Dave Sim's Answers to Five Questions about Flight, part 3

Kickstarter ends 2 December!

Hi, Everybody!

As we close in on the last week for the Kickstarter for Cerebus Archive Number 7: Flight, I thought we should take a look back on Dave's answers to the Cerebus Yahoo Group's five questions. Specifically, his answers regarding Flight.

Preamble: So a few years ago (2005, I believe,) The Cerebus Yahoo Group started a re-read of the whole series. And then we'd discuss an individual volume and come up with five questions and send them to Dave, and he would respond. These are those questions and answers. (Please note, most questions were multi-part in nature, and Dave would break them down as he answered them.)

Q2a. Strange happenings: Underwater, the coins are still rising - orbiting each other and glowing. At a Chico painting session (great painting!), the nude model sees tiny Cerebi. Just as Cerebus orders the villagers to attack the Cirinists, Thatcher sees part of the city wall grow in a penis-like shape. I guess overall we're supposed to think that Cerebus rousing himself to action and becoming a player again has the effect of causing weird things to happen over the world. Is there a specific pattern?

DAVE: The idea that I was trying to get across was of a transformational state that was so widely dispersed and so various in character that no pattern could be readily discerned-it was impossible to stand far enough back to see the Big Picture (which prefigures the trip through the solar system-a genuine try at standing far enough back). I was already aware that that was the nature of reality-that, in our own world, each day's newspaper essentially documents the fitful progress of the global storyline as it has changed since yesterday. It's the reason I think the news is so compelling. Our higher natures recognize the larger pattern and are absorbed in studying that while our human natures are interested in what we perceive to be disparate and unrelated episodic chronologies. I tried to hint at the former while documenting the latter. It's a tangential observation to the old "if a tree falls in the forest and there's no one there to hear it, does it make a noise?" How many things happen that we aren't around to see? How much of the debate between unresolvable dualities takes place outside of the realm of human perception?

Q2b: Is it merely a case that with Cerebus charging and slaughtering Cirinists, his amplified energy is spreading out, along with the action of the Black Lotus (another amplifier)?

DAVE: It's certainly partly that, but it's also the fact that he has accidentally achieved a dormant and quiescent state over an extended period as a result of the profound shock that he's experienced. What is the net effect of catatonia upon whatever the thing is that inhabits him/he is inhabiting? My best speculation was that the spirit enlarges under such a circumstance and effectively begins to seep outward-like the fog created by a dry ice machine-and to permeate all aspects of its surrounding reality: that is, that catatonia has a great deal in common with meditation and other transcendental states: the difference being the respective catalysts, in the first case a psychological trauma and in the second case an imperative toward self-improvement. The danger in the former case is that a comparable trauma is apt to hurl the subject out of the transcendental state with the same force that he was hurled into it. So everything he's become hooked up to through the seepage becomes subject to the same form of whiplash. Depending on the severity of the reaction (which in turn hinges on the extent to which the connection has been made) everything in the spiritual vicinity abruptly begins to rise above or in one sense or another move outside of its previous state and discharges or extrudes or divides one part of its intrinsic nature centering on The Other from the other part of its intrinsic nature centering on Self because Jaka's presumed death is the initial catalyst for the seepage and Jaka's mistreatment becomes the secondary catalyst for breaking out of quiescence. All you need is love to trigger a series of peculiar and occasionally catastrophic episodes over a wide geographic area.

Q2c: Are the circling coins attempting to re-create the sphere, and make what seems to be a physical representation of Einstein's formula E=MC2, precursor to another "big bang"? (i153)

DAVE: The circling coins are enacting, rather disinterestedly by the looks of things, the two dichotomous political positions in the debate on the preferred nature of The Other-whether it is better to just hurl off a bunch of sparks (the spermatozoa/masculine/masturbation position) or to generate small imperfect replicas of oneself (the egg/feminine/procreative position).

Next: Question 3...