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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5.7
Five Children and It
by Travis Hedge Coke
A comic is a way unite people and their biological and psychological components together along common threads, to direct senses and consideration to common ground. All art, all story, all is media.
To make bread rise, we foster yeast and we kill them. Build bread on the backs of those we kill. The otter father. The American Shakespeare. Everyone is five children and it.
Queering space and time is what we do. Going poof as a vortex. Hexed thoughts.
Queer for death is the common denominator of The Invisibles and the order called, the Invisibles. Fraudulence and fabrications.
Arising because we see patterns that are not logical in their connections, that are not intentionally constructed, insofar as we can show, the illusion of cause can save our life or end somebody’s.
The Invisibles is tricky because it admits that it turns all other media into extensions of The Invisibles as it turns us into extensions of The Invisibles. We become Invisible, indoctrinated and initiated, we meet and work now with other Invisibles. Movies or albums we encounter become invisible media, as we are prepared to receive symbolic meanings and relevant connections. Intimations.
The wheat we use in breads was mostly dead, or nearly dead, before the harvest. To become bread is a transfiguration of the dead.
Why would preachers fomenting anger claim that Portlandia, a lady of commerce, is throwing horns? Why persist in demonizing the gesture of throwing horns? All of this is easily researched, easily confirmed as not evil, not harmful or threatening.
The anxiety of conservative Christians intuiting by anxious symbology, the demoniac and demonic godform in Portland’s Lady Commerce with her right hand and a six-point macrocosmic star over head. The sign of the pantacles compels spirits may be reduced to macro and microcosm.
Men kicking the womb to bother their twin.
The Invisibles makes us intimate with people we may never meet and gives us personal stake in media we may never partake of directly. Our idea of this book or this film becomes relevant and informative as much as the book or film if we read or watched them directly.
5/10. The Philadelphia Experiment.
Billy Batson, of comics and movies, says a magic word to be replaced by Captain Marvel (also called, Shazam), who looks like an adult Batson. Captain Marvel is not Billy Batson, but an idealized version of Batson or a kind of parent-friend-figure transfigured from Batson’s mind. Captain Marvel embodies the aspects of six gods, but he is no more those gods than he is Batson. Without the six gods, there is no Captain Marvel. Their natures have to go into Captain Marvel to make him, but without Billy Batson with his magic word that calls the magic lightning, there is no Captain Marvel, either.
Billy Batson is the secret seventh god. Drawing. Lightning. A god in all equations.
(You. I am talking about twin to you.) 1752.
What does that mean, and does it feel irreligious? It ought to, and it ought not be. I do not care if you can fly under your own power or crush boulders over your head or have the wisdom of Solomon. I am not really concerned if Solomon is a god or if you consider Solomon a god.
We are still talking about The Invisibles. Everything threads back to comics with The Invisibles, and if you ask me, life.
It is posited that it takes five human minds to be comparable to one of them, in The Invisibles. Five is a good number. Five in the Simpsons’ house. Five in the Scooby-Doo van. Five founding X-Men. Five kids in the Breakfast Club. The Panchakshari mantra. The Pentateuch. The Torah. And, they all have secret members, too. The Famous Five. Five Children and It. Everyone has their Professor X; their Scrappy-Doo.
Five of you and one of them. One of you.
You can tell yourself it is not irreligious because this is about The Invisibles. In The Invisibles, this probably works. It is a working theory.
When, in 1924, Edie’s cell hold a magic circle around a table to use the Hand of Glory, contacting the “shining ones,” or, “them,” there are six people at the table, holding hands, but one of those is a ghost. One of those is a meditating man in 1997 envisioning himself being in 1924 at a table holding hands to link five occultists so they can perform an act.
King Mob, this ghost in this instance, is the Scrappy-Doo, the Professor X. The secret one. The one you do not count.
The five and their ghost meet the Harlequinade, also called the King in Yellow, the Shining Ones, the others, the ultraterrestrials, but as the Harlequinade is all of us at once shown, as we are, in a subsection of space and time, we are always all always all meeting the Harlequinade.
Billy Chang is the one who says, in words, “Five is the minimum number of human beings needed to complete the final operation and open the spirit gate,” that, “Perhaps it requires five of our minds to create the equivalent of one of their minds.”
The seance table are, holding hands around the round table, looking at each other. Whether we are five or seven or one, we always all always all are.
Billy Chang is, in The Invisibles, not particularly human, but he is still as human as anyone. (To, I am talking about you, to win.)
