Here they are:

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1. Before you decided that the Big Round Glowing White Strange
Thing was YoohWhoo, who did you intend the two voices to be that we
heard when Cerebus climbed up to the Regency to talk to (what turned
out to be) the fake fake Regency Elf? (i73/C&SI)

DAVE: Yoohwhoo isn't a term that I use, personally. I see no
reason to be consciously impolite, so I always call he/she/it YHWH.
In conversation, literally, Why Aitch Double You Aitch.
Well, the answer to that is "how many adjectival `fakes' belong
in front of the term Regency Elf in your sentence?" You would have
to answer my question before I could answer yours. Remember that
what you think of as the Regency Elf is an internal construct of
Cerebus', whose only existence is as a mirage partway between
Cerebus and the real Regency Elf, assuming that the Regency Elf
actually exists. Do you believe in fairies? If you don't believe
in fairies, personally, then add some more layers of
adjectival "fake" to your question. If you do believe in fairies,
personally, then subtract some layers of adjectival "fake" from your
question. Given that I am now addressing two different systems of
belief, which question do you want me to answer? Now one or both of
you can say "you're being evasive". Am I? "Well, yes, we're asking
you a question about your story: what was your intention?" That
subdivides as well. What was my intention at the time? At the time
I was foreshadowing and laying the groundwork for breaking the news
as gently as possible to my readership that the Regency Elf as known
by them doesn't exist. Which at one level is silly—you shouldn't
have to explain to grown-ups that elves don't exist. You should
feel silly for having to have that explained to you. At the same
time, I was trying to depict as accurately as possible what I think
the nature of that human impulse towards belief in fairies is all
about. It's amazing how far people will go in response to their
personal fairies if they're fairy people (on as real a level as
possible, I'm forced to draw an analogy to feminism here, at the
risk of offending all you feminists, because in a "what was Dave
thinking of here" sense it really does apply. At this point in my
life, my marriage had broken up and, now that I was on my own and no
longer having to accommodate another system of belief and now being
able to return to my own intrinsic nature, a person who believed in
the truth and perceiving accurately, I had at two levels—love and
feminism—come to the conclusion that I had just taken an awful
beating in a number of ways for having made the mistake of allowing
myself to be gulled into believing in those two present-day societal
fairies.
In retrospect, in the sense that the Dave Sim you are asking
this question today who has consciously chosen not to believe in
those two societal fairies, as with much of the Cerebus story—prior
to reading the Bible and the Koran—I think I was enacting on paper
parts of the debate between God and YHWH, which I think it's kind of
impossible to avoid for human beings given that I think that's a big
reason that we were created by God. So, as I look at the two voices
on page 391, what I see, now, at the highest level of metaphor is
the voice of YHWH (black lettering white balloons) and God (white
lettering black balloons). Which always sustains itself down and up
through all other levels of metaphor, including my creation of their
dialogue. I tend to see God, or the nature of God as always engaging
YHWH's attentions in whatever way possible, using people as
metaphors and the stories people, like myself or any writer, write
as metaphors. So, please bear in mind, that this is pretty much my
answer, today, to most questions, both about the Cerebus story and
about life in general. If you consciously believe in fairies and
you're a guy, you're asking for trouble.
So that cautionary note being struck, meanwhile back at my
intention back in 1983, Cerebus doesn't have the belief in the
Regency Elf in Church & State at the required level that he had in
High Society and that makes her transparently false to him. If you
believe in fairies in a psychological or biological sense (Alan
Moore's mythopoetic regions of the brain stuff) then Cerebus is just
responding to that part inside of him that is a magnifier and that
is dealing with super-reality(ies). Does the magnifier believe that
Cerebus is infallible because Cerebus is the Pope? Cerebus
consciously believes that he is infallible because he is the Pope so
that sets up an internal war to which both the magnifier and the his
genetic aardvark nature would respond (are responding). The
magnifier has no concept of the scope of its own magnification on
the Papal level as Cerebus consciously perceives it (what is the
equivalent of a Pope in the realm of pure spirit?). So through the
Regency Elf, the magnifier is asking (him/her/it?) self if this is
true. Is the world going to come to an end because there's no way
to get all of the gold coins and because Cerebus is infallible in
his pronouncements? At one level the only hope is that Papal
infallibility is fake in the same way that the Regency Elf is fake,
that "fakeness" is the abiding condition on all relevant levels
between Cerebus' perception of reality and the magnifier's
perception of reality. The question for the magnifier would
be "which world?". If it's just the world that Cerebus knows, that
could be fine, as long as the magnifier exists in its own reality
and not just in Cerebus'. If Cerebus and the world disappear, is
the magnifier still going to be there? At that point it was worth
the magnifier really stretching a point with the false Regency Elf
construct as a means of communicating an idea to Cerebus that
Cerebus would be hiding from himself. Given that the magnifier is a
super-reality construct in the story, I thought it was funny to have
Cerebus worrying the next level up and the next level up from that
just because Cerebus is so intrinsically simple-minded on these
things. Being infallible is a great way to get people to give you
their gold, if you threaten to destroy the world but it does, I
think, call a lot of realities into question simultaneously.

2. In Rick's Story/i229, Rick recites words that Cerebus recognizes
as a "binding spell:"

Lies wound the truth/truth will bind lies,
The truth said but once/the lie thrice denies,
I bind 'he' by listen/twice bind 'she' by look
'it' thrice binds 'its' selves. with. in.
branch breaks branch/the one branch/is now 2/1 branch is me/1 branch
is __
branch breaks branch/once/twice more/
for the 3 at the table/for the 1/at the door

Please explain the dynamics of the binding spell and its effects
(i.e. what does it do, what did Rick intend for it to do) (assuming
you actually had those worked out in your mind - writers don't
always invent meanings or backstories for things, sometimes they
just focus on what serves their story (or, if you believe artists
channel their ideas from elsewhere, what serves those outside
forces)). Additionally, if possible, can you tell us, line by line,
how it relates to the plot and any larger thematic meaning?

