An Analysis of "An Incident In Aisle Five"
"An incident in aisle five" is a 14-panel comic written and illustrated by Nova Morgengrau, and published under their screenname Ouroborista. It features a dead rat, a butterfly and a young woman in a white dress along with an exhausting litany of thoroughly pretentious references and allusions largely confined to the corridors of a distorted supermarket. The comic uses three styles of text-boxes: connected white bubbles with black cursive text in a serif typeface, white rectangular boxes with black non-cursive text in the same typeface, and black bubbles with white text in a non-cursive, non-serif font, framed by quotation marks. In all panels which show the rat, the first type of speech bubble is unambiguously attributed to it via the tail and it is likely that this style is always meant to indicate the rat. The rectangular boxes meanwhile appear to contain some form of third person narration, often framing spoken statements as would be the case in a novel, since Ouro is clearly working in an unfamilliar medium. They will therefore be called narration from here on. Both the narration and the rat's dialogue contain a great amount of pun-like misspellings and mondegreens that bear resemblance to Daly's Wickedaryan English or generously to certain passages of Finnegan's wake, both of which are lauded by Morgengrau in their essay-series The Demiurge Diaries as "attempts [of language] of escape itself". This terminological fluidity, along with the distorted backgrounds and doubled lineart lead to a dreamlike, delirious impression of the events presented and certainly might inspire in readers a desire to escape this language specifically. The first panel finds a young woman crouched upon the floor of a supermarket aisle, the shelves are stocked, though a grid-like edge-detect-pattern obscures what any of the items actually are, and leaves a labyrinthine sprawl of colourful reflections upon the ground. She stares with wide-eyed focus at the rat which she is holding by its tail and the eyes stylised into latin crosses presumably indicate that the animal is dead, though still it speaks to ask who it was that "trapped [the woman's] god in these atoms". The word "god" is not reverentially capitalised, which is unusual for Ouroborista's writing. Of special note is the short story Lord of Atoms, in which the term bears consistent capitalisation despite the antagonistic role which God plays within it. Perhaps it is gesturing at the trapped god's weakness, though it is never made explicit what that trapping entails and which atoms or which god are even being referred to. To the left of the panel, the woman casts a pitch-black misshapen shadow whose upper part looks as though she has wings, which will continue to be a theme. The narration claims that the rat's words were "murmured [by] doubt" and some shrewdness is attributed to them, though without context it is unclear why. It continues to claim that "her shadows [are] more stasima than episode" while conceding that "a psychologist might disagree" which offers a number of possible readings. To begin, it is ambiguous who "her" refers to. On the one hand, the phrase "[beyond the] shadow of a doubt" is invoked and twisted in the same way in which it is in Morgengrau's novella Sky-Out, where a journalist and her entourage are described as "the doubt and her shadows". Seeing how the rat has been identified as the doubt, this would make the rat's shadow the thing which is "more stasima than episode", though the rat is at no point shown to cast a shadow. The only thing casting a conventional shadow is the woman who would also be the most natural referent for she/her pronouns, though gendered appellation is never again used for any of the parties involved. A similar lack of concrete attribution lies with the word episode. On the one hand it is juxtaposed to the stasima, which are a structural element of Greek tragedies with which their episodes are interspersed. Dramatic action occurs in the episodes and is commented upon in the stasima, so to deny the shadow's status as an episode is to deny agency. The doubt casts explanation but allegedly not action. To say that a psychologist might disagree however invokes the more common facet of the term as a mental episode which would certainly be in-keeping with the imagery. A psychologist might also well claim that action is occurring within the fact of analysis. To examine a mental object is to change it. The reader is not told whether such a psychologist would be correct or not and is ushered on to the next panel instead, though before leaving they might note that no plausibility is lent by omission to the idea that the current setting could be a prologue, a parodos, let alone an exodus. All invoked figures share a mute agreement that —whether moving or not— they are certainly in medias res. The next panel shows the girl from before pinned to an entomological collection board by the chest, alongside multiple butterflies and what seems to be a beetle. Her dress and jacket are splayed in such a way as to look like butterfly wings and blood seeps from the spot at which the pin is inserted. Again the latin crosses for eyes likely indicate death and the rat's voice drifts in from beyond the panel asking whether "[she does] not see it [...] where the īsarnom-spike drives [her/their] souls into barren soil like the fragile mnimic [she is]". To first get clarity on the terms: īsarnom is a proto-celtic-reconstruction of the term that likely became "iron" in english, though if one attempts to trace it further, conflict arises between scholars of proto-indo-european, who squabble over whether it derives from a term for blood or one for holiness. To not simply say iron, it is clear that at least one of these meanings is being highlighted. Mnimic on the other hand is not a real term at all, reconstructed or otherwise. Giving the benefit of doubt and assuming that it is not a simple misspelling of