In Other Worlds - Margaret Eleanor Atwood [12]
THE FLYING
Batman couldn’t really fly. This must have dampened my view of him somewhat, since—judging from the pictorial evidence—flying was the superhero attribute that interested me the most during my days as a child superhero cartoonist. Almost everything in my created world of Mischiefland was airborne. Why was I so keen on the life of the air? Come to think of it, why were the creators of the superheroes so keen on it as well?
The interest appears to be widespread. One of the recent—though minor—superheroes I’ve come across is named Kidney Boy. I picked him up on the Internet micro-blogging site Twitter, and, intrigued by his nom de plume, I offered to design a superhero outfit for him, complete with special powers and charm-word. In real life, Kidney Boy has a somewhat geeky alter ego—he’s a nephrologist, or kidney doctor. He told me he would love to have a magic power, one that would allow him to create new kidneys that would be perfect matches for his dialysis patients. But if he couldn’t have that, he said, could he please have “the flying-around thing”?
In the event, I provided everything he wanted: an outfit with a purple kidney helmet; a magic scalpel that would never fail; a magic word—Nephro-Change-O!—that would not only create the desired kidneys but cause them to slide effortlessly into his patients without even an incision; and, to top it all off, “the flying-around thing.”
Kidney Boy by Margaret Atwood:
Ontogeny repeats phylogeny—could Kidney Boy and I both have inherited this interest in flying? Is it inscribed in our genes, or is it the result of a meme, of the kind popularized by Richard Dawkins—a theme, idea, or motif passed down from generation to generation, self-replicating, mutating, and competing with other memes as it goes? In either case, it’s surely no accident that the ability to fly, with or without the aid of wings, flying shoes or capes or horses or carpets, balloons, aerodynamic kidneys, and so forth, has a very long history.
What does the ability to fly portend, in a superhero or even a god? We are not talking here about airplanes and helicopters: the flying-around thing is not about more rapid and efficient real-life transportation methods. It has to do with wings, either actual or implied, with rising above the earth, and with the ability to glide effortlessly from one place to another. It has to do with overcoming the restrictions of the body, that dead weight of ultimate mortality we lug around with us. “If I had the wings of an angel,” mourns the old folk song, “over these prison walls I would fly …” We don’t have them. But it seems we’ve always wanted them.
At first glance, you might think that wings are an unconditionally good thing. In fact, wing-possession in a non-human being is an alarm signal.
For instance: Inanna, the life-and-sex goddess of Mesopotamia already mentioned, was shown with wings, but she was definitely an entity you wouldn’t want to get tangled up with. Both she and her later incarnation, Ishtar—who appears in The Epic of Gilgamesh—were travellers between realms—Earth to the Underworld, Earth to Heaven—and both were known for seducing mortal men who then met tragic fates. When Ishtar asks Gilgamesh to be her husband, he recites a long list of her former lovers whom she has killed or tortured or turned into wolves or dwarfs.
The Greeks had two messenger gods: Iris, a morally neutral figure who had golden wings, and Hermes, who governed communications (thus justifying his handsome, curly-headed appearance on the Bell telephone books of the 1940s, with his traditional winged helmet and sandals, but with a modern touch—a number of thick telephone cables wrapped modestly around his midsection). Hermes was also the god of travellers and as such conducted the souls of the dead to the Underworld, so going with him on a journey was not always a fortunate thing to do. There was also Nike, thought of as the Goddess of Victory, but perhaps more accurately the goddess