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Letters and Back-at-ya
BLUE is the (dated) voice of the narrator of this letter page, and will hopefully provide the context for the letters.
BLACK is a letter Toc wrote to someone.
RED is a quoted voice ...or your voice (...and thanks).
Gray is a second generation letter included in a first generation black letter.
Green is my interpreter interpreting my words for little kids.
So ...
2/11/03. It has been a while since I've posted a letter here so I looked among my responses for something worth the read and found this odd dibbit to another comic maker...
…Write me something …sometime, to put up on my site, sometime when you're pissed write me something to shake-up and shake-off the dense apathetic mediocrity that is comics, lets have our Self's a toothy renaissance. I hate knowing I'll be dead before Comics achieves sentience. I continue to get letters from people asking me to help them understand the linear trugery of my stories. In the words of Alfred Jarry, "The squitty ass never lacks for shit," so the last letter I wrote went like this:
I'm
a little lost at the idea of trying to reduce my Self any further than the triangulated
image of Toc Fetch and Le'grand Cirque Psyche. I am in fact struggling always
to maximalize his reality in my comics, my site, and my self. You understand I
am not Toc Fetch, and that he is a personification of my desire to grok my Very-Self
and thereby to answer your question to my self (Q: "What your ideas concerning
Life are"). Ideas are an addiction of the mind comparable to twenty-four
dollars worth of trinkets. Ah... pretty.
Yes … Feeling life is the point
of living, and (some) ideas feel beautiful and those are the places where your
Life and mind overlap. The mind is a tool, mostly rational and linear, it is like
a flashlight in the night, if you are willing to turn it off and wait till your
eyes adjust then there is a huge night of wonders waiting to have some chats with
you.
The Homeric Greeks believed that there were ethereal creatures in existence
somewhere between the Gods and humans that they call Genius or Daemons.
These Daemon were spirits of inspiration to humanity (some good some bad),
and the origin of the idea of "a genius" as we now understand
it. This idea of a symbiotic relationship between a Heart (subconscious)
and it's Body (conscious-mind) jives for me. The Eskimos say that we each
have many souls in us, I like that view as well. (Being an atheist I believe
in very little, but some things tend to feel just like me, and, finding
my self living those things, I'm always so glad to get someone else to
say what I know.)
I know from my experience in sensory deprivation that the Heart is in
a constant dialogue with us. And the language it speaks is that of feeling-image-dream-inspiration.
it is THE most powerful language, a preliterate pre-civil language and
also the most reductive language (the most in the least: metaphor and
allegory). Anything more direct from the Heart would… blow-your-mind
(dropping you off in… Schizotopia. Hail-Hail-Schizotopia-land-of-the-freak-and-brave!).
The Heart doesn't speak
the specific language of ideas that is just us packaging inspirations, attempting
to share our delights with each other like the happy little monkeys that we are.
The language of ideas is full of contradiction as summed up in Schrödinger's
equations of the live/dead cat. Even mathematics' can go only so far, and in physical
mathematics; only as far as the Uncertainty Principal.
And listen to my mouth
run on…I'm just rambling at this point…
So …check out some
Rumi (try the one translated by Coleman Barks) probably the most beautiful dialogue
between a man and his Heart ever caught in language. Or Bly's Rilke, if you are
interested in beautiful ideas.
Ok I'm going to stop rambling now.
A last
point; I suppose I am proving the theorem that Comics can be an art form. So…
I make comics …to solicit feelings through verbal hints and visual metaphors,
of non-linear delight.
Go-on jump-in!
I'm not too interested in conveying
my insights about daily life, or slices of daily truth washed down with kindness
and humility (there is nothing wrong with this, it's good health stuff …but…
feels to me like the filler in which the bits of real apple float in the pie).
I suppose I want to open a dialogue from my Heart to who ever else can read my
subtle eclectic imagery as their own experience. Not a voyeur's remote experience
(of something happening to someone somewhere) but an actual experience that happens
because the language is fluid and direct. Direct, in that it is about your perception
at that moment perceived.
Ok I'm going to stop now.
Am I barely civil? Hi-ho. So here is page 17 of my cyber pages. That is my little brother Holybean posing as a son of Lower Utopia (which he is). I am the man around. My beloved Tree-girl is his other father and her twin sister is Bean's mom-factor. Here in Lower Utopia we create the world in our own image with love.
So... Page 17;This page came out of all the flack my pal ODSeeus took from friends for showing Joel Peter Witkins in his gallery. I did page 17 for ODSeeus as a pat on the back.
