Travis Hedge Coke
There Is Nothing Left to Say On The Invisibles
2.05
Sacrificial Greed
by Travis Hedge Coke
Angela Davis wrote, “Prison is considered so ‘natural’ that it is extremely hard to imagine life without it.”
Rousing the troops, Reverend Ron Auch, of Rapid City, declared that, “America is facing one of her most crucial hours. Our major cities, and possibly minor ones, are in the grips of Satan. Inner-city problems have now reached the suburbs.”
In Patrick Meaney’s good book, Our Sentence is Up: Seeing Grant Morrison’s The Invisibles, he offers that while Harmony House, where Dane is imprisoned, is horrible, “If a gang of kids… stole your car, wouldn’t you want them locked up?”
The very next sentence, elaborating on the kind of lock up that Harmony House is, reads: “Harmony House removes people’s brains and sex organs.”
For stealing a car. For a ten minute joy ride.
Literally, not metaphorically, removing brains and sex organs.
“Can you commit a whole country,” Lord Byron asked rhetorically, “to their own prisons?”
He meant freedom of work, living wages, and the machining of industry, canalizing of rivers, and restriction of fields to which people had been raised to anticipate access.
Meaney’s book is, of course, about prisons, as indicated by its title, and about the necessity and (secret) functionality of prisons. De Sade is imprisoned in France and freed, but he is imprisoned by a promised and historically recorded death, too, and the Invisibles rescue him from that. Percy Bysshe Shelley is imprisoned by grief and confusion, politics and flesh, and Invisibleness frees him. Jack is freed from prison, to live an Invisible life. King Mob is furious at other Invisibles for the kidnapping and imprisonment of one of his cell, and later him and his cell, knowing it was a ritual with positive ends.
Human reactions to realizing we are arguing something that is wrong range from obfuscation to refutation to acceptance to apology. All can sting. All can feel freeing.
The arguments for prison are punitive or reformative. Not punitive and reformative, because those do not go together. Reformative can affirm the imprisoned. Punitive rewards the condemning. Punitive does not affirm victims or society. It rewards them only if they are condemning.
Part of human existence is to be condemning of some things, and of some people. If you have never felt that yet, wait, and – in the words of Grandpa Simpson – it’ll happen to you!
In There is Nothing Left to Say (On The Invisibles), Travis Hedge Coke steps back at times, allowing quotes without context, cut/up and collaged text, mistyping, and rotten low-down base deceit for the sake of being contentious or tugging loose threads of thought the reader can destroy their own sweater with.
In Interpretation and History, Umberto Eco has it that, “The Gnostic views himself as an exile form the world, as a victim of his own body, which he defines as a tomb and a prison.”
In The Invisibles, that eternal helper, ElFayed, is quoted as saying, “We made gods and jailers because we felt small and ashamed and alone,” echoing an earlier assertion that the Gnostic error is to misinterpret materiality as exclusion from a holy truth, when it is part of holy truth.
Prison is so much a setting, a genre in American Twentieth Century fiction, that it may as well be as natural and anticipatory as home or the workplace. A three-bedroom apartment or the reception area of a local clinic. American entertainment has normalized imprisonment as part of life in the way of drivers education or sweet sixteen parties, while simultaneously demonizing and abstracting the imprisoned.
The Invisibles – because they are all of us and everybody else – will free us from all prisons, eventually, be free of all prisons, and declare that “our sentence is up,” while still leaving us, on the final page, inside the quotation marks of that statement. There is still a wall, still a set of claws, keeping us just in bounds. But, all walls, all structure, may not a prison make.
It is reported, around the world, that many prisoners, and many students, when queried, admit their idea of what prison would be like first came from exported American entertainment.
“Our sentence is up,” is a declaration of Jack Frost’s, but he is quoting ElFayed. And, we leave, or the comic leaves us, before the quotation can be finished enough for the close quote claw.
Every year, we check if my mom or Bysshe Shelley will be celebrated with a poem on August Fourth.
We have to make our own freedom, maybe, or what we have is allowance. Even if at beginning and end of The Invisibles, it is ElFayed talking.
And, when we condemn others, we have to temper sentencing or actualized punishment, with something other than simply our condemnatory feelings. We cannot dehumanize others in our rush of condemnatory feelings or the afterglow of having rewarded those condemnatory feelings.
And, we cannot take all our pride in our transgressions which result in others feeling those condemnatory urges towards us. Gallows humor; sometimes you do and have to. But, if all you have, all that moves you and satiates you is that other people do not like you or what you have done, what kind of life is that?
