Superficiality (The Photo With The Résumé)

I remember a passage in Plato’s Symposium, which I don’t have with me and which I don’t really have the patience to find, and it was a typically Platonic, gnostic sort of passage regarding levels of intelligence and wisdom: the lover of souls and minds is superior to the lover of bodies, probably because the soul is immortal, godlike, and perfect, while the body is made of temporary stuff, a Protean Ship of Theseus, constantly changing, impossible to define, and soon reduced to dirt “stopping up a bunghole.” One of my more sensuous friends complained about Plato’s disdain of the physical world and his seemingly Buddha-like adoration of the mystical and the unseen, but at least in the case of Socrates we can tell rather easily why it’s important to focus more on the mind than the body:

…once I caught [Socrates] when he was open like Silenus’ statues, and I had a glimpse of the figures he keeps hidden within: they were so godlike — so bright and beautiful, so utterly amazing — that I no longer had a choice: I just had to do whatever he told me.

(I lazily stole this quote from wikipedia)

Socrates, the notoriously ugly man, is the shining source of ancient Greek philosophy, God-The-Father in the hypostases of Himself, Plato the Holy Spirit and transmitter of His Words, and the mutable Son, crucified on the rood of exile, the most human of them all, Aristotle. But to judge Socrates based on his looks, you would feel nothing but repulsion; this sickening Matroyoshka doll is full of infinite beauty.

I live in South Korea, a country where it is standard business practice to demand a photograph along with your resume every time you apply for a job, and where, at the moment, it seems my wife is the only Korean woman in her twenties who has not surgically lengthened her nose and enlarged her eyes to look as much as possible like the impossible Platonic ideal of Korean beauty (who herself looks as if one of her parents is a grey, and whose avatars, in the incarnate form of various celebrities, are plastered to every wall, window, and screen, in the country). This isn’t to say that plastic surgery or superficiality is unknown to America, my home, but in Maine and Massachusetts, where I spent most of my American life, I can’t remember ever seeing someone walking around with Joan Rivers’ botoxified face or Pamela Anderson’s cubical breasts. It always seemed like more of a West Coast thing, since in California people are prancing outside in the sunshine all the time where the whole world can see them, while four years ago in rainy Maine I was holed up for two months straight before I got on the plane for Korea. I was only able to see the sun when this plane rose up above the clouds…

No company I’ve ever heard of in America asks for pictures along with résumés. That’s not to say people don’t discriminate based on appearance, but a person’s achievements are, at least ostensibly, considered more important; in Korea, too, a (K)Ivy League degree is what gets you your coveted Samsung-wage-slave-corporate-cubicle-cog-in-the-machine-I’m-so-happy-I-don’t-have-to-think-for-myself-anymore lifetime gig: not your fake nose. Still, superficiality really seems to reign supreme in this place: products are primarily sold by simply pairing them with the faces of celebrities: my son cannot go outside without being complimented (catcalled) by middle school girls and old ladies, probably the greatest victims of this anti-woman culture, people who sometimes make a point of telling my wife that my son is only beautiful because all mixed-race children are beautiful; it has nothing to do with our genes—as if our genes belong to us, rather than we to them.

I am also not immune in any way to being infected by this superficiality.

I was talking with a Chinese friend two days ago: he was bothered by the claim, made by some Koreans, that their country possesses a five thousand year-old civilization. The wikipedia page for the History of Korea was once Orwelled by one of these Korean patriots, who made a point of stating that Korean civilization was one of the oldest on Earth, but thankfully after much wrangling and wrestling this absurd line was finally removed. There were videos on youtube declaring that Koreans invented the airplane, and the very best, a Korean-made satire of these ridiculous claims, has found the true origins of pizza.

These different Asian countries, China, Korea, Japan, and others, are all proud and fiery and nationalistic, and yet it bothers them that numerous incredible technologies were first invented in America. Korea’s portfolio, at least according to the English wikipedia, is comparatively slim. And so historians and nationalists stretch their histories back as far as possible, since, superficially, that looks impressive—though if you were to ask King Gwanggaeto about his nationality: “Hey! Are you from Korea?”, he would say: “What’s Korea?”, since the idea of the nation-state is only about two centuries old, and before that people were loyal to leaders or faiths rather than flags and passports—and this historical superficiality is linked to the physical superficiality that forces women to spend millions of won, to risk their lives, in fact, to alter their faces: the dangerous and destructive and simplistic and un-Socratic belief that if a person looks beautiful, that person’s thoughts must also be beautiful.

