VOLUME III Main Discussion
Here is the discussion thread for Sandman Vol. III: Dream Country!
Go ahead and jump in anytime, but please avoid spoilers that take us beyond the bounds of Volume III (especially Wikipedia links).
If you do have spoiler-ish comments, you may post them in white text if you must!
I'll be in tomorrow much of the day to discuss, but kick it off anytime. Thank you for reading!
Go ahead and jump in anytime, but please avoid spoilers that take us beyond the bounds of Volume III (especially Wikipedia links).
If you do have spoiler-ish comments, you may post them in white text if you must!
I'll be in tomorrow much of the day to discuss, but kick it off anytime. Thank you for reading!
Comments
I think it's significant that Madoc's only true creation (the others, in my opinion, being stolen via his rape of Calliope) is called The Cabaret of Dr. Caligari, which of course brings to mind The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. This has led me to dig through the plot of the movie (which I, unfortunately, have not yet seen, though I intend to eventually), and I find the idea that Cesare, in the film, is able to seemingly pull the truth of the future from dreams to be particularly significant. Of course, that ability all turns out to be a trick, and furthermore, the entire thing is the delusion of a mental patient, all of which adds further significance to the title of Madoc's book.
We don't see the full title of his first stolen work, the final word(s?) is obscured, though what we do see "...And My Love Gave Me" seems to cast an interesting light on how he may see his relationship with Calliope. He's raping her and treating her as an object from which he's stealing these stories, but he seems to think they're being given to him. Of course, I may be reading too much into the title, but there's a twisted irony to him calling himself a "feminist writer" as he's literally holding a woman hostage and raping her to serve his own career.
The fact that his film is called ...And the Madness of Crowds, makes that original Caligari connection, feel even more significant, as does the imprisonment of Calliope, and Madoc's own eventual fate.
I wish I'd seen the movie because I know there's something there to dig into and get more out of the reference, but I'm left frustrated by having no more to get out of it right now.
I find Morpheus's empathy for Calliope's plight given his own imprisonment notable, and wonder what it says that he punished Madoc so righteously for his treatment of her while he still left Nada imprisoned in Hell back in vol. 1. Was it the softening of his own personality through his quest that allowed him to forgive and help Calliope? Was it that Calliope was also imprisoned by humans, while Nada received her punishment from Morpheus himself? I don't know. It's definitely something to keep in mind while following modern Morpheus's actions moving forward, though.
Having come from (and perhaps back into - haven't really figured this out yet) a branch of conservative Christianity where it's important to the 'truth' of the religion that certain things actually happened, I wonder whether there are truths in Christianity (and by extension any other religion) that are true even if the underlying events/facts it claims to support those truths didn't actually happen.
Extending that question to myths in general, all the great myths/creation stories/etc have important things to say about the human condition, life, suffering, etc. But we can only reduce all religions to basically being the same thing if we don't consider any particular religion the 'deepest' truth, with the best factual support. Or can we separate the truth of something from the facts used to support it?
In some ways I'm ready to dismiss the validity of those underlying facts, but perhaps not the kind of logic that links those facts to the 'truths' claimed.
Anyway - a discussion of religion is likely counterproductive. So I wonder in general - if a story illustrates deep truths about life, humanity, etc, by using made-up events that (may or may not) purport to be true and factual - does it matter that the storyteller is essentially lying to illustrate those truths? Or does the truth transcend the false facts used to support the telling? Morpheus and Puck both seemed to think so.
When I first read Calliope, I just accepted M's decision not to accept her gratefulness after her rescue. Now I think that may have been a mistake on his part. If he had allowed her to come and go into his realm as she pleased, she might have freely given him some better ideas of what do with his future adventures. And he keeps going it alone. When does he ever ask for advice or help? He does ask Titania at one point in the play if he did the right thing by giving to Will the stories her requested, but she does not answer him. That seems to have been it and that is M's biggest flaw (my opinion).
