- A mindmap about the power of the author/historian/artist/curator. Memory is the central node. The radiating nodes are: legacy, propaganda (for and against), eyewitness, telephone game, myth/legend, auto bio, facts and lies, legacy.
- Every age has its own Alexander
- Alexander Questions: what is Alexander’s history as a person? What is the history of Alexander’s legacy? How do these retellings of Alexander’s story, how are they relevant to our present, how do we value power and powerful people? And how can we tell a story of Alexander for the future? Do we even need to anymore, in a better world? This is how Alexander Comic is able to inhabit past, present and future simultaneously, not as a new thing, but as chronologies that affect/interact with each other. The narrative structure isn’t new. Anyway we don’t see his past from birth to death.
- History is seen as straight, linear, forceful… (units that form the shape of an arrow) but what if it is a container (units floating inside a bag)
- Comics are defined as sequential, that is to say linear… but is that really true?
- The so-called monomyth is a circular narrative structure. It is split into known and unknown realms. It begins in the known realm with a call to adventure, then it passes the threshold, after which the journey begins and then culminates into a Trial, a Revelation, then it proceeds along a process of transformation, before the return into the known world.
- Paul Klee’s Angelus Novus is a very stylised drawing of an angel (if you have never seen it before you will never expect the way it actually looks, even though it is humanoid). Walter Benjamin describes the angel like this, which is also quoted in the montage: A Klee painting named ‘Angelus Novus’ shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing in from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such a violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.
- The Hegelian aufheben – to preserve, elevate, cancel.
- A burning rose.