DAVE: I suspect you're going to be sorry you asked about this
one. Well, here again, I'm still dealing with the same levels of
dichotomy that I have been dealing with all along, only now I've
read the Bible, so I now I have a much clearer idea of who the
actual players are. The idea behind Rick's Story—which I evaded
discussing in the introduction to that volume—is the idea behind
Rick himself. I had to come up with a super-nice character to be
Jaka's husband. It was the only way Jaka's Story would work. The
more I thought of someone who Cerebus wouldn't just kill on sight
and someone who Jaka would stay with longer than a few weeks, I
realized that I was talking about someone on the Jesus level of the
niceness scale—in the bland, secular-humanist, feminized sense that
the historical Jesus is understood (or, rather, misunderstood): that
he was this really, really nice feminized guy—so that was what I
went with.
(This tied in nicely with what I saw as Oscar Wilde's secular
humanist messianic pretensions: when he would entertain his
enraptured host and hostess and their guests at upper crust dinners,
he sincerely thought that he was imparting the equivalent of Jesus'
parables, that Jesus was a Poet and a Storyteller just like himself—
a forerunner of John Lennon's blasphemous notion that "The Beatles
were more popular than Jesus". Much of De Profundis and Wilde's
fairy tales are composed of exactly that kind of pretentious
blasphemous twaddle. I thought Oscar Wilde attempting to
seduce "Jesus" would be a good metaphor for how I saw that part of
the historical Wilde's story).
So, I was still a secular humanist when I started thinking about
what Jesus would be like after his marriage broke up the way it did
(this was a little funnier than I knew it to be at the time. I
wasn't aware that there exist vast numbers of Christians, or,
rather, "Christians" who believe that Jesus was secretly married to
Magdalene or someone else, that he had had children, that someone
else had died on the Cross and that en famille Mr. and Mrs. The
Christ and the kids all moved to France—of all places—which, it
seems to me, explains a great deal about the French and why they,
you know, " are" that way). And that was when I came up with the
idea of a one-on-one story between Rick and Cerebus where the
magnifier inside of Cerebus would, essentially (having been starved
for any other object for any kind of interaction for so long) take
partial possession of Rick and magnify Rick's dormant Jesus nature
up to the next level where, combined with his alcoholism, he would
write an Aardvarkian Age bible, where Rick would see himself as a
Jesus-like figure and would see Cerebus as alternately an Angel sent
to Rick from God and as Satan sent to torment Rick.
Purely comedic interest on the part of a secular humanist.
A story that would get funnier and funnier as Rick's new
religion engulfed Cerebus and forced Cerebus to become the Cerebus
Rick saw him as being.
To understand the container spell, it's important to understand
that Rick "snapped" when Joanne told him that Cerebus had told her
that Cerebus had been married to Jaka. "Snapped" on a number of
levels that went all the way up to the peak of his Jesus nature
because he knew he should've been "beyond that" now that all these
truths were being revealed to him and he was writing this miraculous
book. It shouldn't have bothered him, but of course—given who he
was—it did. What was set in motion by Joanne's (she thought, anyway)
harmless remark produced a completely internalized chain reaction.
The more he tried to suppress it bothering him, the more it would
bother him and the more if would bother him, the more it would
bother him that it bothered him. See, although he could never have
Jaka again, the fact that he had been Jaka's only husband was,
unbeknownst to him, critically important to his perception of
himself and the way he needed to see himself in order to function.
The first reaction would be to get rid of Joanne by blowing up at
her—shooting the messenger—and thereby eliminating one of the three
key components of The Book of Rick (Rick, he, Joanne, she, Cerebus,
it) and one of the two reasons he had to stick around
the "Sanctuary". The only way to survive Joanne believing that
Cerebus had been married to Jaka was to eliminate Joanne and Cerebus
from his life which was very much in contravention of Rick's own
really, really nice Jesus-like nature which recognized when Cerebus
was "persecuting" him but would just accept it as good-naturedly as
possible. This internalized attainment of a spiritual critical
mass then set up a series of magnifying echoes between Rick, Rick's
nature, the part of Cerebus' magnifier that had taken possession of
Rick and Cerebus himself, magnifying echoes which called into
question the nature of the magnifier itself (or, rather,
his/her/itself) for itself and centering to a large extent on where
the magnifier "left off" in Cerebus and "began" in Rick. i.e.
there's certainly no precedent for Rick having any knowledge of
magic spells, right? which is an indication that Rick has proven to
be something of a tar baby for the magnifier absorbing some of
Cerebus' limited, but potent magical training and nature. The
magnifying echoes bouncing between them become so strong that they
start manifesting in the physical world, chipping paint off of the
Seat of Truth and manifesting in super-reality as the big (actually
little) round glowing white strange thing over the Seat of the Right
Hand page 170 panel 1 and the Infinity Serpent on the Seat of the
Left Hand page 170 panel 3—who then beats a hasty retreat. I got
partway through laying out page 170 with the Infinity Serpent
basically slipping out through a mouse-hole in the baseboards after
passing through the chair leg (doosh). Just a funny visual: "feets
don't fail me now!" And then as I was tightening it up, I thought,
Hang on. Where do you think you're going? I mean, it's all fiction,
right?
Unless it isn't. " That old serpent," as he/she/it is called in
Revelation whether it's Chauah's fictitious snake in the Garden of
Eden, Satan, Leviathan, Alan Moore's sock puppet, the question
became an obvious one: which team am I on? And to me, there was only
one answer: I've got to catch the snake. So I basically did the
cartoony little drawing you see here, with the snake making a break
for it out of the heavenly Sanctuary (as Rick saw it), getting
trapped in a cartoon book and dropped into hell. And then I thought,
this really resonates with some comic-book history and with my own
history: because the little cartoon snake was so small, he looked
like a worm, instead of a snake, and I flashed on the first extended
comic-book serial—Cerebus' first ancestor in a very real sense—the
Mr. Mind serial in Captain Marvel Adventures (issues 22 to 46) where
Otto Binder (interesting name, eh?) and C.C. Beck had built up this
suspense about this thoroughly evil character who wasn't seen on-
panel for several months (an unheard of length of time in the age of
the self-contained comic book story) and who turned out to be this
super-intelligent…worm.
(Short digression: the first time I met Harlan Ellison—as part of
our far-ranging discussion—he mentioned that he had been a devoted
reader of Captain Marvel as a kid and that he had actually followed
the entire Mr. Mind serial when it first came out and that the only
issue he hadn't read—and still hadn't read—was issue 27 where Mr.
Mind's identity was revealed. Well, I filed this away in my mental
rolodex and, when Deni and I got back from the US Tour—we had met
Harlan at the last stop in Colorado—there were three or four Comics
Buyer's Guides waiting and while catching up on the news, I also
scanned the advertisements to see if anyone was selling a Captain
Marvel Adventures No. 27. And sure enough, there one was for
fifteen or twenty dollars or something. So I ordered it and it came
in about a week later. And I read through it and thought, well,
there it is. The only issue of the Mr. Mind serial Harlan Ellison
has never seen and I wrapped it back up and FedExed it to him. ).
I had already figured out the "he/she/it" construct of YHWH and
I figured this would be kind of appropriate that the imaginary snake
from the Garden of Eden that had grown to Leviathan size turned out
to be actually nothing more than a worm, just like Mr. Mind.
So, in order of each line's appearance:
"Lies wound the truth"
is my best assessment of what Genesis chapters 2, 3 and 4 do to
Genesis chapter 1. On the cosmetic level, it's a) the best
distillation of Rick's profoundly hurt feelings that Cerebus has, in
a real way, stolen his wife from him and at a slightly less cosmetic
level it's b) the culmination of Rick's pretty firmly
developed "Rick is of the Seat of Truth and Cerebus is of the
Sanctuary" construct and what I see as the underpinning of any two-
person construct: Which one of us is sane here?
"Truth will bind lies."
I think I might be able to "bag me some snake" here, pardner.
"The truth said but once,"
is, again, a reference to the first chapter of Genesis, which
is still my best assessment. Like all of God's truths, it seems to
me very simple and very direct.
"The lie thrice denies"
YHWH in his/her/its he/she/it manifestation and also my best
