Standing on the Shoulders of (Disgraced) Giants
By now all the hot takes on Neil Gaiman’s recent sexual scandal have cooled to a tepid, lukewarm porridge. I’m sure we’ve heard them all, each anecdote about all the cool meet and greets, the nice words shared, the articles reposted; but, this isn’t one of those.
Why?
Because the porridge is shit, and I’m tired of eating it.
The cliche, knee-jerk reaction to becoming a believer (ie. Christian) is to rid yourself of the worldly attachments that would otherwise cause relapse into prior sinful habits. Obviously, an alcoholic should toss their beer, a pornography addict should remove the smut from their bookshelves and steamer trunks, and an angry soul should seek therapy. When it comes to art (no, pornography is not art), film, literature, and music, the distinction between sinful and redemptive becomes blurry. So, when I hear that my (previously) favorite author, has been accused of a handful of vile, sexual acts, how will that change the relationship I have between him and his art? Truly, we are all made in the image and likeness of God, and while we can stray from the path, there is still something in us that God loves and desires to redeem. That includes Neil Gaiman.
I commiserated with one of my friends over Gaiman’s spectacular fall on Tuesday night, about what I was going to do with all my books, all of my comics. Incidentally, he told me that he had a similar experience when he was a kid, going to see Paul Gauguin’s paintings in a museum. He loved them, thought they were spectacular. But then he read more about what kind of man Gauguin was, realizing that his hero was a drunken pedophile. What do you do with that new information? So he told me that, “all of us are sinful… If we removed every book from our bookshelf because those people let us down and failed to live up to our expectations, then we would just have the bible.”
So many of the people that have watched this all from the sidelines keep saying the same things. “Men in power, your time is up!” “I can’t believe he did that.” I couldn’t read the whole article.” “I feel devastated and betrayed.” “How could his wife have let this happen?” And so on… The sad truth is that when our gods are dismantled and defamed, without them, we also feel dismantled and defamed. One of my heroes, Umberto Eco—who hasn’t yet, to my knowledge, done any untoward, horrific shit—wrote an essay called “On the shoulders of Giants” where he discusses the tension between the past and the present, or how we leverage the past to create the future. Right now we are wringing our hands at the horror of Gaiman’s indiscretion, throwing out his books, purging his memory from our collective consciousness, and waging holy war to make sure his name is abandoned to the desert of obscurity, but I think that the art stands apart as it is. We will probably rediscover his work again and marvel at it, despite what an apparent asshole he was. But that is the future, this is now.
I know full well that I wouldn’t have started writing books if it wasn’t for Gaiman’s groundbreaking imagination and gritty realism. I wouldn’t have read comic books if it wasn’t for The Sandman and the majesty of his world building. I wouldn’t have appreciated the academic depth of popular culture if it wasn’t for the research I poured into a book that I was planning to write about themes of religion in The Sandman while writing for Sequart Organization. Have there been better founders of these arts? Of course. But here I am, standing on the shoulders of a disgraced artist, trying to see where the horizon meets the sea.
Without God, these cultural implosions send shockwaves around the world. Without God there is no hope, just failed promises of something better in this abyssal, shitty world. Another artist dethroned, another tragedy for the community, for the survivors who went unheard, for the work that will be forever colored by the deeper knowledge uncovered. But with God, everything changes. The fragments of the empyrean can be lifted from the ashes and polished and held up to refract the light of something far better. Even though the work is laid bare, the art is still the art it was before. The opportunity to redeem and redirect characters, symbols, and themes toward a higher meaning is still possible. It’s because of things like this that I’ve clung to my belief in God, because no matter how fucked up things appear, the story isn’t finished.
I don’t think we can honestly point to a fallen man and judge him for his sins when we all have our own to bear. That doesn’t mean we should forgive him, or even like him; however, we should be called to love our enemies (of whatever kind, as Umberto Eco once indicated in his essay, “Inventing the enemy”). If the above doesn’t work for you, that’s OK as well. I do it because I am a Christian, and because I believe grace is for everyone, even those we think “don’t deserve it.”
That said, it’s still not going to be easy for me.
