Linkblogging and progress for 29/06/11
I’m too migrainey today to finish the Mister Miracle post for Seven Soldiers (though those new readers who are waiting can always read this, which is an earlier post I wrote on the same series). The plan is that I’ll get that up and posted tomorrow or Friday and the final part in the series done before Sunday, when I’ll also get proof copies of the book version to my beta-readers Illogical Volume, Original Eyeball, Plok and Holly. The book will have a cover, an introduction, an index, and a short appendix explaining about Alan Moore and Jack Kirby for people who don’t know who they are, but will otherwise be pretty much identical to the essays as published here. The book should be out on Saturday of next week.
To celebrate its release, I start my six-day blog tour on Saturday July 9 (not the middle of next week as originally planned), visiting:
Saturday – Deep Space Transmissions, who has interviewed me about Grant Morrison.
Sunday – Gavin Robinson who has interviewed me about self-publishing.
Monday – Plok, who will be interviewing me about something or other.
Tuesday Liberal England, where I’ll be doing a guest post about The Monkees
Wednesday Thagomizer where I’ll be doing a ‘beginner’s guide to comics’ post.
And Thursday The Mindless Ones who will be doing… something… with me.
Anyway, enough about me, here’s some links.
The Mindless Ones interview Grant Morrison!
Autistic people don’t have magical super-vision shocker.
Charles Stross on the Bomb as obsolete existential threat
Plok on the future of SF now we’re living in the future
And Millennium Dome on the fallacy of the false dichotomy
Hello, New People!
Well, Bleeding Cool is certainly popular, isn’t it?
Just want to let the hundreds of you who’ve clicked through from there know that you’re very welcome here, that the Seven Soldiers posts will be becoming a book soon, that there’ll be another one up tomorrow, and that I do write about things other than comics (but do write a lot about comics). Please feel free to join in the comments.
Linkblogging For 27/06/11
Too hot to write. Somebody turn the heating off in the big blue room, please? And dim the light while you’re at it. Mister Miracle tomorrow if I don’t boil to death in my own sweat.
Links.
Colin Smith on the covers to several Flashpoint titles. “No conventionally conscientious and competent artist could produce work such as this, because it’d be obvious that they were mocking the audience, that they were deliberately moronisising their work in a desperate attempt to attract a rump of readers with the most incestuously-peculiar of tastes. But Mr Syaf ‘s work seems almost to suggest that of a man who draws like this all the time, even when he’s not managing to convince DC to pay him for covers such as these. On the back of bus tickets found in his jacket pockets, we might imagine, should our entirely-imaginary Mr Syaf ever actually leave the house, are drawings of tiny little bundles of lycra-covered muscles lovingly detailed with hatching, cross-hatching and yet unnamed species of hyper-hatching operating down to the quantum level.”
Plok offers another alternative 52 DC titles, all of which I would buy.
The Aporetic on Why Libertarians Love Slavery.
The brain is not made of soup, according to Neuroskeptic.
Low-quality, spammy Kindle books are not a problem.
Millennium on Lords reform and the space race.
Low calorie, low-carb diets can reverse type two diabetes.
Chris Dillow on how Harold Shipman was typically middle-class.
Also, I don’t know if I ever got round to mentioning it, but Teatime Brutality is back, now on Tumblr.
8: Bulleteer
This essay appears in a revised form in my book An Incomprehensible Condition: An Unauthorised Guide To Grant Morrison’s Seven Soldiers. Paperback, Hardback, Kindle (US), Kindle (UK), other ebook formats
We’re heading into the home stretch now, so hold tight.
“Fair was the woman’s face, and sweet
Her voice, and swift were her noiseless feet,
And kind her hands; but her husband knew
Full little of her the fair and true
To work when the dawn brake golden-fair;
At work when the stars of night shone there
Forewatcht, forwearied at night and worn,
Yet eager to meet his work at morn”The Sculptor – Emily Hickey [FOOTNOTE No relation as far as I know, though this 19th century poet shares the name of my paternal grandmother.]
Over and over in this series of essays we have seen variations of the same story – the creator making something in the likeness of a human being, and that creature gaining life and sentience. Whether Frankenstein, or the golem, or the robot revolt, or Gwydion, over and over we’ve seen the creator/created conflict appear in Seven Soldiers.
Even the Snow White legend, which at first sight seems to be of a totally different type, fits into this pattern. Snow White’s mother wished for a beautiful daughter, but as soon as her daughter grew more beautiful than her, she tried to have her killed. (The Brothers Grimm only changed the mother to a step-mother fairly late on – in the original story it was the mother).
The myth of Pygmalion and Galatea (rhymes, more or less, with Bulleteer) is another story of this type. According to the classical poet Ovid in his Metamorphoses, the sculptor Pygmalion was not interested in women, because they were all whores (who says the ancient Greeks were misogynist?). So he decided to carve himself one out of ivory, because women made out of the teeth of dead elephants are somehow better than the kind made out of flesh. However, when he groped its breasts they weren’t soft, so he prayed to Venus, the godess of love, to turn his statue into a real woman. Rather than say “No, leave me alone you strange man” she granted his wish, and the next time he groped his statue’s breast she became human, and despite the fact that her very first experience of him, or indeed of life, was of him sexually assaulting her, the nameless statue (only given the name Galatea centuries later, when people realised that women mattered) agreed to marry him. Who says the ancient Greeks were misogynist?
This, incidentally, is another connection to the stories of both Snow White and Sleeping Beauty, both of whom have to be awoken by a similar assault.
These days, this story is best known as the inspiration for George Bernard Shaw’s play Pygmalion, in which philologist Henry Higgins (whose self-description is “I do genuine scientific work in phonetics, and a little as a poet on Miltonic lines”) attempts to raise Cockney Eliza Doolittle out of the gutter and into polite society by teaching her to speak ‘correctly’. Doolittle, of course, rebels against him and asserts her own individuality, though during Shaw’s lifetime he had continuously to fight directors who wanted to bowdlerise his work and have her fall in love with her teacher.
