Travis Hedge Coke
There Is Nothing Left to Say On The Invisibles
4.10
Autonomy
by Travis Hedge Coke
Reynard scaling the image of the admirable Shae Fox shifts her memes, feeling and being “terrified-daughter-of-dracula” and “weird loner,” in “post-ironic drizzle.” She is “self-blind,” but what does “self-blind,” in this instance, mean? Is she experiencing a mystic amnesia? aesthetic amnesia? Fabunir? Juxtaposing two or more divergent fictions, as she mimics Dracula in the self-named novel, he who also climbs walls he does not have to?
The etymology of amnesis is, “river town.” This is not what amnesis means, but we diverge.
I am fond of fatalism. I do not think it means a lack of choice.
Within the context of The Invisibles, a universe in which dueling or intermingling interpretations generate an ideational phase space and a line art and dialogue balloon universe, fatalist eschatology is secured by the cessation of publication and the locked set of panels and pages, if we ignore or treat as apocryphal redrawn pages, adjusted art and dialogue, cover representations, and anything someone less-authorized by Grant Morrison can do to by graffitiing an issue or thinking around planned narrative or symbolism with fresh symbology or weird takes.
Reynard, in December of 2012, has been an active Invisible for eleven years. They put her in deep cover, but she is here, in 2012, with Jack Frost in the winter, scaling a tower. She should and other times seems to know things and folks. Why is it she and maybe also Jack do not understand King Mob’s operations in that year? Do not understand what is coming, the snow which is not snow, even though they are both Invisible, and like the Reynard of older stories, the anthropomorphic fox, they are invisible in their environments, wearing their natural coats?
It is no small synecdoche from the set of The Invisibles and our set. This universe we have of Earth, Water, Air, Fire, Ether, Time, Space, Soul, and Mind. Mind works through Space and Time to Action. Air, Water, Fire, Ether, Earth are states in transition. Phase in spacetime.
The only two covers on which Black individuals are prominently emphasized are V1 & V2 #20. Or, Volume One, issue number Twenty, and Volume Two, issue number Twenty.
Externally, these interlock into a whole as surely as any set is a set. Causal fallacies can occur inside a set, but not of a set. Selecting three chickens and an elephant means we have selected three chickens and an elephant. The elephant may not be a chicken, a bird, the size of a chicken, feathered, hatched from an egg, and if the set is determined by any of those, the elephant does not belong, but if the set is simply that we have selected these four animals, the set is complete and accurate.
Pure ritual but life is. Life in one time is a pattern in death and rebirth struggle at ease. Every life and its timelapse hubs and arms, a snowflake, unique as anything, self-sorting, sorted for itself.
The Reynard of old story is storied by many. Many authors, many versions, always retold, always in retelling. Morally gray as reminds us who are morally gray. Abnormal as nature.
Robert Graves fancied himself the fox, the way some in the time of The Invisibles’ serialization would claim they were being a trickster figure, while framing misogyny as a love of women and bigotry as simply challenging. This figure, in that there can be a figure, is friend and enemy because this fox fucks with you but also fucks for himself.
In context of The Invisibles, everyone is the unmoved mover of existence, the prime mover of the universe. External from time and space we have always been external to time and space and we are always being and becoming external to time and space while being inside and of time and space.
Everyone of us is a satellite without loss.
MaidenMotherCrone is the way one fox might have looked on a timeworm from which they were born, onto which they believe they father.
One time, Edith Manning is in the apocalyptic not-snow of the birth of our universe, and she is comfortable with it.
One time, Edith Manning is in the snow of the apocalypse, the end times furor and blessings, and it is horrifying.
One time, Edith Manning is at the climax of the universe, and and.
Only in time is there a posteriori or a priori knowing. The experiential categories of romance, mirth, fury, mercy, disgust, terror, heroism, amazement, and comfort function in time and space.
Gauging by these nine as a set for a cohesive, live human being, even minor characters in The Invisibles are people.
One set of roving eyes can see from another, without seeing in the other.
Accepting fatalism and the fata morgana state of experience within time and space, the question of “What stops you from being evil?” is similar to when it is asked of someone playing any game. Like, “What stops you from cheating,” or, “Why play fair?” it assumes even the rule-makers do not know there will be cheaters or the overeager player, the unsympathetic competitor; that the game is a territory without border or blindspot, which no game is.
