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Underground > Comic Books >

So... what exactly is a "fiction suit?"

  
  

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18:45 / 16.11.02
One question I had after the series was... ok, so what's next? The universe has merged with the supercontext, we're all giant brain tree things... now what? What is this new "reality" like? Was it worth it?

Frankly, I think I'd get bored being a giant brain tree. But maybe there's concepts going on here I simply can't imagine on a giant scale.

And I've never experienced life as a giant brain tree, so I can't really comment on it.

My theory of John A'Dreams is that, after putting on the time-suit and becoming a 4D being, he saw what he had to do to bring about the birth of Horus. So he reinserted himself into "the game" taking on a bunch of different parts and steering the game to it's conclusion: westminster Abbey. After jack assimilated the king Archon, John's work was done and he took himself out of the game. maybe. I don't know.

Still, it seems to me that the whole brain tree evolution was set to happen at 2012 anyway, regardless of the Outer Church's attempts to stop it. Makes you wonder if all the fighting was really necessary.
 
 
yawn - thing's buddy
22:28 / 16.11.02
yeah but the invissy crew wanted to prepare as many peeps for yon event as poss surely?

I mean it's not everyday you dissolve into the supercontext....
 
 
--
02:45 / 17.11.02
Wonder how many people they got to believe it...
 
 
yawn - thing's buddy
08:42 / 17.11.02
oh, probably enough to make it happen, I'd imagine.
 
 
--
14:03 / 17.11.02
So what you're implying is that if enough people wouldn't have believed in it, it wouldn't have happened? Interesting...
 
 
some guy
15:08 / 17.11.02
I think that's the implication. The supercontext is a reality shift triggered by a critical mass of human thought, it would seem.
 
 
gravitybitch
16:50 / 17.11.02
Yup. We should all start meditating.

Everybody:

"Iamascoolasbrucelee
Iamascoolasbrucelee
Iamascoolasbrucelee
Iamascoolasbrucelee"
 
 
yawn - thing's buddy
19:56 / 17.11.02
how many times do you have to tell a story before it becomes true?

etc.
 
 
houdini
07:01 / 18.11.02
Memes are behavioural atoms in our minds. The molecules they form can interact with one another and become memeplexes. Memeplexes can indulge in psychic chemistry. The "world where everyone gets what they want, even the enemy" [misquote, but you get the idea] is one where all of our memes come into synchrony, making us act as part of one overall consciousness - the Supercontext - in much the same way that ants crawling through a hive act together as dispersed drone units carrying out the will of their queen. Except that (and this is not insignificant) there is no queen, there's only the ants and that notion of "queen" or "personality" or "being" is only made up by the whole, the society, the Supercontext.

In this way, our fractured, individual consciousnesses compound to remake the consciousness that God had when he/she/it was outside the universe. The Hiroshima rift (or something) pulled part of God down into the universe and fractured Him/Her/It, creating of His (I'm just going to stick with the Patriarchal Judaeo-Christian name, okay, it's getting tired...) Unity a fractured Many consciousnesses. One of these Many, a woman named Edith, advised God to call on Buddha (namu amida bhutsu) so that we could all find our way back to the source, back to the Unity. But God didn't hear her properly; He wasn't able to find his way out of our reality. So now it's a rescue mission. We have to find a way to resubmerge ourselves in our reality and play out until God is free. We need to realize that we, ourselves are each God, living outside of time and visiting it, sequentially, once as each living conscious thing. In that way, we are all each other's reincarnations. In each incarnation where we read/play/experience THE INVISIBLES a Buddha named JackFrost/DaneWhitman/GrantMorrison reminds us that we created this reality and the notions of aloneness, alienation and domination. We are only held here by fear. When we overcome fear we will realize that we need not be dominated because we are always here as everyone. If we could reattach these isolated scraps of our brain then we could take reality under our control (or put it back in synchrony with us, to use less patriarchal language) and there would BE nothing more to fear. In 2012, when we finally do this, history will end and new histories will begin where we create a superreality calling on the God Potential that is at each of our fingertips.