Cyn: I would not have thee find another head
That seemed as fair to thee for all the world!
We’ll have no stranger models if you please,
I’ll be your model, sir, as heretofore,
So reproduce me at your will; and yet
It were sheer vanity in me to think
That this fair stone recalls Cynisca’s face!
PYG. Cynisca’s face in every line!
CYN. No, no!
Those outlines softened, angles smoothed away,
The eyebrows arched, the head more truly poised,
The forehead ten years smoother than my own
Tell rather of Cynisca as she was
When, in the silent groves of Artemis,
Pygmalion told his love ten years ago:
And then the placid brow, the sweet sad lips,
The gentle head down-bent resignedly,
Proclaim that this is not Pygmalion’s wife,
Who laughs and frowns, but knows no meed between.
I am no longer as that statue is!
PYG. Why here’s ingratitude, to slander Time,
Who in his hurried course has passed thee by!
Or is it that Cynisca won’t allow
That Time could pass her by, and never pause
To print a kiss upon so fair a face?Pygmalion And Galatea by W.S. Gilbert
So why does this story of the creature rebelling against the creator have so much resonance? I suspect it’s to do with our old friend entropy.
As soon as we’re born, we’re destined to die, and once we’ve got past about the age of eighteen our bodies are slowly starting to crumble. Our mortality is a fact that hits us every time we see a new grey hair in our beard, or notice that we can no longer hear the very highest frequencies, or have to have a tooth extracted. Pretty much as soon as everything in our body has started working at its full functionality, bits of us stop working, until eventually we stop altogether.
This is something very few of us actually welcome. The idea that the very best-case scenario for me is to spend fifty to seventy more years in slowly-increasing amounts of pain and disability, before ceasing to exist forever, is not a cheery one. So we look for ways to avoid this. It’s no surprise that one of our very oldest pieces of literature, the Epic Of Gilgamesh, deals with an attempt to gain immortality. It’s also no surprise that legends of a Golden Age and a Fall have such potency – I remember how in my late teens I would go to my lectures on the eighteenth floor of the Maths department and take the stairs, and how my hair wasn’t receding, and wonder what went wrong (I forget that in my late teens I was desperately lonely, physically unattractive and reliant on others for financial support, of course. There was never a Golden Age, our memories have just yellowed with age).
The two ways in which people have usually attempted to gain at least a metaphorical immortality are through their children and through their artistic creations, so it’s natural that we’d have stories develop about children who *are* artistic creations. The problem is, though, that as a method of gaining immortality, having children is a decidedly ambiguous one. Yes, our children carry our genes and often resemble us a great deal. We can even hope that our children carry on the best of us while leaving the worst.
But children are also the worst reminders of our own mortality – not only are they a reminder that we’re grown up, and an additional responsibility, but they’re our replacement. Once Us Mk II exists, it’s only a matter of time before Mk I gets taken off the market.
There’s also, for men at least, the additional possibility that our child is not really our biological child at all – that it’s not ‘me’ becoming ‘immortal’ at all, but someone else. That’s not a problem when it’s our intellectual, rather than biological, child. And men can make those all by themselves, without any of those icky girls being involved.
But if a child being a parent’s ‘replacement’ is hard for the parent, it’s hard, too, for the child. The child, after all, loves and respects the parent (assuming even basic competence in parenting – which is sadly not an assumption one can make all that freely), but is an individual herself who cannot be expected to want the same things her parents do. There’s a reason that one of the first words learned by all babies, after ‘mummy’ and ‘daddy’ or their local equivalent, is ‘no’.
(It may be significant here that work on Seven Soldiers started shortly after Grant Morrison’s father, who seems to have been a genuinely great man, died. See for example the obituary of Walter Morrison at http://libcom.org/history/morrison-walter-1924-2004.)
Seen this way, Pygmalion becomes a myth of defeminizing, in which the artist/scientist would ensure the male final cause (through which version of the myth the single man attains the state of God the father) by seeking to control, through this bizarre form of recycling, original female energy. Natural birth (as well as natural death) is recast as a fantasy of perpetual motion. The female body, seen as the source of entropy, is turned into a machine to defeat entropy. The benefit of this process ensues only for the male who manipulates this force to his advantage – a possible infinite extension of his single-willed life.
In Shaw’s play Pygmalion, the twist on the myth is that it is not a statue that is brought to physical life, but rather a lower-class woman made into a socially acceptable being. Through diction lessons, another’s words are in a sense put in Eliza’s mouth, and by the same token her own organic life drawn out. It is necessary to turn the woman into a statue before the statue can be made to speak the proper way, made into a work of social art, and thus into a person a male artist can not just love but “wed” in civilized society. Shaw, it seems, is equating here the creation of a statue with an act of male vampirism.
George Slusser – Last Men And First Women: The Dynamics Of Life Extension In Shaw And Heinlein, in Shaw, vol 17, Shaw And Science Fiction (Milton T Woolf ed.)
Alix Harrower, like Eliza Doolittle, is an almost entirely passive figure until the very end of her comic. Her husband decides her destiny is to be a superhero, and turns her into one without her consent. The only reason she survives is because she (unlike him) keeps her wedding ring on. She then fulfills his ambitions for her after his death even though she doesn’t want to – she becomes a superhero during a suicide attempt she makes when she discovers his infidelity. Everything that happens to her in the entire story is initiated by someone else, usually for reasons Alix never fully knows. The only decision she makes in the four issues of her comic – the one that truly defines her as a character – is to walk away and stop being a superhero.
Even at the climax in Seven Soldiers #1, she makes no decisions even as she ends up saving the day. She’s ‘the spear never thrown’ because she chooses not to throw herself into events. Instead, events throw themselves at her. She refuses to accept the fate which the entire world, from her genetic ancestors, through to her manipulative husband, through to the supernatural forces manipulating everything behind the scenes, has planned for her.