Rainie's story is so sad. She has this great gift and she just can't cope. Someone dropped the ball to get her into some JLA counseling. I do respect an individual's decision to end their own life if the physical pain is too much... but she is relatively healthy but unable to cope emotionally with having been made post human. One of the ways I was shown to deal with my own personal negativity was to do things for others. This led me on adventures I'd have never had by remaining in solitary. If she continued to serve others, who knows what being(s) she would have later met that could have shown her how wonderful and special she was?
Beauty = Appearance * Personality (where A & P are both numbers > 0)
and as time goes on, Appearance approaches 1.
The same series of panels also mentions John Dee, Queen Elizabeth's "...spy and magician." I wondered if there would be any mention of him based on Dr. Destiny's real name being John Dee.
Bezoars figure into an episode of "House" in which a trichinobezoar lodged in the patients GI tract is the cause of the problem. Were the writers reading Gaiman?
SOOOOO much more here than I thought. I originally breezed through/dismissed the stories in Vol. III, since they seemed like fairly simple one-off stories apart from the main timeline. Now I see how absolutely central they are!
If anything, I'm starting to sink into the realization that Neil Gaiman so often writes about writers and writing.
A thought brought up by my partner Patrick -- in many oral storytelling traditions ownership and transmission of a story is incredibly important, in fact sacred (in the culture descended from Nada's people, for example, or here where I live in Tlingit / Tsimshian / Haida territory). Not only is the way a story is told crucial, often demanding word-for-word memorization, but permission to tell a story belongs only to a select few, and is seldom passed on to another. In Tlingit tradition, short stories may be told by almost anyone, but an important story may be told only by the elders -- and anyone else who wants to tell the story must first pass the tests required, repeating a sometimes hours-long tale with near perfect rote memorization. Permission is crucial.
I see a number of these tales (going all the way back to Vol. I) as testing the bounds of the permissions and consent of the storytellers and the story subjects.
The issue of consent came up for me a lot in this book. Sexual consent, even. We often get two similar situations (Shakespeare and Madoc, Element Girl and Hob) with crucial differences in consent and permissions, and we see them play out very very differently:
- Element Girl is given incredible abilities and life eternal, but in a disturbingly rape-like scenario. It destroys her. I have the feeling that if she could accept her current state, she could in fact go out and mingle. If only she didn't feel the need to wear her fake masks, if she could just accept and be her bizarre self -- I mean, I kept wondering why she didn't ask to meet that friend in another setting, where they could be candid about what her condition meant. I'm sure she could have made some friends and earned some sympathy if she could have found the strength to befriend herself. But she didn't want to or ask to be that superhuman alienated self, and she already had a full life of being a different self. She can't go back to what she knew herself to be, so she lives in total despair, mostly forgotten.
(Did anyone else notice how all the faces in her apartment seem to mirror both the McKean artwork and the domain of Despair? Her living situation is a perfect illustration of what Despair does to a person.) In the end, she is freed by asking permission, something that never was asked of her.
- Richard Madoc takes inspiration itself captive, locks her away, and rapes her for his own literary success. I also note that some folks are talking about how he does it for his own success -- I think he actually starts out of fear, fear that he will disappoint, that he can't follow up. He's terrified, so he takes an extraordinary measure. It's awful, but at least it's comprehensible. But when he keeps her for the second work it gets as dark as it can get; his fear is gone and he accepts that he's a slave-owner. He seems to become an expert at a Fight Club-style dissociation, not seeing any irony in calling himself a feminist writer.
In some ways, I almost see this story as commentary on colonialism and on cultural appropriation, a metaphor for the privileged using the language and art forms of oppressed groups. It reminds me of those rather disgusting films in which the white person comes to a foreign land to be a samurai / fight with the natives / learn an ancient martial art / make ramen, and winds up doing it better than all the people in that culture who have been practicing for years, and ultimately saves them or teaches them some important lesson. The writer who steals stories in this particular Richard Madoc way is committing a kind of cultural crime. He's telling a story that he has no permission to tell. The stories themselves do not consent to his telling them. In the end, his punishment is so so fitting.
