Blast from the Past

I think I must, subconciously, believe in fate a lot more strongly than I think I do.

Once upon a time, I read a comic book and was shocked and amazed. I was intrigued and gratified and I barely remember why. I don't recall much of it, for if I did I would surely also remember where, when and why I came across it. Regardless, one of the most powerful, haunting (and strangely detached) images that has followed me - one of those things that just latches in your brain - was of a graphic image of president Kennedy holding his brains in as he wandered through a strange bizarre empty landscape. Later on in the book I may have encountered an image of a bear with blood round its mouth and a slumped woman in white.

Unique in my experience enough to stick in my head for God knows how many years, cropping up on and off and making me wonder if I would ever see it again, this image was powerful and affecting and I didn't know why. Both although and because I did not entirely understand the story - though I'm now sure I must have read it all - I found it enormously affecting, backed up by my own incomprehension, my enthrallment at this amazing image (and at the dawning disbelief that people created books like this), and by the enormous sense of space and possibility and the incredible world this man with the head wound implied. Perhaps this sense of utterly absorbing and deeply affecting scale that latched the pictures firmly into my developing brain was in fact fuelled by my lack of grasp of the exact niceties of the book and its mythos.

Because I found it again. You have to understand that the vagueness of my recollection is almost complete. I was certainly quite young; I may even have been in primary school at the time. I have certainly never made the effort to seek it out, though I did on occasion wish quite hard I could complete my knowledge. But the fact that I had no idea where to start looking wasn't even the first obstacle.

So I had completely forgotten about it. In recent years, I have added to my literary knowledge with what I consider to be the higher class of comics - the stuff that can arguably be termed 'graphic novels'. Watchmen; V for Vendetta; Black Hole. Collections such as the Sandman and Preacher.
And now Constantine. The issue collection is incomplete and a little arbitrarily ordered, so I've been putting off buying the various collection books. I bought the first two earlier this year sometime, and was more impressed with the second book than the first, because the writer had changed and it held together better. Then today I decided on a whim to buy what I pretty much had to guess were the next three in the series: Fear and Loathing, Tainted Love, Damnation's Flame.

I also picked up the new series of Battlestar Galactica on DVD for a mate's birthday present.

On the subway home I picked one of them at random and opened it, curious as to the value of my new wares. Anyone who cannot guess what was on the first page it fell open at gets another try. And here's the thing: half forgotten as it was the memory was still very powerful. The chance was, again, incredible. See below for my views on coincidence; even on two high coincidences in the same location in two weeks. But I don't remember even feeling surprised that it had just turned up before me, and this happened only a few hours ago. It just felt like things had fallen into place. Admittedly it was not the guiding factor in my life; admittedly something like this was bound to happen and there are other similar items that I may never find in the same way. But I loved the memory-book for its incredible possibilities and the simple displaced weirdness in a literary life that had not previously known many such things, and I should have been momentarily stunned that it just rose from the depths into my life like that.

But I wasn't. It almost felt destined; like this powerful icon had simply, matter-of-factly found me again like it was always going to do. Like fate. My subconscious obviously has a different view of the world from me. And I almost feel like I have been deprived of a gratifying sensation of reunital by my brain's calm acceptance of the printed pages before me. Compared to the staggering, dizzying newness of my first experience of that book, I can't say the reality holds up. But then it never does, and it's still enjoyable for its own sake.