(It’s rather depressing how she’s been used in comics since Seven Soldiers finished. Turned into a generic superhero, she’s depicted in crowd scenes, usually flying, even though she doesn’t fly. Even after her story’s completely over, her decisions and her very existence are disrespected and rendered unimportant – though so too are the opinions of her male creator, which is on one level an appropriate response).
The rest of the story need not be shown in action, and indeed, would hardly need telling if our imaginations were not so enfeebled by their lazy dependence on the ready-makes and reach-me-downs of the ragshop in which Romance keeps its stock of “happy endings” to misfit all stories. Now, the history of Eliza Doolittle, though called a romance because of the transfiguration it records seems exceedingly improbable, is common enough. Such transfigurations have been achieved by hundreds of resolutely ambitious young women since Nell Gwynne set them the example by playing queens and fascinating kings in the theatre in which she began by selling oranges. Nevertheless, people in all directions have assumed, for no other reason than that she became the heroine of a romance, that she must have married the hero of it. This is unbearable, not only because her little drama, if acted on such a thoughtless assumption, must be spoiled, but because the true sequel is patent to anyone with a sense of human nature in general, and of feminine instinct in particular.
George Bernard Shaw – Pygmalion (afterword)
Bulleteer has an odd position within the Seven Soldiers mega-story. The mini-series itself is one of the three (Shining Knight and The Manhattan Guardian being the other two) that provide the narrative throughline for the story, while the other four series flesh out the bigger picture, but the character’s own narrative ‘arc’ (I had hoped to get through this book without using that word, but it seems the only appropriate one) is almost entirely divorced from it. The rest of the characters in the story are concerned with superheroism, or with the Sheeda invasion, or with taking revenge on overbearing parents, but Alix herself is only after a quiet life. It’s notable that while the other characters are either born different, or become heroic when they gain their costume, the Alix before her accident is more confident, wittier, happier, and more secure than afterward. She’s also actually more heroic – she works with autistic children before the accident, while afterwards she works as a bodyguard for an unpleasant film star.
But like Jake Jordan, the other character who starts out the series as just a normal human being, her instincts are always good, even when she’s depressed and suicidal. She refuses to be a ‘hero’, but she takes the woman who tried to steal her husband and attempted to murder her to hospital without a second’s thought, because it’s the right thing to do.
Bernard Shaw eventually had to write a short ‘sequel’ to his Pygmalion (it’s a prose piece, printed as the afterword in most editions of the play now) giving Eliza Doolittle a happy ending, because the audience flat out refused to believe that the story ended with her walking away from Henry Higgins, and directors kept changing the ending to suit what they wanted. His sequel still wasn’t what the audience actually wanted – they’d been expecting a love story, and were angry that they didn’t get one – but it was an attempt to give them a sense of completion, of ‘closure’. Of course, after his death, it was turned into a musical and given a love-story ending (the same people also wrote Camelot, which had Arthur and Lancelot forgiving each other and surviving at the end, rather than going to war against each other as in their source material).
It may well be the fate of Bulleteer to continue appearing in crowd scenes, flying, and doing generic-superhero stuff for all eternity unless her creator gives her an ending that comes closer to the desires of the typical superhero comic reader than simply walking away and getting on with her life. There’s something sadly appropriate about that. The one decision Alix makes, her one bit of agency, is taken away from her by forces outside her control.
But it’s by fighting those narrative conventions all the way, by struggling to gain any kind of agency, that Alix fulfills her destiny and saves the world. Had she gone with the flow, had she been the superhero the entire universe seemed to be wanting to make of her, the world would have been lost.
Comic issues Bulleteer #1-4
Artists Yanick Paquette (pencils), Michael Bair (inks), Alex Sinclair (colours)
Other credits Phil Balsman (letters), Michael Siglain (asst editor), Peter Tomasi (editor)
Connected Morrison works The Filth is very, very, very different, but has some connections.
Look Out For Millions The Mystery Mutt’s secret
Still to come in Seven Soldiers The time of your life!
Linkblogging For 23/06/11
First, a little self-promotion – I have a new, low-traffic Twitter account devoted only to my books, and Amazon pages in the US and the UK
Jonathan at Liberal England sparked an interesting debate last week about the differences between Social Liberalism and Social Democracy. His most recent post links to much of the discussion.
Eddie Campbell on Batman artist Lew Schwartz, who died recently
DC cancelled a story where Superman teams up with a Muslim superhero. After Chris Sims brought this to comics fans’ attention (warning, avoid the comments which are full of white American male geeks), DC unofficially told unfunny P. Staines cartoon-writer Rich Johnston that they weren’t avoiding telling the story for fear of offending racist fuckwits who don’t even read the comics, but that the story had Superman rescuing a cat out of a tree, and they didn’t think that was appropriate. David Brothers has the best reaction to this.
In other Protracted-Painful-Suicide-Of-DC-Comics news, they have apparently stated that they’re going to aim all their comics at 18-34 year old males. Ragnell has her thoughts on this.
Charles Stross has three arguments against the Singularity.
Via Tom Peyer, Georgia’s farming industry has been devastated by anti-immigration laws.
This has been going round the Lib Dem blogosphere
But only because it’s so great. And since I am too headachey to write tonight, I too will reproduce Paddy Ashdown’s wonderful speech on Lords reform in full. This kind of thing is why, despite everything, I still feel at home in the Lib Dems:
Lord Ashdown of Norton-sub-Hamdon:
I think it was Oscar Wilde who said that in a democracy the minority is always right. That thought has given me much comfort over the years as a Liberal, and it appears that it will have to give me comfort in this debate as well. I spent an engaging hour and a half yesterday in the House of Lords Library, looking through opposition speeches made in December 1831 to the Great Reform Act 1832 and to the Reform Act 1867. Five arguments were put forward. The first was: there is no public call for such reform beyond those mad radicals of Manchester. The second was: we should not be wasting our time and money on these matters; there are more important things to discuss such as the Schleswig-Holstein problem, the repeal of the corn laws or the crisis in the City that caused Anthony Trollope to write his wonderful novel.
