All around me darkness gathers,
Fading is the sun that shone;
We must speak of other matters:
You can be me when I’m gone.
— The Kindly Ones
We need to talk about the three-faced goddess. She/they have been everywhere in The Sandman, from Preludes and Nocturnes, when Morpheus summons them to find out where his dream sand, his helm and his ruby—the devices of his office and his function—have gone. Whenever three women are together, the goddess is there. She's Thessaly, Foxglove and Hazel in A Game of You, and as such, she is not to be messed with. She’s Eve in the cave of nightmare, the First Woman who ate of the knowledge of good and evil and became wise. She’s maiden, mother and crone. She’s the witch. She’s the Fates, the Moirae: Clotho, who spins the thread of life, Lachesis, who measures it, and Atropos, who cuts it off.
She is also the Erinyes, the Eumenides, The Kindly Ones, the ones we don’t name except by euphemism. They are the goddesses of vengeance, possibly surviving aspects of a cthonic goddess; by the time the Greeks come around, they are said to be the daughters of Gaia and fathered by different figures in different circumstances, but they are always to be feared and appeased. Their function: vengeance, and vengeance of a particular kind in response to a particular crime, the killing of kin. Murder within the family—one of the oldest and greatest taboos.
The three-faced-goddess-who-is-one appears everywhere in The Sandman, but nowhere more prominently than in The Kindly Ones, and The Kindly Ones is a tragedy, structured as a classical tragedy, and tragic in all its aspects.
If you’ve not read The Sandman yet but have been following along, you have probably figured out by now that it doesn’t end well for Morpheus. And if you haven’t figured it out yet, the fact that the final volume is called The Wake will provide the last clue you need. Morpheus is in a trap, and he can’t escape. Everything closes in on his choices, and what he chooses to stand by.
The first piece of The Kindly Ones, “The Castle,” isn’t really part of the volume. It appeared as a stand-alone tale in Vertigo Jam #1, which was a dim sum of then-current Vertigo titles, along with Hellblazer, Animal Man, Swamp Thing, etc. Your mileage may vary on whether or not you like it, or whether you consider it part of The Kindly Ones. I tend not to, even though “The Castle” serves a couple of functions: the nightmare of the faceless women devouring the dreamer nicely echoes Orpheus’ dismemberment by the Maenads, while the ferocity of the women prefigures the appearance of the Eumenides in the Dreaming, and the terrible consequences of their assault. Also, Lucien gets a starring role, and there’s a lot more to Lucien than first glance might suggest. After all, before he was a librarian, Lucien was a raven; he was, in fact, Morpheus’ first raven, and before that, it’s strongly hinted that he was Adam. As in, the first man. We also get more of Nuala than we’ve gotten in a while. She cleans the throne room to keep busy and is desperately in love with Morpheus, which will figure in his downfall. All of which sets events for The Kindly Ones.
If you’ve read this far and you know this is a tragedy, everything else I write will hardly fall into mortal sin spoiler territory. And while the book is layered and rich, and we could discuss aspects of it for a year and not be done, I’m going to focus on just a few of the main points.
Most of the characters we’re familiar with return. In a graveyard, a bereaved Hob Gadling reflects he’s learned about life, which is that there is never enough time, and love hurts. Talking to Morpheus at the pub Faith, Hope, and Charity (whose sign features three women—I tell you, they’re everywhere!) he asks about revenge on the bloke who ran over his beloved Audrey. Morpheus responds with what he has learned about life, that revenge tends to come with repercussions.
Revenge as a theme runs under the narrative, from the John Webster and Beaumont/Fletcher quotations on the flyleaf and their lines slipped into the narrative as conversation to the closing pages, revenge lies like a skull under the skin, revenge and the influence of the Weird sisters whose fingerprints are everywhere.
When Rose Tyler goes back to the nursing home in England where Unity died, following a dream in which she’s been told that Unity wants to give her back her heart, she goes looking for the three-faced goddess in the broom closet and finds just a broom closet. The three arrive instead as three old ladies who live at the home. One of them tells the story of a wicked man and his broken vows. Gaiman has said, “It’s a folk tale about what revenge is for, and what it does. The original version I ran across was in a bizarre dialect; I remember first looking at it and misreading worm for woman,” (1, p. 198).
