Religion in Cerebus - Mothers and Daughters - Part Six

There's not as much directly about religion in Women as one would suspect. Oh, certainly, there are the facing pages from extracts of the writings of Cirin and Astoria, and one would assume they are there to exhibit some of the fundamental principles of Cirinism and Kevillism, respectively. And of course they are, in a way. But they are not spiritually oriented, really. There's little talk about The Goddess here, really. There is certainly discussion of morality, in the sense of a set of rules for living one's life (making sure girls tell their mothers all about their dreams, for instance). And there is discussion of the broader legalistic aspects of morality, more properly political than religious, such as the Alcohol Sanction. But we learned more about what Astoria believed in, what she thought about her Goddess, during the brief conversation between her and Cerebus in her jail cell in Church & State than is revealed in any of the writings here.

From the opening salvo, where Astoria asserts that "The penis is an organ without scruple" and advises women to take advantage of that fact, giving herself as a demonstration of how this can be done, and Cirin on the opposite page advises tolerance with daughters and assurance that they will "grow up" when they become mothers themselves, to the final debate on the nature of The Eye in the Pyramid, there is little here that provides insight into Cirnism or Kevillism as religions, although we learn much about their general attitudes toward life.

Nonetheless, I'll be dealing with these pieces as well as the few overtly religious moments in the narrative parts of "Women," because religious or not they do provide our deepest and best insight into Dave's ideas of what Cirinism and Kevillism are.

As I say, the first item is a call for women to be ruthless and unscrupulous in their use of sex to control men, on the justification that men are controlled by the penises anyway, and that organ has no scruples. It is at once boastful and celebratory, and Astoria seems totally unaware that the avenue she has chosen to travel is not available to all women. Like many women who are both attractive and intelligent, she completely discounts her appearance as contributing in any way to her success, congratulating herself that it entirely due to her intelligence, even while describing a path that could hardly have been taken by a homely woman. Cirin's counter is to call for tolerance of bad behavior by daughters, because they will eventually grow out of such excesses once motherhood overtakes them. While the percentage of fertile women is much higher than the percentage of attractive ones, Cirin is herself ignoring the fact that extremely homely women unlikely to attract a mate and those attractive enough to do so but infertile -- a substantial chunk of women, put together -- will never experience childbirth, in any case. She refers to it as a universal condition, but it is not so. They both, in other words, universalize from their own personal experience (gee, who does that sound like?).

This is not to deny a certain amount of truth in both positions. A young, attractive woman who is willing to use sex the way Astoria describes will indeed be able to get almost anything she wants from most men. And it's true also that childbirth does something to most men and women that alters and matures them, and that this effect is more pronounced in women than it is in men.

Their next debate is about power -- Astoria, as a daughter, chafes under the control of a matriarchy, arguing that mothers are by nature conservative and overly cautious, creating a static and stagnant political system. Cirin, points out that the expendability of males causes them to love disorder and chaos, seeking to make their mark on the world, and cautions that daughters with an "irrational fear of childbirth" may engage in the same behavior.

The next debate contains what is, for me, the first false note in the proceedings. Remember that long ago Dave said that modern-day feminists were Kevillists, and of course on the central political issue of modern feminism, abortion, the Cirinists are obviously firmly on the side of the anti-feminists.

So it seems odd to find Astoria charging that the Cirinists are hypocrites when it comes to children and family:

. . . at the upper levels of Cirin's government (and, in fact, at most levels of her bureaucracy) the children of her officials are cared for by nannies and governesses until the age of five when they are unceremoniously shipped off to government-run boarding schools. Cirin's own son, Gerrkick told me that he did not spend a full day in his mother's company until he was nearly sixteen; and then it was merely to observe her working day so that he might have a fuller appreciation of the complexities of governing Upper Felda.

