Jean Wei’s ‘Heat’ – an argument for forgiveness

Picking up Heat by Jean Wei was an instant delight: the illustrations within are so colourful and charming; you flick through the pages and see a usually unwelcomed visitor being taken in by a small and unassuming family, seamlessly falling in place and into the flow of everyday life with these people. Upon closer reading, however, we see a much deeper narrative centred on the importance of forgiveness.

Heat follows a giant, naked fire demon through their transition into a quiet but hardworking farm-hand [1]. This quaint, rural farm is run by Auntie Anne and her Grand-Niece Katy, and for a good majority of the book, we bounce along quite nicely; watching the relationship between the trio grow and also witnessing the caring relationship between Anne and her love-interest Clara. Cute scenes unfold: we see our fire demon – who earns the name ‘Red’ for obvious reasons – is taught how to help out on the farm and around the house,  witness the tender moments between Red and Katy, and smile at the child-like innocence of Red encountering everyday situations, as well as their quiet moments of solitude.

Then we see a relationship which is not so clear-cut, drawn into even sharper focus through the contrast with the kind and tender relationships prior to this. For there has been a falling out between Anne and her actual Grand-daughter, Maya. The two haven’t been seen together for years, and it is revealed that Maya had left the farm to start a small glass-making business with a partner. We are shown there is a clear divide between them, but the exact nature of this fall-out is only hinted at. It does, however, seem to be focussed on a dispute over Maya’s role within the family, on the consequence of her actions and the reasons behind them. Essentially, there appears to be a conflict surrounding purpose, and this has thrown Maya to question where she belongs.

On the one hand, Jean Wei draws a strong contrast between Anne’s relationship with Maya and her relationship with Red, whilst on the other, both Red and Maya appear to be going through similar identity struggles. Both are wondering about their utility; Maya wondering ‘Was I useful?’ and Red being criticised by the narrator, who we can even read as Red’s own internal dialogue: “What are you, Demon? Do your job, Demon. Useless Demon… What are you”.

In the end, through Red, Anne is allowed to enact the forgiveness she has never been able to give to Maya – perhaps through stubbornness, anger, or hurt: “[…] you’re more than the help you’ve given me here […] You don’t need to deserve to exist. You don’t need to prove anything to me. I’d just like to spend more time with you”. Here, the word ‘deserve’ is key; to deserve something implies that you have earned it somehow, through your actions and behaviour. We could see this as relating to an imagined individual purpose. But Anne realises that this is tangential to existence; that, as the Existentialist philosopher Jean Paul Sartre wrote, ‘Existence precedes essence’ [2]. This means that we exist before we can determine our own purpose and there is no such thing as a ‘reason for existence’ already embedded within us.

Yet, Red goes against this in the very beginning, where our narrator taunts ‘But, warm one, what are you? What more can you be? What more, but to bring fire to light!’. For, usually, heat is something that is necessary i.e. as a casual response to fire. Unlike the concept of heat, however, we humans do not have such clearly defined reasons for existence; there is no rule telling one person that they are made to tend the fields and another that they are to shape and create magnificent works of art from the dangerous and sharp-edged material of glass.

Red, the embodiment of heat in this story, goes against this predetermination and instead carves out their own path. This is what leads Anne to realise that it is simply being human that is worthy of consideration and acceptance; our human freedom, and with it, our mistakes and our triumphs, unites us. This should allow us to be a little more forgiving of others, and I hope it helps Anne and Maya forgive each other too, finally.

 

 

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[1]  Wei, Jean, Heat (Peow Studio, 2018)

[2]  Crowell, Steven, “Existentialism”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2017 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = <https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2017/entries/existentialism/&gt;.