It’s an unsettling story, and I haven’t been able to find the original.
Revenge. Revenge—at its heart, that’s what The Kindly Ones is about.
As far as plot mechanics go, the story is pretty simple: Lyta Hall, who understandably but unjustifiably blames Morpheus for her husband’s death, loses her mind when her son Daniel disappears and his body is found incinerated. Again, understandably but unjustifiably blaming Morpheus, Lyta seeks revenge; her hatred and lust for vengeance power the narrative.
Meanwhile, Morpheus is tending to his duties and making preparations, almost as if he knows what is coming. He makes a new Corinthian, and details both him and Matthew to find Daniel, who has been stolen by Puck and Loki and put into a fire, which is an ancient method of burning away his humanity.
Lyta wanders both LA and the mythic world at once in search of the Ladies who will help her (remember, she was a part-time superhero called Fury, once), and Thessaly makes a deal with the Ladies, who forgive her impertinence in A Game of You if she will protect the dreaming Lyta from Morpheus. After meeting various mythic figures including the Gorgons Stheno and Eurayle (who want to keep her because “two should be three,”) Lyta finally reaches the Eumenides. They can’t help her with vengeance for Daniel because Daniel was not Morpheus’ son, and they can only revenge blood-crimes. But then they tell her that Morpheus did indeed kill his own son Orpheus, and so, with Lyta’s hatred powering them, the Ladies assault the Dreaming to destroy its king.
The attack on the Dreaming takes place at the same time as the reality storm of Worlds’ End (or in part it may be a prefigurement, as time is fluid in the Dreaming), and effects of the assault ripple into other dimensions. For a time, the garden of Destiny is filled with possible Destinies, Morpheus is pulled out of the Dreaming and the reality storm rages while the Eumenides destroy Gilbert and Merv Pumpkinhead, and even Abel—until Morpheus returns to his castle on the same train that was featured in the story of Sleeping Cities, and everything narrows down to one inevitable end.
Just How Much Has Morpheus Changed?
The Dream-King has been fighting and denying his evolution from the beginning. Calliope is the first to have noted that his imprisonment has changed him, but he denies it, and continues to deny it, even to Destruction in Brief Lives. But now he is beginning to realize and accept it. Gilbert tells him that
The skies of the Dreaming are gray and mournful, even here, in me.
Look about you: This is Fiddler’s Green, where sorrow and care are unknown. But what little sun we get now is stretched and tired. Ever since your son’s last death—
Morpheus cuts him off and tells him that he is attending to his responsibilities. Gilbert responds that he is doing the same thing, “but when, some time ago, it became too much for me, I stole the idea of this body, and walked into the waking world,” to which Morpheus says that he has been forgiven.
“Hoom,” Gilbert answers, “I’m not entirely sure we’re talking about the same thing, here.”
The fact is that he has changed, enough that Thessaly, who is as cold-blooded and unconcerned with humanity as Morpheus was before his imprisonment (and we know that because we’ve seen him in flashbacks), says to him, “I think you care about other people too much. It’ll get you into trouble one day.”
It already has.
Gilbert, Lucifer, Destruction—all have offered Morpheus a way out. He could leave. He could just walk away. After all, the Dreaming did continue, sort of, while he was in the Burgess dungeon. But we know, from the conversation between Lucien, Cain and the Corinthian, what happened when Morpheus vanished:
I...I remember [the recreated Corinthian says] waiting for his return. I remember the strange strained gray days that stretched into years and into decades. The slow crumbling of walls….the rooms that were no longer there….
and Lucien adds,
I remember those days. We waited for him, while the castle fell apart about our ears, while the words fled from my books and scurried off down the corridors in twos and threes, or faded into oblivion and obscurity.
Those of the staff who took their power directly from our lord, the gatekeepers and suchlike, became insubstantial, or ceased to exist entirely.
Morpheus knows what will happen if he leaves. He won’t do it. Despite his growth, he is still bound by rules and his responsibilities—the things that define him.