assessment of chapters 2,3 and 4 of Genesis that end with "Then did
men begin to call vpon the name of the YHWH." "You told Joanne
that you were once married to Jaka" is also "The truth said but
once." Rick and his Jesus nature at war with each other. He
doesn't want or see the need for a discussion, he just wants to
state the charge and then contend on a very esoteric level knowing
that it's an open-and-shut case. Rick=Truth, Cerebus=Lie. Of course
he also just wants to get away from Cerebus who is a reminder of his
conflicted nature: that he actually still cares enough about Jaka to
have it bother him that someone claimed to have been married to
her. He can't be the Rick he wants to be—God's Rick— anymore, if
either Joanne or Cerebus is around. On page 171, Cerebus' size
diminishes relative to Rick: he's literally subsiding into his own
inescapable context (I echoed this sudden disproportion in relative
sizes in 299 when Shep-shep asks if Cerebus recognizes
the "baby"). Remember that what Cerebus had told Joanne—before
Rick showed up—was that he and Joanne and everyone else were in this
book being written by someone named Dave, so now we have Cerebus
looking up "through" Rick and "at" me, not consciously aware of the
levels involved but certainly his magnifier aspect is. See, there's
also three levels of book here: the book that I'm writing, the book
Rick is writing and the little cartoon book that the snake just got
trapped in: depending on your point of view, Book/"book"/book OR
book/"book"/Book respectively/respectively. So to start page 172,
what I'm indicating to Cerebus is, no, it goes much higher than
that. You were only looking at Rick. You're actually at a 90
degree angle to the chessboard I'm playing on. You're right on the
edge of a descent into hell. If you tilted your head way, way back
and changed your thinking so you could understand where the
chessboard is and what it's doing, you would see that Rick and I are
both knights on this chessboard. One of us has your queen in
jeopardy and the other has just put your king in check. "Look"
becomes, "Look you're toast." You have to move your king out of
check and then you lose your queen. Which one of us is which
knight? That's no longer pertinent. All that's pertinent is that
one of us has got your queen. So this hits Cerebus and the
magnifier inside of him simultaneously and moves them from the first
layer of Book or book, down to the third layer of book or Book—the
little cartoon book (page 172)—as Cerebus/magnifier now manifest as
the he/she/it snake (remember that Cerebus is an hermaphrodite
rendered infertile by the knife attack he sustained as a child)
making a break for it, a break that can't succeed because it has
already failed by the time Cerebus is consciously aware of
participating in it. The word "Look" gets said twice, binding the
female part of Cerebus and his internal magnifier—I intentionally
reversed the birth order of Reuben and Simeon (whose names translate
as "SEE a son" and "HEARING"—see Latter Days page 384 for my fuller
speculations on this) the first two of the twelve Jewish tribes. If
YHWH wants to get everything backwards, fine let's try backwards.
LISTEN first, then LOOK. The word "Wrong" gets said three times, the
judgement that's being passed on Cerebus—which can be read as being
said both by Rick and by the internal magnifier who suddenly sees
the super-reality of his/her/its situation: my, that is Dave's, book
or Book, Rick's "book" and the little cartoon book or Book.
"Cerebus didn't do anything…"
(Cerebus told Joanne that they were all in Dave's book.
Cerebus definitely, inescapably did something by telling Joanne so
that Joanne could then tell Rick. The magnifier in Cerebus and in
Rick judges Cerebus' defence: "…WRONG.")
"Cerebus did nothing"
(No, that's not true. Cerebus told Joanne that they were all
in Dave's book. That's not nothing. The magnifier in Cerebus and
in Rick judges Cerebus' defence: "…WRONG.")
"Cerebus isn't"
(Well, that's not true in any available contextual sense
either. In the three available contexts of "book," book or Book,
Dave's book or Book is called Cerebus. It has been a major "is" in
Dave's life for around twenty years. Twenty years constitutes an
irrefutable "is". Cerebus is also the pre-eminent figure in
Rick's "book". No question. Cerebus IS. Cerebus is AT LEAST as real…
as the little cartoon snake that just got trapped in a book or a
Book on page 170. Note that the "n't" are faded as Cerebus'
argument collapses, overridden by the magnifier's now inescapable
awareness of the super-reality so that the bottom panel actually
reads "Cerebus is…WRONG.")
"It thrice binds `its' selves".
(Three defences have been mounted endeavouring to establish
that it is Cerebus who is telling the truth and all three have been
declared wrong by the magnifier itself. The It magnifier has
literally bound its selves in the three contextual levels by the
admission: in this case, the thrice-used term, ALL qualifies the
previous WRONG, the acknowledgement that the defences have
collapsed on all three contextual levels. Wrong. All. All.
Wrong. Backwards or forwards there's no room to manoeuvre, which is
why Cerebus is just swept along. This is the last conscious attempt
to assert his own perception of reality. Obviously what he is
trying to do is to explain, to say to Rick, "All Cerebus said [to
Joanne] is We're all in a book written by someone named Dave." So
there's a bit of commentary there on moralistic absolutism of the
kind Rick has retreated to because of the level at which he has been
offended by these two key individuals daring to think that Cerebus
was once married to Jaka. It would certainly take a lot of
explaining to get across the context in which that had happened—that
Dave showed him, pretty vividly, what being married to Jaka would
have been like. That it wasn't a dream, it wasn't a hoax and it
wasn't an imaginary story. The problem would be describing what it
was. Even Cerebus isn't sure what it was, let alone how he would
explain it. But there is a level of truth to it even though it
certainly isn't as true as Rick thinking that it was a lie. And
then in the first panel of page 173, Rick and the magnifier quality
both declare "WITH" at the exact point where Cerebus and the
magnifier quality—now seen as what it is, a puny little snake—part
company. The "WITH" doesn't follow sequentially if you refer back
to what Cerebus is trying to say, so Rick has sort of overpowered
him with his own moral absolutism. "ALL WRONG. ALL CEREBUS. We're
ALL." It would be an interesting speculation as to what the re-
channelled thought was leading to. "We're all with…" would appear
to be the magnifier quality/snake trying to retain the connection to
Cerebus which is severed at that point. Like the poet in Barry
Windsor-Smith's "The Beguiling" Cerebus can't pass through the final
impediment. He gets most of the way through and the magnifier
quality/snake detaches from him. And, now that the magnifier
quality/snake has been detached from Cerebus he/she/it on its own is
no match for Rick, who turns the second syllable of "within" into an
instruction, as if he was talking to the cat who's been scratching
at the door. "In." And all the magnifier quality/snake can do is
respond "in. in. in." and become imprisoned in Rick's "book". The
largest accomplishment for Rick is that it is now a two-man parade,
the religion that is getting started: Rick and Cerebus, not Cerebus
and the snake. His motives are suspect, but Rick has cleansed
Cerebus of what is basically a demonic possession. And then
Cerebus, having lost his magnifier, makes the only assessment that
he can "coming to".
It's Rick's book.
See the actual spell is: Lies wound the truth/the truth will
bind lies/the truth said but once/the lie thrice denies./I bind `he'
by `listen'/twice bind `she' by `look'/It thrice binds `its'
selves/within MY book. But it would only work if Cerebus said it
because the magnifier/snake was binding its selves. It could only
do that by acknowledging that it was Rick's book. What I suspect is
that I got YHWH as well. It depends on how much he/she/it
identified with the misspelled three-headed dog that guarded Hades
and how far up and down the metaphorical ladder
the "reality"/reality/Reality model holds true. By having Cerebus
say "your book" I suspect that I was identifying a YHWHist reality
at a number of levels. I'm saying to YHWH, here, here's your book
that you identified yourself with back when you had no idea where I
was getting my ideas from but that I certainly seemed to be on your
team. Here's the metaphorical you binding yourself into a little
cartoon book that I dropped into the fires of hell. It's all just
extrapolation and speculation, but it certainly started with the
Infinity Serpent making a break for it and my thinking, Where do you
think you're going?
Now there is a large potential for blasphemy here. On a
metaphorical level, I'm enacting the part in Revelation where an
angel comes down from heaven and "binds that old serpent" for a
thousand years, which is one of the Davidic messiah prophecies in
Christianity. I'm not willing to go anywhere near that far. I just
backed into the situation because I drew this ghost image of a snake
retreating from an accounting and I figured I better close it off
