Once I noticed I was on fire, I decided to relax and enjoy the fall

Elseworlds

I'm musing about an old style essay chock full of the crazy ranting typified by the last post: I'm not quite ready to do that yet, but I'm getting there. In the meantime, more comic books. Oh, and while I've suffered a pretty bad body blow this week, I am reassured in the prompt response of friends that I am not worthless, even though I feel so, and for that I'm thankful.

In a recent post over on the Howling Curmudgeons, I mentioned that the kind of comic knows as an Elseworld, a variation on the theme of 'What-If' stories first developed by Marvel Comics as a response to DC's old Imaginary Stories, comic books that varied from the main line and didn't affect the ongoing story of a particular comic book. These 'Elseworlds' are a mixed bag, but usually they follow one or two formulas: a fundamental change in the setting of a character (Superman's rocket ship lands in feudal Japan, Batman's family is killed by Jack the Ripper in Victorian England) or a variation on the origin of a character (Superman's rocket ship is found by Amish farmers, not the Kents; Bruce Wayne becomes the Green Lantern of Earth instead of Hal Jordan). Some of the best of these 'Elseworld' tales range a little further afield... Christopher Priest wrote an excellent story about what would have happened if 100,000 kryptonians had come to Earth instead of merely one, as one example... but in general, they follow this format. And it's not a bad format to follow, mind you: as Red Son and Speeding Bullets show you, there's a lot of storytelling mileage in merely exploring what would happen if someone other than the Kents raised the kryptonian infant.

However, just because I'm contrary, and because it's 6:24 in the morning on Thanksgiving day and I feel like posting something, I'm going to discuss other possible uses of the Elseworld concept. I know I'm leaving quite a lot of them out of the above general recap, including some of the best (and some of the worst) but it really can't be helped. Here, however, are a few ideas for what I'd like to do if given an Elseworld or two.

Dr. Wayne - okay, imagine you're a young child who sort of hero worships your father and idealizes your mother, and you one night see them gunned down in cold blood by a mugger. Now certainly there's a lot of resonance in the idea of a solemn graveside vow to avenge their deaths, and the premise makes for one of the best origins in comics.

But what if the young boy's grief manifests in another manner? What if he swears to emulate his father, to do his best to heal and safeguard life, obsessed with the idea that had it been he who had been shot instead, his father could have saved his life? It's certainly not hard to imagine that furious energy dedicated towards medical excellence instead of ruthless revenge, and a pretty good story could be made out of angry young genius Dr. Bruce Wayne and his clashes with his superiors, his desire to heal not only the sick and wounded but Gotham itself? You could go the way of the medical vigilante ala Dr. Mid Nite with this one, but I almost think it would be more interesting if Dr. Wayne never dons a vigilante guise... I'm under the impression that a fascinating story could be derived from a crusading doctor who wants to use his gifts to help others, inspired by a tragedy in his own life and his family history. Could a rich doctor with a vast family fortune do as much or even more to help the people of Gotham as a man in a pair of tights?

The Blazing World - Imagine a world with a star so bright that the Guardians of the Universe can't send a Green Lantern into the star system, because the intense yellow light from the star washes out the power rings within the zone of habitable planets. As a result, the system has become, to paraphrase Obi-Wan Kenobi, a hive of scum and villainy where the most sinister and evil criminals converge, led ultimately by renegade ex-Green Lantern Sinestro of Korugar, whose Qwardian power ring is of course unaffected by yellow light. As a result, the Guardians locate a suitable replacement for a Green Lantern: young Dev-Em of Krypton, a malcontent unsatisfied with the way of life he's been brought up in. (You can do this with almost any version of Krypton you like, really, whether it be Byrne's sterile, antiseptic Krypton or the more silver age version Mark Waid used in Birthright or even the classic silver age version itself, but for the sake of discussion we'll assume it's Byrne's) Realizing that the flaw in Kryptonians that renders them dead upon leaving its atmosphere can be counteracted by bathing them in intense solar radiation beforehand, Dev-Em is recruited by the Guardians to go deep undercover in the Blazing World, using his ever-growing Kryptonian powers to oppose the criminal gangs, dangerous life-forms evolved to thrive in the intense heat and harsh conditions, insane Daxamite war-criminal Sodum Yat and eventually the mad Korugarian and his power ring. Will Dev-Em try and use brawn or will he play the various factions off each other? Well, I didn't decide to use Dev-Em because I wanted a noble, good-hearted sort. I'm pretty sure watching him subtly turn Sodum Yat against Sinestro and then finally revealing his own solar-based powers in a final confrontation with the weakened victor of that conflict would be exactly the kind of thing Dev-Em would do.

Comes Great Freedom - No, I'm not limiting myself to DC. Consider this a 'What If?' if you like. Anyway, what if Peter Parker got bitten by the radioactive spider, developed strange powers, and immediately told his uncle Ben all about it? And what if he and his uncle Ben came up with a way for Peter to make use of his powers, help a lot of people, and make a hell of a lot of money for college? Imagine celebrity Peter "Spider-Man" Parker, doing stunt exhibitions, donating time and money to charities and 'Make a wish foundaion" style events, making movies, maybe even fighting crime on the side while providing for his elderly aunt and uncle? He's good looking (even as a dweeb, Pete was never bad looking, otherwise Betty Brant would never have noticed him), he's rich, famous, confident, he and Johnny Storm date supermodels together... would Spider-Man be as interesting a concept if it made Peter's life better instead of worse? And is it worthwhile to use your gifts to benefit yourself, even if you do give back in the process? Why shouldn't Peter profit by his new abilities? And as the Marvel Age progresses and anti-mutant hysteria begins to spread, will there eventually be suspicions that the Spider-Man is one of them?

