I recently picked up Alan Moore's Swamp Thing: Earth to Earth, one of the trade paperbacks collecting the legendary writer's equally legendary work on the Swamp Thing comic series. I've got the earlier Moore volumes, and I'd been meaning to pick this one up for a while, expecting an entertaining read.
Then I got to the final story in the book, entitled "My Blue Heaven."
I'm gonna try to sum this up: at the end of the previous issue, the Swamp Thing, a self-described plant-elemental whose consciousness can reside in and manipulate the entirety of the planet's fauna (it's more interesting than it sounds, believe me), finds himself cut off from the plant collective, which he calls The Green, and trapped in his plant body, which is then burned to ashes by assassins. Swampy, faced with annihilation, launches his consciousness into the void, only to regain awareness on an odd planet, a long, long way away from Earth. Which is where we find him, when the story begins.
The Swamp Thing, marooned on this strange world in which everything is blue, misses his home. He misses his wife (yes, he's married). Forlorn and desperate, he tries to recreate both from the planet's blue vegetation: a town of plants, skillfully woven to look like brick and stone, a facsimile of his wife with skin of blue moss, bones of blue wood, embodied with a part of his consciousness to act like he expects her to act, to say what he expects her to say. To further the illusion, he creates simulacra of other townfolk, men sitting on porches, lovers strolling, all a part of him, given life by him, and doing what he assumes they should do. It's a good lie, incredibly convincing, and he almost manages to believe that he could mistake it for reality.
But he doesn't. His wife, he can't get her smile quite right. It's off. Her tone is wrong. His mind gets distracted, and the puppets in the puppet show begin to wander, and then it all falls apart, as these lives of lies always do. The artifice can't bear the weight of the reality, the illusion requires more energy and will than he can bear, and it crumbles into the nothing it really was all along.
It's a beautiful story, one I've read a number of times since. And I can't fully explain why it's moved me as much as it has. There's no real bearing on it for me...I don't see myself reflected in the tale. My own blue world is relatively free of illusion, an odd thing for a writer; but perhaps not so odd, as I've a strong analytical side as well and have always striven to resist self-delusion. I'm not living a lie, and I like my reality quite enough to not need to go to great lengths to escape it. But escapism has a tremendous appeal to the imaginative: we wake from the best dreams with reluctance, and with a desire to return that can be overwhelming enough to haunt us in the waking day. In college, when I spent my days studying engineering, filling reams of paper with intricate calculations and filling my conscious mind with analysis and science, my unconscious would retaliate while I slept with amazingly detailed adventuries taking place in past and future times, on this and other worlds. I once woke from a dream of robbing stagecoaches with the taste of dust in my mouth. Such is the curse of imagination: the ability to create worlds that, once you've created them, can become far too appealing to leave behind. In the worst or most vulnerable of us, the danger of this attraction is surprisingly real; as in the case of Jean-Claude Romand, who over the course of eighteen years built up a life in which he was a respected doctor for the World Health Organization, convincing his wife, his children, his parents, all the while hiding out during working hours in caf駸 and hotel rooms, spending his and his family's savings, until the strain of the illusion became to great, and he ended it violently.
The rest of us, we just write.
My point? I don't know...I was moved by a comic book. Of course, I was also moved tonight by the Christmas episode of JUSTICE LEAGUE. So either the holidays and my birthday are making me reflective and sentimental, or as my wife has suggested more than once, I'm somehow starting to psychically share her emotional rollercoaster of PMS. Me, I'm praying for the former.