much tighter than that to be on the safe side. The Davidic messiah
is also called "the Branch," the branch of the House of Jesse, one
of King David's progenitors, so I hide behind the old "I didn't say
it, the puppet said it" routine, much beloved by ventriloquists.
It's Rick's book, Rick's "spell," so I double up the branch. Let's
let fictional Rick be the Branch and let's give him a real branch.
So "Branch breaks branch". Rick saying that he might be the Davidic
messiah but the branch served its purpose, it bound the Infinity
Serpent, now he'll break it in two.
"The One Branch is now two" and effectively negated. There
is, from what I understand, only one Davidic messiah. First the
branch of the House of Joseph and then the branch of the House of
David is supposed to come.
(For all I know, it might not even be blasphemous. What little
I know about it I got from a book on Sabbatai Svi, the 17th century
Jew who declared himself to be the Davidic messiah and was pretty
widely believed among Jews since his declaration coincided with the
proliferation of commercial printing and moveable type so his
message swept through the Hebrew underground like wildfire. He was
actually imprisoned in a Muslim country (Turkey?) and entertained
pretty lavishly in his cell which was adorned with a lot of
overstated materialism by his legions of followers. The Muslims
were wary because this could be the guy and they didn't want to have
a Jesus situation on their hands by possibly martyring the guy.
Literally most of Europe started emptying of Jews, all headed for
the Holy Land because the Davidic Messiah was here. Finally, one
day a guy showed up in his cell and told him that he was the Branch
of the House of Joseph, so Sabbatai couldn't be the meschiach
because the Branch of the House of Joseph had to declare himself
first. They, evidently, debated this for days on end and the new
arrival wouldn't budge an inch, so the whole thing collapsed and
virtually everyone abandoned him. At the point the Muslims gave him
a choice between some gruesome fate like being forced to swallow
molten lead or something or converting to Islam. Sabbatai chose to
convert to Islam.
Now, as with so much that I find about post-Scriptural Judaism,
Christianity and Islam, I don't know where they get this stuff
from. I've read the Torah at least a dozen times and there is
nothing about a Davidic messiah unless you are reading an awful lot
into the text, which is what I think happens. I mean, a lot of
people can accuse me of that, but at least what I'm trying to do is
to figure out what the story is, not building this precarious house
of cards that the Rabbis have built over the centuries in the
Talmud.)
Anyway, if the metaphorical branch is broken, that, to me,
negates any potential charge of blasphemy. But, just to be sure:
"One branch is me, One branch is…"
And here I won't let him finish. Just to be really sure, I
create a whirlpool so he's looking out of the page and seeing me and
seeing that I won't accept him saying "One branch is you." You
know: don't drag ME into this. And at that point he understands
that there are two different levels of reality going on here.
Breaking the branch once isn't enough, that still allows for each of
us to have a branch.
"Branch breaks branch, once, twice more".
Four pieces, that's safe enough, I think (I really wanted to be
sure that there was no mistaking my intention)…
This also had its own strange comic-book resonance with the only
Carl Barks Donald Duck comic book I own, a coverless copy of "The
Golden Helmet" (Four Color #408, 1952) which concerned itself with
the eponymous helmet which, whoever discovered it, became the owner
of North America (hey, it's a Donald Duck comic, folks). Anyway
there's a part at the end where everyone is getting tempted to keep
it when the best thing is just to throw it in the sea so no one owns
North America. Like the $100,000 cheque for Spawn 10. Don't think
about it, just sign the back and send it to the Comic Book Legal
Defence Fund. Anything else will just be asking for trouble. I do
tend to think that way
…which causes Rick to basically go back to the story as it's
unfolding and to use the branch fragments just as a basic plot
point, fortune-telling being way, way down on the scale that the
previous sequence was skirting around: The Amazing Kreskin Rick
predicts! There are going to be three guys at the table and someone
is coming in through the door! Of course the residual
magnifier/snake just about jumps out of its skin. Not paying close
enough attention it could be that what Rick is saying is that the
Davidic messiah is at the door right now! YIKES!
And then Cerebus panics when Rick says goodbye, because there is
a residual magnifier/snake inhabiting Cerebus who is obviously
thinking about how to reunite with the separated part of
his/her/itself now trapped in Rick's book. So, on page 179, Cerebus
is going through magnifier/snake residual trauma, because most of
the magnifier/snake quality is leaving and a part of him is
terrified because he doesn't know what life is like without the
magnifier/snake (or even how long he's "had it," a plot point I
never addressed formally—whether Cerebus had just been born that way
or if he "caught" something while he was an apprentice to Magus
Doran). Consciously, as Rick's walking out the door, Cerebus is
trying to say, "You take good care of yourself," (the same line Bear
used on Cerebus when Bear left—translated from "guyese" it
means "I'm abandoning ship, so you're on your own and I don't really
care what happens to you") which is almost coming out right at
first, but—as the magnifier/snake residue goes into "override" mode—
then first changes into "Take Cerebus with you." (Take…Cerebus) and
secondly changes into "you `re taking us with you" (You. Take. With.
You.) and finally "you take good care of us" (You. Good. Care. Of.)
combined with the original "You take good care of yourself". The
residue doesn't have a choice, it has to abandon ship and rejoin the
part that's leaving. So, basically Rick cleanses Cerebus, thinking
that he is completely conscious of what he is doing—he sure looks
like he knows what he's doing—but clearly he isn't. All he knows is
that he's been hurt, he hurt Joanne because she hurt him, and now
he's hurt Cerebus because Cerebus "made him" hurt Joanne. My
assumption is that he would "come to" some miles away, vaguely
dissatisfied, but now determined to preach his message as a solo act
until it's time for he and Cerebus to have their final meeting.
So Cerebus is finally just Cerebus again, probably for the first
time since he was a kid and he just runs around bumping into himself
for a few pages. The part of him that has been making most of his
major decisions is gone, so all he can do is second-guess
himself. "Stay" and "leave" sound equivalently plausible and
implausible because he hasn't made a completely autonomous decision
in so long, he doesn't know how to make one. Cerebus' medallions—of
magical origin—have shrunk through the sequence of events showing
the extent to which he is now Cerebus only and how much "residue of
residue" there is left: some, but not a lot (he would never have
been able to stick with Jaka for any length of time while the
magnifier was in the driver's seat—the magnifier wouldn't have
allowed it) as in the instance with the F. Stop sequence I described
last time. There is a patterned response "aura" around Cerebus at
this point where the magnifier residue responds to familiar
environments ("Cerebus killed a guy over there once") and can
resonate with those people who are having their own problems with
levels of demonic possession (like F. Stop who, unbeknownst to
himself or Cerebus, "resonated" with Cerebus' memory of Weisshaupt).
I really wish that this was easier to describe, but it isn't and
since I got eight more letters today and I still haven't answered
the five from yesterday, I'm going to have to cut my explanation
short (relatively speaking at ten pages).
But before I do, I have to mention that this did manifest in my
life after I had it on paper. I was walking out back of the house
to Camp David and there was a branch sitting on the walkway that was
identical to the one in the book. So, I picked it up right away and
broke it into four pieces and threw the pieces in the garbage. Then
a couple of months later, around Christmas (you might remember this)
there was this strange week where both Somebody-a-Kennedy and Sonny
Bono died smashing into trees on the ski slopes at Aspen (DOOSH)
(DOOSH). I mean, the imagery and the coincidence—two famous guys in
one week?—were just too coincidental. The Somebody-a-Kennedy was the
one who had gotten busted for having sex with the underage
babysitter he had hired to watch his kids. So from this I took a
little word to the wise: don't fuck the babysitter (no, actually,
stay away from underage girls). Sonny Bono was a little tougher.
To me, that was either Don't go from entertainment into politics or
Don't manufacture a persona for a female that makes her look more
intelligent than she is (as Sonny did with Cher on their television
series). Stick to reality. So just to be on the safe side I
resolved to avoid all three of those. DOOSH. DOOSH. Who needs
it?


