Travis Hedge Coke
There Is Nothing Left to Say On The Invisibles
3.10
No Future
by Travis Hedge Coke
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.
A Freewheelin’ Time Suze Rotolo
I am the Law: How Judge Dredd Predicted Our Future Michael Molcher
Tenebrae Dario Argento
We Wear the Mask (series) Krista Franklin
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There is no future in The Invisibles. We are told, shown, it is explained in many ways and demonstrated in rituals, rites and recitations, but the allure of the future is so real we cannot keep a grip on the reality of its unreal existence. The Invisibles only really exists, as a universe, as a context, during our participation, and that is collective and individual, communal and intimate, idiosyncratic and cliche. It is now.
The mother of tomorrow ordering delivery? Cullins and Pugh exist at the same time as Una and Zero. Shasta and Scratch the future of Deadpool and Kane. The Homeboy and Hourglass, Lube and Hairline and the Mimosa; promises. The x-factor and the force.
“The day must come, when I shall leave my friends” – Vita Sackville-West, “Nostalgia”
No matter how enticing the future, regardless of how quickly or fervently we run towards the future, the past clings to us like filaments chasing a magnet, and in The Invisibles they are all often on the same page, sometimes in the same panel. The Invisibles exists on page-time, and in our collective and individuated orchestration. Our every thought of The Invisibles is a cover of the song others can sing, others can hear or read or know or know about.
Page-time is not time. Not even a perceptual time. Page-time is a physical proximation alien enough to our sense of timeless space, that it appears to have time.
If there is a future, it comes to us as the buzz of an insect, near and then imperceptible but probably still near.
The future makes of us, fools and criminals. Promises It is in crime and flaw we grow and regrow.
The futures we see, the early 2000s, the Winter of 2012, are puppet plays on pages. They are story. So, the futures of 1997, 1999, 1928, any and all times, like the face of a postcard which reads, “Et in Arcadia ego.”
“Brutality and beauty shared the sun” – Vita Sackville West, “Nostalgia” (1932)
Like David Bowie stumbling through the phase space of The Man Who Fell to Earth, the timelines and geographies are as acted as Bowie’s performance.
Like Bowie, the future is where we forgive, forget, and forego. The future is AWOL. Hypnogogia before and after sleep. Shine on. The future shines no ugly lights on us. Don’t need no ticket, just get onboard.
We may forget that art is art, but we might never forget how good it is.
You have to leave some swords behind, in the future. You pack up your stakes, but already you have forgotten to put up your tent. You may be the victim, or somebody’s fool, and you will be. You has been.
No one gets right the future. It would not be the future if you did.
No one includes you. You, or anybody else.
“This is how the collapse appears to those condemned to live in it,” says someone inside The Invisibles. This is armageddon. Always has been.
Harumageddon is also a rice-based takeaway meal offered for a limited time. Happy Science existed concurrently to those who saw Harumageddon. Harumageddon speculators sought to murder those of Happy Science. Aum and on. Aum and on.
There will eight-packs of soft drinks in 2012 and 2008, and there were in 1958.
Caste mark fetishes and suspect hypos and pretending to be on drugs you are not are things individual teenagers are inventing every day. Each the first. Each next the first. A catherine wheel or origami.
The future is often prophetic massages. Bend. Fold. Press. Hold.
Peel back.
There are times you cannot remember how you know a thing you do know.
Of all The Invisibles, Chris Weston’s is the art I forget most is art. His lines swim, deep-flowing, etched density of line which is never busy, never distraction. Should be the easiest in the world to know is drawn, but I am entranced. I forget the skill before my eyes and in memory. The way I forget that Annihilator and Nameless are Batman comics and know they are not Batman comics. Whether there is Max Landis in Max Nomax or Max Nomax in Byron Lomax in Peri Lomax and Vera Lomax or Martin Lomax and Arthur Lomax and Peregrine Chase and a man called Hawk from Promised Land.
An actor can live in many futures, if futures be only sets.
Imagine being outside a structure of space and time dimensions, having the whole before you, but only accessible in slices, in moments or your recollection of the rest. If you could journey in, or touch or kiss the panes of cathedral-glass scenic world-windows, you could have a knowledge of the whole universe, knowledge which would seem predictive, prescient, psychic and revelatory, but you would get parts of it wrong and the more intensely you tried to communicate to anyone who was bounded by those time and space dimensions, or the more careful you tried communicate, the more threatening or suspicious you would probably come off. The long-necked swan of disparate.
If you could go in, you would come off.
“And this is no romance, the place is no.” – Vita Sackville-West, you know the rest
In 1917 three Motherly children visited the quarter of a city called the Grave Pit, and what adults heard as the buzzing of horseflies or busying bees, they heard as divine promises. Throughout The Invisibles they hear the buzz and sometimes it whispers or talks plainly to that child in all.
“Barbelo heard uttering a sound thus: ‘zza, zza, zza.’ ‘I know what that is!’”
People all the time experience ufological materia. It is funny when you can know what the bee knows, where you can find an unidentifiable saucer-shape in the sky.
From inside a comics panel, our fingers could look like blots of color moving or pressing against impossible angles in the air. Round red, white, silver, blue motionless moving.
“Up we go! Up we go!” till, at last, pop!
All is now. All now.
“And this is no romance, the place is no.” – Vita Sackville-West, you know the rest