AKBecky, Well said about Rainie! I have not chased down Element Girl's back story but I did recently read another old DC superhero that Neil Gaiman worked on before Sandman. It's "Black Orchid". It helps to know a bit about "Swamp Thing" before you read it but it can all be picked up from context. "Swamp Thing" underwent a change when it was turned over to Alan Moore. It really established a return to horror for DC Comics and some fans hated it (and hated Sandman and hated the whole Vertigo line). I was/am not one of them. Good story telling is good story telling. But this was the scene at DC into which NG was invited. I wonder at which point they really knew they had a runaway smash on their hands. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Orchid http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swamp_Thing
Up until now, I never thought of Rick Madoc as cheating for art when he was using Calliope. I have to think about that. (I saw Madoc as a scumbag who finally gets what he deserves.) Things to think about.
Becky -- wow to the wounded warrior, home with PTSD!
I have been thinking this week about Rainie's lunch meeting with her friend. That is so exactly how it feels to go out to lunch with a friend when you are deeply depressed, feeling like you are a completely different creature from everyone else, wearing a mask and trying to remember how to interact -- and then suddenly the mask slips, the game is up, and you flee. I remember so many meetings like that from back in the day.
You've made me wonder how much more extreme that would be for a soldier home from the conflict, trying to re-engage, having learned a host of miraculous superhuman new skills but having no use for them in daily life. The mask slips -- people see what you really are -- the game is up and you're even more alone than you were.
@svithrir, you chose the exact phrase I wish I could have remembered! Those who want to write a novel vs. those who want to HAVE WRITTEN a novel.
I think even a lot of professionals belong more to the second category, because the process is so difficult -- but then there are those who want to skip it altogether, like Madoc, breeze through the process in a haze without even knowing where the time has gone. He wants to skip the head-banging-against-the-wall part. I think a lot of us do, but then, he cheats. That's exactly the right word. Except it's not big enough to describe his atrocity against Calliope.
This volume freaked me out so badly that I haven't really been able to write anything except that little posting about bezoars until now.
I felt incredibly sad at the end of Ranie's story, so much that I didn't want to read the script that was included. I still haven't. Maybe another time. Not even now, a week later. The whole theme of the volume, the theme of possession and possessed, who owns what and how, disuturbed me.
How can you own the wind or a muse? How can you hold either of them? Put the wind in a box and it just becomes air. Put a muse in a box and she becomes unhappy. Neither is then of any use for what you wanted to do with them.
Ranie lost possession of her self (purposely as two words,) or so she thought, after Ra's orb changed her at the behest of "the company." She equated her physical form with her self and when that became something she couldn't accept she wanted to end her existence. She didn't understand that we all wear masks of one sort or another, masks that we've been growing since childhood, masks to avoid pain or to please someone else. Ranie's true self was exposed whenever the mask detached, reminding her of who she had become physically and that was unacceptable to her psychically. Her choice to lose all physical form and become some other form of existence without the feelings, if she continued to exist as some members of this reading group have suggested, lacks a quality of life and just becomes existence. No sadness and no pain but also no joy. In the world of drive and defense that is "isolation of affect." the stifling of emotion. Her choice saddened me deeply because she couldn't accept who she had become and thought that no other would be able to accept her as she was.
One more thing: How can something not have happened and yet still be true? That's not a tough riddle. Dreams. What happens to us in dreams (usually) doesn't happen and yet is true. The title of the play is "A Midsummer's Night's Dream" The characters within the play awake as if from a dream, the play ends and we awake to the everyday world, sleep ends and we awake to (our) reality. Dreams are true because they come from us, whether it's from our collective or individual unconscious, and therefor can't lie. Distort and disturb yes, but not lie.
Each of these volumes, so far, reads like the complicated dreams that patients bring me. Not in content but in style because, even though they think it's one long story (or one volume,) they are individual stories that their minds (or the author & editor of the book) have bound together. There may seem to be a common thread but that's the mind's editor at work, trying to make sense of what has happened. My job as a therapist is to separate out the long dreams into their separate stories, to find the breaks. Happily that job is done for me, and us, in these volumes by Gaiman. We never see a dream, just as we never see a "naked" story. We only see either of those things after filtering through an editor (even an author is an editor of his dreams and stories.) Happily, thankfully, Gaiman is a talented and generous editor.
Something I love a by the sandman is that it is so steeped in mythos. Perhaps that's all part of these for stories. We have the obvious connection to Egyptian mythology (Ra) as well as Greek mythos (calliope). The cat story is an obvious connection to mythos, albeit a newly invented one. Still, it is the heart of myth - it shows how things were before, and how things changed, even provided hope for the future. In a way, it's almost Genesis for cats.
