MYTHCOMICS: :"TALES OF HOFMANN" (DOOM PATROL #50-52, 1991)

The three-issue sequence I've termed "Tales of Hofmann" (after the first issue's title) might be the first "Christmas in the comics" story  in which Xmas only plays a niggling role. As the cover of one

collected edition shows, the Patrol's perennial villain "Mister Nobody" is seen wearing a Santa hat in a few panels, and apparently the story does take place at Christmas, since the chimerical character is seen giving away a toy-store's merchandise to thrilled kiddies. However, there's not much Yuletide content in the three issues. Nobody and his comical cronies also parody the Last Supper, though that theme would seem to have more to do with Easter. 

To be sure, the date that most concerns writer Grant Morrison in this sequence is not December 25, but Election Day 1976, when some parodists, probably associated with the Yippies, started the first "Nobody for President" movement. Morrison doesn't directly reference that historical event, but "Hofmann" is a positive ode to all things Yippie-ish, and to all aspects of the counterculture's determination to break down "the doors of perception." For instance, the "Hofmann" of the title is not the horror-story writer associated with the famous opera, but Albert Hofmann, the Swiss scientist who first synthesized and ingested LSD. 

Mister Nobody, originally a minor functionary in the Silver Age DOOM PATROL, was re-imagined by Morrison and artist Richard Case as an opponent for their version of the Patrol. However, whereas the original Patrol had contended against the preachily named group of villains known as "the Brotherhood of Evil," Mister Nobody brought together a bunch of freaky fiends to become his "Brotherhood of Dada." Though his original group were exiled from Earth, Nobody returns to the mortal plane, and promptly recruits yet another merry band of pranksters, and then decides to run for president of the United States. The members of the current Doom Patrol-- Robotman, Rebis, and Crazy Jane-- don't quite know how to deal with this non-destructive rampage, any more than cops of the sixties and seventies knew how to cope with the planned insanity of the Yippies.

As in most if not all of his DOOM PATROL scripts, Morrison firmly endorses an ethics of ecstasy and resistance to the "tedium" of ordinary existence. That said, he might be a little more cautious than the average Timothy Leary disciple, given that he does show a "bad trip" on the part of one of the recipients of Nobody's distribution of LSD-like experiences. However, even if the superheroes aren't quite ready to shut down these wacky malefactors, the U.S. government is more than prepared to do so.

While Morrison could have simply created some standard government super-operative, in "Hofmann" he shows his enthusiasm for "found art." The cover of DOOM PATROL #51 reproduces, albeit with alterations, an unused cover for a DC series that was never launched, concerning a disguise-master named "Yankee Doodle." Probably this aborted concept owed something to similar fare like the pulp-character SECRET AGENT X, but naturally Morrison's concern is to show his version of Yankee Doodle as an agent of the repressive status quo.

The one thing that keeps "Hofmann" from being the best example of a Morrison DOOM PATROL script is the fact that the three issues utilize a somewhat bizarre melange of contributing artists: not only the dominant penciler Richard Case but also Stan Woch, Rian Hughes,, and (most jarringly) Jamie Hewlett. But Morrison still presents a rich discourse regarding humankind's problematic ability to imagine anything, versus their confinement to the Tedium of Ordinary Life.

HUXLEY, JUNG AND STRANGENESS

Without an understanding of man's deep-seated urge to self-transcendence, of his very natural reluctance to take the hard, ascending way, and his search for some bogus liberation either below or to one side of his personality, we cannot hope to make sense of our own particular period of history or indeed of history in general, of life as it was lived in the past and as it is lived today. For this reason I propose to discuss some of the more common Grace- substitutes, into which and by means of which men and women have tried to escape from the tormenting consciousness of being merely themselves.-- Aldous Huxley on Self-Transcendence, opening paragraph.

As the online reprint of Huxley's 1953 essay notes, the author wrote this roughly a year before he took mescaline under a psychiatrist's guidance.  The result was the famous book THE DOORS OF PERCEPTION, which took a very different attitude than this essay toward one's finding "transcendence" through chemical substances.  To be sure, Huxley does allow in the 1953 essay that some brief "moment of spiritual awareness" can be acquired through drugs, but he's skeptical as to whether it can be maintained.

