posted December 16, 1999 03:23 PM            

Look!NickWaddam!'s theory, as best as I understand it, is that the "rescue mission" is an attempt to wake up the entity who is our Universe, which lies sleeping around us, and which is also known as John-a-Dreams.

posted December 16, 1999 09:28 PM            

That could change, though, if Look!Nick! would care to make it interesting... what d'you say, pal? Fifty pounds on your John-a-Dreams-as-Universe vs. my Bobby-Murray-as-Tim-Robbins-in-JACOB'S-LADDER?

The beautiful thing, of course, is that these theories are not mutually exclusive...

posted December 17, 1999 02:39 PM            

Holograms...

Obviously I have a certain amount of faith in my theory, but Grant Morrison is one writer who can make me happy to be wrong.

I don't pretend to be able to describe the plot details that will lead up to the awakening - John's or Bobby's (please note that I understand John as the original cosmic man: Adam Kadmon. His awakening is the awakening of everyone, including the reader and Bobby Murray).

Any way, here's a bit more "convincing" for you:

As I've pointed out before, John is the fragmented unity. The creator trapped in creation.
The soul returning to God.
John is the original "seeker", "obsessed with finding the hand (the grail/philosophers stone/the crown etc)". Like the Fool in the Tarot, he falls into the abyss (the world of form) and detonates, exploding into manifestation. He is all the suits; all the trumps and the major arcana - the whole process is mapped across his "body". The fools "journey" is a circle, at it's conclusion he finds himself. He completes the circle. Like Adam Kadmon, he embodies the entire Sefirot. The universe entity.

"It's all about the spaces in between"

Unified across the ultimate Invisible.
Remember the shape Robin and Flex take in the time machine/teleporter?
Imagine this process on an even greater scaleÖÖ

The fox in bits. Osiris in bits. The comic in bitsÖTorn to shreds.

And speaking of FlexÖ
Nanoman and Minimiss, the divine Tantra at the heart of being itself. The unity. This is how far we have come. We are so close to reactivation/awakening. Yes, it's true! The universe is awoken from a "quantum coma" in Flex Mentallo. "The universe is dead, the universe is alive".
This has all happened beforeÖÖ.

And Horus has arrived on "fiery wings and tides of blood". Vol's 3 and 2, respectively.
The process reaches critical mass in vol 3 # 5. Has the entire series been a form of invocation?
Of course it has.

posted December 17, 1999 04:05 PM            

What in none of it was real?

What if the entire comics series THE INVISIBLES were the dying dream of one sad bastard?

A strange and fantastical world of sexy international freedom fighters and dark Lovecraftian terrors... certainly preferable to lying there in the bloody sand listening to your guts rush out through perforation scaused by three pounds of Argentine shrapnel, no?

It's only a game.
Try to remember.

posted December 17, 1999 06:46 PM            

He gave me that wry smirk he has and said, "You're close," and said he'd say no more...

Damn him! How close was I?

Could Jack and Roger be trying to pull KM out of the 'Matrix'? Is that the rescue mission?

posted December 17, 1999 07:16 PM            

I hate to say it, but I would not be satisified with a "it was all a dream" conclusion. Morrison has pulled that trick before, and to good use--and then he played with it mercilessly in Flex Mentallo, and that was good. But it can't work here because the buildup has been too good--to lose it all on a technicality would just suck. Forgive me, here, but the thing I've always liked most about the Invisibles was that it was like the Doom Patrol but built to survive re-entry into our world, and dreaming it all away would ruin that. Yes, I know the Invisibles is just metaphor and should not be taken as a description of meatspace but all the same... I was hoping we were all done with pomo, and ready to move on to post-futurism.

posted December 17, 1999 07:44 PM            

I don't think your theories will be resolved by issue one, anyway. This discusion will go on in a different tense, and I look forward to it.

I'm more interested in the (something else?) and I'd like us all to makes sure that (something else?) is not sad or fanboyish. (things this collective elegently sidestep).

Perhaps we can petition Grant to give the Invisibles to Barbelith, in order for fictionality and barbalithity to mingle/merge. In that way just as we will have been rescued by the Invisibles (I know I've been saved) so will rescue it.

posted December 18, 1999 09:10 PM            

they don't seem like the thoughts of a man who experienced all he did in chapter 2 - I mean, they had a time machine for starters - his thoughts seem more like something one of us may come up with rather than those of a international time-travelling space assassin (that is what he is, isn't it?).

Know what I mean.

Jack, I see what you mean about Bobby Murray hallucinating all this up on the beach in the South Atlantic. The gas mask imagery he was confronted with as a child being a starting point for the generation of King Mob and his weird mask and the whole story etc... though the dream hallucination theory is kinda being assasinated on this thread.

I would like it if Murray figured somewhere in the story ie. more than just part of the hologram of connectivity.

posted December 19, 1999 09:11 PM            

1) It was all just a dying hallucination of Bobby Murray.

2) The whole series was a trojan horse, and the last issue will be a psychic trap designed to remove individuality from anyone who opens the cover.

3) Flex Mentallo will show up and avert the apocalypse by confronting the British Telecom Thing under the Tower of London.

4) They were all androids built by Mason Lang to do his secret bidding. Shot by KM (when he realizes his own non-being), Lang will then reveal that the timesuit was actually an exoskeleton that will not only allow him to walk again, but also to fight crime.

5) Mr. Quimper will spend the entire last issue pleasuring himself in grotesque but startlingly beautiful painted panels by Brian Bolland.

