The Persistence of Legacy: How Past Events Forge Present Attitudes (and Should). [Part II: Spike Spiegel's Star.]

[Click here to read the reddit post to whom I am replying.]

None of this was hard for me to understand. Spike's dream was that he could escape the consequences of his actions, and he tried to do this through a thoroughly absurd, amoral lifestyle, drifting aimlessly through space and barely scraping by on bounty hunter gigs without concern for any of the broader moral implications. Julia was someone whom he kept within his memory as though she might be safe there as a mental image; so, he had a "dream" of her which he could wander back to as a vestige of some love or meaning in his otherwise amoral, apathetic life. So, when she died, he woke up from the dream she represented. He beheld that he could not escape his past by looking to the future. So, he sought revenge on Julia's behalf and died a martyr, ridding the entire universe of Vicious and thus finding his redemption, represented by his star up in the skies.

The Beatles quote about "the weight" one has to carry reinforces this core theme: that we are burdened by the past and can't evade it endlessly. Spike tried to find his place up in the stars by cruising on the "BeBop", yet it was by coming back to earth (well, Mars) that he found peace (both in himself and in the World) and thus became the star up in the sky that Laughing Bull referred to. He'd worked through his karma and brought order to the best of his ability, and so he woke up from the Dream of Life to the reality of Cosmic Justice which is meant to permeate the universe throughout this series, under the veneer of chaos and absurdity. In short, the "dream" is conscious life, which we mistake for what the World is: cold, uncaring, and chaotic. Yet it only seems that way because *we choose to be* that way. Reality, as represented by the program, has an underlying moral order, yet we have to play a part in that to see it and to find a place within it. (Note how Jet and Faye reject this, so they stay aboard the "BeBop".) Spike did die a hero, not because he was successful, (since the ends don't always justify the means, but rather it's *intent* which does that) but because his cause was noble. Killing Vicious to avenge the death of Julia could not have been a selfish act, since doing so would not allow for Spike to be with Julia again within this lifetime, as he would have liked. It rather was a selfless act, since he had recognized in Julia a value which lived on in death, and in defending such a value he would follow her into that void and take her killer with him.

You can't understand this story without understanding vengeance as a positive necessity for moral action. In the world of *Cowboy Bebop*, law and order do not serve as justice; only personal vendetta could restore a sense of order to this fallen world. Without that, there can ***be*** no heroes, and the people who have tried to vilify vendetta in our own world also meant for heroes to become irrelevant. (Read Hegel's views upon the subject for the proof of this, especially in his *Philosophy of Right*.) Spike cared too much for Julia to go on living an amoral life in a chaotic universe. So he avenged her, ending his own life and "waking up" to the profundity of Cosmic Order. His enlightenment was that he saw that, rather than persisting in a meaningless survival, chasing after pointless temporary gain, he could find permanence within the Cosmic Order through an act of justice that could never be undone or sold.

I would say that this all is just my personal opinion, yet that would be an insult to the message of the story, which, of course, has to be clear for all to see, myself included, if it is to serve its purpose for humanity, and I don't claim much credit for that. It is all quite obvious and blunt, as clear for all to see as stars up in the sky at night. I'm merely giving names to constellations.

**[({R.G.)}]**


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