This isn’t just tied to Samsung’s relentless pirating of Apple’s ideas, or China’s notorious intellectual theft of America’s military technology: it goes back to human evolution, as well: why human beings triumphed over their competitors in the primitive primordial savannah. Cheetahs are faster, lions are stronger, elephants are bigger, ants are more numerous: but humans are the smartest beasts of all, and their brains are what pushed them ahead of their competitors in the distant past, and their brains were still revolutionizing philosophical thought in the Athenian Golden Age, and their brains are still changing the world now, and so long as a country like Korea believes that physical appearance is important enough to warrant a photo stapled to every résumé, so long will it be destined to follow and copy those who recognize the Platonic importance of the mind over the shifting untrustworthy mirage of the body.

In Search Of New Images

“…There are few images to be found. One has to dig for them like an archaeologist. One has to search through this ravaged landscape to find anything at all… It’s often tied up with risk, of course, which I would never shun, but I see so few people today who dare to address our lack of adequate images. We absolutely need images in tune with our civilization, images that resonate with what is deepest within us. We need to go into war zones, if need be, or anywhere else it takes us…to find images that are pure and clear and transparent… I’d go to Mars or Saturn if I could…because it’s no longer easy here on this Earth to find that something that gives images their transparency the way you could before.”

From Werner Herzog, a man who has added countless new images to cinema. I found the quote here.

I seem to remember hearing him say (perhaps translated through the ideas of one of my friends) that a civilization is dead when it runs out of new images. Not social inequality, not environmental disasters (plagues, asteroids, summers of snow), not great men or even great women, not military catastrophes, not bourgeois fatcats, not even fanatical communist insurgents: no, the ancient Egyptians and the ancient Romans and all sorts of other lost civilizations were destroyed because they ran out of pictures.

I went to see Star Trek yesterday, and while I was in the theater I really had a great time, and I didn’t want the movie to end, but then almost as soon as I walked out I started unraveling the ridiculous plot holes and inconsistencies, and found myself confronted with the incontrovertible fact that I had seen nothing new. Everything in that film was just a mixed-up rehash of things I’d seen before: even the people getting sucked out into warp speed (!) are really no different from all the other people who have fallen out of cinematic airplanes over the years. The first time I saw that, in Fight Club, I was pretty amazed, but now I’m not so sure. The thrill is maybe something like eating fast food: explosions of deliciousness with each bite of meat mixed up from hundreds of different animals, followed by an aftertaste of self-loathing, guilt, and disgust.

Maybe this movie should have been called Star Trek We Ran Out Of Darkness. Even when Khan crushes Robocop’s skull, which the frightened director chose not to show, I was like, I saw this before, in one of the crazy violent sequences of The Animatrix—which was not too afraid to show it to me.

Still, I tried to view the film from the perspective of someone who had never seen any film before, rather than someone who has seen hundreds of them. One of my friends, a die-hard Star Trek fan who works in the film industry and has seen thousands of films, refuses to watch Into Darkness (as well as numerous other Hollywood blockbusters) more or less, I believe, because, like me, he’s sated. He’s fed up with the laziness, the lack of new images, and he doesn’t want to support them with his hard-earned pay.

So instead of people getting sucked out into space and vanishing, let’s see them freezing and dying and exploding, as Scotty said. Instead of endless repetitive fistfights and gunfights and starship battles, let’s see something new! These films are being made for the masses, who haven’t seen quite as many movies as my friend and I—this friend has, rather impressively, watched every film in Kurosawa’s oeuvre, for example—and one day, someday, far off, they are going to get tired of the giant robot clashes, the three-act character arcs, the purely good guys and the purely bad guys, the Pixarification of movies, the way only mindless explosions count—and cinema is either going to die (long live cinema!), to be replaced by video games, or, maybe, who knows, better films will be made.

The artist has to be like Commodus, in Gladiator, a film which does possess new images, with hands running over golden grain, and roses raining down from the sky, and catapults bombarding barbarian hordes with fire, and dudes in crazy metal masks swordfighting tigers: “I will give the people a vision and they will love me for it…I will give them the greatest vision of their lives.” That’s the Herzogian civilization-saving ideal to follow.

PS: Apologies for not writing anything here in a month. I’ve been using every spare moment to edit one of my books, which, I hope, is full of new images.