- The Cats - Along a similar line, I am interested in how this story reflects the struggle to "own" a cultural narrative. It is possible, easy, almost inevitable to change history completely, so that someone else's history never happened. For example, in some history textbooks about Alaska, the timeline begins with the discovery of Alaska by Russians -- which obliterates the way the story of the state might be told by the people who lived here thousands of years before that, making it as if it was never real, especially after it's taught for fifty years even to the very people who were here first. The winners write history -- and perhaps those who write history win, like the humans did with their collective dream. I remember that after reading certain nonfiction history books, opening my eyes a little wider to the many many ways history (and any story) can be written, I felt much the way the little kitten feels. It's funny, that spinning, ungrounded feeling when you wake up to the possibility that the world is very, very different than you always imagined, that there is not one story of how the world was, but thousands. (These days, because the internet has fractured that formerly consolidated cultural power, I feel like we see fragments of every possible story at once -- especially on Twiter, where I follow over 10,000 people -- and it's overwhelming to see how different they all are.) Anyway, the ones telling the story have a terrible power. Writers are dangerous.
- William Shakespeare I see as a great foil to Madoc, because instead of wanting the approval of others, he wanted to tell the stories that made men dream. His inspiration comes from a very different place. It is a somewhat dark place -- he "strikes a deal with the devil" -- but at the same time it's consensual all around. He wants it, he is offered what he wanted, he accepts, and he pays the price. His distance from his family is tragic, but it also doesn't seem to trouble him as much as it troubles them -- and he's hardly the first artist to be a disappointing family man. I also love his gift when compared with Madoc's punishment -- they're not that dissimilar, but one is a curse to drive Madoc mad, while Will receives literary immortality. There's a fine line between the two gifts; do not piss off the Prince of Stories.
- Hob Gadling - I just want to mention him as a foil for Element Girl. Both have been gifted with eternal life and good health, but the key difference is consent. Element Girl never agreed to be what she is, Hob (like Will) struck a bargain with the devil willingly, and he continues to want to live, even at his lowest. Looking at all the stories of captivity and freedom above, I think it's very very interesting that he is involved in slavery, but he stops, and later repents.
Morpheus himself now knows more about enslavement, freedom, consent, and permission after his experience with Burgess. I didn't know how to read the stories in Vol. III, really, until I saw this common thread connecting them.
Good grief. Now I've written far too much and I should be working, so break time! Gold stars for anyone who reads this whole thing.
Many of the stories he turned into plays existed before he used them.
Particularly some of his more famous ones: Romeo and Juliet existed as a poem, as did Othello, his various histories obviously took their perspective from whomever was in power at the time, etc.
This adds to the contrasting portrayal between Madoc and himself.
Which brings me to the "true even if it didn't happen" conundrum.
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I'm a bit of an actor. Amateur, and only occasionally as there aren't so many _plays_ I have the opportunity to audition for in my area, but an actor regardless.
The #1 thing to acting: truth.
This may sound contradictory given that acting is, by its very definition, playing someone that you're not, and in a situation you aren't really experiencing, but truth it is.
You have to make it appear to the audience as though you are legitimately feeling and reacting to the events around you the way you've rehearsed it. They go in knowing it's been written and rehearsed, but willing suspension of disbelief takes over as long as you play it true.
Even if it's not how you personally would react, you have to find that gem of recognition within you and legitimately feel that the reaction is yours, at least for that moment. You never lose sight of the fact that it's all fiction, but in that moment, it is true.
The reason A Midsummer Night's Dream rang true to the fair folk, despite the fact that they knew the events hadn't happened, was that Shakespeare understood the human mind and emotional reactions. This also reflects in most of the rest of his canon.
I've been told in both literary and psychology classes that because of that deep understanding, Shakespeare is unofficially known as "the first psychologist."
