Travis Hedge Coke
There is Nothing Left to Say (On The Invisibles)
Light Bend Backwards
by Clive Nolan
Clive Patrick Nolan is a photographer and psychotherapist who lives in Snowdonia, Wales.
*******
4.05
Universal Drag
by Travis Hedge Coke
In the late 1990s, some of my friends made “easy money” playing dead or dying in necrophile porn. It was always a laugh. Just lay there. Kids young enough to feel the fun in pretending to die with a lack of broad context.
The salt of the earth is not in the soul, but in the clothes.
I was raised old-fashioned. Drag, for me, has never been a Madonna-derived riff on ball culture or something for RuPaul to host. Every costume you have ever worn, ever identity you dressed up as, each person or profession or status embodied, is a drag act. Doctor drag. Politician. Monarch. Painter. Poet. Physicist. Cardiologist. Mother. Father. Saint. Devil. Coward.
The video game of The Invisibles lets you play five times a go. Many buddhist schools permit monks and nuns to take on vows three times, seven times, as is their wont. Some buddhists tear their robes apart and rearrange them into a new shape, a new pattern. Sometimes, whole monasteries prepare donated rags for the adornment of one.
With The Invisibles, everyone is implicitly dragged up, because every identity, human and other, is an affectation. A set of convictions or tools, a face, a market, a shield.
If we have to distinguish drag kings and queens from other drag; they know they are affected drag. They remember. With most drag, it is easy – it is simple – to forget the drag aspect.
Crowley. Cowley. Crowley. KA ABRA ABHA. The number of earth. The lead, the ape, the fig, the bean.
Real? How can we be sure? can cause so much anxiety. We chicken off of deconstruction in part because deconstruction has no end. There is no answer at the bottom of a well of questions.
“[W]hen it reaches its conclusion, somewhere down the line, I promise to reveal who runs the world, why our lives are the way they are, and exactly what happens to us when we die.”
Skins and what gets down in it. The wasp makes the wears the fig. Bella was put in the wych elm by seventy-two disciples. Bullshit? What more appropriate to cover with?
It’s offensive to suggest. Conspiracy makes us feel nervous, but comforted by the nerve. The Invisibles is about conspiracy theories more than conspiracy. Is it.
The Invisibles was marketed as offering the answer to everything. Knowledge beyond knowledge. That when the comic finished serializing, we would be told some ultimate secret, the why and what of our existence.
To be fearful and nude is to be clothed in skin and soul. Sometimes on the very edge is to have your back or stomach to a wall.
This was always marketing. It was always some made up scam.
The original house ad of The Invisibles declared, “Welcome to the Ultimate Conspiracy,” and, “Subversion has a new name.” Neither looks nor tonally feels like the Invisibles comic we received. The beetles, grenades, and tall buildings do feature in The Invisibles, but not to the degree you would expect, knowing the full comic or even the first issues, that these would be the marketing gimmick, the thing the comic’s best bits are boiled to.
In the house ads before the launch of the first issues, Jill Thompson’s renditions of the principle players are unlike themselves in the comic. The heaviness to Ragged Robin. The smile and eye makeup on King Mob. A very soft-looking, heart-shaped-sunglasses Dane with prominent lips. Almost secret souls. A version of them we have been otherwise never shown.
A popular theory amongst the most obnoxious of public commenter, is that an artist is feigning their religion or their magical or metaphysical practice, “too be interesting.” As if being interesting is only the affectation of the undeserving and not something reached for by everyone.
Vertigo was cool adult drag of a DC Comics young enough to feel the fun in pretending to die with a lack of broad context.
Everyone wants to be thought of as interesting to someone, at some times. Dead, reckoning, and the forte.
Pretentiously trying to be interesting or relevant. We see this accusation less frequently with normative Christian faith or practices, though we do see it there as well. No one is free of this bizarre accusation. A spiteful accusation.
Disco was queer and disco was color.
Eighties Ball had Best Butch and documentaries or reality show replay skip it over.
But, if it is true, if it is a common enough practice to pretend to believe or pretend to do a thing, to sell comics and appear interesting, is that important? What does it mean or change?
“Magick is a thing to sell rocks,” as someone surely has said it.
Or, “Religion is skim to build an army.”
All practice is drag. All ritual and most faith are drag. We cannot really measure faith. We cannot very concretely put out finger on it at all.
Mass Image Compressor Compressed this image. https://sourceforge.net/projects/icompress/ with Quality:80
“We will never become one,” said Sylvester in 1979, “as long as Folsom queens don’t like the Castro queens.”
Descended from a Pentecostal from outside Palestine, Arkansas, Sylvester, musician, star, gay Black man, said of bigotry and the miniature nationalism of cliques, “it’s all segregated and fucked up.”
As we see Ye go down the Tila Tequila route of antisemitism and anti-queer aggression, disinformation networks sprout global blood libel and willfully degraded video clips of vending machine toys kept like reliquaries, maybe we understand how snow becomes blizzards.
What are the forgotten ones? Why do multi-limbed octo-meks, Martian slugs, and the very tall and very small occur to us in our most arresting bad dreams? What do we caul this encephalopod chunnel berth in this future film?
