EVERY REVELATION, STILL A SECRET

All we communicate to others is an orientation towards what is secret without ever being able to tell the secret objectively.-- Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space

Here we run into a dilemma, for what is truth and what is illusion? John Briggs, paraphrasing Martin Heidegger, has described truth as "the freedom of letting things reveal themselves as they are-- but... when anything is revealed, other things are concealed."-- DREAMS OF ISIS (1995), Normandi Ellis, p. 266.

These two quotes both appeared in separate sections of the Ellis book, which is that author's personal account of her experiences with examining Egyptian concepts of spirituality and/or occultism. It's an interesting book, and I've read a considerable number of similar accounts from dubious biographies like the Don Juan chronicles and theoretical studies like those of Colin Wilson. While I've had occasion to believe in the reality of certain so-called "psychic" events, I hold no firm opinion one way or the other on subjects like soul transmigration or the existence of archaic gods, even on something akin to the "astral plane." I suspect that much of my interest in the occult stems from my desire to know, as much as any individual can, the outward limits of the imagination. I have a dim memory of a Percy Shelley reminiscence, in which he claimed that in his youthful years he read a lot of mystical literature because he was seeking "metaphors for poetry." However, I haven't troubled to look for that particular quote.

As for the quotes above, I knew Bachelard by reputation but have not yet read POETICS OF SPACE or any other work by him. I have read a little Heidegger, though not enough to have any notion as to what he may've said that author John Briggs paraphrased, or the context Briggs had in mind when he made the comment in his book FIRE IN THE CRUCIBLE. Still, Briggs' purported ideas on aesthetics might prove interesting to my ongoing project. Bachelard's evaluations of science might draw some intriguing comparisons with the works of Whitehead on that subject.

Though about thirty years separate the quotes of Bachelard and Briggs, they seem to complement each other not a little in speaking of the difficulties of communication. Reading both quotes out of context naturally means that I don't know what general argument either writer was making, but I can respond to what the quotes suggest in themselves.

Starting with Bachelard, it's fascinating that he asserts that all one can communicate is something subjective, something that is explicitly not objective in nature, and that, even that "subjective something" is not the actual secret of the person transmitting it, but an "orientation" toward that secret. The opposition bears a structural similarity with Plato's synopsized view of Art: a "shadow of a shadow," the originary shadow being the phenomenal world, which is itself "cast" by the Eternal Forms. But for Plato, the Forms were objective reality. Centuries later, materialist philosophers would regard all the phenomena associated with "the real world" as the only measure of objectivity, while all things subjective were at best epiphenomenal. I would guess that when Bachelard says that the implied "we" cannot "tell the secret objectively," he's at least partly agreeing with the materialist idea that subjectively speaking every man is an island, and that every such island harbors secrets that cannot be communicated as such to any others. Yet Bachelard is perhaps more hopeful than the materialists in saying that though subjective secrets of a private mind cannot be communicated-- possibly because they stem from so many intertwined, personal factors-- "we" can communicate orientations, as one presumes, for example, Socrates did to Plato. Last month I touched on similar limitations with regard to literary experience, under the heading of "intersubjectivity:"

But subjectivity doesn’t exist in a vacuum, and so we must speak of intersubjectivity as a way of understanding how persons from all walks of life can see reflections of themselves in the works of strangers, often strangers from other times and cultures. Thus, when we feel affection for the works of Shakespeare or of Bill Finger, what we “love” are shadows of our own tastes and personalities. -- THE CARE AND ESTEEMING OF LITTLE MYTHS, PART 1.

Of course, I don't know if Bachelard is using the word "secret" with any special connotation in mind, but for the present I view it as general subjectivity. "Orientation" would be the part of an individual's secret subjectivity that can be transmitted to others, though always with the likelihood of misprision of some kind, like, say, Plato recording those aspects of Socrates' philosophy that resonated best with Plato himself.

Now Briggs' quote sounds a little more pessimistic, a little more "one step forward, two steps back." Briggs doesn't confine himself to communications between human beings; for him, even "things" can reveal themselves-- and conceal themselves, too. I assume that "things" would include all phenomena, from human beings to all aspects of the environment in which humans live. Shamanistic accounts, such as those on which Carlos Castaneda probably based his books, would allow for human beings to receive communications from birds or insects or even stones. 

