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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5.04
Gander Politics
by Travis Hedge Coke
I want you to stare at this goose until it is completely gone, then continue to stare to keep it gone. Evaporate every line and shape. Displace them.
The first part of the Great Rule of Progress is, “cease to do evil.” You are free to do wrong and suffer, we are instructed, but which part is the instruction?
We have to give up what we hoard.
Feeling froggy? Why don’t you jump in my pocket.
“Saving is what misers do,” as Boy says in The Invisibles.
As Julio Caro Baroja says, in Some Spanish Myths, “Symbolism occurs when natural religions are degenerating.”
Saving is what misers do. We come back to that.
The great anxieties of the world end up being being thought of as unoriginal, thought of as boring, received as tedious, a burden, or not being received at all. King Mob and Sir Miles know they are caches of influences and rebellions. Edith is so set on making her points and standing tall she dies to be difficult.
One of the great cons is always the rich man who says he cannot give his wealth away because giving it away accrues him more. Always nonsense. Always such a feel good, self-rewarding narrative we embrace, if only for a moment, a fairy tale truth inside it.
We can know what is good for the goose is good for the gander, but when the gander has, it is hard to give up for the goose. When the goose has, the goose holds. Selfishness is probably generated from a feeling of vulnerability, of the transience of possession, but it is difficult to say without pandering to someone. To something notional.
Those who feel the most guilt of their selfishness, who worry they hoard, who want to do better, tend to be neither the worst of us, nor even the middling of it. We’re a brutal people, humans. Harder on ourselves than anyone else will be.
When, in The Invisibles, people speculate on ultra terrestrials as us collectively or us individuated, even for them it is hard to reconcile how we could be both supremely significant and atoms in the wheels of the cogs of the factory.
The moment we put on masks, we get confused. Does mask end? Where? Do masks reveal a real us?
You can spur a million stories and sell a million self-help books because we get confused.
“This was followed by 136 images of eavesdropping races and games. No secrets could exist.” Toying with one’s ego, nobody knows.
Jenny Everywhere appearing invisible in issue 2, volume 2, between panels four and three on page nine, in the gutter going out to the bleed. This is our wife’s work.
For every, “It takes a wonderful person to play a great villain,” we have someone who played a range of baddies and nice people but we, anecdotally, just never liked them, never took to them, and so when they are shown to be bad people, we leap with our aha!, justified in our perpetual distrust or distaste.
Outside The Invisibles, we know that everyone in the comic is in a comic. They are paper, ink, light and idea. They aren’t people, they’re made up people. Some of them are made up people inspired by people. Some are made up people who copy very directly people. Some are made up people who people dressed up and did their hair like.
Robert De Valcourt reminds that, “a cat in gloves catches no mice,” is a, “good proverb for cats. But ladies and gentlemen have no occasion to catch mice,” and that gloves, like, “the best dress,” “is that which subserves the end os of purity, health, comfort and beauty; and, properly considered, these are harmonious qualities.”
King Mob and Grant Morrison do not have the same hair color, but Morrison affected some of Mob’s style and lent Mob some of their own. Bootsy Collins was through a panel just being Bootsy Collins, but it’s all image.
Is Boy racist about Pueblo Natives, or is she mocking white magicians playing acid-engine dress up on a mesa. Mason on the mesa on acid a la El Cid?
Should ladies smoke sable?
You or I will never know how much Andrew Dice Clay is an act, a mask, but Andrew Dice Clay probably does not know how much he is a mask and who wears him.
I feel like giving the benefit of the doubt to friends accused of heinous things. I waffle on two or three of the Velvet Underground and I never knew any of them personally. A really hateful child-raping rock musician once told me his family were all praying for my grandparents and referred to me and them together as, “people like us.”
The teacher of the field may ride stupid horse, a foreign horse, specific horse. How much is a knight their steed? Al-S?d had a sword called Tizon and one called Colada. Colada is cast steel. Tizon could be a lot of things, as Babieca might come from León.
It gets complicated in part because we believe there is a basic gauge, a measure, and there is not.
I have been sob-storied by Nazis. I have been talked around by abusive partners. I was friendly for decades with someone whose work and whose candor meant worlds to me, who turned out a philandering, blackmailing, manipulative cacophony of problems. I lived with a guy three or four different times who has, to date, left his husband and dog to champion Donald Trump and do massive quantifies of ugly drugs in a Walt Disney planned community.
There is no basic, concrete metric for how we will feel about Michael Jackson or you. And, if there was a level, the level would bob and shift and drop and change more than daily.
We are a fair weather bunch.