I know I'm talking around the specifics of what can make fiction "true" but it's different for everyone who experiences stories or other art.
I guess that what it ultimately boils down to is: does [story] ring true, emotionally? Do the characters' actions feel grounded in reality, no matter what sort of fantastic events may or may not be going on around them? Does [song] feel like it comes from a legitimate emotional place? Etc.
It's very subjective, and can also vary from performance/production to performance/production, but there's my take on it.
Given the themes of agency/servitude, dominance/oppression, control/freedom, etc. in this volume, it's really telling of Death's character that she refuses to control Rainie's fate after she was forced by the CIA to be mutilated and re-shaped by Ra, and then dumped by them when she was understandably a bit broken by the experience.
I must say, I didn't enjoy this volume as much as the first two. First of all, as I mentioned in the questions thread, I had a really negative reaction to the idea of stealing, purchasing, or trading for inspiration. It really upset me. I hated the idea of imprisoning a muse, and I hated the idea that Shakespeare's work wasn't his. (Although obviously I knew that a lot of his stories weren't originally his to begin with. This just seemed like another level.) To me, as both a writer and consumer of stories, there's a contract between the storyteller and the audience, and it boils down to, "I am giving you this thing that came from me. It might not be ABOUT me or inspired by anything that happened to me, but it came from within me, and I want to engage you with it." Again, it's sort of this idea of truth, in the context of fiction -- I take a feeling or a journey and make you feel it, make you experience, and that's the truth I created and gave to you. And when the inspiration is stolen, or bought, or whatever, it makes that truth a lie. And it violates that contract.
The other reason I didn't enjoy this volume as much was that it was pretty rapey, and we'd already had doses of violence against women in the first two volumes, and I just got kind of maxed out with this one. To be fair, there's been violence against men as well, and I guess this is more or less a horror comic, so violence is to be expected. But I really did just get raped out, so to speak.
I did enjoy the story of the cats. I love the story and thought it had some of the most striking artwork in the whole series thus far. And as a cat person, I found a lot of little nuances in it that I thought could only have come from a cat lover. (I also related, in brief, the story to my cat who tends to come and yell at me for attention while I'm reading in bed. She seemed pretty interested, but I don't think I gave her any ideas, since we're all still here. But I did ask her and my other cat to keep me on as a groomer, if the change ever comes, rather than eating me. You gotta cover your bases.)
The Element Girl storyline was sad but very intriguing, and it made me want to read her earlier canon to see how she got to this point. Which is what a good comics crossover does; I also want to read Constantine now, thanks to his appearance in Volume 1. (Something the movie Constantine did *not* make me want to do.) I really wanted to know more about how she became so isolated and desperate. We're pretty used to comic narratives where the hero has conflicts and doubts but embraces his destiny. Or, at least I am. I wanted more from Rainie's story, because I wanted to understand WHY she couldn't overcome her curse, and WHY it was such a tragic affliction, when, in the world of comic heroes, we've seen heroes overcome just about any isolating or demoralizing setback.
Actually, that's kind of funny, because I think the reality is that any normal person would be completely emotionally broken by becoming what Rainie's become, but I'm so used to seeing stories of heroes who just throw on a mask or gloves or special suit and go out and save the world that I see what a mess Rainie is, and part of me just wants to say, "Get it together, girl!" Which is completely unreasonable. I just now realized that.
Anyway, I reread the volume a couple of times, and I'm glad I did, because I had a negative visceral response to a lot of elements on the first reading, and when I reread, I was able to enjoy a lot more.
From an artist's standpoint, I know that feeling of sometimes having lightning strike, sometimes having an encounter with art that feels like meeting a higher power and simply being a conduit for it. I've had that experience maybe 2-3 times in my life, and it's produced my best work (though I hardly even feel like it's mine, it felt like such an outside experience). I think a lot of artists are familiar with this experience.
