Travis Hedge Coke
There is Nothing Left to Say (On the Invisibles)
4.0
a shake-up, influences cut
by Mordant Carnival
The Invisibles wasn’t so much a revelation as a rearrangement. It didn’t have anything new, exactly; you’ve read RAW, you’ve seen The Avengers (the one with Mother, not the one with Thor), you’ve watched repeats of The Sweeny flickering across the cathode-ray tube; you’ve been exposed to most of the influences it wears so flamboyantly on its leather sleeve. But you haven’t seen it all like this before. You haven’t seen this specific kind of a collage. And it sweeps you up, hustles you into new perspective. There are places where it’s broken. It has its lacunae and its ankle-wrenching trip hazards. There are always things that will bark your shins, though, in pretty much any piece of media.
What The Invisibles had was a shake-up, influences cut and remixed, fragments of culture thrown around like tinsel in a kaleidoscope. A new image every time you pick it up and twist it. Time as a growth medium, seeded with spores that can blossom into new things. A Petri dish. A culture.
Mordant Carnival can be found here.
There Is Nothing Left to Say On The Invisibles
4.01
Practical Techniques Vol. 2
by Travis Hedge Coke
You can shake a lot of ass, but you still have your one butt. You can take fire, water, air and dirt, and turn them into rod, cup, sword and coin. You can turn coins into stars. Beat your swords into ploughshares, your sticks into feats. Some cups are stones and some stones are die, but any die can be cast and any rock can be bet on. The alphabet of Astarte, Beltis, Cybele. I and I of Ishtar and Inanna.
The Invisibles is a coterie comic for everybody.
It is hard to move your bottom at two weddings at the same time.
Everybody heeds somebody, so lead on, MacDuff, and damned be her that first cries, “Hold, enough!” Exeunt, fighting. Alarums.
Exercise 1
Asking
(1) Mirror
(1) Audiovisual recording/playback device
(1) Timer
(1) Audiovisual editing device
Make sure you are alone as you can be.
Turn your recording device on. You only need the audio from this part.
Set your timer for two minutes.
Start that timer and set it aside.
Ask your mirror self every hard question you can only ask while it is you and a mirror alone.
Set your recording device near the mirror, so you have a clear recording of as much of your face and body as possible.
Set your timer for five minutes.
Turn recorder and timer on.
Watch your mirror self. You can change position, react; what you need to. But stay as focused on your mirror self as you can.
Edit the audio from your spoken interrogation in a loop over your five minutes of watching yourself footage. Meditate on that.
Exercise 2
Sanb?in
(1) Stack of photos or printed images of yourself
(1) Stack of images of things which interest you
(1) Sharp, sturdy scissors
Mix the two stacks of images vigorously.
Take the mix and throw it in the air as high as you can.
Collect and mix them again.
Take a handful (three to five) images in hand, and with the scissors, cut them all at once, making the cut the shape of the first letter of your name.
Take the largest section from the resulting parts, and make a cut through that section which is the shape of the second letter of your name.
Take the second largest section, and cut that with the shape of the third letter of your name.
Gather another three to five images, and continue with the fourth letter, and so.
Repeat your name, if you reach the end and still have images.
Gather all the pieces and throw them in the air as high as you can.
Gather all the pieces and throw them in the air as high as you can.
Gather all the pieces and throw them in the air as high as you can.
A week later, arrange these jigsawed pieces into collages.
Exercise 3
Talking Up a Toy
(1) Toy figure/Stuffed animal/Action figure
(1) Mirror which can be at head level
Be as alone as you can.
Hold your toy up to the mirror.
Describe every way the toy or the animal, character, idea it represents, is superior to yourself.
Remove the toy.
Hold yourself up to your mirror self.
Describe every way your mirror self is superior to yourself.
Exercise 4
Table Request
(5+) People
(1) Table
(1) Sharp, sturdy scissors
Stand or sit (as able) on a tabletop. Hold hands with a participant to your left and right.
Ask one of the participants holding your hand to take your place, while the other escorts you back to your respective seats. Two remaining, seated participants will replace you and your escort.
Negotiate with those holding your hands. Make offers. Make suggestions. Persuade one of them to take your place.
When one of them does take your place, and roles are exchanged, repeat.