Old Gods - This one could be an Elseworld or not, but I'm including it here because it's always interested me. Technically speaking, it would work best as a multi-issue crossover between DC and Marvel, an Elseworld/What If project.

Thor leaves the Avengers and travels backwards through time and space with the host of Asgard to the plain Virdgirthir, where Ragnarok is fated to take place. Alongside the rest of the gods, he engages in the final war, and the titanic clash splits space and worlds, raging across the planets of Earth's solar system in the unimaginable past. The asteroid belt is formed from the shattering of Asgard, and the tree Yggdrasil which exists in-between space and time sheltering the worlds in its boughs manages to preserve the primordial beginnings of life in its boughs. Meanwhile, fired into the void where the dragon Nidhogg once gnawed the roots of the tree, the power of the destroyed gods begins to coalesce into one planet, a seething cauldron that eventually forms into a world of its own, a living, verdant, vibrant world with a host of men and gods of their own. Eventually the cycle repeats itself as these reborn gods make war on one another, each creating a terrible weapon or tactic... one god creates Mageddon, the Ultimate Destroyer, while another births the infant universe, another the demons of the wheel, bell and jar, weapons of corruption... one of these gods, a god of light and solar fire, conceives of a weapon system of infinite subtlety and begins tinkering with the building blocks of life that survived in the boughs of the world-ash Yggdrasil, creating the beginnings of a world of living weapons to rival the gods themselves in power, but the war consumes their world in a seething cauldron of annihilation and only one god, terribly weakened, endures the destruction by planting himself in the heart of an ancient red star.

The destructive fury of the conflict creates two worlds where once there were one. The aborted attempt to create living weapons out of the seeds of life on Yggdrasil releases forth Ash and Embla onto the surface of the Earth and causes the great Ginnungagap to form, and the great cow mother Audumla who would lick Ymir from the ice, and lick from Ymir's icy form Buri, Bor, Bestla and the other ancestors of the gods of Asgard. So rises the Aesir and Vanir, while an infinity away in the void past the nine worlds that Snorri would remember rise Apokalips and New Genesis, birthplace of the newest realm of gods, and while dread Darkseid and wise Izaya the Inheritor struggle with their natures and rise to power, sleeping in the eternal darkness drags forth the ultimate annihilator itself, Mageddon the destroyer, and sleeping in the heart of a red star the last god of the great war waits for his army to rise, the army of Rao the Sun, capable of converting the power of the anti-sun at Mageddon's heart. The sleeping god watches his Krypton spin in the void and give homage to him and waits, for that is not dead which can eternal life and in strange aeons even Rao may rise.

That should be enough for now, I think. Happy Thanksgiving to my fellow citizens of the United States, and thank you for your indulgence to those of you from elsewhere.

I made this post exactly one year ago

Obviously, things were different in my head then. Still, I think it's one of my best.

Bottled Demon

When I was much younger and therefore seemingly protected by a phalanx of guardian spirits (who really earned their pay with me, let me tell you) I used to do things just because they seemed interesting to me at the time. For instance, I once spray-painted several pigs bright gold, possibly because I'd been reading Norse Mythology the week before and I wanted to see what Gullinbursti would look like. If he looked anything like a sow that had several gold streaks of pain down its haunches, then I know what he looked like. Similarly, I once climbed up the side of a collapsed stone building just so I could stand in the remains of the top window and stare down into the ruins of the first floor, which had collapsed into the basement. Had I fallen, I would have dropped close to fifty feet into rock-strewn darkness.

My most famous moment of explorative idiocy was when I decided that if I hooked up a watch to an arc welder and the battery charger we used to charge the tractor batteries, I could make a time machine. As you might expect, it didn't work...I half-melted the watch, fused its interior mechanism, and blew out the transformer that connected our property to the power grid, however. I got in massive trouble, of course, and I learned that in no way is it possible to make a time machine by hooking a watch up to a heap of juice.

Since that time, I have maintained several of my fascinations. I am obsessed with the passage of time, with the often forgotten and seemingly lost past. I am fascinated by the power and even the pageantry of electricity, the dancing discharge of sparks we run the world with today. Electricity is the bottled demon that we trap to power our world.

Is it something more?

We are all aware, of course, that to create life in the laboratory is an impossibility. Yet this is precisely what was done in 1837 by an amateur scientist named Andrew Crosse - not once, but repeatedly, under the strictest conditions; moreover, his experiments were repeated successfully by a member of the London Electrical Society who followed Crosse's instructions to the letter. One result was that Cross became the most hated man in England; clergymen denounced him as a blasphemer, local villagers damaged his property, and one vicar started to perform a ceremony of exorcism from a hill overlooking Crosse's house....He had become fascinated with electricity while still a schoolboy, and spent most of his adult life experimenting with it. In 1814, when Crosse was thirty, he had delivered a lecture on his experiments, and there is a reasonable certainty that it was attended by the poet Shelly and by his future wife Mary - if this is so, then it may have inspired Mary to write her novel Frankenstein in 1816, and there would be some justification for describing Crosse - as one modern biographer has - as 'the man who was Frankenstein'.
Colin Wilson with Damon Wilson, The Encyclopedia of Unsolved Mysteries