How much of being edgy, a trite, a provocateur, a stand up comic, a rebel soldier, the detective who has relinquished his badge to go gritty lone wolf, the internet asshole, the smirking tradwife, the burdened patrician white man… how much of it is work to simply keep breathing?
In a short period middle Twentieth Century, King Mob puts John Lennon and Yoko Ono on a hit list, the London Street Commune move to Dorinish, the Beatles record When I’m Sixty-Four, John Lennon buys Dorinish, The London Street Commune borrow from Yoko Ono’s art to further their own, King Mob melds with the London Street Commune, and the Quarrymen record One After 909. Sid Rawle dies at sixty-four. John Lennon dies at forty. Phil Cohen, Yoko Ono, Paul McCartney, and others remain clinically alive as of this writing.
Breathing is an autonomic function so that, under good or even passable circumstances, you do not have so much to worry about it.
We are not meant to spend our lives fighting to breathe and there is a reason why Hitler chose, “breathing room,” as an excuse for conquest and genocide.
Morrison’s father, Walter Morrison, often faced police harassment and abuse while imprisoned. At sixteen, Walter Morrison lied about his age, to become a child soldier. According to Stuart Christie, by eighteen, Morrison had openly declared he would, “personally shoot any soldier who turned his gun on a woman or a child, and would shoot any officer who gave such an order.” Morrison was placed in solitary confinement for this 1942 declaration. Later a worker at the Factory of Peace, a member of the Committee of 100 and Scots Against War, Morrison was eventually knighted, as has been his offspring, Grant Morrison.
Many of the direct contributors to The Invisibles have had their experiences with police abuse and with imprisonment. It was not then and is not now a matter absolutely alien to them, nor, I suspect, is it as foreign a territory to all reading this as some reading this will assume.
When The Invisibles emphasizes the fetishistic connection between fought-for freedom and the threat of imprisonment, often implicitly, sometimes explicitly, the connection may take forms of visualization (BDSM scenarios, role-play, line width in the artwork), of political or social context (Boy’s siblings as police and gang members), class divides (the wealthy and the not; the white and the not), and textual ironies and sardonicism, such as when the main characters rescue the Marquis de Sade from a physical French prison only for him and they to be trapped in a psychic or metaphysical prison based on a modern play based on his novel about prison abuse as a model of unfair society.
“Then Jesus said to his disciples: ‘Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat; or about your body, what you will wear. For life is more than food, and the body more than clothes. Consider the ravens: they do not sow or reap, they have no storeroom or barn; yet God feeds them. And how much more valuable you are than birds! Who of you by worrying can add a single hour to your life?”
– Luke 12:22-25
What if, telling people that only their bodies can be imprisoned, or that real imprisonment is of the mind, only makes people more ashamed and to feel more helpless and constrained when the feel their bodies or minds are, thusly, failing to cope with or combat against forced imprisonment?
What if we do not like to go hungry, to be limited, forcefully, in our allotted sunlight or free ranging?
Prison-fear motifs and phrases made famous by writer Philip K Dick appear in the comic, while, by their own admission, the writer of The Invisibles had not, at that time, read too much of Dick’s work. Dick introduced the phrases, perhaps, but they speak to such common concerns, common anxieties, that they can be reiterated without textual tether or direct citing.
Everything is a reference, eventually. Everything, as Nora Ephron used to say, is copy.
To be trapped in by copies is easy. To be held and limited by truisms that develop in repetition and official versions. There is a comic called, The Invisibles. A play of a novel of a metaphor not despite all these versions, all these tellings, strong, accurate and useful, but because they are all, each, strong, accurate, useful, and none of them have stopped the abuse.
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NEXT: Dreams Like This
And previously:
- Prologue/Series Bible
- Chapter One: I Was a Librarian’s Assistant (Pt. 1)
- Chapter Two: I Was a Librarian’s Assistant (Pt. 2)
- Chapter Three: Robin Roundabout
- Chapter Four: How Did Helga Get in Here?
- Chapter Five: Boy Our Embarrassment
- Chapter Six: Once I Was a Little Light
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.
Morrison, Grant. The Invisibles. Jill Thompson, Chris Weston, et al. DC Comics. 1994-2000.
Mobile Sinfonia. 2012. <http://mobilesinfonia.net/>. Composed by Jem Finer.
Rum Sodomy and the Lash. Album recorded by the Pogues. 1985.
Here Comes Everybody. 2014. James Fearnley.