Pages 2 and 3, The Facts of Life (V5 No1)

Page 2. Big thanks to The Xeric Foundation for covering this feast. They are very cool to care. There are surprises yet in the world, and PapaWolf says, "Up with each, down with all." A Statement of Purpose (for the Xeric Foundation). The Short. I suppose my purpose (other than to exercise a daimon of "inner necessity") is to extend comics into a language visual and verbal of a surrealist prose poetry under the influence of cheek. I am telling stories about the life of a soul that is spiritually independent of any God, a soul mortal and insular. A place where God is what you see, a place so painfully steeped in love it might make the language of observation utterly visible. Comics…right? The Long (defining my terms …and such). The subconscious is what is conscious. We are, when we are conscious, mostly un-conscious. The Subconscious : 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 soul's 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 athletics. I am approaching comics (time-served) from art as apposed to approaching art through comics. A friend of mine had a copy of "God's Man" when I was a kid; I hated it with a studied affection, and feasted on its hellish sadness for an eternity. 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 hungers 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) which creates an on going story from two divergent images in a formal proximity, as in film-edits and comic-panels. A series of images initiates the Readers participation in that virtually-alert (sub-conscious) space between two images. Art itself has arrived at a loop in the story of "The Individual", tenaciously gutting-out a fearless …"NOTHING," (egomaniacally and chest thumpingly brave). But even Malevich needed to describe his Desert-of-Feeling with metaphors. Because the soul (as a Godless, mortal, and insular symbiotic) feeds on story. So where am I going with this? My comics. I build stories about the life of a soul through images (verbal and visual) that carry their own life, their own readable depth that speak to the "Reader" without explanation, (and not meant for everyone). The subplot of my images is that no smallest part of any images is any less observed, necessary, beloved, and exacted, than another, and that everything is made of a readably conscious language. With the soul's nod of tenacity, if it's true to its end, a kid living in Lower Utopia could make a novel with only eleven pages. Is art a disguise I've put on just to have my say? ………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 wherever 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 ... once upon a time ... with love, and a heart full of Animals ... Amen. Your brother
Toc Fetch