Those who are of a naturally conservative bent cannot help but see the perceived loss of "self" as a horrendous degradation. It is this misapprehension that leads Miles in his perception of the Outer Church's service as a "degradation" and stops him undergoing modification. John sees further and, submitting himself to it, becomes free, returning to reality as a Reader and experiencing all of the fiction suits possible. Ironically, it is also this misperception that causes the Invisibles to struggle (needlessly?) against the forces running Miles and the OC, not realizing that the "sides" they are on are like faces of a coin: the coin is both of them, otherwise it would not be a coin. And yet the coin is "on" neither side.

Anyway, that's just my take on the whole business. Don't know if this really answers the fiction suit question at all. I guess it kind of does. To the extent outlined above, THE INVISIBLES meshes near-perfectly with my own religious and spiritual beliefs, although it took me until reading volume III in the trade paperback last night to come to that realization.

It sure would've been helpful to've known all this during the 1998-99 school year when I was busily going insane as I created the notion of the SuperCulture - a self-aware monster made of all modern culture (created by applying Turing's hypothesis and a whole lot of analogy theory to global human culture - I'll say more about this some other time) - and felt the annihilation of my own consciousness looming over me. But then, as the man says, some things are better for you if you go through them on your own first.

Be appreciative of any feedback, too....

Cheers for now,

Houdini.
 
 
yawn - thing's buddy
08:35 / 18.11.02
that's what i was going to say!
 
 
The Natural Way
09:12 / 18.11.02
Great, Hou.

Now guys (not yawn), I explained what the bugmen are. John explains what the bugmen are - an unfolded timesuit, or, more correctly, organic, human, 3D process viewed from "above". According to Invisibles cosmology there is only one human process (one birth, one death) - one giant, seething, fucking, bleeding, shitting worm cast (or, and perhaps more correctly, chrysalis) ready to be sloughed by horus (God, the oversoul, whatever you want to call it) on the day of 4motion, the day of initiation, which is also one and situated outwith spacetime.

We are all born together. We all wake up together.

"John" is simply the most elegant cipher for the supersoul that we all, in our natural, endlessly reflective, endlessly pliable primordial state form a part of (Magic Matter, remember?). He's the Divine Fool that leaps of the cliff into incarnation, the Fallen God, the player trapped in the game, the spirit crushed into flesh. One program, one iteration waiting to be freed.

Hou, on reflection I'd have to say that, while yr model's good and tempting, I'm wary of it for the same reasons I'm wary of Chesed's. It's a cool narrative and it's TRUE and all, but that's just it - it's a flat narrative. It doesn't take in the whole picture. All the disasters (or creation myths) that inform the invissyverse - God collapsing into the 3D, The sleeping universe, the cosmic war, blah - they're all just masks/iterations of for some vast, unamable, untranslatable event - the event that brought the universe into being, moment after moment. So, from a certain angle, there is no story, there is no free will: the Invisibles is a map, or a cross-section of the birth process of a 5D entity. It is a spell, and the characters/events that inform it are simply reiterating superglyphs. Nothing needs to be done. There is no war. There is no rescue mission. This is the dream of Buddha.
 
 
some guy
12:15 / 18.11.02
In this way, our fractured, individual consciousnesses compound to remake the consciousness that God had when he/she/it was outside the universe. The Hiroshima rift (or something) pulled part of God down into the universe and fractured Him/Her/It, creating of His (I'm just going to stick with the Patriarchal Judaeo-Christian name, okay, it's getting tired...) Unity a fractured Many consciousnesses.

I'm not sure I buy this - God can't fracture retroactively once he's inside space-time, so this can't really have anything to do with the Hiroshima event (or, more accurately, the US atomic testing in the southwest). I think the entrance of the magic mirror is a symptom, not a cause. We know the Invisibles stretch back before the magic mirror downloading into reality, so this can't really be connected. The only way this event could send effects "backwards" in time is to have occurred outside of time, on the surface of the solid, and this isn't what happens because it's "trapped" inside of time due to the blast.

One of these Many, a woman named Edith, advised God to call on Buddha (namu amida bhutsu) so that we could all find our way back to the source, back to the Unity. But God didn't hear her properly; He wasn't able to find his way out of our reality.

This isn't what Edith does, or means.

