INTRODUCTION

"To whom it may concern" -The Vonnegut Prayer

I met Toc Fetch in the spring of 1996. I was on sabbatical in the small art-colony town of Woodstock in the state of New York, USA. It is a quiet town that nestles in the beautiful wooded foothills of the Catskill Mountains. The local people are surprisingly intelligent, eccentric, and private, it is a place I find conducive to my writing.

I am in the habit of taking a walk in the early mornings. In the peace and early quiet of the day, with the air fresh and cool from the night, my thoughts find their true directions. After my walk I would return to my cabin to write through the morning hours. Most mornings on my walk, I would cross paths with the man I came to know as Toc Fetch.

What first drew my attention to him was one side of a conversation I overheard on the other side of a wall of blooming lilac. It seemed to be a ranting disparagement between two voices, high and low. When I rounded the corner I found myself face to face alone with Toc Fetch, who without the customary shyness of strangers, (as if I had been all along party to his conversation), he asked me if I had ever "studied to be innocent". To which I replied, that I found his remark to be "Nearly a contradiction." He leaned into my personal space and studied my face like a mirror. A look which, I knew, weighed my words and their conscious inflections against my body's subconscious expressions, a brief but thorough gestalt from a piercing intuition. "Nearly", he asked, "nearly, as in; very difficult?" I think the fact that I laughed, and then we laughed, at his reply began our friendship.

Later I was introduced to his work and it has taken me three years more to convince him to allow me this introductory note to his second book. I wanted the opportunity of this introduction to clarify some fundamental ideas which are not necessarily widely enough known, but which are, at the very core of advanced theories of perception today.

First off the reader of Toc's work must understand, what is a metaphor, and more importantly, why. A metaphor is a overlay of one image on another. For example; Johnny is a dog. The fact that Johnny is an eighteen year old human male surging with hormones humors us to say he is a dog. These simple words overlays on Johnny all the dog-like qualities we associate with dogs. From our own cultural bias we are usually implying the negative qualities, such as; eating garbage, a fascination with loud smells, and an endless desire to copulate. But why a metaphor? And the answer is, that with four words, "Johnny is a dog", we have created an image worth hundreds of words.

This aphorism states an essential function of the "subconscious". The subconscious speaks to us by way of concise images and feelings, and the connectedness of metaphors, gathers the most imagery in the least words.

So what is "The Subconscious"? The subconscious is a perceptive function of our awareness that misses nothing, witnessing every layer of perception and then feeding needed parts back to us by way of dreams, desires, feelings and inspirations, thereby quietly directing our life.

There are ways to influence "The Subconscious", but its predilections are mostly preset from the perceptually rich experiences of childhood. In most people the subconscious accepts the safe predigested persona of the group, that of Jesus, Jehovah, Allah, etc., Money, etc. And in some few, the subconscious takes on a character and voice before the culture has the chance to form it, (or in spite of it). These people often find their way into the arts, because the hard-wired difference of their perception makes their observations a little more interesting, and therefore a little richer. Often these individuals feel compelled by their subconscious to offer their society their personal language of images and feelings, giving us fresh views of our own humanity.

They give us these views through personalized metaphor, because metaphors arouse the subconscious into a state of response. This seems to be the mechanics of it's nature, it is curious, puzzling and playful. To an extent the more and more concise the metaphor the greater the subconscious responds. The connecting-imagery of metaphors is a kind of high-energy food to the subconscious. Artists are addicts. They are addicted to the escalating response of their own subconscious and the particular energy of feeling it affords. The feeling is everything. And in the arts we applaud obsession.

Toc's works are an exploratory journal of his addiction. His works are both a conscious observation of, and a self-effacing parody on, the mechanics of his (and our), subconscious. He reveals to us through a labyrinth of images, the dual nature of his love for, and the state of war in which he lives with his personified subconscious, personified as Pope Joey and his Grand Circus Psyche.

I once asked Toc to explain in my language, without recourse to poetics, who Pope Joey was. He told me that Pope Joey was "the first-voice-elect of my gathered Heart". As I understand it, Pope Joey is an ambassador from the Dreamtime, or the heart of his subconscious, that very closely borders Toc's daily world. Pope Joey, it seems, was sent ahead into Toc's life, by Toc's own death, (named Papawolf), as a gesture of love. When Toc enters the Dream world (which also includes meditations, trances, and once upon a time psychotropic intended schizophrenias), Pope Joey is his guide and the initiator of the many other characters and experiences inside of Toc's "Self." To Toc his Self is a place that he calls (with tongue-in-cheek) "Schizotopia".

Pope Joey has the appearance of Toc when he was himself a (precocious) child. Pope Joey also carries the mercurial elements of the trickster (often dangerous, like the Hopi's Coyote), along with the biting wit, of Shakespeare's dower fools. Toc considers Pope Joey's particular persona a kind of punishment for his rational resistance to the ruthless machinations of his subconscious. On occasions Toc rides disembodied in Pope Joey's awareness to witness places in towards the center of Schizotopia, but most of the time Toc is the physical vehicle for a number of observers personified from the pantheon of his Self. He calls this endless testing of his subconscious, "Puppet-in-hell's-heaven", and he, in turn, sets his words and images, ("like a grid full of sky"), as our test. His works are not for everyone, they are for those that recognize it, and know it as an echo of their own dream.

So here, I am stepping out of my clinical voice and into Toc's shaggy company of metaphors to stand in-side, here, among unrepentant howls, where Toc lives.

Toc lives charting the inroads to good-madness, drawing out it's secrets with the loving slyness of an honest man. While standing wide-eyed to the onslaught of his Very-Self, his voice is DADA at it's best; yes, obsession, and good-bye. And the relationship between his images and writings is the exact distance that only a Heart wet with poetry can cross. And for you, I recommend it highly. It is a work that lives, and life, after all, is why.

'Doc' Taylor Stubblefield - Wolfli Institute, Lausane, Switzerland 1999