The Invisibles gives up most conspiracy-mongering by Volume Three, the late 1990s years, but so did some of us. Everything from Montauk to the Matrix had become febrile, fertile remix for antisemitic paranoia and misogynistic pick-me desperation. The oncoming dark parade militaristic drag foreseen by The Invisibles carried with it virulent fascism and a Y2K acknowledgment of shaky groundswells.
Why are Bonfire and Queen Sky Blue’s gray death darlings moccs on the ground?
Is Jim Crow in London is a parody of Tom and Jerry?
What if every bad story about Tom O’Bedlam is just a story? What if every evil thing about Edith Manning is dress up? If every dress up of Miles Delacourt from Sir to Brother is a hair shirt panto? How far under the lipstick is the lips?
Drag is not transgender or gay, female, male, nonsexual or sexual, religious, frivolous, private, social, work or fun. Appropriation is not drag, but drag an appropriate.
Real. Natural. Truth.
Crowley is Cowley and Bodie is Brodie, and Edie says to call on Buddha. Everybody on TV.
Confirmation names are drag. So, is confirmation. So, my truth. So your. So you. Sew you and me into clues into clothes into cues in queues of crews in codes and modes and body and soul.
How much of The Invisibles is real depends on whether you feel there is a realness in ink and light. Is there a realness to stories and to stories which have been read or seen or heard and now are alive inside you, in audiences, in minds and memories, is a personal line of questioning, virtually immaterial for anyone else.
I am as uptight, as stressed and strained, as decorated.
A trick, in The Invisibles, is to strip off. What if we are being stripped, and what if it only feels that way?
We should be disgusted the way we present real things. Everyone a TV.
When we feel that drive to start referring to practices or descriptive language as someone, “trying to be interesting,” I think it tends to be that in that moment, our concern is that something we want to be mundane, that we want locked and shut down small and unquestionable, is significantly broader and stranger and magical.
You used to be able to rile eurocentric magick and religion types by suggesting much of “worship” in Indigenous practices is, instead, respect. Whew! would the word itself, “respect,” set some people on edge. They do not want to hear respect, they want to know that without a rape impulse, a violent push, creativity and growth cannot happen. That weird core nonsense at the center of comics like, Promethea, and the doctrines of Robert Greene and the Catholic Church.
It is a hard leap to hurdle the hairstyle of one of the creators of the Matrix franchise. Mayhap, she hath brightly colored elflocks.
Ancestor worship mayhap be respect. Mayhem be respect. Might be folk horror vulcanize vulviform vuln the pelican peeling itself flying fish flighty fickle bird cage to the right of the voltigeurs.
Can be a drag separating survivance drag, entertainment drag, casual drag, professional drag, disguise, costume, posture, imposture, and the strains of paranoia and bigotry, anxiety and anger, which mix with allure and effervescence to foster festering accusations.
You have to own your disgust and your glory. Do not confuse them or mix them up but confuse them and mix them up.
The Invisibles can be read in line with this kind of thought. One can look at the violence of individuals, the sadistic impulse or the cruel hand of a person, group, or magical entity as a required part of a machine, but there is still another layer, a layer which is that layer, all layers. This is a comic. It is not the universe. It is a comic. A set of pages, a set of panels on pages. Spacetime in panels. Timespace through panels. A set of lines and lines and shade and light and color and shape in panels on pages in issues in volumes in media in our homes, our libraries, our internet clouds and our continents and the contents of our tablets, laptops, phones and minds.
There is machinery in the representation of things, the acting and portraying, the discussion and evocation.
Being misrepresented or misread is not a subversion. Not, on anyone’s part.
The Invisibles goes to lengths to remind us what is simulation, simulacrum, symbol and stagecraft, what realness there is in those, what value and tenor. How tender the staging of violence. How fruitful the discussion we have with ourselves of guilt and pain and strangeness. How tenser love and truth and firmness when we suspect they are portrayals but feel a fairy story intensity, a secret truth, a behind truth, the actor acting is someone even if they are an actor acting as an actor.
The raging want transgender and transracial to be closely related, genderqueer and gender-policing to be the same, and maybe it validates their fear. They know it is untrue. They choose things they know are bad, are harmful and cruel to tether to things they know are not harmful. And, it does not matter if rage or libel or cruelty are committed out of fear. It will not lessen nor justify causing pain.
It can be drag all the way up and down, left and wrong, right and right. If we found tomorrow that the sun is not the sun but a simulation, there is no way that simulation could not be as remarkable as the sun. It would remain as important as the sun. If it does all the sun does, it does much.
We call the Scottish Play the Scottish Play as we call, in The Invisibles, Macbeth’s castle, Glamis, because these are their true names. True names hold less curse. Drag names are true names. Invisible names are real. Real is a prefix of realty.
The sun does not blind you on purpose, when you look at it directly. Truth dazzles carelessly. Does truth have agenda?
Drag is mostly people. A human fait. Living. Accomplice of survival. Blessing. Surplice of life. The drag isn’t us, but neither are we.
A lot of what has been rendered, by colonial minds, as sun worship, is a healthy, sensible and awe-filled respect for the sun.
*******
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.
Red herons in Gil Scott-Heron’s The Vulture.
Red Herring in “The Spirit of Rock ’n’ Roll” by Mary Jo Ludlin, Bill Matheny & Laren Bright.
Redd Foxx on The Side Splitter Vol 2.
