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 ...

Thank and Love Letter from Joey Fool, V1 No1

(11/17/03) This Question is in relation to my next comic coming out in Feburary 2003. I actually made this comic in 1996 it was my first work in traditional comics. I have always been fascinated by our curious ability to read entire stories out of single images. Every image carries its trajectory in a gestalt of clues. In this book of (splash-page stylie) diptychs I present random snapshot moments delineating the politic of a single interior persona: PopeJoey Fool who is the image of my tricksey pontificating Superego, a little boy Pope who plagues my Dreaming.

Q: What do you have against the Pope?

A: I kind of like the Pope. I like icons, the Pope is an icon, a walking icon covered with icons, an icon of western civilization, an icon of Christianity. Catholicism is the prototype of Christianity. Christianity basically projects God outside of your self (God "He" is somewhere else and you are here in this mess). But Christianity is really just a kind of minimalist pantheon of Gods, a severely frugal organization of gods, but a multiple godhead none the less. Just a few Gods; a father, his son, a ghost, an organization of angles, a virgin mother or two, that's a few, even if Protestants don't count the Saints. But... who you pray to is a god.
The Pope is the Superego, the acting conscience and crowned king of the world body of Catholicism. I like the Pope, it's a fascinating image; here is this guy elected by some other guys (a guys only club), to speak for THE one and only God. How Odd. I'll bet just playing that roll, being that character, must be a beautifully surreal experience.
What I do have a problem with is the CEO of the riches business on earth moralizing to the world about suffering, and humility and pretending to have an exclusive relationship with my personal image of God. That is funny. I think he should just tell us his dreams and live a beautiful life in public, but otherwise...
I am convinced from my own research that the closest thing to god I can "ever" experience is the independent actions of my own subconscious communicating with me, mostly through my art, my dreams, and such. I call this the Voice of my Heart, I award it this title because of the awe and reverence in which I hold it. From my own research I have been introduced to the vastness and phenomenal sentience of my own subconscious, thus I have co-opted the term 'soul' from the religions, to title my subconscious … reverently. I know my Heart is a "Good" thing because it always faces the direction of love, but it is not with out curious teeth (…it has a bit of a bite), I find it to be full of wit, I only wish I was too.

"Wit is our animal talent." - Pope Joey Fool

From the backcover of Thank and Love Letter from Joey Fool (V1 No1)

"Many people live with strong interior Voices and find life styles to authorize and validate their multiple-Heart. When one of those Voices grows in strength and independence, (through attention practiced and paid, knowing that most Voices eat oppression), eventually you must bargain in good faith for a working peace …or die. Learning to listen carefully, with the smallest crust of identity, to the distinctive Voices of that interior place, "Schizotopia" and then patching together a religion of one . . . self, while living sane in the daylight, is … a life. Does this sound familiar? If so then this book will make you smile." -Doc Taylor

(11/18/03)

Q: Di-Ob?

A: Di-Ob, Direct Observation, is allowing the power of your skilled observation to bridge your subconscious-grok with the outside world, and thereby equating your Selves = Presence.
"Hozro."

My pal Roger suggested I do animal images for a while instead of my comics in order to sell more work at the gallery and thereby live less poorly.

(10/25/03) I know you were being Good for my sake, trying to make my life easier to live, by trying to finding a way to sell my work. I couldn't tell you at that moment what I felt. I knew, I just didn't know how to word it. I was just trying to agree with you for love of you. You're my friend, I feel that, so with that as the base-camp for the rest of this meander of reason, I have to tell you how beyond me, how beyond my small part in this Work, it is for me to stop what I'm doing. And even more beyond me to do something so trivial as survive. This story (V6), and the way I'm telling it, is too important an event to my medium to consider stopping it to do otherwise, which includes spending a month making art in order to feed myself.

"I have felt the swaying of the elephant's shoulders; and now you want me to climb on a jackass? Try to be serious." Mirabi (woman poet, 16th century India)

I have been promised the importance of what I am doing by my Heart.

