I just finished reading Signal to Noise by Neil Gaiman and Dave McKean. It's a graphic novel depicting the life of a film director who is dying of cancer, and is working on a movie in his head about the impending Armageddon as seen from the perspective of European villagers in A.D. 999 - worth a look if you're interested in this type of reading/viewing.
A total bonus in the book was a little-seen graphic poem which I've transcribed below. I hope you find it as interesting as I did. It speaks to me of a gated-community approach to Christianity - I have no idea if the writers thought of this interpretation... How do you read it?
Vier Mauern
Neil Gaiman & Dave McKean
O P E N I N G
“Something there is that does not have a wall.”
Robert Frost said that, but he also
suggested, in the same poem, ‘Mending
Wall’, that “Good fences make good
neighbours”, so what did he know?
T H E F I R S T W A L L
I wonder who built the first wall. What
was in his mind. Or her mind. Protection?
Privacy? Or something else.
We build our civilisations with walls,
giving us shelter and stronghold.
Keeping out ‘the other’: the elements,
wild beasts, people who are different.
Walls define us, as they divide us.
Walls separate people; and not just the
walls we build. Perhaps the walls we
have to be scared of most are the ones we
can’t see, that we simply believe in.
T H E S E C O N D W A L L
I had a dream about that when I was small.
In my dream there was one note; one musical
one; one sound; and when it sounded all the
walls everywhere came crumbling down. And
all the people everywhere saw…
They saw each other, doing all the things that
people do behind walls. Nobody had anywhere
to hide anymore.
I woke up then, so I never knew if it was a good
thing or a bad thing, not having any walls. Not
having anywhere to go and hide, and being
able to go everywhere; no pretending, no
protection, no secrecy.
T H E T H I R D W A L L
They tell me the Great Wall of China is the only human artefact that
can be seen on the Earth from space.
I’ve never see the Earth from space. I don’t know anyone who has.
I’ve only ever seen pictures.
They tell me that when you get that high, it’s hard to tell one country
from another. You’d think they’d be coloured in, like on the old maps
we had at school.
So you could tell.
T H E F O U R T H W A L L
When I heard the Berlin Wall was coming down, my first reaction was one of
relief; but then I thought, what if there was a young woman who had spent years
- half her life – painting something on the wall?
Painting a message, or a picture.
If every morning she got up early, and went out and painted just one or two
lines on the wall. Every day, in the rain, or the cold, sometimes in the dark.
It was her cry against oppression. Her protest against the wall.
She’d almost finished when they pulled it down.
People could come and go as they wished. The wall she’d been protesting
against was gone, as was her creation, split into art-sized chunks, sold to a
private collector…
I wonder how she felt. I hope she wasn’t disappointed.
I would have been.
C L O S I N G
Maybe we should look beyond the walls.
Listen: painters and writers and music-makers and filmmakers and the
ones who paint graffiti slogans that blossom like bright flowers on the
sides of derelict buildings – all of you.
There’s a fourth wall that needs to be broken down.
Governments and official voices point out forever that good fences make
good neighbours, and tighten the border controls in an effort to make us
happy where we are.
But something there is that does not love a wall, and it’s called humanity.