But the terrifying part of being an artist is getting down to the daily work of creating things even when you DON'T have that encounter. That's the difficult and daunting work of creating. It's a flash of miraculous insight sometimes, but 99% of the time it's a daily discipline and a wrestling match of a very mundane sort, putting one word or one note or one brushstroke upon another.
Madoc and Fry, I think, were not content to do that work, or maybe they weren't capable of it. They refused the work of being an artist and instead tried to harness the source. It's the height of laziness and covetousness and ego. And somehow to try to repeat that experience over and over, instead of going and making your own, seems like the height of gaucheness. It reminds me a little of the "hit factories" in which a lot of pop music is written, throwing money at creating Top 40 hits with no care at all for whether the results have artistic integrity. I don't know exactly what I'm trying to say here, but I see why Gaiman wrote this part of the story -- it's an alternative vision of how not to be an artist.
My parents are artists, and growing up they particularly impressed a strange interpretation of the 10th Biblical commandment on me ("thou shalt not covet"). In my family, a little nucleus of five artists, we were taught not to covet someone else's art, someone else's gift, someone else's inspiration. That's what it meant to us. Jealousy and theft in art were (in my family) the worst of spiritual crimes. Pursue your own work, devote yourself to the discipline of it, and do not try to take or even emulate what you know is not yours to create.
This is rather abstract, but there's something important in it that I'm trying to work out. Somehow Gaiman with Calliope has illustrated one of the Seven Deadly Sins of the Artist in my mind. I'll keep working on it internally.
Interestingly, I think Madoc and the waitress Bette back in the Diner have more in common than anyone suspects.
Having said that, it was a terrible place for humans to begin with, which is the very reason why the humans dreamed up the current world. Even if the cats where able to dream up the old world, what's the humans to stop Dreaming things back to the now?
It makes me wonder if maybe the cats should dream up a world that is equally satisfying for humans and cats.
My wife and I had the pleasure of hearing Neil Gaiman speak in San Jose today. One of the things he said that sticks with me (though I probably can't quote it accurately) was his explanation of why he is so fascinated with Story. He marveled at how stories can outlast even the cultures that create them. People die, buildings only last a few hundred years, cities and societies come and go, but stories persist. They morph over time, but they persist.
I look at the events around us and I see this playing out all the time. People see the Facebook movie and believe it's true, even though Sorkin openly admits he couldn't care less about accuracy. The facts are clear, but what people will remember is the popularized story. And when everyone who remembers the facts have long since died, the story is all that will remain.
Then we look back at the stories we revere, for which no one alive (or at least no one outside academia) remembers the actual facts, and we see it again from the other side. Was that ancient demigod/hero/ruler really that heroic? Or was he just another asshole who happened to have better PR than his peers? On December 25th, how many people realize it's Mithras's birthday that they're celebrating, not the other guy?
The truly chilling apsect, though, is when you see people openly embracing this idea for nefarious purposes. Who cares what's true? As long as we repeat our lies loudly and repeatedly, enough people will believe them that they will become true. Call it the Fox News syndrome, if you will.
What I would like to see in the world is more positive exploitation of the phenomena. Stories based on actual truth, but spun in a manner that will make them reverberate in the hearts of mankind, so that they echo through the ages, long after the facts themselves have faded. Stories with morals, with undying archetypes to emulate and avoid.
Gaiman makes these. As do many others. But not nearly as many as I would like to see. And not just those in entertainment. I want to see this kind of inspiration in politics, business, education, and every other aspect of humanity. I know so many people who are working hard to get to this point. I can't wait to see what they create over the coming decades!
Given that, and you speculation above, one might ask if Sandman was actually Gaiman's story, or the story of his nightmares. I'd argue that they are his, and likewise that Shakespeare's are his. No matter how rich the source dream may be, it is only the ideas, visuals, and emotions that hit the writer that they can claim credit for. What the writer chooses to do with them from there is all about them.