Leaving aside the question of why Cirin's son, who as a male could not ever hope to hold any position in a Cirinist government, would be taught the complexities of governing, there is a very real problem here, in my opinion. There is an obvious solution to the problem of governing by mothers if motherhood is itself all important -- the delaying of career until after the children are grown, or at least until they are of a certain age. It's something many women have done through the years, something Cirin almost hints at in her rejoinder here. It seems obvious to me that if Cirinism were real that would be the standard and preferred way of doing things (though there certainly might be exceptions, especially among the upper echelons). It seems to me that Dave, eager to attack feminist motherhood and unable to do so through the Kevillists, whom he has artificially determined will all be childless daughters, has twisted Cirinism into something totally false and inherently hypocritical, something he will develop further later in the book but which seems to me to grow out of Dave's desire to paint women in the worst light possible rather than truly out of the inherent nature of the philosophies he claims to be representing here.

Cirin basically says that women should wait until childbirth to start a career, that before childbirth they are too immature, but that one shouldn't worry too much about a young woman who insists on putting career first -- for most of them, they will soon abandon it when a suitable mate comes along. She finishes:

In those situations where the cart is before the horse; where career comes before childbirth; it is interesting to note that few daughters ever return to that career. In those situations where the career comes after childbirth, career is kept in its proper place as an ancillary interest to the fuller and more important task of child-rearing.

There are a couple of things of note here. First, note the word "return," clearly and unmistakable implying that women who give birth in the Cirinist system do, in fact, wait at least some time before they begin a career, or return to one they have already started. How long? Six months? A year? Could it in fact be that the ideal is six years or twelve and that Astoria has distorted the situation, focusing on a few exceptions to the rule (such as Cirin herself) among the highest of the high? On the other hand, unless we discount Astoria's description of Gerrick's relationship with his mother as completely fabricated slander, there's an irony and an undeniable hypocrisy in Cirin insisting that a woman's career should be ancillary to the "fuller and more important task of child-rearing."

Before moving on to the next pair of quoted texts, I'd like to speak about Cerebus' meeting with the mysterious woman whom we much later discover to be the real Cirin. She tells him that women literally read men's minds -- something Dave has stated that he actually believes.

It's a little more complicated than that. "Women's intuition" is a nice way of putting it. "Women are more sensitive" is another. A not-so-nice way of putting it is that women rape men's minds the way men rape women's bodies. It's not an exact analogy, of course, because rape is invasion and invasion is the man's way, not the woman's way; absorption and consumption are the woman's way; what they're built for. Consider the two genders, one that invades and violates and the other that absorbs and consumes. The nice way of putting it is that they're complementary. The not-so-nice way of putting it is that they deserve each other; serve each other right.

I'm quite aware that these are the words of a character -- and a female character at that, and can't be taken at face value as Dave's opinion. Still, it's quite insightful that at this point in the story we're talking about a balance, about women being just as bad as men, but in a different way. There's no hint yet of the equivalent of "two legs bad, four legs good" kind of "anti-feminism" that discounts the value of half the human race Dave will develop later. "One that invades and violates and the other that absorbs and consumes." That strikes me as about right. The notion that men are all Goodness and Light and Reason and women are just absorbers and consumers of that Light strikes me as false.

But I'm getting ahead of myself.

Next: more of Women.

Time in Cerebus: Suenteus Po

We were supposed to discuss Alexx Kay's Cerebus Timeline some months ago, but somehow it never happened.

I am very sympatico with Alexx, having created my own timeline not unlike his a long, long time ago. Mine was not nearly as complete -- for one thing, the comic wasn't halfway finished yet at the time. I was thinking of pulling it out and working on updating it when I first ran into Alexx's first version (or was it his second?) on the Internet. Wow. He'd gone much further and deeper than I had even then, so I resolved to let him do the hard work.

Still, while I'm grateful to him for compiling lots of good factual information and agree with most of his choices where subjectivity was unavoidable, there a couple of places where I think he got it wrong. Moreover, the deeper into studying the notion of time and its passage in Cerebus, the clearer it seems to me that Dave Sim deliberately and quite calculatedly made Alexx's task utterly fruitless and impossible, muddying things so that no one would ever be certain how much time had passed when.

First, an obvious thing I think he got wrong: Suenteus Po.

