A Review of “Prometheus”

Does a watch, found on a beach somewhere, make it reasonable to assume the existence of a watch-maker? This question is familiar to those immersed in philosophy of religion and the works of writers like Pascal and William James. This is the question taken up appropriately in our era by a science-fiction film. And it alludes to the long tradition of dealing with this kind of question in myth, drama, and novels by having the title Prometheus.

The “watch” for the film is the awe-inspiring sequence of vistas that we find ourselves confronted with over the course of our lives. The visions we encounter, like the opening sequences of mountains and a chalky cataract plunging over cliffs into a river below, instill in us a naïve theological argument. These kinds of powerful images are used over and over again in the narrative of Prometheus. They range from light and water, sun and sky and starlight imagery – the Apollonian – that preoccupy the early parts of the movie, together with the Dionysian descents in chasms, haunting visages, shadowy domes that fill the latter half of the movie. It is the feelings inspired by visions that give cogency to the otherwise shallow words uttered twice by two of the less-than-memorable characters who populate Prometheus: “I believe because I choose to.”

The impressive influence that comes over us by way of our visual cortex can’t be underestimated as one of the main bases for religion. It must be true that susceptibility to this influence must vary from person to person, although the popularity of film generally suggests a basically high level. So for a person like Scott, an artist who consumer culture has catapulted to the ranks for genius, the visual must play an important role in his life of mind and life of belief. Like the Methuselahesque Weyland, Scott has spent his life a builder of worlds. The scenery in the background of his holographic speech to the crew, reminds one of the cityscape of Blade Runner or even, more loosely, the cityscape of ancient Rome conjured up in Gladiator.

Prometheus was for the Greeks a god who had fallen into disfavor. Folk etymology explained his name as meaning “wise before the deed” but in fact his name meant something else in a language everyone had forgotten.  He is given the status therefore of Titan, probably because his cult was superseded by later the cult of the Olympians. Accordingly, the important myth in which Prometheus is featured has him chained up by Zeus, confined to the eternal punishment of having his innards pecked out by omnipresent vultures. And so although this story was unlikely to be intended as such, Prometheus was fit into the pattern of the hero-savior, who sacrifices himself for humanity.

For the film this myth is central. It serves as a prologue to the story in much the same way the monolith and gibbering Neanderthals set the premise for 2001: A Space Odyssey. Notice the ritualistic elements in the sequence. The Engineer climbs to the top of a tall mountain just as his UFO vanishes into the sky. This represents his abandonment to his fate, his absolute commitment. He then sheds what looks like some kind of monastic robe. The choice of making him look like not only a cenobite of some kind, but also a martial artist, is telling. Notice also that he takes the mutagen serum in what can only be a ritualistic gesture. It isn’t injected or swallowed in a gel cap. Rather he drinks it back like a sacrament. And thereby he literally fulfills the words of the mass giving up his body so sins may be forgiven. To understand the meaning of the prologue as a sacrifice requires some further speculation, imaginative speculation, about what the greater purpose of what may be ultimate design of the Engineers in Prometheus.

The Engineers were likely advanced enough to have seeded the earth with life without requiring the actual destruction of one of their numbers. That one of their numbers would actually give of his life for this purpose indicates that there is some kind of non-utilitarian belief system at work – Weyland similarly found it desirable to bring along on the expedition the two scientists who discovered the star-map. We could also reasonably speculate that not just anyone is chosen for the honour of seeding a new planet with what will ultimately become sentient life. In fact it is precisely this kind of altruism, this kind of willingness to face extinction in the name of the greater cause that made the Engineer eligible for the service. The Engineers probably revere to the point of worship the DNA code and the humanoid form it gives rise to.

Evidence from the film suggests that the Engineers are a phenomenally old species. They are engaged in a project that is just about beyond human comprehension. What can be said about it is that they are deliberately trying to force the evolution of their genetic data.

What the Engineers had probably found early on in their existence was that there is an inherent contradiction in life. It has to destroy in order to survive. But ultimately, survival of sentient life forms depends on overcoming this tendency to want to destroy. And so a bloody epic unfolds in which a species grapples with itself, with periods of stability followed by times of conflict that come very close to bringing about utter annihilation. The Engineers found experiments in both nature and nurture both to be powerless to overcome the destructive impulse. And yet, gripped by a non-rational impulse, they focused all the energies of their powerful civilization on filling the universe with their life. They did this in the hopes that one form of life would undergo some random mutation that would succeed at last in resolving the contradiction that had plagued the existence of their species. This project was made possible by a singular discovery, the mutagen agent that we see in urns on the buried UFO that the crew of the Prometheus discovered. This agent caused massively rapid and random mutations. When mixed with the existing DNA code of a living host it unleashes possible variations. It is very possible also that some degree of disciplined control on the part of the Engineer who imbibed the mutagen went into unleashing its potentiality as the genetic basis for all the life of a planet. Otherwise, however, if randomly spilled on the ground or slipped into a mickey or fallen into face first, it is likely to produce some hostile result. Hence the possession and spawning of monsters that leads to so much trouble throughout the film.

And yet, the behavior of the only Engineer to be met in the film would seem to contradict the thesis that they were a race of Utopians, trying to seek Enlightenment through the perfection of an ultimate species. Certainly their ship, the weird gothic interiors and the fact that the only decoration was a huge statue of the Engineers themselves all seem to suggest that they were in fact a destructive and hostile species. This fits with the idea that they created the mutagen and the H.R. Giger-alien species as a weapon or maybe just for kicks. But here the supposition is that they are static. Remember hundreds of millions of years, if not billions of years, intervened into the life of this race. Though powerful, they aren’t necessarily unchanging. What is very likely is that over time their religion came to be corrupted. That is, they stopped finding meaning in the forward-looking project of creating some perfect form of life and instead decided to glorify themselves – perhaps by seeking a form of eternal life. This would have been seen as a heretical development to the original Engineer faith, which viewed life as a perpetual process of change and mutation. And so a war ensued between a faction that we’ll call the Narcissists and a faction that might be designated the Heraclitians. It was a holograph of this war that the android David found when he accessed the Engineer’s computer in the corridor. And then, perhaps to wait out the infection they had unleashed against their enemies, the remaining Narcissist Engineers when into a long sleep. During this time knowledge of the earth was forgotten about, giving our species the time it needed to evolve at least to the point where we could follow the clues they had left us.