In the end, he has only one way out. And he takes it. On a mountaintop, in the heart of the storm, he waits for his sister. Their final conversation mirrors their first one at the end of Preludes and Nocturnes. He conjures bread and pigeons for her, and even offers to let her throw the bread at him. “It’s too late for that, my brother,” she says. “It’s much too late for that.”
Like the Endless themselves, the Eumenides are aspects of human nature; in literature and mythology, they hound the kin-slayer. They are regret unending, and their whips are made of scorpions, and the wounds never heal. And Morpheus wants — needs — to suffer their whips because he killed his son. He killed him twice, out of his strict adherence to rules. Now he suffers according to the rules, until he doesn’t suffer any longer.
Unlike Lucifer, who walked away from hell, and unlike Destruction, who left his realm, Morpheus feels too much responsibility to his subjects, and the responsibilities that sustained him also bound and constricted him. In death he is freed. And the Eumenides retire, their task completed.
However, Morpheus has found a loophole in the rules, and secured for himself an heir. The Dreaming will continue, and Daniel, the baby with a little humanity left after Puck and Loki’s fire, becomes the new Dream. Morpheus dressed in black; even his word balloons were black. Daniel/Dream is his opposite. He dresses in white. Instead of a ruby, his dreamstone is the emerald. He is Dream; he remembers himself. “I told myself many things before I died,” he says.
Dream is dead; long live Dream.
Who Dunnit?
It’s a real mystery to figure out the extent to which Morpheus is complicit in his own destruction. The plot turns on Loki and Puck and their motivations. Puck appears to be along for the ride, content to make trouble for its own sake, but Loki is another matter. When he escaped from Odin and Thor in Season of Mists , Loki gains his freedom knowing he is under obligation to Morpheus, but Loki isn’t willing to owe anyone anything. Watching Carla die horrifically, he declares, “I am Loki, who is fire and wit and hate. I am Loki. And I will be under an obligation to no one.” So you might think that his motivation is purely his own.
Except that after his fight and blinding by the Corinthian, after his recapture by Odin and Thor and his rebinding with the guts of his son Narvi, and with frost and fire and the weight of the world, the snake venom dripping into his empty eye sockets…
he writhes, and a city falls: and in the moment of pain he gains a certain clarity. The master manipulator realizes how, ultimately — how strangely, how elegantly — he too had been manipulated. Perhaps the sound he makes is laughter.
Neither was the culprit Lucifer, who once vowed to destroy Morpheus, but instead, showed him an exit...by leaving hell. Meeting Delirium, who is looking for both Barnabas her dog and a way to help Morpheus, Lucifer tells her that he bears Dream no ill will, but thinks that no one can help him now, so she’d be better off looking for the dog.
So who set it all up? Well, all signs point to Morpheus himself.
When she arrives in the Dreaming to take him, Death tells Morpheus,
I don’t know anyone who can be so completely straightforward, and so utterly devious at the same time…
The only reason you’ve got yourself into this mess is because this is where you wanted to be. There’s personal responsibility too, y’know? Not the kind you’re always talking about.
He tells her that he’s made all the necessary preparations, and she answers,
You’ve been making them for ages. You just didn’t let yourself know that was what you were doing.
The Question is:
Why?
I can’t answer that. It’s up to every reader to figure that out.
I have a few ideas, though.
When we first meet Morpheus, he’s a prisoner. When other characters talk about him, they talk about his arrogance, his power, his rigidness and remoteness. In flashback we see what they mean; he is more than a god, and he is as indifferent to life — mortal or immortal — as it’s possible for one to be. I think the experience of being powerless, being a victim, changes Morpheus—or it starts the change. He begins to recognize the lives of others as inherently valuable and powerful, as he tries to tell Desire in The Doll’s House.
With the killing of Orpheus, Morpheus enters time. He has intervened directly in the world. Before, any action he took in the waking world was limited to protecting the Dreaming. When he grants Orpheus’ boon and gives him death, he breaks the rules. He does it out of love, and because of conflicting vows: to help Delirium he must put himself in Orpheus’ debt, and then he must pay Orpheus’ price, regardless of the consequences. And he grieves, not the showy self-conscious “rain all over the Dreaming” mopiness of a blown crush, but real, substantial, soul-deep grief. He’s become human.