Faith In Archy

Thought-sparking piece about anarchy in The New Yorker today: the anarchists involved didn’t convince me, or the author, however, that anarchism is any different from Savonarolism: take everything and burn it just because a few things don’t work. But it did get me to consider anarchy for an instant. I thought of the case of certain religious types, probably predominantly American, who believe that faith in god (and a corresponding fear of hell) is the only thing that keeps everyone from murdering each other, and there would seem to be a parallel among archists like myself: the government is the only thing that keeps murderers from breaking down my door.

But here’s the difference. I’m an agnostic. I think god could exist, but I’m not sure. There’s no scientific evidence, no photograph of a burning bush or a giant monkey flying around with a mountaintop or even Alan Moore’s “rather amazing” snake god. At the same time there was little to no evidence to support evolution two or three centuries back: absence of evidence is not necessarily evidence of absence (Dawkins himself has admitted as much), though at the same time proving the nonexistence of the supernatural could also be logically impossible.

Regardless, I believe these things, and you don’t see me running around killing everybody. I have trouble killing the flies that have infested my bathroom (and despite the annoyance I’ve largely left them alone). When you take away religious faith, people generally do not turn into berserkers: but when you take away government, when you take away the police and the fire department and the ambulances and the huge numbers of soldiers that stand between us and North Korea—I’m writing this from South Korea—what can you possibly expect beyond horror and bloodshed? This is the truism: government is corrupt because people are corrupt, and taking away government will not turn people into angels, just as taking away religion will not turn them into devils.

So instead of throwing out the bathwater with the baby, we should stay committed to cleaning them both in the same tub: mount cameras to all elected officials, and make the feeds accessible to anyone with a dialup connection; raise taxes to a hundred percent on incomes exceeding $250,000 a year, and use the money to provide everyone with enough food, space, and time, to live happily; outlaw private education as well as private medicine; plant trees, build spaceships, cover the rooftops with solar panels, manufacture self-driving cars, destroy the world’s arsenal of nuclear weapons: shit, man, aren’t these crazy ideas radical and utopian enough?

When You Say Simple, You Probably Mean Plain

Allegorical tales that involve animal characters have notable appeal for adults as well. Orwell’s “Animal Farm,” for example, is a masterpiece of political commentary that is arresting in its simplicity.

From the comments section of A Child’s Wild Kingdom. As soon as I read it I thought—simple? Orwell is simple? I don’t know, doesn’t Orwell seem, actually, to be kind of brilliantly complex? And doesn’t he just mask that complexicity in an attractively plain style?

And then from the chorus of dead people I’ve tucked into my brain, Nabokov—the master of concealing difficult and complex thoughts within a difficult and complex style—lashed out from his excellent Lectures on Russian Literature:

…But remember that ‘simplicity’ is buncombe. No major writer is simple. The Saturday Evening Post is simple. Journalese is simple. Upton Lewis is simple. Mom is simple. Digests are simple. Damnation is simple. But Tolstoys and Melvilles are not simple.”

Nor, indeed!, is any artist worth experiencing.

So just why are you into Malian music anyway?

Glad you asked. The obsession began around eight years ago when I strolled into the Hampshire College library one evening, as was my wont, after a somewhat reverse circle-jerk-like Philosophy of Time class, and Alice-in-wonderlandly fell into the music section: hundreds of CDs, and most of them really fucking weird. Like, I’m talking Karlheinz Stockhausen kind of excellent weird: there wast discovert Steve Reich, Sergei Prokofiev, Balian jegogs, and, at last, les griots du Mali.

The gateway drug into this most excellent musical tradition was The Festival In The Desert, where I not only found Ali Farka Toure, Afel Bocoum, Tinariwen, and Super Onze, but found them at their best. That, in turn, led me on to all kinds of other weird names you can use at any convenient time to out-hipster even the raddest and most widely-listened acquaintances: Toumani Diabate, Bassekou Kouyate, Ballake Sissoko, and Afrocubism, which somewhat projectile-orgasmically unites many of these artists onto one single stage.