"Some people feel like they have stared into the face of evil enough and refuse to waste any more time identifying it. They might feel that their function is to identify something a bit more perpendicular to evil like The Beautiful."
This is how I felt when I first viewed
Witkin's work. Animating the dead feels like mockery - feels wrong, deformities
"on displayed" feels wrong (the deformities don't feel wrong
- but the displaying feels wrong), feels like hungry evil. I feel familiar
towards evil, a vague don't-touch-me friendliness, knowing that most of
its power is drawn off by non-reaction, and then all that is left is just
someone working down their chain of neurosis/psychosis - an unresolved
knot of ego. I was heartened when I was a kid by what Goethe once said;
that he could not imagine a crime he wasn't capable of. Being in art all
my life I have always felt like a criminal (goes with the job). That is
because in art inspriation is god, the one authority, and so, being my
only authority I had to know my own feelings about each and every
thing - I had to test each and every thing against the one authority.
In my …imagination if even only briefly I have willing done everything,
particularly when I was young and had so little love for my humanity.
I "could not imagine a crime I wasn't capable of." Maybe Witkin
is filling a need best kept well aired. And how could I judge someone
else's desire to know their self in the dark, being capable of every crime
… in my self.
Once upon a time Joel Peter
Witkin caught a dose of darkness and recognized it as beautiful.
There is this human thing of wanting to defeat an impossible challenge
with skill and heart; it is called in mythology "the hero".
It is the prerequisite for giant killing, monster killing, and it is heroic.
Something happens in a young still-green psyche; an "event"
of beauty or horror or both. And from this "event" your life
as hyper-consciousness begins and you are obsessed (for life), with solving
towards a "Yes" redemption of that event, which is to say; growing
Heart. (Some people are stilling waiting for their event and their lives
to begin and they are just lucky if it begins in love). It is a redemption
in which the event its Self is your final savior. Because the event its
Self has become your door to Self, and often the place where you first
met your Heart. So you begin to examine "the event," consciously
or unconsciously, with every aspect of your life (through relationships,
through work, through worship, through art, through anything and everything)
and you begin to develop skills, refining them towards a discriminative
tool, or a delineative weapon, because it is only disciplined-skill turned
effortless that in the final analysis can restate the event as salvation.
Witkin's skillful handling and his perceivably-careful dark
allegories are really and honestly wonderful. It is a kind of "laudable puss"
(haha!), this is an old doctoring term I learned from Robertson Davies, that meant
that a wound was healing well based on its obvious discharge. In other words Witkin
is exorcising a dark desire to Know. And after studying his work up close I understand
that he is applying his depth of skills to these old taboos and in almost all
of his pieces he makes them …eatable (ha-ha, pun intended for those with
that acquired taste).
And you wonder
why I'm telling you all this… I suppose this is just how I chat with …
friends. And… we might as well start from there … from "…Whatever
you're chewing through." Says PapaWolf.
My resent meat.
(2/17/03 - A return letter on the subject of critiques)
Brother, I'm sorry this has taken so long to come back to you. I am just too busy to breath and all self imposed. I am trying to chew my way into the corpse of both; the art world (for the bread), and comics (because that is who I am). It leaves little time to float, (leaf-floating-river).
"I fear understanding the technical aspect of what you have done might ruin the implied feelings that one should leave themselves to bathe in." Big thanks brother, and well-said! And I love the visceral of bathing. Poetry is wet.
To critique:
You wouldn't like my critique. People
everywhere use the term art without any relationship to its meaning. Like
calling dogs "people" (the obvious insult to Dogs). This is
done in comics and pop so constantly that the term has become nonsense.
The point then becomes; if everything is art than nothing is.
With the discipline of skill I approach the work (comics) by way of art.
I say "why" to each and every thing until the answer is all
that is left. ("What is a thing in its nature?") If you are
interested in Comics as an art form than forget collaboration, art isn't
made by committee it is made by one human alone in honest dialogue with
his (mortal) Heart. Knowing your age you are probably still immortal (I
hope you survive the form of your transition to mortality).
There
is an inherent problem with critiquing someone else's work and that is that I
will be projecting my own esthetic ethics onto your work. (Those who tell you
they have an objective eye are suspect, read their motivations). Therefore you
must be sure that what I am doing ecstatically feels very close to the nature
of your own voice, so that my questions do not dis-place you but rather clarifies
the very place of you.
You need to find your own Voice … first.
You must allow your Very-Self a voice, and then have some chat. Alone.
