moral choice turns out to have the disastrous outcome. Universe and
its rules appear to be chaotic and unjust:
'There was no sense of order to a random universe, nothing made any sense;
the price of sparing an enemy's hands was the lives of four friends; people
died for no particular reason, they called your name as if you could do
something about it.... meanwhile, the berserk juggernaut of the Federation
crushed anything in its path, bending and breaking people into cogs for the
machine, forcing order out of the chaos Blake tried so desperately to
preserve, to defend...'
The only alternative to 'a random universe' seems to be the totalitarian
order imposed by the Federation, characterized by brutality and violation of
basic human liberties. Even in his confused state of mind, Blake refuses to
accept such an inhuman order and rather opts for the chaotic freedom of a
universe he cannot comprehend.
Eventually, however, a new meaning emerges out of this chaos. On the planet
Cephlon, Blake meets Meegat. In Jacquelyne Taylor's version, she is
represented as a somewhat different person. Beatific and confident, she is
the embodiment of the goddess, the life-giving, nourishing feminine
principle. Her wisdom, although instinctive, is superior to Blake's. After
Blake has told her about his belief that reality is chaotic and meaningless,
'Meegat showed him a bit of cloth that looked like a hodgepodge of tangled
thread. She asked if he thought this was "the look of a life disordered;" he
allowed it was a fair enough representation of his - until she turned it
over, revealing it was actually a beautiful piece of embroidery, everything
falling perfectly into place.
Blake didn't know what to say.'
As the story reveals, Blake's decision to spare an enemy was not as
meaningless and futile as it seems to him. The following scene, in which
Travis and his mutoids burst into Kayn's office, is probably one of the best
written pieces in the zine. It depicts very realistically the horror of
living under a totalitarian regime, the dread and anxiety which constantly
haunts even those blindly subservient to it - such as Kayn.
The very fact that the surgeon has survived his encounter with Blake is
sufficient to make him a traitor and collaborator in Travis's eyes. Through
their charged dialogue, threats and brutality, Kayn's fear and physical
suffering, and his final refusal to participate in Travis's evil scheme, the
reader witnesses a convincing catharsis.
Kayn's 'moral awakening', however, has been initiated even earlier.
Ironically, it almost parallels Blake's own, triggered by the massacre of
Bran Foster and his rebel cell. The horrible scene Blake witnessed could not
be altered in any way to fit the model of reality previously imposed on him
by the Federation therapists. 'Reality was reality,' Pat Fenech writes in
'The Edge of Memory', 'the reality of defenceless people, unresisting
people, shot down. How did one interpret that reality in any other way than
to recognize the truth of the cruelty and barbarity of it?... Nothing could
alter it to fit any model of what a sane world was about... what he thought
was his world.'
Blake's model of reality was challenged by a scene of bloodshed; Kayn's is
challenged by Blake's forgiveness. 'You're too late,' he says to Travis.
'The injury done to me at Blake's hands cannot be included in any record or
seen in a viscast.'
It turns out, however, that the 'injury' has been recorded after all. In
'Blake's Heart', Sondra Sweigman's sequel to 'Kayn's Hands', Blake
accidentally comes across a visplay message Kayn has sent to his friend
Ensor. Kayn tells Ensor that after Gan's death, Blake's crew were thirsty
for revenge. 'And Blake stood up to them. Stood up for me. Or for some
abstract notion of humanity which was anything but abstract to him....And
because he did, although my body is intact, all the certainties I've lived
by have been shaken to the core.'
The visplay functions as a revelation to Blake. 'Now he understood that a
pebble tossed into a pond creates ripples, the farthest reaches of which the
thrower can never hope to see. The consequences of a man's actions are never
*only* the consequences he's aware of. And so the most reliable guidepost he
has is his own moral compass and his faith that to honour it is always
better than to betray it.'
Blake is now able to comprehend the meaning of the embroidery Meegat has
shown him. Symbolically, it implies that the order the Federation promotes,
'breaking people into cogs for the machine', is not the only one which may
be projected upon reality. There also exists a different kind of order, the
one based on humanity, morality and sympathy. The change Blake has provoked
in Kayn raises a fragile but still essential hope that it is possible to
organize the human world on the principles of the heart.
2.'So all the time you spent with Blake, it meant nothing? You came out
exactly as you came in, self-interested and blind to the suffering of others?'
It is a question Avalon puts to Avon in Michael J. Miller's PGP story, 'The
Ghost of You'. Several stories are concerned with the influence Blake
exerts, consciously or unconsciously, upon other people. In Curtiss
Hoffman's 'Undelivered Letter', Kasabi tells her daughter that by training
the best cadets in the Federation army she was naively hoping she would
initiate changes and reforms in the heart of the system. Her attempt at
teaching has failed, but she draws an analogy with Blake and calls him 'a
true teacher'.
Blake's 'teaching method' is quite unorthodox, and perhaps most likeable
when his lectures are delivered unawares. Sondra Sweigman's AU version of
'Orbit', entitled 'Altered Options', places Blake instead of Vila on the
shuttle with Avon. Blake's own readiness for self-sacrifice affects Avon in
a way Vila couldn't have done. Blake provokes what's best in Avon by his own
conduct and personality, rather than by any conscious intention.