However, in the folklore we have on such subjects, such communicates reveal, but they don't also conceal. So I tend to think Briggs is, in the final analysis, still talking about human communication, just like Bachelard. 

How does one reveal and conceal at the same time? In OEDIPUS TYRANNUS the Delphic Oracle reveals what is destined to happen to Oedipus. But the Oracle conceals the relevant info that he is not related to the two people Oedipus thinks are his natural parents. Revealing that, of course, would spoil the story, which depends upon a reaction to limited knowledge.

 In the world of intersubjectivity, too, Reader A can feel that this or that work by Author B feels revelatory. But of course, Author B is only revealing what is important to him, and in communicating one thing he may conceal a hundred others, both from himself and from others. Percy Shelley's incantatory poetry reveals his superabundant talent for versification. But nothing in the poetry will reveal many other aspects of Shelley, aspects that might distract from his poetry. In a somewhat more intentional concealment, Karl Marx enthralled countless believers into a sincere belief in his myth of the proletariat, but he omitted anything that might hinder that revelation.  And often there's no intent to conceal. If one chooses to follow one philosophy, it will always remain concealed as to what another path might have revealed.

And possibly the greatest concealment is that I have found both quotes to have revelatory content, though since I haven't read them in context, I might be "concealing" some or all of their "real" meanings.

HELLBLAZER: ALL HIS ENGINES (2005)

I have only an irregular acquaintance with the HELLBLAZER series, starring John Constantine, ruthless, seemingly hellbound occultist, but most of what I've read so far amounted to near-myths. However, ALL HIS ENGINES shows considerable inventiveness in presenting the liberation of a "Persephone" from both pagan and Christian conceptions of Hell.

To be sure, only once do writer Mike Carey and artist Leonardo Manco evoke the Persephone myth, and even then, Carey uses the Roman name for the Greek woman taken to hell by the god Pluto, in the opening chapter title "Proserpine Gathering Flowers" (the phrase derived from a Victorian painting depicting the famed myth). The innocent virgin this time is Trish Chandler, who is one of several persons struck down by a mysterious coma. Trish's father Chas happens to know something about the world of the occult inhabited by his mate Constantine, and he calls upon his old buddy to sort things out.

A divinatory ritual sends Constantine and Chas to Los Angeles, and there they meet a corpulent demon, Beroul, who has trapped the spirit of Trish in his capacious gut. Beroul holds her hostage to ensure the cooperation of Constantine in Beroul's big project: to knock off all the other demons floating around the City of Angels.

Constantine then decides that he must play along with Beroul to preserve Trish's life, and thus, he must find a way to kill all those other demons. He decides his best course is to take advantage of the many persons of Hispanic heritage in L.A., or rather, of a select few who are still tied to the Aztec death-god Mictlantecuthli. (I"m just going to type "Deathgod" henceforth.) The modern-day believers lead Constantine to the Deathgod while Chas eventually ends up enjoying a booty call with a comely young Hispanic woman, Melosa. The name is a Spanish variant on "Melissa," which in Greek myth signifies a priestess of the bee-goddess cultus, though Melosa is not an actual priestess of anything and in fact is pretty much a practical modern woman.

Constantine converses with the Deathgod, essentially mocking him with his inability to enjoy the glory days of his ancient pantheon. He plays the ancient death-deity, egging him to strike out at these latecoming Judeo-Christian parasites. Accordingly, Constantine traps all of Beroul's enemies in a deconsecrated church and the Deathgod devours them all. However, Beroul then shows up and forges a deal with the Deathgod, and then refuses to honor his pledge to release Trish from his demonic male womb.

On top of that, Chas has a crisis of confidence, believing that he'll never see his daughter freed-- and there's a strong implication that he sees himself starting a new life with Melosa. Thus, even though Melosa isn't a pagan priestess, there's a sense that she provides a temptation that can cause Chas to stray from his righteous course. But Constantine makes a special deal with the Deathgod to betray Beroul, liberating Trish from the demon's gullet-- after which Constantine must also manage to liberate the innocent "Persephone" from the control of the Deathgod.

