The Filth, Part Two-- (Spoiler Alert! This is not a Review)

Back in the I-Life Again

Thuh Fuck?






Throughout The Filth, Greg/Ned asks his interlocutors variations of this question from issue #2:"Are we on another planet? Just tell me, I can take it. Am I in the future? Or in virtual reality? Am I in a state ward, wanking in front of relatives?"


An answer, of sorts, comes much later, in response to the related question of what the Hell those crazy dolphins are doing in "The Crack" (and where that pen came from)...


Noxinnixon: "Did the blueprint maker cut off his almighty hand in a fit of horror at what he'd made? Is it still attached to a body somewhere in a bigger universe we don't even want to imagine, stuck with writer's block?" [Spector jumps in, dialect first] "Or wiz it writin the suicide note we like tay call existence, eh? Naebdy geeza fuck. Aw we kerr aboot's the ink..."


And the ink, as "naebdy" ever tires of mentioning, "brings things to life"...I-life!


Where does Greg go when he falls into "The Crack"? Well, I think he goes to the same place that Sidney Orr does in Auster's Oracle Night--the world of the creator, as opposed to that of the created.


As human beings, we are always both of these things at once--The Filth represents a major advance beyond Animal Man in that Morrison now realizes that the moral buck stops nowhere--and, consequently, everywhere. The feeling of an "infinite egress" is more palpably conveyed here than in any of the previous work. This is nothing like The Matrix--reality has no "ground zero" here. There is no "truth" obscured by "conspiracy". That's Max Thunderstone's--and, apparently, the old Greg's--bag. This is clearly a dead end! Morrison calls it the "person/anti-person complex". Chaos-fomentors need an "Oppressive Structure" to push off against...and they really have no place in a post-structuralist world.


There's only the ink.


The ink "rolls through all things", courses through our veins, and it coagulates into panel/memories too. When Greg Feely stares at a framed picture of Tony (in #12), his deceased cat, and says: "You don't even seem real now", he echoes "Secret Original's" (definitely a sad reinterpretation of Animal Man, as far as I'm concerned), virtuoso look back at the pages featuring his wife (remind anyone of Ellen Baker?) in issue #3...

Oh, Eve. If only I could see you. If only I could talk to you again but I flew too high and broke against the walls of heaven, Eve. You were right. I see the cruel reality behind all of our hopes and dreams now. I know us for what we truly are. Not supermen but super-slaves in a synthetic prison. Playing out crummy meaningless adventures written by amoral monsters. They farm us, Eve; they farm us for the wonders we simply accept in our ignorance...


There are even pornographic versions of our lives, my love. Alternative continuities where you let the entire Status Quorum gangbang you for money to pay the rent. Sick sex situations I'd never even thought of until I found Mercury's files... The sideways lives he'd written for us to live... I pull out and run those rotten stories every night, Eve. I can't help it. I...I love to watch you lose your cool and your decency every night because it's the closest I can get...to how it once felt tgo love you. Man-Ro help me. I keep thinking I'll find a way to save us all. Then I just waste another five hours checking out sleazy hardcore comix.

Of course he's dead wrong--but I'm sure that everyone reading this has wasted ink of their own on similar projects. At the root of Secret Original's confusion (and the Filth's critique) is his flawed insistence upon the "us" and "them" binary. Nobody's farming us--we cultivate ourselves. And we are pollinated by Otherness. Telling stories is a very healthy human impulse--narrative makes wonderful fertilizer--but the desire to sink our roots into that manure is not. Consciousness blooms out of nothing and feeds upon the shit that happens... You cannot be present at the moment of your own conception. You can only hear about it later. You were never there. You still aren't. There's nowhere for any of us to BE. That's what's sick about pornography--"wish you were here" syndrome! It's not the images so much as the fact that these are films/comics/books that really depend upon reader/viewer-identification. They cannot be contemplated, they must be "escaped into".


"Fuck or be fucked"?


That's "volitionist" philosophy in a nutshell.


And--as Greg says late in the book--"I'm not having it!"


"Love" cannot truly exist between creators and their creations. Love proper is always a relationship between I-life "bio-ships". Your subjectivity glints off of mine--objectification is inevitable but it's still a drying out of vital fluid--a hardening of the arteries. Parallel ink-smears create far more beautiful effects than those which run together. We spoil things by connecting the blots.