There is a very good chance that our species is coming very close to developing along the lines that the original faith that the Hericlitians had hoped for or prophesied. Indeed there was a hope of reconciliation and acknowledgement that Weyland had dreamed of. This was the paternal fantasy that had long lured humankind into folly. The moment occurred when the alien listened to David speaking to some ingenious reproduction of its speech. What David and the others could not have fathomed is that the Engineer view them all with contempt and very possibly as aberrations against itself. Perhaps they would have had a chance to communicate with it if they came as supplicants. But even then, there is little chance the Engineer would have thought twice before destroying them and then wiping out the human race – effacing all signs of its rival faction’s sentimentality.

This was not a good movie. Ridley Scott (he will never earn the distinction of being just “Scott”) is no Kubrick. He has far more in common with John Carpenter, when all is said and done. Of course the movie has a lot of interest-value and is worth the entertainment a few hours and a few dollars can provide. Then again, the same can be said of the titanically stupid Battleship. Things exploded, some weird sounding guns got fired, etc. And yet, Ridley Scott can film some stately sequences. There are beautiful and haunting spaceship aesthetics – especially when the spaceship Prometheus alights on the planet surface – that conjure up the beauty of 2001: A Space Odyssey – all the classical music and a computer voice calling someone David served as some pretty heavy-handed allusions, (It is generally agreed that David is the most compelling character in the film). There are neat effects like the “pups” that map the inside of the Engineers catacomb. And everyone agrees that the caesarian section sequence was a unique and harrowing event. But it was all stitched together poorly. The first few prologues to the space voyage hinted that the sequence of the whole film was wonky. This off-kilter sequencing meant that otherwise decent performances by all the cast made their behavior seem illogical. What slit the movie’s throat was the dialogue. Who thought it would be successful to let the writer of “Lost”, for heaven’s sake, get behind the wheel of a script for a serious feature length film? He succeeded in making the characters of Prometheus all sound like morons – like something between the cast of “Friends” and a Tarantino film all launched into intergalactic space. This is what happens when pretentious and mediocre nonsense like “Lost” gets undeserved praise: those associated with it go on to ruin films that might otherwise have had potential to be at least cult classics.

Special Feature: An Essay by Steven Henri Martin

Ghosts of the Mac-Paps

“My guards were so tired that they only awoke when grenades were thrown up the alley in the early hours of the morning. I was standing with my back to a doorway stroking the muzzle of a starved burro when suddenly the strains of beautiful music floated over the city for some minutes followed by a speech over a loudspeaker, followed by rifle and machine-gun fire and grenade explosions. More music and speeches then a short silence and then a terrific bombardment of hand grenades thrown at our barricade, followed by fascist shells thundering over our heads… we soon discovered that the explosions came from fascist officers who were trying to make a getaway, not to attack… The whole night was like a fantastic melodrama, weird, beautiful, dangerous and delightful because we knew victory was ours.”

-Pete Neilsen of Vancouver with the Lincoln Battalion, on the battle of Belchite (1937)

“I Support Our Troops” ribbons are everywhere in Canada, particularly once you get outside the cities. Although the slogan only appeared after the U.S. led-invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, it evokes enough of the Canadian’s reverence for the soldier’s duty that I’m sure the ribbons will hang around long after this present war is over. There is a general feeling that soldiers do something honourable and terrifying and they deserve not just gratitude for it, but unquestioning respect. The slogan also contains a subtle but nasty inference that there are those who don’t support the troops and need to be publicly defied – you know, people who question wars.

That soldiers do something terrifying is undeniable – engaged in the business of killing and being killed, they volunteer to do work that most of us cannot imagine, cannot even imagine if we ourselves would be capable of doing their job. But the sweeping claim that what they do is honourable is too fanatical a notion for me – it depends on the man and it depends on the war. During Remembrance Day celebrations in Canada, the soldiers of good wars and bad are honoured, partly because a sincere populace wishes to, but also because it helps political support for future wars. But soldiers who fought against the government’s wishes are not remembered. The Mackenzie-Papineau Battalion are among those left out of popular sentiments of “supporting the troops.”

The Spanish Civil War (1936-1939) was a war so messy and divided that it is hard to find general consensus on whether anyone was fighting a just war. Not that it is talked about: teaching it to a university class last year, most of my students were amazed they had never heard of the war, much less what it was about. As a prelude to the Second World War, it does seem strange that it appears most often as a footnote in history. It is also the time of one of the most staggering events in world history – the volunteer army of 40,000+ who came from all over the world to fight on behalf of the Spanish Republic – the International Brigades. Neither before nor since have so many common people left their home countries to fight and die for an ideal in a foreign land. Fighting fascism in defence of democracy might seem like a no-brainer today, but in 1936 fascism didn’t look so bad to a lot of people. Franco and his buddies Hitler and Mussolini had yet to commit their worst atrocities, and supporters of authoritarian policies are often too naive to understand the implications of their positions.

The Mackenzie-Papineau Battalion is shorthand for the Canadian contingent that found its way to Spain and fought on behalf of the Spanish Republic. Out of a population of just 12 million, 1600 Canadians made the journey, an incredible proportion. They were recruited from among the ranks of socialists and the working poor, but the On-to-Ottawa trek is the legendary beginnings of the adventure: hundreds of unemployed men were organized by agitators in the work camps established by the Canadian government, not much more than prison camps for the unemployed, and marched to Vancouver to occupy the city and demand for work and wages. They tried to cross Canada to confront the Prime Minister in Ottawa by hopping trains. They were stopped halfway in Regina by the RCMP, resulting in a city wide riot that ended the movement but radicalized thousands of Canadians. Young men with nothing and nothing to hope were attracted to the higher purpose offered in fighting fascism.

Even though the Canadian volunteers came from all walks of life and from every part of the country, the operation was organized by communist elements within Canadian society. It could be said this affirmed conservative suspicions that communists were behind radical activity in the country, but it could also be said that only the communists had the organization and the physical resources to mobilize Canadians in an idealistic endeavor that was discouraged by the elites of their own societies.