The conclusion is actually fairly upbeat for a HELLBLAZER story, except that Chas, reunited with his daughter, essentially breaks things off with Melosa. One can trust Constantine to put a pessimistic spin on any salvation, though, as he ends with his meditations on the unadvisability of "giving any hostages to fortune," because "you're on your own in the end." This recalls the context of the Milton quote that provides the novel's title. In PARADISE LOST Milton pictures Satan being hurled to perdition despite "all his engines"-- and throughout the narrative, Carey and Manco suggest that Constantine will never be able to save himself as he saves others.

MYTHCOMICS: PROMETHEA #1-32 (1999=2005)

 

I’ll start off my analysis of PROMETHEA by celebrating the intricate, near-visionary artwork of J.H. Williams III. Of the hundreds of artists who have attempted to depict supernatural realms for the comics-medium, Williams deserves to be counted as one of the five most accomplished such raconteurs.

For the rest of the analysis, though, it’s almost inevitable that I must generally speak of this series as if it sprang unassisted from the fragmented brow of writer/co-creator Alan Moore. And there exist two separate but equally important reasons for viewing Moore as the project’s shaping influence.

On one hand, this series was one of several continuing features released by the Wildstorm (later DC) imprint “America’s Best Comics.” Moore founded the company, conceived most if not all the features, and wrote the majority of the scripts. The imprint ran from 1999 to 2005, concluding more or less with the run of PROMETHEA.

On the other hand, the feature was conceived as a forum upon which Moore could expatiate his views on the subject of the Western tradition of occultism. Allegedly, as the result of Moore’s 1990s research into magical concepts for the FROM HELL graphic novel, the author became fascinated with these mystic disciplines, and proclaimed himself as a “ceremonial magician” in 1993. While it’s hard to assess what Moore might have done with ABC had Wildstorm not sold the imprint to DC Comics, it seems unlikely that PROMETHEA would have continued much beyond its 32-issue run, given that the series’ continuity was clearly designed to come to a definite conclusion. Even if PROMETHEA had enjoyed “X-Men sales” in the direct comics market, an iconoclast like Moore probably would not have prolonged the title once he’d said what he wanted to say.

Now, the mere fact that a given work is produced from a hellacious amount of research into a given subject does not mean that the author will produce from that research a work strong in symbolic discourse. In this essay, I cited a Gardner Fox story in which the author reeled off an assortment of factoids about the properties of minerals, but the story as such did not comprise a cosmological myth. The same principle holds true for this work: Moore could not produce a mythcomic simply by deluging his readers with tons and tons of info about mystic systems like the Tarot and the Kaballah, or about the careers of occultists like John Dee, Austin Osman Spare and the unavoidable Aleister Crowley. Many sections of PROMETHEA feel a bit like school-masterish lectures on occultism, or (perhaps worse) the exultations of a fan desperately asking his audience, “Isn’t all this stuff cool?”

Fortunately, Alan Moore does manage to impose a loose structure on the 32 issues (compared by Moore to the 32 paths of the Tarot). The master thread of the series is Alan Moore’s celebration of all things feminine, using as his focal point an icon of heroic femininity, more or less emulating the example of the Golden Age Wonder Woman. Of course, Promethea was not designed to continue as long as readers were willing to buy the heroine’s adventures. But perhaps more importantly, Moore’s heroine is a vehicle of an adult sexuality impossible to the DC character—and in part, Promethea concerns sex because sex is also a vital part of ceremonial magic, at least in Alan Moore’s interpretation.

Though Promethea’s physical appearance conjures with the Amazing Amazon, her nature is probably closer in essence to that of the Golden Age Captain Marvel. College-student Sophie Bangs is the “Billy Batson” of the series. As the result of her research into a supposedly fictional character who appeared in various 20^th-century media, Sophie finds that she can call upon the archetype of Promethea from an otherworld known as “the Immateria.” Promethea then transforms and takes over Sophie’s mortal body in order to battle the evils of the mortal world. But even though Moore gives Sophie the trappings of a life for a “double identity” heroine—residence in a “great metropolitan city,” a handful of supporting characters—the author’s interest is clearly not focused on righting wrongs on the earthly plane, but on exploring the joys of assorted otherworlds, generally patterned on Tarot and Kaballah formulations.

