Volume Three of The Lost and Found Season of the Most Pope Joey
Number One of The Tenaciously Sane Adventures of a Noman - T.O.C. Mongo Fetch
(Cover)

Footnotes. Volume three of: The Lost and Found Season of The Most Pope Joey, number one of: The Tenaciously Sane Adventures of a Noman, Toc Mongo Fetch; Titled: AnOther Piece. (Edited by Toc Fetch and Claudia Cline. ©1998, ink on paper 14'' x 17'' First published by L'association, Paris, in Lapin No24, June 1999, Published in the U.S. by Abbane Ink, November 2001)

Synopsis: An ancient story found in the Brahmavaivarta Purana …reskinned. Book one, Acts one and two. A man attempts to achieve a hearts desire. In this new skin it is to make a painting true to his soul, to do a thing greater than his self. He meets resistance from the personified voices of history and his own past. Even the man's very desire itself, to do this impossible work, comes personified as a huge bright snake to test the man's resolve. With the help of his creative-darkness he defeats his desire and becomes it, climbing inside its skin and there-by avoiding the conflict of his other desires. By this act he gains on the one hand, and must lose on the other, that is the law of these things. And that is the end of book one.

Epilogue by Arebear, in which he remembers the exponential magic that took place once when comrades lived together through this work.

Page 0 - (Cover) Frame 1: (an old pun) 'Noman' is nobody, everybody is nobody if everyone is every one - the proletariat, humble humanity. Noman is also the name Homer's Odysseus (the preeminent hero) calls himself when he plays the trickster against a godling, against a son of one of his own gods.

Toc was given the name Mongo Fetch, by his brother Obear, taken from a character of that name from Robertson Davies' novel World of Wonders (Book 2 part 5 paragraph 43). A Fetch is a spirit double, an Other. An Other is a metaphor of the Self.

(Toc defines his terms): The Self or subconscious is what is conscious. We are, when we are conscious, mostly unconscious. The word Subconscious is a flip-flop, if to be conscious is a pitcher suspended in the deepest of the ocean, to then title the ocean as a subset of the pitcher... is parody. Our small island of awareness is much more of a sub-conscious realm within our Self then our Self is within us. The subconscious (better called the soul) is a perceptive function of our awareness that misses nothing, recording every layer of perception and then feeding needed parts back to us by way of dreams, desires, and ...visions, essentially creating our life as a dialogue. Though the dialogue is mostly a one-way conversation, there are ways to influence the 'soul'. Though... its predilections are mostly preset from the perceptually rich experiences of childhood. Art is the closest approximation to that language of the soul, and the "metaphor" gathers and speaks the most imagery in the least effort. The souls conversation moves like water, the path of least resistance ...down. If you will talk to the soul, you will speak the-most-in-the-least and be willing to go downward. Down where things are so carefully lit and praise is the only sustenance.

Surrealism speaks a figurative poetry, (best described in the tradition of Lorca, Neruda, and Rumi), that reads the world as a conscious conversation, and maximalizes the distance within metaphors. I belong to this aesthetic.

I am approaching comics (time-served) from art as opposed to approaching art through comics. A friend of mine had a copy of God's Man when I was a kid; I hated it, and studied its hellish sadness endlessly. What I think impressed me the most was the amount of "inner-necessity" (a Kandinsky thing) observable in the work, and the amount of "Serious" that went into it. No smallest part of it was less hellish than another.

Storytelling is the nature of what I hear when I listen into everything. Storytelling; the human hunger that come right after survival, like right after the belly's full; I mean ... we invented languages just so we could elaborate on our stories. Art itself is a kind of religion of Storytelling. And religion is just '...dead but not yet buried imagination (eec).' Every image is a complete story, our 'Reader' (our subconscious), tells us, if we listen, how any image came about, and the trajectory of where the image-event will possibly go based on the gestalt of clues. In many ways this is what Pollock offered, in a concretized form; that art is a summation, a 'still-point' in an extending story, in a larger frame of reference. It is this innate desire/function to read, (inductive-deductive), that creates an on going story from two divergent images in a formal proximity, as in a paragraph, film-edits and comic-panels. A series of images initiates the Readers participation in that virtually-alert (sub-conscious) space between two images.

In my work I am caught in my own reflection with the eyes of a snaked horse, near mute for fear of splitting my tongue, with a hand up to cover my ugly teeth fearing to frighten flowers, searching every word from the back of my eyes …you-know ...art. Is art a disguise I've put on just to have my say? The-fuck-yeah! ...And it is embarrassing, but what choice do I have. The air whispers by kidding at my hair, the first drop of rain parts my lips, mud hugs to my feet and climbs me, flicked up to my ankles, and the fire leans towards where ever I sit. It's a fucking conspiracy from the elements down! Isn't It! Everything lifts its huge toothy head and growls Talk! Tell us!' I say, 'What do you want me to say?' And everything answers in a little kid's voice, 'Tell us a story'."

So …what follows is …one… possible reading, and far less valid then your own.