The Sim/Fetch Dialogue

Part One: "Further In and Further Up"

3/20/04 Letter #5.
Toc went out of turn here and fucked things up
so that this letter #5 passed Dave's in response to Letter #4 in the post
creating a kind of time hiccup.
So here is his second response to Dave's letter of 3/6/04 (Letter #3)

Dear Dave

I'm adding to my website a button to a very long series of love letters to my Gallery-guy Mr.ODSeeus (Roger Ricco). I'm adding it for what it's worth in its weight-of-ideas that are interesting to me. The following is one of thoes letters with a quick history of comics that I thought you might find worth a smile for it's somewhat outside perspective. And you will see that it was really at the time just a kind of self-directed pep-talk. So many of the voices in my head just arrive to root for me and keep me on this trail in the dark.
(Yeah I know that I am a terrible writer and that it is only my trilling enthusiasm for ideas and images which carries my words afloat… but oh-well and Hi-ho. In the words of Kabir: "It is the intensity of the longing … that does all the work. Look at me, and you will see a slave of that intensity.")

Your pal
Toc in his socks

(2/13/00 Letter to Roger Ricco)

Roger...will I spook you by saying that I've always known that I would meet you some day? Sorry, but I always thought you'd be woman, and of course you're a man...because that's PapaWolf's game. He always arrives from where I am not looking. What's the point of being a trickster without milking the juice of surprise?

And who could trust an artist who could sell his Self?

I am percolating with Ideas. My brother AreBear (of magnificent memory) pointed out (after that dinner) that you seemed reluctant to speak of my work as a product, that I might feel in some way delicate about turning it into money...the-fuck-no! My internal circus-psyche has, through years of close and loving horror, been beaten down into a kind and willing materialism.
I love the idea of making money, and even better than money, is to wake-up this medium into art, (and the reverse). An art whose form fits the true proletariat mythology of our time (whispered: the proletariat being naturally materialist). An art innately designed by the technology of its form to be applicable to every economic strata..."UP WITH EACH, DOWN WITH ALL"...and maybe we should burn the originals!
Yeah!
Funny ...not-so-funny?

A Poor Little History Constructed of Toc-ish Opinions

So...from storytelling -- to plays -- to Gutenberg -- to novels -- to films. Film began as a technology that had to entertain for its supper. The early films were gross parodies of life, child like imagery full of human caricatures of flat heroes and thin villains. Art was just...out of reach, an embarrassing idea (because art is never a good Reason).

I imagine many stage actors, during early films, felt that they knew art in their Self, and held that knowing in their presents during filming. But mostly film's early perceptive head was still too heavy to get out of the way, (and heavy headed giants don't make art, they steal it). And then one day there was young Orson Wells and Akira Kurosawa, and you probably know (earlier) others who began it, and suddenly film, like every medium, reached a moment when it could finally, naturally (as if invisibly), speak its own language fluent. As if it had fallen in love for the first time. And then it just… was an art form.

Art is a skilled intention. Though the word "art" is slopped around on everything now. It's just a big wet word, or worse it is like the word "shit", "hey buddy, is this your shit? ...I like your shit". Yeah-thanks. But it is better that no word is sacred or we'd all have to eat dogma. More …shit.

The life of comics have paralleled film, they also began in the magnified realm of human caricature, super heroes and super villains, telling the stories of the most common denominators. Appealing through images to the innate 'Reader" (the subconscious). Comics appeal to the simplest observational deduction, to the pre-literate non-literate in us all, to the kid who still reads images (no matter his age).

Prior to art there is reading the world and its dialogue of story. A baby looks at the world and learns to recognize it, learns to read it, first there are senses, the colors and the patterns with the good stuff, food and touch and those beautiful cooing sounds of love. The kid then learns to read the minutiae of face and place. Soon enough the simple language of humanly-predigested images, of storytelling, becomes a food shared. We give Picture books to kids because they still love to read images, naturally. As a kid we read the potential story in anything. Throw a metaphor at a kid and they won't cock an eye at you, they'll ask "what happens next," because they see.

I have always used kids to tell me what is going on in my work, if a trusted kid like Jyothi, Isham, Bean or Ivan, don't see it, then it's not there. School necessarily wipes out this ability to read, school is all about the words and not the experience the words represent. It forces the mind into a state of detached abstraction - detached from life. But …when you close your eyes and I say the word "Horse," you don't see a word, you don't see an abstraction, what you see is a very specific horse, and …the trajectory of it's story (with clues to the where and the when). As if your Self is saying with each image, "Love this …and more will be given you." (-PS- Equus-)

I remember when you showed me Dargar's images for the first time and Dragonlenny acted surprised that I could read his images without any feeling of doubt? Even without speaking of the more abstracted feelings stated by color interactions, there are learned clues in visual symbols. Symbols that have been repeated and handed down because no image, as yet, can state it better, (they are visual abbreviations of metaphors). This world language of images that are used in comics, has yet to be codified by "scholars" and therefore it is still alive and growing, it is still allowed its mysteries, and everyone who puts their hand in, adds to its possible life. A doted line around words is whispered because it is half-invisible, half unseen like the wind. Eyes that are black are turned inward, they are looking inside. For example, some of Dargar little hermaphrodites have black eyes: children, having just arrived from the Inner Reality are still part-here part-there, and are usually still closely connected to their pre and subconscious origin. This is a culturally independent archetype; we say "out of the mouths of babes," comes wisdom. It is a given that children don't need to look inside because that is where they still live. The worlds of inside and outside are still somewhat equal to them. Therefore if a child's eyes are completely turned towards looking inside they are acting as a seer - an instrument of the absolute, or they are Heartsick and forced to remain inward, or they are a witness to an atrocity. (In some ways all three are the same because of their similar impetus; that of the realization of mortality). This seems obvious to me. But black eyes are just one clue in the total image to be verified by other clues. Oden had to give one of his eyes to gain in-sight, to gain the two black ravens of wisdom - past and future. Owls are always the messengers of the gods because they can see inside the dark, and the dark is from where all things first arrise (the virtual photon). Images are our oldest language, pre-literate.
Every image is a complete story, our "Reader" (our pre-un-sub-subconscious), tells us, (if we listen), how any image came about. The Reader also reads the trajectory of where the image-event will go in its gestalt of clues. It is this innate ability to read, (inductive/deductive), which creates an on going story from two divergent images placed in a formal proximity, as in film storyboards and comic-panels; it is what reads the continuity between juxtaposed images in a poem. A comic initiates the Readers participation in that virtually-alert subconscious space between two images.