Rainbow Shite


Now, this business with the "parapersonae" really intrigued me. Not happy with your life? Don't worry--we'll snort that out for ya in a jiffy. Greg doesn't have a sex life--so if the "bio-ship" carrying that persona winds up in a clinch, a new identity becomes necessary. Enter Ned Slade. "Without Warning!!"


There is an organic substratum beneath all of the character-stylizations in this book. It's the man we first meet as "Greg Feely". He's a natural born "not-self detector"--the ultimate subject--and he never quite plays the role he's assigned. Objects are closer to him than they appear.


"Greg's not a pervert. He's just got his own tastes, that's all."


No. Greg is a pervert. But the guy that we accompany through this book isn't Greg. "Greg Feely" is a parapersona that drinks all day long, watches porn, and lets everything go to Hell. But the protean subject (the I-Life) beneath Greg/Ned is focused solely upon the cat. Think about it. He goes through the randy bachelor and super-agent routines on auto-pilot. Only his concern for Tony is genuine--overwhelming. The man we meet in The Filth #13 has lost everything--including his raison d'etre... He has no identity at all--and yet he goes on, free to become "care in the community".


Of course, no one can remain in that state for long. If you want to "take care of the little ones", you have to siphon off a lot of yourself into a "parapersona" that gets things done. The key, I suppose, is never to forget the reasoning behind the sacrifice. In issue #2, "Greg/Ned" asks: "What's my fucking motivation?".
Morrison's answer--"with great responsibility comes the need for great power". Or something like that.


And this brings me to Gruenwald & Capullo's Quasar #18--"The Bearable Lightness of Unbeing". I'm sure most of you never read Quasar, but it was a very interesting series, and this was the best issue of the run. A one-shot that opens with an amnesiac Wendell Vaughn wandering through the streets of Oshkosh, Wisconsin, thinking "I'm in my hometown... Right up the street from my mom's house! Don't know why I'm feeling so confused, but it's pretty obvious that I've come home for a visit."


So he goes home, and he has a nice time catching up with his family, talking over the small details of a life that doesn't seem to include any superheroic activities... While taking a nap, he dreams that he can fly, and it all feels oddly familiar to him. Later on, he is introduced to Billy Betelheim, the kid next door who aspires to become a comic book artist someday.


Billy drags Wendell up to his tree-house to show him all of the superheroes he's been making up. But this isn't "Earth-Prime", or "Liddleville" or anything like that, this is the Marvel Universe, and Wendell feels obliged to challenge Billy: "Wait, did you say you created all these characters? Some of them look kind of familiar. This one, for instance, looks like Mr. Fantastic of the Fantastic Four."


"I know," Billy replies, "I created him."


Wendell tries to mitigate the lie: "You mean you created the drawing of him. Mr. Fantastic's a real guy. You know. He has his own comic and everything."


Soon, Billy is confessing that he is "secretly a really old cosmic entity whose name you couldn't pronounce..." The little brat claims responsibility for every superhero on earth, including "Quasar", whom Wendell has never heard of. And here's where it gets really interesting--i.e. goes beyond rote metafiction:


Wendell: "You mean you made me up? I'm a figment of your imagination?"


Billy: "No. That's silly. You're a real person."


Wendell:"That's good to know."



Billy:"When I say "create", I don't mean like I created something out of nothing--everyone knows matter can't be created or destroyed. What I did is take people who already existed and turned them into superheroes whose names, costumes, and powers I invented!"


In other words--Billy's mixin' up "parapersonae" in that tree house! That's what writers do. They take real people and turn them into characters that serve the purposes of narrative. And that's what each of us does every day when we leave our sanctums to take part in the grand storyline of civilization. In Marvel-U terms, this means taking your powers back--and that's Quasar works toward, for the rest of the issue.


This has always stuck with me. Every organic being, at its core, is a "not-self detector"--and to be reminded of that fact is to experience unspeakable joy. There's nothing onerous about "unbeing". Unbeing is pure awareness of "otherness"--in this state we skip happily along "The Crack" between the subject and the object. "Being" is the tricky part--that's where "stepping on the crack" can "break your mother's back". The important thing to remember is that, while everything we do may be pointless, it's not in vain.


"Faith Held Me Back A While"


Greg/Ned's big speech near the end of The Filth is definitely worth the wait:

Scale's the next big frontier, they say. You can power a whole city with the energy in a human cell. Only humans could make something kinder and better than themselves--that makes them smarter than God in my opinion... Like anti-bodies in the great big body of nature except antibodies don't get sad like we do. Because they know their place.