3. You've said that Cirinism reflects closely the TRUE human
condition - and therefore, Cerebus can never defeat it.
(i194/Minds) You also stated that Cirinism is a system that mirrors
human nature and, as such, flourished naturally. The movement is
solidly constructed. Therefore, Cerebus would never be able to
conquer Estarcion. But of course, Cerebus *did* conquer Estarcion --
or did he? The New Joannists won out in the end, didn't they? Please
explain how Cirinism reflects closely the true human condition.

DAVE: You're paraphrasing. What I said was "thoroughly in tune
with human nature and human ideals" that's a very different thing
from reflecting or mirroring the human condition. Let's start
with "in tune". The musical analogy was selected specifically. Take
improvisational jazz. All of the instruments can be in tune
(relative to themselves and/or relative to each other), but that
doesn't make them the same instruments nor does it mean that they're
playing the same notes. In fact they likely aren't if they're "in
tune" in the broader sense of "relative to each other". In that
sense, "in tune" means that there is a pleasing auditory
compatibility going on. Everyone's playing and listening and
smiling because it's working. How is it working? Music isn't like
that. It doesn't lend itself to factual analysis. It sounded
good. It was in the pocket, we were popping the gator, etc. etc.
Pick your favourite old bluesman phrase. That's why I find music
perverse because it creates an illusion that something has happened
that isn't demonstrable. Which is fine. To paraphrase Woody Allen,
music is a perverse enterprise, but as perverse enterprises go, its
one of the more harmless ones. Until you have someone like John
Lennon being backed into a corner where he has to sing Revolution to
try to explain that while everyone is grooving to his beat (The
Beatles are more popular than Jesus) that doesn't mean that they're
likely leadership candidates. Likewise with the Police. "Da doo doo
doo Do da da da is all I want to say to you. They're meaningless and
all that's true." Well, that's perverse. That requires a
female "brain" to nod sagely and go, "Ah! Yes! It seems like a
paradox, but it's REALITY. It's both meaningless and all that's
true." No. It's meaningless. No ifs ands or buts. You have to
stretch meaning to the breaking point and beyond to get any "truth"—
let alone Truth—out of Da doo doo doo Do da da da. It's perverse in
the large sense because most of the generation before mine and my
own generation did exactly that: formed their political opinions and
attitudes around Da doo doo doo Do da da da.
I mean, I was trying to play fair with the material. I don't
think a post-Industrial matriarchy is remotely likely and a pre-
Industrial one is only marginally more likely, but let's completely
convolute reason into trying to making something up that sounds
good. Let's try and make some points about women but let's
literally become Devil's advocate for a few pages. So I did use
clever phrasing like the "in tune" thing. Improvisational jazz
leapfrogs. The sax leads for a while and then the keyboardist
catches a wave and he takes over and then another instrument and
then the vocalist and everyone ends of (literally) God-alone-knows-
where an hour later. Well, that's perverse. But for those who like
that sort of thing, that's the sort of thing they like. For people
like me who like lengthy conflated and well-thought arguments it
sounds like hell on earth. For people who hate anyone who talks
longer than thirty seconds, it's heaven on earth. The danger that I
see is that as you allow that female sensibility that sees more
merit in a really good band than in, say, a solid military program
and begins to supersede those with the latter aptitude with those
with the former attitude, well, to me, that's a recipe for trouble.
People who "think" that way are literally going to govern just by
being in tune, reading the polls and leapfrogging from what feels
good to what feels better and ending up God knows where six months
from now with no larger plan than more of the same.
And I also carefully used "human," because I think human is a
perverse concept. I see it as the underpinning of belief that there
is no difference between brainless femaleness and thoughtful
masculinity. Let's all just sit around and talk about it and just
decide that fighting is bad because it hurts people so, like, let's
just stop. No more fighting. Yes, there are a lot of humans who
think that way. They aren't men or women or boys or girls, they're
just humans and all humans are the same. The development (so far as
I know) of the term "Crimes against Humanity" seemed to me the thin
end of the wedge on that. To me, the suitable punishment for the
Sho'ah, the Holocaust is summary execution. Trying Adolf Eichman?
That's insane. How can you have a trial for an Eichman or a
Goerring? You're implying that what they did might be defensible, so
we better ask some intelligent questions. There is no intelligent
question to ask someone who gassed six million Jews. You might as
well send a rabid dog for psychotherapy. I better stop there before
I give anyone ideas.

