Superheroes, Retcons, Zombies, Kant, Kafka, and an Uncomfortable Zen

Okay, I don't really own a yellow coat.

I own one of those hooded sweatshirts in the style of Spider-man. It even has a zipper that you can pull all the way up over the face to complete the look, as it were. And while I get a lot of compliments on it from adults, there was a student, some time ago, who looked at it and said, "You're a grown man, and you got a superhero jacket."

My response was something to the effect that my interest in superheroes was evidence of my refusal to let getting older make me jaded. I've been a Spider-man fanatic since the early nineties. Growing up as a Jehovah's Witness and being simultaneously allowed to observe other kids but forbidden from really being a part of their world (Coincidentally or not, "wordly" is a pejorative in JW vernacular for practices and people that are either accidentally or intentionally in opposition to "the truth.") couldn't help but affect my view of myself as an outsider. Peter Parker was a nerd/social outcast with a super alter-ego reviled by the media and rewarded with suspicion for trying to help people. It felt like a unique sort of parasocial relationship (if that applies to a fictional character) but I now understand that I was far, far, far from alone in that. I once read - I can't remember where - that Stan Lee almost lost his job when pitching the idea. To that point, superheroes were supposed to be the paragons of society, treated to ticker-tape parades and idolized by the gen pop. The idea that a superhero would be someone with whom a bookish, spazzy kid could actually identify was not something that interested the execs. But Lee had saved the company with the Fantastic Four, so they gave him his shot, and on August 1st, 1962, Amazing Fantasy #15 premiered the new hero.

That was nearly sixty years ago. According to the comic lore, Peter Parker starts his career as Spider-man at fifteen. Obviously, this has been retconned to no end, or he'd have been born around 1947, making him the same age as my dad. There are some interesting things to think about here, and I don't mean this only in terms of comic books - I'm thinking more broadly in terms of our heroes, identities, culture, capitalism, and reinvention. This is going to be a pretty long post. I'm okay with that, and I'm really the only one who has to be.

Here's probably a pretty good spot to stop and say that what I am hoping to do with this particular blog is to ask questions about things that are intriguing and personal, and it doesn't get a whole lot more personal than identity.

It's a funny thing: on one level, who you are feels static. Think about how much stuff you do over the course of a day that is predicated on you being the same you that you were when you signed that contract, got that job, forgot to pay that bill, or remembered to turn off the lights... Hell, our religious beliefs (of which, I have none) are all based around the idea that there is some fundamental aspect to you that doesn't change between life and death or whatever transcendence your essence or soul or whatever undergoes. Otherwise, rewards and punishments would be arbitrary. But between our faulty memories, our a posteriori attributions of our own motivations, how infrequently we're mindful/metacognitive, and all of the other ways that we imagine or hope ourselves to be (when we truly aren't); I'm not sure how much of our identity is even real, let alone the same from one day to the next.

Obviously, I have no way of knowing how many people will find this interesting enough to start (or how many of those have already stopped reading) but I think this is as fascinating, as it is timely, as it is important.

This is timely because as we are nearly at the halfway point through 2021, I think a lot of people are trying to make some of the recent events mean something. Just a few days ago, the COVID-19 epidemic hit 604,000 deaths in the United States, killing more of us than any war ever has (the lower estimates for the Civil War). More than 10% of the country contracted it, and plenty of people out there still don't even believe that it exists. We have a new President, who has been surprisingly progressive on certain issues (don't take my word for it!) and absolutely ridiculous on others. 

Maybe, it's because I'm an English teacher by trade, but I feel that our psychology relies on our construction of narratives to make sense of things, perhaps to make an incomprehensible universe more comprehensible, one of those primal drives that developed to help us survive... We wanted to chunk information into processable bits so that we could make it meaningful enough to learn from it, and we ended up with stories? I don't know. What I do know is that creating meaning from our own narratives is a subjective enough thing for two people to experience the same event and take two different messages away.

Narratives, like everything else, have endings. Otherwise, how could you construct any kind of meaning from them? I would argue that endings within narratives - to this point in our relatively short history as a species - are all somewhat arbitrary simply because if one character dies the world only stops for them. But death is as close to a definite boundary as we're likely to get, so...

