Travis Hedge Coke
There Is Nothing Left to Say On The Invisibles
5.01
The Devil’s Walk
by Travis Hedge Coke
What if, when Mad Tom makes pre-Jack Dane McGowan invisible, he is telling him – by quote a savvy and retentive student like he might vaguely recognize – that the one audience’s call, Satan, is a gentleman, giving him two names, of Mahu and Modo; that he, like Edgar in the play which names Tom O’Bedlam, is possessed by devils.
“For what we are, gifs a gross if we are, about to believe.”
The Devil’s Walk is a single issue story proposed for the first or second year of The Invisibles, but never published, and likely never drawn, maybe never scripted. This would make The Devil’s Walk an undrawn, unwritten, unpublished comic, and what better?
Maybe that is why Satan sticks around the entire comic. Looking for his highlight issue. The Devil waiting in the wings waiting for their solo.
Satan is John a Dreams, of course. Follow the white coat, character to character, and those are all John a Dreams. But, so is everyone else. Identity is just a coat, in all The Invisibles. Individuality is a play we get enamored with.
Satan prods the playing board. And, he prods the playing bored.
Andy Warhol said he liked being bored, but that did not mean he enjoyed being bored all the time.
Idle hands, as they say, are the devil’s workshop, and the Satan of The Invisibles is a devil who workshops the world, who workshops the narrative, the machinery, the step by flow and flow by step of our universe, to a specific and predestined end.
Or, so he may imply.
By the time of The Invisibles’ original serialization, the winking, trying to be challenging self-elected trickster was an annoying common figure in conspiracy and science fiction circles. The Edgy Man. Prodder. The trixta! The trite. You had to deal with him consistently, from message boards to bookstores to parks to parties. Always with a few countable devotees, always with an air of unearned self-importance.
Satan, as we affectionately know him, in The Invisibles, is never actually called anything of the type, but he is an abbey lubber when we meet him. Like Friar Rush and other lubbers of story, sits he at Rennes-le-Château, or the idea of the sometime Septimanian church grounds, playing and waiting and talking to the daughter of the devil, the witch of the white ganzfeld.
Friar Rush. Glamis Monster. Ariel. Jack Frost. The Edgy Man. Judy. Punch.
“Poor Tom hath been scared out of his good wits: bless thee, good man’s son, from the foul fiend! Five fiends have been in poor Tom at once; of lust, as Obidicut; Hobbididance, prince of dumbness; Mahu, of stealing; Modo, of murder; and Flibbertigibbet, of mopping and mowing; who since possesses chambermaids and waiting-women.”
- King Lear, William Shakespeare
Rennes-le-Château is in a postcard’s address. The head of John the Baptist in the air and the loops near the stamp or where stamp could be.
Demoniac Tom, étrange fêlé. The language of Shakespeare and Burroughs turned gibberish, or meaningful tongue alien to receiver. What is a language which fails to communicate? Folderol of angels. Five general devils. The nine foals of the night mare. Bid her alight and her troth plight.
Aroint thee, witch, aroint thee.
When Odin, the god, hung himself, he said he was, “myself offered to myself.”
Avante! a’v?n??
Make you shit your pants, he will.
Either all of him.
Why would Tom teach empathy for “deadly Urizen” and steal the blue of a boy’s eyes?
Tom who orders two sets of fox hunters to prey on homeless and hopefuls, one good and one wicked. Tom teaching empathy for himself.
Like Simon crucified while Jesus laughs, the Voudon Gnostic Workbook – from which I learned “uistia” is “you see” in Latin and “lure” in Finnish – compliments you endlessly and almost immediately suggests you sell your name to any spirit who will take the ticket.
Naga are twin spirits. Uzbek way of life. Sun and Sun God. A river of the Punjab running through India and Pakistan.
The irregularly spaced intraday value at risk. Liquidity risk. Tar risk. Testing risk. The ultra-high frequency risk. The mean duration we suffer to here on this Earth.
Does Satan have no name in the world, or is he telling us his name?
When Robin visits Rennes-le-Château, she finds and surrenders the treasure of the head of John the Baptist, babbling glossolalia, a symbol and a miracle of engineering, to the enemy who are not actually an enemy, a thing she probably already knows because she comes from the future and she already read accounts and is writing this account.
But, when Robin visits Rennes-le-Château, she meets a kindly, interesting fellow, who pauses to have an elucidating and affirming chat.
The Invisibles may have quietly presented him as the treasure, or that the real treasure is the friends we made along the way.
The alter of Saint Mary Magdalene in Rennes-le-Château bears an inscription that, “Jesus, remedy against all our pains, The only hope for the penitent, Through the tears of Magdalene Thou washest away our sins.” The bas-relief consists of an illuminable yellow, not unlike the concentrated thought of the gallows on which a figure is hanged on the tarot card called, The Hanged Man.
“Like the Devil,” asks Dane of Tom, and when Tom was Freddie, at the same time, in that place, Edie tells her cousin, “We have Pan and Dionysus on our side.”
Talk a lot of nonsense and little-import in small talk, but small talk reveals the most. The unconscious, the subconscious, genetic memory, collective unconsciousness, selective consciousness, conscience, conscience externalized.
Pre-Jack, Jack Frost is Dane’s own mother-gifted bogeyman. The family banshee.
Being Jack Frost ends bogeying. Tom in being does not end Freddie’s fear of everything, even if Tom is “one holy fucking terror,” even if Freddie fears everything.
Are heads big enough to contain every devil, god, demoniac, seer, and deadly Urizen and tired childe?
Fee! Fie! Foe! Fum!
Jabir Ibn Hayyan may have written in code. And, in Arabic. Gibberish does not descend from his name, but gibberish in use sometimes, yes. Yes.
It is Jabir who decided there are three categories of the natural elements. Spirits, which vaporize with heat. Metals, which melt. Stone, which can be pummeled to powder and chips.
It is unknown to us if Jabir enjoyed the bacon crisps the way Tom can.
There is no war, only a dalang. Maddalo and I are written by one poet. Mab.
Words detonate across centuries. Pop. With Shakespeare and pop is the devil telling us his name?
“No. I have not,” the lubber tells Ragged Robin at the most photographed Rennes-le-Château in the world.
Why are Invisibles spirits when they are moving in time or the night? Why ghosts? Why faeries? Dross?
Why do spirits talk of movies, mirrors, and television guns? Who die and toll’em?
Erotics or hermeneutics, semiosis has to be of a company. Ain’t talking, just walking. Ain’t walking, just talking. Put. Went.
What if we found it only took one stone to kill? As it does?
Will be hang every stone as we bedevil any hand?
If we roll the bones and find one a day, two is rain, three for fog, and five, who gave you permission?
There is little we can make that we cannot out of oak, broom, and meadowsweet.
The devil is a screech owl offering outs.
The owl is the fear of other birds.
An owl is an owl. Even in parliaments.
And, the birders and cataloguers who dislike when you refer to parliaments of owls? They also hate murders.
*******
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.
Flowers and kingfishers. Miao Jiahui. Undated.
Petey Wheatstraw, the Devil’s Son-in-Law. Starring Rudy Ray Moore. 1977.
The Illustrated Book of Manners: A Manual of Good Behavior and Polite Accomplishments. Robert De Valcourt. 1806
Flowers and Insects. Ma Quan. 1723.