No matter how detailed the writing instructions you give, a thousand students will still come up with a thousand variations on the assignment. Even when writing code, which is typically much more straight-forward than the English language, you still see a wide variety of approaches to even the simplest tasks.
The only difference I see between art for pay and art for art's sake is the intended audience. If you're just doing it for yourself, and it makes you happy, it's a success, if a limited-scope one. If you're making art to please a larger audience (or perpetuate a Story for a greater purpose), there are a lot more variables to take into account. It's more complex, it's more prone to turning into crap, and it's a million times more effective when it does work.
It's not the involvement of money that's the key, but the intention of what the art should become that counts.
The key, for me, is Death's assertion that "you people always hold onto old identities, old faces and masks, long after they've served their purpose." I know this is certainly true for me. Although I try to throw things away when I can.
While I never attempted suicide myself, I did reach a point once where I *wished* more than anything in the world for an end to it all. I yearned for it. I begged for it. And I got nothing. In the hollowness that followed, I struggled for a way to cope.
Eventually, I figured that if I wasn't using my life, I should at least let someone else get some use out of it. I studied those around me, tried to understand how they interacted with one another, and where I could step in to nudge them back onto a path they were about to stray from, or prevent them from starting a fire they wouldn't be able to control. It's amazing how much you can positively impact other people's lives once you have given up on any hope or desire for personal happiness.
In order to get close enough to people to herd them back onto their paths, I created an increasingly plausible series of masks for myself. For the next decade or so, I was still essentially hollow inside, but I showed the world what I thought it needed to see to get it where I thought it needed to go. Like an open wound under a plaster cast, most of the things that were broken inside of me slowly stated to heal, without me realizing it. And after a decade and change of wearing my Shepard's Mask (if you will), I was finally brave enough to take it off and take a long, deep look in the mirror.
Since then, I try to kill myself as often as I can. Not in the physical sense, of course. But every few years, when that undefinable thing inside me starts to ache and throb for a Really Important Reason That I Just Can't Identify (what David Wilcox would call Metaphorical Reasons), I fill up my gas take, get the hell out of town for a few days, and go on a vision quest. I take off as many of my masks as I can, shatter them to pieces, throw out the shards I don't need, and rebuild new ones from the scraps.
Having this metaphorical death/rebirth cycle firmly entrenched in my own personal mythology helps me get through some of the toughest times. Yes, it's aweful. No, I can't see an end to it. No, I probably can't survive it. But I don't really need to. I just need to learn something from it, so I know which bits to toss out and which bits to keep when I go through my next rebirth. I may not be strong enough. But the next Me will be a little bit stronger. And he'll build a slightly stronger one to replace him. And eventually we'll figure this shit out.
And isn't that how humanity evolves, really? We're not going to fix all the important issues in our lifetime. Most generations don't even get fix one. But we make tiny little improvements here and there, and we try to pass on the lessons we learn to the next generation. We teach them. We warn them. We inspire them. We tell them stories that they can pass on to the generations after them, embellishing them with what they have learned.
When societies devolve is when they refuse to submit to the death/rebirth cycle. Fundamentalism and the unshaking idea that What Was Must Always Be stops the growth. It lets the wounds fester instead of heal. It infects the world with frustration and anger instead of inspiring with hope and wonder.
The world needs fewer shepherds and a lot more bards!
I also agree that this volume was particularly rapey, both literally and symbolically, but I think that's just a symptom of its themes of agency/servitude, dominance/oppression, control/freedom, etc.
Madoc seeks to control inspiration. The cats discover that the world was once theirs, but control was wrested from them. Urania feels as though she's lost control of her own life.
Shakespeare, from that perspective, looks to be the odd one out, but I don't think that's the case. It's not so explicit in that issue, but Shakespeare has found the balance between freedom and control.
He's bound to follow the terms of his arrangement with Morpheus and to write to the whims of the royals, but he's also free to travel, mostly in control of his own life, arguably the head of his troupe, and mostly free to write what he feels.
