Travis Hedge Coke
4.07
There Is Nothing Left to Say On The Invisibles
Class Commercialism
by Travis Hedge Coke
The backmatter of an issue of The Invisibles tells us to destroy our copies and that doing so flouts the conventions of collector culture which had, at that time, gripped comics something fierce.
Destroying the copy means, if you want to reread it, you have to get another copy.
More sales.
Crafty in craft.
When the comic is closed, when we look away, when a page has been passed, we have not the contents but the inference, the reference, the implication. The Invisibles is the song hummed, not written. Fake book grimoire.
Throughout The Invisibles, recurrent motif of the off-panel injury, just as the unsourced blood on the wall, as implication without causality, interpretation without hard evidence.
We know, if we have been around enough, that when Fanny’s head is the one off-panel it is a ruse by the artists, the writers, pencilers, editors, et al. We know.
When it is someone else, we make our own choices. Or, our educated guesses and formally-educated defaults do for us.
Like the Hand of Glory or St Thierry, maybe no head off panel is until it is on.
Maybe we can give up the head when the information is babble or insufficient, as Ragged Robin surrenders the head supposed to be John the Baptist. Another famous walk-on celebrity in a comic as packed as a charity benefit.
When Lord Fanny, a youth, goes down on a violent offender in a car in Rio, maybe she is suffering in real, maybe it is a false memory, maybe it is dirty pornography, ritual magick, drawings and lettering on scripted comics.
It is a craft. Any secret is given the power of being a secret.
And, Fanny sees herself and us and little yellow dogs so flat.
Fanny’s head off-panel to imply oral sex.
On panel: the gun.
Ragged Robin on-panel: someone goes down on her.
Ragged Robin, on panel, cannot cum.
How vile is any hard sell? When they make it seem up to you?
The kind of rationalizing away of magical thinking which Umberto Eco might talk of – avoidance of self-perpetuating mysteries – addictive hermeticism – in which “language is unable to grasp a unique and pre-existing meaning” and, “a text is an open-ended universe where the interpreter can discover infinite interconnections” – is untethered by Eco in his admission that he thinks “caricatures are frequently good portraits [of] what could become the case, if something were assumed to be the case.”
“Erdische methode gut,” “starker besitscher,” “seelisches land,” are phrases useful if we know German and if we do not. If we believe Dane knows some German or does not.
Our interpretation of starker is always a net sum. To misinterpret “seelisches,” as relating to Seelie, a faerie court, also reveals a truth which understanding, “psychic,” would, from an angle. We are all anglers in seelisches land.
If the Black Man of the Loteria is Tezcatlipoca, and this contradicts with how we understand Orlando or El Negro, our reaction might be to decide there is a contradiction or that the first truth of this scenario is untrue.
There can always be apparent contradictions. These apparent contradictions can be resolved by processing the details until a context is found which allows all appearing aspects.
In a non-causal universe or a universe of open-ended interpreter’s connections – which a serial like The Invisibles is and our life or universe may be – contradictions which are solely causally contradictory are reduced not only by processional analysis but acknowledgment of simultaneity and the unmappable miasma of edits, rewrites, erasing, drawing, inking, interpreting, ordering, exposure, demand, understanding, misinterpretation, confusion, etic invisibility, uncertainty, deliberate uncertainty, obscurantism, abstinence, obstinacy, cartomancy, crafty, services, donuts, refreshment, and expiry.
Parody fiction serial killer.
We live in a world where people in over their head try to dress cool, have a cool name, sound cool, and might end up standing around or de facto hired killers.
We live in a world wherein people have tried reverse-ejaculation to teleport and avoid train ticket fees and jetlag.
In The Invisibles, few people can embrace how much they live in Psychic Land and what that means when psychoplasm is treated as novelty goop. “Time telepathy” is implied, but left vague and dangling for us. Tummo breath work can generate physical heat, it seems, with associative thinking.
As the navel of the world is the heartbeat is the heart is the head is the hand is the glove is the time is the rain, a fire near the navel is the fire in the heart is the expanding of flowers, the coiling of snakes, the pulse of snails, the pressure of stones, the pleasure of flicks, the fire of figuring. Tummo gives you increased focus, it seems, with successive practice.
Net loss is a net gain. Again. Meditation, repeated, sees an increase. Sees some decrease.
See that increase and decrease need not contradict nor cancel one another.
A star amongst stars amidst stars.
*******
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.
Tesla’s egg of Columbus, radar stealth, the torsion tensor, and the “Philadelphia experiment”. Corum, Kenneth L, James F Corum, and J.F.X. Daum.
Crime and Punishment. Glover, Crispin H. John Hurt, Margot Kidder, et al.
Dead Man. Hurt, John V. Crispin Glover, Gary Farmer, et al.
Shirley’s Phantasm (Main Title) Painting. Shakespeare Planet. The X-Files: Ghost in the Machine. Philip Leister.
