The Sim/Fetch Dialogue

Part One: "Further In and Further Up"

3/18/04. Letter #4. Toc's response to Dave's letter of 3/6/04

Dear Dave:

Thank you for the layers of conversation in your letters. Playing catch with someone who can … is a little spooky for me. It's usually just me and Gravity.

It feels like a hard ball in hand but when I let go it stops, and looks back smiling at me like a mirror, and says, "How far?"
I say, "Don't be smart! Gowan! Jimmy as you like but please arrive polite."
Yes, you caught-clean my bewindsored pitch. It's tricky to talk about egotism vs egoism in the work without shrinking. (Robertson Davies your fellow countryman, and my most beloved writer, says it best in World of Wonders).
Mr. Smith is a charming nostalgic standard bearer of the old hustling regime, full of elegant style and the driest wit (and …the endless repetition of which "…is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake" [borrowing the words of Steven Dedalus])
Mr. Smith, just-kinda-somewhat you-know "wha-da-ya-call-it" like-aaa doesn't really …almost interest me. You do.

"great men burn bridges before they come to them" -eec-

I am convinced that you are right about the hand holding that you suggest with my (non-existence) audience. I would readily stitch-up the artificial-graft with my next published book but …when I wrote "Why-a-duck" I was happily naive about Diamond's willingness to go on distributing me. Filip Sablik finally clued me into the unspoken quota of how many comics must be sold with each solicitation in order for them to continue distributing me. And so with the way he left it, it is doubtful, if not all together a flat-fat-no that they will allow me on the train again. Diamond's bottom-line, saying that they won't distribute me, has very little to do with publishing my comics anyway, it only has to do with how much smaller is the small return on its output. But luck swims deeper than money and it is a "mad-funny" ride if you're willing that it might turn around and eat you.

You were spectacular in your assessment:
"My poverty is not a disguise or an affectation. I'm not obscure because I don't know where I am or what I'm doing. I'm pursuing something that I hope (on a minor scale of my hierarchical hopes) proves to be lucrative, but all that can be hoped is that financial viability proves to be the lucky accident up ahead. I have to follow my quarry and hope that there's money at various locations along its migratory route. It isn't Marxism. I'm not opposed to how the capitalistic sleight-of hand is accomplished or opposed to the illusion itself. I'll take my doves from any sleeve that's offering them."
…Wow! "…to follow my quarry and hope…" To trust life, to trust in the luck that opens to awareness is all I have.

When I speak of psychology I am using it as a simile for open daylight, for a blue sky and readable distance (a kind-of fear-not gesture), but I am thinking along the lines of James Hillman (Spring Publication: Re-visioning Psychology, The Puer Papers, etcetera). Hillman has a respect and reverence for the independent spiritual life of an image as few do even among people devoted to art. And I apologize for throwing the word in front of you without qualifying it better.
You and I have fairly different historical accents on many of our close and important words. My words (my concepts and voices of my image-nation) have difficulty wearing the masks and clothing that are their "closest plural approximation" in English. This is why I am constantly falling into what looks like a poetic form but is really just the first sighting of my thoughts (because images are my first, and still best, language, they are the form I think in). I-AM a preliterate animal posing as human. I mimic rationality because it is so charming with excellence, but I have an animal Heart of which I am deeply/tragically … in-love
I hope these images do not offend you, (I would rather hope that asking you if they offend you, offends you ...but …not by much).

Wow! I did not know what a fuss of harpies you had gathered around you about your anti-feminist imagery. Wow again. I stumbled onto an online stoning of you… with admirers leaping bravely in front of the stones to protect your…effigy. It was all so frustrated in its wobbling spin. The problem with all those opinions is that they are composed of air alone …because Images refuse to behave anyone but them selves. Hi-ho! (A Vonnegut prayer).
I wanted to turn all that pent up misdirection back on its self by saying (in your voice of-course); "Forgive us… All …You see I was just grieving for all my loss and defining the sublime with these bright black flowers I found. Forgive my images for not agreeing with your tastes (meat in place of cake), forgive the painful excesses of my observations for being true to themselves, If anything I would have hoped that they would have helped you to see your Self, knowing that there are no crimes of which we are not all curious and capable. And for all the rest -- who are not capable -- I am sorry for your limits, and please-please go back to sleep. Love, Dave."
I imagine you might think that too many people would see that as an apology. I my self see it as a reverse pipe fitting for returning the pressure back onto itself, because anyone incapable of forgiving is guilty of their own accusations -- is spitting in the wind. And the wind is good.
Dis-love is dis-ease and its own depravation = knowledge. But anything worthy is difficult and almost always painful (and oh-do-we-know-that). I suppose all that heavy judgment of you is the difference between the artist and the non. Because in art, (to own an image as your Self), you are necessarily obligated to follow out observations to their "logical absurdity" ignoring all preconceived limits. This has ever been the formula for great things, and great things are dangerous because right and wrong runs perpendicular to beauty, and beauty is always yours … alone. Anything less is … cake …and a continuation of the mundane.
I think that you "hate" women, the way I hate communism by the way I memorized and sing the Internationale with a pride and longing blazing in the high chamber of my heart … or something like that.
Therefore … from my stand, I thank-you for your research, and I'm sure glad I didn't have to go there. Hi-ho!