It's probably the easiest way to conceptualize the ending of our own narratives. You can quibble all day long about any number of afterlife scenarios or, my personal favorite, Second Death, but to my thinking, even in those cases, you stop really interacting with the world in any way that has any meaning for you, once you're dead.

I grew up believing that YHWH was literally going to put most of his faithful followers in an earthly paradise for all eternity, and I have to say that even as a kid that raised a lot of questions. NEVER dying has a whole host of problems, but the parts of our haphazardly developed brains that motivate us really have a tough time accepting oblivion in most cases. I'd posit that if you've never really thought about eternity, immortality sounds wonderful. On the other hand, I can't imagine anyone fully embracing the concept of the infinite (if such a thing is even really possible for our tiny hominid cortices) and thinking that eternal life would be a gift.

So, yeah, anyway, having read this wonderful book, I think it's important for us, as individuals, to really think about how we want our narratives to end - even if we're talking about something other than death - we want closure. We want meaning. We want it to be right. We don't want whatever phase or lifespan or whatever to drag on painfully and pointlessly for no rhyme or reason at all, especially if there is suffering involved. And there usually is.

Maybe, that's one of the chief differences between the superheroes of today and the superheroes of yore. Hector is killed by Achilles who is killed by Paris who is killed by Philoctetes who... stank... (And honestly, how many of us could even really get to Philoctetes in that chain without consulting a reference? If you're waving your hands and screaming, "me!" at the computer... I onno - Congrats?)

My point with this is merely that everyone, even our heroes, can and should come to an end at a certain point. To paraphrase some of the dialogue from "The Dark Knight," they either die off or they live long enough to jump the shark.  At this point, I'm beginning to wonder if the poor shark is dead from having been jumped so many times. After all, for Spider-man and anyone else who has been smelt by investors, the comic book death has been trotted out as almost a joke, an impermanent fixture that's part of a capitalistic venture to appeal to (mostly?) kids. It used to be a joke that the only ones who ever got to stay dead in the comics were Batman's parents, Uncle Ben, and Bucky Barnes.

Welp... If there's enough money to keep things going, I guess all of the permutations of all of the stories will be told, right?

It's definitely too late to really let Marvel or DC characters out with any kind of dignity, and the companies who own their likenesses aren't about to kill off their cash cows. I guess, in this case, it's up to me as to whether or not I want to "put away childish things." Are they inherently childish? Does it matter? Or, is this the point, as I near forty years-old, where I cobble together an identity consciously, rather than scrapping it together from bits and pieces of things that I've liked at different phases of my life, things that I often have no attachment to anymore, but are nostalgic for reasons that I've long left behind - some of which might actually be somewhat toxic?

And here's the root of what I am trying to get to with this particular post: Do we ever stop reinventing ourselves? Can we ever become comfortable with who we are? Should we? Or, is even asking a question like that indicative of an immoral amount of privilege? Is there any moral aspect to it, at all? Is there a mortal aspect to it? Is it in our best personal interest to keep reinventing ourselves or to, at some point, just be satisfied with who we are, with our lot in life? 

This is my big question, and while I have some inkling of what I want to say about it, I really don't - at the time of writing this sentence - know what to think.

I've seen memes and inspirational messages about this.

And, I have to say, I find them to be pretty silly because, well, if you're looking up at the sky and watching as an extinction level asteroid impact occurs on your planet... it's pretty damn late, right?

You might say that that's reductio ad absurdum, but at a certain point, it isn't right? It's absolutely too late to be a professional basketball player when you're on your deathbed. Is it too late when you're in your seventies and diagnosed with pancreatic cancer? Is it too late when you're confined to a wheelchair in your sixties because of a degenerative problem? Is it too late when you're in your fifties and have had a heart attack that renders you incapable of exercising for long stretches?

So, there is some point where there it no longer pays to keep reinventing yourself. There is some point where it makes more sense to, maybe, enjoy life, and consume more than you produce. Or am I already taking too many liberties with the idea? A semi-related aside, I think the time to kill off the Marvel multiverse was probably after a lot of their weird plot lines in the 90's, or, at very least, when they did this.