 

 

Charles Burns’ ‘Black Hole’ and the timelessness of high-school angst

Charles Burns’ ‘Black Hole’ via Google Images

I was left open-mouthed by a lot of what happened within Charles Burns’ Black Hole, and it took me a few moments to realise that the majority of the drama which took place was completely detached from the reason I had picked up the book. I picked up the book because I was intrigued by its seeming basis in the science fiction genre. Set in the mid-1970s, Black Hole is a story revolving around a sexually transmitted disease which mutates its owner: growing new body parts, excess skin, boils, spots, bulges and second mouths. It would manifest in different ways for different people.  In the end, this wasn’t the focus of Burns’ gaze. No. In this gripping graphic novel, Burns’ use of raw, honest detailing is predominantly used to share with us the raw and emotive world of teenage angst.

Here, I will be highlighting the subtle ways in which Charles Burns’ portrays the Existential Angst experienced, specifically, by the American teen.  In Philosophy, angst represents a necessary anxiety we experience because of our status as free, undetermined, creatures. In other words, it is a symptom of the fact that there are absolutely no rules as to what we should or should not do, no cosmic guidance on how to act, and no one to tell us which is the best path.

By no large stretch can we see how this angst can become prevalent during the teenage years; when most of us cannot avoid thinking about the future and all that it entails. For the teenager residents in suburban Seattle, this angst is embodied by the mutations of their peers. Of course, one of the big decisions or dilemmas of secondary school involves the testing of relationships and sexuality. Perhaps there are first boyfriends or girlfriends, sexuality may be discovered, feelings get stronger, and the entire school seems to be holding its breath and waiting for you to testify to these things.

In Black Hole, these decisions are put on display for everyone through often grotesque means. Surprisingly, those students without the disease do not seem to rule out relationships with their condemned peers. On one hand, the nature of desire and lust is that it is hardly reasonable, but on the other, it seems that the decision of whether or not to make any kind of ‘move’ is heightened by the idea that either path will be clearly identifiable by friends and family. Suddenly, the high school dating scene, usually something adults laugh at when looking back on because of its intangibility and temporality, is something which will stay with them permanently for the rest of their lives. For, whether they give in to desire or not, they will be left wondering what life would be like if they did otherwise.

However, there is also a reading whereby Charles is trying to tell us that this is what it really does feel like to be a teenager; as if you will be forever accountable for the decisions you make now. It is where right now is the most important time in your life, and it is what you do right now that matters most with the shaping and formation of that life. Recently, I read a letter to my future-self I had written during my secondary school examinations, and it read basically as an apology letter in case I had not studied hard enough and had not got the grades I wanted. Now, I laugh at the letter. But at the time, those exams were synonymous with my future. Here, Burns is trying to allow us the reader an unflinching glimpse into the teenager psyche: where fainting in Biology class can feel equivalent to being swallowed by a black hole, and an unplanned one-night stand makes your skin peel and shed until you don’t even feel like yourself anymore.

Simply, Charles Burns assimilates teenage angst into an undeniable visible form and through this demonstrates the timelessness of these uncertainties. For every teenager, the present seems to, above all, defy time and space with its demand for decisiveness: their own unique black holes.

 

Plurality of Meaning in Murakami’s ‘Nausea 1976’: A Phenomenological Approach

If you have read any of Murakami’s short stories, you will know how their brevity really emphasises the search for meaning in his narratives. I have discussed the ambiguities of these meanings previously, but there is also a plurality of meaning which is being highlighted by the imagery used. This imagery is so strange and unique, that we cannot help but imagine some grand meaning behind it – why are her ears so beautiful and magical, why is her sister in an endless slumber, and why on earth are fish falling from the sky? His conversational tone invites us to seek out these connections, and I feel as though, as a reader, I am being teased with the answer to some great secret being dangled directly on the page.