"Hi-ho. Hi-ho. It's off to Work we go."

So …to me, Duchamp's green-box is a comic. Anything placed in sequence is a story, a possible comic. A row of objects tells me a story of their relationships in form as well as use. One painting in a show on a wall next to another is a story that is usually about the life of the painter (but could just as easily be about the personified life of that work). When I was a kid reading words in comics was optional. But it was really Batman who taught me to read. What could Batman say to make evil men cry? When I was a kid my father's art books were also comics, a kind of problem solving in describing to my selves the stories that accrued between the paintings on any page, a story of the world they came from. Every image carries it's own innate story, an inductive/deductive trajectory, and that is the very charm that comics live under.
I understand that we are interested in conscious comics, the sequential that is conscious of it's self as a narrative (a comic), but then what isn't conscious, (and this from an atheist)? This open-definition does not seem to live as a reality even in Free-range comics. The apparent desire towards a tiny protective exclusivity with lip-service to art seems to define the comic world. But outside that tiny definition of comics there is a potential that is the equal of art in form (…as well as name). Hell is too small for an angel to fit in, said CSLewis in The Great Divorce (a funny and telling image). Even in the (supposed) independent comic world they seem to love the word art but (funnily-enough) do not like …art. As if art is an image that agrees, a friendly dog who only looks like A wolf. And all this coming from a (supposed) visual realist - me, (but who reads the fine print).
I know that the limitations all come down to their bottom-line and the word art is really just a selling point in the jingle. And …that you must find my posture of direct naiveté laughable … but it's funny to me too.

And you can't help but love an audience who cares so much even if they're blind authorities on the very now of daylight.

So I have taken to a new aggressive expression when sending off my comics to strangers, I say, "Be warned… my comics are not entertaining they demand that you give as much as you get." (I just refuse to belong to any club that can't have me as a member.)

Snake says, "Yes"

Snake says yes and no, with a perfectly random offering, whenever I ask. My sense of God (which is, if it is any thing, is a lucky innate love for the sublime [which is a lovely exhalation of reverence for the cognizable Heart in all things]), my sense of God is so perceptually everything that it seems pointless-to-silly to project a separate thing of it, or to participate in making of it any thing. Therefore I separate my Self from all organized forms of it and by so doing claim to take responsibility for my actions.
I very carefully do not believe, A-theism (…despite my vast Feeling that I am Observed by everything and that my observations in return are a dialogue with that virtual awareness). To believe is just an intense form of desire but you desire something only when you don't have it - I don't believe in what I AM, because I don't want to BE separated from IT. I think the concept of God is generally a projected anthropomorphic answer to fear-of-death and fear-of-life.
To-open is my direction towards the aesthetic-sublime (a kind of heliotrope of the Heart), and the concept of God is in language synonymous with closing. A forever us-against-them. Words are their history, and I have chosen to befriend some and make others sit in the corner and contemplate their too-willing participation in harm.

You see the kind of problem I have with attempting to stand up inside any simple skin of words. I tend to start dancing even with this terrible limp. I am just not very useful (but my voice isn't bad). I try to wear corrective leggings and find my Self dancing the Mockery. I am what the pack-wolves looks for in the herd, anything lame or exuberant.

I am too shy with a weight of thanks towards you to ask what you will do next but I am so looking forward.

Your pal
Toc

PS - Enclosed is the cover of my second chapter of my Kids of Lower Utopia V6 No1 hot off my little press. I was trying for one of those sweetly sad Da Vinci twilights that used to kill me as a kid, as if all utopias live only in their twilight.