the word mimic, which butterflies of course are, the mn-prefix usually denotes a connection to memory via the greek goddess Mnemosyne as found in terms such as mnemon, mnestic and mneme. A mnimic would thus be a thing that imitates memory in some sense. The notion evokes Fisher's hauntology as well as Ophrys apifera's possible imitation of an extinct bee. If the collection board is to represent that "barren soil" then we can draw the connection to Fisher further: Dead cultural objects, isolated and over-examined. Evidently unable to convincingly fake the edge-detect pattern that covers the rest of the background, the descriptive tag beneath the girl has been rather clumsily overridden, labelling her as a "Pondenome of Demonstures" belonging to the nonsensical species and family "non sum - qualis eram". Without the hyphen, placed in a uniquely lazy attempt to fit with the other labels, this is a latin phrase meaning "I am not what I used to be" which famously haunts Johnny Truant in House of Leaves. "Pondenome of demonstures" on the other hand once again fails to be a genuine expression of any language, though it carries within itself hints of "pandemonium", which is likely why Moregengrau picked it from admidst the variety of nonsense-sentences generated by the markov chains of Claude E. Shannon's 1948 paper A Mathematical Theory of Communication. While no one could be blind to the allure of a simple mathematical generator producing something self-evidently eldritch when fed the structure of natural human speech, it is not particularly obvious what this label contextually means. Perhaps the environment makes the claim that this entity is an incoherent babble merely glamouring as real, which would certainly reinforce the accusation of being a mimic, mn- or otherwise. Perhaps it is alleging that she wasn't always. This second panel is also the first instance of the woman being addressed as "shatter thing" which will be the primary appellation given to her throughout the comic. Taking aside the obvious objectification, a shatter thing might either be a thing predisposed towards shattering or a thing that is shattered. The latter implication appears more likely by way of the fact that the rat refers to her souls in the plural as opposed to the singular. The term shatter-thing first appears in Ouroborista's Escapril 2025 poem Mirror:
Shatter-thing your eyes are mildly scary Limbs are stilted, hair won't acquiesce Appearance of the product's prone to vary Darling did you know that more is less? Shatter-thing you're failing at expressions Mirror neurons freshly out of ink To print for what they ought have cheap compressions Reflexively reflective one would think Shatter-thing you're imitating nothing Your sense of dress and posture are a joke Quite vain to boot and terrible at bluffing It would not solve your problem if I broke
Here, the shatter thing in question is quite evidently their own person, or at least their reflection, as an unsettling stare, stilted posture and unruly hair find themselves rather frequently and accurately in Morgengrau's self-descriptions and portrayals. It is at this point at which one might draw attention to the fact that the protagonist of Aisle Five wears a necklace resembling a butterfly or moth and that Ouro owns and frequently depicts themself with a moth-necklace of their own, though the wing-shapes and colours are meaningfully different. While there is overlap between the comic and the poem in terms of "mildly scary" eyes and references to imitation, both are staples of Morgengrau's fiction in general and as no particularly prescient bridge between the two is obvious, the re-use of shatter-thing is more likely an echolalic term-fixation of their shared author than any deliberate reference. Panel three shows an antique syringe, or at least an approximation of one by someone who evidently could not be bothered to pull up a reference image and who thus failed to discover that there is supposed to be a metal cap on the back end and that this cap is usually the thing with two finger-holes while the piston only has one. The fantastical instrument is filled with a translucent reddish liquid which it administers into a crack in the floor of what is presumably the titular aisle five. A puddle in the form of yet another butterfly forms around the injection site. Within the syringe floats a representation of the chemical structure for trimethylamine, a very much colourless and medically inadvisable precursor-chemical in a variety of industrial syntheses. Having a degree in chemistry, one would hope that Morgengrau is aware of these facts and merely taking artistic license. If so it is worth noting that the liquid in and outside the syringe has the same colour as the girl's blood and the head of the fixation-needle at lowered opacity. The rat's disembodied dialogue goes on to claim that "base matter is being inoccultated against the lies of [her/them]" and once more the reader will have to grudgingly presume that the apparent typos have some purpose and so that Ouroborista sees reason to insert "occult" into "inoculate" and "lies" into "the likes of you". The latter at least, if "the likes of her" are some manner of mimic, fits an established pattern of the rat believing the woman and whatever she represents to be ontologically deceitful in some sense. Since the whole īsarnom business primes one to scour etymologies, the way any pedant must once they have run out of compelling arguments, one might discover that inoculation was originally the insertion of an oculus, which is to say an eye, which is, in turn, to say a bud, into a plant. To replace oculus with occultus (concealed, hidden) would thus gesture to the introduction of a secret or obfuscation into some substrate. By the structure of the sentences and the mirrored needle-imagery from panel two, it is possible to infer that the "barren soil" and "base matter" are this substrate into which a lie-warding obfuscation is introduced by