6) It's just a book Rags was writing.

7) Sir Miles is actually Miles Davis in reincarnation and the whole merry crew will dance away to the strains of heroin-soaked jazz.

8) The destruction of Paris will actually be the Apocalypse of Fashion, in which it turns out that KM et al were merely pushing back the barriers of human experience to let in new fabrics (perforatex, etc) and colors for the summer lines...

posted December 21, 1999 08:29 PM            

This is the first time Morrison has had a continuing series that didn't cross over somehow. The Doom Patrol and the JLA were at least aware of each other. Flex Mentallo was a Doom Patrol spinoff. My very favorite moment ever was when, going up against the painting that ate Paris, Cliff snubs Animal Man.

There have been no crossovers in the Invisibles yet. This is a good thing.

posted December 23, 1999 12:45 PM            

The play of the Dalang is a universal catharsis.

All trauma sites will be reactivated.

posted December 23, 1999 02:53 PM            

The final secret! The moment of realization! Illumination!

"Every nervous system makes its own model of the event."

But,

"What I know is this:ÖÖÖ.
A kind of ego annhilation is followed by euphoric reintegration (Osiris is made whole) and a sense of extended understanding. There's a surge of creative energy, all time is understood to be happening simultaneously, weird synchronicities occur constantly. A new relationship with time, the self and deathÖ."

Unity, at every point.

The eschaton is understood by the Outer Church as destruction, annhilation etc. It is heralded by the birth of the King Archon within the Moon Child.

The eschaton is understood by the Invisibles as the birth of the aeon of Horus. Prefigured by the emergence of the cosmic child.

Both are unified across the "body " of Horus. The Outer Church invoke the aspect of Horus known as Ra - Hoor - Khuit: The war god; the Invisibles represent his other aspect: Hoor - Par - Krat, the God of silence and illumination (Gk: Harpocrates. "SSHHHHH!"); The "Golden Age" that will manifest itself as Ra - Hoor - Kuit's influence begins to decline.

"The child God who destroys in order to create."

The Outer Church, then, must be understood as the war itself. At it's deepest level the Invisible college understands the war as a necessary evolutionary tool. One aspect of the larger rescue mission. The college is the repository of the secret alchemy that transforms base metals into gold. Matter into Spirit.
The "war" transforms into something else in front of our very eyes. Is it more like lovemaking? Dancing? The war is the world of duality (Maya) . The "Black Iron Prison" of Phillip K Dick (Yes, Dick does understand "The Black Iron Prison" as deluded, egoistic perception). The "thought" that Jack describes us as being "stuck in" is this thought of division/duality. When we realise this we "release him from his prison". The creator is no longer trapped in his creation. The soul no longer imprisoned in the realm of formation, hiding behind the "Billion Masks of God". Even the most deeply affected "trauma sites", those aspects of mind that are completely lost amidst the billion masks of formation, must return to their creator. The lost ones must return home.
The teachings of the outer church are shadows of the divine catharsis.

"Yog Sothoth is the gate! Yog Sothoth is the key and guardian of the gate! Past, present, future, all are one in Yog Sothoth!"

Lovecraftian, but a declaration/invocation of the unity nevertheless.

Oh yes, I nearly forgot to mention it, Yog Sothoth is also described as "existing not in the spaces we know, but between them."

Osiris torn to bits, the comic torn to bits. All one in Yog Sothoth. In Outer Church cosmology the realisation of the unity would, perhaps, be embodied by the awakening of great Cthulu and the rising of his lost city (Ryleh) from beneath the waves (the world of form).

In Phillip K Dick's nervous system the unity was understood as ZEBRA (as Grant well knows). Here's a good description for you:

"A giant intelligence that remains invisible because it looks like the enviroment, as some insects do - but Zebra looks like the whole enviroment."

Sounds a bit like someone I'm always going on about:

"So big and so obvious it's invisible in it's entirety"

"Hiding in plain sight"

"Hiding behind the Billion Masks of God"

"Things appear Invisible to us.....when they're there all the time".

The universe is described in anthropomorphic form as far back as "How I became Invisible", where Boy images it as a "Beast hiding in everything". This is how those aspects of mind that are still in shock/fragmented understand creation/the unity. Boy left the "war" when she understood this.

"It's about what's not there, the spaces in-between. The Invisible."

On a side note: It's ridiculously easy to track down Grant's sources/influences. Simply pick up a Robert Anton Wilson book and work out from there. Almost everything on this post is the product of having read "Everything is under Control", and Valis (which Grant was probably turned on to by Cosmic Trigger).

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posted December 23, 1999 04:09 PM            

The hive on the cover of issue 5 takes on interesting connotations when examined in this light.
The Lloigor - the ascended mind (in this case in the aspect we describe as "Edith") Rises above the hive (realm of matter/manifestation/fragmented self), through the recognition of unity (that "unity" which the hive mind - personified in the series by the Cyphermen - has yet to recognise, but, nevertheless, is always present: the "voice of the hive"). Karmageddon is all about unity/circles.

I also forgot to mention that the Harlequinade and Satan are not the polar opposites of the dark Archons (in the same way that it turns out the Invisibles are not the polar opposites of The Outer Church). They are manifestations of the unity. That is why they play both sides. They are "non local" in the strictest sense. Wilson's "higher circuits".

It only looks like a war.

[This message has been edited by look!NickWaddam! (edited December 23, 1999).]