Pah

The Supercontext

Andrew thinks he’d have nothing to say to Grant Morrison. But from the videos I’ve seen, Morrison’s a softly spoken, easy going kind of guy. Patrick Meaney did catch up with him at a signing in June, and had a lovely chat.

Of particular interest was their discussion about the supercontext, the fate of humanity in 2012 laid out in The Invisibles:

Now, I’ve had some issues with the idea that we lose our individuality, and I asked him about this. He was very adamant about the fact that individuality is an illusion to begin with, so moving into the supercontext isn’t losing anything at all. I’d heard about this in theory, but it didn’t really work for me. However, he took things to another level with his explanation for this. The idea of the “timeworm”, all your history stretching back behind you, through time, was present in issue 3.2, however, I’d always thought of the timeworm as an individual thing. Grant said that the timeworm extends from you now, back all through your history, up into your mother before you were born, and hers extends back to her mother, and it goes back like this all the way until the very first single celled organism. So, all of life is quite literally connected because we are born out of the same parent organism, and like a tree, we have branched out through time and space. So, if you were to view things from an outside of time perspective, you wouldn’t see individuals at all, you would see just one massive organism growing out of itself and expanding.

(What appears to be many forces is one.)

I first came across the idea of the time solid in Watchmen, followed shortly by Slaughterhouse-Five. Like Patrick, I’ve always thought of it as being personal: in the time solid, we are like centipedes, but we are still individual. And I don’t think Ashley Wood conveyed anything otherwise on page 14 of The Invisibles volume 3 #2, nor did Cameron Stewart when he redrew the page for The Invisible Kingdom trade paperback, nor do I think Morrison allowed enough space and time for it in his script.

But if there is no proper revelation, I can still see the hints throughout the series. And it is a compelling idea.

The Tralfamadorians can freely experience any moment from their existence, but in the supercontext we can all, like John-A-Dreams, experience any moment in any of our existences. Because it is a single existence.

This idea that all life is a single entity also gels with the idea developed by Morrison in The Filth, that we are not Cartesian robots piloted by an Ego, but, in fact, super-organisms composed mostly of gazillions of micro-organisms. The boundary between I and not-I is indefinite.

I’m not sure in either case that we “lose our individuality” or that “individuality is an illusion”, but rather that individuality is just one of many options, literally a point of view—a position that is backed up King Mob’s claim in #8, his experience of the supercontext in And We’re All Policeman, and the whole John-A-Dreams story.