Go off somewhere and live alone, insular, private, etc. cut off from your
friends, schooling, entertainment, consuming, partying, fucking, etc.
and offer your self degrees of sensory deprivation ... get quiet, work
and listen carefully, and listen most carefully to your own suffering,
it is your greatest teacher. Eventually your Voice will come through to
you. It is as if you must turn down the noise to hear your Self speak.
Let us say that your Voice is a wolf. (A thing that knows absolutely
no thoughts but it's Self). How do you get a wolf's attention? If you
are noisy … forget it, he'll be gone… deep into the woods. If
you sit quietly in his world, intent, eventually his playfully curious
nature will bring him closer, he'll circle you wide sniffing everything
that brought you here, he'll sit near by and watch you for …years(?),
it takes time to earn trust, to trust your self in the work. Eventually,
if you show by all your choices that you will-not quit, he'll offer you
his close and complete presence, the full language of his eyes, and the
hot rich smell of his accomplished piss. All the good stuff. Of course
if your Heart was fucked-up when you were a kid the wolf may just eat
you.
It happens, Hi-ho!
So …why would you want to do all this? Aren't you having fun?
(6/14/03- I was asked By Roger Ricco of Ricco/Marsica Gallery to put together a show with Marc Dennis who is also in that gallery. A show about the place where comics does art.)
Hello Brother
Mr. ODSeeus reminds me again that he wants you and I to put together a show at the gallery about the edge of comics, where comics do art, he wants us to make a list of comic makers living by the skin of their obsession. Hi-ho! I am for this.
"Quince: Here is the scroll of every man's name, which is thought fit, through all Athens, to play in our enterlude…"
So here is my list. I've listed the books which I think show each in their best light, you can probably find them at the website of their publisher or at marsimports.com. I could spin a laborious pealing of each for you but of course the work does it best.
Jim Woodring (Seattle), "Jim,
volume 2 # 5), and "Frank #1" both published by Fantagraphics Books
Chris Ware (Chicago), "Acme Novelty Library, #10 and 13" both published
by Fantagraphics Books
Laylah Ali, (only the comic she made for MOMA that
you can only get by calling its store)
Max (of Spain) (Francesco Capdevila),
"The Extended Dream of Mr. D." and "Drawn and Quarterly, volume
2 #6"), both published by Drawn & Quarterly Publishing, Canada
Francesca
Ghermandi (Italy), "Pastil #1 and 2" published by Ghermandi & Phoenix
Enterprise Publishing Co., Bologna, Italy
Dave McKean (of GB), "Mr. Punch"
published by Fantagraphics books
Paul Pope (NY), "Heavy Liquid (GN)"
published by D.C. and Horse Press
Dave Sim (Canada), "Cerebus" published
by Aardvark-Vanaheim, Inc.
David Mazzucchelli (NY), "Rubber Blanket #3"
published by Rubber blanket
Stefano Ricci (Italy), "G.Y. Data dell'arresto"
published by Coconino Press
So who have I left out?
It doesn't cost a lot to publish, maybe two or three grand, (see if __________ will back you, don't you know ________ everyone knows a _________)? It is so simple to publish … if …you just expect to lose all the money. Fuck money, think of it as paying back to the same world that fed you The-Juice through anOther's Image. Money is Nothing … but an existing comic …never dies. Whereas …a few people see your work in a gallery, (and one may take it home and privately own it), within a comic, (over time), thousands of people will see-it, grok-it, and again, and again, and they will be able (to afford) to pass it on to others. PopeJoey says (as art relates to the great proletariat struggle), "If you can't print it you're on the wrong side. Up with each, down with all!"
Your
brother
Toc
(7/01/03 - Gioia Timpanelli is a writer and one of the Great oral storytellers of our time, and she is my friend. She live here in Woodstock and drops us notes when there are things worth seeing, and of the things worth see the best is always her.)
Dear pal Gioia
Thanks for inviting us to
that talk on Utopia but it's always you we come to see. The guy had wonder images
…but I would come just to hear you introduce anyone. You have such a powerfully
subtle voice that you could talk P&J recipes and I would be spelled.
As we left, that is what we talked-up the most; how does Gioia do that? How are
we so completely enthralled? We all noticed that when you put down the glass of
water and your hands took over, the feeling of the moment multiplied-up by X.
That was very cool.
Thank you for your kind words about me to Roger. On one hand I can count out the true authority (I've known) in this Work and it is a pure sustenance, the riches of blessing, to be acknowledged by someone you know who Knows. It is in fact the only place in all reality where any authority exists (subject to my Self, of course [ha]).
Utopia.
Us Kids of Lower Utopia is the very theme of my work.