Regardless of one's opinions on this particular issue, the salient concern of Huxley's essay is to understand "the urge to self-transcendence."  The last sentence of his opening paragraph, speaking of "escape from the tormenting consciousness of being merely themselves," seems to imply that such escape is a form of what Adler would call "negative compensation," but the bulk of the essay shows a more analytical approach.

Briefly, Huxley sees the "urge to self-transcendence" as taking three forms:

UPWARD TRANSCENDENCE-- a state of mind that Huxley doesn't adequate define, though he associates it with "theophanies" and the veneration of a " liberating and transfiguring Spirit."


 DOWNWARD TRANSCENDENCE-- a state of mind in which the transcendence "is invariably downward into the less than human, the lower than personal."  Huxley's three main venues toward this form of transcendence are "drugs, elementary sexuality and herd-intoxication," though he mentions some others as well.

HORIZONTAL TRANSCENDENCE-- Huxley himself is worth quoting at length here:

In order to escape from the horrors of insulated selfhood most men and women choose, most of the time, to go neither up nor down, but sideways. They identify themselves with some cause wider than their own immediate interests, but not degradingly lower and, if higher, higher only within the range of current social values. This horizontal, or nearly horizontal, self- transcendence may be into something as trivial as a hobby, or as precious as married love. It can be brought about through self-identification with any human activity, from running a business to research in nuclear physics, from composing music to collecting stamps, from campaigning for political office to educating children or studying the mating habits of birds. Horizontal self- transcendence is of the utmost importance. Without it, there would be no art, no science, no law, no philosophy, indeed no civilization.

To invoke Jungian terminology once more, "horizontal transcendence" most nearly approximates the idea of a given subject's purely "personal" psychology, dealing with activities that pertain to one's day-to-day consciousness, such as acquiring a given skill:
 

If Person One wants to build a birdhouse, that individual is in a static state with respect to his non-knowledge about birdhouse-building, and he reaches a dynamic state once he has learned the method of crafting birdhouses and does successfully build one.-- A SIEGEL SEGUE.

Jung's concept of the "transpersonal," however, compares favorably with Huxley's concept of both "upward" and "downward transcendence."  Even though the latter concerns a descent into sordid physicality that Huxley deems "lower than personal," it, unlike horizontal transcendence, can lead to the other kind:

To what extent, and in what circumstances, is it possible for a man to make use of the descending road as a way to spiritual self-transcendence; As first sight it would seem obvious that the way down is not and can never be the way up. But in the realm of existence matters are not quite so simple as they are in our beautifully tidy world of words. In actual life a downward movement may sometimes be made the beginning of an ascent. When the shell of the ego has been cracked and there begins to be a consciousness of the subliminal and physiological othernesses underlying personality, it sometimes happens that we catch a glimpse, fleeting but apocalyptic, of that other Otherness, which is the Ground of all being.

Jung does not speak of "downward transcendence" as such, but in some writings he too views the darkness in man-- what he terms "the shadow"-- as a source of upward transformation:

Taking it in its deepest sense, the shadow is the invisible saurian tail that man still drags behind him. Carefully amputated, it becomes the healing serpent of the mysteries.-- Jung, The Integration of the Personality (1939)

Huxley's theory also has some worthwhile applications to my theory of metaphenomenality and isophenomenality.  Obviously the working manifestion of isophenomenality, "naturalism," denotes a state of being in which the subject remains on a horizontal plane.  Within that plane, all phenomena are essentially the same, differing only by degree in terms of how typical or atypical a given subject considers them.

In contrast, the two characteristics of metaphenomenality are marked by the attempt to transcend the world of sameness, of contingency, as I noted in a not unrelated context here:

But what form can transcendence take, if one does not nullify the world of the contingent?

In a sense "strangeness"-- the quality that I find in both divisons of metaphenomenality-- is that nullification of the world of the contingent, of sameness, in that strangeness presents to us a world of ghosts and gods, a world that implicitly trumps the tigers of materialism.  Strangeness can operate equally well in terms of "upward" or "downward" forms of transcendence, evoking presences that are beyond one's horizontal consciousness, irrespective of whether they incline more toward heaven or hell.   One might even loosely term the supergenre "fantasy" as having a predilection for images of upward transcendence, while "horror" tends toward images of down-bound movement.

More to come in the next essay.