Even gods.
No one wants to die feeling they failed to achieve their dreams, or that they failed to employ their powers to their full extent. So free yourself by recognizing that you only thought you wanted those dreams, and that you didn’t fail to live up to your power because you were never really as powerful as you’d made yourself believe…certainly, never possessing the power to cheat death permanently.
Ids, Gods, and Death
Rooted in every sentient being is the id-centered yearning to outshine all others. The fate of anyone with the lust to be such a luminous being—or to employ the ancient name, a Lucifer—is clear.
Even for the most powerful and spectacular heroes, the quest to outshine everyone else will ultimately fail, and for everyone else beneath the paramountcy of power, the mission is a failure before its first sortie.
If all you want is simply to be the best, why not roll up the world’s largest ball of string? If you want to be the best skater, why not break your competitor’s ankles? You could be the world’s most accomplished excretor, entering hot dog–eating championships after consuming a gross of Ex-Lax tablets. Clearly such an aim—merely being “the best”—is empty on its own terms.
But even if victory were possible, it still couldn’t provide meaning or genuine happiness, because saying “I want to be the best” is simply the polite way of saying “I want everyone else to be worse.”
Selfishness is the very heart of your glory, the same impulse which caused the mid-1950s wave of superhero-on-superhero battles to see who was bigger, stronger, or better. Yet not one of those battles to be the brightest produced anything of value (especially not for those heroes’ insurance companies), and every last one of those champions and their comrades has already died or one day will. Even deities like Hawk King.
What you must do is decide how you want to live now. In fear? In rage? In competitive hamster-wheeling? Or in acceptance?
To avoid wasting your remaining time and relationships with ever-more destabilizing distractions, surrender. Surrender to this truth: that a life devoted to scaling the mountain of your own pride does not mean you can build a palace at the peak. Like everyone else, you’ll still have to erect a sod house on the flatlands of your own mere existence…and that, too, will eventually crumble.
Visualizing such an erection can be a powerful means to escape the awful anticipation of your own demise. If you’ve never employed visualization before, go beyond the suggestions of Unmasked! When Being a Superhero Can’t Save You from Yourself and employ the approach I detailed in Secrets from Menton’s Brain: Using Two Lefts to Make Yourself Right (also available on audiobook and holodisc). Your greatest power over emotions such as pride and fear is your imagination. So use it.
But as my F*O*O*Jsters were about to discover, the only path to escaping hubris and mortal terror is deicide.
CHAPTER THREE
Clash of the Icons
SUNDAY, JULY 2, 9:12 A.M.
Voyage into Iron Lass’s Brain
Idols. Gods and goddesses. Icons.
They’re the embodiment of any society’s perspectives on the pinnacle of human achievement. Whether representing beauty, intelligence, strength, science, combat, industry, eroticism, or religion, icons serve as foci of mass attention and mass emulation.
But to the same extent, they serve as implements for mass emasculation. When hyper–role models exist on a plane far higher than we can safely fly, our desperate attempts to touch the hems of their garments will eventually knock us down the staircase of humiliation and into the depths of abasement.
So what happens to one who both is an icon and has an icon, especially when his own icon fails? Can anyone survive the pincering punishment that is the iron mandibles of the Icon Trap?
Icon to Generations
She sat across from me, the only illumination inside the echoing darkness, radiant in her raven-feather hair and flashing amethyst eyes. In one way it was hard to believe that it had been only two days since she learned of the death of Hawk King.
On the other hand, she’d exchanged her electrum-plated iron armor for an elegant black skirt and a mandarin-collared powder blue cardigan, and her ubiquitous black-and-white feathered cloak was hung neatly elsewhere.
But if she was attempting to affect a schule-frau appearance, it wasn’t working; her six-foot-four feminine muscularity couldn’t be contained by pleated wool. In the 1950s, more than one Hollywood scribe compared Lauren Bacall to her. Half a century later, she still looked an athletic thirty-nine when in fact, she’d seen two millennia. Yet by some accounts, she’d changed more during her twentieth-century career than she had over the previous two thousand years.
This woman knew better than almost anyone what it meant to be an icon. Because for centuries, Iron Lass–AKA Dr. Hnossi Icegaard, UCLD professor of Military History, Political Economy, and German and Scandinavian Literature—was literally worshiped as Hnossi of Aesgard, daughter of Queen Frigg of the Norse gods.
Since our sessions began, I’d noted her extreme reluctance to share her feelings; rather she hoarded her words and thoughts in my presence as if they were a mound of Hostess Twinkies and I a projectile bulimic. Hoping for better results that day, I shifted into a new approach as the two of us sat alone inside the temporal lobe of her brain.
“I’m sure that over the last forty-eight hours, Iron Lass, you’ve been reflecting mostly on Hawk King and your relationship with him, probably to the exclusion of pretty much anything else.
“But today, I’d like to touch on an outstanding issue at the core of why you’re here—namely, why are you here?”
Purple lightning crackled overhead along a neural pathway, the synapses pulsating in echoing thunder
