Comments on: Abraham Instate http://revolvingfloor.com/issues/2/abraham-instate/ Just another WordPress weblog Wed, 10 Mar 2010 21:42:45 -0800 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.9.2 hourly 1 By: Michael Bennett Cohn http://revolvingfloor.com/issues/2/abraham-instate/comment-page-1/#comment-344 Michael Bennett Cohn Wed, 16 Sep 2009 02:17:24 +0000 http://revolvingfloor.com/?p=930#comment-344 The parallel stories of the multiple Isaacs makes me think of all the "rebooting" going on in TV and movies these days. Star Trek and Battlestar Galactica, and, in a different way, James Bond and Doctor Who, all follow this pattern of re-presenting a hero in ways that will make him seem more palatable... but of course, "reboot" is itself just a modern way of making that very process, ancient as it is, easier to understand for modern audiences. I just came from a reading where Susan Orlean was talking about the many incarnations of Rin-Tin-Tin, fictional and otherwise, and how the public maintained an idea of a sort of continuity of character, even though both the real dogs and the fictional dogs could not logically have that continuity.<br><br>With this poem, we have a sort of aesthetic synthesis of such parallel stories, which is, after all, what's going on in the collective readers' mind, if not in the mind of a single sophisticated reader, who is capable of absorbing all three versions of the myth and regarding them as non-contradictory facets of the same object. The fact that the story in question deals with death and rebirth (actual or virtual) makes it work at a whole other level as well. The parallel stories of the multiple Isaacs makes me think of all the “rebooting” going on in TV and movies these days. Star Trek and Battlestar Galactica, and, in a different way, James Bond and Doctor Who, all follow this pattern of re-presenting a hero in ways that will make him seem more palatable… but of course, “reboot” is itself just a modern way of making that very process, ancient as it is, easier to understand for modern audiences. I just came from a reading where Susan Orlean was talking about the many incarnations of Rin-Tin-Tin, fictional and otherwise, and how the public maintained an idea of a sort of continuity of character, even though both the real dogs and the fictional dogs could not logically have that continuity.

With this poem, we have a sort of aesthetic synthesis of such parallel stories, which is, after all, what's going on in the collective readers' mind, if not in the mind of a single sophisticated reader, who is capable of absorbing all three versions of the myth and regarding them as non-contradictory facets of the same object. The fact that the story in question deals with death and rebirth (actual or virtual) makes it work at a whole other level as well.

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