Electricity, of course, had been known to the ancients in the form of lightning and sparks. But in the early nineteenth century, this phenomenon became the central focus of physics research. In particular, the discovery that passing a current of wire across a compass needle can make the needle spin riveted the attention of the physics community. Conversely, moving a bar magnet across a wire can induce an electric current in the wire. (This is called Faraday's Law, and today all electric generators and transformers - and hence much of the foundation of modern technology - are based on this principle.) To Riemann, this phenomenon indicated that electricity and magnetism are somehow manifestations of the same force. Riemann was excited by the new discoveries and was convinced he could give a mathematical explanation that would unify electricity and magnetism.
Michio Kaku, Hyperspace

What does Andrew Crosse's electrical experimentation have to do with Riemann's theorizing? Well, we'll get around to that. For now, we must keep in mind Riemann's dictim, all forces are a consequence of geometry. That one will be coming into play fairly soon. The experiment that earned Crosse the hatred of the vicars and the scorn of the mob was at its heart a simple one, based on earlier work he'd done. His original experiments had involved passing electrical current through water that had come from an underground cavern. The current caused crystals of calcium carbonate (the same material formed by water flow in caves...essentially, the building blocks of stalagmites and stalactites) to form on the electrodes. Deciding to take the experiment even further, Crosse then made glass using ground-up flint and potassium carbonate and then made a solution of the glass in hydrochloric acid. He then passed this fluid through a porous iron oxide rock charged by a battery, hoping it would form glass crystals. Instead, over the course of weeks, the iron oxide began to form small bumps, and these bumps began to grow small filaments. After a while, Crosse examined these bumps and found that they were moving, and under a microscope saw that they were in fact small insect-like creatures, some with six legs, some with eight. Of course, seeing no other possibility but that some strange brand of insect had laid eggs in his iron oxide rocks, he repeated the experiment...this time making sure to superheat the glass to iron-melting temperatures and dropping it into boiled distilled water, sealing it away in an airtight container.

And again he found tiny creatures where no creatures should have been. Later, W.H. Weeks of Sandwich would replicate these experiments by following detailed reports on them filed by Crosse with the London Electrical Society. This led to Crosse being singled out for abuse by those who believed he was trying to take the place of God. Soon, in an attempt to defend Cross, Sir Michael Faraday himself (the person who the Law our friend Riemann was bedeviled by was named for) stated that he, too, had duplicated Crosse's experiments and he, too, had produced similar little creatures. Over the next hundred or so years, various explanations were brought forth as to how these organisms could have been formed...insect contamination, eggs riding to earth inside meteoric iron...but in the end, it remains unsolved.

Of course, in modern times scientists have created complex molecules inside sealed containers which held an approximation of the earth's primordial atmosphere, and have come to the basic conclusion that what they were doing approximated the actual formation of life on this planet. However, none of them created pseudo-arthropods in their experiments. Furthermore, unlike them, Cross had no idea what the primordial atmosphere of the earth was, nor in fact was he trying to approximate it: he was simply trying to grow glass crystals on iron oxide. So from whence came the tiny insects? Crosse in his time would substitute copper nitrate, copper sulphate, iron sulphate and other substances for the iron oxide and still formed the small creatures. What were they, and how could they have been created by simple electrical discharge?

Here's one possibility to consider. What if they evolved the old fashioned way, over billions of years...inside Crosse's sealed containers? What if the scientist, so fascinated with electrical forces, had managed to do something even more amazing than it seemed? What if the bottled demon twisted the rules of the universe on him?

Ernetti told Brune he had discussed the matter with a number of other physicists. Some of them had been quite interested. Little by little, he had assembled a team of scientists. The team had undertaken to carry out in the utmost secrecy one of the most extraordinary projects ever conceived by the mind of man: to build a machine that could penetrate back into the mists of time and recapture the sights and sounds of mankind's vanished past. Their efforts had not been in vein. They had built the chronovisor. It had extended its sensory apparatus back into the past, and brought back photos and recordings from times which were no longer there.
Peter Krassa, Father Ernetti's Chronovisor

As you might expect from a Catholic Priest who invented (or claimed to invent) a device that allowed him to witness events in the distant past, Father Pellegrino Ernetti used the chronovisor to watch the crucifixion of Christ. Apparently there were a few details messed up in the Bible, but on the whole it was generally correct. Also, the Vatican chose to disassemble the device rather than use it further because of the danger it posed...since the chronovisor could peer back into any point in time and produce sound and images of the past, it was the ultimate in surveillance devices. Nothing could be hid from it. It was supposedly used to find the rest of the Dead Sea Scrolls once the original goatherd found the first. And if you're cynical enough to believe that if the Vatican had such a device (Ernetti claimed to have shown a film of the Crucifixion to Pope Pius XII) that it would never, ever disassemble so potent a weapon of surveillance...well, let's just say you're not the first person that's occurred to. Ernetti would later claim to have used the chronovisor to reconstitute the text of Thyestes, a play written by Quintus Ennius that today survives only in fragments. Well, unless Ernetti's reconstitution really was the original as he watched it through the chronovisor.