One of the problems
with such an Idea in the day-world was pointed up exactly in reversed by the "Hippy"
advertisement for the "sister" colony, because proselytizing is what
is done when in doubt. The word Utopia, meaning "not a place" or no-place
(which is the same as every place [which is Watermelonsugar]), can only exist
within a no-place such as the Self.
We look quietly and careful for the Utopia
in each other, we chat with double means hoping for a spark, knowing that where
two utopias overlap is a stronghold where the friends meet.
When I was a kid I went to an experimental utopian school that was based on Advaita principles and silent internal dialoguing. I began in Seeliszberg Switzerland with about 150 in `73, in `74 we move to a university campus in no-where Iowa where we grew to about 500. Even with 500 we all knew each other with a sweetness that lightened the air. It was understood that everyone had there personal demons and daemons, but all together we were diligent with love. By the third year in Iowa the utopia was gone, there were over a thousand-five by then and strangers everywhere. Suddenly rules hardened, and the arts, that were so live in the first years, so much the essence of its health, were no longer allowed. Why? Because a number had been reached and there were now one-two-many virtual mutation perking, and utopia was no longer being lived, but was now being projected out onto the group. The No-place had become just another place in an endless list of possible places. Utopia is very personal and when that number is reached, "the center does not hold." (WBY)
"When (they) stop being themselves they start behaving, each other." (EEC)
When that number was reached, the artist, that held the very feeling of that experiment to its potential were actually asked quietly, one by one, to leave. When there were no more happy mutants (and visiting Robert Blys and Agnes Martins), then there were no more conflicting ideas by which they could sharpen their Selves, and by which they could split the subatomics of Samadhi into the day. And the feeling that was it's life was gone… and when the heart stops you're dead. And so another utopia evolves from a sweet rogue summer into a cold smiling rhetorical despotism.
It is in the lifestyle of making art that the seedling for Utopia (and Religions) effervesces. Because people intimate with Images always come to know that "Knowledge" (all that ancient and sacred …stuff), was, and so is, just someone else's image, and no one's image is more sacred than your own. And the Image (your Image) is in everything and so can be shaped out of anything.
Utopia lives in a feeling. So now we look quietly for the Utopia in each other, and when we recognize it in an-other we admire it as quietly as our own, hoping our own is just visible enough.
Your pal
With love
Toc Fetch
(9/21/03)
Dear Gioia
Thank you for inviting us to that experience with you and Robert, and that rap song about Odysseys was way-funny. We love hearing your stories, we live by them, when we speak about day-to-day things Mama Draga is in our talk or Ragnell at the crossroads or the mossy old women under McDermott's cloak or that most beautiful kindness of the brier's Rose. These are very intimate daily voices because of your stories. You don't know how important the stories are to my work, (to Tricia's work), it's as though no one will understand us without knowing those stories. Robert is very much a rich oral experience because of the story-space he creates under and around his poetry.
Q: I somehow think it's true that to hear a story is the only real way to be formally introduced to a new one … weird, yes? Like there is some subtle protocol of the Heart that requires a social element to it, a pedagogical force. Cool.
The following is a little chewed-off piece of a mock-manifesto, that-never-was, that I'm thinking of sending to The Comics Journal magazine, to see if they will publish it. The Journal is the only reputable critique in English comics (a sad comment). They have a beleaguered and cynical air sometimes, so I know they will crucify me for the naive-smile in my voice, which gives me a perverse pleasure, (its that Irish land-agitator in my gen-memory that loves it).
What I am doing is redefining comics as what …I do (as opposed to what is done). I have redefined the very audience of comics before they even exist. According to my definition comics are at the beginning of a change that will be obvious in ten more years of hindsight, and all because it is a humble art … that travels.
Love and much admiration,
Your pal
Toc
Why-a-duck
I am asked often enough the question; "Why-a-comic," (since the by-product of my comics is art), to warrant finally writing a useful answer. Other than comic's emphasis on art as narrative, it is because the system works. The distributors (Diamond in particular) are savvy enough to recognize the economic value of mutations and thereby maintain an open system for the new and different. There are very few limitations in self publishing (compared, of course, to being dead), Diamond asks for a professional presentation; such that you make it easy for them to distribute the work, and that is pretty much all they ask for. This seems reasonable since they are in the business of business, and comics are just their lucky commodity.
But mostly why-a-comic is because to publish a personal comic is within the economic grasp of the poorer class, where artists, for the most part, live. Why are artists poor? Because the art is always smarter than the artist and thereby does the choosing, (choosing its own expression). And if you make art and if it is your life, and if your work does not fit the fashion of the time, than you will necessarily become part of this poor class... or you will quit. In such a wealthy country as America to be poor is to be invisible because most Americans' can not conceive of anyone with an intelligent reason to be poor.