way of iron/blood/sacredness driving the woman's souls into it. Whether this is to mean anything should be highly dubious. The actual material of this figurative injection is an interesting one. Trimethylamine has, as previously stated, no medical use, though does play an important role in the manufacture of choline, a cerebral metabolite. Perhaps there is something to be found in this idea of being an industrial precursor to real cognition, though more likely, being depicted in a syringe and looking nothing like itself, the thing being referenced is one of the most exhaustively dissected sequences in Freud's dream analysis: Irma's injection. In it, one of Freud's colleagues injects the patient with trimethylamine through a possibly contaminated needle, after discovering that the cause of her maladies is "organic" rather than mental. An obvious conclusion to draw is that the problem here too is material rather than noetic, discrediting the hypothetical psychologist from earlier. Another is that the lens which should be taken to the whole of this work is one of Freudian dream analysis, whose foremost axiom states that any dream, no matter how uncomfortable it is on its surface, expresses a desire. To summarise the field in this way does of course perpetuate the same mistake of which Freud accused many of his readers, who were reducing an interplay of insights to the simple claim of whish-fulfillment which is easily distorted and abused, but there is no space for a full guide to Freudian analysis between these paragraphs and good faith will have to work its subtler aspects beneath the hood. Narration chimes in to provide an account of the woman's stance with regards to all these repudiations, claiming that "The meat-stuff was playing petulant, like it did not agree with demons and could not hear them and did not know what words were, only the last of which was effectively true". While taking a similarly objectifying view of the protagonist, this external voice implies that the rat is a demon, or at least that the woman takes it to be one. To claim that the idea of her being ignorant with regards to words is approximately true is likely some pretentious point about language rather than in indication that this girl specifically is somehow challenged with regards to it. To claim that her behaviour is akin to not agreeing and not hearing and etc invokes something like the narcissist's prayer: A layering of highly general excuses employed to cling on to an already decided outcome. "I do not wish to consider this, and anything which allows me not to is true." The fourth panel, showing half of the woman's smiling face and multiple distorted clock faces along with an eye in the background, expounds upon the list of excuses to say "[her] microsecond-aeons [belong] to higher bidders for at least a few more hours" while also stating that this makes it a particularly good time to feign ignorance. Notable is that the woman's eye is closed while the one watching her in the background, presumably belonging to those "higher bidders", is not. For her to look away does not stop others from seeing. The other half of the woman's face is shown in panel five, though the background has returned to the supermarket aisle, and her face has been torn open above the mouth to reveal a pile of coins filling her cranial cavity. The skin that would have covered this part of her face is pinned back with five more of the red-tipped needles that held her as a butterfly. The narration maintains that "the sustenance of flesh", which, if the appellation is to be taken seriously, is all that anyone takes her for, "requires funds", and that "selling limbs is more dignified than selling minds". This is needlessly confused by the fact that the girl's mind is evidently missing, which could easily be interpreted as it having been sold, though the intended meaning, given the text, is likely that her mind simply isn't here because she is merely selling limbs. The wide smile is recast as automatic or maybe even pinned in place, and some context is lent to why the narration does not address her as a person: Her personhood is implied to not be present within this interaction. The narration is broken up by a black speech bubble asking "shall I ring this up for you?", though no tail marks its origin. This inquiry could belong to another employee or even to the protagonist — automatic and perceived as external. It appears vaguely confusing that someone would be asking her this question when she has been implied to be staff, though one might note that the woman's face appears mirrored in these two panels relative to how it looks across the whole rest of the comic, where she has a long strand of hair on the left rather than the right of her face. This, taken along with the previously unexplained plural "your souls" might imply that the woman is a stand-in for a variety of people, seeing herself reflected interchangeably in the clerk and the shopper. This larger reference class might then also be the entity which the rat considers to be shattered. The fact that the black-bubble-speech is enclosed in quotation marks makes it feel more distant and less real than the other things being said. Panel six shows a strange combination of an antique scale and an old cash register, for which Mx Morgengrau seems to even have consulted references this time. At the top of the mercantile chimera rests a modern eight-segment display reading JA(S/5) (S/5):(I/1)-6, which is likely intended to be Jas 5:1-6 meaning chapter five, verses one to six of the epistle of James, better known as the warning to the rich:
1 Come now, you who are rich. Lament and weep over the miseries that will soon overwhelm you. 2 Your riches have rotted. Your clothes are all moth-eaten. 3 Your gold and silver have corroded. Their corrosion will serve as a witness against you and consume your flesh like a fire. You have hoarded wealth for the last days. 4 Behold, the wages you fraudulently withheld from the laborers who harvested your fields are crying out, and the cries of those harvesters have reached the ears of the Lord of hosts. 5 You have lived on earth in luxury and self-indulgence. You have gorged yourselves as on the day of slaughter. 6 You have condemned the righteous man and murdered him, even though he offered you no resistance. —Translation according to the New Catholic Bible (2019)
Aside from unabashed leftist proselytising, this projects onto the imagery of a customer paying for goods a vision of the wealthy paying for their greed with damnation. Perhaps it is an overreach in reasonable speculation to draw a connection between the sudden invocation of religious doom, the revelation of a distributed self and the overly formal "shall I ring this up for you", but in this context "ring" seems like it might gesture towards the Very Reverend John Donne's tolling of the bell in Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions, and severall steps in my Sicknes [sic].
"Hee for whom this Bell tolls may be so ill, as that he knowes not it tolls for him [...] No man is an Iland, intire of it selfe; every man is a peece of the Continent, a part of the maine; [...] Any mans death diminishes me, because I am involved in Mankinde; And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; It tolls for thee."
Though expecting people to be aware and reminded of this text seems like a rather insane thing to presume even by Nova's high standard of ignorance regarding which bits of the cultural canon can be considered common knowledge. The scale itself holds the rat on one of its trays and two coins, one silver and one copper, on the other. The coins are displayed as heavier, which seems unlikely given their size and the weight of a real rat. On the one hand this can be taken as more communist whinging about how even small amounts of currency outweigh a life, but on the other hand the imagery is strongly reminiscent of the weighing of the heart by Anubis according to the book of the dead. Taking this lens it would be positive for the rat to be portrayed as impossibly light, since having a heart lighter than the feather of Maat avers its purity and saves it from destruction. For the rat's soul to be pure would of course be quite contrary to its description as a demon, though the narrator has not sufficiently established their trustworthiness for such contradictions to be troubling. The rat continues its verbal onslaught from upon the upper tray, claiming that "all has not yet passed [likely in pedantic response to the narration's statement that selling limbs is less degrading than selling minds after all]" and that "it is rushing past us even now and [...] knows as little of where it is headed as [she does]". The background is a mirrored version of the clock-face from panel four, which might either be a further indicator of directionlessness or a way of calling attention to the earlier mirroring. In the context of the bible verse, the rat's claim would mean that the trade is still happening and that the cost will not come due for some time. The cash-register after all is closed. Between panels, narration interjects that "perhaps it wasn't headed at all. Perhaps it was tailing them. The limbs did not know whether they were listening to threats or assurances", possibly making some statement as to how time is created by action as opposed to existing outside or around it — gaining ground in the very act of escape from the previous moment. For "the limbs" not to know whether the distantness of judgement is soothing or alarming means that she is uncertain or possibly wilfully ignorant about the state of her own soul as it was ambiguously yet concretely assessed for the rat a moment ago. Wishing to be so-weighed would certainly constitute one compelling Freudian desire for the dream to express. The seventh panel consists of a stone slab —possibly a tombstone— propped up by a forked branch, to the bottom of which some string is tied. Beneath this contraption, which seems to also be located in the store aisle, lies a single leaf and a butterfly is passing close to the maw of this evident trap. Scan-lines of alternating brightness and a battery symbol in the top right of the panel indicate that the scene is being witnessed through some sort of camera and the slab bears an inscription in hellenic script, though the butterfly and the branch obscure a number of letters partially or entirely. In the absence of context it would surely be difficult to reconstruct the words on the tombstone from (Φ?)?óνει θν??ά, without any meaningful grasp on the greek language, though Morgengrau too has no more than a passing dabbler's familiarity with Hellenistic mythology or history, and so any reference they make confidently is unlikely to lead more than a stone's throw away from their evergreen obsession with the Pythia. Using this coda it is not too laborious to find the lesser-known delphic axiom Φρóνει θνητά (think as a mortal) which matches the inscription rather nicely in both letters and implication. Thinking as a mortal should obviously caution one away from such a trap, which confuses the matter, though the rat elucidates by chiding that "these are all just deadfall moment captures, shutter-thing". It invites the woman to step further outside of time, indicating that who is chasing whom in states of recursive cybernetic feedback is a mirage of chronology and that it is precisely the myopic moment-thought of mortals which gets captured by the deadfall. To say "shutter thing" draws further attention to these short isolated time slices and recordings in which grave game-theoretic mistakes are made. Morgengrau documents all the books they read each month publicly, and so one may conclude that they would have had the last unicorn on their mind during the making of this comic. In it, butterflies are portrayed as so short lived as to be utterly swept up in disconnected impressions, repeating songs and rumours and phrases as they