There was never really a wholly Canadian battalion – the Canadians fought under Americans and English, mainly in the Lincoln Battalion, winning the privilege of forming their own battalion a year into their involvement. Even then, the Mackenzie-Papineau Battalion was a mixture of Americans and Canadians, suggesting more than anything the complexity and chaos of the reality of the war. Or any war, for that matter.

After making the arduous journey into Spain (some of them didn’t make it – including the infamous torpedoing by an Italian submarine of the Spanish steamer Cuidad de Barcelona that killed many Canadian volunteers), the Canadians found themselves in a war in which the odds were stacked against them. In spite of this, the International Brigades were no propaganda piece – they fought hard battles, as brutal as any in the coming Second World War. The Canadians fought without experience, but with awesome tenacity. They participated in bloody battles in defense of the capital Madrid that for a time turned the Fascist advance, and were part of valiant and briefly successful counteroffensives in the north of the country.

The Canadians as a group displayed the toughness of a people who grew up in the bush, able to endure deprivation and hardship with an instinctive adaptability. Individual acts of the Canadians, lost in the innumerable defeats and tragedies the Republicans suffered against the better supplied Nationalists, seem like matters of legend. It defies the imagination that people could cross an ocean to fight for strangers for an ideal, and perhaps it could never happen again. But these Canadians did it, not for common nationalism or supremacy, but to fight fascism, pure and simple. In the cynical present, such acts are not just dismissed, they are ignored as irrelevant.

Tiny Anderson was of course a giant of a man who heartened the men around him. He survived the sinking of the Barcelona, the worst of the fighting, through the defense of Madrid, through the counteroffensives and the retreats from Nationalist rushes, only to fall in the last battles in 1938. At the Battle of the Ebro, Arthur Linton of Windsor recounts that he and Anderson were running up a hill and kept falling behind. Anderson yelled at him, “Come on you little bugger and don’t drop the machine gun,” and kept hauling him up. When they got to the top a mortar shell hit and took both of Anderson’s legs. Tiny’s last words were “When we get back from here, boy, there’s no pension, no nothing…” then he stuck a rifle in his mouth and shot himself.

Pete Nielson recounts the death of a young Canadian during named Jim Wolf the battle of Quinto, “War seemed to stun Jim up to the attack on Quinto. There he appeared to have made up his mind to fight in the front ranks at every opportunity… A hand grenade exploded near his face smashing one side of his jaw and neck… He could not smoke so he gave me his cigarettes.”

Finnish-Canadians signed up in numbers disproportionate to their population, and many of them did not come from unemployed backgrounds: they were idealists and internationalists and hardy ones at that. Toivo Saair was assigned to small groups of guerrilla fighters who ventured behind enemy lines, blowing up train tracks and recruiting subversives in Nationalist-held towns. Saair cuts a dashing figure, surviving a night alone hiding from Nationalist forces in a swamp for three hours, finally circling the enemy and scattering them with machinegun fire. He then swam across a river and rejoined his men on the other side. He eventually survived the war and returned to Canada.

Other Finns such as Gunnar Ebb, Nilo Makela and Untamo Makela conducted themselves heroically, fighting as if they were on home soil. Ebb and Untamo fought in dangerous guerrilla assignments like Saair’s, Ebb taking over as commander during the last campaigns. Ebb was not from Canada but had come to the Mac-Paps after being released as a political prisoner in his native Finland. Nilo Makela, from Timmins, Ontario, one of the most respected leaders of the Mac-Paps and who seemed personally invincible, fell during the retreat from the Nationalist push in 1938 – torn apart by mortar burst.

Maurice Constant lived up to his name and was a source of strength to the Battalion, being in the heat of the worst battles the Canadians fought. He went down during the retreats from the Ebro in 1938, taking grenade shrapnel in the face. He managed to make it back to an ambulance, ending up covered in blood from the slow drip of a dying soldier lying in the berth above him. He remembers his commander, Colonel Copic, astride a white horse strangely, seeing him being led to the ambulance and weeping at the sight of Constant’s wounds.

Most of the stories are such as these: men doing incredible things only to fall in losing battles. Charlie Walthers of Vancouver picking up bags of grenades and throwing himself at a fascist emplacement. The Mac-Paps delaying the Fascist advance as Spanish and International troops retreat. Jules Paivio recalling hearing the news of having to attack a Fascist stronghold: “there was something awful in the way the men knew they should not go back, some even couldn’t, but every man was there grimly waiting for that fateful order to march ten kilometres into the inferno again. At that moment, I thrilled to be one of them.”

These are a few illustrations to give some sense of the heroism of their efforts, as great as that of the veterans of Vimy or Passchendaele or Normandy, in service of a cause in which hope was in much shorter supply. In the end, the Republic fell to the fascists, in no small way because Western democracies like France, England, America and Canada left them hanging out to dry. Spanish democracy was too left wing to be of interest to democracies corrupted by moneyed interests. Even worse, there was not much in the way of documentation, given the Canadian government’s disinterest at the time and given the illegality of volunteering to fight in Spain, and many of the volunteers’ names and deeds are nowhere recorded. They not only died, but have vanished from memory, recognized only as an absence. The Mac-Paps returned with a 50% casualty rate, with many captured Canadians executed by the Fascists.

The Spanish Civil War is one of the great lost causes of history – after the fall of the Republic, Franco tyrannized the country for thirty years before dying a good old man in his bed. But at the time, history had yet to be written and a great thing was possible – the defense of a socialist democracy, uniting the ideals of liberal freedom and socialist equality, against the darkness of fascism. The odds of pulling this off were slim to none, but that makes the contribution of the Canadians all the more noble – in the bleakest and truest sense of nobility.

