Pulau Blakang Mati

Somewhere on the ridge between Churchward's Mu and Sclater's Lemuria, there is an island. That island is called, by its longest-term inhabitants, the 'Island of Death-From-Behind'. Some wags have therefore concluded that the ancient indigenes knew what a civil service was.

But emerging from the Atlantean towers to the north comes a book, presently being proofed and completed. It is the tale of the Gnome, referred to several times in this blog, and the modern Imhotep of this present Atlantis.

The question that was being debated by some in recent times was: "In what way was the Gnome a hero?" It is an interesting question, and one well worth considering.

The Gnome was not a barbarian or slave gladiator who with might of arm drove the enemy away in flight. He was not a wizard-king single-handedly holding back the fall of night, the incursions of chaos, the end of time, or the ruthlessness of the Lords of Order. He was High Priest of his own order, but not the bearer of the temporal majesty — that was the Thunderer's role.

Yet, as the book will show, the Gnome was a hero because he was a hero with a thousand faces. Whether it had to do with the instilling of lessons, the defence of the realm, the collection of rare birds, the injection of culture, or the hard golden coin of the marketplace, the Gnome had everything to do with it, while the Thunderer's bolts struck downward to the left and right, removing opposition. Like Gilgamesh and Enkidu, the Gnome was the true tragic hero, while the Thunderer was his foil.

A hard truth, perhaps, this story of Atlantis.

Dauntless

On All Hallows' Eve, we remember the departed saints. It is a good alternative to Samhain.

The late and nearly-sainted Dauntless has long been a hero of mine; my great-grandfather was his student. But writing about him is difficult for that very reason. What can one write about one's heroes?

One duty of the historian is to tell the truth as much as it can be discovered. Another duty is to keep discerning how much truth there is in the truth, and how much cover remains to be discovered.

The first is a narrative duty; the second is an investigative one. The historian is a journalist of the past, with the frequent disadvantage that sometimes the sources are all dead and gone, whether human or otherwise.

And so a month after Adobe's commission, I am still mulling about whether the narrative I am telling about the Dauntless really is the truth — whether it is sufficient, whether it is adequate, whether it is correct, whether it is biased. Blah. And blah, blah, blah.

I want it to be true. Does that make me guilty of bias?

Hot Soup

I sat with Gnomus and the Hierophant yesterday in the NineSquare. There was coffee, tea and, for me, a dish of hot beef soup. It was a dish I had long enjoyed; of late, I have not had much of it. I have always enjoyed hot soup.

It's confession time, though. I do not like being in hot soup for bad reasons. I do not like people who put other people into hot soup for bad reasons. I will brave the hottest of soups for a friend; I will stand against injustice and tyranny; but I am, to some degree, not very brave.

Bravery, to me, is tempered and strengthened by reason. The lyrics from Man of La Mancha go:

To dream the impossible dream,
To fight the unbeatable foe,
To bear the unbearable sorrow,
To run where the brave dare not go,

To right the unrightable wrong,
to love pure and chaste from afar,
To try when your arms are too weary,
To reach the unreachable Star...

It's that line in the centre that is the point: these things are the extremes where the brave dare not go. And since I am not very brave, I suspect I will fall short of such Quixotic ideals. I can drink hot soup, but I cannot live in it.

For those of you who may have once thought that I was brave in any way, I have to say that grievous irritation can spur one to bravery, but it doesn't necessarily mean that one has vast reserves of courage. I wish I had, though. I sometimes would like to be a bit of a hero, but I don't think I am very much of one.

I think I am just me. No Don Quixote, nor Prince Hamlet, I. Just a Prufrock, like any anonymous other.

Reel Life Superheroism

Even when we were much younger, we used to make fun of comicbook heroes. After all, to a large extent, the world before 1990 (or at least, before 1986-7's Watchmen) was full of colourful jokers who had largely optimistic worldviews. Even the death of Jean Grey changed little in terms of perky colours. That's not to say that pre-Watchmen superheroism was all goodness and light; there has always been some darkness in the derring-do, even the deepest derring-do contained some... do.

But the irritating thing about the last few days of my personal space-time continuum is that I can't get a few things out of my head with respect (or regard) to superheroes and the media. For one thing, I keep dreaming of a really bleak superhero movie called...

Fantastic Fear: The Rise of the Civil Service, in which four rather ordinary humans have been irradiated by some sort of cosmic radiation and are now fearsomely powerful and out-of-control administrative officers. They have to deal with a faceless entity who keeps reflecting every form of question, interrogation, probe or investigation back at the originators. This entity might destroy their world – which might not be such a bad thing.