During that arc in the comic’s second volume, Sensitive Criminals, the Tower card of the tarot is drawn. It is a special brick that holds the architecture together for the arc.
In the five-and-fifths-anchored Smile issue of Volume Three (Part Four) of The Invisibles, the Kali issue, the stare at yourself naked in public and let your enemies have your tools issue, we are told Mason Lang’s analysis of the movie cum franchise, The Matrix. It is this: “Grof’s Perinatal Matrices — birth trauma memories experienced as cosmic horror — global death camps — monstrous technology — poisoned babies — birth.”
Seeing the vesica piscis as the model for the vagina could imply an anxiety over the actuality of vaginas, a gynophobia leading to tilting the axes of the pisces overlap to perceive circle or lens within lens or circle.
The qAnon pleiadian Icke Montauk justification of the Nazi as an unfortunate confusion of a good ethos, like the frequently related reduction of woman to vagina to symbol or energy is Nazi work. Death camp dehumanization and the making of people into screws and fasteners and self-sealing stem bolts.
Whether an oven, the mystery, a furnace, a womb, these babies need to be cooked up and made to rise. As it is described in Finnegans Wake, written by James Joyce: hierarchitectitiptitoploftical. Motherly so. Mary, maybe, motherly so.
The Lost Ones are, “hunger, sex, fight-or-flight, clanning, communication, curiosity, altruism,” and more. They are cartooning, or de-anthropomorphizing – hypermorphizing – cosmic or karmic instars hypermetamorphic metaphor bored holes in extension – a big local little beingness of a drive we can never fully externalize.
It is okeh that it is all an act. It is all enacted across pages, panel to panel, for you. For me, for you, for everyone who visits The Invisibles and their kingdom of truths and lies. Time itself is breached in our collective read, our joint experience. Space becomes immaterial to our attentions as two-dimensional illusion breaks into fifth-dimensional arrangement for us any time we play The Invisibles. Is it a self-assembling architecture or do we assemble it ourselves? We assymbol it ourselves. Salves and salvation.
The Montauk conspiracy yarns will emphasize bad energies as necessities, of the ill, broken, bad Earths in the same way the hippydippier Ong’s Hat stories will hint at peaceable, free love Earths with Indigenous peoples closer to the toy franchise, Monchhichi. Project KOALA and the Zebra satellite, the fiery face or hand writing on the wall. Like the blood on the wall, in story, this story, deception only need be implied.
The Aldous Huxley perception valve is our ability to re-forget.
Have you ever pondered why the pun is principally set apart as the immature form of humor, the improper form of lingual gaming? Puns apply themselves for everyone, even if we do not know the words which are being punned. There are verbal puns, puns of enunciation and of spelling. Visual puns abound and abut. Puns threaten the integrity of a rigid lingual base, they put at risk the integrity of immutable word and sentence, phrase and meaning.
If I tell you the milf ought to be a haughty. But, if I tell who in The Invisibles to choose it to describe?
Puns, allusions, outliers and mispronunciations violate the inviolate concretism of the word, the sanctity of the word, the primacy and Bible truth of the printed page. (Parallels to win.)
In The Invisibles’ three issue number twos, Jack and God and everybody are unhoused in the heavenly bowels.
Gnosticism makes (another mistake) in energetic causation. Time does not need death to quell what it kills to grow in. For every phase, a misphrasing. Each pen, a pun. A plethora. A run.
In Volume One, Issue Two, Jack meets everybody. In Volume Three, Issue Number Two, Jack meets everybody.
In Volume One and Volume Two, the issues numbered 2 involve getting high on story. High with expectation.
Hold what cooks and goes. Your heart, too, is that muscle that holds the groan in us.
Every page of The Invisibles is a story, a told or shown thing, a showing, telling thing. A thing. The thing, the page, is as important as what is on the page or evoked by the page. We hold tactile trade paperbacks in our hands, our eyes take in light bounced off screens of digital copies of the collections, our noses sniff out the newsprint of single issue copies. The artifacts – print, digital, memory – exist extant of our moment of recollection. Assemblage.
Each person in The Invisibles, a story, a told and shown, a thing, a showing, a showered shored sunning sewn soon thing. Sung thing. Something. The artistries. The sophistries. The fingerprint. The digit. The mammary. The exit existent. F?re monent of wreck and lection.
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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.
Julieta Venegas. 2022.
Princess Eud. 2014.
Phyllisia Ross. 2023.
Sarah La Morena. 2024.
