Sunday, May 16, 2010

Who Are You...!?/γνῶθι σεαυτόν gnōthi seauton/Mr. Nobody...






"But first, a story. The true story of Mr. Nobody-- who he is and how he came to be, you'll laugh, you'll cry.

Listen! You can almost hear the screeching of exotic birds. You can almost hear the rain drumming on the skylight, on the veranda! Splash! The fish jump in the choked pond, the clocks tick tock tick tock. Listen...

Are you sitting comfortably? Then I'll begin."

"The story goes that he locked himself in his...room and using shamanistic techniques, which, they say date back to man's infancy, emerged after several days with a...how can I put it?"

"I wasn't Mr. Nobody then, Oh no, I was Mr. Somebody! ...there were, he said, certain methods. Certain forbidden techniques...would transform me into a new man...the careful construction of a new identity. I imagined freedom. And so like a fool I agreed.

By the end of the first day I was completely insane. Those initial hours were very bad. I was assailed by doubts, by terrors and by hallucinations of every conceivable configuration. I endured a horror-show of sensations.

And then nothing. White. White forever in every direction. Minutes became centuries became millennia, became eons. I learned later that I was in there for only three days and three nights--the traditional Celtic period of mystical trial. It was like forever. Like forever piled on forever and forever, world without end, yahoo! After several billion centuries, I was thoroughly convinced of my own serene divinity. Like the ascended Buddha, I was beyond Maya, beyond the veil of illusion. I knew the purity of infinite absence and then on the third night, something happened...

...it occupied all my thoughts, I evolved whole cosmologies around this supremely mysterious and grateful presence. And then I was struck be a terrifying thought. In that moment, in that catastrophic final instant, all that I was, had been, would be, the whole infinity of my being was erased. I had become the spirit of the twenty-first century, the abstract man. The virtual man. The notional man. Or as...so aptly put "Mr. Nobody."

---Doom patrol Vol 2 p 20-25, 35; Grant Morrison




"Do you want to know who you are ? Don't ask. Act! Action will delineate and define you." -Thomas Jefferson.

"I am not a man. I am dynamite." - Nietzsche.

"Become who you are." -Nietzsche.











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