Urgh. And that's not all...

The Leak of Extraordinary Scholars, Officers and Gentlemen, in which a shadowy figure recruits a dark cabal of unusual and semi-fictional characters to examine the strange disappearance of local talent in recent years from an institution of the utmost quality and prestige. Plenty of back-stabbing and betrayal from invisible sources, a few explosions, and tantalising sequelae involving monstrous abominations and gold medals (or is that Tiger Beer advertising?)

Help. My dream-life is being invaded by unhealthy cynicism. Not good.

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Note: No confusion should arise from cross-dimensional leakage between this post and movie exhibits A and B, which you may examine at your leisure.

Beyond Thunderdome

There is always the rebel alliance, there are always the unwanted and unwashed lords of misrule beyond the pale. Somewhere out there, the twisted mutants bring life to the scorched post-apocalyptic desert. And the ravens laugh.

The signs are there. The effete world of the eugenicists, the controllers, the artificial and synthetic intelligences – this too will pass. For raw blood and the knife of the mind conspire to turn the order of the world upon its head, to what it should have been. It is a time for heroes.

Will you be one?

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Reading List:

1. The Book of Seth
2. A Book of Gaiman
3. Grandmaster-Level Courage
4. A High-Class Reply to a Low-Class Insult

A Sense Of Wonder

I spent most of today marking essays. Tall ones, short ones, long ones, brief ones. It struck me that they all lacked one thing: a sense of wonder. I mean, here you have young men writing about God and philosophy and transformation and power and technology - and yet it sounds so dry, so dispassionate, so bloodless. The Greek word is anaimosarke - lacking blood and fleshly substance, and it is the adjective used in a very famous classical poem to describe the cicada, who is happy to be that way.

Yes, they lack a sense of wonder - a sense of numinosity - that deitropic sense which seeks and finds a hidden fundamental glory behind the apparent firmament of this world. Agnostic physicists have it; Feynman could marvel at how his simple diagrams of the subatomic world were so apt, so descriptive of the unseen. But where to find it, if they don't have it?

That's a serious problem. It goes beyond philosophy and sometimes, even religion. It goes beyond modern culture or society or whatever. I think that a sense of wonder only forms when two things happen: 1) the human entity realises how small it is, and 2) the same entity realises how big everything else might be. Note: 'might be' and ' not 'is'. If you know how big something is, then it isn't big enough, or perhaps it's really big and all that, but you have set the seal of finity on it, and it will someday end.

So I tried delving deep in me to find instances of that sense of the numinous. Where have I ever felt that, when, and why?

I found numerous examples. I shall share just one, though.

In my life of idle wandering, I have seen many comicbook heroes die. Some companies kill them off in huge numbers (maiming is sometimes almost as good) just to raise sales. I will talk about three. I saw Jean Grey (Phoenix) die - we all did, in X-Men #137 all those years ago; I saw Superman die, beaten and pounded to a pulp by Doomsday, on 18 Nov 1992. And I saw the Batman die, at the hands of his best friend, at the stroke of midnight and Frank Miller's pen.

I was saddened greatly by Phoenix's death, but she had killed a world, and besides, her Cyclops was there to mourn her and I closed the book and it was never as sad again. I was stunned by Superman's brutal demise, because he was Superman - Last Son of Krypton - and could never die; and of course, he didn't. But the one which kicked me in the guts was when a bruised Wayne crumpled in his armoured exoskeleton, the ultimate knight felled in his defence of a free land.

Why?

Because Batman was human, purely so. He had triumphed over evil, both within and without, with nothing but bare humanity and the excellence that can come with it. If he had ever taught anything to any of his colleagues, it was that humans can be much more than anythng humans can imagine; that a driven, focused, intelligent perseverance could be more telling than X-ray vision, an emerald ring or a golden lasso. I wept when Batman fell. He was the darkness in us that was also the dark before the dawn. Unlike Superman and Phoenix, he was really one of us - perhaps not the neighbour of our choice, but the defender who would always have our concerns at heart.

I saw a lot of the Batman in the defenders of New York three years ago. Helplessly, they watched loved ones die. Tirelessly, they fought to save the living, and they swore, 'Never again.' It was one shining moment which could only come out the darkness, the cape blackly flapping in the midnight wind of Gotham. And it was that moment, when humanity in all its frailty looked into the darkness and found light, that I felt again a certain sense of wonder - not certain, as in 'specific'; but certain as in 'sure and steadfast'.

As long as a sense of wonder remains to be evoked, humanity has hope. The true heroes are among us.