Every image has its story, its internal dialogue with time. (It is inherent in our original anthropomorphic nature to give life to everything). Every young struggler I meet, I ask them what their work is about and when they tell me I say; that is your story and these are its images, publish a comic, see who responds. An essential part of the process of art is that of putting the work out into the world to see if it is sentient enough to live on its own, this understanding of objective distance can not be realized in any other way. But... putting it out into the world has little to do with other peoples opinions, it's really just a way to get that final juice of your own reading, (the reading of what you did, and so ... will do).
The audience of a comic is in a sense a single buyer of a piece of art -- that is the comic. All those three-dollars come together to make a single amount that pays for the life of the work. And over time more and more audience trickle in increasing the recompense which supports the future work, the next comic -- the next show.
The audience of comics are the ones who define the limits of what a comic is, they are the actual critic. A small but consistent part of the entire comic audience seems to willingly participate in an ongoing search for the new and subversively interesting mutations in visual story telling, they encourage mutation with their three dollar votes. It is a very direct response that includes question, letters, and discussions in critique, it is very live.
In the gallery system the dealer stands between the audience and the artist, weeding, choosing to show one over another as the representative (elected by the dollar-vote) of a constituency (their clients). The gallery dealers know their clients' taste and the limits of their attention. They attempt to educate and cajole their clients into new realms of perception... slow work... for big money. The gallery takes half and doesn't say to the artist; we like your work allow us to sell it for you. What they say is; I like this, I like that, can you do more a-this to a-that. They know their market -- you don't, and you had better be limber enough to participate in this game of willingness or you will find out that there are thousands waiting to take your place. The few changes asked of me were innate within my work and excellent ideas. (Friends... you are not your ideas you are the way and the skill with which you feel them). A gallery is a business and has a monster overhead and must do what it takes to stay alive. That is the way… it works.
In comics the much more direct power of the audience to participate in the choosing of their own culture is exhilarating. Eventually some part of that initial searching audience, by virtue of their mutual dollar, becomes a single loyal patron of that artist's work, and even the poor can afford a few votes each month. The live-ness of this system is a direct check against the stagnation of the medium by the domination of the addictive mundane consistency of corporation comics. (I have imagined that the thinking for supporting this work is; better this than nothing).
Another answer to why-a-comic is that; the comic is an art form that travels. Instead of gathering an audience in mass and traveling a distance to a gallery to see the work, the art travels to the audience. It comes in a compact, replaceable, disposable, recyclable, and all around hively humble form: a comic, whose intimacy of voice does not fade or change by size of editions or time. The conservation of useable time is a strong influence on everything in our culture including art; we live for the higher protein of the Edit.
When my son is performing some questionable action I say to him, "Are ya helping or hurtin?" There are feudal overtones to the ownership of original art, in its small way comics are helping to move the world towards a more proletariat percept of value where the value has moved from the physical thing (of the art) to its expression as experiential-ideas. Once while traveling In Elysium I met a kid who said to me (about art), "If you can't print it... you're on the wrong side." "Helpin-or-hurtin," is a good question, it's the kind of question you can't help but ask when you have a kid.
Another answer to why-a-comic (that is maybe too esoteric) is that because of the very personal pacing of the medium, the amount of silence inherent for each reader, the potential for reading a kind of non-linear perceptual leaping by intuition - is maximized. If a comic is a list of images in a formal proximity that initiates a narrative experience, a subconscious inductive/deductive narrative flowing, then it strikes me how this definition applies to certain kinds of poetry as well. I heard Robert Bly once say that some of his poems were "gathered" as if he had readied the table for a feast just to see who would show up. This is also is found in the Spanish and Persian poets, we call it surrealism or mysticism but it's really just a form of surrendering to intuitive thinking (traveling inward by means of the subconscious) these poets spoke a figurative poetry that read the world as a conscious conversation, and maximized distance between metaphors. Verbal images set in a formal proximity with other verbal images causing a narrative flow ... is poetry.
Comics
are a medium where the incantations of poetry can arc across in juxtaposition
with the direct-observations of visual-art, while both are embedded in the silence
inherent in the personal pacing of the medium. In comics that movement between
images, verbal to verbal, visual to visual, visual to verbal and back, within
that agreeable and formal proximity, has such potential of tension (measured in
absorption) that the compelling could equal the Heart's own velocity, allowing
you to feel that little amber juice in your chest that makes beauty so addictive.
Of course... that could just be me.
or read on below...
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