Special Feature: An Essay by Koom Kankesan

A DIVINE CLOCKWORK – the work of Alan Moore

The first time I can remember looking at a comic book was when I was four years old in England. My father was a hardworking immigrant and the comic book was an unusual luxury, an unexpected expenditure. The item in question was a black and white reprint of a Marvel comic that featured Spiderman and the Valkyrie, a little known Norse Marvel character who was leather clad, shapely, and blonde. She rode a horse that could fly. I could not read the comic then but the pictures fascinated me. The panels, each with a moment frozen in time, somehow connecting together like a mosaic, were a physical representation of time and space on paper. Furthermore, there were lines of magical force that radiated from the story itself. Spiderman climbed a tenement wall while the Valkyrie flew above him. They conversed and argued while the point of view of the ‘camera’ framing the panels roved around, above the characters, beside them, at angles that could only be viewed by birds. I got my father to explain the story to me again and again.

Of course, even then, I somehow understood that my father could not read this story to me like a regular book. It happened on the page through the interaction of words and images. Separating the story from the images would be like removing water from a cloud. No, the connection was more tacit; it happened in my brain in some funny way when the faculties took the words and pictures apart and fused them together through a strange alchemy. I think that more than anything else in my life, comic books have been the most consistent presence. Even when I moved to Montreal and had to limit what I took with me to the space of a friend’s small car, I took the complete sets of Alan Moore and Frank Miller comics I had filed away in cardboard boxes, not because they were valuable or because I planned on reading them regularly, but because I could not imagine my life without them. I first discovered Alan Moore at the end of my comic collecting days in high school. Having become tired of collecting comics, losing my interest in superheroes, I picked up the first collected volume of Alan Moore’s Swamp Thing. This was an accident; I returned another collectible comic I had bought to a store and the owner graciously let me exchange it as he normally did not do refunds. I spent an hour trying to find something appealing to take home and then settled on the Swamp Thing out of exhaustion rather than excitement.

As I continued to acquire, in bits and pieces, Alan Moore’s available oeuvre, it’s hard to describe how much I identified with the writing in his work. My mid to late teens, a time of rapid change and growth, was also a time of emotional explosion and feverish excitement. Biologists state that a child’s brain undergoes a high degree of physical and chemical change during the teen years. I don’t know if Moore’s work resonated with me on a primal level because it was so adept at pulling on the forces that seemed to direct my own essence and growth, or because his work influenced that change itself,   spreading out at the core of my central nervous system.

There is something ornate and clockwork-like in the universes which Moore creates. Complex planes of existence link together architecturally and harmoniously even if the tone and mood of the story is one of violent conflict. Milton’s hell interlinks with the DC Universe which interlinks with the history of the 20th century. I think the work where this architecture of time and space is most visible is Watchmen. The layout of the panels and the storytelling has a measured, precise clockwork. The characters, the storytelling conventions, the artwork itself has the pattern of a molecular grid. The title itself hearkens to the mechanism of a clock. Moore seems to construct the very fabric of space and time itself in the universe of the comic book with its symmetrical flashbacks, resonant dialogue, and parallel storylines. This kind of mystical connection, especially the use of key lines of dialogue or expressions of speech to form resonances between different events and times, underpins the cosmologies of Moore’s works so that one feels that the universe must be grand in design and purpose. As a teenager who had long been questioning the truth and meaning behind the Hindu rituals he had been brought up with, this was a fresh mythology, a new and exciting sense of things. The way that time is narratively laid out in Watchmen strongly emphasizes that there are resonances between nodes, that time is fixed in the Einsteinian sense with past, present, and future happening simultaneously, and infused with a strong dose of fate. Even though he suggests that the universe might be a watch without a watchmaker, it has the elegance and order of a grand purposeful mechanism – “some marble blocks have statues within them, embedded in their future” remarks Dr. Manhattan.

The brilliance, scope of thought, and sheer magical force of Moore’s writing from this period filled in a sense of fate or meaning that was painfully lacking in my life. It would be impossible for me to analyze his work in detail. There’s so much on the web that gives testament to the complexity and ingenuity of his thinking, his writing, while I don’t even have the knowledge to correctly summarize or deconstruct his influences. What I can focus on is a singular and quite passionate element in some of Moore’s major works from the eighties: the brilliant transformation. I’ve seen this again and again in Moore’s work, each time in new and astounding ways, but they all have a mystical and world shattering quality. Three in particular stand out: V from V for Vendetta, the Swamp Thing from Saga of the Swamp Thing, and Dr. Manhattan from Watchmen. V is perhaps the most counter-intuitive example. Little is known about his history except that he was a prisoner in a dystopic concentration camp who was subjected to infusions of experimental drugs. The drug batch had no physical effects but brought V to a mental state beyond human frailty, beyond human longing. He uses gardening chemical compounds to construct homemade bombs and destroy the block where he is contained. In the panels, the dark silhouette of the freed prisoner confidently advances against the mustard flames.

The Swamp Thing’s origin is that of a scientist working on a ‘bio-restorative’ formula, also caught in an explosion, and then hurled into a swamp. The presence of the formula knits with the scientist’s consciousness, forming a large lumbering body of monstrous vegetation and swamp growth. He becomes a monster. When Alan Moore took over the writing chores, the character came to realize that he wasn’t the scientist any longer but sentient vegetation that was pretending to be a man. The pod like lungs do not have capillaries, the spongy brain has no synapse gaps, the pseudo kidneys do not work. Coming to terms with his existence, the Swamp Thing slowly learns to fall apart and regenerate at will, to move his life force through the network of flora and vegetation, the living latticework spanning the earth which Moore calls ‘the green.’

Dr. Manhattan is the most interesting character in Watchmen because his consciousness is the one most closely tied to the structure and sensibility of the book. Before his transformation, he is a nuclear physicist working on experiments to isolate the intrinsic field, the theorized ultimate force field which binds and acts upon matter in the universe and contains all other forces. He gets trapped in an intrinsic field chamber and, in his own words, ‘the light takes him to pieces.’ Presumed dead, he begins to rebuild himself as a circulatory system, then a skeleton, and finally as a muscled humanoid that exists at multiple points of time simultaneously and can affect the composition of physical particles and their actions. And this is without even touching upon the transformations of the characters Rorschach and Ozymandias in the same book, each rendered in appropriate and vibrant detail, with compelling narrative voice and storytelling.