'His very history and life's work forces everyone around him, myself
included, to examine very difficult issues about themselves,' Avalon writes
in her diary in 'The Ghost of You'. Even Blake's death seems to make people
question themselves. Blake's not a survivor, Vila surmises in the same
story. 'Avon and I are survivors. We just keep on going. Blake's exactly the
sort to up and die and leave everyone else with too much to think about.'
On the other hand, Blake's conscious influence on others (usually referred
to as 'manipulation' by those who indulge in Blake-bashing) is closely
related to his talent for psyching out people. The stories in this zine
often point to Blake's ability to see beyond appearances and pretences and
grasp the 'inner self' of others. In 'A Few Minutes More' by Rebecca Ann
Brothers, after he has learnt the story of Avon and Anna, Blake is not at
all surprised that his friend is capable of such an intense love
relationship. 'Yes, I forgot,' Avon says. 'You like to see things that
aren't really there.' 'It's there,' Blake replies. When, in 'The Unending
Crusade', Curtiss Hoffman endows the clone Blake with telepathic abilities,
the reader finds this idea plausible, because the original Blake was
'almost' a telepath, with his great capacity to sympathize and see through.
'Blake appealed to your better nature,' Vila says in 'The Ghost of You'.
'What I mean is, he never forced you to do something, he just let you know
that if you didn't do it, it wouldn't get done.' 'I still don't understand,'
Avalon writes in the same story, 'how he was able to assemble such a diverse
group of individuals and forge them into something greater than the sum of
its parts...Blake... has had to reach down into the bottom of people's souls
and draw out whatever impulse towards justice exists there... He reminded
people of the possibilities their own lives represent.' The problem with
some of these stories, however, is that they fail to support their claims
with concrete examples, which would have made them more convincing.
3.'So why do you keep going back for more, then?'
In Sally Manton's 'Fellow Feeling', Vila and Blake both have nightmares due
to the brainwashing treatments they once received. Vila asks how come Blake
hasn't been intimidated by his traumatic experience or why he doesn't think
he has done his share of fighting and simply withdraw.
Sequences examining Blake's motives for fighting the Federation appear
throughout the zine. In 'Fellow Feeling', Blake replies to Vila that the
injustice done to him is in a way universal. He draws an analogy between
altering historical records and erasing the memories of one's personal past.
He recalls, for instance, a group of Federation officials present at
Servalan's inauguration, who later became undesirables and were erased from
the vistapes showing this event. 'They took the records and wiped out whole
lives, Vila... like they wiped out whole lives in my mind, even my own. They
changed you - they erased me... Are you so surprised I want to save others
from that?' Mind manipulation, on a larger scale, parallels the Federation's
manipulation of truth and history. Blake's struggle is therefore far from
being just a matter of personal revenge.
Jean Hubb's fine story, 'It's About Time', allows the reader a glimpse of
Blake's suppressed desire to give up fighting and withdraw to a world
abounding in natural beauties. Blake's dilemma is here represented in terms
of choosing between two notions of time: mythological time - suggesting a
life in harmony with Nature and its cycles; and historical time - which
implies living in a man-made world, with the full awareness of one's
responsibility in constructing and revising this world. The attraction
'mythological time' holds for Blake and his final decision to opt for
'historical time' are wonderfully compressed in just a few sentences. Blake
tells Avon that as a young engineer he was sent to a planet the Federation
wanted to colonise. While working on the dam controlling one of the planet's
major rivers, he was fascinated by the natural beauties. Suddenly, however,
'His memory stirred again. "As I remember, it was then that I first learned
the Federation used slave labour." He frowned and lapsed into silence.'
Blake is too sorely aware of the general injustice and the suffering of
others to abandon history. The sense of obligation forces him to return to
historical time. His initial desire for a simple, uncomplicated life close
to land and nature turns into a distant hope, a vision of some future he may
never live to see. 'Blake wondered how many people were living amongst these
trees. Perhaps there was room for one more... The sun was fully risen. The
warmth sinking into his bones reminded him of the passage of time. He
couldn't stay here... The Federation had too much to answer for. Even if it
was too late for his family, there were thousands of others to be freed.
Everyone should be able to stand on his own front porch and breathe freely.
Like this.'
The most comprehensive 'catalogue of grievances', i.e., the Federation's
evil practices which have driven Blake and others to rebellion, may be found
in Sondra Sweigman's 'Proclamation of Principles'. I was much more moved,
however, by a sentence in another Sondra Sweigman's story, 'Blake's Heart'.
In very simple words, it manages to capture Blake's generosity of spirit and
show he doesn't hate those who are not willing to help him. I must resume my
struggle, Blake tells himself, 'for the sake of all those who cannot fight
for themselves, who cannot speak for themselves, whose voices have been
stilled whether by death, ignorance, confusion or fear.' Thoughts like this
inspire tolerance and understanding - two valuable threads for the
embroidery of the heart.
