SUPERGODS, by Grant Morrison: Excerpt 2 of 2

Here's the second, longer excerpt that I typed up out of Supergods.  I promise, it's well worth your time.

Again, I did not write any of the text below, and I have no rights to it.  I just wanted to make it accessible to people who are unlikely to read the whole book.

Excerpt #2 (Outro: 'Nuff Said)

WE HAVE MADE YOU A CREATURE NEITHER OF HEAVEN NOR OF EARTH, NEITHER MORTAL NOR IMMORTAL IN ORDER THAT YOU MAY, AS THE FREE AND PROUD SHAPER OF YOUR OWN BEING, FASHION YOURSELF IN THE FORM YOU MAY PREFER.  IT WILL BE IN YOUR POWER TO DESCEND TO THE LOWER BRUTISH FORMS OF LIFE; YOU WILL BE ABLE, THROUGH YOUR OWN DECISION, TO RISE AGAIN TO THE SUPERIOR ORDERS WHOSE LIFE IS DIVINE.

It’s 1486, almost a half century into the new Western dawn, and that’s one man’s idea of “God” having a quiet word with man.  We’re at the beginning of the great European Rennaissance of culture, the end of a long dark age, and here’s Count Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, aged twenty-six, seizing his moment in the piazza.  This is it; his big chance to impress posterity and an audience of hostile clerics with his observations on philosophy and human nature.

“Born to a high position we failed to appreciate it but fell instead to the estate of brutes and uncomprehending beasts of burden.”

Pico’s Oration on the Dignity of Man is still regarded as the foundation stone of the “humanist” movement that strove to cast off the manacles of Church dogma, locked in place since the founding of St. Peter’s Basilica in AD 324, but for all its status as a humanist manifesto, the Oratorio is without a doubt urging us to go far beyond the human, into the realms of angels and gods.  It asks us to accept the superhuman as an undeniable fact of our nature, and the goal of our future evolution as people.

As we draw close to the back cover, I’d like to think Pico’s time has come around again, one reason why he was given a cameo in All-Star Superman.  What he’s saying still makes sense, perhaps more than ever given the possibilities of our technology and medicine, because Pico is telling us about the power of stories and imagination to reshape our future.  He’s doing me a big favor by explaining what this book is all about, in fact.  Although his metaphors are Biblical, suggesting Cherubs and Seraphs and Thrones as our role models on the road to “God” or “cosmic consciousness,” we can just as easily call them superheroes.

Pico tells us that we have a tendency to reenact the stories we tell ourselves.  We learn as much (and sometimes more that’s useful) from our fictional role models as we do from the real people who share our lives.  If we perpetually reinforce the notion that human beings are somehow unnatural aberrations adrift in the ever-encroaching Void, that story will take root in impressionable minds and inform the art, politics, and general discourse of our culture in anti-life, anti-creative, and potentially catastrophic ways.  If we spin a tale of guilt and failure with an unhappy ending, we will live that story to its conclusion, and some benighted final generation not far down the line will pay the price.

If, on the other hand, we emphasize our glory, intelligence, grace, generosity, discrimination, honesty, capacity for love, creativity, and native genius, those qualities will be made manifest in our behavior and in our works.  It should give us hope that superhero stories are flourishing everywhere because they are a bright flickering sign of our need to move on, to imagine the better, more just, and more proactive people we can be.

Here in the twenty-first century we’re surrounded by proof that we tend to live our stories.  As I brought this section to a close, one last synchronicity directed my attention to an article in New Scientist’s February 12, 2011, issue about the work of William Casebeer of the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), based in Arlington, Virginia.  Casebeer, a neurobiologist, goes so far as to suggest that certain narratives are as addictive as cocaine, commenting on the effects a compelling yarn might have upon the minds of enemy soldiers or suicide bombers.  He is convinced that we should be investigating the military potential of stories, by creating “counter-narrative strategies” engineered to undermine or oppose the religious or political storylines that inspire war, oppression, and greed.  We may scoff and leave it to military experts to develop a technology whereby a cadet is told a story so convincing he believes he’s superhuman before a battle, but I’d like to think that magic words and spells belong to the rest of us as well.  If Pico is correct, we can write new lives and new futures, and, more important, live them.  Stories can break hearts or foment revolutions.  Words can electrify us or make our blood run cold.  And the idea of Superman is every bit as real as the idea of God.