Aside from claiming that the Vatican, for the good of humanity, had disassembled the chronovisor, Ernetti was remarkably close-mouthed as to how the chronovisor worked. It supposedly had antennae and a component that could somehow tell the chronovisor how to find light and sound across time and space, and a bank of recording devices. It was an electrical device, in short, that could somehow record the impressions of light and sound that no longer existed.

Now, even I have a really hard time with certain portions of this story, and I'm going into this assuming that it's all bunk but fun bunk to play with for an afternoon. But setting aside the idea that a working device that could film events taking place in the past was supposedly set aside out of concern for humanity instead of used by the same folks that brought us the Spanish Inquisition and who may well have helped Josef Mengele escape from Germany following WWII, let us consider the chronovisor. How could this device possibly do what it was said to do? How could it see into the past?

Both quantum theory and relativity theory permit time travel, of one kind or another. And anything that is acceptable to both those theories, no matter how paradoxical that something may seem, has to be taken seriously. Time travel, indeed, is an integral part of some of the stranger features of the particle world, where you can even get something for nothing, if you are quick about it.
John Gribbin, In Search of Schroedinger's Cat

The idea of a physical eternity - an eternity of matter in motion governed by eternal laws - has come down to us through mechanistic science, but it is rooted in far older traditions, with origins more mystical than scientific. The initution of a timeless state of being, a reality where nothing alters, has been described, in so far as it can be described, by mystics throughout the centuries. For many who have experienced it, this vision of a changeless reality has been so powerful and so self-evidently true that they have concluded that the changing world of everyday experience is somehow less real. The impermanence of things in this world is an appearance or reflection or illusion. Underlying everything is the true reality which neither comes into being nor passes away.
Rupert Sheldrake, The Presence of the Past

Electricity, electromagnetism is a force. And all forces are a consequence of geometry. As Kaku puts it, Riemann concluded that electricity, magnetism and gravity are caused by the crumpling of our three-dimensional universe in the unseen fourth dimension. Thus a "force" has no independent life of its own; it is only the apparent effect caused by the distortion of geometry. In essence, electricity is our observable universe coming into conflict with the higher, unseen, unseeable fourth physical dimension that exists alongside, as much as that word can be used, the ones we can perceive. These fundamental forces exist because of the interplay of dimensional intersections, they are the symptoms of those very dimensions in contact, like earthquakes are the symptoms of tectonic plates shifting against each other. To a degree we can observe this effect with gravity. We already know that matter and energy are, in essence, made up of the same fundamental particles...it's the basis for the raw power of the atomic and hydrogen bombs. We also know that if you concentrate sufficient matter in one area, it has a deformative effect on space...the infamous rubber sheet syndrome expanded out into three dimensions. Black holes are, in effect, the consequence of too much matter (which is the same, ultimately, as too much energy) causing so extreme a spatial distortion that light cannot escape them. In essence, to use Riemann's analogy, the light attempting to escape appears to be moving in a straight line, but space itself is deformed so that the light's straight path is curved back on itself, much as a man walking in a straight line on the surface of the planet would eventually find himself back where he started. He is walking in a straight line in two dimensions, but taking a curved path in three, just as the light in the black hole is travelling in a straight line that is curved in four dimensions, arriving back where it started and unable to escape. So we know that these forces that are in fact a consequence of the interplay of dimensions can in fact have a distorting effect on space...and we know that if you distort space enough, you can distort time.

The technique for time travel allowed by relativity theory is very similar. It involves distorting the fabric of space-time so that in a local region of space-time the time axis points in a direction equivalent to one of the three space directions in the undistorted region of space time. One of the other space directions takes on the role of time, and by swapping space for time such a device would make true time travel, there and back again, possible.
John Gribbin, In Search of Schroedinger's Cat

Perhaps the most profound of the new natural philosophies is the theory of the implicate order proposed by the physicist David Bohm. According to this theory, there are three major realms of existence: the explicate order, the implicate order, and a source or ground beyond both. The explicate order is the world of seemingly separate and isolated "thing-events" in space and time. The implicate order is a realm in which all things and events are enfolded in a total wholeness and unity, which as it were underlies the explicate order of the world we experience through our senses.
Rupert Sheldrake, The Presence of the Past

Consider the fundamental forces of existence...electromagnetism, grativation, nuclear forces...as the flow from the implicate order into the explicate order, the holomovement proposed by Bohm, generated by the interrelation of the two. Now consider the build-up of any of those forces in a concentrated area, the distortion waves created by the dam of the holomovement. Sufficient force to create 'waves' in three dimensional reality strong enough to flip the time axis...in effect, you can surf through time on the distortional waves of implicate/explicate interaction, riding the expression of extradimensional geometry forward and back in time. It would require a vast amount of energy to move a human being along this temporal axis, but it requires remarkably little energy to so move light: indeed, according to some, light does this naturally. A photon going forward in time is the same as an antiphoton going backward in time, but an antiphoton is a photon, so a photon going forward in time is the same as a photon going backward in time. Light interacts with electrons and positrons (aka anti-electrons, positively charged electrical particles...and as such, consequences of the geometry of implicate and explicate interaction) in the same manner, just in different temporal directions. Light, therefore, travels backwards and forwards in time with relative ease when prompted to by the electrical demon. This means that the chronovisor is at least feasible when considered properly. And this allows us to make another leap, and consider the phenomenon of psychometry, which is basically when a human being claims to be able to psychically sense events having taken place in the past.

