Travis Hedge Coke
4.09
There Is Nothing Left to Say On The Invisibles
Ethnic Magick.Stereotype Life
by Travis Hedge Coke
I have seen frogs prayed on, on both hemispheres of this mapped Earth. Frogs asked for rain. For help with life.
Carrying the jewel of the world – an always-closed eye – high on their head where we fail to see.
The existence of the oppressed feels like bragging to the oppressor.
Seeing the oppressed represented – even worse, representing themselves – is treated as showing off, as privilege, indulgent braggadocio.
“And it struck me that for black people, the pain of learning that we cannot control our images, how we see ourselves (if our vision is decolonized), or how we are seen is so intense that it rends us. It rips and tears at the seams of our efforts to construct self and identity,” writes bell hooks in Black Looks, a book with a chapter entitled, Eating the Other.
Too many people will insist that it is transgender existence or gay existence which actually limit gender or sexuality. That is it racial or ethnic identity and the attempts from within to preserve an ethnic integrity or an integrity of practice or art, which stokes racial conflict and the racism of colonizers. That they, the mainstream or those buying, courting, and parlaying a way into the mainstream, are the ones fighting for freedom of expression and existence. The arguments are not against labels – they are often quick to slurs – but arguments are lobbed against them having labels, them having terms.
These anti-queer, racist, colonizing, dogmatic, systemic, abusive arguments are misogynist, by nature, even if they veil themselves in a guise of matriarchy or feminism. They are inherently and irrevocably racist and xenophobic.
In Black Looks, bell hooks expresses a shared, variegated fear of terms such as, “primitive,” and “intimate,” and “purism.” Purity, in context, in too many contexts, is weaponized to degrade growth, to malign development, to ruin complexity and deny the intelligence of people who, by the powers in control, it is desired be kept or reduced or made into fodder.
Is it a different thing for a Black character to be visually diffused to the same level as a psychedelic rooster on a cover image as it is for a white or an Asian character? When Lord Fanny is emphasized on covers or promotional images, what do audiences make of her indigeneity?
The reasons given for mandatory ethnic reeducation and training camps is almost always rooted in anti-queer and misogynist rhetoric. Inappropriate dress. Inappropriate physical contact. Inappropriate socialization. Boys and girls not being separated enough. Men being pretty in the wrong fashion. Women expressing sexuality in the wrong way.
Misogyny is an anti-queer knife in the back of oppressed and colonized peoples.
And, colonizing peoples always, as well, colonize themselves.
Surrounded by thugs, gays, problems; a serial situation. Something to keep tilling, to keep corralling. A reason to colonize, to police, to never leave and never stop and always pillage and profit and turn and inter.
Lines from The Invisibles which seem to have aged the worst and practices which seemed dated within year are the rigid opining of gender or sexuality truisms. That “dykes and queens” do not get along, or consciously splitting off the women and the men feels artificial and an on-ramp for less hip factions of a potential audience than we necessarily want sharing the road, but The Invisibles is always cognizant of the need and use of on-ramps, of entryway, and like or dislike, we, ourselves, sometimes express ignorant ideas or capitulate to social norms.
The girls trip/boys’ own adventure dynamics are never as pure here as they appear. Lord Fanny is ride and die with whoever they hell Lord Fanny decides, sitting comfy with the boils or the ghouls. King Mob is comfortably femme-coded or femme-coding in his sapphic ingenue dynamics with Edith Manning or his elective mother role in Jack Frost’s life. When the men do the big magics and hard choices at the climax of Volume 1, with Fanny taking more of a masc aspect, unshaven, no wig, wearing a man’s uniform, Ragged Robin and Boy become the audience eyes, ears, and voice, looking and calling out for Jack, and remembering the human mission, the direct search, rather than being caught up explicitly in the etheric politics of guns, bosses, and abscesses of cosmic uncertainty.