It makes me laugh to say such outrageous shit out loud, even though I am the one who believes it. I suppose it sounds arrogant but being a Dogs-body witness makes any pleasure in the arrogance virtually not. Being possessed by my Heart, acting under its influence, is the only way I have found to actually live, to feel life.
I mean ...if I could only replace the word subconscious (which is what I mean by Heart) with God then it would all make sense, but ...in that word I have found in me, a perfect absence of belief. Faith is then only equal to imagination, and the harder, more difficult reality to live is one without pretending God. And because it is my direct-observation I am obligated to live it or be, in the face of my VerySelf, a coward. And that's No-fucking-way.

"I am a man. I am an artist. I am a failure." - eecummings. …I-am.

Your Idea of working in pencil was a pure synchronistic possession; you were my Self coming to me offering me permission to speak my best language. Drawing was always my best language. How could you know that? You couldn't therefore it was my destiny. And my destiny is whatever my Heart decided it would do/be when I was immortal (as a kid). It (my Heart) then gathered its friends to suit its designs and wrote the signs on my forehead (a kind of heliotrope), where you, being under your own Heart, and oddly sensitive to groking these subtleties, read it. Our Hearts are astronomically huge inductive/deductive smiling creatures who miss nothing.

Here I am trying to lay out a map of the force (its full undulating length) that is behind my comics (the actual juxtaposition of sizes here is …comic, to comic is comic). Like a flower or a mondala, this Work opens from the middle because I wasn't there where it began and I will never see its end. I have already died once and now I am here for this.
My Heart is a kid made of smooth cool white fire. He told me when we were little that he ("he" though he has never had genitalia*) would never realize his Self for money or friend (if only I hadn't been born into the mythology of Jesus who made such a big to-do of being poor).
I want money of course, I want money but then… I'm just a fucking Dogs-body, and what would I know (I'm the boy they send for coffee)? I think you wont like me saying this …but I think it might be essential to the construct of my humility and work ethics to feel the embarrassing shames of being poor till …something in me gives… for good, or gives in for the good (punny-haha), but probably till I am long dead and a young Roger Ricco finds my stuff junked up in my granddaughter Katte-bo's attic.

We both seem to wish my work would sell more but that isn't what we care about. (I get it, you get it, the-people-I'm-interested-in get it, people-who-think-with-their-Self get it, and that… is my audience). It's strangely interesting to imagine why it doesn't sell more, I would say people don't want to take the time to solicit the presence of their own Heart, many people find their Heart repugnant because of choices made in the past, and many not only want their food (and art) as pabulum but they want it predigested as well, (it is too often the very difference between American and foreign films), but what they want has nothing to do with why I do it.
I do it because doing-it is my Very definition.

You are my friend to care, and I think you are as amazed as I am how the intrinsic value of my drawings are invisible to many. I think the show that you will give me in 2005 (with the smaller gallery for Tricia's growing Refuge Series) will prove itself worth the wait. But … I am just not a "career artist", I am the real thing… and that… refuses to be helpful to either of us for now. Ha!

(10/23/03) Just a point from your lecture at Suny-New Paltz…
In reference: "(He [my Heart: Pitr] ... though he has never had genitalia)" -Toc

"Not knowing what female genitalia looked like," I don't think that was why the girls in Darger epic comic had penises. I think his psyche said if he didn't give the girls penises they would doubtlessly be girls, and they were not girls, they were neither beings, they were the Daimons, inspirations fighting to be realized. And … a girl with a penis would never judge you, and a freak isn't a freak among freaks. And only a grown man can use his penis as a weapon.

Read; the girl-penises and the full black eyes in children, and the triangulation seem very readable, he is not speaking a foreign language just a preliterate one ... so feel it.

(11/17/03) Thanks Nathan ... for the reminder.

(11/21/03) The following is from a letter to a friend, you can puzzle out what his question was, but the point of writing Q-and-A's is to find out what the ideas look like when concretized. I am always hoping to catch a glimpse of my Very-Self in the answers.

I presented this response because I went through this too, when I was young (as did… AM, MR, JH, EEC, RB, M, K, KV, R, WB, JJ, PN, RD, DT, JV, RMR, GL, VK, NK, RB, and others). I had to figure-this-out, cobble-it-together, dig-it up, puzzle it out, etc., by way of my own subconscious (see how I avoided the word 'Heart' just now).
So … I-got-it, once-upon-a-time, and so I hand it over to my young friend so that, if it feels right to him, I will have helped shortcut him into a finer complexion of The Work (I am the performing technology here). He can use my research to augment his own continuing research into the general and specific predilections of his own Heart.