A few years after Andrew Crosse experimented with electricity and found himself confronted with a mystery, a young French woman named Angelique Cotton found herself capable of summoning electromagnetic energies at will. For ten weeks, she could magnetize furniture and spin compasses. Years later, in 1877, Caroline Clare, a seventeen year old girl in London, Ontario, would become so magnetically charged that silverware would stick to her skin and her skin would discharge electricity...and she began having visions of places she had never seen nor been to. Confronted with these electrical people, we begin to wonder if it is possible for the human body to generate many thousands of times its normal current of bioelectrical energy? And if it is so possible, does it then follow that some of that electrical energy could be diverted to the purpose of generating distortion waves in the interplay between implicate and explicate orders...in essence, the 'ether' of nineteenth century science dressed in new quantum clothing? What Madame Blavatsky borrowed and called the Akashic Record could be nothing more than unusually active brains firing random pulses of electrons and positrons in order to alter the direction and flow of light...possibly even creating sufficient microsecond distortions in space and time to allow sound waves to pass through, which would allow them to hear and not just see the past.

However, once we consider the idea of using bioelectricity in this fashion, other, more subconscious uses for it come to mind. The problem of Crosse and Faraday's 'lightning bugs' comes to mind. How is it they were able to produce these results?

I am sorry that I Mislead You in My Previous Missive. True, enough, such a form of Levitation has been accomplished as described. It is also a Very commonly observed reaction of certain Metals to Certain Fields surrounding a current, This field being used for that purpose. Had Farraday concerned himself about the Mag. field surrounding an Electric Current, We today Would NOT exist or if We did exist, our present Geo-Political situation would have the very timebombish, ticking off towards Destruction, atmosphere that Now exists. Alright, Alright! The .result" was complete invisibility of a ship, Destroyer type, and all of its crew, While at Sea.
Carlos Allende/Carl Allen

Ah yes, the Philadelphia Experiment. That venerable hoax which told the tale of the USS Eldridge, a destroyer that was supposed to be rendered invisible by electromagnetic means and which instead...well, instead, nothing really happened. It was a sham. Carl Allen made the whole thing up. Having thrown a bone to the reality-minded among us, let us now play with what didn't happen. In the letter, Allen/Allende alleges that in an attempt to use Faraday's field theory of electromagnetism (the same theory that inspired Riemann) to cause a solid object to become invisible, the Navy instead sent the ship to...well, they sent it somewhere and when it came back some of the crew was dead, some were fused with the bulkheads and floors of the ship, and some were wavering between time and no-time, unstuck in space and fading in and out of sight, unable to truly connect to the flow of time as the people around them experienced it. In essence, they had been rotated along the time axis and then shoved sideways, reappearing hundreds of miles away from their original location and with various consequences from their rubber-band like snap into and out of the explicate order we call reality. Time and space, you see, don't exist over there. Even when they return, at a moment's notice a runaway emotion can trigger becoming 'stuck in the green', a sense of displacement as time seems to speed up or slow down for the victim. They have been left with their time axis permanently wobbling.

So imagine the following. More than a hundred years before the Philadelphia Experiment, Crosse (and later Faraday himself) is occupied with his electrical experiments. His own natural bioelectric field interacts with that of the sealed containers, and Crosse actually creates a time dilation effect within his experiment. In essence, he hyperaccelerates time, shoves the whole works through the green as Allende would put it, and so allows for the evolution of a silicate based life-form within that airless, unearthly environment. The creatures he creates can not be reliably replicated because only those with an equal imaginative facility (in essence, the will to cross the explicate/implicate divide, to access Akashic non-space) yoked to an equal familiarity with and possible exposure to electrcity, avatars of the dawning electromagnetic age (like Faraday) could possibly hope to recreate his results. You have to love the bottled demon if you want to coax it to revealing its secrets. I'd be remiss here if I didn't mention Terence McKenna's machine-elves of the emergent machine-mind in hyperspace...as discussed here, and the shamanic nature of some of the pioneers of electromagnetic invention. One wonders if Tesla's experiments in broadcast power were really an attempt to find a way to ride the wave distortion created by the implicate and the explicate communicating through holomovement? If Bohm is right, and the implicate order contains within it all that is, has been and even ever will be, a place of no time where all things interpolate and are constantly revised and rewritten by the recursion of the explicate order back into implication, then those who can create the electrical distortion waves can access an almost infinite storehouse, can know everything that can be looked upon. Like Ernetti's supposed fear for the chronovisor, there can be no secrets from an avatar of the electrical intelligence. Time and space are open to the highly charged, the entire universe a database of pure energy riding backwards and forwards in time, a network infinitely more sophisticated and inclusive than any primitive computer system. The universe itself, all space and even all time, is just the interface for the implicate...that non place where all 'thing-events' pass into and out of each other, allowing for any explicate moment to be called up and watched.

This begs the question: does the bottled demon have a will of its own?