Is it intended that Fanny, who grew up in a tradition not successfully stolen from her, who most comfortably rolls across all gender lines, or that Boy, colonized and deprived from deeper inherited traditions, as an African American – Boy, who is sensitive to accusations that she is reaching for something deeper or a familial or lineal connectivity, reading Maya Angelou and touching the world – is potentially homophobic and touch-sensitive?
Judith Butler frames bodies in the context of a Greek word and a Latin, hyle and materia, in which the first is what is made of sources and the latter, the source matters. There is body which is a concrete, physically delimited thing, and there is body which is what an individual’s identity is seen to embody. Your hair is dead cells. My fingernails are dead cells. They are your hairs. My fingernails. When they detach from us, unless we have given express permission, unless we have implied we have relinquished them, we have not.
Or, we have.
Things are not as they appear.
What is the law and whose law and why law and the bylaws?
We pick our guidance stars. We find our flocks, our asterisms, our way.
I shuffle loteria cards and lay them: La Rana, la Dama, la Apache…
Make a plan. Stick to the plan.
That which is hylic is always materia, that which is material is all spirit.
I believe in the existence of all things, even things not existing. I believe in fictive existence, in simulation, in rectification, in justification and marginalization. I believe existence is life and that I have no good way to measure sentience, sapience, divinity, and I understand that I think, generally, they are all the same in my estimation. If I make adjustment between them, I do it for others. I am not going to hassle you with the divinity or sapience of a rock or a broken off fragment of a rock. I am not constantly concerning myself with the sentience of my dining room table, a napkin on the table, or microbes on the napkin.
I will not intentionally or knowingly assist in the dehumanization or degradation of essential divinity or sentience embodied by any person, and animal, plant, mineral, construct; any thing. What am I, an asshole?
I am an uncomfortable ethnographer, even if I feel I sometimes need to play one. We all find ourselves eventually in the role, sometimes prepared, sometimes on the fly, but I think it should always make us uncomfortable. People are cultures, are ethnicities, and practices of one. And, in each of those ones, a myriad. One person is many cultures, many lives.
The idea, itself, of anthropologists, worries me. I have been fond of individual anthropologists, but I am unfold of anthropology as a political existence.
Anthropology has a bad history with Native America. It has a bad present.
Truisms I feel.
Like the Batman, I sit bleeding in holiness, in the animal magnetism between broken window theory and model bust. A study. Ringing that bell for fairy godmothers like King Mob.
Shield me!
Shield me from rain I called with frogs.
Shell my enemies with rounds I dare not wield.
Shake shells and ring bells and dance and turn.
Water in: water out. Nonsense in: nonsense out. A programmatic life.
All things tend to divergence and corrosion. Arguably the same from different appraisals.
Fill a jug enough times, it will develop cracks or warp and the water comes out different, and if you fill the jug enough times you might drop it or fall, yourself, and the jug will crack or warp. Here you are.
Water in. Water out.
Encontré un camarón en el charco. I found a shrimp in the tide pool.
We make analysis whether or not we choose to. We have conclusions which roll into new analyses. Some people call frogs, “Dutch nightingales.” Some folks make ethnic jokes. Some make ethnic jokes and do not even know they are.
Slowly, slowly now in your greed.
Who is the black man in his suit, his dark face, his white clothes, spiffed and sniffing and murderous and lech? Orlando of the flowering easters.
Orlando, the spider, the head of blur behind the faces of victims. Thumb smudge negro pencil mark above well-addressed shoulders.
The rooster bleeding mirror on the cover of a comic.
Those men, Death. Those dead mess.
El cotorro and cocaine, a fable ending in minstrelsy.
The edible Christmas caterpillar.
We sacrifice everything we eat.
*******
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.
1976. Valerie Harper. The Muppet Show. Directed by Peter Harris.
1998. All Souls. The X-Files. Story by Dan Angel and Billy Brown.
2022. The flânerie and psychogeography as rooting practices in the contemporary urban. Bote, Davi R.
2024. Statler is a Bi Icon. Muppet History. Except and title by Joshua Gillespie.
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