Kids of Lower Utopia - V6 No3 - A Letter from the Front Lines

V6 No3 Cover, ( 2002, pencil on paper, 33" x 51" )

Statement/Synopsis: In this, my 8th book, Kids of Lower Utopia: A Letter from the Front Lines, I am drawing, through the lens of Zen Nondualism, an allegorical dream in which my heroine; River Scout Finnagain, travels through archetypal stages of realizations to finally arrive at her beginning.

To me this story can best be told in the medium of the pencil. Nothing holds more directly the silent life of observation-in-light as a metaphor, undisguised, then the pencil; simple, direct, and so very elemental. My drawings are spoken in a careful language of conscious vectors summing into "still-points" where life's attention waits, gathering silence.

The pages are a sequence of images in a formal proximity that initiates a narrative flow which solicits from the viewer intuitive leaps to bridge the space between pages - leaps through their own non-linear space of Truth, of pure awareness. At first this book was a series of wordless long-jumps, like visual Zen sutras describing the greatest of the hero's journeys - the one of self-realization - but even my most perceptive friends asked for words to encourage their jumps. So I created the "possible" subtext pages (like diptychs) that are each a detail from their original page. On these pages I added one-of-many "possible" subtext dialogues, along with a piece of the original letter (as an ongoing narrative). I was given this letter by River in a lucid dream that was the original impetus for this book.

And, after all is said, it is in essence just a comic book - a child's story in words and pictures.

Art is a metaphor about being fully conscious. It mimics self-realization by seeing so thoroughly, so seemingly instantaneously "now" that the viewer is suspended in "Aesthetic Arrest" and experiences observation free of thought, free of time. This …is our Work.
("Or so I feel" -eec-).

Thanks for looking.
Your Brother,
Toc

Definition: "Nondualism" (meaning; not two), is what Joseph Campbell and Aldous Huxley called the Perennial Philosophy. It is the observation of a universal recurrence of philosophical insight independent of epoch or culture, universal truths on the nature of reality. It recognizes that all things have, and are made of (in their essence), consciousness. One consciousness that is empirically beyond mind and matter, and the direct experience direct experience (2) (3) (4) (5) of which is the same to all, independent of epoch or culture. It is this experience that my images attempt to be a metaphor of, in both my visual language and narrative.