But why do I even like these guys? Why is the sky blue? Why do birds sing? This music works for me, other music works for others, but I also found it cool that a lot of this stuff is like classical for the Malians: griots are the rough equivalent of wandering minstrels, skipping along the great bend of the Niger Delta, singing about the djinns and kings of Mali’s glorious past: Mansa Musa, who had so much gold he made gold worthless; Sunjata, the lion king, and others. And so these songs, which to me sound like what Martin Scorcese calls “the DNA of the Blues”, the roots of rock and roll and everything good that makes your feet tap, is like Beethoven to them: except Beethoven lived over seven centuries ago and didn’t write any of his music down, requiring instead that each generation of griot teach their children how to play the symphonies, with generation after generation adding their own genius to the mix. Thus!, there’s really something to Socrates’ dismissal of writing, because in Mali the classical tradition isn’t just alive and well—it’s life itself—while Beethoven and Bach and Mozart are frozen museum pieces, delightful but unevolving, mothballed and cotton-haired.

Just imagine how different life would be if some virtuoso cellist improvised on Bach’s Cello Suites, or if some great pianist pounded his soul into the black-and-white bars of Gershwin’s rhapsodies, rather than mechanically obeying the sheet music—as all those greats once did! The three B’s, Gershwin, Mozart, all of them improvised, but people don’t improvise so much anymore when they play their music, so the music is dead. In Mali, however, the rhythm of the ancients—that food of love—plays on.

The King Midas Of Shit

So I started watching the original version of this movie right on the heels of The Empire Strikes Back, and realized two things at once:

a) I haven’t seen this in, like, ten years.
b) For good reason.

I’ve always been crazy about Star Wars, and Return of the Jedi was my unquestioned favorite through most of my childhood: the darkness and complexity of The Empire Strikes Back didn’t really grab me until I was in college (though I can remember begging my dad to rent “the one with the snow” when I was around four years old).

But don’t get me wrong, Return of the Jedi has a lot of good things going for it. The action sequences are impressive. The speeder chase through the forest is one of the best ever, right up there with the end of The Blues Brothers, with a rhythm to it so strong that music isn’t even necessary. The fact that it was filmed by a bunch of guys walking around with cameras strapped to their bodies, who then sped the film up “in post”, makes it even more impressive; movies are generally better when people go outside to film them. The throne room and the space battle is also pretty cool.

But, man, everything in between is just filler. Darth Vader visiting the Death Star in the beginning seems contrived—he wants to speed up the construction, a problem which didn’t seem to exist before his arrival and one which evaporates without any perceptive change right after he steps aboard. And then the droids coming to Jabba’s palace: why doesn’t Luke just go there himself with his lightsaber? Ah, right, because it’s contrived. Plus: Han Solo.

I recently read that before George Lucas turned to the dark side (before he became, as a redditor wrote, “the King Midas of Shit”), they had planned to kill off Han Solo, which Harrison Ford apparently also wanted, and I think they really should have: the unpredictable gunslinger from the first film, the deeply-flawed womanizing enemy of feminism who is nonetheless fairly charming in the second, is, like Leia, almost completely passive and emasculated: imagine the kind of film we would have had on our hands if Luke had rescued Han, only for him to get shot by Boba Fett—reduced, here, to slapstick prop, though he was frightening in The Empire Strikes Back—or swept aside in a rage by Darth Vader. Leia, devastated, sacrifices herself to save Luke, who abandons everyone and everything, walking off into the sunset. No second Death Star, no Ewoks, no goofy aliens, just ever-deepening gloom.

Instead the movie keeps Han Solo on life support. He forgives Lando for his betrayal completely, even though he has no idea that Lando later changed his mind; the last thing Lando said to Han was: “you’re being put into carbon freeze.” Then Han wakes up, meets Lando, and is like, hey, whatever, it’s cool, don’t worry about it, I hated you then, but because the scriptwriters were lazy I don’t care now, I know psychically that you had a last-moment change of heart. He doesn’t just say this: he even saves Lando from the Sarlacc Pit, without even thinking twice about it.

And then the Ewoks.

Imagine George Lucas pitching the idea for Return of the Jedi to some studio executive board room—Return of the Jedi, instead of Star Wars, before he was famous. “Guys, check this out,” he starts, “the movie ends in a forest with a bunch of dancing teddy bears!”

Apparently he wanted to use them to comment on the Vietnam War, showing how a vast technologically-powerful enemy can be defeated by small numbers of determined natives, but it just doesn’t work. “Guys, hey guys!” he continues, “what if we mixed death and violence with teddy bears?”

