Jean Grey

I have long identified with the Wolverine.  I know I”m not unique in that: he’s just about everyone’s favorite hero, not least for his rough edges.  But as I slowly and painfully work my way through “The Body keeps the Score”, I continue to wonder why I am alive.  The only explanation I can offer is that as I was disassembled and broken, something in me kept regenerating, something kept me alive.  This is the Wolverine energy.  I even do the workout I read Hugh Jackman used for at least one of the movies. It’s a really good program.

But I was sitting there wincing, looking at my water dispenser, and thinking of the 3 X-men, where Jean Grey becomes Phoenix.  I was thinking of the bubbles in the water dispenser in the house scene.  What is not said is that she is clinically dissociated.  She is suffering from Multiple Personality Disorder, and that, itself, is pretty much always the result of severe abuse.  She was likely molested as a small child.

And as a metaphor, you can see the small become the large;  you can see powerlessness turn into absolutely uncontrolled fury and lust.

Comics are very interesting to me. In important respects, they are our contemporary substitute for myth, and Comic Conventions of various sorts a sort of ritual.  People need order, and when it is not there, they create it.