What is it about the transformation that is so essential and profound in Moore’s work? It’s not only limited to the superheroes for William Gull in Moore’s masterwork of the Victorian age From Hell undergoes an equally profound and protracted episode before becoming Jack the Ripper. I’m not sure I have the answer but it is somehow linked to Moore’s worldview in his books: a precise and complex storytelling structure that lattices time, space, and destiny, full of resonant movements and planes. In each of the examples listed above, the character is not merely transformed but taken apart, scientifically and spiritually, before being put back together again. Moore separates the character’s soul from his body before giving him a new identity. What wondrous power is this? Even V, whose body does not disintegrate, is a completely different being – his mind crosses a new threshold.

As a teenager, this motif of transformation (the instances are really too powerful and profound to be labelled motifs) was impossible to ignore. In my young, naive way I thought that Moore himself must have gone through a similar cataclysmic transformation, rising above his humanity and seeing his own godhood or essence, to be able to write like this. Years later, I have no clue one way or the other whether this might be the case. For all I know, he could go through these transcendent experiences daily, between tea time and dinner. It could simply be that Moore is an astoundingly good writer who writes in an operatic and metaphysical vein. Another explanation is that this motif (the transformation of a human into an overman) is simply a stock trope of the comic book genre and Moore’s gift is his ability to render the interiority of the transformation with special mythical prowess and pathos. What still remains impressive to me is Moore’s mastery as an architect of the process of transformation and how it is experienced; the mastery, on the more personal scale of the characters, echoes his ability to control time and space in the universes he creates. That is to say, he works with a fine hand over the clockwork of his creations.

As deeply affected as I was by Moore’s work, I waited in anticipation for my own transformation to come. This anticipation would always be envisioned in the guise of some artistic manifestation. My life would be different from before the moment of transformation. Magically, I would now be a writer, filmmaker, comic book creator, artist. For real. Suffice it to say, this moment of rapture never came, and perhaps I am in search of it still. For me, writing is a constant striving, more like the pulling of weeds than the blooming of flowers. This block of marble has no statue within it, only stones. That is not to say I don’t see the beauty of the vision in Moore’s work. We all have our moments of dissolution of being, and I’ve had my flashes, but the world did not sort itself out into waves of light as, say, in the case of Yogananda. Nobody talks about it this way but the real creation of art is moving energy from one place to another. From active potential to kinetic. Thought to word. Idea to manifestation. It seems I am constantly figuring out how to be a writer and move that energy, ever approaching the moment, never getting there.

What amazes me about Moore is that he moves energy so multifariously, so assuredly; and this is not to even touch upon his prosody, prolificacy, knowledge, and wit. His scripts to the artists that have worked with him have been legendary for being riddled with ideas, detail, and volumes of notes. He often brings out the best work in the artists and writes for the medium as opposed to expecting the medium to illustrate his writing. I’d like to say that like his finely tuned worlds and metaphysical calibration of soul, he takes apart the medium, words and images, and fuses it together in a new way. But this is just my zeal running away with me; I’m trying to separate water from a cloud. Like some adept of Moore’s style, I want the separation of time and space, body and soul, image and word, to ring consonant. Towards the end of the eighties, Moore left behind that architecture of words and time and space, that Newtonian sensibility, for a looser, choppier, modern architecture. He claimed that Watchmen was really the last flourish of that style and aspired to something more like what the Hernandez brothers were doing in Love and Rockets. He would get very fed up with the comics industry and take breaks to work on alternative projects. He is in one of those periods now and puts out a counterculture magazine called Dodgem Logic that bears his trademark values and energies. Never at ease with celebrity, he does not travel much beyond his home town and as far as I have heard, does not own a passport or e-mail account. However, he is down to earth and effusive and has made trips to local libraries to speak out against their being closed down, and responds to interviewers with characteristic sincerity and aplomb.

Somewhere deep inside, I suppose, is the boyhood fantasy of talking face to face with the man whose writing has affected me so much at a tender age, whose writing means so much to me. I cannot tell you what a single word of that conversation could be. I have no idea. All I can garner is that it has some sense of the mystery and power of one of those key moments in a scene by Alan Moore; I can hear the thunder, I can smell the lightning, of the smoke and forces of creation which tendered their way into my DNA, my teenage soul. The fact that Moore gave me a glowing and generous commendation on the back of my own little book is so unbelievable that I’d easily have to say it is the best thing in my life. I still sometimes think that it cannot be true; it is some fantasy I have dreamed up; it is some hoax I have perpetrated. It is strange to me that I should easily pick this as the best thing that has happened to me, and not something that might involve a lover or my family. It is that moment of dumbstruck surprise, of mysterious horror, before the light strikes.

A Review of Robert Stone’s “Bay of Souls”

” ‘I came because I wanted to be with you, Lara. I could go back tonight if I wanted to.’ In fact he wanted to share a taste of danger with her. To descend as far, to take as much of her as he could survive, and risk even more. ‘Are you mine in the ranks of death?’ she asked, laughing.”

This theme of vitalism is central to the novel Bay of Souls. It is a brilliant book, pleasurable to read as it imparts an important message. The story deals with the question of what it means to seek out a more intense form of existence. And the way Stone tells the story is appropriate for this theme. The book is brief. It hits hard. Stone selects precisely the right episodes that are necessary to move the book from the placid, domestic scene at the beginning to the desolation of its ending.

The protagonist is Michael Ahearn. His dilemmas are in a sense unique in that as a university professor he belongs to a privileged class and therefore is open to certain problems that wouldn’t occur to others with less leisure or less opportunity to the plagued by existential doubts and anxiety. But there are hints that Stone intends us to read Michael as an everyman. And that is to see the central character’s sickness unto death as a symptom fundamental to our social arrangement in late capitalism.

The problem is an old one. William James deals with it in his essay concerning the necessity of finding a moral equivalent to war. It seems that our species has a biological predisposition to find fulfillment in strife. In taking risks and facing conflict. This feature of our minds is understandable when we consider the dangers and contingencies that homo-sapiens faced throughout the millions of years of being at odds with the natural world. Now, however, the lust for danger is precisely what won’t help us survive but threaten us. The need to take risks and face intensity is exactly that which threatens civilization, which is the organized way we’ve found to confront nature as a whole. And so, our ancestors, comprehending the threat that the passions played, wrapped tight bounds of taboo around our passions. This is represented in the novel by Michael Ahearn’s wife Kirstin who had a strict Lutheran father. He commanded respect for his disciplined and unyielding character. Even in death he casts a deep shadow over Kirstin and her mother. Michael resents this.