Alexx does acknowledge the contradictions and troubles in trying to pin down just when the three main Suenteus Pos lived, and the further problem of the fact that there are large numbers of people by this name -- there are at least six separate characters by that name in Cerebus, if you count the successive lives of the Suenteus Po we meet in Flight as separate characters, possibly as many as eight, not even including things like the brief mention that "at the time of his [Alfred, aka Suenteus Po the Second] death at the age of forty-one, fully one third of the population of the Lower City was named Suenteus Po and believed themselves to function within a single, divine consciousness."

But in the end he puts the events of the three main Suenteus Pos as having happened long, long ago, sometime before the original Tarim and therefore before the count that produces the years we see in High Society and other places. This despite the fact that he quotes extensively the Flight's Suenteus Po about his "subsequent incarnation" (after living and dying as "Suenteus Po the First" and not referred to by any name but in light of the above mention about 1/3 the population of Lower Iest there's at least a good chance that his name was Suenteus Po), including the fact that he worked with gold coins, and in the next breath points out that the original Tarim invented coins -- supposedly sometime AFTER Suenteus Po was working with them.

But not only was he a goldsmith who worked with coins, but he mentions specifically that he worked with the "gold coins which served, as they do to this day, as the foundation of each family income in Iest," and mentions that they were "traditionally carved with the symbol of the family" who owned them. It's clear that coins are not a new invention, but have been around long enough to build up "traditions."

With Dave Sim's cyclic view of history it is indeed possible that this happened long before the "invention" of coins, just as his story "The First Invention of Armour" takes place not just long before the invention of armor that *we* know of but before a subsequent invention even within the world of Estarcion. But for there to be a long-held tradition of coin-making and coin-keeping in Iest prior to the recognized invention of coins seems unlikely in the extreme. It would have had to have been long enough ago that all records from that time were lost, which doesn't seem to be the case.

So, it didn't happen more than 1400 years ago, as Alexx supposes. When then did it happen?

Well, actually, there's more evidence than just the gold coins. All the way back in the first appearance of Suenteus Po -- or at least someone who calls himself Suenteus Po -- in "Mind Games," we have the following exchange:

PO (at this point still an unknown voice in the dark): Well it's not as if I don't have anything *better* to do. I have my own quasi-religious movement to worry about . . .

CEREBUS: Cerebus doesn't . . . uh -- your *own* movement?

PO: I thought you'd recognize me -- I'm Suenteus Po . . .

CEREBUS: Founder of Illusionism . . . ?

CEREBUS: Cerebus thought you were dead . . .

PO: Quite *understandable*. Most people one hundred and eighty two years old *are* dead.

Now, leave aside for the moment *which* Suenteus Po Cerebus is talking to here. The obvious supposition is that it's either the Suenteus Po we later meet in Flight, or one of the "capricious aspects" of that Po's personality acting independently. In any case, this seems to clearly establish that Illusionism, at least as an organized (to the extent the Illusionists are organized) movement identified by that name, is a relatively recent newcomer to Estarcion, at least compared with the Church of Tarim. Whether or not the entity he's speaking to is telling the truth is irrelevant to this important point: Cerebus takes it as either an already-known truth or an unsurprising new detail that the founder of Illusionism was born one hundred eighty-two years ago.

And who was the founder of Illusionism? Well, according to the Suenteus Po of Flight, it was Suenteus Po the Second, aka Alfred, the son of Suenteus Po the First.

Therefore, the invasion of Iest by Suenteus Po -- at least the one we hear about in Church and State from the Judge and again in Flight by Suenteus Po -- took place something less than 200 years ago. It was all very recent, as historic events go.

This does not jive with the impression that these things all happened unimaginably long ago, but then, neither does the story we learn about the origin of Cirinism and jive with its presentation as something that's been around for "thousands" of years. Dave may be making a deliberate point about sweeping historical changes that, once they are accomplished, make people think things have "always" been that way.

And of course, we know that Dave does deliberately mess with his readers' heads, and especially in regards to the passage of time. It was almost like he was toying with Alexx and I (even though I'm sure he didn't know of our existence, as neither of us knew about each other and our timelines) when he said that a fortnight had passed since Cerebus had last seen Jaka and then gave her a year's worth of new growth on her hair. This goes all the way back to the infamous gap between issue #20 and #21, when Cerebus not only got transported from Togith but lost several weeks.