A noble Lord: Not in 1832.
Lord Ashdown of Norton-sub-Hamdon: No, but in 1867.
The third argument, which was put so powerfully—indeed, in bloodcurdling terms—by the noble Baroness, Lady Boothroyd, was that if we were to embark on this constitutional terra incognita, the delicate balance of the constitution would collapse around us; mere anarchy would rule upon the world.
The fourth argument put forward in those debates was, “No, no, let us not disturb the quiet groves of wisdom within which we decide the future of the nation by letting in the rude representatives of an even ruder republic. God knows what damage we shall do if such a thing should happen”. The last and fifth argument was the argument actually used by the noble Baroness, Lady Boothroyd, just a moment ago: “if it ain’t broke, don’t mend it”.
Those are the arguments that were put forward against the 1832 Act, the 1867 Act, the 1911 Act—every single reform that we have ever had—and they are the arguments that are being put forward now. They were wrong then and they are wrong now. Perhaps I might explain before I come to the substance of the argument.
The first argument is that there is no public interest in this matter. Of course there is not; it is our business, not the public’s. The public have made it very clear that they do not trust our electoral system in its present form. Is there anyone in this Chamber who does not realise that the dangerous and growing gap between government and governed that is undermining the confidence in our democracy must be bridged? It must be bridged by the reform and modernisation of our democratic institutions, and we have a part to play in that too. This is not about what the public want, it is about us putting our House in order.
The second issue is that there are more important things to discuss. I do not think so. Frankly, we have been very fortunate to have lived through the period of the politics of contentment. The fragility of our democratic system has not been challenged because the business of government and democracy has been to redistribute increasing wealth. If we now come to the point at which we must redistribute retrenchment, difficult decisions, hard choices, I suspect it will come to something rather different, as we see on the streets of Greece today and as we saw on the streets of London not very long ago. This is very important.
The third is that we are embarking on a constitutional journey into terra incognita. Of course we are. We do not have a written constitution in this country. I wish we did, but we are told that the genius of our constitution is that it is unwritten, that it responds to events, that it develops, that it takes its challenges and moves forward. Oliver Cromwell did not have to say, “We will delay the Civil War until we have worked out the proper constitutional relationship between Parliament and the King”. In 1832 they did not say, “Let us hold this up until we have decided what proper constitutional balances would be achieved”. If you believe in the miracle of the unwritten constitution, you must believe that our constitution will adapt. You cannot argue that that is a good thing and then say that we cannot move forward unless we know precisely and in exact detail what will happen next. Of course this will change the balance between us and the other Chamber. It will not challenge the primacy of the other Chamber, but it will challenge the absolute supremacy of the other Chamber—that is called check and balance.
The fourth argument is that this will disturb the gentle climate of wisdom in this place. I have no doubt that there is unique wisdom here, although I have to say that I do not believe it is necessarily evenly distributed—maybe in some places it is, but not everywhere. However, I am not persuaded that there is less wisdom in the 61 second chambers that are elected, that there is less wisdom in the Senate of the United States, or the Sénat in France or the Bundesrat in Germany. I do not believe that the business of election will produce less wisdom than we have here now—rather the contrary. It is not wisdom that we lack; it is legitimacy. My old friend, Lord Conrad Russell—much missed—used to say, “I would happily exchange wisdom for legitimacy”, and I will tell your Lordships why.
This is where we come to the final point—the point made by the noble Baroness, Lady Boothroyd: “If it ain’t broke, let’s not fix it”. It is broke; it is broke in two fashions. First, our democracy now and our institutions of democracy in this country do not enjoy the confidence of our people in the way they did. That confidence is declining. We have to be part of the reform that reconnects politics with people in this country. If we do not, our democratic institutions will fall into atrophy and may suffer further in the decline of the confidence of the people of this country. If noble Lords do not realise that, they do not realise just how difficult the current situation is in Britain.
We in this Chamber cannot leave this to others to do. We must be part of that reform, modernisation, reconnection and democracy. It is said that this House does its job as a revising Chamber well. So it does. It is allowed to revise, change, amend legislation, but is it allowed to deal with the really big things? It does the small things well, but is it constructed in a way that would prevent a Government with an overwhelming majority in the other place taking this country to an unwise and, as we now know, probably illegal war? No, it would not because it did not. I cannot imagine that the decision to introduce the poll tax and the decision to take this country to war would have got through a Chamber elected on a different mandate and in a different period, or if there had been a different set of political weights in this Chamber from the one down the other end.
The truth of the matter is that we perform the function of a revising Chamber well, but that is not our only function. We are also part of the checks and balances in this country. The fact that we do not have democratic legitimacy undermines our capacity to act as a check and balance on the excessive power of the Executive backed by an excessive majority in the House of Commons. That is where we are deficient and what must be mended.
The case is very simple to argue. In a democracy, power should derive from the ballot box and nowhere else. Our democracy is diminished because this place does not derive its power from democracy and the ballot box but from political patronage—the patronage of the powerful. Is it acceptable in a democracy that the membership of this place depends on the patronage of the powerful at the time? We are diminished in two ways. We are diminished because we do not perform the function that we need to perform of acting as a check and a balance on the Government, and we do not do so because we are a creature of the Government’s patronage. I cannot believe that noble Lords find that acceptable in this Chamber .
A noble Lord: Time.
Lord Ashdown of Norton-sub-Hamdon: Perhaps noble Lords will forgive me, I will finish now. I have already strained my time but I ask for patience. The Leader of the House is right. We have spent 100 years addressing reform in this House. It is time to understand why that is necessary—both to make our place in modern democracy and to fulfil our proper function to provide a check and balance on an Executive who may get too powerful. We turned our hand to this 100 years ago; it is time to finish it now.
