Watchmen

By Alan Moore

Who watches the watchers? Watchmen takes place in an alternate 1985 (one year after George Orwell’s iconic anno domini), amid a kind of societal schizophrenia that is both twisted and completely rational. Watchmen is about the essential disconnection between morality and pragmatism. On the one hand we have the characters and situations of Watchmen, and on the other, we have preconceived notions about how super heroes are supposed to think and behave. Super heroes are supposed to be moral, virtuous paragons fighting for truth, justice and the American way. Alan Moore has a field day ramming that Titanic boatload of tropes into an iceberg of moral relativism, and the result is brutally ironic.

In Watchmen, super heroes are decidedly non-super. Only Rorshach has the values one associates with super heroes—he cares about the truth and about justice while all about him, super heroes are making closed-door deals, making political alliances, looking the other way when convenient, and allowing the hard truths to go unexposed. Richard Nixon, that paragon of pragmatism for whom the ends always justified the means, is still president in his fourth term. He is the perfect symbol of what Moore’s worldview intends to convey. This is a world of shadow dealings, of obfuscation and cover-up, of lies and innuendo, of muddy waters.

Alan Moore’s literary style here contains multilayered brilliance, with as many facets as the Koh-i-noor diamond (not the Hope—there’s no hope in this universe). Rorshach is aptly named for the famous psychiatrist who created the inkblot test as a window on the subconscious. In one of the best scenes of the film, Rorshach takes the inkblot test, his verbal responses betraying no hint of the profound agonies underlying each image as they raise memories of murder, mayhem, and injustice. Thus, Rorshach’s uncompromising commitment to his values becomes a dark obsession, rather than a mission.

Rorshach becomes like a Super-Ego, unable to compromise. He finally is unable to accept a world which has no absolutes. Watchmen is Rorshach’s dark night of the soul. He is experiencing an existential crisis throughout the story as he uncovers more evidence of greed, ambition, cruelty, avarice, larceny, sadism. He cannot see any beauty in humanity nor in the world. And in this world, ruled over by the Prince of Paranoia, Richard M. Nixon, there’s very little beauty to be seen. For Rorshach, though, beauty can be an idea, or even simply an ideal. But as the story unfolds, each of those underpinnings to the meaning of his existence is pulled away until oblivion remains as the only antidote to uncompromising agony.

The golden age of comics is the backdrop for this dark take on the realms of Camus and Kafka. Golden age superheroes have a multitude of problems with sexuality, relationships, addiction, and codes of honor which are at best mutable. Even their costumes seem embarrassingly ill-fitting. As “enemies of communism” super heroes are shown fighting (and winning) the Vietnam war. “God exists and he is American,” crows the scientist who helped create Dr. Manhattan, the ice-blue ambivalent supreme being which has evolved beyond “super” to “godlike” powers. In one scene, we are treated to the spectacle of the Viet-cong doing humiliating obeisance to Dr. Manhattan and worshipping him as a god, something the powers that be desired more than the lives of the 50,000 American troops they discarded in the attempt to make that fantasy a reality.

The Watchmen bring the idea or ideals of superheroes squarely into conflict with the world as it is, exposing comic book superheroes to be the psychological stand-ins we use them for—fantasies for making the world “right”, that there is an agency out there somewhere, that in karmic terms, looks after us, and repays right with right and evil with evil. Moore exposes that mind-set for the infantile moral pap it is. He at once ennobles and destroys the entire genre of comic books. As a work of art, it is sui generis, a attempt to deconstruct the entire genre, and turn it on its head. At this, Moore succeeds. The story, with its nihilistic ending, captures the notion that big ideas don’t change the world. In fact, nobody can change the world. You can only change your relationship to it, and that requires sacrifice, and yes, compromise. There are no absolutes. We swim without fins in a relativistic soup and all we can do is love one another.

Good Karma

Today I made a donation to Mercy Corps for Haitian earthquake relief. I urge everyone to do so. My decision is not completely altruistic. At some point, it is likely a major subduction quake will strike the Pacific Northwest. Such a quake would possibly reach a force of 9.0 or thereabouts on the Richter Scale. I'm giving to Mercy Corps today because I want good Karma in my spiritual bank account. By being here for Mercy Corps today, perhaps they will be here for me at some point in the future. And if there's never an earthquake of that magnitude in Seattle during my lifetime--no harm done.

