Travis Hedge Coke
There Is Nothing Left to Say On The Invisibles
4.02
So It Is Written
by Travis Hedge Coke
Not that you should stop reading for content, but when you read a news article or a short story, next time, read for patterns and read for persuasion. Read for false choices presented to you or to characters, false dilemmas. Any time choice is framed as a strict choice between two things, which only have these strict, limited consequences or boons.
When you look for content, look for what is not mentioned as much as what is.
Volume One of The Invisibles can be so wordy, we forget how visual it is. Volume Two is so cinematic, we forget it is so concerned with the word. The word is immaterial by Volume Three wrapping up like Claude Rains in, or his Tim Turner’s voice, The Invisible Man.
Ripped up like mummies for ink and tea, The Invisibles can be dissected or consumed, as much as repurposed, as much as leaves or caterpillars and poems.
It is always the apocalypse. Always in a reveal.
These are false dilemmas. Agreeable, but they exaggerate something agreeable and avoid mentioning what would make us question the purity of the statements.
Why do you think, when the prose, in The Invisibles, tells us it is the end of the word as we know it, Jolly Roger does her thing against the solid unbroken white of the AllNow event?
Only on the following page is she in New Mexico. Only in that scene is her name Baby, fitting the Bambi/Bobby scheme.
No matter how much a text or a person tells you to focus, you do not have to. You can be encouraged to limit yourself, you can be forced into limitation, penalized for broad reception, but you do not have to. Consequences be dammed.
If an person can be lost in a group recollection of Castle Silling and versions of 120 Days in Sodom they know, and an Invisible can be lost in a stopover church in Occitanie via a postcard, what is a difference between person and Invisible?
The Invisibles invokes “the word,” gives substance and potency to “the word,” yet only really implies the power of the visualization in something like the Rob Liefeld riff Jill Thompson draws to demonstrate what a King Mob anecdote feels like; demonstrating the written word on a picture, a puppet show in a comics’ panel.
What part of our life is postcards and tourist traps besides physical postcards and passing tourism on the highway?
By the way, what is the first smell you can call into memory from The Invisibles?
Spicy food, for me, which many of the characters enjoy. And, white musk and vanilla, which a former roommate used to invoke fictive Disney dragons who also, it seemed, required chicken eggs placed in the water of a local golf course’s water trap and the wearing of cape and pointed hat.
Too quickly, scents which are prominent, which I can call into active memory, dissolve in visuals, contexts, people, events. Pointy hats.
Why can I not, right now, trust in the strength of the smells?
Jack Frost has heat powers and I do not appreciate that with sufficient verve or frequency.
As much as we think of a jolly roger as being a skull and crossbones flag, it does not have to look like anything, follow any pattern. A jolly roger is a standard flown by pirates. Jolly roger is a context, not a pattern, and – high comedy – could easily be a context you do not grasp until it is far past too late.
This is the end of the word, not with a purity but a Quimper.
Marianne Williamson can be in earnest and leading when she writes, “A Return of Love has had a life of its own, as does any book.” We want to agree, because it is rewarding to agree.
Do we all agree on the same meaning of what she has there said?
Williamson continues, “An author is like a mother,” bringing to us an entire complex of matrices of complexities of how we think of “mother,” and the mythos of mom, and then clarifies, “who brings a child into the world and then watches it live its own life story.”
Children are independent beings, or at least, they grow into them. When and how this starts or when it is secure, that is up for much debate, but eventually, we mostly agree, they will and do, provided they stay long enough alive.
Yet, the child, here, is an it. We moved to metaphors of human beings, proxy human beings, mother, child, then back to nonhuman, a book, though a book with its own, autonomous life. Living.
“If not this, than this,” is a trick. “When you are ready, we will this or this” is a trap.
Implying we will be ready, eventually, placing onus on us, pushing responsibility and timetable to us, but giving us again only the this or this illusion of choice are mechanisms of control deployed by the Outer Church throughout The Invisibles and techniques we should be well familiar with by the time we are tweens, though even as adults we often fail to see them coming or identify them before the pirates have raided our vessel and oh ho! they were pirates and shit. Sad face.
The Invisibles use these false choices and weasel words as often, too. Invisibles and Outer Church are just words meaning people. Like gods, spirits, loa, cats, fish, Republicans, grays, Tories, anarchists, journalists, Scouse, Scots, Hindu, Gujarati, Pueblo.
“It’s a man’s life,” from King Mob to Jack Frost is comedic, inverse, as they stand with their female and nonbinary colleagues, Mob, himself, Jack’s fairy godmother, but it is still an invocation of recruitment. It is a challenge meant to push someone to allow themselves to be recruited. And, it works.
Slogans, even deployed ironically, even sardonically or sarcastically, still work as a slogan in earnest.
An Invisible trick, like detournément, relies on controlling tonality while embedding commands and directing a savvy audience, redirecting a savvy audience.
It might be weasely of an advertiser to claim, “up to fifty percent off!” when most of the sales prices are reduced from typical only less than fifteen percent, however, the Invisible technique knows we know this. “Up to fifty percent off,” in an Invisible sell, has to tonally carry irony and recognition. We need to wink to one another. Fifty percent off our readiness for war. “The price of freedom, reduced up to fifty percent, for a limited time lonely!”
You can think this through when you feel ready.
*******
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.
Nadine Akkerman’s Invisible Agents
Lesbian Pulp Fiction selected and introduced by Katherine V Forrest
Brimstone and Treacle, written by Dennis Potter; both versions
The most throttled edition you can find of Emmet Fox’s The Sermon On the Mount
