Volume Six of The Lost and Found Season of the Most Pope Joey
Number One of Kids of Lower Utopia
Chapter One of Daffodil Eleven and Softdoor Scout Finnagain.
Page 86- Footnote Page 1

 

 

ATTENTION WORKER!!!
READ THIS ONLY IF YOU ARE SURE YOU DON'T GET- IT

 

Footnotes and Anecdotes. Volume Six of The Lost and Found Season of the Most Pope Joey, Number One of Kids of Lower Utopia, Chapter One of Softdoor Scout Finnagain and Daffodil Dash Eleven. Elizzy and Brother rbear and Tree were my editor. My Friends. My Thanks.
The Cover - (Twilight-of-Lower-Utopia). (The Cover, Pages 3, 29-73, 76-81, and 85, are pencil on paper, 2004. Pages 11-26, are ink on paper 6.125 x 9.625 - 1999, and now in the collection of the divine Claudia, my friend). - So this was the comic I was working on when ODSeeus knocked on my door in the spring of 2OOO. I was working on page 26, and immediately after his visit I stopped working on V6.1 and began V6.2. I had already mapped V6.2, but I hadn't planned that it would be done large and in pencil. I hadn't thought I would ever be able to afford to print a pencil edition because to reproduce pencil costs 10 times more than ink. But despite the sad lack of money the pencil returns me to the bright and shiny place of my childhood. I am convinced that ODSeeus was sent by Luck (Herself) to remind me of that very live and original voice of the most humble of creatures -- the pencil. Now I just can't go back to ink, so the second part of this comic is in pencil, my first language, starting on page 28. When it is done then I will cry about money. But for now I am thrilled to get back to the exhilarating speed of doing just a comic. I had forgotten the strange reinforcing nature of the direct spiritual proletarianism that fills me when I work on a comic. It is so direct. To be back in a comic, is to be Yes!
Page 6-7 - The Softdoor Yantra - (and Introduction by my beloved Brother rbear). Once upon a time when we were kids we were climbing up a huge rock face which we did without proper gear, in order to bring Death as close as we could without actually dying. Death had a way of making things real so we called on Him at times to remind us of what mattered. Anyway, near the top of this great forehead of rock we arrived on a brief plateau from two different sides. As I remember I wasn't paying much attention to Brother rbear because the intention that had brought me there -- to feel the presence of Death -- had swallowed my whole life. I don't think rbear had actually arrived onto the ledge yet (he was a very silent climber). I do remember sitting on the ledge in a complete existential misery and looking over the edge. Death had failed me on this climb, there wasn't even a whisper; so I remember leaning out as a challenge. And that was when He came, in a full whoosh of Presence. Yes! (His Presence is the absolute Present, the very Now that is outside of time.) And, of course, I lost myself and my suffering and with it my sense of balance as well, and I began to slowly topple forward, alone and with nothing to prevent Death from taking me. Then …a hand grabbed me and a familiar voice said "Isn't it beautiful." Brother rbear …he saved my life and in the same breath re-membered me to the Beauty. And that moment for me describes him best. The only other thing he said as we sat there, alive and looking out over the whole world, was "It's all good." And ... It Is. Thank you Brother. JPW - JGD - JJC - JNM - JET
Page 11 - (Home.) So …here on the eleventh page begins the story (after the intro and ritual-of-Yes). Here I present, in the narrative voices of the two main characters' diametrically opposed experiences of Home. Home as the Self, the axis mundi, the I-Am in-my-environment (says Softdoor), and Home as the place where no Seer, no Prophet, no change - is ever accepted (snipes Daffodil Eleven). Spiritual proletarianism = Lower Utopia = the polite Animal Ethics of the Image Nation = "Up with each or down with all!" says PapaWolf (a lord of cheek). So ... always the Question Why? Why this? A: When I am thinking in Images, if I find something fearfully impossible to grok it is usually what I must talk myself into doing (it is usually the right thing to do). Drawing things I've seen, where I am stunned by the question: How could-I-would-I ever draw that? If the idea seems impossible, then that is what I have to do; like: close moving water, snow draped trees, a bed of leaves, a cut of light. Things that seem impossible to speak in pencil.