Do What Thou Wilt

Grace, honour, praise, delight,

Here sojourn day and night.

Sound bodies lined

With a good mind,

Do here pursue with might

Grace, honour, praise, delight.

--Francois Rabelais

I discover today that Do What Thou Wilt originated not with Aleister Crowley, but with the French mystic poet philosopher Rabelais, he of the famous lines from The Music Man's PickaLittle song:

Alma: Chaucer

Ethel: Rabelais

Eulalie: Balzac!

Writes Rabelais concerning the Abbey at Theleme, built by the Giant Gargantua:

All their life was spent not in laws, statutes, or rules, but according to their own free will and pleasure. They rose out of their beds when they thought good; they did eat, drink, labour, sleep, when they had a mind to it and were disposed for it. None did awake them, none did offer to constrain them to eat, drink, nor to do any other thing; for so had Gargantua established it. In all their rule and strictest tie of their order there was but this one clause to be observed,

Do What Thou Wilt;

because men that are free, well-born, well-bred, and conversant in honest companies, have naturally an instinct and spur that prompteth them unto virtuous actions, and withdraws them from vice, which is called honour. Those same men, when by base subjection and constraint they are brought under and kept down, turn aside from that noble disposition by which they formerly were inclined to virtue, to shake off and break that bond of servitude wherein they are so tyrannously enslaved; for it is agreeable with the nature of man to long after things forbidden and to desire what is denied us.

Sir Francis Dashwood of the infamous Hellfire Club adopted the central law of Do What Thou Wilt and it became synonymous with licentiousness and immorality. Crowley has tried to rehabilitate the notion.

• Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law"
• "Love is the law, love under will"
• "There is no Law beyond Do what thou wilt"

For Crowley, the Will was the innermost highest purpose. This is not a call to gratify base lusts and sinful desires, but to follow your bliss as Joseph Campbell famously said. In essence, it is a call to find existential meaning in one's life. And this in 1904!!!

Furthermore, He taught that the True Will of each individual was identified with the Holy Guardian Angel, a daimon unique to each individual

Those who have seen or read The Golden Compass, what think you of that?

Lisey's Story

I'm listening to Lisey's Story (read by the incomparable Mare Winningham) by Stephen King. As writers we hold the mirror up to nature as Aristotle's famous trope says. That means we are not strictly natural, we are mirroring the natural. The little bits of day-to-day minutae that comprise life are redacted in favor of those elements which support the story, and its artful rhythms.

While Lisey's Story has some heart-wrenchingly beautiful poetic prose (SK's description of John Lennon comes immediately to mind), the way Lisey thinks is simply not natural. She imagines all the little bits leading up to the big event (which I haven't got to yet). But that's not how real people think, I believe. That's how authors think who are plotting a mystery; or like a historian giving us the step-by-step reasons leading up to disasters like the Hindenberg's or the Titanic's. Because this thought process (not the words themselves, but the substance, the rhythm and the meaning) seems stilted, the book keeps me at arm's length, gnashing my teeth and muttering, "get to the point already!"

Real people remember the big events first. Then we fill in the gaps. We also have fantasies about what we could have done differently if only we could turn back time and have a do-over. Lisey experiences none of this (or very little--since I'm listening I may not have the same focus as reading on the page). Reactions make the story. Big events--then reactions--make the story. In all of her musings I often lose where she is in the moment--what's she's doing in real time. If she were writing the story--i.e., if it were in first person--then all of this would be moot because she would be de facto unreliable. Then we would have to piece together the clues ourselves because she's focused on other things and the author, like her subconscious, is dropping little hints along the way.

As it is, Lisey's Story is rather like a murder mystery in which you've been in the point of view of a character the whole time, and only on the last page do you discover this character is the killer. Fraud! Cheat! Compare this with Hearts in Atlantis, and I think you'll agree. When you're writing psychological horror--you have to get the psychology right.

