The Ceremony of Innocence is Drowned

    The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
    The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
    The best lack all conviction, while the worst
    Are full of passionate intensity.

- William Butler Yeats, "The Second Coming"

Bodysurfing offers a disturbing afterlife in the Mogran, one innately tied to human sexuality. In the ultimate irony of the story the Mogran are obsessed with sex, consumed by lust, yet the results of this act consume them to such a degree that it provides their victims with a means of destroying the spirits. Ileana provided an example of a Mogran so engrossed in the act of rape that it did not fight back when it spotted her approaching with a metal pipe. With a lack of a concrete, bound physical association the unsettled psyches of the people become hedonistic pleasure seekers, which is only exacerbated by their former status as "bound" or virginal souls in life.

The Mogran's lot is one of being a free-spirit to such a degree that they can never reap the results of their physical desires– they can only find comfort in perversion and destruction. Unbound from physical bodies they are able to experience a myriad of experiences but they can never find a body that is theirs, that truly belongs to them. There is a tragedy to them that is best embodied in their attempt to beget children, which forms the driving conflict of the novel with Leo coming into conflict with the three products of his life: the child he wanted Jasper, and the two products of his urges Ileana and Q.

The immortality that is offered to the Mogran, those who die "bound" to their physical bodies as people who have not engaged in sex with another, is in sharp contrast to the limited immortality that normal people gain by way of sexual reproduction. The method of creation of new Mogran is actually cast into doubt until the start of the novel's story, and they seem to create a legacy only through their creation of the hunters. Like with normal humans the hunters such as Q. and Ileana are made through sex, they become inhabited once the demons are unbound from their last body and are left changed in the wake of the demon's reaching of orgasm in their body.

Unfortunately for the Mogran the product of their inhabitations, the hunters, are not grateful for the alterations they had made on the people's bodies and use their enhanced physical attributes to slay their makers. The hunters are the husks of former Mogran inhabitants, an unwanted legacy that follows the demons and seeks their destruction. Otherwise, the Mogran want to create another kind of legacy by creating more of their kind, through inhabiting a "bound" soul before its death in order to create another free-floating and capricious entity that would not be so ungrateful for their attention.

Yet Leo proves incapable of having either of his children, Q. or Jasper, either leave him be or follow directly in his footsteps. This eventual betrayal by his progeny extends even to the progenitors of the Mogran, the Alpha Wave. The roles of the Mogran and their opponents in the Legion in controlling the Mogran presence on Earth changes when taking Dr. Thomas/Foras's agenda into account.

The Alpha Wave of Mogran also controlling their legacy in the Mogran they unwittingly created, seeking to cull their progeny "when it became clear that the proliferation of the Mogran was becoming problematic, both for us as well as humanity" (384). Foras's machinations form the backstory of the novel, as Leo mentions Foras as the one who shared with him the secret of reproduction. Foras even implies a more congenial relationship with his "creator" than that of Leo and Jasper, keeping the sigil of Beleth who he describes as a "friend to me. In the same way that Leo attempted to be a friend to you" (399). This suggests that in becoming "unbound" from their physical bodies the Mogran are additionally unbound from forming lasting bonds of emotion such as friendship, which explains their period of lull and frenzy.

Additionally, the most direct example of progeny-progenitor relationship is Jasper and his father John. They may have had their differences, Jasper may have thought his dad was limiting him and his father may have thought everything he had accomplished in life paled in comparison to making Jasper, but they ultimately put themselves on the line to honor each other's memories. John flings himself down the stairs once Leo tries filling his mind with a "sudden, electric wave of hatred for his own son that flooded into him" (345). John may have failed his son in many different ways throughout his life, but when push came to shove he threw himself down three hundred ninety-two steps to prevent a maligned demon who fancied himself Jasper's father from eradicating all he held dear. That's one way to make up for things.

Jasper returns the message in kind. He outright rejects Leo's claim to paternity or authority over his existence when he says, "'No... He made me" (404).  In this way Jasper is placing his own experiences, the one he had as a mortal during his own lifetime, above those he absorbed from others in the process of his extended metempsychosis. The legacy of his life as a living or "bound" soul is thus more meaningful than his experience as an "unbound" spirit. How telling is it that when a Leo-possessed Q asks Jasper what he would do before he died Jasper responds, "I'd tell my dad I love him" (18). What else is this act of defiance but the ultimate affirmation of filial ties and rejection of a false parenthood?

The wheels of conflict between the Alpha Wave, the remaining Mogran, the secret servants of the Alpha Wave's will through the Legion, and the freshly born Mogran Jasper raise questions about legacy and lineage.