If our shallow, self-critical culture sometimes seems to lack a sense of the numinous or spiritual it’s only in the same way a fish lacks a sense of the ocean.  Because the numinous is everywhere, we need to be reminded of it.  We live among wonders.  Superhuman cyborgs, we plug into cell phones connecting us to one another and to a constantly updated planetary database, an exo-memory that allows us to fit our complete cultural archive into a jacket pocket.  We have camera eyes that speed up, slow down, and even reverse the flow of time, allowing us to see what no one prior to the twentieth century had ever seen – the thermodynamic miracle of broken shards and a puddle gathering themselves up from the floor to assemble a half-full wineglass.  We are the hands and eyes and ears, the sensitive probing feelers through which the emergent, intelligent universe comes to know its own form and purpose.  We bring the thunderbolt of meaning and significance to unconscious matter, blank paper, the night sky.  We are already divine magicians, already supergods.  Why shouldn’t we use all our brilliance to leap in as many single bounds as it takes to a world beyond ours, threatened by overpopulation, mass species extinction, environmental degradation, hunger, and exploitation?  Superman and his pals would figure a way out of any stupid cul-de-sac we could find ourselves in – and we made Superman, after all.  All it takes is one magic word.

Somewhere, still, Pico is wrapping up his Oratorio.  Somewhere right now Joe Schuster is putting pencil to paper and bringing Superman to life for the first time.  If Superman stood on a hypothetical planet orbiting the ancient red star Antares in the constellation of Scorpio, he could watch the arrival of light from the cultural Renaissance and catch the Oratorio on its way past, going on forever.  I can see 1489 just by looking up at the night sky where Antares is the fifteenth-brightest star.  The photons traveling down my optic nerves into my brain were launched on their epic interstellar dash around the time Pico was clearing his throat, ending their journey in my eyes five hundred years later.

We love our superheroes because they refuse to give up on us.  We can analyze them out of existence, kill them, ban them, mock them, and still they return, patiently reminding us of who we are and what we wish we could be.  They are a powerful living idea – a meme, to use the terminology of Richard Dawkins that has propagated itself from paper universes into actuality, with unknown consequences.  The Bomb, too, was only an idea that someone hammered into being.

But the superheroes showed me how to overcome the Bomb.  Superhero stories woke me up to my own potential.  They gave me the basis of a code of ethics I still live by.  They inspired my creativity, brought me money, and made it possible for me to turn doing what I loved into a career.  They helped me grasp and understand the geometry of higher dimensions and alerted me to the fact that everything is real, especially our fictions.  By offering role models whose heroism and transcendent qualities would once have been haloed and clothed in floaty robes, they nurtured in me a sense of the cosmic and ineffable that the turgid, dogmatically stupid “dad” religions could never match.  I had no need for faith.  My gods were real, made of paper and light, and they rolled up into my pocket like a superstring dimension.

Superhero stories are sweated out at the imagined lowest levels of our culture, but like that shard off a hologram, they contain at their hearts all the dreams and fears of generations in vivid miniature.  Created by a workforce that has in its time been marginalized, mocked, scapegoated, and exploited, they never failed to offer a direct line to the cultural subconscious and its convulsions.  They tell us where we’ve been, what we feared, and what we desired, and today they are more popular, more all-pervasive than ever because they still speak to us about what we really want to be.  Once again, the comics were right all along.  When no one else cared, they took the idea of a superhuman future seriously, embraced it, exalted it, tested it to destruction and back, and found it intact, stronger, more defined, like steel in a refiner’s fire.  Indestructible.  Unstoppable.  The superheroes, who were champions of the oppressed when we needed them to be, pioneers, rebels, conformists, or rock stars when we needed them to be, are now obligingly battering down the walls between reality and fiction before our very eyes.

There’s only one way to find out what happens next …

SUPERGODS, by Grant Morrison: Excerpt 1 of 2

Supergods is a scattered, often fascinating book about superhero comics – well worth reading if you happen to be a comics nerd like me.  But there are two passages in it that I believe would be of interest to a much broader audience.  If you're interested in the magic of life or the vastness of human potential, I urge you to check them out.  I've taken the pains to type them up for your perusal.  Ain't I just a sport?

Obviously, I hold no rights to the text below, and I will happily remove it from this blog if anyone thinks it worth the trouble to ask me to.

Excerpt #1 (from Chapter 26: Star, Legend, Superhero, Supergod?)

Mark Millar, Tom Peyer, Mark Waid, and I had approached DC in 1999 with the idea of relaunching Superman for a new generation in a series to be entitled Superman Now or Superman 2000, depending on which version of the story synopsis you read.  We’d spent many enjoyable hours in conversation, working out how to restore our beloved Superman to his preeminent place as the world’s first and best superhero.  Following the lead of the Lois and Clark TV show, the comic-book Superman had, at long last, put a ring on his long-suffering girlfriend’s finger and carried her across the threshold to holy matrimony after six decades of dodging the issue – although it was Clark Kent whom Lois married in public, while Superman had to conceal his wedding band every time he switched from his sober suit and tie.  This newly domesticated Superman was a somehow diminished figure, all but sleepwalking through a sequence of increasingly contrived “event” story lines, which tried in vain to hit the heights of “The Death of Superman” seven years previously.  Superman Now was to be a reaction against this often overemotional and ineffectual Man of Steel, reuniting him with his mythic potential, his archetypal purpose, but there was one fix we couldn’t seem to wrap our collective imagination around: the marriage.  The Clark-Lois-Superman triangle – “Clark loves Lois.  Lois loves Superman.  Superman loves Clark,” as Elliot S. Maggin put it in his intelligent, charming Superman novel Miracle Monday – seemed intrinsic to the appeal of the stories, but none of us wanted to simply undo the relationship using sorcery, or “memory wipes,” or any other of the hundreds of cheap and unlikely magic-wan plot devices we could have dredged up from the bottom of the barrel.