George Lucas obviously didn’t pitch this idea to anyone—or, if he did, his audience was too terrified (too job-dependent) to say the obvious. “George,” any rational unafraid human being would reply in this imaginary situation, “I think your idea is really, really, really fucking stupid.” Watching the famous Red Letter Media reviews of the prequel trilogy is not unlike watching Aguirre, Der Zorn Gottes: Kinski among the Conquistadores, Lucas among the production crew, the same look of “just stay the hell out of his way” painted on the faces of the underlings, the same look of absolute power corruption on the faces of the leaders.

No questioning, no criticizing.

And you know, obviously, wookies would have been better than ewoks. So why didn’t Lucas use them? Action figures. According to Gary Kurtz, when George Lucas transformed himself from Luke Skywalker into Darth Vader, he decided that selling action figures was more important than crafting a quality film, because you can make three times the money on action figures, as if the unbelievably vast box office profits from the Star Wars franchise weren’t already enough. Thus!, instead of wookies, we get ewoks. Instead of just Darth Vader, we have to deal with the Emperor (with his red guards). Instead of stormtroopers, we have the speeder bike stormtroopers. Instead of Leia, we have her wearing some bounty hunter getup. Instead of just people, we have dozens of crazy-looking aliens: in The Empire Strikes Back there were almost no aliens at all except for Yoda, whose movements are so remarkable that he is more or less an honorary human, leaping the uncanny valley and scrambling up the far side decades before CGI manages to do the same—if it ever does.

Basically, we can’t use wookies, because we already have them. We have to use something new, so we can mass-produce it for the kids. “Ewoks are the answer,” George Lucas said, later turning this phrase into a bumper sticker and slapping it onto the back of his minivan, screeching away into the dust and leaning out the window to scream back at us, the disheartened adorers-of-The-Empire-Strikes-Back: “SAYONARA SUCKAZ!“

I was going to end there, but I found this rather terrifyingly Orwellian George Lucas quote on wikipedia:

There will only be one [version of the films]. And it won’t be what I would call the “rough cut”, it’ll be the “final cut”. The other one will be some sort of interesting artifact that people will look at and say, “There was an earlier draft of this.” The same thing happens with plays and earlier drafts of books. In essence, films never get finished, they get abandoned. At some point, you’re dragged off the picture kicking and screaming while somebody says, “Okay, it’s done.” That isn’t really the way it should work. Occasionally, [you can] go back and get your cut of the video out there, which I did on both American Graffiti and THX 1138; that’s the place where it will live forever. So what ends up being important in my mind is what the DVD version is going to look like, because that’s what everybody is going to remember. The other versions will disappear. Even the 35 million tapes of Star Wars out there won’t last more than 30 or 40 years. A hundred years from now, the only version of the movie that anyone will remember will be the DVD version [of the Special Edition], and you’ll be able to project it on a 20-foot-by-40-foot screen with perfect quality. I think it’s the director’s prerogative, not the studio’s, to go back and reinvent a movie.

I think you’re wrong, George. The original versions of the first and the second movie will survive, since they are actually good: everything you’ve done since then will be thrown to the burping gullet of the Sarlacc Pit.

Super Onze

Listening to this music is like being lost in a tornado. Feelings of joy and sadness, praise and lament, wrap me in ecstasy…everything great about American music in its purest form: rap, blues, jazz, rock, all together flowing from these clattering ngonis and pounding calabashes. I bought it off itunes last Friday and have been listening to it all day long ever since, walking the streets and feeling as if I’m about to faint and spin up inside a whirlwind, my eyes closed, breathing through my nose, smiling. Give one of their music videos a chance: the dance moves alone look as though they’d work in any context.

I Think I’m Turning Ko-re-an

“My very chains and I grew friends…”
—Byron, The Prisoner of Chillon

I thought Korea was the worst mistake of my life when I first came here. “It was the worst, most painful, mind-destroying, horrible moment!” As I recounted in my first book, I flew into Gimhae in the middle of the blazing summer, and spent six months surrounded by the filth and garbage in western Busan, my misery only occasionally relieved by the friendships I made, though it was likewise compounded by my memory of the joy of life in liberal arts school, where I spent four years climbing trees, talking about and reading and writing books, and re-enacting several times daily Apollo’s pursuit of Daphne. Life was a dream. In Korea it became a nightmare.