He fits because he stands in contrast to the rest of the main players.
Madoc feels oppressed by his contract and writer's block, so in turn he oppresses and violates Calliope, which leads to his ultimate downfall.
The cats abused their control of the world, and were thus overthrown by humanity. Their own hubris and individualistic personalities are the main thing preventing them from regaining that control.
Rainie was press-ganged into touching the eye of Ra by the C.I.A. and until the end, she never took agency over her own life, falling in direct contrast to Madoc and the cats.
Shakespeare, on the other hand, sought no more than to have access to the abilities he coveted, and used them only to find his own freedom in life.
And as far as how he gained those abilities, dreams may be the heart of imagination. Getting lost in possibility, and potential. I don't think Shakespeare was given his stories by Dream, but rather Morpheus saw the potential in Will Shaxbred and unlocked it for him.
As we saw in vol. 2, Shakespeare seeks to spread dreams and imagination to people. Even as Morpheus enters the inn, Will is referring to the theme of Marlowe's Doctor Faustus as, "for one's art and for one's dreams one may consort with the darkest pow'rs."
This usage of "dream" is significant because it captures more than what we may have been taking for granted. Dreaming is not just what happens as you sleep, but rather, dreams are whatever you can picture in your mind's eye.
Morpheus isn't giving Shakespeare full stories like how Madoc steals stories from Calliope, but rather opening his mind's eye to be better able to look at existence and how it connects.
I think it's interesting that Gaiman had them discussing "Faustus" as Morpheus entered. Not just because of the year it was published, not because of how it echoes Hob and Shakespeare's bargains, but rather because it was an older story already, just rewritten by Marlowe. The same is true for much of Shakespeare's work, even, in the DC universe at least, A Midsummer Night's Dream. As Titania remarks to Morpheus during the production, "In the old tale there was a love potion, that left the goddess rutting with an ass..." Which, of course happens in Shakespeare's play as well, as I suspect we all knew.
So, there's a theme there of taking older stories and re-telling them, whether the stories were known to man or not.
That brings me to a loose idea I had when I was younger, and has come back to me as we've examined these books:
All stories exist already, they just choose who communicates them to the world. Some push their way through you in a flash, others require more digging, but they exist in the collective unconscious anyway.
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That would be all for this rambling comment, but I just remembered that @Joi_the_Artist said that A Dream of a Thousand Cats was the first glimpse we see of a non-humanoid dream. I disagree. I think that Morpheus's appearance as "Lord Z'Oril" to Martian Manhunter fits, as he appears there to be a disembodied head surrounded by fire (which is deadly to Martians, something that struck my curiosity from the beginning, but I somehow forgot to bring up for discussion).
I saw 2 things differently than you did. I think we are both right. But it gets complicated...
Raine's dream showed her as more volunteering. She was told upfront that there was a chance she could be made super human. And she crawled toward it. She could have declined. She just did not understand the consequences of what she signed up for and that it was way more than she expected. As a volunteer for the government though, she should have.
Dream's older sister Death does not decide directly who dies. It seems to me more like she is the Office Manager / Receptionist. In the story of granting Hob's immortality, it seems more like she is just postponing his collection as a favor to Dream. In some of the spin off stories (after Sandman) she has some discretion in how she exercises her office. Death tells Raine that it's Raine's choice for what happens to her. Death also offers some great advice but Raine's head appears wedged in what advice she takes. Some of Death's collections are crummy as evidenced by why she was in Raine's apartment building. I read all this as Mr Gaiman's excellent treatment of "destiny versus free will" (where (spoiler into Vol IV and beyond!) destiny is the choices some higher power is writing in Destiny's book that the character Destiny appears to have no choice over at all). Some of this gets explored in further detail in the spin off series "Lucifer" (which went to 90 issues) but mostly from Lucifer's point of view as he claims free will but is still trapped in a larger plan.
