Travis Hedge Coke
There Is Nothing Left to Say On the Invisibles
4.05
Purpose in Story
by Travis Hedge Coke
When we were children, my brother believed I was kernel of barley from a barley patch. We had a doll called Charley Barley, marketed by Avon, and picked up from a thrift shop in a clear plastic bag I believed would suffocate him, and our mama said I came from the same barley farm, and Charley and small-child-me both wore overalls, so from my brother’s perspective, these two smiling goofs were the same. I came from a barley patch and he came the traditional way.
Later, in our teenaged years, my brother would tell people we were not blood related. He barely knew me, despite growing up close in the same homes, siblings, often sharing one bedroom. I just showed up one day and maybe ingratiated my way in.
This is not a story to insult my brother, who did his best to make his life a story palatable to him. I may not be the faerie who pleats the manes of horses and braids the elflocks at night, but I was prissy, anxious, precocious, and weird. Like the Charley Barley doll, I had no bend in my back, a stiffness from cerebral palsy, and I smiled constantly, misunderstanding that because it made me feel better and safer did not mean it radiated this sensation out to other people.
“It was like falling all at once into an endlessly shrinking well, like Alice.”
The Invisibles, attributed to Lady Manning, by Grant Morrison
“When you leave Barton to form your own establishment in a more lasting home, Queen Mab shall receive you.”
Sense and Sensibility, attributed to John Willoughby, by Jane Austen
So, there is barleycorn me, and common we, and there is Queen Mab, a horse in a novel. And, there is Beryl Alice Wyndham, of The Invisibles, Queen Mab in a mystic order or amongst some friends, whose hand (I do not think) is maybe the Hand of Glory and whose role is hardly touched upon where we can see or read.
This is a chapter of that Mab.
“It only looks like a hand,” says that Mab, “I saw it all…”
Queen Mab lights the final candle for the activation of the Hand. Mab sees the future is present and time.
This is the opposite of How I Became One of the Invisible. I am not going to make us subject to anything “collected by Chris Kraus.”
Mab is a gift of creatives, of poets, painters, playwrights, pencilers, pickers. As Orion, Queen Mab may have been made up for art, not explanatory term for an antecedent, a historical utterance, or pregender Adam identifying the spiritual components of animals. Queen Mab is born in fiction to be fiction.
Whether Beryl chooses her Invisible name from Shelley, from Shakespeare, from Austen or to match her partner, King Mob, Beryl chooses an art. The making of a new thing.
All is all, Mab could derive, etymologically, from Herodius, recorded as the mother of Salome, who used her daughter’s enchanting dance to ask for the head of John the Baptist. Mab could be derived from Diana, patroness of crossroads. Nicnevin, Hecate, or Abaduntia, who is less a queen of witches, faeries, or nymphs, but a goddess like a gracious hostess, protector of savings and investments. If the name is, or the character, no one would find out without looking carefully and successful guesswork.
There is an art to seeing the end of things.
“Who is that exquisite creature in eau de nil satin? Beryl Fairfield.”
Beryl is said to strengthen belief in gods, to remove kidney stones and gain knowledge. Beryl promotes happiness. Beryl keeps away demons.
There is no chance that The Invisibles’ Queen Mab was named by her parents after the Alice and Beryl of Prelude, a short story by fauvist, symbolist, modernist, experimental, bisexual writer, Katherine Mansfield, whom she somewhat resembles in her middle years, but there is no good reason to assume her creators, at least, her writer, Grant Morrison, did not have the story somewhere in mind.
Beryl and Alice and the book of dreams.
“To dream of black-beetles drawing a hearse is bad.”
“To dream of spiders creeping over you is good.”
Every Beryl Alice I can find is born before 1940. I do not look too hard.
Beryl is for curing injuries to eyes, for fixing disorders of the spine and heart. Beryl is good for fresh starts. Beryl for soothing worries. Beryl for seeing the future. Beryl for success. Beryl for dreams come true.
We form these phantoms on the go, ghosts to measure. Queen Mab can be whoever you need, whoever you want.
Wyndham may be as much for wind as for the aristocratic lineage of real life Wyndhams, even if all who share that name do not share the aristocracy or linearity.
Charlie Barley sold his mother for two duck eggs.
Healing stones. Cat eyes. Asterisms.
“The walls of spiders’ legs are made
Well mortised and finely laid”
Cryptophasa nymphidias. Nymphidia borealis. Stiboges nymphidia, the columbine, is a small butterfly, “striking,” related to both Punches and Judies.
Solenoidal, divergent, congregational, cognitional, our Mab. Do not read Michael Drayson’s poem. The filaments tracing spider’s eggs.