So now it's a rescue mission.

I'm not sure of this, either. We do an awful lot of dismissing Morrison's glib dialogue in this series, but somehow "it's a rescue mission" never gets the same suspicion. It doesn't look like a duck or feel like a duck, so...
 
 
The Natural Way
13:58 / 18.11.02
Oh God, Laurence.... The script TELLS us the God thing reverberated backwards and forwards through time. Don't bother taking it apart using logic or science - that's just the wrong approach. Morrison freely admits he uses this stuff poetically. The secret origin of the universe according to Black Science is just that - the secret origin of the universe according to Black Science. In the same way the secret origin of the universe according to a young hooker in Soho/a bunch of zoroastrians is the secret origin of...blah. IT'S ALL TRUE, remember? Just masks describing the [untranslatable concept] that occured the moment God/The Player/5D bastards impacted with/condensed into the 3D.

Vol 3 is FULL of stuff that undelines that what we are watching only looks like a war....from a certain point of view. Hardly a glib, throwaway comment, Loz - more like an important component/manifestation of Vol 3's underlying ideological trend. The Invisible mission is to restore the lost ones to their home in Barbelith/reactivate the comatose trauma sites/reintegrate the oversoul/Wake the sleeper. Birth Horus.

From a certain point of view, that sounds like a rescue mission.
 
 
some guy
15:26 / 18.11.02
The script TELLS us the God thing reverberated backwards and forwards through time.

The script isn't the comic. And I don't think it's being a party pooper to point out some of the flaws of the series. Morrison goes to such lengths to make sure we all understand that things only grow once trapped in objective reality, because time doesn't work on the surface of the solid. We do see specific bounces across the space-time supersolid (Robin, for example). But the download doesn't happen everywhen - it happens on a specific date (and dates are VERY important to the series, which is why the Golden Age Invisibles don't have much to do with ensuring the onset of the supercontext).

I agree we're supposed to look at the series through different angles ... but I also think we're fed a lot of red herrings and abandoned ideas. I don't think "rescue mission" is an apt descriptor of what's happening, largely because nothing is actually being rescued! I think it is a glib line that hasn't really been examing by fandom, partly because it sounds good and partly because it seems suitably dramatic. The advent of the supercontext is a transformative event, and like the "war" descriptor, "rescue" doesn't work very well. As, well, you yourself said in a previous post. Don't get so excited.
 
 
yawn - thing's buddy
19:12 / 18.11.02
Laurence: I think braxy, when he said 'script', was refering to the words you read in the comic book, rather than the actual parchment. As for the point you make about the dates - strange really, cos both Mad Tom and Edith (Golden Agers) have a huge amount to do with the summoning of the supercontext.

Yes - dates are important:- they are marker buoys which represent linear time, but snap free from their anchors occasionally in the narrative - when we get the trans-temporal love in betwen edith and mob and also when we see Dane and Old Tom in the same panel with some of the sensitive criminals. Yon glory hon sems to do this trick.

The dates are there to remind us of Moz's cutup techniques as well.

I've got a perverse fascination with this idea:

cutting up every panel from the book and laying them out in a linear time sequence. Anyway....

They also represent the way we understand time NOW as opposed to the way it will be after the biggest buoy (segmented temporal reality on 22nd Dec 2012) finally snaps free and floats off into the super duper context.

To be honest, I'm not really sure what yout gripe is with the rescue mission metaphor.

Mister Six said it, so it must be right.
 
 
some guy
20:06 / 18.11.02
To be honest, I'm not really sure what yout gripe is with the rescue mission metaphor.

What are they rescuing exactly? And in regular English, please, not the smattering of unexamined pat phrases that usually characterizes Barbelith talk of the book: "The space-time supersolid ... Jack Flint ... reiterating fractals ... the Ivory Toad of Shanghai!"

I don't think they're rescuing anything. Just like they're not fighting anything. In fact I would argue that if the cell had all packed it in when Boy left, the supercontext would have occurred before December 22, 2012. But nooooooo, they have to keep playing soldiers and superheroes and extend the negative karma...