Blog Tour?
This will sound both daft and egocentric in the extreme, but would anyone like to interview me?
I’ll explain.
I’m hoping to get the Seven Soldiers book finished this weekend, and get it published within a week or so of that. This book has taken an utterly ludicrous amount of work on my part, and I’d like it to have an audience, but it won’t have one. It’s a book about a six-year-old superhero comic, except it goes whole chapters barely mentioning the comic and talking about 17th century theologians or thermodynamics. This is not something that’s going to leap off the shelves.
But I think there are a small number of people who would *really* like it, and they’re the people I’ve been writing it for. I want them to be able to find it.
One of the ways all the people who write books on “How To Sell A Million Ebooks On How To Sell A Million Ebooks” say you should do is to do a ‘blog tour’ – go around a bunch of different blogs and do guest posts, and I think that might work. I think some of my friends might well have friends who would be interested in this book (or even my previous ones).
So what I’m thinking is, if people want to, I could answer a bunch of interview questions for different blogs and the interviews could be posted to coincide with the book coming out. Would anyone be interested in doing this?
7: Frankenstein
This essay appears in a revised form in my book An Incomprehensible Condition: An Unauthorised Guide To Grant Morrison’s Seven Soldiers. Paperback, Hardback, Kindle (US), Kindle (UK), other ebook formats
“Did I request thee, Maker from my clay
To mould Me man? Did I solicit thee
From darkness to promote me?”
John Milton, Paradise Lost
“When, after some heretics had taken Christ for a mere man and others for the supreme God, St John in his Gospel endeavoured to state his nature so that men might have from thence a right apprehension of him and avoid those heresies and to that end calls him the word or logos: we must suppose that he intended that term in the sense that it was taken in the world before he used it when in like manner applied to an intelligent being. For if the Apostles had not used words as they found them how could they expect to have been rightly understood. Now the term logos before St John wrote, was generally used in the sense of the Platonists, when applied to an intelligent being and the Arians understood it in the same sense, and therefore theirs is the true sense of St John.”
Isaac Newton
So let’s talk about Arianism.
Arius of Alexandria must have been very naughty indeed, even though he was a priest. We know this because he is the one person of whom we actually have a reasonable historical record of him being slapped in the face by St Nicholas.
So what put Arius on the naughty list?
The Nicene creed (“We believe in one God, the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth, and of all things visible and invisible…”) is the major touchstone of the Christian faith, and is shared by the vast majority of Christians in the world – Orthodox, Anglican, Catholic and Lutheran alike share this creed. It was drawn up in the early fourth century at the first Council of Nicaea, the event at which this face-slapping took place. And this council, probably the most important event in the history of Christian theology, took place mostly just to tell Arius he was wrong.
The original version of the creed, in fact, ended with “But those who say: ‘There was a time when he was not;’ and ‘He was not before he was made;’ and ‘He was made out of nothing,’ or ‘He is of another substance’ or ‘essence,’ or ‘The Son of God is created,’ or ‘changeable,’ or ‘alterable’—they are condemned by the holy catholic and apostolic Church.” – this was specifically aimed at Arius.
Because what the Christian church – as we know it today, as it has been known since the fourth century – teaches is that God has three aspects in one. There is God the Father, The Son (who is also The Word who became flesh as Jesus), and the Holy Spirit. But these are all the same thing. I would say here that they’re ‘like different faces of a die’ or something, except that pretty much every metaphor for the Trinity has, over the millennia, been declared a heresy. But they’re three aspects of the same thing – Donne’s “three person’d God”.
By contrast, Arius taught that the Word (which is to say, the thing that became Christ) was not the same as God, but was created by God – that the Word was the first and best creation of God, and that all the other creations were created by the Word, which acts as the intermediary between God and the physical/spiritual universe. (Arianism seems almost here to shade over into Gnosticism).
Richard Dawkins, incidentally, says in his book The God Delusion that there is ‘very little’ difference between these two positions. One hates to imagine Dawkins’ reaction were a theologian to claim there was ‘very little’ difference between Lamarckianism and natural selection. I would here use the phrase ‘separate magisteria’ but that would just be rubbing salt in the wound.
The substantive point here is that Arius, and his followers the Arians (who include modern-day Jehovah’s Witnesses, which possibly explains their aversion to Santa – old enmities die hard), believed that rather than being the same thing as God, Jesus was somewhat closer to the Devil or Adam. God was eternal, but the Son had a beginning. He was created. He was a creature.
Some of them say that the Son is an eructation, others that he is a production, others that he is also unbegotten. These are impieties to which we cannot listen, even though the heretics threaten us with a thousand deaths. But we say and believe and have taught, and do teach, that the Son is not unbegotten, nor in any way part of the unbegotten; and that he does not derive his subsistence from any matter; but that by his own will and counsel he has subsisted before time and before ages as perfect God, only begotten and unchangeable, and that before he was begotten, or created, or purposed, or established, he was not. For he was not unbegotten. We are persecuted, because we say that the Son has a beginning, but that God is without beginning.
Arius
In the late 16th and early 17th centuries, once the Reformation had allowed religious disagreements to surface in central Europe [FOOTNOTE: Interestingly, this was the same time and place in which Rabbi Loew lived. Had we not earlier discussed his golem, this would undoubtedly feature in this essay.], there was a flourishing of theological thought never seen before or since. The many movements that became known as Puritanism were among the more obvious fruits of this, but one small but influential group were the Socinians.
Based on the teachings of Fausto Sozzini (also known as Faustus [FOOTNOTE: This is the Latin for 'lucky'. The tale of Faust was not yet so widespread that the name had died out. However, it's a nice coincidence given our subject.] Socinus), Socinianism became popular in Poland and TransylvaniaYes, honestly. It was an offshoot of Calvinism which disagreed with Calvin on two important points. It agreed with Arius that Jesus was a creature, not God, and it also believed that humans have free will, and therefore God’s omniscience only stretched to necessary truths, not contingent ones.