are blown about through the world, and dying before they have any chance to draw all of it into coherence. To interpret the butterfly this way is of special analytical help in this panel, and to some lesser degree for the rest as well. It is perhaps worth noting that the stone slab is the first thing since the woman in panel one to cast a visible shadow, though whether this is to mean anything or whether it was merely necessary to make the construction of the trap spatially legible is unclear. At the very least the light-source seems consistent even if it only occasionally elects to produce shadows. Narration describes the rat's warning as "dismissive as always" before proceeding to a panel consisting entirely of a minimally edited diagram of a vocal tract, though Ouro seems to want to cover up the fact that they didn't draw anything by hiding more than half of the image behind text reading "Had tongues been involved they would have slipped here [indicating that no-one actually said "shutter thing"]. The remnant bites its own just to be safe and there is a forgetting of which voices make habit of coming from this mouth." The revelation that the dead rat is not literally speaking cannot come as too much of a surprise, though the notion that the girl, now going by remnant, has to bite her tongue and is forgetting which voice is hers deserves further examination, since she has not so far been clearly indicated to have spoken at any point. This could be taken as meaning that she is coming around to the rat's viewpoint and seeing herself as a part of a fractured hivemind rather than a single agent with a single voice. It could also mean that she is herself unsure of the origin or the black speech bubbles. Closer examination reveals that the anatomical diagram is not captioned with actual physiological features. The only two fully legible labels are Murmur and Crocell, two demons of the Ars Goethia which are certainly not part of the throat. Murmur is known for bestowing the ability to converse with and query the souls of the dead as well as the teaching of philosophy, which would explain the rat, while Crocell appears as an angel speaking in dark riddles, which is in-keeping with a number of stylistic decisions. It is of course also perfectly possible that these two were chosen because their names remind of croaking and murmuring respectively, both of which could be tied back to the throat and recontextualize the choice of verbiage in "murmured doubt mercurial". Biting one's tongue "just to be safe" is re-framed as making sure that the voice with which one speaks is not that of a demon since the whole of the throat is corrupted. At this point it might be possible to make guesses as to whom or what the rat is representing. Nearer the start an associative connection to civilisation, filth and disease might have been valid, as would have been a connection to the subculture of the same name given the questionable company Ouro keeps, though by now the comic has established an ontology which works through phrases and idioms, and so one is compelled to think of rats leaving the sinking ship as well as the ever-popular rat-race. Since this specimen is dead and "speaking" through murmurs, they would have failed or refused the call of either. More likely, given what they have been saying, they represent the broader eusocial good which is shredded and left dead by the wayside in a grocery aisle through these phenomena — the mankinde which is diminished in any death of its multitude amidst competitive ratchets. Given their unsightly preoccupation with Land and the likes, Morgengrau could of course not be unaware that there is a significant difference between the brown rat, rattus norvegicus, and the black rat, rattus rattus, the former having won a well documented and ecologically devastating rat race against the latter. Rattus rattus, despite what the colloquial name might imply, comes in various colours, not necessarily or even predominantly black, and the rat's depiction in panel six, though it is by far their worst drawing of the animal, does more closely resemble the proportion of a black rat, while the rest are charitably ambiguous. Still, it is very strange that they would have given what is presumably supposed to be a black rat brown fur, if only for ease of comprehension to an anglophone reader. Perhaps it is simply that their native tongue does not misleadingly colour-code these two species and that they were too immersed within the visual medium to think for a second about words and their sprawling web of lexemic pitfalls, which is admittedly hilarious in a piece of such load-bearing magniloquence. Panel six shows a close-up of the woman's head at a 3/4ths angle. She is looking up at the dead rat she is dangling very close before her face and wears an expression that —against the backdrop of a disintegrating church— reads as a mixture of fear and reverential awe. The switch from a store to a chapel is likely one of perception and not actual location, since a connection is drawn via the word "aisle". Her teeth are sharp and shark-like as blood trickles from her nose to coat some of them. For the first time it is entirely visually clear that her earrings are fishhooks, and they seem to mirror the shape traced out by the rat's speech bubbles. Certainly in this panel and less definitively in the sixth. The imagery calls to mind yet another of Morgengrau's amateurish forays into poetry, this one charmingly titled "Get hooked or die drowning"
Subspacial substitute submerged Subdued the waves ebb and flow With naught to show But fish of silver lining beaches Lying lifeless Lie in life less Lessen blows from lessons learned The sea reclaims the ground it earned And grounds the world it grinds to dust Beneath the waves a metal glint Hints of regret But already hooked Ripped and reeled in The real sealed in/torn out The swarm disperses Fragments away Can? Not yet. Only water rises Nauseating nautic choir Sink with us!