In terms of time - Grant sets it up quite clearly that outside of space-time things cannot grow. Which is the Entire Point of the Universe as We Know It. To grow the embryo of human consciousness until it is collectively mature enough to no longer need to grow (and hence able to live outside of time). Therefore the God material cannot insert itself retroactively from the point of download unless Grant Fucked Up.

Yeah, there's a lot of poetry and cut-up in the series, and yeah, it's fucking cool. But there are also a lot of boners, and this appears to be one of them.
 
 
yawn - thing's buddy
21:09 / 18.11.02
but laurence, you are not addressing the points I made regarding your misreadings of the 20's cell and the importance of dates to the series.

I think there are a lot of abandoned ideas within the Invisibles. I don't think this was deliberate but I DO think that you can retrospectively place them within a meaningful interpretation of the Invisibles.

As for the fallen god/shiny blob event - I always understood that as a direct metaphor for the reader being lost within the text. Obviously this would mean the supercontext is the occasion when the reader has finished with the book and is able to 'see' all of it in it's entirety.

I know grant has claimed this to be only one reading of the text but I think it's the one which has facinated him most over the years and one which he will return to.

For me, the impending apocalypse which the charaters all felt, was in fact, the realease of the final issue.

But I've been hung up on this sort of shit since I read the New York Teilogy when I was sixteen.
 
 
some guy
21:11 / 18.11.02
Yawn, I think you're right about the close of the text. How else could it be a hypersigil?
 
 
--
00:45 / 19.11.02
Houdini, I have to disagree with your saying that being modified by the Outer Church is a way to reach enlightenment. As far as I know Col. Friday and Miss Dwyer were modified, and they don't seem enlightened to me at all.

Final issue stuff I don't get:

What KM means by "The Fox"
Edith talking about Freddie panicing andand collapsing time down into a single point (this seems very important)
How the Archon was dosed by Key 64 (what is the Archon even doing there? I thought Jack ate them in 1999 at Westminster Abbey)
And the clincher: What the HELL does GM mean when he says that Archons are BPM (beat per minute?) 3 Grof condensations.

* * * *

Hey, if Jack is the Buddha and he is supposed to lead the people to spiritual enlightenment, how come it seems like King Mob and Technooccult do more to clue people in to the birth of the supercontext, while Jack Frost, in the final issue, originally wants to blow up the Technooccult building? Weird... Has he switched places with Mob?

As for "now it's a rescue mission", beats me.
 
 
houdini
03:37 / 19.11.02
"Quimper said I was to tell you something... He said, 'Once my name was John...' I said, 'John, John... hiding in plain sight. That's not playing the game.' And then Edith said to call on Buddha. But he didn't hear her properly. And now it's a rescue mission."

This fragment, from 2.22, starts off as being direct speech from the Blind Chessplayer to Jack, "inside the UFO", and then becomes a voiceover to images of a fly (possibly a mosquito?) on the Chessplayer's hand.

I think that the opinion I offered above about what time/fiction-suits are, and who John, Quimper, Flint, God and the Chessplayer are, is a valid reading of the book. I'm certainly not dumb enough to try and say that it's the reading of the book, nor even that it's my reading of the book. But it's one of my readings of the book. It seems to me that a (vanilla) reading of this passage would indicate that the Devil addressed Quimper as "John", that Edith "said to call on Buddha" and that the "he" who "didn't hear her properly" was Quimper/John, who might as well be God/me for all I care.

My 2c on the matter is that it doesn't really matter what action trapped God in the creation. Maybe it was the mere action of creating reality itself. Of course, if God did create reality there's no persuasive argument that he created it from the beginning. Maybe he created it on August 6th, 1945. Or at least came into contact with it.... The notion that this would preclude things happening "before" that date seems to me to be missing the point. For this reading, the subject is God. The "rescue" really comes from our awakening, which will be much like a macroscopic level of the "nanomachines, switch on!" bit from the end of GM's run on Doom Patrol. But I digress....

Sypha, here's one for you:

Fanny: John... what happened? Did they make you like them?
John: Well... yes. The question is, who are they?

[From the conversation in the Cathedral, 3.2.]

