“We have to shout above the din of our Rice Crispies
We can't hear anything at all”
-
Synchronicity,The
Police, 1983
Let me start this today with a massive understatement: I
like comic books. I always have. I think there is something magical about the
mixture of art, story and a child’s imagination in inventing a worldview and a
cohesive set of morals. Myth has woven
its way through the whole of human history and is as much a part of us as our
DNA. While our cultures have let the
names and the places of our myths change over the years, the fundamental truths
have largely remained the same. It is of
no coincidence that comic books are steeped in myth. The heroes in their pages have been fighting
our moral battles against the dark side of our souls since the printing presses
started rolling cheap pulp out for children in 1933. While Hercules and Thor still captivate us on
some level, they do so in the comics.
And, let’s face it, neither one is as popular as Batman on his worst
day.
To paraphrase Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight, Batman is the hero the American people deserve. He may not be the one we want, or even the
one we need, but he is who we deserve.
We deserve someone smarter than us.
We deserve someone stronger than us.
We deserve someone richer, someone more determined, someone willing to do
the hard work of protecting a people too lost in our own lives to do it
ourselves. And, we most definitely
deserve someone who will not abuse all of that power once he has it. I love Batman. But, let’s not forget he’s a myth. A real person with those capabilities would
not be viewed as a hero, and I doubt he could exist for long without losing his
grip on reality. No, a real person with
the skill, subterfuge, science and fortune of a Batman would most undoubtedly
be the greatest threat to freedom we’ve ever seen.
I think the beauty of Nolan’s Dark Knight Trilogy is that by pointing out the very realistic flaws
in every character in the mythos, these films challenge us to be a better
people. He may be the hero we deserve,
but perhaps we might do better to not need him at all. Certainly, that is the statement made in the
newest movie. Truth is the hero we need
at this time. Not a CIA skulking in
shadows. Not an organized religion
hiding the words of the leaders they claim to love. Not big business and big money conspiring in
smoky back rooms. We need the truth, and
we need to be able to tell the Joker that we can handle it.
There has been a back and forth on whether art imitates
life, or if life imitates art since Oscar Wilde published his The Decay of Lying in 1889. In this famed essay, Wilde posits that Lying,
the telling of beautiful untrue things, is the proper aim of Art. This is to challenge the viewer to strive for
something better. As such, as art pokes
and prods us, life follows its direction.
I have loved that essay since I was required to read it in college, and
I always felt it was a shame that only other aspiring artists like me had it on
their required reading lists. Perhaps,
if everyone took art as seriously as Wilde, our airwaves would not be crowded
with the lowest common denominator of unchallenging drivel.
Of course, I always took Wilde’s arguments as metaphorical. I never once thought that the act of drawing
a picture, crafting a story or penning a poem would make manifest the subject
of the art itself. Okay, maybe in an
inspirational way, sure. But, most
assuredly there was no true magic behind the act of producing art. A few years ago, a posting on Cracked.com got
me thinking about the possibility I might be wrong.
Cracked is usually good for a laugh at the end of the day
when my eyes have glazed over from spreadsheets, or needs assessments, or
whatever other fascinating document the exciting life of a grant writer
entails. So it was that I settled in to
read through Maxwell Yezpitelok’s “6
Eerily Specific World Events Predicted by Comics” in the minutes before I
had to leave to pick up my daughter.
Little did I know that would be the beginning of a long journey into an
alien world of alternate thought. I won’t
go into it too far today, but let me summarize what’s important for discussion
right now. In 1945, the creative team over
at Superman’s Action Comics so
accurately described the top secret atomic bomb project in an issue, that the
Defense Department had to crack down on them and pull the book from the
stands. A few months later, they
described a cyclotron, also drawing the ire of the Defense Department as this
device was also part of the Manhattan Project.
To this day, no evidence links anyone of the DC comic team with any spy
network. Besides, if they had been
spies, why leak their findings in the pages of a widely distributed
periodical? It defies explanation.
In 1986, Superman was at it again when writer/artist John
Byrne’s Man of Steel comic exploded a
space shuttle in its pages, and had to be hastily redrawn at the press when the
Challenger disaster occurred. This was following John Byrne’s involvement
in predicting a massive black out in New York City in a Spider-Man/Wasp team-up
book for Marvel back in 1977, released one week before the actual blackout in
New York City. Oh, and later Byrne killed Wonder Woman, otherwise known as
Princess Diana of Themyscira in 1997.
Three days after its release, Princess Diana of Wales was killed in a
car crash.
There is more, but I think that’s enough to make my
point. Now, I like John Byrne. His run on Avengers: West Coast in the late 80s, early 90s were some of my
favorite Avengers stories of all time. I’ve
read his interviews, and dug up what I could on him after I read this article. There are those who believe he is everything
from a government agent to a Satanic sorcerer.
I think he’s a comic book nerd with a distinctive art style and a flair
for the melodramatic.
However, if we chalk these events up to coincidence
alone, I think we do them and ourselves a disservice. As Commissioner Gordon says to the young Det.
Blake in The Dark Knight Rises, “You’re
a detective now. You no longer get to
believe in coincidence.” So, what does
that leave us? What plausible scientific
explanation can make sense of what on the surface is insensible? I believe the answer may lie in the widely
disregarded theory of synchronicity put forth by Dr. Carl Jung in the
1920s. As Jung aged, there can be no
doubt he fell into insanity, but there can also be no doubt in his genius. As defined by Jung, synchronicity is the
experience of two or more events that are apparently causally unrelated or
unlikely to occur together by chance, yet are experienced as occurring together
in a meaningful manner.
That is most definitely subjective, and as we all know,
science cannot stand subjectivity.
Therefore, science has never accepted synchronicity as anything other
than the delusions of a confused mind grasping at straws. However, revitalized with the strength a good
Batman yarn has always given me, I challenge you to consider synchronicity on
its own merits. By its very nature, it
is the observer alone that can decide if an event has a “meaningful manner” in
Jung’s definition. That means in order
to consider it, we must abandon the scientific method and its reliance on the
impartial observer. Quantum theory has
already required us to make this leap, however.
The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle shows us that we cannot separate
the observer from the observed. In point
of fact, the Higgs-Boson tells us the observer and the observed are in fact one,
made of the very same nothingness of existence.
If we can make that intellectual leap in quantum theory,
I think we can make the same leap when it comes to the harmony of the
universe. As the butterfly flaps its
wings, we get rain in New York. As we
read our comic books and we fire up our myth receptors, could it be that we are
contributing in our own spiritual way to the manifestation of the events on
their pages? I don’t know, but I’m
neither a scientist, nor a guru. I don’t
have that answer. But I urge you to
be unafraid of asking the question. As
Alfred tells Bruce…maybe it’s time for the truth to have its day.
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