Travis Hedge Coke
There Is Nothing Left to Say On The Invisibles
3.08
The Same Shows as You
by Travis Hedge Coke
“I imagine the next thing you as the reader will be interested in is whether or not you have been abducted and if so, what can be done about it.”
Encounter in the Pleiades: An Inside Look at UFOs
Preston B Nichols and Peter Moon
“The maps within this book should be seen as an aid to memory, rather than a representation.”
A Map of the Invisible
Jon Butterworth
King Mob takes walks through the toxic parts of the wall of reality, behind the paint and decals that make our world, so he can feel empathy, sharpen his resolve. Everything is exaggeratedly terrible, deformed and tragic, conflicted and brittle. The Berlin Wall is a thousand yards tall; the air can kill. In that realm, he visits a mother and child who represent a cosmological sickness.
The look of the mother and the baby, the tone of the scenes, remind me immediately of a Flaming Carrot gag, in which that titular hero is described as, “not too bright,” but someone who saved the baby from a burning building when no one else would. A comic in which aliens have a raygun which can make statue heads turn to balloons and pregnant women give birth to Nazis.
The sick friction of nightmare familiarity.
“I used to be with ‘it’, but then they changed what ‘it’ was. Now what I’m with isn’t ‘it’ anymore and what’s ‘it’ seems weird and scary.”
– Homerpalooza
Brent Forrester
The Invisibles is concerned with the influence of influence, but so is life. I am concerned about the influence of influence. I am concerned about you. The familiar and influential stir around inside us, until Me and Bobby McGee is mixed with Dale Carnegie. Backlot town sets and local rock formations reused between television shows until they become more familiar to us than the far side of our own towns and cities.
Even what we do not recognize can be familiar, and familiarity is not comfort.
The anxiety we face when we have to acknowledge an actor is not their characters or a character was not who we remembered, that a character is changeable production to production, writer to writer or portrayal by portrayal. The stress of knowing someone can like the same snacks as us, the same old tv shows, wear their hair the same as us or also have a parent as we did, while choosing to be a vastly different person in politics, aesthetics, or tone of voice.
Ragged Robin’s birth name is a name no one who made The Invisibles owns. It is part of a trademark owned by DC Comics and the owners of DC Comics. Or, could be if anyone said it.
We all come out of influences, we all come tethered, feathering our nests with familiarity and clarification.
It can often make us feel particular if we have feathers we think no one else has. There is an aristocracy in old sitcoms, in science fiction franchises and eras of painting and schools of philosophy and shoals of superhero comics, brands of clothing and weaves and wefts of style which we feel are idiosyncratic to us and like-us. A program can have millions of fans, but feel like a small club, a select few.
No one can really watch the same show as you. No one has read the same poem as I have. We might watch or listen or read simultaneously, from one page, one television set, one screen, one wall, we may hear the same words from the same mouth at the same time, and it is not the same.
Our old programs are not catalogued in streaming services or on disc or VHS. The books of our childhood are not shelved or boxed. In us, our media, or stories and experiences go. In us they are. Still are. Fresh, changed and changed around, but renewed and constant. Consistent in their internality. In us.
None of us were every cool. Every one of you is cool.
Some of you got uncool.
The first things many people tweeted after the Sandman show debuted in Netflix, were laments of, “Imagine if they all read the comics,” sort. As though Sandman was a comic no one really ever heard of, very in need of a larger audience but alas, only the chosen great ones among us can read such a comic.
From Trekkers to Christians, the sentiment remains too often the same. “If only they were as enlightened and good as us.” As if everyone is not familiar with their program.
I remember getting a copy of Aleister Crowley’s Magick Without Tears out of the university library for a project and my friend, a Silver RavenWolf devotee, being shocked a school library would stock such “rare” and “important” a volume. The original thelemic Clarissa Explains It All, Magick Without Tears is not particularly rare and I do not know how important. And, as schools, RavenWolf and Crowley probably run thematically parallel more than they run contrary in any ways. None more hermetic than the diaper commercial on afternoon tv.