Nietzsche remarks that the repression of the ancient Christians was a source of immense power. It allowed them to win Europe over to their ideology for thousands of years. The successful repression and sublimation of the instincts for passion and violence led to certainty, to decisiveness utterly alien to the characters of men and women in later modernity. And this uncertainly, this confusion about just where commitment should be placed, is exacerbated by the technological end for the need of even physical exertion, let alone risk-taking, in all but a small number of specialized occupations. Enter the structural surrogates for a heightened existence that are the props of Bay of Souls: recreational hunting, unblended whisky, cocaine, not to mention sexual encounters involving loaded firearms and choke-straps. But the novel interests us not for what is said, for its licentious or salacious elements, as much as for the way it is said.

Stone has put together another of his well-constructed novels. It follows Children of Light, Dog Soldiers, A Flag for Sunrise, Damascus Gate and others no less worthwhile. Stone’s artistic approach is to write a narrative that imitates reality. It is sometimes called “realism” – although this name can be misleading if in using it we forget that “realistic” literature is every bit as conventional as a sestina or a madrigal. What is true is that this mode of writing bears a resemblance to some of the categories our social arrangement obligates us to place on daily life. Otherwise, Derrida is correct in his criticism that “realism” shouldn’t be understood as a form of writing closer to real life itself than other literary genres. To think this way is to believe an illusion.

And the realist illusion, beginning as a response to modernism in the 19^th century, is very much the tradition that Stone is writing in. Bay of Souls has its antecedents in Russian writes like Turgenev and Chekov, the later in Zola and Conrad, and as we move into the 20^th century in Hemingway, Greene – with perhaps Stone’s most similar contemporary being Denis Johnson, whose work Tree of Smoke is exceedingly suitable to go alongside Bay of Souls and Damascus Gate.

Bay of Souls challenges the bias against realism which contends that it is a shallow form of literature. The claim is that in attempting to render life as it really is, by rooting the narrative in the unified structure of time, place and horizon of expectation, it doesn’t really get to the core of truth about life. And it is for this reason that realism as a form lends itself so well to entertainment consumer novels – Tom Clancy or V.C. Andrews, good reads that provide distraction and won’t worry their anxiety ridden audience with any disturbing demands on their intellect or moral sense. Obviously there is truth to this, but Bay of Souls and the other writers mentioned above, even Greene in novels like Brighton Rock or A Burnt-Out Case are subversive of this expectation of realistic literature. Bay of Souls is from the first few pages fortified with heavy themes. Stone doesn’t hesitate to openly meditate on religious questions. And whatever the suspicion about this might be, this isn’t speculation along the lines of Dan Brown. Stone’s purpose, a part from supplying that nebulous “aesthetic experience”, is to tell us that religion is still a very large question mark in our lives. That is while religion has been dealt with and no longer seems an issue for a larger part of society than ever before, in reality it is still a going concern.

In this novel of violence, of the fraying away of order in life and of irresponsible solutions to pressing imperatives, there are two major treatments of the theme of religion. The first relates to the way that life seems to have become strictly utilitarian. Something that might sloppily be called “the sacred” or more specifically a feeling for the intrinsic value of things has been lost to the characters of Bay of Souls. Marriages and friendships dissolve and reform based on the caprice or whim of the parties involved. One opening scene eerily depicts the carcasses of deer filing the neighborhood streets of the small town where Michael Ahearn teaches. Most poignant of all is the vision Michael has of a half-crazed man pushing an over-sized carcass along in an under-sized wheel barrow. This happens in the stillness of the forest and is a terrifying foreshadowing of the events to come in the novel. This is also true of the flashlight Michael drops into the river during that same hunting trip. They see the flashlight at the bottom of the river, “soldiering on” weirdly illuminating the depths.

It is down to the depths that Michael is going to have to go during the crisis of the novel. He dives down to retrieve some lost items from a plane wreck, submerged on a reef. This section is written in the typography of the classical “katabasis” or descent to the underworld that the hero undertakes in poetic works like the Odyssey, the Aeneid, the Pharsalia and, of course The Divine Comedy. But unlike the underworld episodes of those narratives, the dead don’t speak to Michael. He sees a corpse being slowly devoured by fish, yet this vision only reminds him how thin is the veneer over life’s terrifying potential. He risks being trapped in plane, which might easily go sliding off into the Puerto Rican trench. This trench represents the sum of all fear in the novel. The absence of anything that distantly drives the characters to seek out consolation is pleasure or rigid stricture.

The world of Bay of Souls resembles our world in that it seems entirely physical, material, the world as described in standard grade 12 physics, chemistry and biology books. The dilemma Bay of Souls presents is that this inert, material world presents a contradiction to the human spirit. To live a complete and fulfilling life, do we need to believe in something more than materialism. Should we not make room for the ecstatic, the fantastical, for the loss of self in Bacchanalian rites, of the kind the closing chapters of Bay of Souls?

Stone seems to answer in the affirmative. He does so by further undermining the standards of realism by presenting possession as ontologically real in the novel. Baron Samedi or Gede seems to be real.  Baron Samedi possess characters in the novel at will and alludes to events in Michael’s life. The novel thus becomes, at the end, a fantasy novel. Stone seems to be suggesting that there really is something out there, a spiritual reality beyond or usual comprehension. And it is in reaching this that Michael fails. He loses the spiritual potential for his life by trying to save his life at the end of the novel. A final vision of Lara, who had been a kind of slutty version of Beatrice throughout the novel, informs him that he failed because he wasn’t able to surrender himself completely to the mysteries she offered him initiation into.