Accepting fatalism and an externalization, we have only on ourselves to turn inward. We do.
Narradrama therapies include conscious forgetting, disassociation, crafting person like poem house, bricolage bridging, alternative tellings and re-storying. We re-story every approach we make to retelling, even in pure recollection.
“The sweat-born produced the Egg-born.”
The hand on the cursor could hold an egg or be. “Whether bees ever steal eggs from another colony in order to rear a queen is another matter.”
The dumbwaiter of hyperflexion. The trap door of rection. A systems novel is long and dense with mechanics. To be of length and density in hints! To inspire hunts.
None of the missions, operations, spells, rituals, rites, models, simulacra or marketing plans of The Invisibles or the Invisibles need to fruit and seed anew, only at most to be and to be posited.
Takashi Satoh is one eyed, without it implying a moral order to his wound, because the one eye thing with Roger is symbolic not causal. Or, it is not even symbolic by intent, but read in by judgmental us. Satoh Takashi is the same as Takashi Satoh, yet they are not the same. One is culturally correct for him, the other affected for another culture. But, what limits are there to culture in a multicultural melange?
Takashi, Roger, you, me, Reynard, pissing through matrices and dynamic vacuums, like Robert Burns’ The Twa Dogs. Fussing with language and linguistic power can encourage us to fuss and miss as we respond to charm and rhyme, rhythm and cuss.
The whim of the nine classical Greek muses is beyond an anglophone headspace. Even if space is adjusted, time and mind remain conflicted. Epics, erotics, history, lyric poetry, song, comedy, dance, astronomy? Into these are breathed inspiration? From these, creation works?
Siddhartha sits perplexed, now and here. Gautama Buddha is perplexed with nine virtues and Gautama Buddha is unperplexed with nine virtues. Buddha is here and there.
Internal to spacetime and mind, we bring the then and there to a here and now and anticipate a future. This is responsibility, but it is not an indebted responsiveness.
The little yellow dog accompanies Lord Fanny in her initiation trials because of course, in a complete set, in place of fear we find comfort. Only is time with space can caterpillars become butterflies, and to become a butterfly is to liquify from a solid, retaining mind, retaining memory and awareness, creating a shell of a body. Reformation of soul is reformation of body.
Not everyone in every life will experience all nine experiential categories, but most of us, if we live long enough, experience the majority of them.
Group identity is holy and reifying and terrifying and awkward. Perhaps every man and woman a star, but every star was watching them.
“Atheist,” like, “spiritual,” is a culturally specific word and an intraculturally imprecise, but multiply-defined word. Moving to another culture, or a slightly different aspect of a culture, they, as with “god” or “supernatural,” change not just meaning and application but descriptive intent.
Lieutenant Phil Peebles is only in one issue of The Invisibles, but he has an implied life before and beyond. Phil Peebles, too, stands outside time and space and is the birthing of our universe.
Phil experiences fury (), disgust (), terror (), amazement (), mercy (), mirth (), and heroism ().
Billy-Bob only exists on the page for three whole pages, yet he knows romance, fury, mercy, disgust, terror, heroism, amazement, and comfort. He does not experience, in those three pages, mirth, and his heroism is perverse, but it is a hard morning for him and he walked into the wrong scene wearing the wrong mask, having rehearsed the wrong script. Billy-Bob thought he was the tough cowboy laying down the cultural law, and he was the poor local sap picking a fight with the Terminator or the gang from Near Dark.
“A good person cannot be harmed.” Socrates, but in paraphrase. Catamnesis of the virtues.
A person who lives a social good, a good of the world, a good life. This differs from doing good or being good, being kind, or doing charity.
In a fatalist structure like The Invisibles, in which spirits, souls, autonomous bodies, gods, devils, loa, animals, stones, and the universe are people, and in which all time is one time and all people one people, a non-good life is an abstraction, a thought experiment to butt against; to proof with.
It is not mirth, comfort, terror, disgust, mercy, or romance pursued in the post-life or post-universe. It is mirth, comfort, mercy, romance, fury, and amazement in the confines of immediacy, in the confines of spacetime and mind.
The really real fairyland world of the Invisible College, the thousand mile iron wall, the fields of death, the halls of healing, the UFOs and butterflies and clapping chests and laughing gods and scorpions and dogs and cats and hats and shadows wearing hats and faceless killers and killer faces, the Universe A/Universe B intersection, space betwixt, the wall behind the paint, the page under the ink, is mind, but it is mind distinct from spacetime.
