Over 50 years ago, Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset’s Some Lessons in Metaphysics introduced a novel set of perspectives on knowledge, being, life, and existence. In “Lesson II”, Ortega y Gasset asks us to ponder the ideas of orientation and knowing, arguing that “the idea of orientation is more basic, deeper, and earlier than the idea of knowing, and not the opposite … knowing is a form of orientation.” He then suggests that the premise of mankind feeling inherently lost is false. Ortega y Gasset then asks the students in the audience to inquire about their own positionality: “If you each turn your attention inward toward yourself, you will not find yourself in a situation of loss and disorientation, but just the opposite.”
Ortega y Gasset’s thoughts on the nature of self and orientation were constantly in the back of my mind as I read Tongues, a compendium of previously released graphic novels in the same series by Anders Nilsen. Loosely inspired by the story of Prometheus, this new Tongues compendium is not for the squeamish. At 366 sprawling pages, Nilsen has given us beautiful illustrations, complex ideas, and the overall feeling you get after watching a particularly “thinky” film or listening to something that feels like it is going over your head – “I am not sure what is happening, but I need to give this another shot.”
As much as I remained confused while reading the material, it was hard to stop. By the end of Tongues, however, I still had more questions than answers. Anders Nilsen shares a few clues on his website: “In the remotest reaches of Central Asia a minor god is chained to a mountainside. Tongues follows his friendship with the eagle who comes everyday to eat his liver, a young girl on an errand of murder and a young man with a teddy bear strapped to his back lost in a wilderness and heading to a crossroads.”
Ostensibly a meditation on Greek mythology, I found more parallels with Islamic eschatology in Tongues, including ruminations on the nature of God, the Day of Judgment, God as the Creator of Man, and the Qur’an. The Islamic subtext also manifested itself in the story of Astrid, the little girl discovered floating down a river in Sudan (ala Musa or Moses), who is baffled by the seeming inconsistencies of the Muslims around her back at home. “Either it’s a religion of peace or it isn’t. They can’t both be right,” she tells her father. We find her engaged in a dialogue with a deity only she can see – Baphomet or something representing the Sabbatic Goat – who entrusts her with a mission that even she does not understand but still accepts.
Anders Nilsen says the setting is Central Asia, which I understand as Afghanistan or Uzbekistan specifically. The setting matters because Nilsen is trying to get at the heart of belief and what motivates god(s) and humans. Tongues is not about faith; it is about knowing your orientation and following through when the rest of the world is pure chaos.
As Sean Edgars wrote in 2017 for Paste, “Anders Nilsen’s work carefully evades description … the Portland-based artist’s mark is unmistakable; elaborate panels that spit in the face of conventional rectangles, designs that segue between the organic and mechanical, and shifting patterns that wind and ebb into the molecular.” This is an appropriate depiction of Nilsen, who certainly pushes back against the norms of graphic novels and comics – even of time. What does linearity mean when the reader is taken on a journey across multiple dimensions in a way that makes the tesseract sequence in Interstellar seem easy to understand?
I was, at times, astounded by the art in Tongues. Anders Nilsen is the rarest of cartoonists: equally adept at storytelling and its visual depiction. Prometheus, for example, is drawn in Tongues in the way that the early humans were drawn, which makes sense since they were created in his image. Even the way Nilsen draws flowers, animals, and plants seems purposive; the shrubbery encasing Prometheus looks like millions of Keith Haring-like figures overlayed in an organic manner.
Reading Tongues gave me an excuse to catch up on Greek mythology and learn more about the story of Prometheus. As punishment for giving the gift of fire to humans, whom Prometheus had also created, Zeus chained Prometheus to a rock for eternity and ordered an eagle to eat his liver every day forever. While there are ostensibly three major characters in Tongues, the relationship between the eagle (who might also be Zeus) and Prometheus is the most important. Their riveting dialogue sequences remind me of the Knight and Death playing chess in Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal (1957).
However, Prometheus is not the only god in Tongues; another figure sometimes refers to Prometheus as his uncle. I was unsure if this was a Titan or one of the later Olympians of Greek mythology. This other god also has a human lover whom he visits at night like the djinn making love to a sexually-deprived woman in Alifa Rifaat’s short story “My World of the Unknown”.
There was so much I enjoyed while reading Tongues, including conversations between the gods, observing humankind developing technology, learning to speak, and stockpiling resources. Like many of the philosophical crises we find ourselves in today, the gods in Tongues ask, Are we better off now than before? Has man exceeded god’s purpose and abused self-determination? As the gods ruminate later in the book: “when this young mortal began to outstrip our own experiments … it was a surprise. I thought it was wonderful. But not everyone was pleased.”