I think the point here is that it's not "modification" that makes you like the O.C. It's merely that the O.C. itself is merely a misunderstanding. Remember that the whole point is that the two sides are necessary and convergent. By becoming "like them" John has surrendered part of his individuality to the Supercontext and gained the ability to come free in time, to be anyone. He has, more or less, become an Archon. (And if he's become a Reader then he's more than an Archon.) My point is not that what John underwent was the same as Miss Dwyer's Attack Womb Makeover Treatment, but rather that those of a conservative bent will view the perceived "loss of self" related to aligning with the supercontext as being a "degradation", and that this in fact may be where the whole OC notion of we are the filth, dirty fucking eggs in our heads came from in the first place.

Your mileage may vary. This is a good thing.

Finally, I'd say that there's no question that The Invisibles is an imperfect transmission. I think when we're each ready for the perfect transmission that we'll know about it.

In fact, it occurred to me last night that it's interesting for a story so rooted in the perception of time to have such strange temporal labyrinths within it, generated by such extranarrative forces as sales of comic books and spread of diseases over a 7 year period in a higher dimensional universe. Very INVISIBLES, neh?
 
 
houdini
03:44 / 19.11.02
For me, the impending apocalypse which the charaters all felt, was in fact, the realease of the final issue.

The roleplaying game that I ran in college ended exactly this way. The game was a modified Amber RPG, a "multiverse" construct set in a pseudoviking mythos. Moorcock was also a big influence. Anyway, the very last game featured Ragnarok and the characters followed Loki's trail up the Ladder of Infinities out of their universe and into the Denser world beyond, where their reality was nothing more than a shared concept in the minds of a bunch of college students.

They had to come to terms with the fact that the real reason for Ragnarok was that we were all about to graduate and go get jobs.

In the end, they saved their universe by transforming it into a Dragon (long story) and sailing it up the Ladder, transforming it to pure Thought and entering the minds of the players in the game.

When I first thought of this ending to the campaign (ca. summer, 1996) I wrote it down in a little Red & Black notebook with the title "Possible Ragnarok -- The Grant Morrison Ending ??"
 
 
The Natural Way
08:26 / 19.11.02
Yeah, Hou's so on the money. And, yeah, "nanomachines", but my fave's "Quarks turn on! Atoms turn on!" from Flex. Nanoman and Minimiss wake up from their quantum coma and the sky detonates with superheroes. Mmmmm.

I wasn't really criticising yr reading, just pointing out the importance of perspectives in the book. In the beginning, the Invisible looks very much like a war; by the end of Vol 2 it starts to look more like dancing and by vol 3, it's time for fucking - the end result? A beautiful, bouncing baby Horus. And the inkling sets in that maybe it was never really a story anyway, and that perhaps all we've been watching is a cross-section of the cosmic birth. But, on the ground, at the level of DOING and HAPPENING and EVENTS everyone still feels like they're participating: "Fanny's on Sorcery, Roger's on Guns...."

"Fate? Free Will? No difference. Same thing."

So they're a gang of freedom fighters engaged in a war, they're one mask of a superorganisation dedicated to drawing down the new age. They're squiggly, wiggly, living components of a spell designed to summon Horus. Same thing.

Yes, Loz, dates are important. But most of the important dates involve time becoming totally unhinged. 2012 is the day the board folds up - the day of initiation - and as such occurs everywhen in the same way the "game crash" does. In the same way the players are simply local suits worn by a titanic mind that exists everywhen. You must understand this stuff - it may not make "sense", but it's central to the series. And central to the kind of magical thought Morrison's involved in. He'd be the first to tell you his 2012 isn't really a date. One death, remember? One birth? In fact, this is the danger you face when making statments like "Oh, that's so glib and throwaway...oh, that was discarded..." Some of that stuff will be essential to magickal thought - the Invisibles is a fucking guide book to magickal thought - and, while he can dispense with one metaphor over another, in large part Grant is incapable of dismissing many of the ideas in the book because they 100% inform his thinking. The "clothes" they dress in change, that's all. But the reason it's not clear who the gang are rescuing? The "rescue operation" thing is a metaphor, not a literal truth. Earlier on I simply pointed out other places in the narrative where a similar metaphor is employed to describe the Invisible Mission. From a human, 3D, perspective there's work to be done and something to be saved. Jack refers to the cell as "Doctors of the Soul". From his point of view, the supersoul is sick, in a coma and a certain operation must be performed in order to wake it up.
Just isn't this bad metaphor you think it is.

