LOST
IN THE WAR-ZONE
Confessions
of a minor writer fallen out of love with The Word.
I've had doubts about the relevance of
writing comic books this last year or so.
Doubts about the relevance of writing anything, if I'm honest. The pen may be mightier than the sword, but
when it comes down to the fire and blood, a keyboard can't compete with a B52.
In "Outlaw Nation" (DC
Vertigo 2000 - 2002) -- my flawed and prematurely truncated attempt at a
surreal satire on the cultural, economic and political imperialism of the
"American Century" -- the lead character, Story Johnson, a long-time
fiction writer, suffers a crisis of faith in the power of The Word to "make
sense of the senseless", burns his magnum opus, abandons his
phenomenological, writerly perspective, and seeks, though ultimately fails, to
re-engage with the human reality of the world.
Maybe I saw it coming, my own arrogant Tower
of Babel collapsing out of the blue; the Black Dog of war loping from the
choking dust to clamp its jaws on my throat and render me incoherent. Or perhaps I'm just a middle-aged burned-out
depressive, a "blocked" writer looking for an excuse, a cynic who's
lost sight of the funny side as his long-feared "Dystopia" solidifies
around him. Whatever the cause, the
effect is a palpable "keyboard dread", a stuttering refusal of the
mind to engage in the struggle to distil the madness into metaphor. Bad news when that struggle is your
job. And when the need for the careful
constraint of chaos through the employment in all media of the subtle power of
language and communication has never seemed more pressing.
But to be even minutely effectual in resisting
the vortex of "spin" a writer needs a stable platform from which
to speak, a confidence in his insight into world events, the raw material
which his instinct assesses and his imagination mills, reduces to dramatic
fictions laced with a vein of truth. And
in a post-democratic world embroiled in asymmetric war, that platform is elusive.
The old dichotomies of left and right, liberal and reactionary, are
redundant; past certainties crumble before the information storm.
Now more than ever perhaps "nothing is true".
Post September 11, 2001 -- although that miserable tragedy signifies
to me not a "change in the world", but only a waypoint on a continuum
of manipulated polarisation -- it seems imperative but increasingly difficult
for a writer to straddle that bogus line drawn in the (quick)sand, keep his
balance, eschewing propaganda and dogma to represent the non-allied interest
of the planet's humane, rational human majority. At least it does for this one.
I can speak only for myself. Writing is a broad church, even within the comics
medium. Others may be made of sterner
stuff. Many will keep their hopes and
fears to themselves, set out for work each morning to offer entertainment
and distraction, satisfy escapist fantasies of honour and heroic sacrifice,
etc., same as they ever did. Good for
them: someone has to attend to the day to day. Others may have their political perspective
clearly defined, their territories staked out, their backbones stiffened by
the outrage of violence, war-cries springing easily to their lips: 'They hate
us because we're free. Kill them';
'It's all about oil. Bomb them with
bread'; 'Allah Akbar'; 'God Bless America'.
They have a right to express their cultural allegiance, their genetic
loyalty, their intellectual commitment to a cause, of course.
If I'm honest, I even envy them some of that ability for conviction,
that combativeness, or fierce passivity, but I can't find it in me to share
it just now.
With half the world, I watched the
appalling collapse of those towers on TV, then four months later stood in the
rain, staring speechless into the sorry hole in the ground where all those
falling lives crashed down, while bombs fell on distant mountains and caged
prisoners crouched in chains, and all I felt was cold and empty, devoid of
inspiration. There was only one thing to
talk about and nothing useful to be said, no virtue in the rehearsal of
traditional arguments: morality versus expediency, the idealistic versus the
pragmatic, good versus evil. That shit
was too 20th Century, a dead debate.
We've had our chance to learn from
history, and blown it. What the world
needs now is new ideas - and it needs them fast. Religion has had its millennia, and proved
worthless. The centuries have revealed
political philosophy as intrinsically corrupt and divisive. Science has shown itself merely the whore of
commerce and power. It must be time for
art and culture to try and claim back the future again, reach into the
"idea space" and drag out a little hope.
That's the job of a creative
community. What use are writers, artists
and musicians if we can't rupture the conventional mindset and force a little
cultural evolution? Who else is going to
do it?
Because we have to resist these shadow
men, these alien soul-killers who currently stir the pot of our world; these
Saddams, Bushes and Bin Ladens who conspire to promote their agenda of hatred,
fear and retribution, and set us at each others' throats, inflamed in
self-righteous defence of fraudulent God or bogus ideology. They have to be disabled and disarmed, their
grip on the world's imagination broken, their ugly visions made impotent - or else we're all doomed to live as the
slaves of fear, or maybe not live at all.
Of course, it may be the revolution is
already underway and I'm missing it, hunkered pathetic and silent in my bunker,
overwhelmed by the banality of this conspiracy of terror, frustrated and unequal
to the challenge of opposing it. Maybe
others are more prepared for engagement, poised to birth a new spirit of creative
resistance from the inevitable violent and bloody spasm that will soon end
the claustrophobia of this year's phony war.
Or perhaps a clear fresh rain of
enlightenment is already filtering among the grassroots, subversive rumours of
peace and possibility virally propagating around the globe, from keyboard to
screen to keyboard, from lip to ear, canvas to eye, and mind to heart. The young might sense it; mutant kids already
riding a new wave clear of disaster, new music, new rhythms in their heads, new
anger to pierce the ugly veil of lies - a strange new language to give the
future voice.
I hope so: Because if not, then
disillusioned old whisky priests like me will be forced to stop whining, pull
our heads from our arseholes and face up to our responsibilities, risking our
fragile sanity again to scavenge our reluctant keyboards for fresh ways to
influence the story of the world with our shallow and insubstantial word and
picture books. And it already feels like
I've been pissing into the wind for ever.
But I'm a writer. What the hell else am I good for? And as an old pal of mine has often tediously
repeated: "You shouldn't join if you can't take a joke."
So see you in the funny books, I guess.
©2002 Jamie Delano
Originally
published on-line at Ninth
Art