11:11

How to Live. What to Do.

goes:

These days I’m often regaled at the kitchen table by ‘origin stories’ of how some Marvel character or other attained their superhero status. I sometimes find myself wanting to ask the boy telling me them why use of this phrase is so restricted, why superheroes and ancient divinities should claim exclusive right to stories of their origins.

— Josh Cohen, 2021

To assign oneself a superpower is to give oneself an origin story that tells how one got it

or

With the invention, the discovery of one, superpower, comes the responsibility of the other, origin story

or

Event (for origin story): for superpowers are seldom gifts; they seldom come with no strings attached. If an individual has a superpower (do not presume … do not despair …) they have an individual origin story. That is a unique event.

or

… the string … tied to … the red … balloon … trailing behind it … is like a … faithful dog, where

red balloon = superpower / faithful dog = origin story

or

or

the faithful dog is Mephistopheles in disguise. Später verwandelt sich der Pudel in den Teufel Mephisto. Er kann so weil er früher in den Pudel sich verwandelt hat.

or

or

the faithful dog follows one home … like a shadow . In contrast to the balloon string, since, if you let go of it, your superpower is gone forever.

or

Is there a contrast?

… the author of How to Live. What to Do. Josh Cohen talks about the gift. It is a volume of Peanuts cartoons. It contains Cohen’s origin story, a strip with Lucy in her psychiatrist’s booth, telling Charlie Brown,

You need to improve your character, then,

Once a child is five years old his character gets to be pretty well established, to which, Charlie replies before Lucy charges him the five-cent fee,

But I’m already five, I’m more than five!

(now I note the fives, look:

… the cover of Five Dice, All Threes, Bright Eyes.) Oddly, I’ve just ordered.

More oddly, before picking up the Cohen book, I had been thinking of another Peanuts strip,

…

…

110.

Truth, goodness, and beauty exist in a symmetrical structure within the object. Observe Hongyemun Gate. It has no supporting structure and simply exists in a structure of itself. Once the structure of an object is discovered, there is no need for any other rhetoric or embellishment. There isn’t much else that needs to be done.

— Lee Seong-Bok, Indeterminate Inflorescence: Lectures on Poetics, translated by Anton Hur, 2023