England in the mid 17th century wasn’t as theologically diverse as central Europe of a few decades earlier. While a certain amount of religious toleration was allowed, this was toleration of the “OK, we’ll stop torturing Puritans and burning Catholics to death, for now” type, and it had definite limits. The Act of Toleration of 1689, for example, which legalised nonconformist Protestantism, included a reiteration that Catholicism and disbelief in the Trinity were still illegal.
Nonetheless, Socinianism had a huge influence on three of the most important English thinkers of the time – Sir Isaac Newton, [FOOTNOTE The great Liberal economist John Maynard Keynes, who first brought to light Newton's views on theology and magic, said “It may be that Newton fell under Socinian influences, but I think not. He was rather a Judaic monotheist of the school of Maimonides.” However, it seems generally agreed that Newton was influenced by the Socinians. Certainly the argument I quote above is a specifically Arian, rather than Maimonidean, one. ] John Locke and John Milton. Newton has been dealt with extensively in these pages already, so I’ll be looking more at the others, but keep the influence on Newton in mind.
I turn my eyes to the Schools & Universities of Europe
And there behold the Loom of Locke whose Woof rages dire
Washd by the Water-wheels of Newton.black the cloth
In heavy wreathes folds over every Nation; cruel Works
Of many Wheels I view, wheel without wheel, with cogs tyrannic
Moving by compulsion each other: not as those in Eden: which
Wheel within Wheel in freedom revolve in harmony & peace.William Blake
John Locke was a friend of Newton, and one of the intellectual founders of both Capitalism and Liberalism. He was also one of the greatest proponents of religious tolerance of the time – his A Letter Concerning Toleration showed that suppression of religious dissent caused more problems than the dissent itself did (one of the earliest examples of the type of cybernetic insight that led to Ashby’s Law, and the eventual unification of thermodynamics and information theory), though he didn’t go so far as to accept that this toleration should extend to atheists, who would be incapable of swearing binding oaths.
The swearing of oaths was hugely important to Locke, because central to his thinking was the idea of the social contract – that society should be based on agreements freely entered into, rather than on authority imposed from above. (Locke did not seem to see any contradiction between this and his being one of the most important people in the slave trade). Free trade and free expression would ultimately lead to a better world.
The reason Locke could think this is that he dismissed the idea of Original Sin. To Locke, humanity wasn’t fallen. Rather people were tabula rasa – blank slates written on by their experiences. No-one was born bad or good, a genius or fool, but everyone was made the way they were by their experiences. Locke’s view here can be contrasted with the earlier work of Hobbes, who in Leviathan [FOOTNOTE: Referenced, of course, in Klarion. Honestly, I'm not reading all this 17th century philosophy stuff into the comics - this stuff is text, not subtext] argues for a social contract but also for an absolute monarch, on the grounds that humans are irredeemably evil and anything less would lead to ‘the war of all against all’.
Locke’s ideas represented the first real break between the philosophy of the English-speaking nations (Locke was a huge influence on the founders of the USA) and that of continental Europe. While self-proclaimed ‘rationalists’ like Leibniz were arguing that many ideas were innate, Locke, an empiricist, argued that we only have a concept of, say, ‘red’ after we have experienced something red in the real world.
Locke’s ideas lead, essentially, to the idea that the soul does not exist as something apart from and separate from the physical world [FOOTNOTE The Socinians were Christian Mortalists, who believed that the soul dies with the body but is resurrected by God on Judgement Day. Both Hobbes and Locke held to this idea, as did Milton, of whom more shortly.]. Humans, like Locke’s deity, are a single substance, rather than beings with multiple independent aspects. God made his Son the same way he made us, and all we are are lumps of flesh – but lumps of flesh that are infinitely perfectible, not innately evil.
OF man’s first disobedience, and the fruit
Of that forbidden tree, whose mortal taste
Brought death into the world, and all our woe,
With loss of Eden, till one greater Man
Restore us, and regain the blissful seat,
Sing, heavenly Muse, that on the secret top
Of Oreb, or of Sinai, didst inspire
That shepherd, who first taught the chosen seed
In the beginning how the heavens and earth
Rose out of Chaos:John Milton, Paradise Lost
John Milton disagreed with Locke about Original Sin – in fact Milton’s greatest work, Paradise Lost, is from beginning to end about the Fall, first of Satan and then of Adam. But Milton was also influenced by the Socinians, and shared Locke’s political views. The two of them were, separately (their productive years overlapped, but only slightly) hugely influential in the formation of the Whigs, the party that later became the Liberals and later still the Liberal Democrats, because both advocated religious freedom and a severely limited monarchy. Even the fact of Milton writing in blank verse was down to his wanting to liberate himself from “the troublesom and modern bondage of Rimeing”.
This wish for freedom caused overrated Tory windbag Samuel Johnson to say in the late 18th century that “the Devil was the first Whig”, and indeed despite Milton’s intense piety Blake noted that Milton was “of the Devil’s party without knowing it.” This is because in Paradise Lost the figure of Lucifer, the fallen angel, is a far more sympathetic one than any of the ‘good’ characters.
This is because the politics of Paradise Lost are confused as hell. Milton’s Satan is a hierarchy-loving conservative who is meant to represent the British monarchy, while God and the Son of God are represented as meritocrats who want everyone to rise to their natural station, like the Roundheads whose revolution Milton so ardently supported.
Yet, of course, it is Satan, not God, who is the revolutionary in the poem by his actions, even though his words are those of a Tory, while God, for all his Whiggish rhetoric, is pretty much the ultimate Tory. As a Whig, Milton couldn’t help but have more sympathy for the creature than the creator.
