Tuesday, June 26, 2018

He’s Not Dead! (Diane)


1/8: I believe in a thing called love!
The song opens with an acoustic guitar and a choir going “oooOOOooo” four times. It feels meditative, or rather akin to what one would listen to while meditating. And yet, there’s a twinge of melancholy to the guitar. Not in the Johnny Cash sense wherein you can feel the anger and depression in the song, but rather the melancholy of nostalgia for a somewhere (or, more accurately, someone) you haven’t seen in a long time.
Diane.
Diane,
How can I ever
Make you
Understand?

To be perfectly honest, this isn’t my kind of music. The lyrics are a bit too straightforward and simplistic, the instrumentals are too soft for my tastes, and I find John Marc De Matteis’ voice to be a bit too wobbly. But don’t confuse my aesthetic for a judgment of quality. Looking up the background of the song, De Matteis wrote the piece for his wife, Diane Epstein on their honeymoon, so it would make sense for him to write a piece that straightforwardly expressed how he feels towards her. Indeed, the wobbliness of De Matteis’ voice is best read as a bit of nervousness towards his new wife and the feelings she is causing him to have.

Words can’t
Explain
The way that your eyes have
Washed away
My pain.

In terms of the themes and ideas of the blog, this is one of the more interesting stanzas. Kraven’s Last Hunt, among being about other things, is about how one can cope with the way the world is. For some, like Kraven, coping is too difficult to bear and they sadly decide to commit suicide to get away from the madness and pain that forms their life. Others, like Vermin, cope by lashing out at the world, being as cruel to it as it was to them. But that path is also self-defeating as it leaves you alone and miserable. But for people like Peter, the way to cope is by finding other people who are also hurting, conversing with them, and helping each other through the darkness. There’s a line from Soul of the Hunter (the coda to Kraven’s Last Hunt released five years later, which this blog will sadly not be covering) that’s telling: “…But we can make a choice to listen hard for a song of hope; a song of belief in something bigger: that every heart can touch when it opens in love.”

Diane,
My wife,
You are a gift from God,
My light,
My life.

This bit straightforwardly expresses the relationship between singer and the object of his affection. Religion is an interesting subject within the work of De Matteis. As noted by Grant Morrison in his psychochronography “Supergods,” De Matteis is “a devotee of Indian mystic Meher Baba.” Baba’s influence within the work of De Matteis can perhaps be best seen within Seekers into the Mystery (another book this project won’t be covering), as he is clearly the inspiration for The Magician, a spiritual figure who brings enlightenment to the lead character as well as several others within the world.

But since Baba seems to be a rabbit hole that I am ill equipped to go into, and I want to cover something with a bit more of a personal connection, I’m instead going to talk about De Matteis’ elseworlds story: Supergirl Wings. Apart from possibly Dr. Strange Into Shamballa (which I can’t find a copy of) and maybe his Phantom Stranger run (which, while focusing on Judas Iscariot, is diluted by the positionality of his co-writer, Dan Didio), this is perhaps the most religious of his superhero works. It takes Peter David’s concept of an angelic Supergirl and pushes it even further, combining it with Grant Morrison’s Hawkman replacement, Zauriel, as well as a few reinterpretations of other superheroes to fit within this fantastical system such as Superman being an angel who decided to become human, Aquaman being the guide from non-existence to existence, and Batman being literal, actual Satan (though in this context, more akin to Satan’s original role within the Bible as being a tester rather than as a straightforwardly malevolent force). It’s a psychogeographic look at a mythological system in the vein of Alice in Wonderland that isn’t a one-to-one allegory for any known religion, but rather invokes several belief systems to create something unexpected yet fitting. Much like Kraven’s Last Hunt, it too deals with a depressed person on the verge of suicide, though her ending is more akin to Peter’s than the titular character.

(The personal connection comes from the fact that for a long period of time, I wasn’t actively reading comics. They were just something that existed that I didn’t need to explore further. But at that time, I had a small obsession with the character of Death brought about by my childhood love of The Grim Adventures of Billy and Mandy and Bill and Ted’s Bogus Journey. As such, I surfed the web looking for appearances of the character. When I heard that Death was going to pop up in an issue of Action Comics on IGN, I went surfing to find out more. It was then that I came across this blog called Supergirl Comic Box Commentary. While going through the backlog, I discovered the work of Grant Morrison, John Marc De Matteis [whose work I was nostalgic for, but never had any reason to go back to before this blog], among countless others. Through those works, I exploded into the comics’ scene and haven’t looked back. I owe a debt to that blog, which I hope I’ll someday be able to pay back.)

To add to the sense of melancholy, a violin is added to the song. It is the only other noticeable instrument in the piece.

Another set of four “oooOOOooo”s comes after this stanza.

Dreams come true,
And miracles happen.