Gothic Teenagers

With all of its talk of demon possession, reality versus superstition, and sexual violence, Body Surfing reminded me strongly of the Gothic literature that could be considered its spiritual predecessor. Because I just read Frankenstein, I initially made connections specifically to that story. There was reanimation by an electrical current (at least that was Q.’s theory) to create human monsters much more powerful than the average person. There was a cat and mouse chase between good and evil, with the roles and the blame for lives lost almost continuously conflated. There were questions of free will and a focus on corporeality. Of course, all of these ideas come up in the Gothic in general, and I think it’s ultimately better to tie Body Surfing to the genre as a whole than to one work within the genre.

This book was written in a much different world than early Gothic literature (which often focused on the idea of rejecting contemporary Catholic superstitions in light of the Protestant Reformation), but it still took up the Gothic game of playing with superstitions we aren’t supposed to believe in any more, and reminding us that sometimes we believe in them anyway. People have talked about the fact that the book was gripping, disgusting, and extremely graphic. I thought it was all of those things too, but my initial classification was that it was scary. Horrifying because possession occurred through violent acts of rape, horrifying because innocent lives were sacrificed in order to save everyone else from demons, but mostly horrifying because it made the idea of a total loss of control seem very real in today’s world. It’s possible that I’m particularly susceptible to scary stories, especially about demons (someone in the Gothic era would probably blame too much Catholic education), but I had to stop reading multiple times because the story was scaring me.

In a way, my own fear extended the metaphor of possession. Reading always involves this process of violation to some extent. Someone else’s story takes over our own consciousness for a little while, and our ability to get out of the story is dependent on its hold on us. And anything worth reading usually leaves some trace behind once we’re done with it. But then we do get be done with it. We get to choose what we read and how much of it we read. I could stop reading when the book, particularly its talk of a lack of choice, got a little overwhelming, and do something else for a while.

Nevertheless, books do have a lasting impact. Ultimately this story was not just a reworking of Gothic themes, but an amalgamation of many genres and styles. To use the body surfing metaphor a little differently now, if Gothic literature was the novel's spiritual predecessor, it was a spirit that traveled around through other genres, picking up what they had to offer as it went – mythology, young adult fiction, modern religious capers. And like the process of the demons within the story, this movement and its connection to humanity sustained the book as a whole, and eventually got me to continue reading, even when I was afraid. Body Surfing was graphic and disgusting and scary, but it also told a story about teenage friends who cared about each other and a boy who almost reconnects with his father, though only after death and tragedy. There is Gothic excess, but there is something human holding together the demons passing through. Whether that's a necessary act of possession or an act of manipulation is something I haven't quite figured out yet.

"Utopias Never Work"

In both Body Surfing and “Invasion of the Body Snatchers”, I noticed several similarities between the stated goals of the Mogran and the Body Snatchers. Both sets of antagonists seek to seduce their targets with the ideal of peace and harmony, and the creation of a world where humans set aside their extremes of emotion in favor of a sort of passive subordination. In Body Surfing, Thomas/Foras explains to Michaela/Jasper that “with the Mogran assuming their rightful place at the head of the species, we can create an era of peace and prosperity and universal harmony” (388). In “Invasion of the Body Snatchers”, Dr. Kauffman glorifies a world taken over by the Body Snatchers, calling it an “untroubled world” in which “there is no pain… Love. Desire. Ambition. Faith. Without them, life is so simple, believe me”.

Their reflexive rejection of such a vision gives the protagonists of both works a much-needed edge in pivotal scenes—and, in doing so, lends both works their moral tone. Both Miles and Jasper come to appreciate not only the inevitability, but the value of conflict in defining humanity—not conflict between individuals or groups, necessarily, but rather the conflict inherent in the extremes of passion contained in even one single human being. These passions don’t exist for the Mogran and the Body Snatchers… and never have those two species seemed so alien as when their inability to understand the reasoning of their targets throws them for a loop.

According to my interpretation, this internal conflict of passions is what allows the human characters in these works (and many others in stories with similar themes) to maintain moral codes**. Caught in a perpetual sort of cognitive dissonance, they (we) constantly question both our own motives and those we infer in others. There is one scene in Body Surfing that I feel is particularly explicit in this regard: After Leo explains his plans to Jasper (plans which are strikingly in line with Foras’s, despite the lack of alliance between them), Jasper responds as follows:

There were two questions Jasper could have asked. One was human, the other immortal. One implied causality and morality, while the other was merely an inquiry into process, an accumulation of data. Jasper, human still—at least in his mind—did not ask how. He only asked:

"Why?"

And Leo, immortal to the core, was caught off guard (270).