4. You described the creation of Cerebus' Injury to the Eye which
through a pinprick of novocaine introduced a "design element into
what remains of [Cerebus'] existence" as "the natural effect" (not
a punishment) of his hurting Jaka and Joanne, and that it shows him
what he's done to others. (i198-99/Minds). What does this mean?
That from that point on Cerebus felt a pain in his eye when he acted
in a way that harmed others? Or something else? Can you expand on
this concept?

DAVE: That was personal experience. Even before I believed in
God, I didn't believe in a chaotic universe of happenstance and the
second time that it happened to me—basically getting a zit on my
upper or lower lid—I was trying to understand, Why did this happen
to me? My conclusion was that it was because I was hurting people
and I was pretty immune to pain myself—emotional pain—so it had to
get translated into a physical realm where I could understand, don't
do this. Of course, in retrospect, having been clean and sober for
a few years now, I think I was missing the more obvious thing that I
was smoking enormous amounts of weed and tobacco, staying up late
and drinking like a fish all of which are known to enflame the
tissues around the eyes. As Dr. Kiss-Kiss pointed out my last time
around, I had about eight of them around each eye: it's just that
the others were smaller and less noticeable. Go home and look in
the mirror. GAH. He's right. Look at that. What am I going to
do? Better fire up a doob and whack off to a porno video and try to
take my mind off of it. I mean, duh. But that was me.
If you are a person like myself who is always looking for
punctuation and living metaphors in life, getting a needle in the
soft flesh of your under-lid (you can take my word on this) is not
something that you're going to forget anytime soon when it happens
to you. It is a very, very memorable pain which definitely kept me
from going for help on my second go-round until way late in the
day.

5. Cerebus' father's death: In your opinion, did Cerebus have
a mystical "alarm clock" which he should have heard when his father
was dying?

DAVE: I wouldn't approach the question, personally, because it
would undermine what I thought was one of the more effective points
I was able to make in telling the aftermath of the Going Home
storyline—the possibly-real, possibly-false memory of what Magus
Doran said or didn't say. In my experience the mind does play
tricks on itself like this, which is one of the reasons that I work
very hard at remembering sequences of events and conversation while
still being amenable to admitting that if I have no conscious memory
of it, that doesn't mean that something didn't happen—and within
limits. I would have remembered if Jeff Smith had threatened to give
me a fat lip, as an example. How would you forget something like
that sitting in someone's living room? Chris Shulgan related an
anecdote to me from his interview with Ger that didn't ring a bell.
And that's what I told him. I don't remember that taking place, but
that doesn't mean that it didn't take place. And it also doesn't
mean that it did. For emotion-based individuals, which Cerebus
definitely is, the memory seems to play these tricks in moments of
great emotional stress. I think I mentioned last time (or it might
have been in a letter I wrote) that I think Cerebus missed the point
in a lot of ways about the nature of Sand Hills Creek (local
mythology holds that Kitchener was once called Sand Hills, which
rych mills, a local historian has pretty definitely disproved). The
place I pictured was closer to the size of Gananoque than any
incarnation of Kitchener I remember, but there are similarities: one
being that people who leave tend to come back no matter how much
they didn't like the place and couldn't wait to get out. That's
always the side I knew. Someone would move away from Kitchener and
then I'd see them back at Peter's Place a year later. The side I
never thought of (always being on this side of it) was that there
was never a big Hey, Welcome Home. Just a, ? I thought you moved to
Vancouver. So, what I'm saying is I think Cerebus was expecting
more than he would've gotten even if he had come home before his
father died. His father wouldn't have welcomed him back and neither
would anyone else. There are Sand Hills people who stay and Sand
Hills people who go. Cerebus went. It put him "out of tune" with
Sand Hills Creek. He was probably always thinking in the back of
his mind of being the homecoming hero which only showed how out of
tune with the place he was. He got shunned as much for showing up
with a harlot as not being there when his father died. There's a
whole list of things that would've gotten him the same reception,
unwritten rules for those places that everyone knows who stays
there. I was documenting something that was the complete opposite
of me. I've lived here since '58 apart from three months in
Honolulu and two months in Gainesville Florida. Warmer weather
wasn't a good enough reason to be away from the place that I live.
That was seventeen years ago and I've never once thought, I should
go live somewhere else for a couple of months or a few years.

Q: Was the phrase "Our fathers died. Suddenly in the night they
died and in the morning we knew." (i241/Going Home) an indication
that Cerebus had heard the alarm clock and that he knew his father
was dying?