At the time -- or at least a bit later, Dave attributed this to a party where he had gotten high and lost time, but if we can trust Viktor Davis there was an even more significant loss of time and disorientation in Dave Sim's life:

Viktor Davis looked down and saw two cookies on a small, flowered plate. He realized he was in the kitchen of his grandparents' house in Stoney Creek, Ontario. A female voice (his mother? his grandmother? his sister?) was telling him that the cookies were for Santa Claus. Moments before, Viktor had been seated in a classroom at Forest Hill Public School, trying to focus his attention on some lesson or other. Evidently a period of a year and several months had elapsed.

We don't know for sure that this happened. "This is my autobiography," says Viktor Davis, standing in for Dave Sim, in Reads. "This is as accurate a word picture as I can paint for you of who I am." But elsewhere in Reads Viktor tells us of a decision made the night John Lennon died to stop the series at 200 issues, and to keep this decision secret. Later, he tells us he was only joking. Viktor is an unreliable narrator. But I happen to believe this story, and even though it's treated lightly, a throw-away anecdote slipped into the narrative, I think it was probably one of the defining incidents in Dave Sim's life.

Dave Sim created Viktor Davis to stand between him and the audience because he didn't believe in the concept of reliable narrators, didn't believe in the possibility of a text that could be said to be True. I think the childhood experience so briefly alluded to in Reads is so profound and so disturbing that it probably is vital to understanding Dave Sim's psychological makeup and because of that fundamental to understanding his use of time in Cerebus.

He doesn't want you to be able to map things out the way Alexx tries to do, because he doesn't believe in the reliability of chronology. He deliberately makes this not only difficult, but in fact impossible. He places clear contradictions, as in the case with Jaka's Story following Church & State -- even if you disallow Dave's offstage claim that it's been a fortnight, you can clearly see by the state of decomposition of Bran's body that Cerebus hasn't been away a year or more when he returns to the hotel (yes, that's left out of the phone books but it was in the comic). How long could it have taken him to walk from there down to the place where Rick and Jaka are living? Hours? A day? Certainly not weeks or months.

Then there are the Cirinists and their abolition of the calendar. We can see the changing of at least some seasons in Guys -- but how many years pass, exactly? Again, in an offstage comment, Dave has spoken of months passing unnoticed between one panel and the next. My guess is that Guys spans ten years or more. Someone else thinks five. We can never know for sure.

Dave Sim obviously has a unique perspective on time, born of his unusual experience in childhood. It might be interesting to do a close reading of Cerebus studying the myriad ways in which this perspective pops up -- but I'm not going to do it now. I'm still working on the religion angle, which I promise another installment of soon.

Religion in Cerebus - Mothers and Daughters - Part Five

Last time, we stopped where Po was instructing Cerebus on the lesson Bishop Posey represents for him. After that, Po goes on to describe his second life, and this is the one with the analogy to Christ's passion and the echo of the Trial we saw in "Church & State" (all quotes below are from pp. 194-196 of "Flight," and I'm quoting the entire text):

At a very early age, I evinced interest in the primitive gold-smithing tools in my father's small workshop. Ours was a small and impoverished village and there was little gold to practice on except the gold coins which served, as they do to this day, as the foundation of each family income in Iest; whether entrusted to a patriarch in the Lower City or to a matriarch in the Upper City.

There are several curious things about this passage. First, Po had introduced this section with a sort of cliffhanger at the end of his description of the lives of his earlier incarnation, Suenteus Po the First, and his son, Suenteus Po the Second: "In my subsequent incarnation, I was born to a gold miner and his wife in Rivershire Province, twenty years after Alfred's death." If there's anyone who would have access to gold, even in an impoverished village, one would think it would be a gold miner. Perhaps this was an attempt by Dave (or Po?) to make sure we thought of his father as a poor worker, and not a skilled craftsman as Po himself later became. But the two things seem to contradict each other.