I'm being partially tongue-in-cheek when I say that, but only partially. Zombies are another aspect of pop-culture that fascinates me. When I was still entertaining the idea of going to graduate school for something in literature, I piggy-backed on one of my professor's ideas and, in 2003-2004 wrote a seventy page paper on zombies. Much, much, much to my chagrin, I can no longer find the full text of it, but I can remember a lot of the major points, and I still have a ton of the books that I used to write it. It's related to this because of the rebirth/reinvention/reiffication of the human self as an "other" - specifically when you get characters who come back from the dead as mindless consumers (of flesh). My original thesis was something to the effect that the zombie is an inherently Marxist character from its origins in voodoun religious rituals bearing slavery centered motifs to its more contemporary (for 2004) iterations of mindless consumer culture because zombie stories center around a proletariat othering of the monsters as subhuman.

I'll maybe go into this in more detail in a subsequent blog post... as the knowledge feels like it's congealing in my brain, but I'm relating this to the current thread in this way:

The zombie is compelled by external forces; it's one of the fundamental aspects of a zombie. This might seem like a facile point, but, to me, our compulsion to constantly reinvent ourselves - to be better - is exactly the sort of external control that makes zombies, well, zombies. WHY do we want to reinvent ourselves over and over? Certainly, I can understand wanting to be healthy and self-sufficient to a point where you aren't suffering or anxious over where your next meal is coming from, but beyond that, what is it that drives us to want to be "good" at sports or more fashionable or more... whatever than we already are? Obviously, there are reasons to be at the pinnacle of something if one can be, but most of us can't and know deep, deep, deep down that we can't.

I'm not saying that there aren't a lot of good answers to these questions: we want to be good husbands and wives for our spouses because we love them. We want to be more comfortable than we are right now if we can be. We hope to have more assets to put ourselves in positions that are less vulnerable to downward class mobility, etc. These things are, as I see them, related to the general state of anxiety that is the set state of our minds. Nature wants you anxious. It wants you to be in a constant state of evolution and winning the genetic arms race against everything else. If we developed a consciousness in order to better predict our interactions with an extremely hostile outside world, it stands to reason that we're just going to be anxious if let to rest. We're a species afflicted by restless consciousness syndrome - if that were a thing. I think that this explains Pascal's aphorism, "All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone."

I believe that we are predisposed toward a compulsion to reinvent ourselves. It distances us from our failures, allows us to embrace new possibilities, and absolves us of guilt from our "old selves."

And our motivators are, as I've mentioned before, often unknown to us - at very least at the time of their influence on our decisions. It's almost a truism that we're members of a species that spent nearly all of its time on the planet a few meals from starvation, but suddenly we have high fructose corn syrup. We know that eating an entire box of Little Debbies isn't good for us, but we're compelled. Any armchair psychologist can reduce most of our motivations to primal instincts. 

When we're being mindful/metacognitive we can make better decisions, live more fully, be less ruled by anxiety, but that's not where we are most of the time. It takes work. It takes brain space. And even people who attempt to be as cognizant as possible as often as possible cannot do it for every second of every day. So, for many of us, we fall back to anxiety. Sometimes, we don't even realize that it's affecting us. As my wife often points out to me, "You're not anxious about X. You're anxious, and you're attaching it to X."

She's frequently correct. And it helps me to calm down, breathe, think about what's happening and evaluate what's productive and what's mindless (and often miserable.)

I guess what I am saying is that we are all zombies if all we're doing is eating to get energy and... other stuff... to make more zombies. If we're just constantly ruled by our compulsion to make ourselves better and not really deciding whether or not it's worth it to be constantly pursuing that - we're still just zombies. Maybe Type A zombies, but the best zombie is still just a zombie. I know that I enjoy my life a lot more when I look around and take stock of what good things there are. 

Just don't, whatever you do, read Timequake...

As the late, great David Foster Wallace pointed out in "A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again" if our set mind is trying to maximize, we're always going to be miserable. Even on a cruise ship. Even in luxury.