DAVE: There is a distinct possibility of that. If you go back
through Going Home and Form and Void, you'll find any number of
episodes where you can picture, Yes, it would make sense that while
this was going on, Cerebus' father was dying miles away to the
north. I tried to put a number of them into the storyline for
exactly that reason—that Cerebus was going to spend literally
decades mulling over when it could have happened, if Magus Doran
said what part of his mind told him was a memory, if he had heard
the interior alarm and overlooked it. It does come on him abruptly
that he's going back to Sand Hills Creek—abruptly enough that it
could be logical response to the events he was living through or it
could have been the form that the interior alarm took. Driving
himself crazy mentally calculating (with insufficient data), Would
he have gotten home in time if he had gone straight there when it
first occurred to him to go home? Go back through Guys: how often
was he so falling-down drunk he couldn't have heard a window
breaking let alone an interior alarm? It's very convenient to
scapegoat Jaka, but what if that's way off the mark? Nothing in the
fragment of Zeke Morton's recollection tells us anything about
whether the event he's describing was last week or ten years
ago.
I didn't, by the way, intentionally put that quote in because
it worked with the story—this is the first time I noticed how well
it works with the story—but because it was easily one of the best of
F. Scott Fitzgerald's notebook entries. As I think I wrote in the
annotations, I think he was "doing" Hemingway. It certainly reads
like very good Hemingway, the earliest meticulously sculpted
fragments that Hemingway wrote for the Bill Bird edition of in our
time which were later interleaved with the longer (and to me less
sculpted) short stories in the later editions of In Our Time.

Q: If not and was it only a matter of a son's natural duty to his
father? And if there was no alarm clock, how could Cerebus have
possibly known when his father was dying? Was he supposed to have
called home on a regular basis (does that make sense given the level
of technology in Estarcion)? Or was he wrong to even have left home?
Is it a son's duty to stay by his father's side his whole life to
ensure that he could be there at the needed moment? If so, then
wouldn't the very lifestyle Cerebus chose - leaving home to find his
fortune - appear to be his "sin," rather than allowing himself to be
distracted by harlots?"

DAVE: Those are all terribly interesting questions for just about
anyone other than me. I mean, in my case my estrangement from my
family came down to: "Does honour thy father and mother" apply to
atheists? I write quite a bit more about this in the annotations to
The Last Day, but there is no answer to those kinds of questions
that I can see in a general sense. You have to do what you think is
either right or more likely to be right. I think men tend to
pretend to be more interested in family than they actually are, just
as women pretend to be more interested in sex than they actually
are, for obvious reasons in both cases. But I think that's starting
to break down as people become more interested in their own reality
than in portraying themselves as something they aren't. It took me
forty years to figure out that I prefer to be alone, but once I
figured it out, everything became very straightforward. I don't let
my dick ensnare me in that opposite context where everything is
family and friends and soap opera. It's just not worth it. If
you're happy in that context or you're happy pretending to be happy
in that context, that's great. But, I can say from experience it's
not for me. If I dealt in "son's duty" questions as I used to, I
would still be married to Deni. I'd be miserably unhappy, but I'd
still be married to Deni. And I don't think that's particularly a
slight against Deni. I'm pretty sure it was marriage—the constant
presence of someone grafted onto me—that made me miserably unhappy.
Once you have reached a state of perception where you are able to
fully realize that everything and everyone lives for a very short
while in cosmological terms and are essentially composed of
oscillating particle/waves flying in loose formation—I mean, you can
have a relationship with those things if you want but, to me, your
only relationship is with God because God is the only Being that
genuinely exists and isn't just this weird conglomeration of tiny
sparklers. I can look at a nicely built 19 year old girl and say
that is a beautifully assembled conglomeration of tiny sparklers but
I have no more interest in having a relationship with that
conglomeration than I do with any other conglomeration that is
comparably temporary. Those are just the sorts of things that make
people say that Dave Sim is offensive, but that's my honest answer
to the questions you pose. The only real part of my day is the
fifty minutes I spend praying, everything else is like a big weird
television show that I'm walking around in. I like ideas. I like
discussing ideas like this and reading other people's opinions but
that's about the extent of my interaction that I think is sensible.
And to me, stepping outside of sensible is just asking for trouble.


6. In the memorialization of Iest's Destruction, we hear what
purports to be Cirin conceding that a MALE god is above The Great
Lady (i249/GH). We also hear a criticism of strangers raising
Cirinist children. This criticism was stated exactly by Astoria in
her Kevilist Origins (i163/Women and also see i169/Women - the
letter from the old lady). We also see criticism of Cirin. These
ideas appear to be way outside of classic Cirinism. On top of this,
we have Rick's reference in Rick's Story that Cirinist dictates on
hemlines are changing (i223/RS) (a departure from the initial
movement's rule of everyone dressing the same to equalize all
(i194/Minds)), and lesbians kissing in public (i236/GH). So it looks
like Cirinist society is undergoing radical changes. Perhaps
Kevilism is making inroads? But even that wouldn't explain an
acquiescence that a male God rules over all.