            As a chorus, these lines repeat four times. It’s a mantra for most writers, and indeed most people, meaning we can achieve whatever we want. At the same time, it subconsciously acknowledges that just because you work hard and try your best, it doesn’t mean your dreams will come true. Life tends to deal odd hands that could prevent your goals from coming into fruition, be it through an interviewer having a bad day, an interviewee saying the wrong thing without realizing it, or the fact that there’s just someone better than you for the position. That’s where miracles come in: those moments of grace that you don’t think are possible until they actually happen.

Diane,
Sweet bride,
You’ve walked into the door
Into the other side.

This most likely refers to the wedding that has just occurred. Doors are a form of passage, to represent the move from one stage of life to another. This is made more explicit within the next stanza, which is far more interesting than this one.

The past
Is dead.
And joy is the only road that lies ahead.

This isn’t completely true. In terms of being a thing that can be experienced, yes the past is dead. And yet, dead things can still have an impact on the world. We are living within the consequences of the 1980’s, be it the rise of Trump, the impact of Ronald Regan’s presidency, or even the culture we consume. The past haunts the present like a ghost whose business will never be completed, who keeps finding reasons to stick around even after it’s become abundantly clear that they’re only hurting those around them with their presence (insert Twin Peaks The Return joke here).

That also doesn’t mean that the only possible path forward is joy. Yes, this is clearly referring to the relationship between De Matteis and Diane, but everything has implications and meaning to it in the wider context of the world. (Even then, to assume that a relationship can’t fall apart is naïvely optimistic, though understandably so.) As 2017 has shown, there are many paths the future can take. But in the end, I tend to see that the path by which the future goes through ultimately as one of social improvement. A path of caring for others and wishing the best for everyone. Be it the recent surge in support of LGBT people, the push of Generation Z for gun laws, or even the countless people in the entertainment industry coming out in regards to being sexually abused by people in power and said people being torn down.

Dreams come true.

            The line repeats four times before transitioning into the chorus.

Diane.
Diane,
No need to explain
Because you understand:
Now dreams come true.
Dreams come true.
Dreams come true.
Dreams come true.
Miracles too.

At this point, I should probably talk about the twinge of melancholy that I’ve noted throughout the song. For all that De Matties clearly cares for and loves his wife, for all that he is astonished that he’s with such a wonderful person, this is nonetheless an ending. And endings by their very nature are sad. Because they’re the moment where nothing can follow from it. It’s a stop gate of the things that have come before, the culmination of all that you’ve been building towards.

And yet, like most ongoing fiction, we tend to not notice this because it doesn’t feel like an ending in the moment. It feels like another part of life. Life is being in perpetual middle. There’s no climax that everything build towards, no Aristotelian unity that connects every little detail in one perfectly created package. To claim otherwise would be to fall into the trap of conspiracy theories. I know I said that life is going in a specific direction, but that’s only right now. That’s only how it feels as I’m typing it. For all I know, the world could feel vastly different on June 26th, 2018 when this uploads on my blog or on May 29th, 2525 (if man is still alive).

The world is constantly changing, becoming something new in every instant. Because that’s the nature of life: change. We all change, when you get down to it. We fall in love, fall out of love, have kids, get jobs we hate, and yes, die. We begin projects that feel too big for use and, when they’re done, find that you could have done so much more. We become new people every single day of our lives.

Yes, someday humanity will become extinct. Maybe even all sentient life or even all life period. The universe itself will collapse into entropy and decay, only to birth itself anew. The story of life is perpetual “To Be Continued,” there is no one singular ending, but a vast multitude of endings for every single being, be it man, deer, or plant. Life has no coherent thesis, no true ending or culmination of themes. It just keeps going on and on forever.

What meanings we do find within life are ones we put in there ourselves. We create meaning through our experiences and the experiences of those close to us, be it physically or emotionally. And through our meanings and interpretations, we find reasons to keep moving forward, to see new things and old ones as well, until that day it all ends for us. And what happens next, I cannot say. But it has been said that miracles happen. Maybe, despite everything, there’s something after this. Something we haven’t considered yet is staring us right in the face. Maybe the story of our lives doesn’t have an ending either. After all, who can actually remember coming out of their parent’s womb? And without that beginning, to paraphrase my favorite book, there can be no ending to the story of our lives. It just stops.

The song closes with a cacophony of lyrics including the chorus, the word “Diane” repeated over and over again, and a few “oOOoOOO”s. The violins are the loudest here.
“Some people want to fill the world with silly love songs. And what’s wrong with that?”
-Paul and Linda McCartney, 1976
The End.

07/13/2017-03/20/2018

[Photo: Both the Immortals and Those Who Aren’t Sing the Praises of Life Equally Directed by Takahiro Omori Script by Noboru Takagi]


Long ago in an American autumn.

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