There's so much here, if you keep in mind the context in which it's uttered. It's a clear invocation of Marx's mentor, Ludwig Feuerbach, the guy who knocked Hegel's "Absolute Spirit" on its ass. God isn't the subject, he/she/it is the predicate--it was a radical theory in its time, but I think most of us take it for granted by now. Why the fuck would an omnipotent being create anything? But it's easy to see how such a figure might appeal to vulnerable mortal minds. Consciousness/subjectivity equals not knowing your place. We create God so that we don't have to pay attention to the shifting ground beneath our feet. He's a crushing place-marker. If you accept this, it becomes obvious that Calvinist theology is the only theology that matters: "God" is the unknowable antagonist. He's not your friend. As good ol' Jonathan Edwards was wont to say: "He hates you."


That's if "He" existed, I mean. And of course "He" doesn't. We made "Him" up--just as Max and Greg and their crew made up Spartacus Hughes.


Hughes understands his function, and he recognizes others who take a turn in the role--like Simon, the "world's richest pervert", in issue #2:

You were like some evil God there for a bit, weren't you? Fucking a whole world up. Turning a sugary heaven into a sexy hell. And they've had generations to plan revenge on their gods.

But The Filth is about ceasing to plan this revenge, accepting the pain of subjectivity without seeking to cathect it upon imaginary conspiracies/shit-monoliths/creators, and to channel all of that I-Life into a new and kinder appreciation of what is.


People generally hate the old "it was all a dream" scenario, because they get off on seeing resolution through conflict. We're a dialectical species. We're big on redemption-through-blood-sacrifice.


In The Filth, Morrison refuses to give it to us. Which side are you on? Neither. There are no sides. But there's no "wholeness" either. Morrison is no Buddhist. He doesn't hold up anti-bodies as a model for humans to aspire to. What would be the point of that? To be human is to have consciousness.


What does this all have to do with Hawthorne and "Young Goodman Brown"? Well, I don't have much time left, so I'd better say something about it. In case you don't know the story, here it is in a nutshell: a recently-married New Englander sets off on a journey into the forest, despite his wife Faith's plea not to go, in search of knowledge/an audience with the Devil. Brown hopes that, by indulging this one dark urge, he can silence the voices in his head and enter more fully into communion with his wife, whom he sees as "a blessed angel on earth;". "After this one night I'll cling to her skirts and follow her to heaven.", he tells himself.


Except, of course, that all he learns from the devil is that everyone in the town, from the Deacon on down--and including Faith--is alienated from God. Sadly, this is the one thing he was unprepared to hear. People generally don't mind thinking that they are bad, as long as there are "saints" in the world to pick up the slack. Brown doesn't really know anything about his wife--she's just a bunch of pink ribbons to him. He returns home to a truly "fallen" world, and whether it was all a dream or not, he has learned a very important and counter-productive lesson:

Often, waking suddenly at midnight, he shrank from the bosom of Faith; and at morning or eventide, when the family knelt down at prayer, he scowled and muttered to himself, and gazed sternly at his wife, and turned away. And when he had lived long, and was borne to his grave a hoary corpse, followed by Faith, an aged woman, and children and grandchildren, a goodly procession, besides neighbors not a few, they carved no hopeful verse upon his tombstone, for his dying hour was gloom.

That's how it ends. He has gained knowledge without letting go of unrealistic expectations. That's pretty much the definition of a cynic, no?


Well, Morrison has always placed his "Faith" in the animal kingdom. The Filth is Morrison's completely uncynical rejection of "sacred cows". Greg/Ned (not to mention Max--a lifelong member of Greenpeace) has to learn not to tie pink-ribbons upon the heads of his mammalian friends. Tony isn't a saint, he's a normal (and hungry!) cat. Dmitri is a motherfucker (that's why "is there a Hell for monkeys, dad?" is more than just a funny line--it's a very poignant moment of self-interrogation on Morrison's part.) And what about those psychopathic dolphins? "Don't patronize me!" yells the one in the "aqua-tank" as he trains his blasters on Max Thunderstone. What do you think Morrison was doing in Animal Man #15?


We don't get any closer to "God" by loving people or animals, we just get closer to ourselves--and each other.


Thanks!

Article Author: David Fiore

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