Cynical Angel

(During this escapade, I had a peak experience, alien abduction, drug hallucination, Conversation with the Holy Guardian Angel, temporal lobe seizure, or something which fit all those descriptions and more \u2013 an event which completely changed my life and inspired the cosmology of my Vertigo comic book series The Invisibles. I\u2019ve spoken about this experience numerous times since then but aside from the journal entries I made in the immediate aftermath of the incident, this is the closest to a real-time account of what happened. On the downside, the full detailed description of the trip was edited down to its heavily truncated form here on the grounds that no-one would care to read about a grandiose drug hallucination! Readers familiar with my various retellings of this experience will have heard more furnished accounts but its cynical framing here as a shameful shamanic lads\u2019 weekend provides an unusual context!

cynical angel

HOW typical it has become to hear good news ``finished off'' in conversations or in press commentaries with such sentiments as ``...but it can't last,'' ``...but it's too unrealistic (or naive or easy),'' ``...but there's a catch.'' We've grown so used to questioning automatically most positive developments -- from marriage relations to international relations -- that we may not even realize we're denying good news a fair hearing. Yet that's exactly what cynicism does. The last year or so, on a relative scale, has seen a virtual rush of encouraging news. Considering the surprising shifts within the Soviet Union and the changes that are bringing long-sought relief from fighting in such places as Iran and Iraq, Namibia and Angola, there's cause for gratitude. Even the desire for improved conditions and for greater recognition of individual freedoms evident in such places as Burma, Poland, Chile, Mexico, and South Korea portend good. Still, as a well-respected foreign affairs columnist recently noted about such favorable changes:``It seems too good to be true.... Not surprising if many are looking for the traps now. But there are also traps in what the American sociologist David Riesman called the `gullibility of the cynical,' a belief that everything is a plot and nothing is sure but evil.''1

When the newspaper column quoted earlier first appeared in print just a few days before last Christmas, it was hard to ignore some parallels to a timely and familiar Bible passage. In it, an angel, or spiritual intuition, speaks to the shepherds at the time of Jesus' birth: ``And, lo, the angel of the Lord came upon them, and the glory of the Lord shone round about them: and they were sore afraid. And the angel said unto them, Fear not: for, behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy, which shall be to all people.''3

I think there was a sense around the time of your third film, Sightseers, that each new project you made was an attempt to show the range of what you could do. The cynical view would be that it was careerist. 041b061a72