“Strike the brazen gong and as the sound dies from your ears the insect will attend you and enter the wound”
What ritual was Miles Delacourt doing with Iscuxcar worms that they peel back you and show a radiant black corps of who you cant let go?
For us to think of people as if they were as fictive and constructed, indestructibly re-issuable as the characters in a comic, would seem to make us sociopathic or otherwise ill. Yet, we do it, routinely. Almost any kind of distancing turns people into re-issuable extras, into background or catalogue.
And, in The Invisibles, people seem to have cosmically-verified reasons to treat others this way. They believe they have reason to see people as less than people. Even, the goodies, sometimes, the best of us, or who we are told by others are the best.
If we forgive Tom O’Bedlam for cruelty, murders, abuse, can we forgive Sir Miles? Are we forgiving them for the same sort of crimes for the same motivations or differing? The same penance or no penance?
In many strokes, Miles and Tom are one. White, English monied heirs, magicians of the old school, classists, afraid of their own shadows. Misers. Do we judge crimes or people? Appraise acts or personality?
Does it come down to what we do not wish to let go?
“I suppose you could say,” suggests a bear who is not a bear in the comic, Yurikuma Arashi (translated as, Yuri Bear Storm or Lesbian Bear Storm), by Ikunigomakinako (a pen name of Kunihiko Ikuhara) and Akiko Morishima, “it is a mere abstraction, given form in the deep sleep cycle and created by a fusion between bears, which are the arch and telos of all things, with the image of our collective diamond unconscious, which is found in the greatest depths of the human psyche. In simpler words, because we’re in a dream.”
That dream, which, “belongs to all of us,” is both prophetic and motivating, and serves as a representation of human need to remain masked and unmasked at all times. We present an earnest face which is fabricated to present earnestness.
The world of The Invisibles, like the world of Yurikuma Arashi and our own, is one which potentially intersects various dreams and dreamers, or that is generated in a space of liminal-cognizance. In these sort of worlds, dreams, stories, and experiences all present a psychological reality.
Dr Saito Tamaki’s distinction between casual audiences, maniac audiences, and otaku audiences places much of the cast of The Invisibles in the realm of otaku, from King Mob’s enthusiasm and sometime jealousy over Batman, Jerry Cornelius, and other hero-figures, to Ragged Robin’s creation of elaborate fan fiction in which she can sleep with King Mob.
While a casual audience takes and leaves entertainment, and a maniac audience covet physical objects, the otaku audience is collecting, storing, and appreciating the imaginal.
“Otaku seek value in fictionality itself,” says Dr Saito, “but they are also extremely sensitive to different levels of fictionality.”
Many in The Invisibles are aware they operate in – and operate on – a fiction, and that they draw influence and inspiration from other fictions, but they are cognizant of their fiction being a different level, if not kind, than external fictions such as Batman comics, Percy Bysshe Shelley poetry, tourist trap postcards, or the novels of William Burroughs.
No one inside The Invisibles may be aware that the comic was once planned as a Burroughs pastiche, a Boy Scout critique crossed with psychic defense queerness and pornographic time travel. They still somehow intuit a reality to Burroughs’ Nova Trilogy novels and his god figures who represent terrible ideals and political practices.
What Mr Six does in cosplay emulation or when Mason Lang addresses movies as being “Invisible” communications, is never reliant on a physical or verifiable concrete original. There is nothing to collect. The ideas and keeping these viral ideas virile occupies more thought than if anyone can point to a trueness in physical form and sweating flesh.
Where Tom O’Bedlam and even Edith Manning may really lose my empathy, is when they lose even a concern with identifying levels of fictionality. I might not mind if Billy Chang did, as of all their cell, he is not particularly over their level of fictionality, but another. Billy, as a historical figure, or at the least, historical gossip, comes from us more than from theirs. Like the Harlequinade and the King in Yellow come from fictions in their fiction.
Treating the Invisibles world as separate from our own, an engineered phase space, there is a plethora of dads and sons, and sisters and brothers, but motherhood is preempted, daughterhood is unaddressed, save for Fanny who as a superhero above superheroes can do almost all things and will.
Our Mob tells our Miles this is, “only a book.”
“Voorish” is White People talk.
If Grant Morrison can be “even more shocked” looking back, what about them of us looking forward?
The earlier King Mob – the Golden Age King Mob – and Queen Mab, both, have much more intense notions of the relativity of these paranormal fictions. To me, Mob and Mab come off more real, too. They are as fictive as Tom or Edith, but they have a compassion those two consistently lack, and they wear their dark mourning like a grief band on the arm, and they never show the levels of condescension or the enthusiasm for colonialism of Edith and Tom.