Only a human, this passage suggests, would struggle with the question of “why”. Only a human routinely allows opposing values and theories to share a space within his mind, and therefore, only a human is equipped to challenge the ideas presented by an outside force with honest evaluation. This concept is one that, in my admittedly limited experience, occurs relatively frequently within the science fiction genre—the idea that, as humans, we are both characterized by and gain our biggest advantage from the traits and experiences that we often think of as our weakest or most trying: our uncertainties (which beget fair judgment), our encounters with grief, loneliness, and pain (which beget the capacity to empathize), and the conflicts born of our stubborn allegiances to ourselves, our loved ones, our ideals, and our history.

** That isn't to say that the "moral codes" that emerge don't take some serious hits-- see Arlyn's post

Rape in Body Surfing

To say that there’s a lot of sex in Dale Peck's Body Surfing is a vast understatement. I’ll be honest — I found myself struggling to read about the graphic violent sex from the very first page, but I continued reading, accusing myself of being too narrow-minded, pushing (forcing) my mind to open… but no matter how much I read, I couldn’t stop thinking about rape.

I think it’s safe to say that sex is very rarely consensual when it involves Mogran possession. It's possible that a Mogran could inhabit a body for long enough to seduce someone without hypnotizing them, and it's also possible that the body that they are possessing could have enough free will to truly desire the person that the Mogran is seducing. Although I can see the potential of a consensual sex act occurring while someone is possessed by a Mogran, this possibility is absent from the actual narrative. Legal and philosophical definitions of what constitutes sexual assault vary. People who define rape as “forced” sex would not consider the nonviolent acts where Mogran hypnotize their sexual targets to be rape (How does this sexual hypnosis work? “It’s all in the eyes” —Leo teaches Jasper to rapidly expand and contract his pupils (214)). I, however, consider sex via hypnosis to be sexual assault. It seems, then, that most of the sex we read about in the novel is sexual assault — the most graphic example is Illeana's gang rape at the command of an officer who Leo possessed, but Jasper also rapes multiple times. At first, Leo promises him that if he has sex, he can move onto heaven. So he seduces a woman in Jarhead’s body who he knows is not interested in Jarhead: “She didn’t have any desire for this body at all,” Jasper acknowledges, but “He was dead, after all. He was hardly accountable for his actions” (80-81). Soon, Jasper realizes that his sexual urges seem uncontrollable. So he finds himself sexually assaulting Jarhead’s roommate’s girlfriend: “Jasper stood their swaying, stunned by the primacy of his feelings. His need. The way it linked up with Jarhead’s feelings about Sandra,running around his trailer with her ass hanging out. She was practically asking for it. Really, he’d just be giving her what she wanted. What she deserved” (154). So, Sandra was asking to be assaulted — hello, standard rapist mindset! Eventually, Leo teaches him to hypnotize women to make it easier to sleep with them (and less violent for whoever he’s “seducing”).

I think we’re supposed to feel sorry for Jasper, to identify with him, to sympathize with him. He’s a sex-crazed teenaged virgin who just wanted to have sex with his girlfriend who he was madly in love with (whenever she was ready, of course), but instead he’s become a helpless victim of a Mogran-generating plot. He still acts “human,” which Leo finds repulsive. But even though he initially feels guilty about his sexual compulsions, I found it nearly impossible to empathize with him. Especially after he didn’t seem to question whether it was alright to hypnotize Shawna — “It’s not like she was going to jump on this particular body…. He was going to have to work a little harder to make this happen…. He opened his eyes wide, tried to imagine his pupils expanding, contracting” (214). The guilt that accompanied knowing she wouldn’t want to have sex with Jarhead’s body isn’t there anymore — he just thinks she’s hot. Alright, so Jasper’s Mogran, and he’s not bound to the same ideas of “right” and “wrong” as humans are supposed to be. But if he’s supposed to be a sympathetic character, how do I reconcile that aim with his “sexual compulsions”? I couldn’t. (And I wonder if anyone else did?)