I am amazed that if you read the world very quietly it makes sense. If you are willing to know the answer to anything, you can. And I think that is the specific definition of our species, the human beings. And the boy writes...

“…Almost anybody can learn to think or believe or know, but not a single human being can be taught to feel. Why? Because whenever you think or you believe or you know, you're a lot of other people: but the moment you feel, you're nobody-but-yourself. To be nobody-but-yourself—in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else—means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight; and never stop fighting…” (eec)

What you feel tells you what you want, that is your Animal. Everything else is just constructs-of-civilization, the machine-of-progressive-order whereby we can each, together, live and let live. But the Heart is a private insular animal with a near infinite source of the good stuff (love, happiness, inspiration, creative-juice; manna, soma, etceteras). But to the Heart, civilization is just "material" like clay, to be formed in order to solicit the presence of the Good-stuff of the Heart. (Did you see the axiom form in that last sentence; the Heart act for its own happiness, all love is directed to the Self by the Self, for love of love, etceteras). So by my definition the Heart is utterly anarchistic it sees civilization as clay. The clay has intrinsic rules to make it workable but the Heart is so astronomically smart (being the sentient extrapolating web of all your mutually collected and unfiltered sensory perceptions) it never sees the rules as anything more then the limits of the material, and not of it's Self. There are virtually no limits to the Heart's extrapolating imagination (The Image Nation). The Heart being so astronomical in scale, that any direct communication with it would overload our delicate human nervous system, fry us, thus we are fed communications by Dreams, inspirations, synchronistic observations of metaphors and art, and above all Feelings.

But the Heart also sees you as clay, and demands abilities from you that you have no ideas about. Remember in the metaphor of the clay the clay eventually goes into the fire. If you act weak the Heart can be a mean fucker. And if you were tortured as a kid, when the pact of your destiny was begun by your Heart, your Heart might demand that you act out your torments in order to fulfill your self-achievement, well… then you are really fucked ... Doctor Lecter, because the Heart "grieves neither for the dead nor the living" (BGita), and …all will hunt you. It can be dangerous stuff living for your Heart. But I mean what is a good moment if you can't feel it?

Ok-Ok I think marriage is a fraud constructed by civilization for its own sake and not yours, there! If love doesn't keep you together, then words and paper will? Try to be serious. The poet Rilke wrote a true analysis of mutual love; titled, "Love and Other Difficulties" (or something like that … find it, read it), essentially he said that you must make your self worthy of a relationship by knowing your own feelings about …everything, and then creating a passionate function (Work) to live for, thus having something of value to offer a relationship. You arrive in a place where you are the protector and …admirer of your partner's relationship to her Self as she will for you. This is the ideal.

I've heard some of the avant-garde Jungian psychologist say that most young marriages are just the Bride and the Groom's mother meeting in the basement of the church to hand over the controls of the boy, because most boys choose a women who will do for them exactly what their mothers did, which includes; invade their privacy, fill their needs, clean up after them, do their laundry, feed them, and pat them on the head, etceteras. A couple of years down the road the incest taboo kicks-in and they can no longer make love to their chosen wife for all the same reasons that the she was chosen in the first place. (She's your mother you idiot!) So many I know has done exactly this. Dismal?

So what have I said by all the goodly-burble? Reveal your Self; the more of your Heart you reveal the less likely you are to live an unlived life. Though it's very tricky because there are no answers, "Answer are like rocks they all sink," (water equates with feeling). The point is… a Voice has come to you that you need to pay attention to. But there is no answer, what matter is the Listening and being brave in the face of helplessness, which proves to your Self your strength and willingness to dialogue.

The answer is ... your heart expanding "yes," and your heart contracting "no", and that (simply put) is it. The "yes" can have sensory notations which can extend as far as full-blown sentient imagery, (and etceteras as "no").

You know the words "what doesn't kill us makes us stronger." When you are young mistakes are a just way of life, jump-in, the path is made of "not-this not-that," it is known by what it is not. I don't believe anything the heart decides is selfish in the negative; I think rather, that it is essential to your realization to do what it says. But as odd as it might sound, it is important to feel your decisions based on a rested nervous system. When in doubt …sleep.