Michael Dachstein’s ‘Time Traveler’ via Google images 

Nowhere is this more obvious than in Murakami’s short stories, where large casts and sequences of events are no longer diluting the metaphors and symbolism present. Instead, we are forced to confront the meaning directly. In ‘Nausea 1976’, particularly, we are presented with quite a simple story – readers of his larger novels will be familiar with untangling more complex narratives, jumping all over the place both spatially and temporally – in which our narrator is talking to his friend who tells him of a time when he has a strange case of vomiting for ten consecutive days [1]. Yet, during this period he experiences no other symptoms or discomfort but simply finds himself unable to keep meals down, and every day he receives a strange phone call from an unknown caller, who would simply say his name and then hang up.

Listening to this story, along with our narrator – who turns out to be Mr Murakami himself – I found myself using every detail given as a clue to help form some kind of connection between the two. There were clues as to why it started, but less as to why it ended when it did, and there were clues as to why there were phone calls, but less as to why there was nausea. Is it because of his lack of romantic emotion or his continual betrayal of friends? Is he being punished by them, or by some other force? Of course, there was no definitive resolution as the end.

However, we are given an insight into Murakami’s phenomenological attitude toward these kinds of metaphors and symbolism. Phenomenology, in philosophy, considers the unique experiences that having a consciousness necessitates [2]. In other words, it considers how our consciousnesses make us see the world in different ways, due to varying intentional states of the perceiver. For Murakami, the same holds for stories. At the end of his bout of nausea, the mysterious caller says one additional thing to Murakami’s friend: ‘Do you know who I am?’ (p. 195). ‘Do you know who I am?’ – the ‘know’ informs us that the answer is something which needs to be sought out, it needs to be considered, it is an ‘intentional state’ which phenomenology claims can lead to a change in meaning.

Additionally, our mysterious caller invites the reader into a privileged dialogue with one of Murakami’s metaphors, asking us to really consider it. The friend tries this, in as logical a manner as he can manage given the strangeness of the situation: ‘I suppose it could have been someone from my childhood, or someone I had barely spoken to […]’ (p. 195). All of his suggestions revolve around his own experiences and memories (‘from my childhood […]’), prompted by the questions appeal to what he may ‘know’; an appeal to his own consciousness (for how can anyone really ‘know’ what is experienced by another…?). And yet, this is inevitable. Of course, any metaphorical meaning we do consider is likely to be self-projected:

 

“So, what you’re telling me, Mr Murakami, is that my own

guilt feelings – feelings of which I myself was unaware – could

have taken on the form of nausea or made me hear things

that were not there?”

“No, I’m not saying that,” I corrected him. “You are.”

(p. 195)

 

This goes for all of Murakami’s work, he is offering up his metaphors to the reader; allowing them to find their own meaning in his stories: ‘[…] I’m not saying that,” I corrected him. “You are.”‘ He surrenders authorial intention, and with it places the responsibility for meaning in the hands of the reader: ‘Anyhow, it’s just a theory. I can give you hundreds of those.’ (p. 196).  Or, as Irish poet Louis MacNeice eloquently put it: ‘The world is crazier and more of it than we think/ Incorrigibly plural […]’ [2].

Here, we cannot help but be reminded of a remarkably similar phenomenological account, provided in a novel with the very same title: Jean Paul-Sartre’s ‘La Nausée’ (‘The Nausea‘) [3]. In his first novel, the existentialist philosopher Sartre also documents a strict diary-keeping story-teller, who is as baffled by the various meanings of things – and of existence itself – that he begins to experience a continual feeling of nausea, based in his sudden disillusionment with the world around him and his inability to reclaim meaning. After all, Sartre is the same philosopher who wrote that ‘Existence precedes Essence’, or, to put it simply, he realised that it is only given our existence in the world that we can posit any meaning into such a life and that it is, therefore, our duty to decide this for ourselves.