But whatever.
 
 
yawn - thing's buddy
11:27 / 19.11.02
runce said:

Of course, if God did create reality there's no persuasive argument that he created it from the beginning. Maybe he created it on August 6th, 1945.

I like this. It can be used to explore my preferred Invisibles reading too. Yknow, the one about the reader being 'god' etc.

Because, lets face it, very few people who've read the Invisibles have done so sequentially and from issue 1 way back in 94 to it's conclusion in another issue 1, 6 years later. (I like the symmetry; it suggests a starting point in the middle) I mysely entered the story during volume 2, round about issue 6 I think. From that point on, I created the Invisible's parallel in both directions through time. Meaning I scored back issues and a trade when I could and decided to collect the rest of the series as and when they were published.

the web morrison spun with the invislbes sure is flexible (and strong)
 
 
yawn - thing's buddy
11:29 / 19.11.02
anyone with a spanner handy, put in back in yer pocket.

I know it was Shelly Roeberg's idea for the countdown and the reversal of issue numbers.
 
 
Our Lady of The Two Towers
13:22 / 19.11.02
Sypha Nadon
Final issue stuff I don't get:

Edith talking about Freddie panicing andand collapsing time down into a single point (this seems very important)

The Blind Chessman late in series 2 says something about Colonel Friday encountering the 'sick' universe sometime in the 1950s and that it was microscopicly small (can't check this right now, so might be mistaken in the details). I did wonder if the two events were directly linked in someway, or whether this is just another of those pesky iterations and reflections of the one idea...

How the Archon was dosed by Key 64 (what is the Archon even doing there? I thought Jack ate them in 1999 at Westminster Abbey)

Yeah, me am confuzzled by this too. I think that the Westminster Abbey Jack ate all the other Archons, The King-of-all-Tears was transiting from the end of series 1 to attack them at the end of series 3. I'm wondering if it was a classic KM psych-out or if he did some psychic scorpion sting like with Sir Miles. I think we have to chalk it up as one of the unexplained mysteries of the comics...
 
 
yawn - thing's buddy
13:53 / 19.11.02
Weird!

Doin ma napper in by the way.

Look, if we accept that Archons exist outside time, then it’s only when you’re stuck in the honey of sequential temporal reality that issues such as ‘I thought he had his ass kick back in 99’ mean anything. But that is not glue which bind this story together. Runt called this comic series a cross section of cosmic birth – this is the simplest, clearest, easiest way to understand the Invisibles.

We can apply the cross section metaphor directly to the archon’s presence. Imagine a 3d cross section of a higher dimensional being. rhere would be bits of ‘it’ all over the fuckin place. In 2012, in 1999, Back in the house of fun in 90 whenever.

In Westminister 99, the Archon was eaten by Jack – but only when viewed from within our immature perspective.

Jeez – it’s not an issue when you understand the mechanics of the series.

Either is the fuckin rescue mission metaphor.
 
 
The Natural Way
14:40 / 19.11.02
Well, Lada 'n' Sypha, the Outer Church is continually described as "superdense", etc. If the Invisible College is all about expansion outwith the confines of the 3D, the Outer Church is about an impossible, infinite contraction inside it. It's Hell - "under the ground"; "beneath us". Contracted to the point of inversion.

So, yeah, you could say Freddie had a good fucking taste of it. Hmmm...even that he *made* it, perhaps.....
 
 
--
14:44 / 19.11.02
Actually I prefer the idea of Jack eating ALL the Archons, it fits into the whole merging of opposites and links John A'Dreams to Jack. And something has to explain where all the other archons besides Rex Mundi went (though the King of Chains wasn't there if I remember correctly).