It’s important to recognize also, although we don’t yet know the new Dream (Daniel transfigured) we know that the Corinthian pulled him out of the fire before all his humanity was burned away. Watch him in the next volume—he’s Dream, but he will never be Morpheus.
The final panels mirror the opening ones. We’re back with the Moirae, looking over their handiwork:
“What did we make? What was it, in the end? [Clotho asks]
[Lachesis answers] What it always is. A handful of yarn; a little weaving and stitching; some embroidering perhaps. A few loose ends, but that’s only to be expected…
It’s the same old story...whatever it turns into on the way, whatever it is you originally undertake to spin or knit or weave, keep it going long enough and, in the end, my lilies, it’s always a winding sheet...
Closing Thoughts
Myth
Lucifer occupies an unusual space in The Kindly Ones. Owner of Lux in LA (and this is where the new television series picks up), Lucifer has been amusing himself with music and people, but he finds himself getting stale.
I opened this night spot for my own entertainment. And, for a while, in the night, it entertained me. But the diversion begins to pall. Once again, I perceive the void beneath the surface of all things.
All that keeps me going now is the desire to see how it all comes out….
I had the hubris originally to regard myself as a collaborator, as a co-author….Very rapidly I found myself reduced to the status of character, following something of a disagreement in the fundamental direction of the creation.
Now I sometimes feel I’m simply waiting around to see which of us was right, which was wrong. But even if it turns out that I was right, what good does it do me?
So — what — I get the thrill of standing at the end of the universe, and saying “See, I was right all the time?” No, I’m better off out of it.
The role of Dream, the role of myth, (well, myth serves several roles, which we’ll get to eventually) is to renew a sense of wonder and place in the order of all things; it infuses events with meaning. Without that sense of the mythic, life is flat, and Lucifer can’t ignore “the void beneath the surface of all things.” He throws in the towel immediately after Morpheus’ death. The juxtaposition points to his larger role, the operation of the role of myth.
Art
I should mention Marc Hempel’s artwork which, as Gaiman says, “looks unlike virtually anything else in mainstream comics. If a reader plowed through a stack of other comics and then read an issue of The Kindly Ones, the visual context could be unsettling” (1, p. 191).
Unsettling is one way to put it. Some readers love the expressionistic art, and others loathe it. If this is your first time through The Sandman, give the style of The Kindly Ones some time to breathe before you decide about it. I hated it the first time I read the series, but after a few readings, I’ve come to appreciate it. The blocky, simple shapes and heavy lines of the art works perfectly with the spare and clean lines of classical tragedy.
A Dash of Humor
Did I mention that this entire work can be killingly funny? When Puck flees from the Corinthian, he says,
It was a delight to make your acquaintance, Messire the Corinthian. And I shall restrain myself from enquiring whether you take your name from the letters, the pillars, the leather, the place, or the mode of behavior….
Marshalling for battle and wearing a sergeant’s USMC uniform, Merv Pumpkinhead gives a Pattonesque pep talk to the little bats that follow him around:
They say I’m hard and I am hard. They say I’m a bastard, and I’ll tell you what. I am a bastard. A hard, tough Bastard. A tough hard bastard with a pumpkin for a head. But that doesn’t mean I can’t be prowda you dumb lugs.
And I am proud of you. Alla you—Wycziezbysky, O’Brien. McTavish, Silverstein, Pucci, and the little Norwegian….
Also, look for Loki’s story about convincing Thor he was pregnant. It’s hilarious.
And, as it all turns out, the Corinthian is a good guy...for a dude who eats eyeballs.
Next week, we mourn.
Flowers gathered in the morning,
Afternoon they blossom on,
Still are withered by the Evening:
You can be me when I’m gone.
References
1. Hy Bender, The Sandman Companion. NY: Vertigo, 1999.
2. Neil Gaiman, The Sandman: The Kindly Ones. NY: Vertigo, 1996. This edition is unpaginated. If you want to find the quotations, read the damn thing.
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