In a way, this is the same mantra with which Murakami encourages those reading his stories to uphold – to add essence to his narrative despite the plurality of meaning. Otherwise, the absurd will simply stay absurd. Towards the end of Sartre’s Nausea, meaning seems to slide and waiver altogether as absurd imagery replaces everything else: in a deep existential angst, the narrator describes centipedes replacing human tongues and facial spots bursting to reveal additional eyes. It has been noted that the core of many existentialist aesthetics (plays, novels, and art produced by the ‘Existentialists’) is a phenomenological one [3]. Perhaps Murakami is also an Existentialist of sorts, his novels and stories are traditionally viewed from the same, rather detached narrator, who observes the absurd happenings within the story with an often frustratingly thoughtful acceptance. This leaves us to simply consider our theories, which will be bound up in our own experience of the world.

In the end, the meaning of the nausea and the phone calls is left open. The only advice offered by the Murakami in the story is this: ‘the problem is which theory you are willing to accept. And what you learn from it’ (p. 196). And I think this a philosophy to be applied to reading any meaning or symbolism into Murakami’s writings: it doesn’t matter what he intended by this image or that metaphor, what matters is what meaning resonates within us; something that we can learn from.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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[1] Murakami, Haruki, ‘Nausea 1979’ in Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman (London: Vintage, 2007) pp. 183-197.

[2] MacNeice, Louis, ‘Snow’. Accessed via https://www.poemhunter.com/poem/snow/ on 03/12/18.

[3] Smith, David Woodruff, “Phenomenology”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2018 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = <https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2018/entries/phenomenology/&gt;.

[4] Deranty, Jean-Philippe, “Existentialist Aesthetics”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2017 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = <https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2017/entries/aesthetics-existentialist/&gt;.

 

 

 

Colour and emotion within ‘Ismyre’ by B. Mure – a study of aesthetics

I went to Bristol Comic and Zine fair earlier this month, and I picked up a lot of goodies. One of the most immersive things I picked up was a copy of B. Mure’s Ismyre [1]. I was lured in by its promise of a fantastical narrative featuring magic and a city of anthropomorphised creatures.  Also, I will admit, I have been a growing fan of the artist’s work and wanted to see how they translated their illustrative talent into the comic form.

B. Mure did not disappoint. Furthermore, I found, despite the relatively short length of the comic, I was taken on a story where my emotions were tugged at in many complex directions. I wondered how this was done. Ismyre is drawn in a relatively loose and rough manner – or at least made to look this way – so I was left impressed by the emotional journey it had taken me on. Looking over it again, I now see that a lot of these emotional arousals (by which I mean the emotions aroused in me by the work) are down to B. Mure’s colouring technique.

B. Mure appears to use watercolour to colour their comic. In the majority of panels, we see yellow for light and warmth and blue for shadows and coldness. Indeed, these are quite natural pairings of colour and emotional expression. The brilliant contrast between these creates a beautiful night-time atmosphere and adds realism to the otherwise simple line-art. Yet, B. Mure also uses colour to create much more depth than this, and it is through his use of layering and additional colours that B. Mure is able to create deeper emotional resonance within panels.

Here, it is suiting to draw parallels to the aesthetic theories regarding music. It has been noted that when there is a mixture of major and minor keys in a piece of music, and we look at the combining and positioning of these as a whole, we can feel aroused within us more complex emotions [2]. In contrast to this, it is noted how a piece of music strictly in either minor or major key, can only allow us at most to feel either happy or sad, but nothing more. Instead, it is the inter-relation of these keys that can give music the ability to tell a story.

In Ismyre, colour is used in the same way as chords to express the emotion of the panels and it is the layering of our base colours – set out as blue and yellow – that contribute to more complex emotional arousal in the reader. For example,  the first page is only made up of blue and yellow.  Each panel represents a small moment of time, and the scene is played out relatively slowly for us to absorb the beginning of the story, and start to become familiar with the main character, Edward. It presents quite a simple series of actions and the emotional pulse of the page is quite subdued: we feel calm and relaxed.