The history of the poltergeist shows many electro-magnetic interferences, from dimming lights to gadgets running without power, as seen in a famous case at Rosenheim, Bavaria, in 1967. Translations of the investigation by Professor H. Bender, Dr. Andreas Resch and others can be found in The Journal of Paraphysics (vols. 3 and 4). Interferences with telephones, electric power and lights were centered on a girl, Annemarie Schneider, and the phenomenon stimulated by her presence included many of the "normal" mechanical tricks of the poltergeist repertoire, like bulbs unscrewing themselves from sockets, drawers opening, pictures rotating on the wall, etc.
Bob Rickard and John Michell, Unexplained Phenomena

In morphic resonance theory, the laws of physics are habitual: they begin with a few simple expressions of an action or axiom, and build in complexity over time as more and more axioms are expressed. In essence, physics in this scheme is evolutionary, abandoning older means of expressing holomovement from the implicate to the explicate as newer ones arise. What the method of selection would be for this evolution of the universe is difficult to say...it could well be thought of as the universe attempting to imagine itself into being, much as in the Qabbala we see Ain becoming Ain Sof and then Ain Sof Aur, nothingness into boundlessness into limitless light...the light of Ain Sof Aur filling the universe and creating both the Emanations, the Spheres of the Sefiroth and the Qlippothic Negations, the shadows. So too can we imagine the backwards and forwards traveling photon/anti-photons of the subatomic world as possibly nothing more than vibrations along a superstring that can run both 'forward' and 'back' as we perceive time. It becomes possible to see the wave distortions of the implicate/explicate holomovement as those vibrations themselves, calling all time and space, matter and energy into existence. And as these vibrations do so, they interact with themselves as well, sometimes creating consonance and sometimes creating dissonance as more and more vibrations are created. In effect, the 'sound' of the superstring grows ever more complex. When beings with minds first came into existence, they gave the concept of mind itself to the cacophony, and in so doing may well have thought the bottled demon a mind. After all, there are storm gods throughout our history, wielders of thunder and lightning, and they are rarely totally benevolent. Perhaps the spirits of the electric tomorrow which has become the electric today simply build upon the preconceptions of the minds they encounter...in which case, is it any wonder that a Tesla or a Crosse might well experience them in ways others simply are not equipped to? When working with a mind like Faraday, you have a much larger platform to base yourself off of...poor Angelique Cotton simply couldn't imagine the kinds of ideas for electricity that Crosse the acolyte of the bottled demon could.

An interesting side-note: in addition to his expertise in archaic music and his supposed building of a device that could see through time, Father Pellegrino Ernetti was an exorcist. One wonders if he ever drove any of his diabolic opposition into confinement, and then made the mistake of asking questions...just like Edison and his ghost telephone, trying to contact spirits he couldn't really understand. One imagines, for a brief moment of fancy, all of modern physics being based on the lie of some long-dead capturer of entities, a confiner of those manifestations of non-space and space colliding. Was Newton a ghost hunter? Did Francis Bacon call spirits from the vasty deep? We've expressed recently the idea that the gods could be seen as complicated formulas, incantations to draw down their attributes into the mortal world...well, physics is dependent on very complicated math at times. Does the bottled demon lie coiled in numbers, sleeping in his millions upon millions of altars like Yahweh in the tabernacle, the televisions and computers and appliances that pay the electrical gods homage as they bend time and space for their chosen ones?

We live in a world shot through and suffused by electromagnetic energy. In effect, we have gathered all around us like garlands the forces generated by worlds in collision, dimensions flowing forward and back into each other, the fury of the waves cresting between the transient, temporal world we exist in and the otherworld, the changeless non-place that is the template and the backstage and the medium of all things seen and unseen. A mere century and a half ago, we did not have coiled metal strung from house to house so that the spark could flow into every home. We did not have devices that broadcast sound converted to energy, passing through our bodies the assonant, dissonant song of the lightning flash. Force is a consequence of geometry, and we are therefore altering our geometry in ways subtle and gross and have been doing so in ways unheard of since the dawn of time. We swim in an electric medium. We dance with the bottled demon, who can see the past and predict the future, who accelerates time to suit concepts we could never think yet which could not be thought without us. We are the processors of the Akashic machine, the electrical people, and inside our blood and our bones, we are the bottle for the demon.

More attempts to keep from going insane

Since many of you have been coming over from Tara's site, yes, she and I have broken up. It's not mutual, but I'd like it to be amicable: she's been in my life for three years now and I think the world of her. That's all I really want to say about that.

As for the rest of my life, well, it's going about as well as you can expect for a man who's been in a depressed coma for a year and who just kind of got the last bullet in the eyes: here's hoping I can make something good happen again soon to take the edge off. Anyone got a gig out there for a pretty damn talented and inventive writer who's down on his luck?

Also, I forgot to thank Paul over at Kiplog for mentioning my book and my site recently. As you might expect, it's been a really shitty week, and it was good to get a little praise.

Another entry designed to keep this blog from sinking beneath the black waves of infinity and into the stygian depths

First off, thanks to The Comic Treadmill and Mike Sterling's Progressive Ruin for the links. If anyone else has linked to me recently and I haven't noticed, I apologize... my near-total nervous collapse is taking up a lot more of my time than I expected. I've managed to fuck up three times this week on a project Pete and I were supposed to be working on, so you understand how messed up I am and all. Mea culpa, mea maxima culpa and all that. Anyway, email or comment if I should have noticed anything, okay?

In between musing about a possible role for Saul of Tarsus/St. Paul as an early Roman infiltrator into the various nationalistic religious movements in intertestimental/post-Christ's death Judea (equal parts The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross, The Dead Sea Scrolls Deception and Phillip K. Dick's Iron Prison House) and worrying about other things, I started musing on how anyone, anyone could be expected to do an interesting (to me) storyline on the X-Men in the wake of Grant Morrison. While musing, I came up with some ideas... I don't claim that they'd be all that spectacular, but I figure I might as well share them with you.

