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).
The "cathedral of bone" is human memory. All storytelling is an attempt to assemble the fossilized remains of past experiences into a thing that makes sense to the narrator. And so we're back to the problem of making something out of nothing... Echoes out of the void? Rose is surely right to argue that we tell stories (even if it's only to ourselves) in order to prove that "the Me" exists; however, that same process poses a constant threat to the "Not Me", and it's important to remain aware of this fact. The point at which we find ourselves saying, "ah ha! So that's why that happened", is ground zero...and every nod of the head sends another shock wave through the world. The perfect work of art qua work of art would account for everything, stop time, and devour our communal reality. That's what Orqwith threatens to do. A little later on in the Doom Patrol series, we'll get to "The Painting That Ate Paris", an even more successful product of the visionary impulse.
What Are You Tlön, Man?
I must say, I'm deeply grateful to Jess Nevins & Rose Curtin for urging me to pick up Borges, at long last. For now, I'll stick to Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius and its relationship to "Crawling From the Wreckage", but I'm sure I'll get around to discussing the rest of the Collected Fictions, once I'm done with them, because it's truly wonderful stuff!
And before I go any further, let me also direct your attention to this great piece on Morrison by Steven Shaviro, which contains, among other things, an anticipation of a key aspect of my projected dissertation:
The mechanically reproduced object has two lives: one as an ephemeral throw-away item, the other as a precious fetish. This also corresponds to two ways that comics are consumed by their audience. On the one hand, you need to leaf through them quickly, with what Walter Benjamin calls distracted attention: it's precisely in this suspended state that they become so strangely absorbing. On the other hand, you need to go back over them, studying every word and every panel, with a fanatical attention to detail. The letters pages of any comic book are filled with the most minutely passionate comments and observations. The letter-writers worry about inconsistencies and continuity errors, express approval or disapproval of the characters, engage in lengthy symbolic analyses, critique the artists' renderings, and make earnest suggestions for future plot directions. In this way, these books become interactive; as Marshall McLuhan was apparently the first to note, comics are "a highly participational form of expression." It's all so different from the old habits of highbrow literary culture. A comic book has fans, more than it does "readers." The medium is the message, as McLuhan always reminds us. The disjunctive mix of words and images, the lines and colors, the rapid cinematic cuts, the changes in plot direction, the tactility of newsprint at your fingertips: all these are more important than any particular content.
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