In contrast to this, we also see panels where colours are combined and overlayed and thrown together in a way which, in comparison to this first page, force a deeper complexity. They do this firstly by literally forcing the reader’s attention to increase – there is more to take in as our eye cannot flow over the page so easily anymore – and secondly by increasing the emotional arousal felt by the variety of colours displayed.

So now, we have a greater response to the images displayed and we are spending more time considering the artwork itself. This extra time contributes to the increased response felt, and the colours aid the complexity of the emotions aroused within. On just the second page, when other colours begin to be introduced, our focus is snatched up quickly as we feel the shift in Edward’s mood: from a subdued contentment to a curious intrigue and the notion that something mysterious is going on…

This arrival of new colours hints at the arrival of a deeper plot and, as a reader, we know we are not simply going to watch Edward carving at his table forever but that a mystery is unfolding. This happens again and again in Ismyre, and although you may argue that the contrast of simply using two colours and draw a scene into clearer focus through the clear division of the colours, it is still true that these scenes are often found to be seeking out one key emotional response, reflecting that of Ed. But when something more pivotal is occurring, or when panels are crowded with other characters or emotions are charged and changeable, we are introduced to more colours.

I can’t wait to read B. Mure’s second book set in the town of Ismyre, Terrible Means, and to see whether the use of colour is continued in this way, and I would highly recommend Ismyre for anyone interested in fantasy, magic and strange worlds full of mysterious and intriguing characters.

 

 

 

 

 

[1] Ismyre by B. Mure (London: Avery Hill Publishing, 2017)

[2] Music & Meaning by Jenefer Robinson (Cornell University Press, 1997)

 

Mirrors and Multiple Worlds in Murakami’s ‘A Wild Sheep Chase’

I may have a slight obsession with the stories of Haruki Murakami, and if you read any one of his books I defy you to evade developing one yourself. In many of his novels, we are confronted with an intricate and finely-tuned view of the complexities and relationships of daily life, combined and contrasted with aspects of magical realism and absurdity.

In his novels, most of what Murakami describes is grounded in reality and abiding by the laws of our world. However, quite suddenly, we will then encounter vanishing hotel floors, an elusive Sheep Man, a gathering of Skeletons, talking crows and a sleeping character who is abruptly absorbed into a television set, and so on. As a reader of Murakami, we cannot help but wonder if these oddities are supposed to be happening in the same world we inhabit, or if the worlds described in Murakami are fundamentally different realms; perhaps with a predisposition for these occurrences.

A philosophical explanation of the latter interpretation would be the ‘Possible Worlds’ concept: things may not have ended up as they are experienced by us, but may have led to an entirely different experience and situation [1]. Maybe, the world was constructed where sheep men hide in vanishing rooms, scurry around the mountains of Hokkaido, and converses by candlelight upon a towering stack of books.

In Murakami’s A Wild Sheep Chase, we join our narrator on a search for a mysterious sheep. Yet, the odd connections and coincidences of the ‘chase’ leave us incredulous and disbelieving [2]. A girlfriend’s beautiful ears seemed a not-too-unusual character feature, but suddenly those ears are a means for psychic predictions – a matter which is accepted by our narrator without any seeming hesitation. This doesn’t seem like a reaction someone from our world would exhibit, given this realisation. Furthermore, upon the discovery of the Sheep Man, of hearing the tale of the non-existent sheep with the mark on its back, and of a man who claims to have been possessed by such a sheep, our narrator is similarly nonchalant and accepting.

Perhaps we are to conclude that this is not our world. Perhaps, what we should conclude, is that Murakami is presenting for us a possible world. Philosophically speaking, the notion of ‘possible worlds’ are mostly induced with regards to modal logic, that is, for discussions of logic and argumentation. But there is an instance of philosophy where these ‘possible worlds’ are invoked in a notion where they exist in the same space and time as our own world, and this is in the Many-Worlds Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics [3]. Let us simply note that according to this view, there are worlds in the Universe which overlap with our own – of which we are totally unaware – and of which there are various instances of ourselves.