A Review of Ken Klonsky’s “Life Without”

“One morning I woke up and was plunged into psychological shock. I had forgotten I was free.”     –          John Henry Abbott

Ken Klonsky’s novel of crime and punishment delves into the disavowed underbelly of society, our system of justice and the penal system. This novella challenges what we might take for granted as the fundamental fairness of our justice system. And in doing so calls into question the security of one of the basic pillars of civilization itself. And yet, “Life Without” remains at its core a work of art. It is a book that, even as it indicts, remains a compelling and well -crafted story. At times the book is even quite funny. But most importantly, the reader finds Ascher’s fate worth attending to, from the enigmatic dream that opens the novella, right until the final reengagement of yet another  hope of finding evidence that will lead to freedom. Ascher is trapped in one of the circles of the mount of Purgatory. And through the medium of Klonsky’s art, our accompanying  Ascher on his monotonous trek  is a memorable reading experience.

Ascher is guilty. So are we. That is the really terrifying content of this book. Yet due to obfuscating of ideas about himself, his crime has gone unrecognized until the roughly mid-point in his life where the story of “Life Without” begins. He is not guilty of the crime, uxoricide, that he is accused of committing in the book. Of course, it is fascinating to watch Ascher jump through the hoops of attempting to establish that he is innocent, to watch him be tantalized by the possibility of receiving a reprieve because of DNA evidence, or on account of the discover y of a new witness.

Ascher’s guilt could be described as ontological. It is an implicit condition. It was the guilt of Cain before he had even picked up the fateful stone. It was the guilt of Joseph K. even before entering the labyrinthine process that led to his execution, “like a dog”. This guilt is part of a broad complex of alienation that has been described by writers as various as Freud and Marx. The former thought that our guilt and “anxiety” simply had to be born as stoically as possible. While the latter was sanguine about the possibility of revitalization of humanity’s alienated condition through a rearrangement of our social relations. All of this seems abstract. But the value of “Life Without” is that it locates what some of these historical failings are in concrete phenomena.

Symptomatic of Ascher’s guilt are the life decisions he has made for himself. In autobiographical sequences that the narration hopscotches to and from, out of the cell where Ascher is looked down, we learn something of his lackluster career. It is through these glimpses of Ascher’s past that Klonsky undermines Ascher’s claim of being basically innocent. He claims, in bad faith, to be just a more or less a “regular guy” who has fallen victim to circumstance. But this isn’t true. Everything that happens to Ascher is following the vicious logic of our social order.

The reader learns that Ascher’s habitual dodging of responsibility begins early in life. We learn a few details about an ultra-liberal background that may have set the state of Ascher’s rootlessness. In any case, Ascher is a character who never develops a serious sense of purpose, of selfhood. He adopts the persona of a culture vulture, an early version of what is now the familiar image of the Gen-X fanboy.

“The only time they appear human is when you have a knife at their throats. The instant you remove it, they fall back into animality. Obscenity.”        

  – John Henry Abbott

He spends his adolescence smoking marijuana, (what Zizek describes as “heroin light”) and listening to “Stairway to Heaven” over and over again. Eventually this solipsistic existence is given the veneer of respectability when Ascher turns his interests from low to high culture. He discovers opera, a putative serious art form. And it is this engagement of a serious art form that serves as a justification for his refusal for taking on any serious responsibility.

In short, Ascher represents the trend that followed the postwar generation. His style and attitude, his acceptance of mediocrity of being a cab driver, all fall short of his parents aspirations as university professors. Ascher is quite brilliant. His analytical mind allows him to make a fortune, not constructively, but rather parasitically, as an online poker player. He mentions this blithely, how millions of people risk money playing poker online and so he is happy to relieve them of the money that they are willing to stake. This movement in “Life Without” points to the entire trend of North American society after the Second World War. The earlier half of the century saw great cultural achievements and historically unprecedented advancements in civil life. But in the second half, stagnation set in. Our energies as a society went into developing technological wonders like the internet, a Mecca of porn and gamblish, and went into an arcane financial industry that did nothing to add real value to the economic process, only squeeze short term profits out of it. Very emblematic evidence of this parasitic approach to life is found in the conversation Ascher has with “the Maestro” in his cab: “Talent is relative to what you do. My philosophy is do what you do well. It comes with knowing who you are and believing in yourself. Nothing should get in the way of that belief. I tell that to singers and musicians all the time.”

It is precisely this “nothing getting in the way” of self-interest that has led to the monstrosity of the penal system as aptly portrayed in “Life Without”.

Utterly swept to the margins of our consciousness is our system of prisons, parole and law enforcement. Occasionally it reaches the headlines in order to assuage our bourgeoise sense of guilt of fiddling while Rome burns. But except when recruited into the editorials of tough-love, law and order conservative media, we hear, and want to hear, very little about this netherworld.

“Life Without” apart from being an aesthetically accomplished and therefore pleasurable reading, is an important document for exposing us to unpleasant truths about the penal system. First of all is the fact that it is a profitable industry. We ought not to suppose, if we can foist off a thesis onto Klonsky’s novella, that the penal system is acting on behalf of society in a disinterested fashion. Like the shape of all social arrangements it is what it is because of profit. Profit exists at every level of society. From the government’s funding of the judiciary, to the funding of police services all the way down to the system of extortion and bribery, the black markets and smuggling that goes on at the level of those who are actually incarcerated. Even the vending machines in the visiting room are part of a system of profiteering, parasitically dependent on the misery of incarceration.

 Ascher’s cellmate has the delusion that the authorities are trying to poison them. Yet Ascher shrewdly point outs that this paranoia cuts against the reality of profit. The prisoners are very much the chattel of the prison authorities, prisoners are they stock and trade. No offenders, no profit. The book is obviously against the basic immorality of this system, not to mention observing the difficulty of even achieving justice under the present climate of relativism, subjectivism, and cynical self- interest that prevails among our present intelligentsia, the cultural and intellectual managers who operate society’s levers.

The prison system, and the judicial system that serves it, are vast obscenities marring our civilization. Anyone who doubts this needs to read this book and perhaps listen to the excellent communiqués of Mumia Abu Jamal broadcast on Prison Radio. To expose this ugly reality is to reveal, to put it mildly, an inconvenient truth about our social reality. No one really wants to think about what “Life Without” is forcing us to meditate on, just as no one wants to think about the reality behind the army helmets that are produced in the prison where Ascher has been interned. “Life Without” is valuable because it simultaneously serves a social purpose while at the same time stands up as a solid piece of “art for art’s sake.”