The interesting thing about the story of the War In Heaven, and Lucifer betraying God, and Lucifer also being the snake in the Garden Of Eden, is that it has relatively little Biblical grounding [FOOTNOTE: Although a similar story, involving a fallen angel named Azazel who teaches humans metalwork before becoming Satan, appears in the apocryphal Book Of Enoch. But there, a separate fallen angel called Gadrel tempts Eve.], and in fact Lucifer seems to have wandered out of a totally different mythology altogether. Lucifer means ‘bringer of light’, and by encouraging Eve to eat from the tree of knowledge, he brings the light of knowledge to humanity, removing it from being the exclusive province of God.
In this, he is more than slightly similar to another figure – Prometheus, of Greek myth.
Prometheus was a Titan, whose rebellion against the other Titans helped the Greek Gods overthrow them. Prometheus made the first men out of clay (and according to Aesop accidentally invented LGBT people by, when drunk, sticking the wrong genitals on people, causing them to revel in ‘perverted pleasures’), but the first men annoyed Zeus, so Zeus wouldn’t allow them the secret of fire. Prometheus stole the secret of fire from the Gods and gave it to men, and this annoyed Zeus so much that, as well as punishing Prometheus, he decided to punish mankind as well, by creating women (who says the Ancient Greeks were misogynist?)
Pandora, the first woman, was made out of clay by Hephaestus and driven so much by her utterly insatiable curiosity that she opened a jar clearly marked ‘do not open’ and let out all the troubles of the world (who says the Ancient Greeks were misogynist?)
“I ought to be thy Adam, but I am rather the fallen angel, whom thou drivest from joy for no misdeed.”
Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
“The only imaginary being, resembling in any degree Prometheus, is Satan; and Prometheus is, in my judgment, a more poetical character than Satan, because, in addition to courage, and majesty, and firm and patient opposition to omnipotent force, he is susceptible of being described as exempt from the taints of ambition, envy, revenge, and a desire for personal aggrandizement, which, in the hero of Paradise Lost, interfere with the interest. The character of Satan engenders in the mind a pernicious casuistry which leads us to weigh his faults with his wrongs, and to excuse the former because the latter exceed all measure. In the minds of those who consider that magnificent fiction with a religious feeling it engenders something worse. But Prometheus is, as it were, the type of the highest perfection of moral and intellectual nature, impelled by the purest and the truest motives to the best and noblest ends.”
Percy Shelley
In 1818 Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley and her husband, Percy Shelley, both wrote very different works on a similar theme. Percy Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound , now the less-known of the two works, was a poetical sequel to Æschylus’ Prometheus Bound. Like Milton, who he took as inspiration, Shelley was writing in the aftermath of a revolution – this time the French Revolution – and Shelley wanted to find a way to avoid the mistakes that had caused France to endure an arguably worse tyranny as a result of the revolution than it had endured before. His Prometheus becomes a heroic revolutionary, eventually overthrowing the Greek Gods and bringing in an anarchist Utopia.
Mary Shelley, on the other hand, had a very different, more conventional view of Prometheus. As far as she was concerned, it was Prometheus’ gift of fire that had caused humanity’s downfall, allowing people to cook and eat meat rather than remaining placid vegetarians. And so in her Frankenstein: Or The Modern Prometheus, her Prometheus is Doctor Frankenstein, the creator, while her creature (never named in the book, but Shelley always referred to him as Adam) is Milton’s Satan in every detail (the creature even learns to read from a copy of Paradise Lost he finds in a barn [FOOTNOTE: As the comedian Mark Steel points out, this is the most implausible part of the story, the most likely reading matter to be found in an isolated barn being pornography, not religious poetry.]).
Frankenstein was, in essence, a reaction against both the Locke-inspired Enlightenment values of Mary Shelley’s parents, William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft, and the Romantic utopian idealism of her husband. While Godwin, Wollstonecraft and Percy Shelley all believed in human perfectibility and the advancement of humanity through knowledge, Frankenstein is a profoundly conservative work. While Mary Shelley has been described as “William Godwin’s and Mary Wollstonecraft’s daughter who became Shelley’s Pygmalion. [sic - the writer clearly meant Shelley's Galatea]”, Frankenstein is opposed to everything Percy Shelley ever wrote. Frankenstein aspires to the knowledge that man was not meant to know, and is destroyed by it. He does not even bring fire to anyone else – it is not for the crime of sharing that this Prometheus is punished, but merely for the crime of thinking at all.
Comic issues Frankenstein #1-4
Artists Doug Mahnke (line art), Nathan Eyring (colours)
Other credits Phil Balsman (letters), Michael Siglain (asst editor), Peter Tomasi (editor)
Connected Morrison works Morrison’s really done very little with this kind of feel. The nearest is probably Seaguy.
Look Out For Fairytales, the dead having their revenge on the living
Still to come in Seven Soldiers Galatea!
Rebooting The DC Universe
Blame plok. I had a post all planned out for today, about Morrison’s Frankenstein, and about the resurgence of Arianism in the 17th century, but then I read this, and now I have to do my own “How would I reboot the DC Universe in 52 comics?”
Now I agree with plok that we need simultaneously to have less continuity-heavy crossover stories *and* to have a way to bring readers through from one line to another. By stealing some ideas from the Faction Paradox range, and adding a few of my own, I think I know how to do it.
It involves Hypertime, of course.
An entity exists at the end of time. A single entity, that exists for precisely one Planck length of time, but that is all-knowing, all-seeing, and omnipotent for that one Planck time. Call it God – we might as well,
But it’s at war with itself.
There are two possible histories of the universe. One leads to one type of God, the other to another. Both these histories have different laws of physics – one set of laws is what we call ‘science’, the other is what we call ‘magic’. Both are totally self-consistent sets of rules that will lead to a consistent universe.
But there can be only one end of the universe, and only one God, and so both Gods are in an existential struggle to become the one that really exists. If either God actually won, not only would the one that lost cease to exist, it would also cease ever to have even possibly existed – we might as well think of it as two potential universes at war as two beings.