I listened to a podcast not long ago about addiction and anxiety where the guest made a very convincing argument that anxiety is actually a form of addiction. It makes sense to me. All addictions, indeed all motivations, stem - at a biological level - from our desire to have certain brain chemicals produced for different sensations that they give us. Anxiety gets fed by our preoccupations, our actions, and our cyclic tendencies that make it stronger, longer lasting, etc. Even if it doesn't feel good, it's still got the hallmarks of an addiction and is one more thing robbing us of the head space that we need in order to live as fully as we might.

For a few years now, I've been interested in two big thinkers who are, as I see it, at opposite ends of this problem: Immanuel Kant and Franz Kafka.

(Caveat: my philosophy classes are about twenty years behind me. If any of this does not sit well with you, please, let me know how I am being daft and point me, if you would be so kind, to the appropriate reading material to true my crooked ideas.)

A lot of philosophers don't or didn't live by the ideas that they set forth. Others, I don't think you could have objectively said that they did or didn't because their beliefs were so abstract that it would be a debate as to whether or not any individual action was validated or contradicted by said beliefs. Then, you've got at least one Darwin Award in philosophy:

You're all a bunch of idiots! You've failed me! I'm done!

And lastly, you've got Kant (and maybe Nietzsche, but I'll get to him... maybe, like waaaay later.) The man lived like he had to be the sanity in an insane world.  He was apparently interested in border disputes - and aren't they abstract arguments about abstractions? Kant believed in dignity as something of a human right, and that is a position that I staunchly support. The saying often goes, "respect isn't given; it's earned," but... like... why? What does it cost to not disrespect your fellow man? It shouldn't be earth-shattering. It really shouldn't. Kant was good at being Kant, and I think that is a very respectable thing. It might be the best any of us can do. He was more than a bit obsessive, but if a passion is that strong, and it's not hurting anyone, it might be wrong not to follow it.

He did, and we've got The Critique of Pure Reason thanks to that impulse. To me, Kant was a person who tried his very damnedest to be the best person he could be, living by the rules he hewed out for himself with his intellect. Some people might see that as quixotic (in an insane world), but that feels like the words of what the cool kids would've called "haters" some years back.

Then, you've got Kafka.

Even if I didn't know anything about Kafka's life, I would assume - based on his writing - that he had been the victim of some kind of cruelty in his life. Kafka was - without being evil or anything of the sort - the "anti-Kant" to an extent. Kafka's notoriously misused polysyllabic, eponymous adjective refers to the horror caused by the inscrutability of a world where knowledge is useless. You "know" that your family loves you, but can you prove, beyond a shadow of a doubt that you aren't the victim of some sort of cosmic practical joke? No. No one can. One of the universals of human experience is that we're fallible. We can be wrong about even the most fundamental things in our lives.

We could debate all day long as to how much people really value their religions, but the truth of the matter is that of the major religions in the world, at least most of them are incorrect. So that means that even if one of the major religions is correct (I don't believe any of them are) most of the people out there are living their lives as heathens. Sure, we could take the soft approach and say that, maybe, there's a some sort of deity out there who inspired all of the religions and that they don't really care which one you follow, so long as you follow one... which would be absurd, considering how many of them have core texts demanding death from heretics, infidels, etc. But even if that is what you're thinking, that's still probably wrong because it's, again, just one religious notion among many.

Anyway, the point to all of that is to say that we're all skating on a pond that we "know" is frozen solid. Some of us are going to be luckier for longer than others. Some of us won't be lucky at all, really. After a while though, we will all be subjected to the indifference of a universe we cannot possibly predict, and we will die of something that we might know about beforehand. And even in those cases, terminal illness is generally seen as a horror. Sudden accidents are as well. So, what is the appropriate amount of time to know how one will most likely die? Think about it. If you have a lingering but incurable disease like MS, is that better than being snuffed in a car accident?

I see these two giants of men - not as the cliche "two sides of the same coin" - but rather as representative of two incongruent but related (not opposite) truths about human existence. Our minds are the best tool that we have to parse the world in front of us; they are also severely flawed in almost every regard, at times being almost a handicap when it comes to understanding what is really happening.

