Travis Hedge Coke
There Is Nothing Left to Say On The Invisibles
3.09
The Past We Read About
by Travis Hedge Coke
Feel that? Feel a shiver of nerves that you are seen and known? That right now you could be doing something productive enough to change your life, yet here you are, you are doing this?
Time is the ache in your elbow. But, so is a bruise.
The past is something we can revisit. In The Invisibles, groups perform rituals to project their psychical selves backwards in time, people self-hypnotize to walk a metaphorical spiderweb into the past as ghosts, people build origami-logic time machines or dress themselves in the wreckage of the “orgy of the insect people” to travel in time. They take drugs, they get old, they amp themselves up to travel in time.
Someone once said that the trick is maybe not to take analysis all the way to the end, but to know when, before then, to stop. I forget who, now, and if you remember, you can mark it down for the next time you read this, because the me writing this will still have forgotten and still, here, be frozen in forgetfulness.
The past can only be revisited. True of the present, isn’t it?
Garry Kasparov wrote The Matrix but called it New Chronology. That is not true. That was Horselover Fat. Philip K Dick. Thomas. Rogers and Leftow cannot agree if Anselm of Canterbury held an eternalist view on time, but we can glance to them all now. Who do we trust, Julian Barbour, Julian of Norwich; Julian Sands?
“Revisionist history,” is a funny term. It is always revisioning. Previsional past. Wavicle sense, provisional tense; revising tense past.
All times are one: time. But, in time: times.
People can tell you that you cannot talk to the dead, and that marks the now from the past. But, you can talk to the dead as much this hour as last year. The likeliness they will talk back is here or there much the same.
Like Tommy Sands of the hourglass asked, “Your leaflet came down from an aircraft of war.” Wait. No. That is later and before. He said, “It’s time for asking why.”
Can we hold a bar and ring paradox in our head in all actions and dance like angels on the pin of every bass drop of a song?
Every part of The Invisibles is in the past, and it was in the past the moment it was committed to print and sold. The 2008 and 2012 of The Invisibles? In the past, even if published in 2000, 1999, 1998, or earlier. The whole comic is there. Every issue is its entire issue.
If Empedocles is right, he is learning now from Pythagoras. Maybe both learnt not to pick up the dropped bass. If Empedocles is right, it does not matter if Peter Lamborn Wilson or Thomas first claimed the egg of time and pace and commercial consensus. If reincarnations are multitudinous and concurrent, overlapping souls like onion shoals shilling the experience of actual all, we can lose track but never the thread, the tread wearing, the warned weary, and maybe Empedocles did die more than once and only once.
I cannot prove to you that our time does not work the same.
I cannot prove to you that it does not.
Our memory is as suspect as the telling or showing we have in the comic. Memory is as suspect as memes and rhymes.
Did the guy really have those Rob Liefeld proportions Jill Thompson drew him with in a telling? That is his telling. But, not his telling, because he said words, not the picture.
Time gets scary when you get to it. Time gets you when it feels like it.
Mnemonics.
If you think I am anthropomorphizing or giving time a conscious agenda, take off the blindfold, open your mouth, taste with your tongue.
If you are not conscious to it, what is time?
In 1979, on July 12, almost fifty thousand people joined Disco Demolition Night. Steve Dahl, try-hard disc jockey, edgelord from before the term, utilizing military drag and hot girl eye pull to incite a rage of destruction, hate, and faux-modern nationalism at Chicago’s Comiskey Park.
At some point, these all just become names.
With retrospect, I think this is on you.
*******
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.
Self-Made Boys by Anna Marie McLemore.
Queer China by Hongwei Bao.
Alice in Anti-Semitic Land by Benjamin Ivry.