So both Gods are trying to manipulate the hypertimelines, to destroy ones that lead to the other’s existence. But the Hypertime multiverse currently exists in a state of flux, and our universe is an interference pattern between two incompatible universes.
This means that there for many beings, they see a universe of scientific rationality, where the universe operates according to the principles we know now. Another lot of people see a universe where thought and mind have an ontologically basic existence – a universe of magic.
There are the people – the vast majority – who live in a lowest common denominator set of the two worlds, that looks like the ‘real world’.
And there are those, a very few, who exist in both universes simultaneously. We call these superheroes. They appear at first glance to operate according to one set of rules, but don’t quite fit. They, and only they, exist in both universes. They can affect both universes, but only to a limited extent – they can prevent an incursion of one on the other, but can’t affect the overall course of history. Superman can travel in time, or defeat an evil magician, and it’ll be on the front page of the Daily Planet and everyone will believe it – but the next day they’ll still think time travel and magic impossible.
All the big dichotomies in the DC Universe – Heaven/Hell , Order/Chaos, Monitor/Antimonitor – are reflections of this great war, and every power in the universe, be it the New Gods of New Genesis or the Guardians Of The Universe, has taken one side or the other, although the alliances are complex and constantly shifting.
There’s a very small alliance, though – no more than a handful of individuals – who make up a third side in the conflict. They realise that were either side to win, their rich universe would collapse into a dull conformity, and so they stand in the middle and try subtly to play one side against the other. Metron and Rip Hunter are the main ones here.
This then lets us split the comics into four separate lines quite neatly. We have the main-line superheroes, who can operate without continuity constraints, and any real continuity blunders we can just blame on the war. We have the SF/Space Opera stuff, which is where we dump all the real hardcore universe building for the people who are currently buying and enjoying superhero comics. There’s a magic universe, which we aim at the Vertigo readers, and the Twilight/Harry Potter people. And then there’s the ‘ground level’ of characters who could almost live in our universe. The superheroes can appear in any of these stories, but there’s otherwise no crossing over between the four lines.
The main line should be done-in-one stories, accessible to anyone of pretty much any age. The SF line would be aimed at the current comic reading audience, the magic line at the huge ‘dark fantasy’ audience, and the ground-level stuff should be, in general, based around character rather than plot and aimed at the largely-untapped but very real female audience for these types of stories.
Main superhero line
Batman
Superman
Wonder Woman
JLA
Captain Marvel
The Flash (using plok’s idea of The Flash being really about time)
Doom Patrol (keep the current Giffen take on this – it’s essentially Morrison’s version, but done so people who aren’t Morrison can do it and with extra Ambush Bug)
Plastic Man (get Kyle Baker back)
Power Girl
Bulleteer
Tales Of The DC Universe – this would be an ongoing along the lines of 52, done in much the same way.
Frankenstein: Agent Of SHADE – give this to Morrison
Metamorpho
SF line
Green Lantern
Metal Men (Giffen and DeMatteis for this)
Omega Men
Booster Gold (done the way it currently is, with Rip Hunter an important character)
Blue Beetle (Jaime)
The Atom (Ryan Choi)
New Gods
Mister Miracle
Green Lantern Corps
Legion Of Superheroes
Magic line
Sandman (also known as ‘get Neil Gaiman to do any magic-related title we can)
Doctor Thirteen (who has ended up in the magical universe from the scientific one)
Zatanna
Klarion
House Of Mystery
The Adventures Of Detective Chimp In Gorilla City (“I was on my twelfth cigar and third whisky of the day, and thinking about breakfast, when the client knuckled in. I don’t normally go for the larger types, but this gal had arms up to her shoulders and the kind of figure that would straighten anyone’s banana”, with Monsieur Mallah and The Brain as occasional guest stars).
The Demon
Tim Hunter
Animal Man
Hellblazer
Amethyst, Princess Of Gemworld
The Spectre
Ground level
Birds Of Prey (with Oracle, who is Barbara Gordon)
Batwoman (by JH Williams)
The Question (Renee Montoya)
Manhattan Guardian
Action Comics (As I described in my Superman pop-drama, with a Jimmy Olsen done-in-one story in the front and a Lois Lane serial as backup. Clark Kent can appear, but no Superman).
Sgt Rock – Garth Ennis and Joe Kubert
Jonah Hex
Catwoman
Black Canary/Green Arrow
Gotham Central
The Spirit (get Darwyn Cooke back on this)
Hitman
Along with these, I’d have five other comics:
World’s Finest – Superman and Batman team-ups
The Brave And The Bold – Batman team-ups
Showcase – an anthology, the first story of which would be a new character by the best-quality team possible, the backup would be a well-known character by first-time creators
Solo – a showcase title for writer-artists
80-Page Giant – a monthly 80-page reprint of classic stories, usually tying in with something out this month (say if the Penguin is the Batman villain this month, a classic Penguin story would be in there).
Plans For The Next Year Or So
I’m hoping to have the Seven Soldiers book finished in a week or two, and then to get PEP! 3 out (I know that’s taken a while, but a lot of people have had personal problems which meant that while the initial deadline was December I only got the last submission in late May).
I now have a much better work schedule (my manager has worked something out that means I’ll actually be more productive while under less stress) and so I’m planning to try to write two books at a time in parallel from now on, one on music and one ‘other’, on here, with one post a week on each. That should still let me write whatever other things come into my head too, like the Hugo reviews or posts on politics and comics. The books I’m planning to write are:
Non-music:
Seven Soldiers (I still need a title for this, if anyone can think of one, by the way).
How We Know What We Know
Cerebus
Doctor Who: The Hartnell Years
All of these I’ve started on here already, but will concentrate on getting them done properly.
Music:
The Beach Boys On CD Vol 2
The Beach Boys On CD: The Solo Years
The Monkees’ Music
John Lennon Solo
I’m also going to try to get another little ebook of short stories done by the end of the year.
1 comment