And then we have the mythos of story - or how does one create. Those of you who are creative might have heard "what made you think of writing, painting, creating, etcetera that?" I've heard it in my own writing, and it's not something that can be explained - it just happens sometimes. So we have not just one, but we myths on the how. We have "I captured a muse," and we have "I had a chance encounter with an other realm entity."
Once more, one story shows what to do, and what not to do. Almost as there's a certain amount of morality the myths are trying to show us.
@Sarah: Yes, I linked Hamnet's death to his conversation with Titania, too!
That's a thing that did strike me in this story: People don't listen to each other. When Hamnet tells his collegue about his father, when Morpheus talks to Titania, when Hamnet tells his father about the Lady he met.... I wonder if Shakespeare remembers this conversation later on and wonders if he could have prevented Hamnet's death?
I had a thought the other night just as I was falling asleep: There are actually certain parallels between William Shakespeare and Morpheus. Both are tasked with delivering dreams unto the world, and get wrapped up in that responsibility to the detriment of those who love them. The fae even address Dream as "Shaper," which isn't too far off in pronunciation from "Shakespeare."
It's a half-baked thought (as mine so often are these days), but a thought nonetheless.
@Svithrir Hm... Interesting idea. Gaiman could've chose to use "Shaper" as a nickname for Morpheus for that reason.
Shakespeare seemed like an inevitable choice to bring into the comic due to A Midsummer Night's Dream, but the choice of using "Shaper" to refer to Morpheus could be very deliberate.
Since i usually assume i'm very far off, i'm not surprised that my thoughts and reflections feel afield. Daniel touched on it bringing all the stories together. This set is about people holding onto the past, but i see that as an extension of people attempting to live forever. To me that's what everyone is trying to do, it's written into our DNA. That's why we tell stories, why we have kids, why we dream larger than ourselves. This collection seems random, but to me it's not. To me this collection is a sense of scale. Dream is endless. Without end. That's a very, very long time.
How long?
In Calliope, Erasmus does terrible deeds to try and make stories that last forever. He gets 50 years. His dreams don't even get one life time. This desperation strikes me as the downtrodden who never get to see past their next paycheck. The art is dirty and the story is gruesome.
In Dream of a Thousand Cats, a cat is trying to dream for a future lifetime. It doesn't work, but he's at least thinking ahead. A little bit. A couple of lifetimes; a better place for his kind. Extending from above, here's the middle class, trying -- with varied success rate -- to do better for their kith, kin, and kittens. The artwork is a mix of light and dark. Clean and dirty. It's hopeful.
In Midsummer Night's Dream, Shakespeare is getting to live on for centuries. His vision/dream extends well into the future. He's still the most prolific plot writer in all of Hollywood. And here's someone well to do. He can build empires that people will remember for long periods of time. The artwork is clean and grandiose (and won an award).
And in Facade, we see someone who has dreamed for thousands of years. It's... terrible. We just can't imagine the burden of a life at this scale. This is the amount of "living forever" that's beyond most people's wildest dreams. But... despite the color in this one, it's very plain. There's a golden time in her youth (in her dream when she touch's the orb), and some vibrancy when she goes to lunch. But it's mostly just plain, boring. After so many years, there's very little left. But...
Dream is endless.
I could be wrong, but i think this collection is meant to ground the reader in just how long Dream has been alive, and just how terrible that really is. It's unfathomable. In the past two books we've seen the anthropomorphized Morpheus and have started to think of him as human. In this small set his humanity is weakened by exposing some alternate sides of being endless.
At least, that's my take.
Some highs and lows:
I think we see "a day in the life of Neil Gaiman" with the torture of Richard Madoc. I want to read each of those stories that he gives a snippet of. I could very well be wrong but i constantly imagine Neil has this particular problem in real life. Some notable ones:
"A city in which the streets are paved with time"
"A man who inherits a library card to the Library of Alexandria"
"An old man in Sunderland who owned the Universe, and kept it in a jam jar [...]"
Dream of a Thousand Cats is my least favorite story in the series. It does help the story along in a few different ways.Yet again from a "sense of scale" perspective, you can't think of him as strictly human because he's so much more than that. But i hate cats (i'm allergic), so it's my least favorite story.
Midsummer Night's Dream. Puck. I want to see a movie with this version of Puck. One of my favorite quotes: "Shush, Peaseblossom, the Puck might HEAR you!"