Escaping to Indochina for a few weeks and then finally getting together with a nice Korean girl changed all that. I wish I could say that I came to appreciate this country thanks to some inner transformation that anyone can duplicate—”In the depth of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer.”—but living in a tiny apartment in western Busan and working at a public school where I was screamed at for four hours a day, five hours a week, by hordes of children, in the company of teachers who (from our first meeting) made little attempt to conceal their complete disdain for me, did little to make this place endearing. I counted the days until my contract ended, thought several times daily of “pulling a runner”, and spent more time than you would think gazing out across the Nakdong River at the planes taking off from Gimhae. I found solace in whining, constantly, as well as by perusing blogs that never cease to criticize this place. My wife changed all that.

And on my occasional pilgrimages back to America I realized how Korean I had become. At the airport in Detroit I was amazed at the tallness, fatness, and contentedness, of the people around me. How come they aren’t all fighting each other while they wait line?, how come they aren’t all glaring at each other judgmentally?, how come they’re wearing colorful clothing?, how come they seem relatively pleased with themselves?, I wondered. I moved to Gyeongju, and ceased to notice the garbage, phlegm, and vomit as much as before, though that simply might be because there’s a little less of it here than back in the cesspit that is western Busan. Finally, by the grace of a miracle whose awesome mystery still lies far beyond the grasp of my worldly intellect, I somehow landed a coveted university job which I continue to believe I do not deserve.

Now four years have passed. I am twenty-five. I have spent almost a fifth of my life here; that makes me, more or less, twenty percent Korean, which means that there’s now a little Korean voice inside of me at odds with the graduate of the incredibly liberal liberal arts school. One part of me thinks everything related to Dokdo is incredibly stupid; another likes singing the Dokdo song. I ask students to address me by name but inwardly wince whenever I don’t hear myself addressed as “professor”. I speak and understand some Korean and still recoil with disbelief when the perfect gibberish pouring out of their mouths and my own makes sense to me. One part wants to wander the world in shorts and a t-shirt while another is terrified of leaving the house without a laundered suit. One part thinks people should be free to look however they like; another believes a woman is a prostitute if she bares the slightest hint of cleavage, while a man who does not shave is obviously homeless, and dark skin is always a sign of laziness and poverty. Animals are dirty; animals must be saved. The list goes on.

I can not only eat, but also enjoy, Korean food for breakfast. I become overly excited when I encounter people from exotic foreign countries: while waiting for the light to change at a crosswalk I overheard two young men speaking Japanese and had to restrain myself from randomly screaming that I thought Kurosawa was the most amazing filmmaker ever. I feel a compulsion to visit Mount Baekdu. The slightest delay is intolerable. My child must be the best student. Living in a nice Hanok house in the country would be cool. Money is important. I cannot gain respect without first possessing the nicest, fastest, and most expensive car on the market.

The consciousness of the half-peninsula flows through me, and I think through it, absorbing a little here while pushing out the rest there: the craziest thing about this transformation of chains to friends is the realization I’ve been feeling lately that there is no need to return to America permanently. When I first arrived I was ticking off the seconds to departure, and now I’m fine with sticking around for the foreseeable future, an idea that only came to me in nightmares in the beginning when I saw myself eventually turning into one of the angry old Korean men sitting on a public bus in a heavy old-fashioned suit and hat and tie, glaring across the aisle of time at the young white lazy foreign youth who’s obviously come to our country to steal our money and our women: and for no other purpose.

How To Understand Everything

Menelaus and his company lay in wait for Proteus.

“We rushed upon him with a cry, and cast our hands about him, nor did that ancient one forget his cunning. Now behold, at the first, he turned into a bearded lion, and thereafter into a snake, and a pard, and a huge boar; then he took the shape of running water, and of a tall and flowering tree. We the while held him close with steadfast heart.”

[...]

“The nature of the universe”, Marcus Antoninus has observed, “delights not in anything so much as to alter all things, and present them under another form. This is her conceit to play one game and begin another. Matter is placed before her like a piece of wax and she shapes it to all forms and figures. Now she makes a bird, then out of the bird a beast—now a flower, then a frog, and she is pleased with her own magical performance as men are with their own fancies.”

“Ineluctable modality of the visible…”

[...]

According to the mystics the thumb-marks of the Demiurge are apparent everywhere for him who has eyes to see and the “might and strength” of a Menelaus to apprehend and hold the slippery object of apperception…and those who are able to read may find the true history of everything written upon the leaves of [the world's] soul.”

From Stuart Gilbert: James Joyce: A Study.