A Visit to the Quattro Books May Book Launch

“Dazzling and Tremendous” are the apt words of Whitman that might be used to describe the most recent Quattro Book Launch event.

There was standing room only last Tuesday night at what are becoming increasingly popular Quattro literary evenings. And rightfully so, since the line-up of readers was perhaps the most exciting in this year’s reading series. No less than five readers took the stage. Each of them was a reader and writer of considerable talent. If any criticism is to be raised it is that the event was on the whole too short.

The venue was back room of “The Supermarket” on Augusta – a bar that fuses an Asian restaurant with a standard trendy licensed establishment and represents the next phase of the probably inexorable Yorkvillization of Kensington market, a lamentable or welcomed development depending on your socio-economic outlook. Indisputably though, on Tuesday night Chantel Lavoie, Leah Murray, Tim Conley, Binnie Brandon and Ken Klonsky saw to it that fine literature has been ensconced in the neighborhood along with high end cheese shops, expensive candle stores and vendors of pricey cultural bric-a-brac. This could be what Marcuse meant by the phrase “ a dialectical union of opposites”.

There were two surprises that night. The first was that there were so many readers from Kingston. Who would have thought suspected that Canada’s former capital would be harboring such poetic talent?

The second surprise, the show-stopper as it were, was the reading of Leah Murray from her experimental novel “Romancing the Buzzard”. The reading came with what seemed a lengthy context placing by a representative of the Quattro editorial board. Such an account is typically annoying to the literary purist who wants the literary work to stand by itself. Having a work’s literary merit explained before the experience of reading or hearing is a sure way substituting literary strength with an ideological crutch. Yet in this case, the work stood up to the peroration it received.

Murray has gone through a terrifying experience. She was held captive by her delusional husband who attempted to brainwash her, indoctrinate her into his paranoid cosmological worldview. The act of writing was no doubt a therapeutic act for her. But she created a truly aesthetic object rather than a personal statement, even listening to a few short paragraphs of this book revealed its merit. Her words created an imaginary landscape reminiscent of the grotesque fantasies of Lautrement. And the sense of self being lost against the irresistible downward tug, drawing madness and the underworld, was similar to that the erosion of self De Nerval made an account of in his short, hallucinatory stories. There was strangeness to her comparisons that were suggestive of the world-turned-in-its-head nature of her experiences. She described “rain drops as big as apples”, and her husband being “rapid fire machine gunned into madness.” Murray made effective use of the experience of synesthesia, describing one sense in terms of another. Her husband himself is described as “one strange sound that never went away.” Something about the always impalpable quality of experience is unlocked by these surprising juxtapositions of different orders of things.

The poetry of Chantel Lavoie had opened the evening. It was clearly the work of an experienced writer. Her new book is entitled “Where the Terror Lies” a homage to the recently deceased Maurice Sendak. She showed the range of her poetic talent by reciting a sonnet that had been written as part of a project she had assigned for her class. It was a convincing anachronism complete with the correct archaic diction. This sonnet reflects her ability as a writer to breathe new life into familiar poetic themes. She takes up material from the Brothers Grimm, from the and from the New Testament. These are mythologies that are in fact every bit as bizarre as those written about by Leah Murray, except they have become familiar to us by constant exposure. Yet Lavoie has reintroduced to use through figurative language and her unique perspective something of the original interest of these mythological patterns. In “Lazarus Opened His Eyes” and “Death and Taxes” we saw our contemporary world being infused with the motifs of our traditional mythology. The ultimate moment of transformation was achieved in an image of the last supper when, as Lavoie wrote, “all that death was sucked out of the air.”

Tim Conley read from his first book of poetry “One False Move”. Like Lavoie he demonstrated his ability with traditional verse forms by reciting a limerick from a collection on the Harper cabinet – a humorous form that was appropriate to its politically satirical intention. Conley’s work was the most difficult of the evening. Of all the other readers that night, his work demanded the most thought and for this reason he was compared to J.L Borges (one of the patron saints of “The New Direction of Time”). Conley’s work does stand up to this comparison, though he himself modestly dismissed it as a wild claim on par with being compared to Tolstoy. But it may be not so meaningful to compare Conley to Borges, but to do something else, something that Borges was himself very concerned with, that is to see Conley’s writing as belonging to a genealogy in which Borges himself is an antecedent, going back perhaps to the Thousand and One Nights and the enigmas of the Book of Genesis. But Conely revealed himself not to be solely concerned with the involutions of myth and literature. He observed that one of his poems was inspired by his observation that we have become far too “used to living at war.” (Or the shocking thesis that our liberalism turns out, contrary to its ideological rhetoric, not to be incompatible with a constant with a constant state of warfare.) He writes of this condition in “Reaction to a Series of Inoculations.” Clearly, Conley is a complex poet who everyone should expect to hear more from in the future. It should be noted that his oratorical skill is considerable and stood out from all the other readers of the evening. He ended his set with the grim observation: “The truest lover of wood is fire.”

Binnie Brandon, Quattro’s best-selling author, was second last in line to read. Hers is the only collection of short stories currently published by Quattro. The selection she read was a short story of a series stories just five hundred words long, a project that she set for herself as a challenge. Her story was a humorous anecdote bringing together the unlikely elements of cherry pits and a beloved uncle’s wake. The story was notable for being convincingly written in the Maritime dialect. This is not an easy task to have carried out.

The last reader for the evening was Ken Klonsky. His reading was accompanied by a henchman who well complemented the compelling dialogue whose subject was a police interrogation. Ascher, the protagonist of Klonsky’s novel “Life Without” was being held for questioning in a police precinct office. By painstaking degrees, the readers revealed Ascher’s progress from a witness being questioned to becoming the prime suspect in the murder of his wife. Well rendered were the police tactics of physical and psychological intimidation, a process so effectively carried out as to compromise any chance of Ascher ever receiving a fair trial. It was with this piece of dramatic dialogue that the evening ended. Unfortunately, this is supposed to be the last of Quattro’s book launches for the year. Devotees of poetry can still, fortunately, look forward to the monthly Wordstage gatherings.