Stuck with the problem, I found myself chewing it over with my JLA editor Dan Raspler at one in the morning in an airless hotel room overlooking the naval yards of San Diego harbor.  We were there for 1999’s Comic-Con.  To clear our heads, we went downstairs and crossed the street, an oddly landscaped liminal zone between the rail tracks and the city.  We were deep in discussion, debating earnestly the merits and demerits of a married Superman when we both spotted a couple of men crossing the tracks into town.  One was an ordinary-looking bearded dude, at first sight like any of a hundred thousand comics fans.  But the other was Superman.  He was dressed in a perfectly tailored red, blue, and yellow costume; his hair was slicked back with a kiss curl; and unlike the often weedy or paunchy Supermen who paraded through the convention halls, he was trim, buff, and handsome.  He was the most convincing Superman I’ve ever seen, looking somewhat like a cross between Christopher Reeve and the actor Billy Zane.  I knew a visitation when I saw one.

Racing to intercept the pair, Dan and I explained who we were, what we were doing, and asked “Superman” if he wouldn’t mind answering a few questions.  He didn’t, and sat on a concrete bollard with one knee to his chest shield, completely relaxed.  It occurred to me that this was exactly how Superman would sit.  A man who was invulnerable to all harm would be always relaxed and at ease.  He’d have no need for the kind of physically aggressive postures superheroes tended to go in for.  I suddenly began to understand Superman in a new way.  We asked questions, “How do you feel about Lois?,” “What about Batman?,” and received answers in the voice and persona of Superman – “I don’t think Lois will ever really understand me or why I do what I do” or “Batman sees only the darkness in people’s hearts.  I wish he could see the best” – that seemed utterly convincing.

The whole encounter lasted an hour and a half, then he left, graciously, and on foot I’m sad to say.  Dan and I stared at each other in the fuzzy sodium glare of the streetlamps then quietly returned to our rooms.  Enflamed, I stayed awake the whole night, writing about Superman until the fuming August sun rose above the warships, the hangars, and the Pacific.  I was now certain we could keep the marriage to Lois and simply make it work to our advantage.

Bumping into someone dressed as Superman at the San Diego Comic Convention may sound about as wondrous and unlikely as meeting an alcoholic at an AA meeting, of course, but it rarely happens at night, and of the dozens of Men of Steel I’ve witnessed marching up and down the aisles at Comic-Con, or posing with tourists outside Mann’s Chinese on Hollywood Boulevard, not one was ever as convincing as the Superman who appeared at the precise moment I needed him most.  This is what I mean when I talk about magic: by choosing to frame my encounter as a pop-shamanic vision quest yielding pure contact with embodied archetypal forces, I got much more out of it than if I’d simply sat there with Dan sniggering at the delusional fool in tights.  By telling myself a very specific story about what was occurring, I was able to benefit artistically, financially, and I like to think spiritually, in a way that perhaps might not have been possible had I simply assumed that our Superman was a convention “cosplayer.”  Superman Now never happened, but I’d come to envisage a Superman project that would serve as the pinnacle of my work on hero comics, and a way to put all of my thoughts about superheroes into a single piece.

Writing Is Easy

Writing is easy.  The hard part is forcing yourself to do it.

Diversionary Tactics

The core question of politics is not "What should be done?" but rather "What should people be forced to do, and who has the right to force them?"

There are any number of defensible answers to this question, and there will never be a consensus on what answer is the best.  But let's at least stop wasting each other's time by pretending we're talking about something else.

Sunset, Midtown

Breaking onto 34th Street,
The wild sun,
Majestic in its dying,
Splashes a tender, violent orange
Over the pale cafés.

Above the Hudson,
The sky has split wide open;
It bleeds color.
Men become shadows
As they tread the rails of the crosswalks,
Cut out in stately black
Against a furious dusk.

Lights flare on.
Somber women bring coffee.
Night settles in around us,
Warm and expected as a shroud.

Don't Just Make – Make Something

What I've realized is, I don't love music; I love songs.  And I don't love theater; I love plays.  And I don't love cinema; I love movies.  And I don't love sequential art; I love comic books.

