Transfigured Characters

I think one of the best philosophical points I've seen in comics lately is that dying changes you even if you come back to life again. This comes across in a dialogue between the Black Widow and some reckless bloggers who spread the news that Bucky Barnes is still alive when actually he's had a power weapon rammed through the front wall of his chest.

At first, everybody's wrong. And then they figure it out after the Widow has more or less trashed the office, thrashed the people and threshed the documents as if they were wheat. (See what I did there?)

The truth is that even if comic characters like Steve Rogers, Simon Williams (who?!), Clark Kent, Bruce Wayne, and Oliver Queen die and come back, they are no longer the same people they were. Their fears of death have mutated. And their fears for their loved ones are even more complex.

The reason for this is simple. None of them died thinking, "Hey, I'm a key franchise character, they won't kill me." In their comic-book world, they died while being heroes or villains or whatever. They had no thought of coming back, they never took it for granted. Their resurrections weren't expected, nor taken for granted after the fact.

But moving from a state of not fearing (or thinking about) death to one of having experienced death, and then being alive again — that is a mysterious return from that "undiscovered country, from whose bourne no traveller returns." It is even more so for Steve Rogers, the victim of two deaths and several clonings as of the present time.

Not for nothing did the iconists and semioticists deliberately confound death and transfiguration. If death grants humans a reversal of life, is the reversal of death necessarily the same life? It would appear not.

Dark and Stormy

It never was a comic book film. It was always the Jack Nicholson kind of movie that I thought we'd grown up away from in the 1980s. The thing that makes it deep is our cognitive bias — expecting a comic book but getting a dark and melancholy, violent, perhaps horrific piece of powerful cinema — this makes us impute extra value to it.

It is not your grandfather's Gothamite avenger, with his chirpy sidekick. It is the psychic residue of a hero who got darker and darker in his own little circle of hell as his writers Reichenbached him to a farewell.

The only versions of him I really liked, of all his latter-day incarnations, were Neil Gaiman's caped crusader and Jeph Loeb's madcap running-around-after-all-the-villains version. These were perhaps the furthest anyone should have taken the character as far as dark and stormy were concerned.

I've left out, of course, Frank Miller's on-the-verge-of-retirement classic version. I loved that one. But it's since become conflated with the no-man-is-an-island clock-ticking Hitchcock version. See first paragraph. Gah.

Theogony

I'm not the first, certainly not the last, to say this: for a long time, people have had superheroes, subdivinities or divinities — the principalities and powers of the world, or the worlds.

What is always interesting is the kind of world that our choice of principalities and powers reflects. In a world where Newton is the Prophet, we look towards determinism in the physical and mystery in the metaphysical, but with one reflecting the other — for Sir Isaac was an alchemical theologian as well as a natural scientist. In a world where the Hulk can pound a Norse god into immobility on the floor of a penthouse in the sky, we bridge the two and conflate power with power, bia with kratos.

I watched The Avengers, Joss Whedon's masterpiece of modern kinematography, on the cusp of Saturday night and Sunday morning. There were gods of all kinds invoked and evoked, with even Death making an appearance (in a way) towards the very end. They create an uneasy balance throughout, although the movie is so much fun that you forget this. But my focus was almost completely on Steve Rogers, played by Chris Evans.

Captain America highlights one problem of his eponymous state: he looks at the Norse gods as they bicker and fight, and his thought is that his own God is not like that. Then that thought too is gone, as he has to become the umpiring principality in a battle between Iron Man, Robert Downey Jr's Tony Stark as technotitan of electronic wizardry, and Thor (Chris Hemsworth) as legend of thunder and lightning. Somewhere in the background, Loki (played to the backstabbing hilt by Tom Hiddleston) wearily ponders the kindergarten-style brawling (of the don't-take-my-stuff variety).

Principalities and powers, indeed. If my foreground eye was focussed on the good Captain, my dark-adapted background eye was focussed on those psychologically warped children of the Cold War, the Black Widow (Ms Scarlet, haha) and Hawkeye. They, like Steve Rogers, don't feel as if they were ever trained for theomachy — but where Captain America sucks it up and goes to war, they grit their teeth and make the little things count. After all, 'twas an apple that started the Trojan War, and an arrow that effectively forced it to its end.

I enjoyed myself. But I couldn't help thinking such thoughts as I wandered home in the night before dawn.

Green Lantern

I had a rather odd and unsettling dream a few nights ago. In that dream, I was walking along dank and crumbly ancient corridors. A voice whispered in my ear, saying, "Remember your oath, remember..."

In brightest day, in blackest night,
No evil shall escape your sight
Let those who worship evil's might,
Beware your power... Green Lantern's light!

An actinic radiance of emerald hue was blooming around me. The dark wings of evil creatures shredded in its glare. I strode across the astroturf, and the black soil could not hold me back; neither could the zombie arms that erupted from that tainted ground.

The funny thing, I was to recall in retrospect, was that the lantern logo on my ring of power looked a lot like this one, except that it was deep green and not sky blue. Ridiculous.

That's when I woke up. Why I can't have standard superhero dreams, I don't know.

What Kind Of A...

...superhero are you?

I've always wondered about this one – probably a lot more so than wondering about what kind of theologian I would make. For a long while, I was caught up in the superhero genre; I still am a fan of some sort, with a memory that goes back to the original Avengers #23 (for example). So I was understandably tempted when this quiz came my way...

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Your results:

You are Spider-Man.

You are intelligent, witty, a bit geeky and have great power and responsibility.

Spider-Man		75%
Green Lantern		60%
Batman		55%
Superman		45%
Iron Man		40%
Robin		40%
The Flash		40%
Hulk		30%
Supergirl		30%
Catwoman		30%
Wonder Woman		20%

Click here to take the Superhero Personality Quiz

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'Nuff said?

The Greek For 'World' Is Κόσμος

I am setting my home page to this for a while, after resisting it for a long time. It reminds me of the most beautiful readable language that exists. This language is Greek to me.

Lexically, the Greek language is one of the most important to an English-speaker. It's probably true that most of the academic disciplines we see in the school curriculum have Greek names - biology, physics, geography, history, music, economics, technology, mathematics, philosophy. I have some limited competency in Greek - my friend the classicist is the man you want when asking for more.

But limited or not, I intend to make use of my competence in weird and wonderful ways. Εν αρχη ην ο Λογος, indeed.

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Edit: Then again, after finding this, I might change my home page again. There aren't many things more satirical and yet comforting than this.

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.