Bram Stoker Award

Unspeakable Horror: From the Shadows of the Closet has been nominated for the 2008 Bram Stoker Award for Superior Achievement in Anthology. Excuse me while I pinch myself. I must be dreaming!

I am a camera

Natasha Richardson, rest in peace. Natasha Richardson won a Tony award for her performance as Sally Bowles in the revival of Cabaret on Broadway, a production I later saw in Seattle on tour with Joely Fisher as Sally. Cabaret was based on a play by John Van Druten titled I Am A Camera, which was based on one of Christopher Isherwood's "Berlin Stories."

“I am a camera with its shutter open. Quite passive. Recording, not thinking. Someday all this will have to be developed, carefully printed. Fixed.”
-Christopher Isherwood, Berlin Stories

Christopher Isherwood was born in England, lived in Berlin during the Weimar Republic and emigrated to America in or about 1940. He settled in Santa Monica during the war and worked as a novelist and teacher. Besides his own fiction, he is noteworthy for his circle, which included W.H. Auden (champion of Tolkein), Stephen Spender, and for having met fledgling writer Ray Bradbury in a Santa Monica bookstore, a chance meeting that resulted in a famous positive review of Bradbury's The Martian Chronicles. I met Ray Bradbury in Seattle about 10 years ago at a book signing. He was gracious and spoke to me for some minutes regarding On the Orient North, a short story of his that had been made into a teleplay by Ray Bradbury Theater on Showtime. He didn't care for its execution, but after I sang its praises he promised he would take another look.

Natasha Richardson's aunt, Lynne Redgrave, performed Shakespeare for My Father at the Intiman several years ago, which I saw, and was quite moved by. This was right before the release of Shine. I later saw Ms. Redgrave standing on the corner of Mercer and 1st Avenue N. waiting to cross the street, a dreamy look in her eye. I wish that I hadn't been driving so that I could have told her how moving her memoir was to me, and how much I enjoyed not only her performance, but her writing, which captured a moment from her father's life of such intimacy and grace that it has been indelibly recorded in my memory. Her father, in a completely selfless frame of mind, ravaged by Parkinsons into an egoless state, cries, "I'm so worried about your mother..."

Natasha Richardson's Mother, Vanessa Redgrave, performed in Little Odessa, with Tim Roth, in which her character is dying of cancer. My own mother had passed away just the year before of the same disease, and Redgrave's frank resemblance to my mother was simply overwhelming. To this day I still associate Vanessa Redgrave with my mother because they looked so much alike.

I am a camera.

Human Life - a closed system.

Reading Peter Levenda's Sinister Forces: The Nine, which collects and investigates the minutiae of American political history. Levenda abandons the kind of clear and convincing historical pattern most common to historical textbooks, in favor of collecting and analyzing bizarre coincidences and synchronicities, the warp and weft of historical threads of various intentions and purposes. This I think has an unintented consequence. How often have we heard that "truth is stranger than fiction?" We know this can be true because we have experienced it in our own lives. However, perhaps most historians fear that their theses will be disregarded if they get lost in the tangential circumstances surrounding "the EVENT." While Levenda's tangential obsession makes him seem like a crackpot, it also gives his work a kind of verisimillitude that seems strangely convincing--because it seems like the way life operates.

Levenda likes to find connections and correspondences between seemingly disconnected events. Charles Manson seems to stand at the nexus of many of these threads. How does Charles Manson relate to military intelligence, the CIA, and psychological warfare? Levenda connects the threads in a convincing way. At first blush, most would consider these connections to simply be coincidental. Levenda believes that human history is connected in ways that are invisible and strange (what he calls "occult") and thus not written about by mainstream historians. Levenda believes that coincidence is an illusion. I find his hypothesis meritorius. My life is dicated by my beliefs and desires, and these have led me in certain directions to meet certain people whose beliefs and desires have led them across my path. Human organizations also have beliefs and desires and act accordingly. We do not live our lives in a vaccum. Our lives are determined by forces (belief and desire) which are invisible and often unarticulated and unexamined on an individual level. These forces of motivation are as strong as laws of gravity. Human life and culture is a closed system.