Here too the subdued, stasimoid waters have nothing to show for themselves but dead critters and there is some sort of hidden reality or truthfulness to be extracted from them. The poem presents a leap of faith from the outside and does not show whether it pays off, though the image of a fishhook certainly begets grim odds. To latch oneself onto something external, to get hooked, ride and/or die and "faintly trust the larger hope" as Tennyson puts it, is to trade a quotidian doom for an unknown one. None of this explains why the woman is bleeding from her nose, though perhaps it is meant to foreshadow some of the panels to come. More likely Nova insisted on the edgy visual for its own sake, reasoning that the shark-teeth would hardly carry sufficient punch if they were not covered in a bit of blood. While this is likely the most striking single panel of the comic, it is still profoundly artless to make such choices merely to sate a barely concealed aesthetic fascination. The rat claims, once more seemingly replying to the narration that "you are a tooth of the thing that will rend us free. It is not your purpose to know. It is not your purpose to experience emotions about this state of affairs. It is your purpose —your sole purpose, shatter thing— to bite. Hard if possible." The beleaguered reader has at this point learned to be almost thankful for the fact that it is not heterographized as "soul purpose". Either way, the call to bite hard evokes professor Donna J. Haraway's neoteric political slogan of "run fast, bite hard" and the solidarity of and with dying animals in the process. The woman is asked to be a guard-dog of goodness with all of the depersonalization that entails. Notably, the rat says "us", for the first time acknowledging some community with the protagonist now that she is paying attention. Perhaps that is why she looks so scared. With respect to her forgetfulness regarding voices, the rat reassures that neither knowing, nor feeling any number of things is the actual goal and that any neurosis about them is thus wasted. Some knowledge or some feelings might be useful towards winning, but so long as they have not been rent free, they hold little value beyond the instrumental. To mistake them for the goal tends to incur unnecessary sacrifices. Knowing Nova "Ouroborista" Morgengrau quite personally and regretting it more fiercely by the day, they might go into a spiel about how the modern western cultural paradigm lionizes freedom and individuality while scarcely providing the option for either, merely the ability to backwards-rationalize coerced behaviour as autonomously chosen, or to feel guilty for not having managed to "pick" an option that did not truly exist. Real freedom on the other hand requires very little choice. There ceases to be a reason not to do what is good when the world is not attempting to kill you. Presented with one of those few genuine choices —the one to bite and get hooked— a narrative insert tells readers of the protagonist's first concrete desire to speak: "Alone? The mindlessness wished to ask". An earlier black text box, wishing a nice day, might indicate that she is now the only person in the store, or at least this section of it. Panel ten shows a vast desert. The woman has her back to the viewpoint, looking out over a large butterfly, pinned with multiple needles to the sand, and towards the enormous rodent looming at the horizon of this dreamscape, meeting her gaze. For the first and only time the rat's eyes are un-stylized and alive and despite the size-reversal they are only now seeing eye-to-eye. There is writing in the sand right in front of the woman's feet, in between her and the butterfly, though her body partially obscures the central ~6 letters of each line, reading "And God w(q/o/a/d/c)??????rsome above the skies, b(w/u)??????e was nothing yet on ear??????(e/r/c)ar Him." Whatever this is, it is not a quote from anything readily searchable, though unless Ouro saw fit to litter this already barely legible snippet of text with further neologisms, "fearsome" is the only remotely appropriate word which ends in "rsome" and fits comfortably into the first blank which would likely make the word before it "was". "And God was fearsome above the skies, b-"... something. Any further reconstruction would rely too heavily on guesswork to be seemly in such a piece, and if Morgengrau thought that this verse was paramount to the meaning of their comic, they should have perhaps ensured that it can actually be deciphered. It is at least notable that God and Him are clearly reverentially capitalised, and, being "fearsome above the skies", the deity is or at least wasn't yet "trapped in these atoms". The way in which the butterfly is pinned is gratuitous and likely deliberately Utena-esque. Since it has been used as a symbol for the woman so far, it is likely that being pierced many times over indicated the fate of her multitudes, and perhaps, since this seems to be the rat's realm in some sense, the way in which her greater whole is perceived by the rodent. The butterfly's head is covered by a textbox and might be hiding anything, though most likely the fact that Morgengrau had no intention to try and legibly stylise an anatomically correct butterfly-head from the front without breaking the symbolic inventory established so far. To the unspoken plea, the rat