Yet, I believe that in Murakami’s works, we are being told stories about some of these other worlds, rather than our own. Near the end of A Wild Sheep Chase, it seems that our narrator, in fact, becomes aware of these overlapping worlds during a strange encounter with a mirror. The narrator experiences the sensation that the person in the mirror is separate from himself:

 

“I wasn’t seeing my mirror-flat mirror-image.

It wasn’t myself I was seeing; on the contrary,

it was as if I were the reflection of the mirror

and this flat-me-of-an-image were seeing the

real me.” (p. 269)

 

This ‘real me’, could be referring to the version of himself that belong in our own world. Furthermore, when he is talking to the Sheep Man, later on, our narrator notices that the Sheep Man is not reflected in the mirror: “In the mirror world, I was alone” (p. 272).  On this interpretation, we can see that the strange occurrences, exemplified by the mysterious figure of the Sheep Man, do not exist in the world seen through the mirror. This mirror-world reveals a different world, which happens to be our world: the one inhabited by your and me, where the Sheep Man does not exist.

Additionally, a similar encounter with a mirror is described in Murakami’s short story ‘The Mirror’, reinforcing the intention of this symbol and the idea that Murakami’s stories are from a world very much different to our own [4]. That they are from another world is confirmed in this story, where our narrator recalls a time when he was on night duty as a janitor at a high school. He describes his experience upon suddenly discovering a mirror, which he has never seen before: ‘It looked exactly like me on the outside, but it definitely was not me. No that’s not it. It was me, of course, but another me’ (p. 72). Here, our narrator has also come across another version of himself from another world, revealed briefly and inexplicably through a mirror.

In telling his stories through the guise of another world, Murakami allows the reader to confront the absurdity of our own condition; things needn’t be as they are and they could have, very easily, ended up differently. Earlier in A Wild Sheep Chase, our narrator goes off on one of his many tangents and talks about the ‘worm universe’: “In the worm universe, there is nothing unusual about a dairy cow seeking a pair of pliers. A cow is bound to get her pliers sometime. It has nothing to do with me” (p. 67). Here, our narrator references and directly mentions the notion of multiple worlds, of ‘alternate considerations’. Murakami forces us to realise that maybe the stories being told seem absurd and crazy to us, but if their world and our world are just two in a multitude of different worlds, then we have no grounds to reason that they are not all absurd.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[1] Menzel, Christopher, “Possible Worlds”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2017 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = <https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2017/entries/possible-worlds/&gt;.

[2] Murakami, Haruki, A Wild Sheep Chase (London; Vintage, 2003)

[3] Vaidman, Lev, “Many-Worlds Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2018 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = <https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2018/entries/qm-manyworlds/&gt;.

[4] Murakami, Haruki, ‘The Mirror’ in Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman (London; Vintage, 2007)

Childhood as presented in Tillie Walden’s ‘On a Sunbeam’

Tillie Walden is a name you should – and this is an imperative – become familiar with instantly. Her gentle, easy lines are so well-trained and nurtured that her art evokes a calmness no matter the subject. Dream-like and full of abandon, it is the perfect style for reflections upon youth and childhood, and this seems to be a theme of many of Walden’s comics and graphic novels.

And how is this achieved? It seems childhood, especially in On A Sunbeam (Walden’s webcomic, which is also going to be coming out as a physical copy very soon I believe), is associated with a resistance to gravity. For the protagonist Mia, flying, jumping and hover-boarding her way through her childhood, these things represent her innocence, and often, her recklessness. Jumping between stories of her past at school, and her present, Tillie shows that Mia is holding onto something from her past:- there are certain threads that are holding fast, and therefore, certain unresolved business.

