So Cliff wakes up screaming, encased in his metal shell.

"Dreaming about our accident again, are we?" a nurse asks. "That's what happens...when we refuse to take our medication."

Emerson wrote in Experience: "It is very unhappy, but too late to be helped, the discovery we have made that we exist. That discovery is called the Fall of Man." That's the "accident" that Morrison is referring to here...

Cliff, "Rebis", "Crazy Jane"--these are archetypal romance characters. By necessity, they spend more time fighting themselves (not, as in Claremont's soap opera world, each other) than their enemies... It's not easy to calibrate your senses to reality--you have to make adjustments constantly.. Get complacent and that beautiful metaphorical swirl of otherness will reify into a silicone breast-pumpkin in two seconds flat.

Is life a pilgrimmage without a destination? The scissormen are onto something! Every stopping point is a curdling of the human spirit.

"Why is there something instead of nothing?"; or, Why did the Idea Cross The Void?; or then again, maybe just: Synchronic Apocalypse

Creativity is a fascinating thing, no? Where do ideas come from? And how do they get here? (that little, flawed, intersubjective realm we call the "waking world", I mean) Personally, I think this a far more interesting question than the one that has sidetracked western thought since about 400 BC: who had the first idea? You know--this week on A&E's Platonic Investigations: the "Unmoved Mover" revealed!! (does anyone know if any bright transportation company has snatched up this Aristotelian monicker? "We'll get you there America. Nothin' gets to us!")

Grant Morrison's "Crawling From The Wreckage" is a stunning assault upon the ontological project (which is viewed as a "man made crisis founded upon human logical processes")--stunning because it lays waste to western metaphysics without succumbing to the kind of cynicism/goofing around that you have to deal with in similarly-motivated twentieth-century philosophers like Heidegger or Derrida. This is why I think of Morrison as a descendant of Emerson: he channels all of his willpower into upholding the premise that there is something instead of nothing, while admitting that there's no way we're ever gonna get a clear fix on what that something is. It's just the "Not Me", and that's enough. That's my problem with Nietzsche (and "empowerment theorists" in general)--he thought Emerson was talking about the "Me", when, in actuality, he was talking about everything but.

Okay, getting back to creativity. It's a disease man! And narrative creation is by far the severest strain... The "villain" in "Crawling From the Wreckage" is a fictional construct, called Orqwith, which threatens to engulf the world. Morrison tells us:

Walk a hundred miles, a thousand miles, in any direction, and you will still be in Orqwith. The city has spread like ripples in a pond from one central point--the Quadrivium--which is itself the terrestrial image of the God at the Crossroads. And in the center of the Quadrivium stands the Ossuary, the great Cathedral of Orqwith(DP #22, 1).