Exercise 5
Disposable Art
(1) Sheet of paper
(1) Set of colored drawing tools
(1) Roll of tape or tacky mounting substance
Make a welcome sign. Use all the colors you want. Make it ironic or serious, boilerplate or unique.
Take your time.
Affix your sign to the entrance of your home for a week.
Exercise 6
Face the Wall
(1) Wall
(1) Television or playback device
Turn the device onto a high-drama program. Talkshows or true crime programs are good. Pornography is good. Something at least twenty-five minutes in run time.
Turn the volume up to where it will be hard to drown out with focus.
Sit or lie down comfortably, with your face as close to the wall as possible. Your line of sight should be taken up by the wall.
Let the program play. Watch the wall.
Keep your attention on the wall.
Whatever is happening on the program, keep your focus on the wall. The color of the wall. The texture and scope of the wall. The age of the wall. The layers to the wall.
Exercise 7
Gematria Dux
(1) Sheet of paper
(1) Pencil/Pen
(1) Calculator
(1) Dictionary
Multiply your age by the day of the month you were born. This is how many iterations you will take this exercise. (Example: If you are twenty and were born May 9, like Lady Masako Ichij? when she ascended to the throne, you commit to one hundred and eighty iterations.)
Write out your name. This is iteration one.
Below your name, write a word or name beginning with the last letter of your name.
Below the previous word, write a word or name beginning with the last letter of the previous word. This is the third iteration.
Continue for as many iterations as you have committed to.
Is this your biography? Self-portrait? Hagiographic?
Find the meaning of this transformational snake of words. Make these words the feathers of your wings. Feather your nest with them to keep you and your eggs.
Consider the path and state. Are the connections there or are you making them up? If making them, yourself, can you not reinforce or emphasize those you wish?
Exercise 8
Role Play With Spontaneous Shifts
(2) Participants
(2) Pencil/Pen
(111) Slips of Paper
(1) Timer
Divide the slips as evenly as possible without counting them.
Each participant writes a word or phrase on each slip in a cycle. The first slip is something felt about the other person. The second is something hard to say or talk about. The third is something which combines the first and second terms, however you see fit. With the next three, follow the same cycle. Follow until all slips have been written on.
Mix together the two sets of slips. Place between participants.
Participants should hold hands, sitting, facing one another.
Each participant will play the part of their partner, not themselves. Speak and act as you perceive they would, and base your agenda or conversation on the slips of paper.
Whenever someone has nothing more to say, or cannot say it, they should let go of their partner with one hand, and select a slip of paper. What is written will dictate what they must say to renew the conversation.
Continue until all slips are used.
Exercise 9
Constrained Conversations
(1) Pomegranate
Eat pomegranate seeds. With every seed, remind yourself that there is no guilt in being hungry, no debt in accepting gifts.
Anyone who implies or demands that a debt exists implicit in a gift, is putting one over on you.
Anyone making you feel guilty for feeling hunger is exerting a guilt onto you for reasons of control.
Eat your pomegranate seeds with no guilt, no debt.
***
Some day, you may need to take someone by the hand and speak to them in a way that will affect them the way you want. I want you to be capable of doing that well. I would not talk to you here, chapter after chapter, if I did not want that.
I am talking to you, of course. You and me, we are in this together.
Everything we are too busy, too afraid, or too disinterested to try gives us something. Standing in front of a mirror, talking up a toy unit the timer runs out is informative, but so is knowing you are embarrassed to do it, or you think you already have whatever the exercise can give you.
So, these are not exercises that will make you the god of empathy or the expert hand-holder. So what? Thank you for trying them, if you did. If you have not, go back to the beginning of this and try these exercises!
Either way, even if you do not, I hope they give you something even as unattempted exercises.
The exercises in life we do not try give us something, too.
*******
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.
“Man is the Story-Telling Animal”: Graham Swift’s Waterline, Ecocriticism and Narratology. Astrid Bracke.
We Have Been Undressing Too Long: An Indigenous Ecology. Armand Garnet Ruffo.
Listening to the Streams Underneath and Overhead: Dispatches from a Water Journey. Rita Wong.
All found in Vol 25.2 (Spring 2018) of Isle.