Did you know that if you search for both Silver RavenWolf and Phil Hine on twitter, it reports there are no tweets which include both?
Pride is alright. Pride is nine tenths novelty. And, novelty will get you up in bed in the morning.
Anything is rare to someone who thinks they cannot get it.
A principle frustration of so many in The Invisibles and out, is that we intuit what could be in reach, but is denied us. Possibility and pleasure, novelty and comfort are held from us.
Some inscribe, “This place is terrible” on a memory of what had engraved on it, “in Australia.” Some invoke a flower as a person, as a meadow, or write themselves, over the manuscript: DESTROY. (Doolittle.)
Martin Brody in Amity, is a chief of police. Martin Brodie (sans amitié) is a big King Mob fanboy. He takes the wrong lessons in his fandom, but the lessons still serve him well in his brutality. James Bond, the living ass. The empire.
Lord Fanny, from childhood, like all Death’s good friends, like’s a rough gag. Dirty joke. Silliness of cot death babies.
Audrey Murray seems alright. She is not harming anyone, actively, or bringing anyone down. Her husband beats her and blames her for his frustrations, his emotionality and perceived lack of freedom. Until he is murdered, and dying, is out of her hair, except for funeral costs and grieving and everything else that attends a death.
When Audrey Murray rescues King Mob, she does not need guns or knives, no wild special fx magic or a satchel of explosives. She does not even need corn and prayer, sigil and masturbational focus. Audrey Murray saves King Mob’s life by not being a jerk. By being alright.
Audrey may not be into the same tantric practices or technofetishism or car culture or what have you, as our King Mob. She may not know enough George Orwell or episodes of The Prisoner to quote them.
A desire for freedom or a wariness of prisons is not dependent on a particular piece of art. A technique, occupation, physical phenomena or objects which are present in a television show, a painting, a comic book, do not necessarily originate from that media. Not even if that is where you first learned of those phenomena or objects.
The ectoplasm of the Ghostbusters franchise acts as ectoplasm as understood by occultists, parapsychologists, ghost aficionados, et al. It has its own rules, particular to its universe – and those fairly light and open to contradiction – but ectoplasm did not originate with the motion picture, Ghostbusters. The ectoplasm in The Invisibles, also called, “magic mirror” and “logoplasm,” among other terms, which is also potentially in evidence in high-stress vomiting scenes, has its own in-universe rules, it has similarities to Ghostbuster’s ectoplasm, but it is because they are both using a preexisting concept, and one which is ostensibly not coined to refer to a new invention, but as a descriptive term for a phenomenon which existed before the term.
Vomiting ectoplasm as emotional ejection as BPM3 amniotic filth. Everyone always in the ejection seat. The oceanic angst of the bad womb. Anxiety and agonies of undeserved, unpredictable pain or disruption. Flush and flowering with love and pleasure. Exuding essence.
Even if ectoplasm reminds a character in The Invisibles of the movie, Ghostbusters, or the franchise, it is because the term exists outside both fictional sets. (See nonexistent postscript for detail on how Grof’s Perinatal Matrices are demonstrated in metaphor across Ghostbusters 2 (1989) and Titanic (1997).)
Love, sex, and fashion may remind us or characters of the comic and motion picture, Barbarella, but queerness, love, fetishism or thigh highs do not depend on an existence of Barbarella to exist. At least, not causally.
I am free to headcanon that Fanny is deeply influenced by Barbie and Monica. Monica’s strength and ability to do anything. Natch, too, Barbie. I can point to Barbie-like dolls or lean on broad Brazilian stereotypes. I am not in charge.
Our feelings, our reasonings, will affect the shows we watch, the comics we read, whether they affect it in the same way for others enjoying the same programs. You can put your canon out there, though. Once it is on the internet, spoken in a living room, written in a book, talked about anywhere, ideas are free to spread. Interpretation becomes interpolation. Headcanon to canon.