Nothing Stops A God

It looks like the people who wrote this movie are fully aware of the trouble with Superman: nothing can stop a god, since a god is, obviously, immortal, perfect, and, yeah, unstoppable. That’s the Platonic view which probably got Socrates in trouble with the Athenians—who executed him on a cross of hemlock!—dying for a love of knowledge rather than our sins!—but to go even further, and to look at God from the perspective of Islam, and Ali Farka Toure, God Is Unique; there is nothing like God, nothing can be compared to It; It cannot have arms, legs, thoughts, feelings, or any recognizable features. This philosophical view naturally eliminates any possibility of drama, since if God Is Unique, and everywhere and everywhen and nowhere and nowhen, then It’s also doing everything and nothing, and there’s no plot, no tension, no payoff. Buddhists take things even further. God The Creator doesn’t even exist in Buddhism. And, like Mohammed, the Buddha is just a dude, though he’s a really special dude, so we have to say Peace Be Upon Him whenever we say his name (for Mohammed) and we have to build giant temples and golden statues and bow to them and make sacrifices to them (for Sakyamuni). Even though he isn’t a god. He’s just a dude. A really, really, really, special, dude…

In the case of Superman and in the case of all these traditions as well as many others, it’s more or less impossible to write a story about god unless god has flaws—in other words, unless god isn’t god. In Job, God is dimwitted, making a bet with Satan, which everyone knows is a bad idea; in Superman, there’s kryptonite, a contrived substance, a sort of MacGuffin which makes the hero more human and therefore more interesting: the most memorable scenes of the very first Superman film involve Clark Kent getting blown off by Lois Lane: Christopher Reeve is so amusing and so charming an entire film could have been made about his life working as a reporter, without even the slightest hint of a red cape, because, really, Superman is best when he’s just Man. You’ve got to Christopher Nolanize him. Throw him under the ice, turn him into a hitchhiker, and make him grow a beard!

In the ancient Greek stories of the gods, their flaw is usually lust or jealousy; Plato thought this ridiculous, since how can a perfect being be jealous of anyone?; but it does leave the door open for plenty of drama. Zeus falls for some woman, turns into a bull to seduce her (since obviously what woman wouldn’t be seduced by a bull?), bones the shit out of her, and then gets found out by his wife, who turns her hair into live snakes (I’m mixing stories to illustrate a point). In Ovid, at least, divine justice is so arbitrary it’s almost random, and the gods are never the victims, so, as in Seinfeld, they never learn from their mistakes, which keeps the hilarity rolling. And in Homer everyone knows Athena totally has a thing for Odysseus. Which makes no sense.

But in the poetry of Horace, a more-or-less contemporary of Ovid, the gods are good, the gods really are flawless, nothing stops them, they fuck shit up left and right, and the delight comes from watching them do it, almost like a video game. The ancient Roman equivalent of modern Hollywood blockbuster special effects is poetry: the power words have to conjure feelings and images.

…The nations know
How with descending thunder He
The impious Titans hurl’d below,
Who rules dull earth and stormy seas,
And towns of men, and realms of pain,
And gods, and mortal companies,
Alone, impartial in his reign.
Yet Jove had fear’d the giant rush,
Their upraised arms, their port of pride,
And the twin brethren bent to push
Huge Pelion up Olympus’ side.
But Typhon, Mimas, what could these,
Or what Porphyrion’s stalwart scorn,
Rhoetus, or he whose spears were trees,
Enceladus, from earth uptorn,
As on they rush’d in mad career
‘Gainst Pallas’ shield? Here met the foe
Fierce Vulcan, queenly Juno here…
Strength, mindless, falls by its own weight;
Strength, mix’d with mind, is made more strong
By the just gods, who surely hate
The strength whose thoughts are set on wrong.
Let hundred-handed Gyas bear
His witness, and Orion known
Tempter of Dian, chaste and fair,
By Dian’s maiden dart o’erthrown.
Hurl’d on the monstrous shapes she bred,
Earth groans, and mourns her children thrust
To Orcus; Aetna’s weight of lead
Keeps down the fire that breaks its crust;
Still sits the bird on Tityos’ breast,
The warder of unlawful love;
Still suffers lewd Pirithous, prest
By massive chains no hand may move.

This was translated by John Conington, whose brilliant works infest the internet. I’m sure I lost every last one of my readers by posting that lengthy excerpt, but for me it doesn’t get much better than that: titans piling mountains on top of one another, knocked aside by a gleaming shield, and thrown down deep inside the groaning Earth, weighed under the molten lead of Aetna. This is CGI that will never look outdated: these are gods who entertain without a hint of kryptonite.