"Sleep is the mother of courage." (eec)

(12/3/03) Surrealism is the closest definition to the Work I do. So I am always willing to eat info about it whenever, so I just read something about old Surrealism and felt an odd nagging annoyance afterwards. I realized that all those early Dads were just reacting to their time and didn't seem to realize that they were at the recent end of a long line of research. The thing that annoyed me the most was the way they flourished limits on the Work, as if in unconscious apology for its existence. So Toc wrote... Dear Brother Arebear, but later I revised and expanded it in a thank you letter to Gioia (7/7/04) presented here.

Dear Gioia

"Children are holy animals." says Comrade-X

I just have to jump in here and Thank you for inviting us to the beginning of that story, it was … wonder-ful. I am sorry that my (awesome) luck rarely seems to extend to money otherwise Tree and I would have stayed for sure. I've held off this letter because I wanted to have my total perception fully facing you when I said how wonderful that one evening was. It was. But the persistent insistence of images won't let me stop long enough to write. So … to jump-the-jump.

Now I am carving, (by pencil), a face with a texture of small vectors. Vectors like animal hairs feeling over the shadowed skin of a woman. A woman who is me as much as her. Fine vectors like a reductive Giacometti-space over her skin that when softened by distance become disguised as realism. It is a kind of Surrealist subtext about the good animal beauty, from which looks the beast. I wrote some of what follows to my pal Arebear but I've rewritten it here mostly to imagine The-you-I-have-accumulated-in-my-Self responding to it.
Edifying!
It is as if I find you inside me standing as witness to validate the creative sincerity of arriving Images offering up their ideas.

Surrealism to me is not just about interior reality as most of the early visual surrealist hyped it as, and so unintentionally limited it to, nor is it about a Magic Realism, (magic is no longer the right word in this time), I think those early Dads weren't cognizant of the earlier works of the Persian and Vedic poets or they would have recognized themselves as having tapped the deep water of an old River below. Surrealism is about reading Direct-Observation without rational subtitles, without the preconception monologue. Freeing the subconscious to participate in the senses, allows your Heart to be fully Present (…art, right?). This…play…is the liquid reality of the Animal world, says my observations, it is an Animal Ethics.
I want to say that Animals are holy, except that this human idea, holy, is so crusty with meaning that its water of feeling is now too far underground to surface in these words.

Direct Observation: (DiOb) Reading the raw image of Observing, observing it's very Self - Presence.

Animal Ethics. Feeling without e-motion (feeling without the looping of emotional history by the intellect [here is the curse of the apple]).

The big a priors. (Either God transcends nature and is perfectly good [theism] or God permeates nature. God is the world, and therefore neither good nor evil [pantheism]. In which case (since this is closer to my a priori) since God is neither good nor evil, [or necessary, as in atheism], where does the Good measure from? The Good is measured by simple Animal ethics, that of Feeling. Feeling is animal innate and can not be taught (it is the only authentic voice of the Self, says my Direct Observation).
A crosscut of religions says the highest attainment (of feeling) is Agape (love and oneness with life, the feast of love). It is the highest experience by virtue of how it feels. This being so… the extension of this feeling into the world would naturally protect it (the experience). The desire then is to create an environment of love extending outward in to the world. Towards this end the innate 'Good" in human nature created, in human intelligence, the idea of "do unto others as you would have them do unto you" which leads to agape, and love in all of its sweet and willing forms. This is my understanding of the positive nature [direction] of life.)

My own realization into Surrealism was grounded most by the Vedic, Spanish, and Persian poets who have given it the most breathe of depth and …water …and fire.

Surrealism looks at the world as if the world is looking back in sentient consideration and cognizing you, realizing you, reading you. By this, your observations in return become a conversation.

In my understanding the world is willing to like us, based on our actions-reactions, our readable intentions. To be looked on favorably by the world is to define "lucky" in life (or lucky with life). Showing your awareness to everything is … polite. It is Animal-polite, an animal ethics.

(PS - To "show your awareness?" Is to back up behind my rational observation and use my body as a radiant sense to project love [the Good]. Hi-ho! [That sure sounds crazy]. As if I am lubricating the mechanism of my way. To …be lucky)

So…is our anthropomorphic-awareness, (that is Surrealism), the secretive One-God of the theist or just the projected personification of our (relatively unlimited) potential subconscious? If you feel there is a choice then the simplest reading, that it is just your Self, is enough?