Basically, I'm far less interested in art forms than I am in what people do with them.

A Puzzlement Regarding the Avant-Garde

To my mind, the perfect piece of avant-garde theater is Stomp. It has no story, no characters, no dialogue, no conventional dramatic structure. It's pure theater. It's a celebration of rhythm and movement for their own sake.

And it works. It works like gangbusters. It's never boring; it's never artsy or pretentious; it's visceral and exciting and life-affirming and even funny. It's the kind of show you walk out of feeling grateful. It's an experience worth having. It's worth having more than once.

The funny thing is, I've never heard any advocate of avant-garde theater mention Stomp as a point of reference. If it comes up at all among theater insiders, it's spoken of dismissively, or even with contempt. I can only assume this is because it's too popular. After all, if a lot of people like it, then it can't really be art.

Beauty Hurts

Beauty hurts.
Beauty demands too much.
Beauty makes me feel small and skinless.

I like a little buffer of numbness
Between me and the world.
Just a little extra hide.
A carapace.
Is that wrong?
It works for me.
I'm open to experience.
I just don't need it to ravage me all the time.

I get caught out.
I get ambushed.
The beauty lurks in unexpected places,
Like a brigand,
And I am not always on my guard.
It leaps into my eyes. I close them.
It's too late.
It has already leapt in.

It stays with me.
Burned onto the brain.
I get no respite.
I close my eyes.
I get no respite.
The beauty burns and burns.

I am a small person.
All I want is to be small and comfortable.
The beauty mocks me with a glimpse of greatness.
A taste of deep feeling.
A hint of a higher grace.

I don't want that.
I want to wake up slowly from a blank sleep
And eat a little cereal
And read something sad in the newspaper
And shake my head
And have a muffin.
I don't need the sublime ache of awareness.
It doesn't help me.
It doesn't help me get through my day.

New York Blooms

One week a year, New York blooms.
Between their scarecrow bareness and their lush green plenitude,
The trees give a brief riot of white, as if to say

We are not so sad amid the gray and the brick;
We are not so tame as you may think we are;
We are Nature in her glory, and our bounty is a kind of overcoming.
Be thankful, and do not flatter yourselves;
You may flourish, but we flourish also.

New York does not reply.
She has other calls to answer.
But she relaxes her shoulders a little,
And begins to forgive the winter.

One Certainty

Crane your neck out the window
As the eve-lit trees rush by,
Or stroll among their twilight shapes
While starlight pricks the sky;
Stop and take a photograph,
But you can never win –
However hard or well you try,
You will never take it all in.

Face the trembling vagrant;
Do not avert your eyes –
And nurture in your deepest heart
The terror of goodbyes;
Take the coldest breath of life
And press it to your skin;
Smell the bullet; taste the knife;
You will never take it all in.

Positive Nihilism

"I just don't think that meaninglessness necessarily negates joy."
- Darcy Boynton

I love my sister.

Feature Film 2012

MIKE: "We're going to need a lot of meat."
KEITH: "This will go down in history as the day you said that."

Project: Feature Film 2012 is officially on.

Keith's Big List of Playwriting Heresies

Conflict is overrated.

Conflict, in and of itself, is as boring as anything in creation. Negotiation and play are much more interesting than outright conflict. Suspense is closer to the heart of storytelling than conflict will ever be.

Subtext is overrated.

The unsaid can be very powerful, but it's often bracing to hear a character say exactly what he thinks. Too much of what passes for subtlety is actually just stalling.

Truth is overrated.

A play should contain precisely the amount of truth that makes it most compelling. No more, no less. Resonance is important. It is not the same as truth.

Controversy is overrated.

It's easier to shock people than to please them.

Seriousness is overrated.

A great comedy elevates the spirit. Fun is a major spiritual principle.

Originality is overrated.

It's good to be original, but it's much better to be good.

Relevance is overrated.

History is littered with forgotten topical dreck. A good play makes us care about its subject matter. People love to gush about how Shakespeare's plays are "still relevant today." Honestly, who gives a shit? What matters is that they're good.

Quality is underrated.

Most of what is said about any given play is an attempt to dodge the awkward question of whether it's actually any good. "Daring"? Sure. But is it any good? "Timely"? Okay. Is it any good? "Ambitious"? Almost certainly not any good.

The real purpose of any play should be to HOLD AND REWARD ATTENTION. That's it. That's the whole ballgame. If you've done that, then you have something worthwhile. If you've held without rewarding, then you're wasting everybody's time. And it's impossible to reward without holding. Once you've lost the audience, you've lost the whole show.

The audience is the ultimate testing ground. The audience is who you're writing for. If your play doesn't work in front of an audience, then I'm sorry, but it just doesn't work.