One of my biggest gripes with the Invisibles is how the series sets Jack Frost up to be some kind of messiah figure but I was never quite convinced. How exactly did Jack change the world, make it a better place? Sure, he ate the archons, but after that what? I know he became a teacher or something at a school. But in the final issue we see him and Reynaud going to blow up the Technoccult building to stop the Invisibles game from being made (at least that's what's implied). This seems to be a destructive act that you would think Jack would have given up years ago after becoming enlightened. It seems like technoocult did more for waking people up to the supercontext then Jack did. It seems to me that King Mob makes a better messiah (maybe that's what makes Dane the messiah: He helped Mob see the error of his ways and showed Mob a new way to awaken people). I'd argue that Dane has more in common with the Blind Chessman/Gnostic Satan character: a messenger sent to help awaken Sophia (or Mob in this case). And Dane is linked to this character.

My other main problem is the whole age of Horus thing. The comic never shows us what this new age would be like at all. It tells us this age would be better but what proof do we have that it would be better then the previous age of Osirus? Maybe it would eventually be worse. And what about the people who didn't want to merge with the supercontext or had no knowledge of it? Was it right that they were forced into becoming giant brain tree whatevers? Was this the paradise the Invisibles talked about in Volume 1? I'm getting more questions then answers here. I think GM started to handle themes that were a little too epic for a mere 59 issue comic series.

I dunno, maybe I value individuality too highly.

And I swear to Pan, if one more person uses phrases like "4D perspective", "linear reading of the series", etc. I'm gonna scream
Maybe it's all bullshit and everyone's wrong. Or maybe everyone's right.
 
 
yawn - thing's buddy
14:57 / 19.11.02
Jack as messiah? Purpose was to unlock the key in each and every reader. For me, that was the biggest red herring in the book. Jack’s journey (and potential status) was representative of the reader’s enlightenment.

Anyway – I’m not the only one on this thread talking to myself.
 
 
yawn - thing's buddy
15:06 / 19.11.02
sypha - if I had the time, I'd cross reference yer posts cos I'm sure you're contradicting yourself - ie. your obsession with linear narrative and yer inability to grasp some fairly worked out themes, ideas etc.

but I canny be arsed and why should i spoil the n-dimensional party?
 
 
--
15:12 / 19.11.02
Fuck, I forget what the original question regarding this thread even was.
 
 
--
15:16 / 19.11.02
I'd be interested to know what themes and ideas you're relating to.

As for contradicting myself, I wouldn't be surprised. But considering all the contradictions within THE INVISIBLES itself, it's very fitting.
 
 
The Natural Way
15:20 / 19.11.02
And, Sypha, if one more person, with a quick knee-spasm, dismisses that kind of stuff (language which Morrison uses himself ALL THE FUCKING TIME IN THE INVISIBLES TO DESCRIBE WHAT'S GOING ON) without thinking about what the other poster meant by it and what it implies, then, well....I'll just give up and you guys can carry on the playing "Hey! Maybe Six is Tom is Mason is Chang!" game without anyone intruding who actually wants to think about the series above and beyond "Whatever you want to believe is true , maaaan!" Which is a fucking cop out.

And everyone was already part of the cosmic brainstem, anyway. It's all one mind - just a matter of recognising it. But I don't think you get what "unity" means in the invisibles, if you think it has anything to do with some kind of homogenous reality gloop. Horus is the name given to the starchild that's being born - it's not an "age", really.
 
 
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15:20 / 19.11.02
actually, if I seem to have an obsession with linear time, it's only because that's what I've been living in for 22 years now.

I'm starting to think you're all 4D beings existing outside of linear time. You seem to know what you're talking about first hand.
 
 
some guy
15:22 / 19.11.02
I think it's a disservice to criticize some readers' problems of linearity in the series by saying they need to understand the larger framework. There is no larger framework. Instead there are merely different readings - reading The Invisibles as metaphor produces X, reading it as magick produces Y. Reading it as a literal adventure series yields Z ... but not without some pretty big problems to sort through.

There shouldn't be a hierarchy of interpretations, and looking at the series through one lens should neither preclude nor necessarily inform looking at it through another lens.

It's fairly obvious Grant intended for the series to work on the literal level, and for the most part it works. Through this viewpoint, questions like "How did Jack eat the Archons?" etc. are valid. Sure, Jack is representative of the reader. But also, he's not.
 
  

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