Another is the whole set up of gold coins entrusted to a patriarch or matriarch as the "foundation of each family income." I never really understood the economic system of Iest, and this passage makes me wonder if Dave understood money and exchange and how investment works and such. If so, I wish he had given us more detail about the system he worked out, because in the few isolated passages like this one where he touches on it, it just doesn't seem to make any sense. Each family had gold coins to invest? For most of human history, the foundation of the income of 99% of all humanity has been labor, and an economy where almost everyone had not only some investment income but enough investments for that to be the foundation of the family income would be so radically different from anything that we've known that most of the analogies Dave consistently made between Estarcion, particularly Iest, and the modern world would just fall by the wayside. Actually, if there were that much gold that evenly distributed, gold would almost certainly cease to be of value as a unit for monetary trade and something would have had to replace it.

And finally, we touch on the time element again. I suppose it's just meant to show Po reminding us that when he lived, the patriarchs (under Suenteus Po III) ruled the Lower City while the Matriarchs (under the Great Andrena, apparently from the Trial echo Astoria in an earlier incarnation) ruled the Upper City, but the whole thing is confused by the "to this day." This is probably just meant to apply to gold coins still being the foundation of family income, but in any case seems to be wrong. If we take the whole sentence literally, he's saying that matriarchs rule the Upper City and patriarchs the lower "to this day" -- well matriarchs are currently running the Upper City, but it's a very new proposition, not a continuation from hundreds of years ago, and patriarchs certainly do not rule the Lower City. Even if you give Po the benefit of the doubt of an awkward construction and take the phrase to refer only to the coins, it's *still* wrong -- gold coins *aren't* the foundation of family income anymore. Cerebus gathered them all up and Cirin has them all.

Po continues:

One side of the coin is struck with the emblem of the local governor at the time it is issued. The other side is blank and is traditionally carved with a symbol of the family who possesses it. I grew adept at carving these symbols, each more elaborate than the last and soon families were coming from neighbouring villages to have my design added to their coins. I learned to scrape traces of gold from the coins to melt and use as inlay. I invented new tools for engraving finer lines and patterns. A devout Tarimite, I carved His Name in ancient Pigtish rune letters on each coin brought to me.

OK, we don't have the actual tenets and the equivalent of Commandments and such for the Tarimite faith, but it's pretty obviously meant to be an analog of Christianity (or, historically speaking, Judaism in this particular scene), and besides there are certain constants in pretty much every major religion that has ever existed, so I think it's safe to say that there's a disconnect here when Po professes to be a "devout Tarimite" in the next breath after describing how he stole gold from his customers. "Oh, well, it's was only trace amounts, they never noticed." So? It's wrong to steal dollars but OK to steal pennies? He's a thief. A devout Tarimite thief, but a thief nonetheless.

The sin of Pride, almost unavoidable for an Artist. Dave said in Reads that the Artist's work must be more important than "the wife and kiddies," or rather that it should be, but many would-be Artists get sidetracked by the latter. Here, he presents a Pure Artist to whom fairly fundamental morality must fall by the wayside so that he can practice his Art. He's not doing it out of Greed. He doesn't want the gold to spend. He needs it to make Art.

Healers and apothecaries began using the coins in their treatment of family ailments. Miracles were spoken of in hushed whispers and soon more people came from the larger villages and then from the City itself; nobles, lawyers and merchants. As whispers became words and words became legend, the coins seemed imbued with the belief of the people made manifest. Priests of the Eastern Church grew jealous of this faith; felt their influence and control of the population waning with each passing day in Rivershire Province and elsewhere. They took their case to Suenteus Po III, informing him that I was building a kingdom within Iest and that I had declared my family carvings as more worthy of loyalty than the governors' emblems on the obverse.

He doesn't say, exactly, that they are lying about him. He implies it, certainly. I've read that passage several times over the years and I've always assumed that he never said what they said he said, that they were slandering him (Bearing False Witness) because of their jealousy. But it doesn't actually say that. Jealous people can tell the truth, too -- Deep Throat turned out to be an FBI guy passed over for the top spot who was jealous and hurt and had an axe to grind, but everything he said about the Nixon White House turned out to be true. Just because someone's motives for going to the authorities are less than pure, just because the accuser is vindictive and spiteful, doesn't make the accusations wrong.

