Against Superheroes: Section 18 (Chapter 15)

November 25, 2015November 27, 2015 Mark Davis1 Comment

The sessions with Sakara were illuminative and intimate. She asked me about what I remembered from before the transformation. I sat in the chair across from her, the susurration of the air conditioning that seemed to feed the field projectors as much as our comfort was a constant presence beneath our discussion. I remembered very little: hints of childhood, more about the dig at Mt. Hasan, bits of Ela’s sexual mystique, strange flashes of schools and lights. Interrogating this past revealed very little new or surprising to me. I was candid about my limitations concerning the changes to my memory. I was also candid about how with the loss of a personal history came, inevitably, a loss of the essentials of being human. We are continuitities of experience. I can’t describe who I am except as part of my memories and the feelings that surround and enervate them. The protracted calamity of religious ideas that Sakara raised, from ethical concerns about harming others to the status of the unborn all unravel with this consideration. A baby is alive but only tentatively human in the strongest sense. A god knows this—can even feel it as a ribbon into the future—but humans just arbitrarily assign categories that are driven by misunderstandings of these cognitive postures.

Why were the gods so capricious, she asked me. Why were they so inhuman? They were good human questions but the answer hardly raised above this faint echo of incapacity. If your mind is subsumed in this web of temporal flux, if you recognize the flammability of experience, and where there are other islands of experiences too, like for a human that there is only instead a moving arc of intransitive expectations and plans, then what is left is the broader permamence of an ineffable now.… Read the rest

Against Superheroes, Section 15

July 30, 2015 Mark DavisLeave a comment

Back among the Western minds, first in Iceland and then his home country of America, living under a cloak of pretense, Sinister appears more human than ever since his transformation. We note that he has taken on a rather different engagement with his powers that is more nuanced and self-reflective. The gradual transformation from an undiluted, power-mad self into this new form operates at several different levels. First there are the physical transformations that ultimately recompose him into his human form. Then there are the mental acrobatics that allow a new sense of self to emerge out of the rubble of the tempestuous being that drove events at Oasis.

We take a moment to try to correlate his rather detailed descriptions of the nature of his powers with known current technologies. He describes the physical world as collections of particles that have deterministic trajectories, for example, and describes his engagement with those particles as affecting that determinism to change both material things as well as affect the “neural” structure of humans themselves. Other Collectives have weighed in on how precisely this technology might work, but the general conclusion is that it closely resembles the bio-essence fields of levels 2 and 3, as well as their control. His misunderstanding of how the technology works is quite understandable; he lacked the educational context that we have.

It is important to consider his statements within the broad contours of his primitive worldview. He views the world as fundamentally composed of small components of material things (atoms and molecules), and he also conceives of mental function as derivative of the motions of these things. We know this to be a primitive and fundamentally bizarre way of comprehending reality.… Read the rest

Against Superheroes, Section 7 (Chapter 5)

April 23, 2015April 24, 2015 Mark DavisLeave a comment

Section 7

With Chapter 4 we see a combination of narrative forms. There is, first, the factual discussion of the details of the archaeological dig itself. There are the problems that arise from the details of the ground, the water, the shaft, the descent. These problems and the detailed resolution of them lend to a sense of consistent realism concerning the tasks at hand in the everyday lives of the protagonists. The level of detail is strikingly at odds with the other primary narrative form: Sinister’s soliloquy on the symbolism and history of other deities. The position of these paragraphs juxtaposed amongst the more detailed discussion has produced several potential explanations, the most important of which was the requirement for presaging the unknown technology and its role in past conflicts. While there is an element of that, as a memoir presenting a linear sequence of developments (remember that he was concerned about that presentation), it is equally plausible that his recollections were merely jumbled and possessed of a certain confused emotional state.

The content of the soliloquy is worth further analysis. The primary descriptions are of conquest of people and their gods against others. There is a spreading out of the various factions, Hellenists, Israelites, Romans, etc. They are constantly at war with one another and the more powerful gods subjugate the less powerful. The subtle indication that amongst at least some of them, the Hellenists, that the gods were somewhat distant to them is of particular interest because it begs the question of how, amongst all the spirits and entities that are referenced, they were applied during war? What means of attack and influence did they have that apparently led to them conquering Yahweh and others?… Read the rest