What is the book on you or your masks?
In Making it Real, J Keith Vincent says, “To insist on an identity-based understanding of representation when analyzing [fiction] is to miss the complex play of identification and desire that brings [fictional characters] to life.”
Our attraction to experiencing via gay male fictional characters is us experiencing a kind of gay male existence. Socially, this is incorrect and would serve one poorly, but internally, psychologically, it is thus. Internally, for each of us, types and existences we feel close to or familiar with are real, have a veracity of emotion, politic, and continuity. Even if those existences are only socially viable inside the social created or sustained for that fiction.
Wanting to commit actions which express emotions, feeling emotions which can match actions, finding yourself acting a way as you realize it means you are feeling something are human. None is more true than the others. You can cry and then realize you are sad. You can feel cold first, then realize it is pain and injury. I can make myself sad enough to cry or just make myself produce tears.
Lot of supertext.
Like symbolism, identification can have tendencies or it can have lines of thought which are taught to be expected, but every symbol, every identification, is its own, on its own. The Symbolist movement, as a movement, was predicated on symbols as antagonistic to easy or set interpretation.
Subtext in your ear.
Identification with a fictional kind of queerness or culturalism work in their fictive environments, but our real world identifications also work in their fictive environs. Transphobes and gender-worriers so frequently pose that gender is unalterable, yet set strict guidelines to coerce and police gender legitimacy. “The man card” can be revoked. Behavior or presence can be, “unwomanly.” Gender is so flexible and mutable that the color of a garment or a single letter in a name can violate it for the same people who insist they do not believe in gender variance, in genderqueerness.
The Invisibles literally tells us, “It doesn’t have to be so literal,” and we go and try to lock it into story tropes we know, anyway. People are chastised, consistently, for trying to take people’s lives, people’s dreams, and turn them into rigidly coded and codified dictations and that is not what dreams or lives do. It is poorly enough when stories or paintings or a tune do it.
The ninth serial issue of The Invisibles includes the number twenty-three in its title. The ninth numbered of the third volume, which descends backwards in numbering, has a nine motif on the cover. Like the Golden Age King Mob takes his people, we have to take significance as it comes.
The apples in The Invisibles could simply be apples. Pieces of fruit. Granny Smiths. Except that every apple in The Invisibles is deliberately placed in a specific context not only by the writer and artists of the comic, The Invisibles, but in that world, by the authors of this particular The Invisibles, a symbolic polyglot or cacophonic concordance of narrativized history by Ragged Robin and others, including, most likely, the never-named Satan and the other white-suited nurse attendants.
As a symbol, traditionally, the apple symbolizes materiality, and material wholeness. The world. Not only the Earth or a realm, but a whole world. It can represent knowledge, whole knowledge or forbidden aspects of knowing. A temptation to forbidden knowing or foreboding consequence.
Frogs and toads, in our day to day, can often be interchangeable as ideas or names, but if a frog is meant to symbolize something, if a toad is used symbolically – as one is, in the church investigated by John A’Dreams and King Mob in 1992 – they have to be precise enough for us to at least suspect the symbolized meanings. A frog can represent a transition from the earth element to water, or to foretell floods. A frog can be used ritually to request rainfall. Knowledge. Change. Maybe even apples.
Meanwhile, a toad cannot be a frog. Even in changing, the change is defined. Toads stare. Toads eat the light. A symbol of fertility and a portent of bad luck, though not necessarily at once, together.
The yin in the toad. The frog pose in yin yoga. The feng shui money frog which is a three-legged toad.
It was a lie that the frog cannot be the toad. Change is defined in stages, like our faces moment to moment, time-lapse photography, a triptych of a journey, or our eyes from the perspective of the comics people on their comics pages looking back at us.
Is the Hand of Glory having to be an historical item as well as a symbolic? “Who put Bella down the wych elm?” Try to remember that flood in 1796. “Try to remember.” First Impressions first draft. A Shakespearean fraudulence of English figures brought to light by an Irish storyteller. “How do you get the goose out of the bottle without breaking the bottle or killing the goose?”
“Try to remember” is a neurolinguistic programming command. Self-help marketing books will tell you.
Water to dirt. Dirt to water. They always hold a little wealth of the other.
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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.
Ariel. Rainer Maria Rilke, aka René Karl Wilhelm Johann Josef Maria Rilke.
On Facial Treatment of Ladies. Ovid, aka Publius Ovidius Naso.
Acid and Stoned Reindeer. Rebecca Ore, aka Rebecca Brown.
We, Too, Must Love. Ann Aldrich, aka Marijane Meaker.