responds "wither without my help", a possible mondegreen of "with or without my help" which, according to the narration, had been "clear from the start". Despite this being the same sort of flippant rhetorical use of broader chronology that the rat has in the past taken objection to with "in the end", it appears to let this one slide, indicating that it perhaps really had been clear from the absolute beginning of things. The fact that the ambiguous phrase is rendered as "wither without" conveys that despite the implication of both paths having their own types of loneliness, the protagonist has already come to the conclusion that one of them is significantly worse. This is likely the comfort she is claimed to find in "such iron-glad deflections", since the response clearly does not answer the question. As undignified as it is, having to try to find meaning in the corruption of "iron-clad" to "iron-glad", an iron-clad deflection would be one that works, one which is actually as disaffectedly stoic as it intends to be. To render the phrase as an approximate heterograph, as well as the woman's reaction, implies that this isn't what occurred and rather that a note of valence, of gladness, slipped through. It is not difficult to guess what that relief might be about, since the fact that the protagonist has gotten to the point of asking questions rather than disagreeing and not hearing and not understanding etc means that she has almost been won over already. What is however difficult to guess is why one is suddenly allowed to plainly use the word "iron" again after such long, pompous insistence upon "īsarnom". The eleventh and twelfth panels are best treated as a single unit, since a continuous background that seems to be a distorted page from an old medical textbook flows between the both of them and the woman's bust continues on across the horizontal panel divide. The bust is very similar to that of panels four and five, though of course mirrored, yet even under mirroring the lines do not really match up. Morgengrau might have been lazy enough to reuse a base-sketch, but at least not lazy enough to fully reuse a drawing. This however makes it impossible to tell whether the fact that her smile looks slightly less strained without the indicated nasolabial fold is intentional or not. Her face is not flayed this time around, but a large, thick pin pierces her right orbita bloodlessly from the front and reemerges from the back of her skull. The upper panel contextualises this visual, showing three cross-sectioned skulls in profile, labelled presumably Fig.1, Fig.2 and Fig.3, though the second label is obscured by the protagonist beyond the initial letter. Each of the skulls has a silhouette of hair behind them which looks like the woman's characteristic strand and within each is the diagram of a brain, though increasingly less of it. Figure one shows a single spike driven from the front of the skull into the area labelled "Neocortex", though it much more strongly maps onto the frontal lobe, since this is a clumsy attempt to unify depictions of the brain separated into lobes with depictions of MacLean's Triune Brain. The neocortex is of course the outer structure of the brain, consisting also of the parietal, occipital and temporal lobes, marked here as separate entities, though one can give the benefit of the doubt and concede that MacLean really did mostly mean the frontal lobe when he spoke of the neocortex. Beneath this layer of anatomical confusion lie the much more orderly structures of the limbic system and the basal ganglia to complete the triune model, as well as the cerebellum which has never caused issues for anyone. Figure two is much the same, though the region labelled neocortex, which is to say the frontal lobe, is now missing and a second pin, inserted from the same direction as the first is piercing the limbic system. Figure three then adds a third pin while having gotten rid of the limbic system as well, to leave only the basal ganglia of the triune model, along with all of those brain structures it did not particularly care about. It often seems as though Ouro is more concerned with sending people down a selection of interesting research rabbit holes by dangling colourful words in front of their faces, than with actually layering object-level meaning upon their piece, and only with intense and utterly unwarranted generosity can the possibility be raised that these too are fishhooks as the girl wears them on her ears and as the rat constructs them from speech bubbles. In the spirit of playing ball: The triune model, which is to say the sequential evolutionary development of an instinct-driven basal ganglia, an emotion-driven limbic system and lastly a logic-driven neocortex, all with their own full and separate warring consciousness, is of course widely discredited, though in the realm of symbols one might as well take it at face value. A mind is stripped first of higher thought and then of valence to leave only a simple actuator. The imagery used also reminds of lobotomies, which is only added to by the fact that the woman's pin is inserted through the eye-socket as would be the case in the trans-orbital "ice-pick" version of the procedure. Lobotomies were a procedure in which bothersome individuals were made more docile by way of fairly imprecise damage to the prefrontal cortex. The procedure