I've been reading a lot of existentialist comics lately, more specifically DC Vertigo comics from the mid-late 90's. It you haven't read Grant Morrisons the Invisibles or the early runs of Hellblazer I highly recommend you do. Then I recommend you read them again. I read the Invisibles for the first time around 5 years ago, and I wasn't a fan, at all. The second time around I was amazed. One of the dominating ideas of the Invisibles can me summed up in the old Magritte painting, "La trahison des images":
The Image on the canvass is -of - a pipe, but it is not -a- pipe. This is something obvious to everyone, but the part I find more fascinating is the other question the image poses. "Even if the image of the pipe is obviously false, is the word? Is the word "pipe" in itself the same as the essence of the idea "Pipe"? The Invisibles presents drug called "Key 23" which causes the user to see, as if real, anything they see in text.
I find this idea amazingly fascinating, and that's the reason I'm writing this blog-post, which I suspect someone else wrote 13 or so years ago. The real reflection I dwell on after this is "How real is written experience"? A typical example in text-as reality is the common web-come-back "Pics or it never happened".
I'm not really sure where I'm headed with this, mostly spontaneous, ramble. I'm currently on a buss from Gothenburg to Oslo and I'm trying desperately to ignore the chattering people who insisted on placing themselves right in front of me on the nearly empty bus.
The point I think I'm trying to raise is that we rarely reflect on what is really real and what we can only perceive because we accept that it exists, in the nature of its name. The understanding of language as defining of our possibility to perceive reality has its own theoretical nickname, by the way, "The Conquering Meme". The most amusing factor in this regard, proposed in the Invisibles, is the existence of letters in our language, which can be utilized to create the names for concepts we have forgotten.
But enough rambling for now, I feel a strong need to reread Foucault and ponder why i felt so hopelessly lost for about half an hour earlier today, when I realized I'd left my phone at home and I wasn't able to find out what the time was.