Did Po say these things? Was he "building a kingdom within Iest?" On the whole, I'd say probably not, but I'm struck by the wording, the very careful wording, I'd say, both on the part of Po and also on Dave's part, not to let us know for sure, either way, just as Jesus, at his trial, refused to answer his accusers.

When they came to arrest me, I knew this had all transpired before many times; as if I was an actor in a play. I remembered my life as Suenteus Po I. As they read the indictment I had a curious sensation that I was imprisoning myself.

As they led me away, there was a flurry of resistance and some blood was spilt. I told my defenders to stand back; not to make it any worse than it already was. They complied and I could see from their expressions that they, too, now felt like actors in a play.

Many of them wept openly.

More Christ analogies. The servant of the priest who lost his ear at the Garden of Gethsemane, and Jesus telling his followers to put away their swords.

I was brought before Suenteus Po III, a bloated caricature of his father, my son, Alfred. He was amused by my threadbare appearance, my regional dialect. The mages and charlatans who held posts in his Illusionist court were amused as well; they felt that the priests of Tarim had finally lost their minds, seeing a threat in this misshapen peasant. Their questions had a comic turn to them. I answered each question as simply and as honestly as I could. I felt I was part of the joke and that soon they would tire of me as an amusement and I would be set free; though what my fate would have been, then, I have no idea.

But, Po III was seized with the thought of enlarging the jest. He asked if I carved only coins that were minted in the Lower City. No, I said, a number of them had been brought to me by representatives of the Great Ladies of the Upper City. He asked if I felt no qualms as a good Tarimite in crafting coins with the Goddess on them. I admitted that it had troubled me, but I felt that the Word of Tarim should be given freely everywhere and paid witness to. He turned then to his senior advisors and asked what they thought Great Andrena, leader of the Council of the Goddess in the Upper City might think of my heresy. There was much levity at the very prospect.

The play had resumed its course.

Like and yet unlike. Here, Suentus Po III plays Pilate -- except that Pilate sent Jesus to Herod, who then sent him back for judgment. Note that Po III seems to tacitly acknowledge that the goldsmith Po is no threat. There is no reason to do him harm. He is being sent to Andrena -- and surely Po knows what is likely to happen to him -- for amusement.

He asked if I had any further words for the illustrious body before me. I said nothing. He informed me that arrangements would be made to transfer me to the custody of the Guardians of the Upper City. With a theatrical gesture, he drew forth a small bowl of scented water and dipped his fingers lightly into it.

I wash my hands of you, he said, and I was led away.

The washing of the hands seems to be an essential part of the proceedings, at least as Dave sees it, or saw it. He made it an unmistakable part of the Trial in Church & State.

That night I was led before Great Andrena. There is no need for me to relate our conversation; the course of the Trial. You experienced it yourself when you tried Astoria as Pope.

You didn't sentence her to death. Events intervened and you ascended instead.

That gives us small cause for hope, does it not?

I was taken to a courtyard in a small prison attached to the Council Building. The charges against me were read again and then the fagots were lighted and I was burned as a heretic.

Obviously, there are differences. History does not exactly repeat itself, but themes repeat themselves, and echoes. Of course, it's denigrating the New Testament Jesus to be just one more echo of that endless list of faces we will see on p. 25 of "Reads." Dave probably doesn't quite believe that anymore, but I'm pretty sure he wouldn't consider it blasphemous, either, and more of a "slightly wrong guess" than a serious mistake.

I wonder, given Dave's use of the "homosexualist" (as he calls him) Oscar Wilde in Jaka's Story and Melmoth and his later commentary, whether he is deliberately toying with the audience by using "faggots" (the misspelling is in the original) in its original context, knowing surely that all current North American readers, at least, will inevitably have the other meaning brought to mind. I'm positive he's aware of it. I'm just not certain whether it's a deliberate choice of something he decided he can live with because it's precisely the right word there.