When Mia is doing something reckless in the present,we jump back to a similar, comparative moment from her school years:

High-school Mia is suffering the consequence of stealing one of the school flying machines, and young adult Mia has just trespassed into an area of a planet where she knows she should not be: an ‘unstable’ area. The focus in the bottom left panel on Mia’s forehead makes us imagine that she had mentally travelled back in time to the previous incident; showing the interconnectedness of these events and also her irresolutions. This juxtaposition of past and present, separated by time but unified both by Walden’s colour scheme and the fear of an instantly regretful Mia, perhaps also brings to focus the ‘prospective’ nature of childhood.

According to Aristotlean ideology, a lot of the value gained through our childhood experiences, are not valuable in and of themselves, but through aiding the transition into adulthood. Here, the juxtaposition allows us to see how Mia’s earlier curiosity and intrigue permeate through into her older self. However, in both cases, this leads Mia into a rather risky situation. Not so much a delayed value then, but perhaps it is some part of childhood Mia has maintained through adolescence, something more valuable in itself and (often) exclusive to childhood: such as the feelings of a lack of responsibility, the opportunity for unstructured play, and – as already mentioned – a certain childish intrigue (Matthews, Mullin). There is definitely something more than this Aristotelian notion of ‘prospective’ value being expressed.

In both cases, Mia exhibits her autonomy to follow her emotive motivations. She wants to ride the flying machine. She wants to explore the beautiful new area. Both of these have restrictions, but these are ignored.

The colour palette seen from behind the tape shows us that another time is being recalled, and the dialogue confirms that Mia is remembering something from her past. In this remembering, she reverts back to her childhood abandon, her lack of concern for her consequences and lack of responsibility.

In a graphic novel set in space, Mia’s jumping, flying, falling, are all expressions of her momentary resistances to gravity, to nature. She flies on the flying machines without permission, she knows the short-cuts to restricted areas in school which involve jumping from one place to another, and, after suffering loss, she takes to the skies with a crew onboard a larger ship…

These are visible signs of autonomy; actions that show freedom, of movement, of expression, of doing what you want. People don’t jump whilst in a passive state, they don’t fly by chance and they certainly don’t hover accidentally. Mia does these to express childhood innocence, and the freedom this gives her: to rebel, to be passionate, and to ignore the future responsibilities.

Or, perhaps, not to ignore responsibility in a negative way as early philosophers liked to claim children do, but to possess a freedom from them. This would shift the image of childhood more so that it reflects Dewey’s conception. Here, the child is not simply awaiting ‘monitors, minders and corruptors’ (Tesar, 2016), but is a being with individual agency, who should be encouraged to play and explore.

I really don’t want to spoil anything about this amazing story, but I want to show you a moment when Mia fully embraced this freedom, maybe at the very point she first felt a nagging of the responsibilities to come – which makes it even more poignant. Here, Mia has just received bad results in the final exams at her school. Despite this, she plans to take the girl she fancies to the school party and, in doing so, she defies gravity in the most unabashed way. With this act, she destroys time, she forgets the future (to which we are all naturally gravitating), and she is guided by passion and innocence and a belief in the suspended now.

 

 

1. On a Sunbeam by Tillie Walden (http://www.onasunbeam.com/)
2. Tillie Walden website (http://www.tilliewalden.com/home)
3. Matthews, Gareth and Mullin, Amy, “The Philosophy of Childhood”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2015 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.)(https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/childhood/#GooChi)

4. Tesar, Marek; Rodriguez, Sophia; Kupferman, David W, ‘Philosophy and pedagogy of
   childhood, adolescence and youth’ in Global Studies of Childhood Volume: 6 Issue 2 (2016) ISSN: 2043-6106 Online ISSN: 2043-6106

The Significance of Change in ‘The Gigantic Beard that was Evil’ by Stephen Collins

In Stephen Collins’ graphic novel, there is a noted divide between the familiar, ordered, and organised world of Here, and the chaotic and unknown nature of There. The Gigantic Beard that was Evil centres around one major, unavoidable and disruptive change: the growth of a gigantic beard on the modest and unassuming office-worker, Paul.