I once heard a great vedic scholar say that the only thing from the deep past that has survived "scholars" unmolested, without being bludgeon to death with the Hyzenberg-Uncertainty probe of knowledge ("knowledge being a polite word for dead but not buried imagination" says eec), are the Puranas (the children stories). And now today, the avanti-guard of Jungian psychology are devoutly mining the old fairy tales and myths, which they have found, amazingly, to parallel human psychological growth. These miners of old stories have come to the conclusion that we actually need stories in order to be healthy in our Hearts. Interesting? So… we need stories says the quazi-science of Psychology. We need…the art of stories. OK(and that 's as close as it will ever get to science admitting the necessity of art). And what is a Fairy Tale? It is an image rich story of heroes and villains.

My generation grew up with comics in the late 50's into the 60's. Comics have, on and off been demonized out of fear of its potential freedom and direct voice, and literally forced to wear a code badge like a yellow star under the stern eye of Christian moral fascism after the Kefauver Hearings in the fifties. Towards the end of the 60's, Zap comics said, "Fuck you" and did whatever it wanted to. It shat in its pants and picked its nose and cummed on everything. Zap got a bit sloppy-high on its own freedom and couldn't seem to ever take itself seriously and look beyond potty humor. (And now we call it "art" but it requires a cloud of verbiage and care not to hold it anywhere near Vermeer or Agnes Martin).

In the late 70's the first self-published independent comics were begun. Dave Sim (Cerebus: written as an ever sharpening parody on the medium, and it's very self) was a kind of first sighting of Self awareness. Then other Independent comics began telling stories that finally disregarded the "comic code" (though the majority were still aimed at kids), the most important of these was the Hernandez brothers; Love and Rockets. A comic without gross heroes and villains, just stories about a small eccentric village in Mexico, or young barrio punkers in California, beautiful stuff, worthy of feeling, alive under the influence of love and humor. Jamie Hernandez greatly stylized his images in the comic tradition but still carried a feeling of honest observation, which for me changed comics for good.

So …a small hand full of people begin to apply the criteria of "inner-necessity" to this fledgling form; comics, (as did Patchen and Ward earlier on). For me comics really began with my own death in 1989. So many times I came close to the end of my own story, that exact place of my death, inside, carrying my small snarling heart opened wide, as if I were ready. And all through my deliriums I was met (plagued) by an imp of my Very-Self, a small Pope in white cowboy boots named Joey Fool. Pope Joey a self-proclaimed Lord-of-Cheek. He was sent to be my guide into Elysium, and I began to listen carefully to him… (I hope this kind of thing, a polytheistic personality doesn't creep-you-out it is unavoidably standard fare in my head. The Eskimos say that we have many souls in us and that seem to be my take as well).
Pope Joey once said to me, (speaking of art), as we huddled in the dark over a small campfire along The-Night's-Creek in the woodlands of Schzotopia, he said, "Brother…if you can't print it… you're on the wrong side."

Very few comics ever seem to realize art… why is that? There is maybe a single hand full of people who are not bowing to the limits of its history. Do you know that substance between "real-things"? It reminds you of "the real", though it is not real, it is filler, it is Maya, it is that syrup in which the bits of apple float inside the pie, it is the holding pattern while you wait to come down to earth, and it is 50 years of comics. 50 years of one tiny niche done-to-death.

(Toc-says): Reading the "intention" of a work, and the necessity of it's …everything, tells me if a (comic) is serving art or otherwise. The intention cannot be to make art. What is art? And besides, art is by any rational honest definition, impossible. (The Audacity! Imagining your self soliciting a resonance of perfection, who do you think you are?!) So the intention is then to be utterly honest, without reserve, to a feeling that is more worthy than ...life. A feeling of the sublime. To tell a story so utterly that your chosen audience feels redeemed by it, and holds it as a place inside theirself by their Self. This is art … for me, my religion (to bind back to the source). My question (to my Self) is … is the work a conduit for this (sublime)" inner-necessity," this truth, or is the work acting out limitations from outside its necessity, desires that are not the work's desires?

In comics acting out limitations is obviously an easy thing to do because the expectations of its existing audience are so limited that they are a little frightening, it is as if no one is looking. I mean, who cares about comics? You might then ask why I care, and I have no (Reason-able) answer, just a Feeling that I recognize as my Self. A feeling of sublime potential that is living my life.

What is a comic? What is art? What art is -- is utterly elusive, and that is what keeps it alive, Art seems to be repelled by the fuss and noisy attention of money. It seems to demand its own voice and if you fuck-with-it you lose it. It is a very private wild animal. You try to find out what it wants and …you give it, you give it your everything, your love, your family, your Heart, just to have it stay with you. "…Stay…"
And do I need to tell you it is worth it?

Your pal
Toc