[1122] The stars were always in the sky

I think I get it. Jones is a perfect example of the power of human creativity because she illustrates that human imagination has brought into existence creatures which can all say with perfect certainty that they're gods despite the physical truth of the universe. Humans have the power to ignore the realities of their world and seek refuge in fantasy, thereby creating the etheric creatures.

Or, you know... something like that.

Anyway I was clicking back a few pages and came across this page. "Let's see if you are so eager to ride on his back and tie up your hair after this day." Wonder what that means? Will Annie's hair be significant somehow? Or was it just because she used bark to tie it with?

It's like in Calvin and Hobbes. Calvin sees Hobbes as a real tiger; everyone else sees him as a stuffed tiger; Bill Watterson, the author, refuses to say which viewpoint is the correct one (and emphatically denies the theory that Hobbes is a stuffed toy who magically comes to life around Calvin).

In this case, the results are rather larger than a single tiger.

I love it how this is the second chapter dealing with the great secret where the actually focus, the great secret, isn't that important, but the things that are explained, almost haphazardly, along with it (Coyote's manipulation of Ysengrim and the true nature of Jones), are.

As a comment on the previous post:
www.gunnerkrigg.com/archive_page.php?comicID=1079 in the sixth panel, left under, Y repeats the same words as in panel 5, but the tone seems different. Maybe in panel 5 he couldn't bear the thought, but in panel 6, he can't bear the things in which he is manipulated to do? This could be a gross over-analyzation of me.

"...the stars were always in the sky"

That seems like a stretch. Jones has been observing for about 4 billion years. That's not the same as always.

I thought a bit of the same about page 1118 where she claims that there is no material in existence that she can't break or bend or manipulate like wet clay. How can she be so certain about that? Does she know for a fact, that she has tried out every material in existence?

Is it just me who thinks this seems a bit out of style for Jones? Perhaps I just got the wrong impression from the start, that her 'style' was to express everything as accurate as possible...

EDIT: And by the way - I'm among those who think Jones isn't correct about the lack of desires and emotion. These claims seemed kind of 'out of style' to me too.

So maybe human fantasies can shape the past as well. Humans "dreamed up" Coyote, who turned out to be the one who put the stars in the sky. Before Coyote existed, the stars had a different explanation. And Jones might have been created that way too. (Or perhaps she will be created that way, sometime in the future? But I'm sure that makes no sense at all.)

I've fantasized about something similar, and I'm sure many others have as well: In the past, when more people believed in gods, the gods actually existed (by consensus), and actually were the ones who created the world. Only when we started "disproving" them with science, did they dissappear, and the past was changed.

This is kind of like that, but backwards - science first, then gods.

I'm guessing that without gods like Coyote, there would be no stars in the night sky - merely big balls of fusion arbitrarily distanced from a chunk of rock.

Yes, I know, something like that. Thought of it myself. This was a nice page, clarified Coyote's ambiguities. There is here a nice combination of all scientific universe and these etheric myths. Because clearly, all that was not created, all that was fully real before the myths. However, since the myths begun, these mythical events started to happen, and in suddenly there was another, etheric being for things like stars, that is not indifferent to the actual physical world. Now, I do not think we have to go too deep into any cosmological theory about how this is possible. This is possible because we talk about a world that is not possible. But it is now, in my opinion, clarified how this works in this impossible world.

Anyway, I think this implies another very important information that we have been pondering about before: that although in a certin sense Coyote is the omnipotent God of the world, he is not the only one. There are others, just as amazingly powerful. I don't know whether they can bear each other, but Jones obviously can, and in this sense Jones is, as Annie points out, more important they are: she is universal, the gods are local; she is real, they are myths. I no longer half believe that Coyote's imaginary teeth would do anything to Jones.

Blah blah too many words about theories and whatnot.

THE ART ON TODAY'S PAGE IS WONDERFUL!

That is all.

It seems to me that, for Coyote (in Coyote's own universe), he HAS to have been the one to put the stars in the sky, just by the mere fact that he is now telling us about it.

There's no real logic there,no evidence to prove it. Just the knowledge that he was created through human myths, and in those myths he put the stars in the sky, so therefore he must have put the stars in the sky. Those myths are reality to him, so they can't be false...

This page confuses the hell out of me!

Does anybody know if, by extension of this argument, Annie's fingerprint on the moon was simultaneously caused by mythical means and scientific means? Because surely the fingerprint wasn't always there...?

Soooo. In the Gunnerkrigg Court universe stars have at least two separate for existence:
1. They exist because they was created by Coyote.
2. They exist because of natural reasons (astrophysics).
I wonder if this applies to everything created by Coyote (shadow people, the Annan ravine)... I mean, there could be some natural reasons for their existence, besides being created by gods.

Or, was it?

What if Annie's fingerprint is like the man on the moon, not really there except in the human psyche? Without human imagination, it just becomes a bunch of ridges and valleys "formed by the solar wind"...




This reminds me of Terry Pratchett's The Hogfather. In it, Death said that if the Hogfather died then "The Sun would not rise", but instead "A flaming ball of gas would have illuminated the Disk".

Never really cared for this existentialism myself, so I'm hoping Tom's at least more creative with it.

I agree, the post-modern fantasy outlook first popularised by Pratchett and Gaiman.

(That paraphrased from Hogfather btw?)

If that's the case, why did Chang'e come to visit the Court afterwards? A mark made by solar winds would take time to form, so it would only be a shock to Kat who doesn't look at the moon that regularly, not astronomers who would have been watching.
Because she is a god who was also created by humanity?