Superheroes
It’s funny how sometimes you observe something and it makes you realise things about something quite different - often with no connection at all. Yesterday morning I was watching my daughter playing with some figures of the ‘Incredibles’ (we don’t really approve but what can you do?) and I realised I knew something I didn’t know I knew (if you catch my drift - if not, bear with me, it gets clearer).
What I realised was this: all desire and effort is on fact a desire an effort to reach God. There is no division into ‘good’ and ‘bad’, there is just misplaced effort - we are all desiring ‘God’ but some of us just don’t realise it. The desire for power, for that new car, to be ‘free’ or ‘enlightened’, to shag the girl next door - all this is the search for God. Of course, one may not be able to find God in these ways but I am not talking about the outward effort rather the underlying impulse which is often unknown even to the person doing the ‘desiring’.
In a way, we are all on a search for truth, we just call it different things, envisage the end of the road in different ways (all necessarily incorrect) and all, to some degree, have a property interest in our ‘own’ chosen method.
Put it this way: all earthly desire is subject to diminishing returns and nothing really satisfies in the long-term. The effort to fulfill desires is essentially a search for ultimate fulfillment - to reach a point where there are no more diminishing returns and all desires are satisfied. This is God. and as people are searching for this state they are in essence searching for God. They just don’t know it or for some reason don’t want to call it that, perhaps because their image of God is of the ‘Policeman on a Cloud’ variety.
The issue seems to me to be one of whether we look at the outward form of the desiring (girl, car, heaven etc) or the inner motivation. There may well be an inner harmony between things which seem to have no connection at all. And that is what the mystical quest is all about - learning to see these connections and inner qualities.
It follows that attempts at travelling on this road which are based on establishing and maintaining division are a kind of short-circuit. They really will take one on the road to ‘Turkestan’ even though the inner desire is to reach ‘Mecca’ and may be the same as someone who is headed in that direction. If we do not start to develop this discriminatory faculty then all we are left with is a pseudo-acadmeic argument about the rights and wrongs of whatever system we find attractive or repulsive and vain attempts at convincing others we are right.
Which brings me back to the ‘Incredibles’ and the title of this post (no, really) - I was thinking of the similarities between the archetype of the Superhero and the figure of the malamati.
The malamati, as regular readers will probably know, were historically a mystical movement arising in Khorasan, Persian in the 9th Century CE. They believed in hiding their religious or mystical activities and would often appear to be impious. For example, if accused of not attending to his religious duties, a malamati might admit that he had been out drinking or carousing with women and would take the consequences of this admission. In reality however, they had been doing no such thing and would have been spending the night praying in secret or somesuch worthy activity that they would keep secret (it should be noted that the malamatiyya did not actually break the law or commit the sins they were accused of, they just did not defend themselves against such accusations. The idea that they did indulge in excessive behaviour or degrees of anti-nomianism is incorrect and arises from a confusion with a later ‘order’, the qalandariyya who did indulge in such activities and were hardly spiritual at all but rather used the cover of religion to hide their depredations).
So what has all this got to do with the Incredibles? Well it seems to me that the motif of the super-hero draws on an archetype that is present in the human mind and which is similar in tenor to that of the malamatiyya. The defining characteristic of the Superhero is that he is unknown for what he really is - often his everyday persona is wildly at variance with his Superhero nature. Clark Kent is a bumbling clerk for example but the defining characteristic is that he hides his true nature and if, if challenged, denies it and refuses to take the credit, respect and applause he would undeniably get.
This seems to me to touch on the central issue of whether we can see beyond appearances. Who recognizes the bumbling clerk? Who suspects that the Superhero is in fact the same man as the drooling office idiot?
The same people who eulogize and obsess about the Superhero - who beg for his help in times of trouble, who spend all day and everyday fantasising in awe and amazement about this ‘saviour’ - these same people are the ones who order the bumbling office boy to make their tea five times a day unknowing and unable to tell that he is the same person.
There is a double aspect: the Superhero/malamati’s capacity of enduring ridicule and abuse when he is undeserving of it (the ‘Suffering Servant’ motif in a Christological sense - and Christ is certainly an example of the archetype we are discussing) and the inability of the observer to see what is really going on whilst being utterly sure that they know exactly who Clark Kent is and exactly who Superhero X is.
And if anyone tells them these people are in fact the same they will get angry, argue vehemently or feel called to start a mission of spreading propaganda to ‘prove’ that Clark is Clark (or Batman is Batman). Or maybe they will just phone the men in the white coats.
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