And Rainie. This one is supposed to hurt. This is how Dream might feel on any given day considering his age. But now it hurts quite a lot more than when i first read it in college. I have a friend named Rayney -- no joke -- who lives in Seattle. She's really awesome, but has the same shut-in complex as Rainie. She walls herself off and it kills me how damaging she is to herself. We don't talk as much anymore since we've both pretty much stopped playing WoW. I miss her. Yeah. This one hurt.
regarding hurt, this comes up later too. And it is one of the heavier themes in Sandman. When friends and family members choose to hurt themselves, what can you do? I have had friends doing this to themselves now. (Thank goodness only one is acting this way currently and that is hard enough.) Friends and family members have committed suicide over the years.
You can try to talk to them and listen if they care to talk about it. But until they want to, it's kind of a waste of time. But I still try. All I know to do is to pray and be nice to them.
In 1991, one of my friends, Jimmy, murdered a postman (who had a wife and 2 kids) and ran for Canada. I had moved away a couple months before this and was a state away. I heard about it on the morning local news. The Feds wanted to know info, so I came forward and gave it to one of the detectives. I figured it was a matter of time before I'd be going to see Jimmy in jail. I never did see Jimmy. He never did turn up on my doorstep. I read in the paper that Jimmy had shot himself in his car at a rest stop near a Canadian border (lots of wanted posters for him).
Then life quieted down. A week later Jimmy turns up in one of my dreams. We are in the parking lot of the apartment house we used to live in. I had lived upstairs of him for a couple years. It was a sunny day. And Jimmy's sober (he was always drunk) and happy. In the dream I was kind of scared to see him. Shouldn't he be in Hell? And Jimmy tells me that the afterlife is like nothing like I have ever thought of before. (Which has baked my noodle ever since because I have been collecting afterlife stories and myths since I was a kid. And I have all sorts of theories.) But Jimmy said everything was OK and we joked a bit more. We had a few more laughs. And then the dream faded away. Life went on.
Do what you can. Give what you can afford. When all else fails, pray.
I think they call him Shaper because he can shape, manipulate and create dreams/nightmares. I know it sounds very simple but the Fae are intricately linked to magic and dream. I imagine the Fae have massive respect for Morpheus, going so far as to give him such a strong honorific.
@Matt, oh certainly, the name "Shaper" fits. After all, it's more or less a direct translation of "Morpheus." The question is, why then do they call him "Shaper" instead of "Morpheus," if they both mean the same thing? It could be that the Fae simply have more affinity for middle English etymology than Greek. But I think there might also (possibly) be the subtle suggestion that Lord "Shaper" and "Shakespeare" have something in common.
And aaahh a sudden thought, also relevant to this volume, that I'll try to be vague about but nonetheless put in spoiler white: Urania feels trapped in her existence and entreats Death to help her end her suffering, and she is of the Metamorphae.
@Svithrir, that is an interesting thought about Urania, indeed. That's very cool.
In Book 4, Morpheus is called Shaper by someone else, too. So, maybe Shaper was an earlier incarnation of Dream? Or since the gods/fae are...a bit static, they cannot allow themselves to call him anything else but by how they first knew him?
Comments
I have not chased down Element Girl's back story but I did recently read another old DC superhero that Neil Gaiman worked on before Sandman. It's "Black Orchid". It helps to know a bit about "Swamp Thing" before you read it but it can all be picked up from context. "Swamp Thing" underwent a change when it was turned over to Alan Moore. It really established a return to horror for DC Comics and some fans hated it (and hated Sandman and hated the whole Vertigo line). I was/am not one of them.
Good story telling is good story telling.
But this was the scene at DC into which NG was invited. I wonder at which point they really knew they had a runaway smash on their hands.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Orchid
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swamp_Thing
Up until now, I never thought of Rick Madoc as cheating for art when he was using Calliope. I have to think about that. (I saw Madoc as a scumbag who finally gets what he deserves.) Things to think about.
I have been thinking this week about Rainie's lunch meeting with her friend. That is so exactly how it feels to go out to lunch with a friend when you are deeply depressed, feeling like you are a completely different creature from everyone else, wearing a mask and trying to remember how to interact -- and then suddenly the mask slips, the game is up, and you flee. I remember so many meetings like that from back in the day.
You've made me wonder how much more extreme that would be for a soldier home from the conflict, trying to re-engage, having learned a host of miraculous superhuman new skills but having no use for them in daily life. The mask slips -- people see what you really are -- the game is up and you're even more alone than you were.
@svithrir, you chose the exact phrase I wish I could have remembered! Those who want to write a novel vs. those who want to HAVE WRITTEN a novel.
