Thursday, December 2, 2010

Looking At "Light of Thy Countenance"


Literature goes by one name, but is of forms as numerous as the stars. One will sometimes make out patterns here and there of nebulas and clusters, and when one looks back one is taken aback by the breathtaking beauty of the Milky Ways of literature. Allow me to draw your attention to one speck of light, dim or bright and red or blue depending on your own relativity. That speck of light is known as Alan Moore's “Light of Thy Countenance”.
Some would argue that works like it, often termed comic books or graphic novels, are not literature. I ask those critics to consider the origin of the term literature, deriving from the latin for ‘letter’ literature would seem to mean those works that make use of symbols. While critics still insist that merit is a factor, to shun the bad grammar of a child from their lofty categories, not only does this not apply to the genre of graphic novels, but is false reasoning, and would make all those who use it look like the petulant children they would avoid.
One can deny the merit or value of a thing, but not its being.
            Washing myself of the Greek-based fire of this tired and pointless war, I would like to look at this text. It mostly deals with a few (contemporarily) tired ideas dealing with television: the mediation or replacement of worldly experience, the sterile falsifications and perversions of beauty, the sheer waste of time, the advertisement, and arguably the idea that tv is a god. The last is more personally unoriginal because of intimate familiarity with the parlor idea years in advance. That said, I’m not sure how original this piece was in 1995. Maybe more, maybe less. But definitely old news for 2009.             Still, parts of it made me smile. The injuntion to “think not that gods find no enjoyment in apocalypse: it is our [the gods] greatest sport” reminds me so much of Gloucester’s lines about the gods' treatment of humanity, “as flies to wanton boys are we to the gods, they kill us for their sport” (Shakepeare’s King Lear, Act IV, Scene I). Moreover, I found the conceit of the narrator hilarious after reflecting that it, by its own logic, asserted humanity to be an enslaved god (Lucifer’s war was successful). But its conceit, along with the whole ‘in the image of god’ ideas of man, reflects on the conceit of man himself.
            That said, from where I float in space, this work is quite red and dim.

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