DAVE: The point I was trying to make with the Memorial Service
of Iest's destruction was twofold: 1) Cerebus gave up too soon on
the service. He's obviously far away when the womyn-actor gets to
the part about "He whose grace and mercy surpasseth all" and ready
to pick a fight with Jaka over it when obviously something has
happened that is a major Cirinist departure and 2) that the
Cirinists were starting to run out of gas, like the difference
between Khomeini's Iran in 1979 and 2004, so, yes, they're now
working on a fusion of some kind. If you're familiar with the Bible
at all, this is mostly Isaiah and Jeremiah inspired text. It seems
a good place to try to achieve an accommodation of some kind with
the Judaism that Rick is also encountering off-panel in this
storyline. What's a good analogy? This is probably provocative,
but I think if Mayor Giuliani after 11 September had announced a
month of prayer and fasting—voluntary—that you would've found the
seeds sown for a large scale repentance which would have benefited
the entire Republic. We the people don't know why this happened,
but we the people know from thousands of years of experience that
prayer and fasting are the single most appropriate reaction to any
disaster of this scale. Isaiah and Jeremiah document exactly that
kind of disaster and counsel exactly that kind of reaction.
Sackcloth and ashes would not have been inappropriate. The problem
being that prayer and fasting is in service to God, not the state or
City Hall, so there's no way of knowing which way the rabbit is
going to jump when you unlock the cage which is what secular
humanists and Marxists are always nervous about. And what the kings
of Israel and Judah worried about. Every time Jeremiah opened his
mouth it was seriously bad news for His Highness. In a general sense
relative to 9-11: What if it does too much good and not in a way
that's beneficial to Marxism (which it likely won't be)?
Particularly in a huge Jewish community such as you have in New York
City, generations of whom have lived through 9-11s of varying sizes
simply as a matter of day-to-day living. And this is what I was
hinting at here. It's always a mistake to think that the Torah or
the Gospels or the Koran can be channelled by secular interests
because they're the new kid on the block and you've got everything
locked down tight. Just ask the Kremlin-appointed Polish government
after John Paul II had paid a visit. The rabbit will jump. That's
a given. Where? About the only thing you can count on is: the
least beneficial place for your Marxist regime. It was the mistake
the Cirinists made because they could see that Isaiah- and Jeremiah-
style texts were appropriate to the scale of the disaster. It will
help the daughters and the mothers to repent and (as we read it
tapering off) to devote time to their own mothers instead of to
careers and somehow find a way to bring the men back into this
instead of them standing around going, "Well, whatever you think,
dear. I have every confidence in your judgement as a mother." "We
have to get back to family in some way." As I think we're seeing
now in North America. "Maybe it's not just the glass ceiling
because the wheels seem to be coming off in places we didn't even
know had wheels."
When you ask about Kevillism making inroads, uh, no—that's what
Mothers & Daughters was about. This is much later in the day and a
more fundamental fragmentation—as opposed to a schism—than that.
Mothers & Daughters is the schism, the duality. What little we see
of the Cirinist modifications in Going Home, it's clearly the sort
of fragmentation that we see in our own society. There are now as
many different kinds of feminism as there are women and—as the
saying goes—the problem with atheists isn't that they believe in
nothing when they don't believe in God, it's that they believe in
everything. They don't know a good idea from a bad idea because
good and bad are meaningless concepts except when it comes to what
kind of latte their local coffee shop makes. A good latte or a bad
latte. It's the problem that occurred with feminism along about the
time that they started talking about the fictional Sisterhood which
only the complete idealogues on the Left Coast like Trina Robbins
ever bought into because it's just so USSR in tone. I mean, all very
empowering on paper, but ultimately this is a gender whose members
flip out if someone shows up at a party wearing the same dress as
them. I can't even picture myself giving two thoughts to being at a
get-together and the other guy is wearing the same sweater I am.
Hey, check it out. We both wore the same sweater. How about those
Blue Jays? But being mysterious and unique seems to be critically
important to women and it's impossible to have a group of unique
individuals accomplish anything. Guys just want to figure out what
needs doing, divide it up fairly and get to work so you can get it
done. Nobody is stuck on his idea if someone comes up with a better
one. Feminized-human-being guys, yeah, probably, they're going to
get huffy if you overlook their Unique and Individual approach to
something. But regular guys, no. That was why I thought any viable
matriarchy would need a habit or a burqa, as standard issue—if there
is only one area where you are totalitarian, this is where it has to
be: this is what ALL the women wear: a shapeless head-to-toe sack
that obliterates all individual characteristics. Then they start to
function the way guys do, cooperatively. But if you allow them—and
here I'm not talking about Dave Sim, I'm talking about Cirin making
political decisions to make a matriarchal society workable—if you
allow them to have their own style, they'll start ranking on each
other and that will take the place of any kind of cooperation. That
was Astoria's "contribution": mothers wear the habit, but daughters
can wear what they want until they become mothers. I saw an Astoria
in a magazine a while back: there was a great photo of three chicks
in Tehran, each with the head scarf worn a different way. The one
looked conventionally subdued as is associated with Muslim women,
she had the most covered up. The second one looked a little
mischievous with the scarf kind of loose and a fringe of hair
showing and shorter sleeves with some arm showing. The third one
looked like Madonna, dark sun glasses, kick-ass grin, scarf all the
way back on her head, plenty of make-up, sleeves rolled up. Trouble
on a stick and proud of it. Trouble on a stick, in my experience, is
not a selective condition. A chick who is trouble on a stick to
date or to have for a friend or as a citizen is also not going to be
employee of the month wherever she works. Y'see what I'm saying?
That's why the cover-up has to be universal or it has to be a status
thing as, from what I understand, it was when it was introduced for
Muhammad's wives. We only cover up the best ones from head to toe
because you're not worthy to look upon them. That will "play" with
women like Aunt Polly's fence in Tom Sawyer. The troublemakers will
contend to be the most covered up and that eliminates your
troublemaker problem because covered up women have nothing to cause
trouble about. Anyone looking at them is just looking at them.
There's no lust from men, no jealousy or superiority from other
women. They actually turn into the human beings—in the sense of the
Yiddish term, mensch—that they keep hyping themselves as wanting to
be. I think this is what worries Western women about the meeting of
Islam and the West, why you're not hearing a lot of Yeah! Let's kick
some misogynistic Muslim ass and humiliate these bastards (with the
exception of the recent prison scandal, a prison which was
supervised by a woman) and liberate our Muslim sisters. Western
women have just steamrolled their men, but steamrolling Muslim women—
as I'm sure they are all fully aware in their little psychic ways—is
a much tougher nut to crack. The one that always grinds Western
female gears is being called a slut by other women. In a room of
Orthodox Muslim women and any Western women, there is no question
who the sluts are, self-evidently, particularly in their own eyes
which is the worst for women—fingernails on the chalkboard when she
FEELS like a slut.

Q: Additionally, we learn later that possession of a firearm by an
unmarried INDIVIDUAL (male OR female) is prohibited (a sign that new
Cirinism doesn't differentiate as sharply between males & females?
or classic Cirinism in that unmarried Daughters are not accorded the
rights of Mothers?) (i262/F&V). Can these changes be seen as
instances of Rickism/Cerebism making inroads into Cirinism? Or is
there another explanation?

DAVE: Yes, exactly. Full-throttle matriarchy or full-throttle
feminism and you gradually don't have anything for the men to do
because you just disagree with them on principle about everything.
You have to keep going to the secular-humanist Marxist well for your
ideas. Make organized professional sport into a religion, combine
prostitution and theatre in interesting ways, but stay away from
anything having to do with God because He will eat your secular-
humanist whatever-it-is for breakfast. You can't just graft it on
and trust that local traditions will carry the day. Just ask all of
the largely Catholic countries that used to worship goddesses and
figured what could it hurt to change her name to Mary? Ouch. Well?
There's your answer. My own best assessment as merely the author is
that the thin end of the wedge was Astoria winning the notion
mentioned above—that daughters don't have to wear the shapeless sack
until they become mothers. It was Serna's weakness for Astoria that
compelled her to capitulate. Cirin would have known—having seen how
successful it was—that that was the one rule you didn't break for
anyone or for any reason. Serna just didn't want to see Astoria
covered up. She wanted to look at her a lot—in a purely aesthetic
way: look at Serna and Cirin uncovered on page 168 when they were
both young. Astoria looked like an exponentially prettier version
of Cirin, a way of mentally turning back the clock to those days
with the same patron/protégé relationship only with the roles
reversed and the prettiest one uncovered. Feel free to see lesbian
overtones if you really want to, but my guess would be "purely
aesthetic".
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