Travis Hedge Coke
There Is Nothing Left to Say On The Invisibles
4.03
New Colonial
by Travis Hedge Coke
A snake came crawling, it bit a man.
Then Woden took nine glory-twigs,
Smote the serpent so that it flew into nine parts.
There apple brought this pass against poison,
That she nevermore would enter her house.
– Maxim I from The Exeter Book
Many colonized hands in The Invisibles and The Invisibles in many colonized hands. Colonized Scots. Colonized Latine. Colonized Natives. Colonized Filipinas. Black hands. Eastern European hands. Black Eastern European hands. Pacific Islander hands. Eyes of all nations and more nations.
It is with those hands in mind, we look to gnosticism in the comic and to colonialist rhetoric. To the good of colonizers and the optimism of colonizers and the degradation and the bitterness of colonizers.
The hand on an apple imprinted with the likeness of the continents and seas of Earth may not notice the peculiarity or similarity, but, with hand on page, we do.
To Edith Manning saying the people of India are their most themselves when they colonized and have colonialism to oppose.
To Sir Miles’ dream of colonizing the Earth an all its peoples.
To gnosticism, in practice, being justification of chattel slavery.
To apples, apple orchards, lone trees, hanging trees, wisdom trees, crab trees.
i
As Old English Wergulu, the crab apple is one of the nine plants invoked in the pagan Anglo-Saxon Nine Herbs Charm, recorded in the 10th century.
Globose crab apple, wergulu, is one of nine ingredients for the Nine Herbs Charm in Tenth Century England. In that century, the lion becomes extinct in Europe. England unifies. Breton flees.
Ninety-five hundred miles from England, the Tu?i Tonga expansion. ?Aho?eitu, the murdered and resurrected king.
When we say, “a zillion,” “a thousand thousand,” we mean nigh innumerable. A lot.
A thousand thousand smallish apples on the tree. A hundred million stars sparking in the sky.
Walter Scott gives, “the space between two Sabaoths,” as a week. Here is time begun person. The great Sabaoth, archon and Archon, army and individual. Father delusion and mother, matter. Archons include the child of the child, the twin saviors, Iao, Ian, John, God of Heaven, God is Good, God of Hosts. The uncontainable. Unpassable. Before and beyond.
Peter, Paul, scales, pall. The “bad universe” liminal space is visited by King Mob to sharpen his intensity and push in him empathy. The Invisible College is presented as a shared mental space or ontic zone so it cannot be colonized. Total control is uncontrolled. Putter, pace here; same difference.
Any postcard implies a journey.
ii
A key to colonialism is the false history, the falsified etymology, the forced folktale, the fulsome store. The cultivars listed as hybridizing to create the Honeycrisp apple are, via genetic fingerprinting, not the cultivars which hybridized into the Honeycrisp.
The Honeycrisp may be an ideal apple, for its use, but it is cultivated in lies.
Parts of The Invisibles which go down easiest, which appeal to our taste, are not beholden to clear origin. The Invisibles is put forth to us with a shaping goal. If we ascribe responsibility to the comic, as we do a goal, we have to ascribe those to the authors and releasers, editors, publishers, purveyors, stockers, pencilers, inkers, letterers, letter-writers, speculators, commentators, this book, this author, this reader, or we ascribe them to an anthropomorphized, intelligent comic.
The Turing Test, a test for machine intelligence, assumes a human proctor who can evaluate naturalness of language, of exchange in language. That a human proctor could tell a cheating computer or a computation cheating by other human agents.
All the midnight agents in the world could not put Humpty together again.
iii
The Brit Invaders! Paul screaming on Hey, Jude and Can’t Buy Me Love. Aaaaaaaaah!
To be lost is to be near someone, and not what I appear to be.
Granny Smith was a verifiable human being. She was born Maria Ann Sherwood. Married a Smith with a given name of Thomas. In colonial Australia they developed the apple which would bear her name as she bore and raised eight children of her own.
Like North America, like many locales, Australia will never be decolonized. There is colonial Australia. They bit off more than we can chew through.
In The Invisibles, Australia is more orientalized than Asia. It appears briefly, in a geological presence, but presents large throughout the comic. The heart of things is the navel of this.
Story is like this, and colonies cling to story.
iv
John Chapman could homestead land if he planted fifty apple trees on it. He planted booze apples, not eating apples.
Johnny Appleseed.
In 1945, a nutritionist at Cornell University, Lester C Anderson, developed the seed which would one day propagate the Empire apple. Grown and regrown, wheedled down by the New York State Agricultural Experiment Station in Geneva, teams turned that seed and its progeny to that bruise-resistant Empire in 1966.
It is a confidence scam to insinuate that the oppressed need the Empire as much as an empire needs to oppress. It is a scam that there is power in oppression or there is truer power in oppression.
Nuclear testing, as we know it, began with the United States bombing of Alamogordo, July 16, 1945. Mescalero land white men put through the tests of empire.
In 1966, Israel completed the research and development phase of its nuclear arms program.
“Where it ever exists anywhere, or ever will exist, is no matter.”
– The Republic, Plato
v
The world apple. A wholeness. An ending to circular of life. A bruise in life before the next touch. An indicator of inexorable change.
The world apple has no trademark or cultivar. No acculturation or rearing reach. No breach. No bomb.
Ragged Robin jests with King Mob that she will not take or take from the apple he gives her, in the first issue of The Invisibles, because she is not Eve. She will not fall, not for that.
She bites from the apple.
Refutation and complicity are panels apart.
They are panels apart.
And, Robin knows this is more than play or a play. All the world is a comic. Or, a comment. A rememory, histology, storying.
Sometimes a snake, Sabaoth can be misinterpreted.
*******
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.
The Girl from UNCLE episode, The Mata Hari Affair.
The first episode of Wolcott.
On The Air’s sixth episode, with the Presidio.