The Last Temptation of Jack: Or comics, Buddhism and postmodern thought.

No, I'm not referring to our friend, the Hatter. This is an issue of The Invisibles, specifically Volume 1 Issue 23. Morrison never gets around to mentioning the term, but The Last Temptation of Jack is a story of a bodhisattva.

For those of you unfamiliar with the term, a bodhisattva is a being worthy of nirvana who forgoes the ultimate enlightenment in favor of spending their energy helping others attain enlightenment.

"‘tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wished. To die, to sleep
To sleep, perchance to dream."

It is a sacrifice to give up nirvana, a sign of nobility and altruism not commonly seen in our culture. We admire the Buddha for his accomplishment, for achieving release from this mortal plane and the suffering that existence represents, but in the bodhisattva we find something perhaps more godly.

And if we take Derrida's view, that death is a gift only a mortal individual can be responsible for giving, then this sacrifice becomes all the more of a gift.

Nirvana: The realization of the non-existence of self, leading to cessation of all entanglement and attachment in life; the state of being released from the effects of karma and the cycle of death and rebirth.

Nirvana then is the ultimate death within this frame of reference. It is a removal from everything that haunts our waking lives, every nightmare and pleasure, every sin, temptation and sordid little detail. It is release in that we let go and are detached, no longer tethered by this strangling umbilical. To give this up is to sacrifice our death, or rather control of our death and work for something bigger. It is the delay of our release of potential, like the bonds that hold together the nucleus of an atom we are far greater than our appearance.

It strikes me as being a lonely kind of existence because you stand so very singular as a bodhisattva. By nature of your continued existence, you are set apart and above from the throngs of bourgeoisie. Revered as godlike, caught between wanting to ascend and seeking the normalcy of a mundane existence, the bodhisattva is the human Superman.

It makes this existence a tragedy and a triumph, and I wonder (as I often do when confronted with these kinds of thoughts) what kind of strength it takes to live that life. It takes conviction and a strong will to choose this harder path and stick to it, for indeed it is the harder path because it is an exercise in self-torture. It is to take on the burden of the Fallen, to glimpse the beauty of heaven and turn away from the light.

The difference of course is that Lucifer in turning away gave up his responsibilities and his name, Light-bringer. To be bodhisattva then is to take up that shirked responsibility and act not for yourself but for the Others.

. . .

For a moment now I would like to return to that definition of nirvana. It describes this total enlightenment as a state of being wherein an individual experiences a realization of the non-existence of self. At first glance, this seems counter to much of the postmodern thought as I've come to understand it. Identity, the Other, and Being, what we call Heidegger's dasein, all call for and intuitively require a Self to compare and relate to.

In order to deconstruct and reduce these thoughts, to tear down and placate these impossible binaries of alterity, we must first admit that they exist. We come across a paradox of the chicken and the egg. To show a binary is false or at least created under false contexts, it must be accepted as existing, bot h states must hold true.

What I see happening in The Invisibles is a similar kind of balance. The lines are drawn but they're blurry. The binary that we see is just a simplification, it is a two dimensional illustration of a four dimensional hyperline. The realization of the non-existence of self that is nirvana then becomes not so simple. The non-existence is perhaps a simplification of the idea that the idea of self as a construct as a single necessity of existence is false. Self then is a multi-facet, multi-dimensional idea beyond what we see it as.

The self is the Self is the Other is non-existent is a byproduct of our attempts to understand and define our existence. Which sounds simple spelled out like this, but to actually put it in words would require more than just the alphabet at our disposal.

To be continued...