On Promethea, and our need for Her

They posted this over on Newsarama today.

To say that Promethea sets me off is an understatement. When I write, I try to clip the very lowest edges of that story with my reaching, out-stretched hand. It is a mountain, like The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, or Blood Meridian, which I have set for myself to cross when I approach a story.

The asshole in me regards anyone who is not suitably impressed by Promethea as a story and an artifact worthy of awe in a very poor light, and the more enumerated renderings of those comments said asshole makes are sentiments I keep to myself.

I truly and utterly love this story, and I'm very happy with the comments I wrote, so I wanted to post them here as well.

To tell you that I nearly cry every time I read issue 17, at the image of Christ on the cross, would compel you to take up immediately and read the entire series (if you had ever actually met me, such would be the impression you had of what strokes of evocation it would take to induce such a reaction in a person such as myself).

I am many things, mostly yeti, but surely not what any reasonable person would consider a christian and sure as hell never cry, but that scene, the evocation of that image, is the most pronounced rendering of Jesus I have ever encountered, and does more to reconcile the nature of Christ’s value as a figure worthy of the highest regard than any words ever uttered by a pastor asking for a tithe.

It IS a long, drawn out essay on magic done as a comic book series. But name anything even remotely like that? “Everything is magic" is entirely the point and has never been made so completely and with such applomb.

The storytelling weaves together Moore's musings on magic and the nature of imagination, and J. H. William's pages, his layouts and paneling, and José Villarrubia's coloring follow in richness the examples set by Eisner or Steranko. They break out of any commonplace ideals set for modern comics storytelling to create something singular, something that holds up a mirror to ourselves to show we are, in fact, capable of much more than we have ever been lead to believe. I for one appreciate that sentiment.

Promethea incorporates nearly all of existence into the story. It is not a mistake that Moore uses a significant portion of the text to mirror the content and ancient role of the tarot and the kabbalah, because both of those systems served to provide a cosmological framework for a time when science was not capable of doing so. They were structured schema organizing observable phenomena into a coherence with the unexplainable chaos of life.

That Moore was able to realign these elements with our modern understanding of time, evolution, and nature I think is actual magic, because he is able to use such admittedly esoteric quanta to the effect of compelling the reader further into a story which illustrates, again and again, how the value of humanity MUST rest not in our derisive contempt of the mistakes we have made, but in how we move forward from failure, in inches by the decade at times, towards being worthy of the time we have on this world.

The christ scene, and countless others, strike at the base of what I believe, and by projection (because I have never met him but I argue he believes the same), Moore believes: that humanity has, and will continue to, attack, destroy, and punish the people who have found through their own awareness, talents, and abilities the means to make of us a better people and a better world, but that through the suffering of fools and tyrants and despots upon those who seek to remove chains and hatred we find the road from darkness up into light.

Moore exults, and I freely admit and support this, writers, as well as artists, poets, philosophers, and teachers. He exults those who would bring us light, which should be pretty obvious from the title, and I am thankful that he does, because there is not nearly enough of that in this world.

On Pasts

"Ooooh you look so good, ooooh you looook so fiiine."


Who makes up the past anyway?

Was it you? I seem to remember you being there, like a detail in a movie that is very small and has to be mauled out in a flash, but that doesn't really fit. It's tight, it's a close-up, and it's in there, pressing it's untrimmed finger into your stomach. But I remember your name. And I remember when your Birthday is.

Because it's alive man, it's everywhere woman, the middle word in life, keeping itself inside your head even when everyone else is loosing their's and blaming you. "Are you going to travel through space on a fraction? What are you going to land on - one-quarter, three-eighths?" Have you lived a third of you life? By 18, 22, 35 - do the math, and then tell me. It's the past man, your past man!

Or maybe, it's raining frogs, and the past, the past, we're through with the past, no, we're through the past, and we'll be back after this short commercial break, but the past ain't through with us.

And so maybe it's a weird night, a night that is happening again and again, always happening, like the restaurant at the end of the universe, a perennial blooming and blooming and maybe because time is a whole and doesn't come in slices. Maybe it's a Rolo, and you can tick off the bits of it and pop then in your mouth. But it's hard to say that it has been a weird night if it's still the same night - yet to become 'has been' - and it is the same night it has always been, when it is all kinds of full of the past and the future, and the past might be the future, and we maybe want the past and the future to meet so that we can feel like we are off the hook for a change.

So if I remember your name, what past can there be for someone who doesn't forget? And if "blessed are the forgetful, for they get the better of their blunders," well what then? Where do all blessings lie? Does this one in his time play many parts too, if his time curls up into a ball, the end always somewhere near the beginning, the feet always near the face. All the world staged in one act.

But then too, onto the last scene of all, that ends this strange eventful history, in second childishness and mere oblivion. Who is that we speak of in our legacy, whose legacy do we speak? What's left?

Am I having the past over for dinner? Is the past having me for dinner?

Holy Frakkin' 3AM, or the Road to Unabashed Theorizing

I've been writing letters all night. Various reasons both professional, personal, and objective. I am not sure what the triplicate of both would be. Throth? Which isn't bad as it is close to Thoth, who has got the cool breeze in spaces. He's a clever bite at that. (turns of phrase wholly intentional, I'm proofreading this one)

He's all word and such. Language. The great evolution. Which is, I figure, sorta like this:

Evolution is a physiological adaptation to environmental stimuli that transmits from one generation to the next. For the mass of terrestrial existence that has been transmitted through genetic coding, through DNA, with subsequent resulting slowness.

The brain, as humans understand their's (though I hardly feel stupid enough to believe that we are either the only conscious life-form on this planet or in the entirety of the universe) is the first organ that induces in itself a physiological change. When we learn, the natural response of the brain is to create new neural connections and folds within the brain. Our brains change with every new piece of information we gather.

But evolution requires transmission to successive generations, and the products of learning do not transmit organically. The brain of a newborn does not reflect the accumulated knowledge of its parentage. But, I mean, I have this thing all worked out positing that the brain is a single generation evolutionary matrix.

And I am totally justified because the brain is also the first organ to create an extra-organic codex for the transmission of its adaptations: LANGUAGE. So not only is Thoth the god of language, but also the god of evolution and thus throth made god.

Spare the rod and fear the Wroth.