The use of ectoplasm or logoplasm in The Invisibles acknowledges the power of confirmation bias and perceptual lensing in how the -plasm will take on form related to thoughts in those nearby. Ectoplasm may take on the shape of a nude woman or a naked rabbit, portray ecstatic visions, or be the base material of all matter and energy in our universe.
Is it logoplasm or us reaching out? It is processional, sure as any of us reading this have written or made a note.
The prima materia is how we found.
Dr Stanislav Grof’s theories of perinatal matrices are aroused in The Invisibles and arose from here. That there are four basic perinatal matrices, which may dictate or illuminate the glomerated appearance of the Barbelith buoy or the “oblate spheroidal shape” of the Philadelphia Experiment field and the vesica piscis occlusion.
The vesica piscis maps the illusion of our centrism. The world surrounds us. Sure, but we contain, we veer left, we veer North, we veer later and earlier. We free float and move with direction.
Amniotic, sustained, Universe A of The Invisibles, Salomon’s House, the healthy twin, the original timeline, or good world, is Basic Perinatal Matrix 1. The healthy womb experience encourages no panics, no unmet needs.
Universe B, the Outer Church, the sick twin, the stillborn, the encroaching timeline, bad world, is Basic Perinatal Matrix 2. The Land of No Exit. The All-Encompassing Cosmic Holding Cell. Never Escape. Contractions have begun, but the cervix is not open.
Our universe, the sick twin, as seen in The Invisibles, is not birth, but birthing. BPM3. The Death and Rebirth Struggle, moving from womb and birth canal to outside the parent, or by whichever other way.
Our perceiving of politics, finance, scent, style, tactility, and personality through the lenses of entertainments, of art, of formal education, parental advice, urban legends, parables, and news stories is a real phenomenon and unavoidable. It can be tempered, but it will occur.
Our thoughts, even our passing thoughts or sublimated fantasies, affect our waking, living, interacting reality.
Our anxieties and met or unmet needs explode into judgments of ourselves, our universe, our parents, place, state, politic, hungers, desires, comforts, needs, cosmogonies. Bad Universe and Good Universe, good and bad twins, first or secondary, we shape and appraise with what we have to work with.
Our politics of perceiving, finance, style, scenting, entertaining, lensing, listening, voiding, tempered.
Dan Aykroyd, who wrote and starred in Ghostbusters, is a fourth generation investigator into the paranormal and magick. On his great-grandfather’s property, he asked his dead ancestor if he should tear down the home. There were three snapping sounds and everything vibrating, as he tells it, like as if electric.
Dan Aykroyd turned the property into a museum dedicated to his family’s work.
As we make it to BPM4, Death and Rebirth, we transform and transfix these worlds. Like the stories told in The Invisibles as stories, of cities which grow and communities which transform to make rockets or spores to other worlds, Universes A, B, and the C-section overlaps are transitions we appraise from partial ignorance and partial hopes.
Maybe it is all metaphor or further ignorant grappling with what we have to work with. There may be no basic perinatal matrices except those storied or felt. Grof calls for Condensed Experience systems, called COEX. A naive interpretation of experiential data. Letting COEX systems define instead of inform would make the BPM more important than what they do.
Mr Dreams, in The Invisibles, discusses a community which rocketed itself through time, transfigured through space, from when to now, and how the little ones with them screamed as little ones do.
To quote from Peter and Wendy, maybe written by a pedophile, maybe not: “You always one after you are two. Two is the beginning of the end.”
Living in BPM3 with its ranges of the titanic, the sexual, the demonic, the sadomasochist aggressions, and the scatological, we make our calls with what we have to be what we are to work with.
But, Travis, I can’t keep my hands on my thighs and think a chair into being a unicorn without moving! Fraudulent! someone may cry.
I don’t think they really want it.
*******
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.
Foreigner. Gates, Southern.
Equestrian Burglary; or the Breaking-in of Horses. Blaine, Delabere Pritchett.
A Banister Wrote This Book. Dalrymple, James.
“Avision of Thésée.” Conchology. Shelley, Percy Bysshe.