A Human State of Affairs

“Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?”
“That depends a good deal on where you want to get to.” Said that the Cat.
- Alice's Adventures in Wonderland

Being a human person is such a silly, amusing and tragic state of affairs – all these things all at once. When I am not being a tremendously busy person, that is, a person tremendously busy chasing his own tail like a dog, it occurs to me that I suffer from schizophrenia in all areas of my life. My being a human person is a sort of schizophrenia all in itself. I am an amphibian of a creature, half animal and half spirit and these two sides are always in opposition to each other it seems. Usually I try and ignore my spiritual half and walk around like I am merely a highly evolved animal. This is okay for a while but I have been cursed (or so it would seem) with a love for the works of two very great men who always manage to tug at my spiritual strings; Professor J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis. It doesn’t help that my good friend Dean introduced me to Dr Peter Kreeft, a contemporary philosopher who loves these two writers even more than I do and gives so much more insight to their works than I could ever have managed to discover on my own. I have mentioned what a slow learner I am many times in this blog, it takes me thrice as long to learn something that other people grasp immediately. By this I don’t mean that I’m stupid but simply that I grasp an idea quickly and then that knowledge evaporates and then I have to start again and repeat the whole process until the knowledge sticks to my brain. My brain glue, in other words, is of the cheap sort. As a result of my slow learning I find myself living in circular ruins – I always come back to where I started. I feel like Roland Deschain, doomed to always find myself back in that same old desert where it all began, following after the man in black as he flees across what seems to be the apotheosis of all deserts. I’m not so sure whether this is a good thing or not anymore. I usually think of myself as making progress as I try again, fail again and (I always hope) fail better. Anyway, I digress. Going back to what I was saying before; after being in contact with the works of the aforementioned geniuses I always find my way back to my spiritual self and realise that there is so much more to life than meets the eye. I find myself thinking of how scared I am of spending an eternity in hell and what a reality it is at the rate my life is going – I find myself face to face with my mortality.

Bats on the Brian

"'But I don't want to go among mad people' Alice remarked.
'Oh, you can't help that,' said the Cat: 'We're all mad here. I'm mad, you're mad.'
'How do you know I'm mad?' said Alice.
'You must be,' said the Cat, 'Or you wouldn't have come here.'"
- Lewis Carroll, Alice's Adventure in Wonderland

"You're in the real world now and the lunatics have taken over the Asylum."
- The Joker, Arkham Asylum, A Serious House on Serious Earth

Okay, I officially have Bats on the brain; the guy is taking over my life and I'm losing the little that remains of my sanity - assuming I was sane to begin with. I've probably played the Arkham Asylum video game demo hundreds of times and I'm rather sad that I won't be able to afford the full version when it comes out on PC later this month. I'll make a plan though, something like stealing my neighbour's cat, Mr Ginger, and selling him. The game is getting rave reviews on consoles and people are even comparing it to BioShock. I just love the Detective Mode and the silent take downs, there's nothing more satisfying than swinging from gargoyle to gargoyle and swooping down and taking out an enemy and then disappearing before his friends see you. You then sit and watch as the villains in the room get nervous wondering who's next and jumping at their own shadows.

I've also just finished reading the graphic novel, Arkham Asylum by Grant Morrison and Dave McKean, which is surprisingly good - I'd go as far as to say that it's even better than The Killing Joke by Alan Moore and Brian Bolland. I just love how dark it is and how it messes with your mind. If you're into psychology you'll notice some of Carl Jung's archetypes in it and another cool aspect is how The Joker raises the question in the reader's mind: which is the real loony bin, the asylum or the real world? Amadeus Arkham converted his ancestral home into an asylum for the criminally insane because he thought that he could help insane people and thus achieve a triumph of reason over the irrational and other cool stuff like that.

Speaking of The Joker, he's always an interesting character to read about. In Arkham Asylum one of the psychiatrists notes that he cannot be properly defined as insane, she suspects that he is an example of someone with some kind of super-sanity: "A brilliant new modification of human perception. More suited to urban life at the end of the twentieth century." The novel has a very postmodern edge to it and asks whether identity is stable or not. In one scene of the novel one of the asylum's inmates suggests that they take off Bats' mask so they can see who he really is underneath. The Joker intervenes and says that the mask is Bats' real identity. So, you see there's a lot of fun to be had with this novel.

All-in-all, Arkham Asylum is an awesome graphic novel that caters for people interested in exploring the darker corners of the human mind.