Feb. 22nd, 2017

Cosmic

Feb. 22nd, 2017 07:16 pm
sadoeuphemist: (Default)
Captain America is in a battle against reality! Aren't we all, aren't we all.

His foe, the Red Skull, wields the Cosmic Cube, an artifact of pure imposition. It is reality, compacted into its most stable form: six faces, twelve edges, eight vertices. It is a comic book construct inked in with a ruler and the Hand of God, it is a comic book itself, all the panels folded in on each other to take on a three-dimensional form. It is a what-if, it is an elseworld, it is an imaginary story. Within its six faces it contains every single story that has ever existed or could ever possibly be told.

The Cosmic Cube, being geometrically perfect, fits poorly in a human hand. The edges cut into the skin, the vertices pierce the flesh. It is the antithesis of organic design. It is a doomsday weapon, it is a plot device, it is the reduction of the world to a set of straight lines. It would take a fascist to effectively wield it, or an artist, someone with the ego to rewrite reality in their image. 

Captain America, at the mercy of the Red Skull, throws himself against blank white walls, tenses and holds his shield at the ready. He is a spot of ink, a figment. His history is erased and rewritten. His screams disappear into the ether. His body blurs. He is a double-agent, he is rendered into a fascist. His allies are arrayed against him. Across the sides of the Cube are the Red Skull's fingers, encompassing his world. The odds are insurmountable. By all rights, the Red Skull should obliterate him completely, smear the red, white and blue into an ugly little splotch on the backside of history. 

So: Why does Captain America continue to exist? 

The only reasonable explanation is metatextual, bleeds upwards to pathology. The Red Skull, fascist that he is, cannot imagine an existence post-victory, cannot imagine an end to the battle. There must always be a foe to defeat, to humiliate, to dominate, to stomp into the dust. To call it overconfidence would be to underestimate the depths of the human spirit. The Red Skull does not believe he is sure to win. He believes he will cease to exist once he does. Poised on the verge of eliminating his nemesis entirely, he would rather resort to self-sabotage: a weak grip, an overlooked variable, a faltering of the will. Captain America is all but irrelevant in the conclusion to this battle. The Red Skull inevitably engineers his own downfall. 

The Cosmic Cube, six faces, twelve edges, eight vertices, comprises the limits to imagination. These are the comics we read. These are the stories we tell. Every month another comic book comes out, and the never-ending battle continues. Captain America persists, and so does the Red Skull. They die and are resurrected, they change costumes, they change forms. They are replaced by successors and impostors, they resurface under different faces and different names. For all his Cosmic power, the Red Skull is an archetype, a caricature of a Nazi, just paper and ink like his nemesis. The stories tell us that even in the most dire of circumstances, Nazis are self-defeating, that all the American spirit needs to do to triumph is to keep alight its flagging flame, to battle against all odds with neither fear nor surrender. 

The stories tell us that America is set against an omnipotent foe, besieged, ever-noble, battling against an existential threat for his survival. The stories tell us that America exists within the parameters of a fascist imagination.
 
***

Captain America, in one of his myriad forms, is Sam Wilson, an African-American man with a history subject to revision. Sam Wilson was a partner of the original Captain America, and eventually took on the mantle as his replacement. He is a creation of the Cosmic Cube, or a victim of it, defined by the limitations of reality. Subject to the Cosmic Cube, Sam Wilson contains multitudes:

In one dimension, Sam Wilson is a social worker who comes upon an indigenous tribe under the control of a cabal of fascists, and leads them in a rebellion. He is an intrinsically good and righteous man, the stuff that heroes are made of. He would only naturally partner with Captain America, would only naturally be chosen to serve as his successor. Good is good and evil is evil, transcending the petty divisions of race, and the heroes inevitably triumph and are recognized. 

In a second dimension, Sam Wilson is a construct, sleeper agent, an invention of the Red Skull. His original identity is Snap Wilson, a man who weathered a harsh world to succeed as a mobster, his identity overwritten into the perfect black man to appeal to America's imagination. "I knew exactly what kind of man would most appeal to your sniveling liberalism," the Red Skull sneers, Cosmic Cube firmly in his grip. "An upright, cheerful negro with a love of the same 'brotherhood' you cherish!" The lurking evil is the failure to accept reality, gladly swallowing up a happy fiction while ignoring the possibility for malice and betrayal. But in the end the trap is sprung, and as always, the Red Skull's machinations fail. Sam Wilson's heroic nature prevails, artificial and constructed though it might have originally been. 

In the third dimension, the pimp-suited street hustler Snap Wilson is a cruel caricature, a lie created by the Red Skull to undermine and discredit him. The Red Skull was lying all along, using the Cosmic Cube to cast doubt on a good and noble black man, and the true evil in the world is having the lie resonate. Only a bigot could believe it, only a bigot could expect it to be believed. Sam denounces the lie and takes flight, free from the prejudice that sought to defame him. 

All three planes of reality intersect at a single point: Captain America is blameless, victim of a sinister plot, battling the unfortunate facts of reality. The truths about Sam Wilson were true until they weren't, the dodgy racial politics of the past foisted off onto a Nazi. Captain America can be re-imagined as anything, anyone, but only within the rigid confines of the Cube, only so long as he suits the purposes of its wielder. The old Captain America can be reborn as the fascist resurgence of the nation, plotting to overthrow the black man who succeeded him, but only so long as the doctrine is imposed on him externally, out of his control. This is not the America we knew, this is not the America we believed in. We must denounce its existence as a lie, a Nazi imposition. Captain America is still noble and brave and true at heart; Captain America is in a battle against reality!

Aren't we all.

We grip the Cosmic Cube in trembling fingers and feel the power thrumming through its surface; we force the world to reshape itself according to our will. We tell stories. America is a hero. America is a fascist. There is a patriot or traitor in the White House, behind the skin, behind the mask. We look out and see the edges of the Cube enclosing us, gleaming glass framing our cities and streets. We see the fingers closing around the sides of the Cube, another person's will imposing onto ours, threatening to overcome our reality. We are transformed, our histories rewritten, virtue and blame shifting to lead us inevitably to our current reality. We see our own fingerprints on the other side of the glass. And in that moment, we see the limits of our imagination. 

***

The Cosmic Cube is six faces, twelve edges, eight vertices, reality compacted into its most stable form. It is the embryonic stage of something greater. If left to exist, allowed to evolve, it inevitably develops its own intelligence, develops sentience, breaches the strict boundaries of its design. It expands past its faces, its edges, its vertices, it abandons stability for volition. It extends hands out to the cosmos, it looks upon the universe with new eyes. It unfolds into a heretofore unimagined potential.

It becomes a living being.
sadoeuphemist: (Default)
Step 1: Take the figure of a cyclist, bent double on his bike, pedaling furiously.

Step 2: Trace an aerodynamic shape over it, like an extension of the helmet or the nose of a bullet train, such that only the wheels and perhaps the pedals and feet are left visible at the bottom.

Step 3: Reproduce the shape, pasting it beneath the first and slightly to the rear. Repeat the process such that the segments stretch backwards indefinitely in a serpentine curve.

Step 4: VoilĂ ! A Velocipede!
sadoeuphemist: (Default)
pet1
/pet/

noun
a friend who is completely dependent on you, who you legally own, and who you will someday probably have to euthanize.

Profile

sadoeuphemist: (Default)
sadoeuphemist

September 2019

S M T W T F S
1234567
891011121314
151617 18192021
2223242526 2728
2930     

Most Popular Tags

Style Credit

Expand Cut Tags

No cut tags
Page generated Jul. 9th, 2025 04:42 am
Powered by Dreamwidth Studios