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Saturday, Nov 28, 2009
Apparently emboldened by the fact that his collaborators hadn't run away screaming, Moore threw the plot out the window for most of Books 3 and 4, and devoted them to an extended explanation of the Kabbala's Tree of Life, the map connecting the sephirot or spheres representing God's attributes (or states of mind) in the Jewish mystical tradition. (The links Moore suggests between the Kabbala and the Tarot are that the 22 major arcana correspond to the 22 paths between sephirot on the Tree of Life, and that, more important, both systems are useful as allegorical representations of the range of human experience.) The conceit of "Promethea's" middle act is that Sophie and her spirit guide, the previous incarnation of Promethea, spend a chapter apiece traveling through metaphorical representations of each of the 10 Kabbalistic sephirot (plus an extra "invisible sphere" Moore sneaks in between the third and fourth).
There's a lot of ungainly expository dialogue in those two books ("This is the fourth sphere, right? 'Chesed,' there on the arch above the Jupiter symbol. I think it means mercy"). Their ratio of profundity to claptrap varies with the reader's openness to semi-digested Crowley, and occasionally Moore threatens to sprain an eyelid from winking so hard. (Sophie meets Hermes, who tells her that gods, as "abstract essences," can only be perceived through linguistic constructs like "picture-stories." Picture-stories? she asks. "Oh, you know. Hieroglyphics. Vase paintings. Whatever did you think I meant?") Some readers complained at the time these installments first appeared that they felt like Moore was lecturing at them, and that's absolutely true. But complaining about "Promethea's" transformation from a graphic novel to a graphic textbook is missing the point: The idea of it isn't to tell a story so much as to present a gigantic mass of arcane philosophy as entertainingly and memorably as possible.
In fact, the Kabbala volumes of "Promethea" are thrilling, partly because they're total eye candy. Williams and Gray draw each chapter in a style of its own, with a color palette dominated by the part of the spectrum associated with that chapter's sphere. The panel backgrounds for the "Chesed" sphere are painted with blotchy, van Gogh-inspired brush strokes, suffused with blue; Binah, the realm of the whore Babalon, is drenched in blacks and dark, tinted grays, with outlines that crinkle like woodcut prints. The colors of the highest sphere, Kether, are traditionally white and gold, and its chapter is illustrated almost entirely in shimmering, pointillist golden yellow. When the story gets back to earth a few pages later, it's hard to readjust, although Williams keeps up the delirious compositional tricks from the Kabbala section.
That leaves Book 5, set a few years later, in which some leftover bits of good-guys-vs.-bad-guys plot from the early stages of the series get mopped up, and Sophie becomes Promethea one last time in order to end the world. ("End," not "destroy." "The world is our systems, our politics, our economies ... our ideas of the world!," an earlier Promethea explains to her; the apocalypse she brings on is more like an enlightenment.) This is at least the fourth time Moore has ended a major series with a vision of global utopia, or at least some kind of benign revolution, although to be fair it's not exactly a cop-out in "Promethea," given that its protagonist is named after the god who brought light to the world.
As entertaining as it is, most of Book 5 is an exercise in clearing the decks for the final chapter, and by then it's clear that hardcore formalist Moore has arranged the series into 32 chapters for a reason. The final one is 32 pages long, each page corresponding to one of the tarot's 22 major arcana or one of the 10 spheres of the Kabbala. (They can be read in the order printed in the book, or they can be assembled into two four-page-by-four-page arrays -- which form gigantic images of Promethea's face -- and read in that order instead.)
This time, it really is a lecture, consisting of a nude Promethea fluttering around candy-colored background abstractions and limning Moore's cosmology, which centers on snakes, psychedelic mushrooms, sensory overload, and language and art as consciousness-altering tools -- especially in comic book form. There is no pretense of narrative, just a circular monologue ("As readers, you are physical beings engaging in a DNA snake-dance with me, a fiction, your immaterial, lunar imagination"), abetted by captions that invoke mythology, literature, science and a little too much pseudoscience ("The butterfly's random fluttering from one point to another also accurately models how thought follows a fractal path from concept to concept").
Without the rest of the "Promethea" series to explain its vocabulary and mystical-theoretical grounding, it would make no sense at all, and even in the context of the story that's led up to it, it's rough going. As a philosophy of life, it's questionable at best; it's a huge pill, and it'd be unswallowable without the smooth sugar coating of Williams' artwork. As an aesthetic philosophy, though, it's astonishingly fertile, recasting the mind as the "radiant heavenly city" Moore promises, populated by the gods that live in the human imagination, and laid out according to the road maps he's presented in the guise of a grand adventure story. He may be the only person who lives there right now, but at least he's inviting the rest of us.
Douglas Wolk's writing on comics and graphic novels appears the first Friday of each month in Salon Books.