Looking back to some of the first questions posed by the ancient Greek philosophers, we can see a clear preoccupation with this concept of change; of things coming about which previously were not; of things over there, becoming part of our here. For example, this division is a key part of Aristotle’s cosmology, where the universe is divided into the superlunar realm (everything beyond the sphere containing the moon) and the sublunary realm (everything below the moon). Aristotle argued that everything in the superlunary realm was made of one pure celestial element, whereas everything on earth was composed of the four elements, and could change. This fed straight into theological (Christian) doctrine, whereby everything on earth was susceptible to decay and corruption, whereas the heavens were secured in perpetual perfection. Going further, the philosopher Heraclitus believed that change was everywhere. He is associated with the phrase panta rhei, which means (roughly): ‘everything changes’. Heraclitus uses the example of a stream: the water flows constantly, replacing the water that was previously there, so that ‘we may never step into the same river twice’. For these philosophers, change creates circumstances in which there is no reliability. In a similar sense, Collins uses the idea of ‘tidiness’ to represent the human aversion to change.

However, in The Gigantic Beard that was Evil, it turns out that change is a necessary component for the existence of value. In order to show this, Collins’ begins with introducing us to a world which has managed, somehow, to completely escape change: change is suppressed into non-existence. This leads Paul to question the meaning of his actions: ‘Did any of what he’d just said mean anything at all?’ he asks. This shows that order and repetition can make meaning redundant. In reality, the nature of time forces change upon all aspects of our lives, and even this dystopia created by Collins cannot escape it completely. Time finds a way ‘through the invisible gaps which connect one moment to the next’.  For the inhabitants of here, time (and with it, change) is solely the concern of there. The nagging doubt described in the members of the public shows that ‘there’ is supposed to represent this notion of change, and therefore the concept of time.

Here, we can see change represented by the ultimate change: death. This inescapable consequence forces all those who witness it into acknowledging the existence of time. And this is where change begins to seep into Paul’s world.

So, what value does change hold for us?

There are two responses to this, which are both represented in The Gigantic Beard. First, we have Paul’s initial reaction: nausea. The lack of purpose to things in the world of the Here means that the initial sign of change, of disorder, which expresses itself in the form of his spontaneously growing beard, causes an internal dread. The beard becomes an exaggerated symbol for Time; its rapid growth emphasises the previous stagnation and suspended nature of existence within Here – with Here now representing an isolated present. This is reinforced by the fact that ‘here’ is a grounding word (an extension of the auxiliary verb ‘is’: to be here, is to be), whereas, ‘There’ distinguishes an uncertain other. In this way, ‘there’ also comes to represent the uncertainty of the future in a universe full of chaos.

Here, there is an assured reason and order to everything. However, ‘Sometimes […] Dave would wonder what it was his company actually did’. When he questions his colleagues, they can always provide some kind of answer, but these are empty and meaningless: ‘It’s insurance, I think’. The arbitrary and superfluous coming-into-existence of the ‘Gigantic Beard’ shows that there isn’t a reason to everything; there isn’t an essential ‘tidiness’ to the universe. This notion of a meaningless universe comes from the philosophical notion of Existentialism. The French existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre wrote that it is because we are in fact free to make our own choices, and that there is no reason for us to act one way over another, that we experience what he terms ‘La Nausée’: Nausea.

And yet, Paul moves through his nausea, and it is this second response which brings in the positive aspects of time, and change: the idea that these things contribute to the value our lives hold. Paul’s beard comes to represent the true nature of life – its lack of order and cause – but with this disorder, we have the development of imperfection, which in turn generates uniqueness: ‘Within a year, most people could barely remember what they were once afraid of’. Indeed, when Paul is fully confronted by his gigantic beard, in a pivotal moment in the graphic novel, all he can say is: ‘It’s beautiful’. In this way, Collins shows that change is beautiful, and leaves the reader tranquil and at peace with their imperfections.