I think even a lot of professionals belong more to the second category, because the process is so difficult -- but then there are those who want to skip it altogether, like Madoc, breeze through the process in a haze without even knowing where the time has gone. He wants to skip the head-banging-against-the-wall part. I think a lot of us do, but then, he cheats. That's exactly the right word. Except it's not big enough to describe his atrocity against Calliope.
This is a horror story indeed.
I felt incredibly sad at the end of Ranie's story, so much that I didn't want to read the script that was included. I still haven't. Maybe another time. Not even now, a week later. The whole theme of the volume, the theme of possession and possessed, who owns what and how, disuturbed me.
How can you own the wind or a muse? How can you hold either of them? Put the wind in a box and it just becomes air. Put a muse in a box and she becomes unhappy. Neither is then of any use for what you wanted to do with them.
Ranie lost possession of her self (purposely as two words,) or so she thought, after Ra's orb changed her at the behest of "the company." She equated her physical form with her self and when that became something she couldn't accept she wanted to end her existence. She didn't understand that we all wear masks of one sort or another, masks that we've been growing since childhood, masks to avoid pain or to please someone else. Ranie's true self was exposed whenever the mask detached, reminding her of who she had become physically and that was unacceptable to her psychically. Her choice to lose all physical form and become some other form of existence without the feelings, if she continued to exist as some members of this reading group have suggested, lacks a quality of life and just becomes existence. No sadness and no pain but also no joy. In the world of drive and defense that is "isolation of affect." the stifling of emotion. Her choice saddened me deeply because she couldn't accept who she had become and thought that no other would be able to accept her as she was.
There. That was cathartic. I needed that.
Maybe now I can get to volume 4.
Each of these volumes, so far, reads like the complicated dreams that patients bring me. Not in content but in style because, even though they think it's one long story (or one volume,) they are individual stories that their minds (or the author & editor of the book) have bound together. There may seem to be a common thread but that's the mind's editor at work, trying to make sense of what has happened. My job as a therapist is to separate out the long dreams into their separate stories, to find the breaks. Happily that job is done for me, and us, in these volumes by Gaiman. We never see a dream, just as we never see a "naked" story. We only see either of those things after filtering through an editor (even an author is an editor of his dreams and stories.) Happily, thankfully, Gaiman is a talented and generous editor.
And then we have the mythos of story - or how does one create. Those of you who are creative might have heard "what made you think of writing, painting, creating, etcetera that?" I've heard it in my own writing, and it's not something that can be explained - it just happens sometimes. So we have not just one, but we myths on the how. We have "I captured a muse," and we have "I had a chance encounter with an other realm entity."
Once more, one story shows what to do, and what not to do. Almost as there's a certain amount of morality the myths are trying to show us.
That's a thing that did strike me in this story: People don't listen to each other. When Hamnet tells his collegue about his father, when Morpheus talks to Titania, when Hamnet tells his father about the Lady he met.... I wonder if Shakespeare remembers this conversation later on and wonders if he could have prevented Hamnet's death?
Shakespeare seemed like an inevitable choice to bring into the comic due to A Midsummer Night's Dream, but the choice of using "Shaper" to refer to Morpheus could be very deliberate.
regarding hurt, this comes up later too. And it is one of the heavier themes in Sandman.
When friends and family members choose to hurt themselves, what can you do?
I have had friends doing this to themselves now. (Thank goodness only one is acting this way currently and that is hard enough.)
Friends and family members have committed suicide over the years.
You can try to talk to them and listen if they care to talk about it. But until they want to,
it's kind of a waste of time. But I still try.
All I know to do is to pray and be nice to them.
In 1991, one of my friends, Jimmy, murdered a postman (who had a wife and 2 kids) and ran for Canada. I had moved away a couple months before this and was a state away. I heard about it on the morning local news.
The Feds wanted to know info, so I came forward and gave it to one of the detectives. I figured it was a matter of time before I'd be going to see Jimmy in jail.
I never did see Jimmy. He never did turn up on my doorstep. I read in the paper that Jimmy had shot himself in his car at a rest stop near a Canadian border (lots of wanted posters for him).
Then life quieted down. A week later Jimmy turns up in one of my dreams. We are in the parking lot of the apartment house we used to live in. I had lived upstairs of him for a couple years. It was a sunny day. And Jimmy's sober (he was always drunk) and happy. In the dream I was kind of scared to see him. Shouldn't he be in Hell? And Jimmy tells me that the afterlife is like nothing like I have ever thought of before. (Which has baked my noodle ever since because I have been collecting afterlife stories and myths since I was a kid. And I have all sorts of theories.) But Jimmy said everything was OK and we joked a bit more. We had a few more laughs. And then the dream faded away. Life went on.
Do what you can. Give what you can afford. When all else fails, pray.