“She mounts her chariot with a trice,
Nor would she stay, for no advice,
Until her maids that were so nice
To wait on her were fitted”
So reads part of Michael Drayton’s Seventeenth Century poem, a mock epic of Mab, and to whom he is referring, as is the quote above about spiders’ legs.
It is improbably to tell, but what does not apply?
With Ariel and Tom O’Bedlam, Mab might be the secret architects of more than appearance guides us to. Shapers in secret. Tom and Edith guide King Mob and his crew and Sir Miles and his men and women and mendicant myrmidons to a ritual of multiple purposes climaxing in 1999 and concluding in 2012 and all times.
Jenny, in the Gideon Stargrave shareable fantasy, “orgasms as she dies.” Others die, dooming themselves to resurrection in the concrete interface of idiopathic universes a and b. Fictions all, like St Hilary or Sherlock Holmes, Jenny and others, as King Mob – who holds Gideon Stargrave in his mind to share with others – espouses, may all share one death and that death the paparazzo paff, the puff of popularity and being seen.
The 2012 “end of the world” is a scene, shown. Johannes Purkinji said, “Deceptions of the senses are the truth of perception.”
So well.
Well, so.
Only a commas difference, maybe, or a barleycorn’s distance. Queen Mab of the dynamic chromosomes.
Our Mab, it is said, dies in 1965. We are not told if she is killed. Her King Mob dies seeing her, younger than she would be, at Guernica, whose artistic representation, by Pablo Picasso, would transform for her, in a gallery in England, in Summer, 1960, to a window truth of the bombing there in Spring, 1937.
Mab, meaning, “a baby.” Mab, a queen, but not the queen. Queen, meaning, “a woman.” Not a sovereign or betrothed to a sovereign. Woman and baby in those claws. In that artifice.
Lofty, scarlet, red wine queen.
“How wonderful is Death, Death, and his brother Sleep!” is included in Shelley’s, Queen Mab, and our Mab is our dreamer and all-dead. Always dead. All-dead.
Is it a terrible thing? Most things are.
Or, they are not. Queen Mab is a dualist if she’s a myriad. In amber arbor armor amour. Parloir parler.
The sun shines not as bright as Shelley’s Mab can radiate in her purpureal halo.
If you had asked me, “purpureal,” would have something to do with pupal, puparial, puerperal.
It does not, not in any etymological or social-history sense. I put the idea out there, maybe they do now. The echos. Sounds.
In
time
a
shuns
Violets “are blue,” and purpureal.
Early in the making of The Invisibles, Jill Thompson – a primary architect of the comic – had her careful reproduction of a real living person’s particular handwriting erased and replaced with a stock sort of text. Her negro pencil blur heads for Orlando, the horror without skin of his own, the demon in the white suit who takes faces from victims, also erased. Wiped off. Replaced by scratch marks, scored off like someone etching away a face with a pen’s tip. The skritched out visage in a photograph owned by a dangerous being.
In the fertile golden islands, the golden clouds, of the 1920s, Mab is a centrifuge. Mab has them together, the set who will activate the Hand of Glory, who will perform the performance, making the cerecloth of the world.
One of the elect. One of those slaves.
Nephesh. Anima. Quiet spirit and fire. “You can’t stop thinking of midwives.”
Serendipity. Sereneness. That sobriety of mind which is the mark of true heroism, Queen Mab restores Ianthe’s spirit to her body. Fleur d’azul. who married an Isis confirmed transsexual. I am glad to have the opportunity to restore them. The Queen of Pentacles.
“‘Beryl Wyndham, thou art avenged.’”
Not quite what we need her to be, Queen Mab is as we take her, like King Mob says he tries to do with everyone. Her Mob. Queen of the fairies, nymphs, and banshees.
Queen Mab is a gunslinger like our King Mob. Queen Mab is, like Boy, probably one of the best of us. A fair-haired buddha. Midwife. Flowering author of our “fair” wind and “fair” fortune. She is her comrades and ours. Her garment for death. Her garment life. She wears it with a blue flower to commit acts. She acts committed.
A royal art. Our art. Thou art.
But let us leave Queen Mab awhile.
This is that very Mab. “I am glad to have the opportunity to restore them.”
*******
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.
Read Satan’s Princess. Featuring Lydia Denier, Robert Forster, and Caren Kaye. Directed by Bert I Gordon. Written by Stephen Katz.
Music in Twelve Parts. Composed by Philip Glass. Performed professionally by Lisa Bielawa, Jon Gibson, Philip Glass, Martin Goldray, Richard Peck, Michael Reims, and Andrew Sterman (The Philip Glass Ensemble). Watch it yourself today!
Halcyon House. Listen to this story! Written by Lisa von Biela.