Suenteus Po tells us of his life as a would-be conqueror who really, truly, he assures us, was just trying to preserve "Vanaheim on earth" before it corrupted into something mundane by forcibly installing it in another place. Then he tells us of his life as a Christ analogy, complete with the washing of hands and the martyrdom.

And what lesson are we supposed to learn from this? What lesson has Po himself learned?

My experience taught me that there is no benefit and little wisdom in attempting to influence the minds and the wills of the mass of people. In both my lives I have described to you, I sought that kind of influence and effect; I was a Reformer. In my succeeding lives, I have seen the long-range effects that profound change always brings about. Each Great Movement is sown with the seeds of its own destruction; its corruption and decay as inevitable as Death itself. In each succeeding life I've led, after leaving my parents' house, I have sought a simple and uneventful existence. My quarters are always mean and rudimentary; a bed where I might sleep, a table where I might eat and a chair for sitting on. At this moment, I live in a one room apartment in Iest's Lower City. I have no friends and no contact with any of my relatives. My one luxury is a crude chessboard, made from a discarded packing crate; the pieces carved by hand from scraps of firewood.

Queen's bishop to King's Bishop Four.

I'm sure the first thing that will strike most of my readers is the "one room apartment" with "no friends and no contact with any of my relatives" and how much this sounds like the life Dave Sim has chosen for himself, and indeed, the fact that this is both Po's ideal and the lifestyle he himself practices is one reason why I find myself inescapably drawn to conclude that his viewpoint here is essentially Dave's own, that this lesson is meant to be taken to heart, that Dave believes these words to be essentially true.

Certainly it cannot be denied that every Great Movement -- at least every political and social movement -- "is sown with the seeds of its own destruction. Any student of history can tell you that. Religious movements are a bit trickier, but one can certainly argue that the Christianity that so upset the Roman Empire early in its existence was in fact destroyed by becoming co-opted to the Establishment, and that the overall message is indeed true of all great movements of any kind.

Notice that Po almost openly admits that he has not been telling us the whole truth. When he presented his life as a simple goldsmith, he was doing what he did purely for the glory of Tarim and as an Artist, and only jealous priests charged that he was creating a movement. Yet now he admits that he was "attempting to influence the minds and the wills of the mass of people."

Again, I think Dave is deliberately undercutting Po's trustworthiness here precisely because he feels such an affinity to him, and because back in these days the relativity of truth and inability of anyone to be sure of anything was one of his chief messages. In interviews in those days, he often said things like, "the reader's guess is as good as mine." I think he wants to make sure we don't just see Po as Dave's mouthpiece and automatically trust what he says.

And of course, to underscore the point even more, the passage ends with Po's next chess move -- and it's one that is impossible. It can't be made.

The correct next move in the "fool's mate" Po is luring Cerebus into is "King's Bishop to Queen's Bishop Four." What Po says is "Queen's Bishop to King's Bishop Four." But White's Queen's Bishop is still trapped behind two pawns, and can't possibly move.

When this came out in the original comics, I immediately wrote Dave a letter. I had a chess set out, you see, and was doing each new move when the issue came out, so I knew right away it was impossible. I thought he had made a mistake. I didn't hear back from him and he didn't print the letter, and in fact about the time it would have made print if he did Po realized his mistake and it became part of the book.

To this day I can't say I'm 100% sure whether it was deliberate or Dave "fixed" it by inserting it into the story as Po's mistake on the basis of my letter and/or similar letters from other readers, but I'm quite confidant it was deliberate. It fits so perfectly, the pompous, pontificating I'm-so-smart-I'm-going-to-lure-you-into-the-
fastest-checkmate-possible Suenteus Po misspeaking and screwing up, with potentially disastrous consequences (when you play Cosmic Chess, you have to expect Cosmic Consequences).

The one niggling thing that hints it may have been a retcon is the apparent lack of such disastrous consequences. Despite having eschewn interfering in affairs, Suenteus Po is trying to arrange the meeting that ends up taking place in Reads, and, well, the meeting does in fact end up taking place. His plan works, as far as I can tell. So the mistaken chess move doesn't seem to have mattered.

Except to make him look like a doofus.