Devitrification of the vitrea.
For more than a third of The Invisibles reading first page to last as bound, this ontic sphere, this communal thought, is treated as an abstraction of spacetime, an interpretation of spacetime, but time and space are interpretations of mind. Universe A and Universe B, a good universe and a bad universe, a sick twin and its good double, are point 1 and point 2 which make a line or plane. The first dimension meeting the second, allowing for their intermediary point, a three-dimensional projection. By which, we already have time.
Thought into space is easy enough for us to hold as a concept, thought into matter. Jack Frost has a super power, as a superhero, of time telepathy. Thought is time. Ghost is temporal.
Abdicate.
Rhetorically facetious and logically fallacious, but no more so than Universe A/Universe B.
Healthy/Not-Healthy is a basic dichotomy of being. Wrong/Right.
Time or space.
Being or thought.
Dichotomies depend on where you stand, but wherever that is, on one hand, health, on the other, ill.
Live with chronic pain, a lack of pain is can become not-health; something abnormal and violating.
Logic and reasoning are not the same, and reasoning and emotion are often essentially the same from differing angles. Or, one taken to justify the other.
Part of having emotions is trying to not have emotions too much. Part of showing emotion is avoiding showing emotion.
Hegemonic glaze.
Our reasoned responses are our emotions, our sins, our virtues, our flexes and frustrations. After catamnesis, anamnesis. Forget how to not climb up. Exmosis supposes toeses rising.
Dante’s nine levels of Hell are illustrations of symptoms of humanness as much as “mirth” and “romance.” Being in some fashion incorrect or agnostic. Lust. Gluttony. Greed. Three wants, basically, rooted in need but exaggerated into perversion and risk, and then to cruelty and damage, by taste. Wrath. Heresy, which is just lying about something important. Violence, in which Dante included self-harm and suicide. Fraud. Betrayal.
It is possible to see a field in which one can be for eternity and see open space, pastoral beauty, food, air, water, life. Vacation. And, it is possible to see in a field in which one will spend eternity a place for labor, which must be kept.
The assignment of a wrong and right to each of the dual universes which are, essentially and more honestly one, is pathology. It is how we reason with difficulty and discomfort within time and space. We assign subjective, transitional valorization to cosmic proportions and mechanics.
Maybe Reynard and Jack Frost, like all foxes and all seasonal changes, only have an illusion of knowledge. Transmit or know? Jack Frost is often a bluff of transmission, I think; a comfort cover. Jack lets us focus on his constant petty thefts, his persistent “fuck,” the glimmer in the eye we intuit or put there, so that buddha does not overwhelm us and we can forget that which is hardest for us to keep in our grasp. The perinatal, the transpersonal, and biographical ranges of a psyche burned to light; borne to life. Dane and Jack are disarming. Charming. Caricature. Kind glamour.
Reynard, eleven years in, degreed, decreed, blooded and anointed, will play the kid if it helps. The Invisibles life is not a determinist machine. We can be encouraged to temporarily forget outside machination, parts, but we un-forget.
St Teresa of Avila says, “Christ has no body now but yours, anywhere on the world.”
In the universe, in the world, in time and space with mind, there are subtleties to action, consequence, pleasure and pain. In the world: immediacy. Waiting for eternal benefit, relying on happy accidents to carry the world to good can be too painful, too trying. We incur – and we need – distractions, to make efforts, to try, to hope, to try. To try.
Our disgust at anything comes from us. Is of us. It is fair to say that we are not our emotions. That we have our emotions or they are upon us. We feel them. That our acts are not us, but what we do. That we do as we do. False consciousness is unprovable and demonstrable. Because we model. (Remember the calendar.) Because we model, our disgust is us. Our mirth is us. Our heresies and wraths and violence and romance and calm and mercy are us.
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Nothing in There is Nothing Left to Say (On The Invisibles) is guaranteed factually correct, in part or in toto, nor aroused or recommended as ethically or metaphysically sound, and the same is true of the following recommendations we hope will nonetheless be illuminating to you, our most discriminating audience.
The Pseudonomicon. Phil Hine. New Falcon Publications.
The R’Lyeh Text. Robert Turner, et al. SKOOB BOOKS LTD.
Savage Conversations. LeAnne Howe. Coffee House Press.