Maybe, this isn't nuanced enough. Maybe, this is painting with too broad a brush. Maybe, this is taking too many things for granted. I'm just one dude.

But, I would say that these two observations about the human mind are not only true and important, I would also say that the are one big source of the inherent anxiety we experience from living in this world. Part of our varying levels of anxiety addiction - and I believe that we are all somewhere on a spectrum of that - comes from trying to use our maladroit, inelegant, and only tool for the only task we're given: living our lives.

So, on any given day, it's not surprising - maybe, it's even helpful - that so many of us seek to reinvent ourselves. It's refreshing to retcon our futures as nonsmokers or in a different profession. When we become obsessive about retconning ourselves, that's when we're right back to being anxious zombies all over again - I think.

The idea that happiness is a choice is not new. Just as the criticisms of it aren't new either. We don't need to take it to David Foster Wallace's cruise ship experience to know that some people are just never happy. It's pretty common, I would think, to have had that friend who will burn their good experiences to the ground because they weren't perfect. Mindfulness as a fad makes my flesh crawl, but I would also argue that people who do that are doing so because they are in the thrall of a compulsion to find problems, to downplay, to detract - and they're often the victims of situations that have molded them in such a way. Yes, it's annoying to outsiders, but imagine never really being able to be happy...

(DFW wrote substantially on this topic as well.)

That having been said, there are plenty of really good reasons to not be happy. I think of this. There are wars, resource shortages, actual existential threats, people living through every sort of privation and abuse... There is avarice, malice, and apathy... It doesn't take a great intellect to find problems with everything, even if one has to rely on, "Well, I can't be happy, knowing that there are people out there who are in misery."

It's a depressing but, I would argue, a legitimate perspective in the world we inhabit.

I tie this back to Kant, Kafka, and, well, everything else that I've been talking about because I think that in order to live well, one must allow oneself to be able to laugh at the Kafkaesque world around us and should also be willing to derive meaning and pleasure for working to make it a better place, even if our fortresses of reason and dignity are sand castles on an inscrutable beach. I don't think it's enough to ascribe to stoicism or zen, but I think that both of those have some very valuable and related lessons for all of us. However, I feel - and I'm sure practitioners of either fields of thinking would say that I "don't get it" - that these are generally ways to cope with, embrace, or deny the power of the external in our lives. If you can do that, hey, great, but what about all of the people for whom that's not a possibility? Do we have a moral imperative to try to make the world a better place? I think we do, but any examination into how much we ought to work at making our world better is going to be subjective and, I think, faulty. 

Yes, we should work at living moral lives. Yes, we should allow ourselves to feel anxiety at certain stages and even depression and rage and all of the other negative emotions that are part of life. I don't believe that we should judge people harshly for feeling those things at times. But at a certain point, letting go of the feelings with the uncomfortable certainty that they will return allows us to experience joy and feel decent for any accomplishments we may have had.

How do you know when it's appropriate to do either? I'm not really sure, but I suspect that there is no right or wrong answer to that question, as each situation is unique unto itself - and anyway, who among us is truly more fit or unfit to judge?

So I get back to reinventing myself. I don't know that I'll ever stop. But one change that I feel is permanent is that I'm less judgmental with myself about doing it. And I'll probably watch, at very least, the next Spider-man movie that comes out. Tom Holland is pretty damn cool.

*** UPDATE 10/9/21 ***

Blog post: everything old is new again: retcons and mashups can have their place; they're just not doing a great job at the moment - is this what I've already written here? Am I losing my mind? Am I starting to see into my own head - how insane I am, how utterly driven by compulsions I am, how the nexus of impulses that make up me are causing me to do things for reasons I don't even understand? Am I a puppet of something else, or is that a feeling that I am getting because of my own attachment to video games? It's like... my Captain N fantasy of getting sucked into a video game because I played so many of them and enjoyed them for their easy, comprehensible rules... Am I projecting my relationship of video games onto the outside world, or is this just a weird fantasy that I am having. God. It's 2 pm. I feel like the day is slipping away from me more quickly than I would like. I am off to do something else.