Moore labors mightily to give his heroine a feminist gravitas. She seems to be an archetype who, before encountering Sophie, has conferred her power on numerous women (and at least one man who had a woman’s nature, so to speak). Moore loosely implies that Promethea may be a mythic reaction against Christian patriarchy, since the writer references the historical figure of Hypatia, a female intellectual murdered by religious fanatics during early Christendom. But at times the feminism angle makes a difficult fit with the exploration of occult traditions, since most of the well-known ceremonial magicians—the aforesaid Dee, Spare, and Crowley—were male. Perhaps to make up for this lack, Moore devotes a subsidiary thread to another of his favorite subjects: that of the intertwining history of fictional creations. Some earlier incarnations of Promethea arose from the archetype merging with mortals like Sophie. Yet it seems that some of the incarnations may have been taken on life in the Immateria because they appeared in fictional narratives, which can range from a pulp-fantasy “barbarian queen” to a gender-flipped version of Windsor McCay’s LITTLE NEMO. (Moore does not really bother to suss out this particular cosmos-building point.)

At any rate, focusing on the role of female characters in fiction helps shore up the feminism theme a bit, though Moore’s main purpose is still the exploration of magical states of being. Being a canny comics-maker, Moore probably realized that he needed to sell PROMETHEA as a superhero comic, and so he dutifully introduced many of the requisite elements—marauding villains like Jellyhead and the Painted Doll, a team of local “science-heroes” roughly modeled on the Doc Savage Crew, and even an occult conspiracy-group, the Temple. Moore even rings in a crossover of sorts, revealing that other ABC heroes exist in Promethea’s world. But Moore does little with all of these elements, because they’re essentially commercial distractions from his main concerns.

Considerable narrative space is consumed as Sophie, accompanied by her preceptor and predecessor Barbara, journeys through the various spheres of the Kaballah in search of Barbara’s husband, though he serves no function in the plot but to provide the two females with a motive to go “sphere-exploring.” As I said, some of Moore’s salutes to Chokmah and Binah and all the rest are a bit pedantic—even for a reader familiar with the topics, as I am—but some of them succeed as rough visual poetry on particular themes, of war, of peace, of emotion and of intellect. One of the myth-images that Moore invokes most frequently is that of the Biblical “Whore of Babylon,” though naturally the author turns the Christian connotations around, so the “whore” is just the other side of the “virgin” coin, and both are seen more as vehicles through which the energy of the Godhead manifests. Indeed, in some vague manner Promethea is also consubstantial with the Great Whore, in that both are supposed to bring the world to an end. Moore attempts to give his heroine this myth-status without delivering anything but an “apocalypse deferred,” which might seem fairly original if the author hadn’t used a similar trope at the end of his SWAMP THING run.

I can appreciate that Moore’s vision of a world liberated by his feminine icon is a pansexual world, wherein the author approves of all things sexy, whether they might be despised by the Right (homosexuals) or the Left (old men sort-of getting in on with sweet young things). On the minus side, it wouldn’t be an Alan Moore production if the author didn’t take some gratuitous swipes at other authors. In issue #6 the Promethea with the “barbarian queen” persona takes on an equally fictional wizard who is the conglomeration of all the bad writers who wrote the heroine’s adventures. I’m not sure why Moore thought a jihad against pulp writers was necessary, especially since one of the writer’s attacks is unfounded. (Sorry, Alan, it’s correct to describe a breast as “heaving;” breasts, like chests, heave when the owner is stressed or excited.) And if anyone is unable to cast stones at bad writing, it would be the poet who penned numerous doggerel-lines like this one from PROMETHEA #12:

“Around and round the fable goes,

“Eternal like Ouroboros.”

In the end I remain ambivalent about PROMETHEA. It certainly does have mythic content, though in some cases the intellectual conceits rein in some of his more inspired moments. His most mythic line, and the one most in tune with his concerns, interprets the Biblical pairing of “doves and serpents” as the tension between the serpentine desire to rise and climb in the struggle for life, versus the sacrificial bird’s descent into death for some greater cause than life. If every one of Moore’s lines ventured that deep, I’d be able to talk about him in the same breath as Melville and Hawthorne.