First off, isn't it time to really have fun playing with the idea of mutants? I mean, it's not hard science anyway, so why not mess about a bit? I have always wondered why, when in comic books some mutant or another comes up with the idea of supplanting Homo Sapiens Sapiens with Homo Sapiens Superior (and really, who got that classification gig?) that no mutant ever got the idea of, well, fucking the human race into obsolecence. It's a lot easier for the inevitable mutant takeover if humanity is simply absorbed into its mutant sub-race, yes? And honestly, if someone tells you that you can have kids who can see through walls or shoot laser beams out of their eyes, at least some people would go for it. Imagine a sperm and egg bank that specialized in mutant stock: they could probably write their own ticket if they were discrete enough. I'd like to see more people thinking that mutants are cool and that being a mutant (or being the parent of one) might not be so bad after all: maybe a story where someone enterprising villain discovers Magneto's old lab notes and starts marketing the process by which he made the Savage Land Mutates? Kids could run out and get themselves superpowers for the right price, like body modifiaction times a thousand, and all as part of a plant to gain so much social acceptance for mutantkind that no one could publicly advocate a Sentinel program ever again.

Of course, if it turned out he or she was using the Terrigen mist and had to dispose of the subjects who got Alpha Primitivized, you could always go back to square one, but I'd like it better if the new mutates created by this stayed as a social factor.

Another thing I think I'd play with is the idea that, technically speaking, each mutant is his or her own species even as they are also clearly not a separate species from humankind (mutants and humans have had children together, as have mutants and inhumans for that matter, meaning that the inhumans aren't a seperate species at least) and the whole idea of how evolution and mutation intersect. I mean, technically speaking, mutation is the means by which the product of evolution selects, but there are plenty of mutations in nature that have no real viability in that they don't allow said mutant to breed and thrive and pass his or her DNA down to succeeding generations. Technically speaking, how does the ability to shoot laser beams out of your eyes translate to the old 'survival of the fittest' especially in a modern situation? Sure, to a tribe of hunter/gatherers, it would have been a positive boon, and I'd expect a whole bunch of laser-beam eyed savannah-walkers before too long, but does it translate to getting a lot of child-producing booty in a society with birth control and television? Are women going to want to have your baby just because you can turn to stone? Obviously my earlier idea indicated that I thought some people would, yes, for powers like those: but what about Jimmy, who can make plants change color, or Sally with her ultra-hard and sharp fingernails that she can't cut? It doesn't help that in the comics, genetic transmission of mutant powers isn't straightforward: in real life, a mutant animal that has offspring will most likely transmit forward the same basic mutation, for instance a black panther has more black panther children (technically, after the first individual leopard was born with a melanistic pattern the offspring it produced weren't mutants anymore, but this is a quibble to my main point), it doesn't have green, yellow and hairless panther children, each one born with a wholly new and different mutation. Yet in comics, the children of mutants can have exactly that happen, such as when the mutant Quicksilver and the inhuman Crystal have a child and that child carries neither the mutation of the father nor the genetic potential of its mother, but is rather born entirely human. Clearly, comic book mutation is all sorts of fucked up, and if I was writing X-Men I'd clearly have fun with Hank McCoy trying to figure out why it's all so fucked up. Can you say 'team of X-Men shrunk down to sub-molecular size to examine mutant DNA and determining that there's some kind of alien civilization living on it, a multi-dimensional doppler shifting society of beings from Bohm's implicate order that are living as hitch-hikers on the inert introns of human DNA, and some of them have so 'over-developed' their hosts that they've started the expression of mutant powers as a kind of combined microscopic/extradimensional version of global warming'? I know you can. (What's really cool about this is it could lead into an exploration of the supposed 'sixfolded dimension' theory in some quantum singularities and the idea that the various Marvel Comics Microverses aren't really subatomic at all, but rather curled up inside the six impacted dimensions of our universe, like the irritants sealed up in pearls, and that all mutants are gaining their powers because new 'microverses' are being created inside their DNA.)

I don't know why the idea that mutant powers come from the overcolonization and overdevelopment of our DNA by extradimensional realities so appealing.

Finally, I would throw out everyone except Cyclops and start over. Well, okay, I'd keep Hank McCoy in a lab somewhere, and I'd have Angel dating Jean and Iceman would pop in from time to time, but other than that I'd totally start the team over from scratch. Why? Because that's what they did in Giant Size X-Men and by God it's what I would do. All new characters. No one you've ever heard of before. And by God my X-Men would do shit like explore reality, fight sentient islands (why has there never been a six part epic storyline where Krakatoa the Living Island, the Living Monolith, Ego the Living Planet and Epoch, the child of Eon all took part) and otherwise enjoy being the X-Men. Why would I keep Cyclops?

Because he shoots goddamn death rays from his eyes. Well, also because I dig the character, and think the more weird-ass shit you do with microverses and implicate dimensions folded in microspace, the more you need an unflappable type as leader.

Well, that's it for me for now. See you around.

Rather than go mad...

Some random thoughts that are pinballing through my head:

Idea #1: an interesting approach to super-speed in a comic book would be to play with the idea of perception: does the speedster's brain/mind speed up commeasureately with his or her body? This is sometimes played with as an explanation for 'time stop' style powers, but consider that one of the most common tricks of characters like the Flash is to run around the planet in an eyeblink: certainly, considering that he's said to be able to approach the speed of light, that's not a terribly difficult feat, yes?

