Travis Hedge Coke
There is Nothing Left to Say (On The Invisibles)
Light Bend Backwards
by Clive Nolan
Clive Patrick Nolan is a photographer and psychotherapist who lives in Snowdonia, Wales.
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6.01
Cops and Protestors
by Travis Hedge Coke
“Per visibilia ad invisibilia.”
“Through the visible to the invisible.”
Come up to the exam table.
There are multitudinous ways to interpret Ragged Robin and King Mob’s sexual role-play. They are performing magick rites. They are creating a blind and lure with which to bait and trap Mr Quimper, who is attracted to perverse or raunchy sexual scenarios and domination scenes. They are creating a narrative glamour. King Mob is a tantric sex magick master. King Mob is a normal fellow for whom a simple missionary five to ten minutes is enough. Ragged Robin is writing sex scenes with the hero of a book she likes. Ragged Robin is reading dialogue aloud during sexual role-plays. Robin is reciting dialogue. Mob is ad-libbing. Robin is playing knowing. Mob is playing naive. Robin is making herself vulnerable. Mob is vulnerable.
Her dynamic with Mob-alike, Jolly Roger, is a tantric rite of its own, greeting one another with head checks, “leather babe,” and middle fingers raised.
Mob will ask two of their cell what they would do if they discovered their lives and adventures, their missions and practices were all lies.
None and all of it is real.
Quixote basing his life in fictions of old knights. Arabella finding truth in fictionalizations of old histories. Scrooge taking the mystery plays of four ghosts and buying a turkey. Your elegant turnkey ready to read graffito off tube station walls.
Our text-derived truisms, our lensed politics are always always always academic. Stop go. Red light green light. The Analects. Romans. The Art of the Deal. Warrior Marks. The English Assassin. Journey to a Woman. Women in the Shadows. I am a Woman.
Ragged Robin take incest porn and her rereads of The Invisibles to rescue the world.
Jolly Roger brings a David Icke book the Invisible College.
Carlos Castaneda, Alice Walker, the Incunabula Papers might have useful anecdotes, facts, practices, techniques, while also communicating falsehoods, or toxic ideas. Isis Unveiled can utilize truisms, common experiences, agreeable tenets, debate club games to sway an audience from looking too deep and seeing the lies, the bigotry, the cruelty.
King Mob roots himself in Jerry Cornelius stories, and one of the reasons the Jerry Cornelius comics seem not to get more reprints is possibly their smug racism. That the Jerry stories might be as facile as they pretend to be.
King Mob’s most shallow, racist moment comes in one of The Invisibles most generic hard man action movie sequences. “Karma accountants” torture a restrained hostage. The women stand by. The hero blazes his guns and sheens his sunglasses. He has a cool one-liner and the bad guys die. He plugs one. He plugs another. He shoots again.
This opens an issue of the comic, but the issue prior has detailed how this and this world we are witnessing is “the wallpaper on the wall.” This is not reality, but a reality, and it is a reality which is the ink and paint on the comics page. It is a creation. A story. A piece of artwork.
You cannot prove that Carl Allen never said, “The time to make up your mind about people is never.” Or, that he was the first to witness that unholy mess.
This is theatre. This is puppet show. Ukiyo-e. Illuminations.
Reading the comics one issue after the other in order prescribed, King Mob goes from showing Ragged Robin and the audience that he can peel back panels, that he can see across the page, that they can even intuit our closing and opening the pages as a kind of shuttering, and next, King Mob and Robin are back on the traditional page, in the traditional panels, being so traditional it is parodic. A tradition which makes Mob vomit from the sickness and intensity of its actuation.
Mob, Tom O’Bedlam, Edith Manning, and others, are able to justify murder, torture, and other violent abuses because they know the reality they are enacted in is ink on page, light on screen; wet paint. Mystic explanations of the cosmogony, from universe a and b to “sick twin, healthy twin” are attractive, and permit behaviors, but some of them know those, as well, as wet paint. Those, as well, are play.
Our universe is their universe if “their” is the us in The Invisibles. Our universe is the sick universe. Our universe is the healthy universe. We are the sick and the healthy placental twin.
It is easier to ask some audiences to give an assassin rope to hold himself up than it is to present good police and pray.
Like the apocalyptic snow of the blank behind showing through the world on some pages, the visual of Barbelith as a lens penetration vesicle pisces, the illustration of peeling panels off the page or painted words on a subterranean wall, the illustrations of Edith, Mob, Robin and the others are all illustration, all illustrated. Faces, words, murders and kisses are pictorializations of these.
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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.
Did Beethoven’s love for married aristocrat and a doomed son colour his darkest work?. The Guardian. Vanessa Thorpe. 2017.
André Breton the Collector. Christina Helena Rudsky. 2015.
Die Unsichtbaren. Claus Räfle & Alejandra López. 2017.
Vom Lieben und Sterben. Zorn. Stephan Ludwig. 2015.
