Of Nietzche and Superman: Not so Small Ville

As I wait here in the fallow wasteland across the street from my burnt house, I find caught up, yet again, by another long tale, and this post goes out as a tribute to it. It is the television series, Smallville, that holds me the way the Star Trek and Harry Potter mythologies have done in the past. I knew I was hooked when I saw the young Clark Kent sitting in his High School cafeteria reading Nietzche, and to confirm that this was a deliberate thematic thread, a character actually comes up to ask him if he is Man or Superman!

I do not get television where I live presently, and my Hindi Serials are one of the sacrifices at the altar of what I have come to think of as my fire. In absence of the Saas-Bahu sagas that used to keep my internal World Tree thriving and populated, my thirst for the Story has led me to this back-story of the Superman mythology.

I must also confess that when Christopher Reeves was struck with paralysis, I actually felt the fabric of the kind, hopeful, logical universe tear apart with a deliberate, malicious pair of shears and I almost believed in Sisyphus' condition:  is spiritual, internal strength the only kind allowed to humanity? So it has been easy for me to fall for the promise of this extremely recognizable Hercules-tale.

However, this story is no simplistic, clear-cut good and evil tale with cool labs and loud explosions, though it has plenty of both; in fact, it examines the extremely complex nature of human morality. In one of my favorite quotes by one of my favorite characters in the show, Lex Luthor sounds this theme very eloquently when he says,  "The path to darkness is a journey, not a light switch." This show goes on to examine what it means to be human by contrasting it with what it means to be super-human and addressing archetypal themes like light vs. darkness, the conflicted self, destiny vs. free will, the father-son relationship, the idea of a family, connection between the land and the people who are defined by it, and the nature of human love and its connections to justice, hate, and death.

This show is helping me come to terms with my situation. It distills and crystallizes all that is the best, all that is worst, all that is possible as well as its many alternatives, and presents my internal struggles in an easy to digest archetypal package, very much like a good Fairytale or Myth does.

Maybe it is time to re-evaluate my definition of Home as some kind of an end to my yearning, not so much to ease or to speed up my Odyssey, rather to recognize the journey as part of Home, since that is the condition, the space I inhabit. After all, the aim of the Story is to understand the ever-changing, ever-recognizable condition of being human, not a perfect, static landscape the unchanging gods would inhabit.

Never-ending Story

I read a facebook post from someone who confesses to her incurable addiction to German soap operas. I can so relate: I, too, confess to this addiction and have blogged about it previously; however, besides the opulent sets, familiar cadences, and use of folklore that I've addressed in earlier blog entries, there is the matter of the story, the plot itself that beggars justice.

I am truly amazed and humbled at these contemporary epics. The plots of these serials make mazes seem tame. There are numerous subplots, an inevitability, really, considering that the typical saga begins with a rather large joint family. These plots are very wise: they know that no story is meaningful if the characters don't mean enough. So of course, there are several episodes devoted to character establishment.

The story uses an intricate embroidery of colors, costume accessories, phrases, melody strains, and amazingly, a background chorus for effective characterization. For example, if a villainous, scheming vamp archetype is being introduced to the newly married bride (our protagonist), the background music associated with the vamp would include a phrase, like her first name whispered ominously, repeatedly; or if the neighbor's good-hearted son (our clown) is about to tell a lie, the background music is woven around a phrase like "Jhoot bola!" (Jhoot= lie; bola=he spoke). And then the story begins; the central conflict is introduced, and variations on the same theme form subplots for characters that are only slightly ancillary.

The plots are convoluted, unlikely series of events that rely on their very improbability for verisimilitude! They seem to rest on the truism that truth is stranger than fiction: after all, the individuals who make the audience examine their own lives and circumstances, and think back to an earlier decade when all that has come to pass since, would have boggled their imagination then. And reality itself is such a shifty thing! One cannot rely one's senses to verify it, and human understanding is so fraught with pre-conceptions, mis-interpretations, mis-calculations and a myriad of patinas, that it seems useless to commit to a limited version.

Moreover, the characters and situations are ever so easily recognizable, so easy to relate to, that the improbability of the opulent settings and costumes becomes just an acccesory to the permutations and combinations of events, and helps in construction of archetypes.

Fiction imitates reality, like a stick figure imitates a human being: this is the first lesson to all who choose to Read Literature. The soaps, like all fiction, then, channel this truth, the truth that transcends facts; the truth of humanity made recognizable in a stick figure has an appeal that is more universal than an individual's face reflected in a mirror.

So it is with these stories. Characters die and come back to life in a different place, with a different name, among new characters, often with different faces, but they become palimpsests of their previous stories which continue with their absence at the center. These parallel plots build up to a climax when the past and present are made to co-exist, acknowledge, and recognize each other, often in presence of the future, so the story can go on once one climax  has been resolved.

I heard of a knife a family has; it's been in the family for many, many generations. Of course, sometimes, the handle has had be changed, and sometimes, the blade has had to be replaced, but the knife is still the same. This post is dedicated to unending stories that continually re-invent, re-tell, re-configure, adapt, to refract the variegated colors of the kaleidoscope that is reality.