It is also possible we are both correct as these scenes have multiple valid interpretations.
Gonna have a drink and work on it. Oh, after I spend more time on that job thing I purportedly have. (Self-employment is dangerous.)
Regarding the ownership issue... The idea of the finished product not being owned by the artist goes back more centuries than most people realize. Once societies settle down enough to allow specialization, the artist has to find a way to feel himself while he does his work. Which usually leads to the invention of patrons. So much of the great art from ages past didn't belong to the artist, but to the rich noblemen or clergy that paid them to do their magic.
When the comparison gets to tech companies, though, most people start to confuse the similar but separate concepts of copyright and patents. Copyright is the legal structure that provides the creator of a work (or the benefactor who commissioned it) control over the financial exploitation of the work, to protect the incentive for them to create more art and thus benefit the overall society. Patents are similar, but instead of protecting a creative work of writing, music or art, it instead protects inventions, again to provide an incentive for inventors (or their benefactors) incentive to keep inventing.
Unfortunately, both of copyright and patent law have been increasingly bastardized over the past few decades. Copyright law is being twisted by the big media companies to help perpetuate a their poorly constructed business model, rather than to actually incentivize the creation of more art. But that is nothing compared to the bastardization of the patent system (particularly in the US). Rather than protecting actual inventions (is, specific mechanisms or methods of solving a problem), our patent system has gotten extremely lazy, and has been granting patents to abstract ideas, rather than just inventions.
Lego's patent on the tube structure inside their brick was a great one. They came up with a clever way of allowing bricks to be attached to one another in a variety of configurations, and for that they got a several-decade monopoly on using that design. But they didn't have a monopoly on the abstract idea of "bricks that snap together" so you still saw a lot of competitors using other methods to achieve a similar task. Like Megablok's grid-pattern blocks form the 70s/80s. And when the patent expired, the competitors abandoned the not-as-good designs for the more efficient design.
But these days we grant patents to all sorts of crap that should NEVER have been granted a patent. Amazon's one-click-checkout patent is a prime example. Checking out with one click is an obvious and logical goal, not an invention or a mechanism for achieving that goal. Every year, thousands (if not millions) or corrupt patents like this are filed, by pretty much every tech company you can think of (including bio-tech, who are some of the worst offenders). And instead of incentivizing invention, these bullshit patents are used to bully small companies out of existence and big companies into paying disgusting amounts to keep themselves out of court.
It infuriates me to see two truly worthwhile ideas like copyrights and patents abused like this. Rather than filling the world with more stories, songs and inventions, they're strangling the creators of tomorrow and killing their creations before they can even make the leap from dream to reality.
Grr. SO VERY grrr.
I like "A Dream of A Thousand Cats" and "Facade" because they both play into this theme. Up until this point, humans are the only ones we see really interacting with the dream world, but here we see that cats can as well. The dream country responds to them the same way it responds to humans, which destabilizes the otherwise (understandably) human-centric overarching story. In "Facade", we see that Death isn't able to manipulate the creatures she visits. The expectation is that she is all-powerful, but she isn't more powerful than the mythologies humans created.
When it comes to "Calliope" and "A Midsummer Night's Dream", I really like what some commenters have been saying about the difference between Madoc's abuse of artistic inspiration for fame and Shakespeare's bargin. It strikes me that the scene from Faustus that Will quotes to Marlowe resembles what Madoc has done - abused an innocent being to serve his "own appetite". Will, on the other hand, exchanges creative control over two of his plays for the ability to create lasting stories. I want to say it is less damaging, but Morpheus suggests that Will might regret it later, and then there is Hamnet's death. I connected that to his conversation with Titania -- did anyone else?
To go back to my earlier point about expectations, I think it is interesting that in "A Midsummer Night's Dream", we see that Morpheus, the Shaper of form, needs to speak through a mortal playwright to create a lasting "truth" about the faeries; he can't actually create or deliver such stories himself. It's an interesting limitation.