But think of it this way: if the Flash's perception increases as his speed does so that he appears to himself to be running at a speed he can percieve and adapt to, then running around the Earth will take, to him, as long as it would anyone else. We're talking months at least, even considering that the Flash can run around or through obstacles and can even run indefinitely on water. In the comics, clearly Flash doesn't have this problem, but I think it would be a fascinating way to limit a character: imagine portraying him as stuck for weeks running across North America while his teammates fly, teleport and so on... to them, it took a few moments but even though he gets there first, our super-speedster experiences the run across the continent as an interminable jog last days and days, perhaps taking the time to read a book (assuming he has some means of protecting the book from air friction, of course, as one assumes he or she is protected, elsewise crispy critter or asphixiation from lack of air... perhaps the speedster actually speeds up a pocket around himself to his own level, so that the air is moving fast enough for him to breathe it without bursting into flames itself, or perhaps he doesn't need oxygen) and maybe even stopping to nap at super-speed, if that's possible.

You can keep going with the Flash all day, really: his feet should punch holes in anything he runs on, he should be creating at the very least sonic booms everywhere he goes if not hypersonic air wakes, it's hard to imagine any substance that could provide sufficient traction to allow him to use his feet to thrust himself forward at those velocities... any physicist could tell you in great detail just how impossible the Flash is, of course. (Being that he's a comic book character, he's in good company there.) Still, I find the rest of that stuff explainable compared to the idea of the perception lag: does the speedster have a dual brain set-up going on, a hyperspeed autopilot that pays attention to obstacles and manuvers him or her around at super-high speeds and a lower-level that allows her or him to percieve what's going on without it seeming to him to take months to run the thousands of miles that they run on a general basis all the time in his or her head? It'd be interesting to play around with, I think.

Idea #2: The Sumerian god Qingu, who was the consort of Tiamat after Apsu died, was divided up by either Marduk or Asshur (depending on who told the myth, Assyrians or Babylonians) and his blood used to create the human race. Now, I'm sure someone else has already thought of this, but it seems to me that Qingu makes an excellent candidate for first vampire, if it's his blood in all of our veins: I can just imagine a resurrected Qingu stalking the land of ancient Sumer, trying to restore all of his lost blood and in the process leaving behind drained corpses filled with his dread hunger and themselves seeking to batten upon fresh supplies of the precious fluid. It's even possible to imagine that Qingu hasn't actually come back to physical existence. Instead, imagine that the undead essence of the dead god infested some unfortunate grave robber in whatever blasted ruin Marduk lay his corpse to rest in, draining the poor bastard's blood off into some Qlippothic level of reality or another, Qingu as a kind of entropic disease that consumes the blood and spreads via fluid contact, so as each new victim drained the blood out of another, the Qingu-hunger filled him or her with nothingness and animated the resulting corpse, sending it forth to feed on more blood in an attempt to restore the dead god to life. I might come back to this idea... I was going to do something for Halloween with it... or I may not.

Idea #3 - Remember those old Kirby monster comics? You know the ones I mean. I was thinking about them, and the true crime, and romance, and horror comics of the 30's, 40's and 50's... the ones before the superhero renaissance came along and wiped everything else out. Stuff like Boy's Ranch, as messed up as that was. I wonder why no one tries to do stuff like that anymore? Okay, so this isn't so much an idea as an excuse to link to stuff. Sue me.

That's enough for now. Take it easy, everyone.

The Greatest Batman Stories Ever Told That Didn't Get Into The Collection - Alan Brennert

Today, my buddy Pete is writing this entry. He did a better job than I would have, and he still has a soul. Enjoy, everyone. Most of the pics this time out are thumbnails, so click on them for a better view.

DC has released a couple of writer-specific trade paperbacks in recent years, collecting the DC Universe stories of Alan Moore and Neil Gaiman. I'd like to make a case for another such book, this one collecting the stories of Alan Brennert. The chances are good you've never heard of him, so allow me to explain why he's awesome. Brennert came to DC's attention as a writer and story editor on the Wonder Woman TV series. I can only assume that episodes like "Disco Devil" are a lot better than they sound, because, to quote The Greatest Batman Stories Ever Told, "Brennert was subsequently invited by DC editors to script whatever handful of stories his time allowed." This he did to great effect. Brennert's comic stories number less than a dozen, but all of them are hard to forget. He's written several Batman stories, along with a Deadman short and an issue of Daredevil that would make Bendis cry with shame. Two of these were straight Brave and the Bold team-ups, one with The Creeper ("Paperchase"), one with Hawk and Dove ("Time, See What's Become Of Me"). Brennert's best stories, however, have always been the ones that play with the concept of the multiverse. The aforementioned Greatest Batman TPB contains two Brennert stories (out of what were, at the time, five, which is a hell of an average). One, "The Autobiography of Bruce Wayne," tells the story of how the Earth-2 Batman ended up marrying the Earth-2 Catwoman. The other, "To Kill A Legend," is, for my nickel, the best story in the book. Batman and Robin are sent to a parallel world by the Phantom Stranger in order to save that universe's Thomas and Martha Wayne from being gunned down. (I'm sure Matt will get into that one later.) A third, however, would fit into this collection just as easily. It's from The Brave and the Bold #182, featuring Batman, the Earth-2 Robin and the Earth-2 Batwoman. It's called "Interlude on Earth-2."