has never been made illegal anywhere outside the soviet union but rather simply fell out of fashion as less gruesome paths towards the same end were developed. Narration claims that "Patiently, the īsarnom spikes of those higher bidders were scraping the last vestiges off the meat-stuffs paleolimbic. Voracious, gorging bites with no intention of ever chewing". At least one of the processes causing this vast cerebral mutilation is thus implied to be capitalism, though it also mirrors the rat's earlier claims that higher thought is not necessarily useful and that what is really needed is teeth. Notions of threat-resistance spring to mind, in which one deliberately impairs one's own ability to act and choose in order to secure better outcomes. It is pointless to blackmail someone who has stripped themself of the ability to give in to your demand, and if they were legible enough about this fact in advance then there ceases to be a reason to threaten them with anything in the first place. It is very difficult to deceive or deflect a simple actuator pursuing a goal. This conclusion is of course muddied by the fact that lobotomies tend to annihilate motivation entirely, though when clumsily jumping between two brain-related metaphors such issues are to be expected. The subdivision of the limbic system into paleo-and neo-limbic seems to be a rare- though not unprecedented one, still it is perfectly possible that Morgengrau meant to say paleomammalian, which is to say the limbic system as a whole. Either way, scraping the last vestiges of either structure simply describes what has been shown in the panels above, to call it "bites" however turns the whole affair from an act of vandalism into one of theft, perhaps implying that those brains which are not sold are stolen. The fact that the rat and the "higher bidders" are to some degree asking for the same thing carries the rather grim suggestion that one will be a tool either way and that the meagre bits of agency one has may only be put towards deciding what-for. To choose a god or a cause and get hooked by the fishing line of some fledgling egregore or to be scraped clean and used by whatever is currently in charge. A block of narration continues that "Peace could surely be found, as one digs through this tissue. It could be wrung from this feeble throat as it utters some broken syllable-substitute for truth", clearly outlining the latter of those options: The conventional lobotomy and the continued path of mimicry. Syllable substitutes in which one pretends to be an independent, autonomous agent and succumbs to the ratchet in the process until death is found at some juncture, though this is not the path taken as "these abandoned limbs and the voice that whispers to them were searching for something else entirely". She, abandoned by a god trapped in atoms and urged on by dead and dying critters, has reached the point of seeking something altogether different from personal peace and comfort at the cost of everything. Panel thirteen shows the dead rat perched upon the tongue and guarded by the fangs of a shark toothed maw, presumably belonging to the protagonist, judging by a sliver of purple hair in the top-right corner. It is silent, though it has already been established to be the bait on the hook and so there is no more need for persuasion at this point. The narration continues that "in that blood-starved inheritance of proto-sapient detritus", which cannot be anything but that community of things trying but not yet quite managing to be a hivemind, "they might yet find it." A final panel shows the entomological collection box from earlier, though the woman is now absent from her pin which pierces the board and nothing else. Around it is a patch of slightly translucent, blood-coloured liquid which fails to quite form a butterfly and thus indicates that the myopic incoherence is over with. The accompanying label is cut off in such a way as to only leave "Pondenome of Demonstures/Non Sum-" where non sum is of course the Latin for "I am not". In conclusion: I like this comic. 7/10.
Postscript: This review is inspired by a similarly roast-y self-analysis of a song by Biz Barklay, as well as the lovely attempts of friends to decipher my comic. If you have not caught on to the bit by now: I am Ouro, the same person who drew this strip. I hope that dissecting it in the style of a mildly obnoxious third party makes it a little easier to quash those unsightly impulses to uncritically accept authorial intent as the truth of any given matter, since there could surely be other similarly interesting and similarly coherent readings out there, which I would hate to discourage. The piece shifts back and forth between providing a full analysis of a puzzle piece and vaguely gesturing towards things that "might be paid attention to" or "might mean something" since endlessly scrutinizing my own choices would lead to an infinite essay that no one ever gets to read, though it should certainly give anyone the pieces with which to fill in and expand upon this "orthodox"-interpretation. In that same breath it also provides those elements which any heterodox theory would have to contend with. A reactionary might try to read the cathedral and the bazaar into the church and the supermarket and the concept of voice could even aid them, but what would they make of the mirroring? I wonder.