Also, in the rewriting of history as largely motivated by Mogran, it seems that famous children’s lit authors are “excused” as pedophiles because they were possessed by the same female demon who motivated their fear of “normal” sex with adults. This speculative historical turn frightened me — what if every person I labelled as a rapist was really just possessed by some demon? Where does that leave questions of “consent” and punishment for sexual assaults if the Mogran could be behind everything? Sadly, sexual assaults have often been rationalized by ridiculous claims that men have uncontrollable sexual impulses - which seems to be exactly what Mogran-induced sex causes. The scariest part of the novel (for me) occurred when Thomas presented an excellent argument for the need to discover technological advancements for containing the Mogran — “We would no longer have to force our hosts to do things they don’t want to do, things they spend the rest of their lives puzzling over…. Perhaps we can become a pure electronic intelligence, a true living computer, or be able to go back and forth between flesh and machine” (387). This was intriguing until the following page, where Thomas asserts that “It is time to forge a new relationship between mortals and Mogran, one based on cooperation and a recognition of our mutual interests.With the Mogran assuming their rightful place at the head of the species, we can create an era of peace and prosperity and universal harmony” (388). At that moment, when I should have been thinking about the implications of this sort of “Utopia,” all I could think about was the fact that the ruling class would be the world’s most prolific rapists, and I realized that any reaction I could have had for the novel as a whole was tainted by my gut revulsion from the overwhelming presence of sexual assault themes. At some point, I gave up on broadening my mind to the new sexual possibilities it opens, and the novel morphed into a gigantic trigger warning. Obviously, my reaction to this lesser theme in the novel is verrrry strong, but I think it’s impossible to read this book without asking what readers are supposed to glean from the recurring scenes of sexual assault and nonconsensual sex. I also can’t figure out what I’m supposed to be “thinking” about it — I just felt an inescapable repulsion that impacted all of my other thoughts on the novel.

Everything Has Its Cost

Following a thought I first mentioned when we studied Nova, I want to discuss more of the principle behind "everything has its cost". This idea factors prominently in Dale Peck's Body Surfing as both the Mogran (used here alternatively with "demons") and their human hosts come to grips with their alternatively mutualistic and parasitic relationship. Like Prince Red in Nova, Mogran seem to metaphorically pay well after their own actions while like Lorq von Ray, the humans must cope with their decisions immediately after their execution.

King Solomon and an aide (left) with the Demons he bound to his service

The most obvious issue of "cost" for the Mogran is summarized by their role in "creating" the Hunters. As described by Ileana:

"The taint of the Mogran is something all of us wish we could wipe away. But it doesn't go away. The best we can do is take what they have done to us and use it against them[...] You have skin like armor. Beneath that skin lie other augmentations. Learn to harness them, and you will have your revenge." (Peck 231-232).

Ironically then, should a Mogran physically improve a host and fail to "clean up" after themselves (as usually happens due to the frenzy driving the jump), they leave this human with what amount to superpowers and thus the necessary tools to slay their possessor and other demons. As is the case with Leo, his "joyride" and manipulation of Ileana convolutedly leads (yet leads nonetheless) to his own demise from the combined efforts of the huntress and her pupil(s) (Q and Jasper/Michaela). As Leo comments to himself: more of his hosts have been recruited for the Legion's hunters/huntresses than any other Mogran, a testament which underscores of how both a demon's actions and attitudes eventually returned to haunt him. With no Mogran left (by the end of the book) except for himself, Jasper, and the Alpha Wave, Leo's hubris has led to demonkind paying the price in (metaphorical) blood. Furthermore, Leo fails in his quest to gain a companion in Jasper by foolishly leaving memories behind in Larry Bishop (later possessed by Jasper) because of his rush to "capture" Michaela. The memories unfortunately revealed to Jasper the truth behind the "accident" in the Porsche and the manipulation of Q.

From a human perspective, cost also appears mainly as an emotional issue rather than the life-or-death one for the Mogran. Though most of the horrible crimes (rape, theft, vehicular homicide, murder) committed in the novel are tied to possession and the whimsy of the demons, the poor souls possessed at the time have to comprehend and cope with their actions. Ileana is haunted by the 46 men she killed during her Leo-encouraged rampage while Q is forced to similarly cope with the loss of his girlfriend, the near-death of Michaela, and the "death" of his best friend at his hand (literally if not purposefully). More obscurely, the Serbian soldiers who raped Ileana paid immediately as she mercilessly killed each one of them. Building on this thread, Leo, the demon who perpetrated the rape, did not pay with his life until over a decade later.

Loss is a fundamental part of our human existence but then again, so is happiness and achievement. Despite the usually inherent positivity of the latter two principles, there is still always a price incurred. As claimed by the book, Hans Christian Anderson, Lewis Carroll, and JM Barrie all had illustrious writing careers. However, these careers only came after possession left them emotionally and mentally scarred and thus had the material they needed to craft their literary classics (184). Leonardo da Vinci was also mentioned as the potential victim of a Mogran who turned his acquired knowledge to become the Renaissance Man we know today (187).

In summary then, everyone (be they human or Mogran) eventually paid a price for their actions. Furthermore, Peck incorporates some elements from the trope of the "Deal with the Devil" yet shifts them to better reflect the capabilities of the possessing demons. Q, Ileana, Michaela, Alec, the aforementioned authors, and (potentially) Leonardo da Vinci all acquired new skills and abilities but only after being forced to commit acts of violence toward the body or soul (murder or rape). Despite the supernatural aura of Peck's work, these fundamentals of human existence remain and I applaud him addressing our broader imperfection and the idea behind "everything has a price."