"This is the curtsy of deep heaven: when you mean well He (God) always takes you to have meant better than you know."-CSLewis-

(And by this, in this way, you never have to lie to your Self with beliefs that you don't experience).

The problem with the Image of your anthropomorphic-awareness comes when you compromise the image in order to share it. Our human desire to share is a given. It is a cornerstone of all Animal ethics, and is documented as an inescapable impulse by ascetic's through out human history. A given.

The only successful sharing of this image that has ever been done was done by art. Religions sprung from moments of poetry, religions harnessed art; the success of religions is a by-product of art. And now that art lives in an (almost) "protected-secular-humanistic-time", its life no longer threatened by religions, art quits the limitations of religions, and has been doing so for 650 years. The sub-text of the Renaissance.
Religions die, being cut off from their source of manna, from the soma of the rite. Murder and war are the hideous death throes of religions that cannot evolve because they were never more than power bases for greed.
And…art by its very nature, says, I belong to no one but my Self (and …aren't I doing it beautifully. It says this while holding hands with its Self, as the culture crashes down beyond the window).

OK… I know… I'm sounding like a twenty-year-old's manifesto (… I end up here all the time). Hi-ho-hum!

The Last Page of Water

Here we are warming in our own friction
after the great myths have gone home.
Religions grind down like the millstones of dry beds.
The water has gone underground.
Raw belief turns the stone for fear of Nothing.
Superman gets laid and soon after dies.
We finally recognize that there are quiet killers among us
full of fresh water.
And it is the water that scares us.
We are buoyant with fear of Self.
The water stirs and lifts its head,
and babble speaks the familiar words,
''What do you want?''
And the rain re-members us.
(When my sneakers get wet
I hear them squelching about the distance between ideas.
And that, ideas are just images
with a quantum of spiritual autonomy.
So now you can imagine, I am there for the rain.)
Water fills the eyes
of the kid chosen to play god
when he whispers back,
''we want what you want,''
his hands drift about him in slow currents,
his fingertips are blind.
The water snakes its own way,
and waits below in the sky.
Other children visit the water
deep down in the alert black vastness of that careful sky.
The water orbits its own voice,
waiting for the kid that plays alone.
Waiting to re-member him.

With love
Your pal

(1/15/04) I have been getting questions about my latest comic: Thanks and Love Letters from Joey Fool, V1 No1, asking what it's about, wondering if it's a Dada-ist tattle or a mystical blather. And all the while the comic was imagining itself as a dry parody of these things. Oh-well. So I wrote the following part "One" hoping to clarify most of the questions with a single statement. But …after my pal Tree read the statement she said that it was just as convoluted as the book, and she suggested that I write it to our 10 year old pal Bean in terms he would get. So part "Two" is written Bean-stylie in Green.

One (Thanks and Love Letters from Joey Fool, V1 No1)

A bicameral self analysis by way of comic, part one: V1 No1 Thanks and Love Letters from Joey Fool.

First off, I'm just a Joe, I am not Toc Fetch. Toc Fetch is a voice that I fall into, that overtakes me when I write. It is a presence that works my hand when I draw. I let it because it seems to know what to do and I don't.

Toc Fetch occurred in me when I had to accept that I was going to die, Toc Fetch is a carrion eater, eats the dead, sometimes a crow, sometimes a wolf-dog, but mostly he is an old man who grows stronger on the constant realization that I am going to die - and that all form is fleeting . In a sense Toc is everything within me that won't die, that refuses to die, and refuses to let me die. You understand this is being said by an atheist, when an atheist dies that is it, no do-overs, no interference-by-tree, no deathless-soul, nor "evidence-of-things-unseen". The purest tragedy is living-up towards death. To an atheist the whole God thing is just a wish that death ...isn't death.

Toc very doggedly pushes me to do things that I find impossible. For me he is the Doer. He is the man! He writes these words. Hi-ho.

I spent years practicing an Advaita-Vedandic method of roaming around inside myself and found a sensitivity for distinguishing certain personas of my identity that seem to have an essential creative independence. I love their surprises. These personas began in my childhood from where they derive their strength. Kids are powerful, so close to holiness like animals.

But what can you do with an obscure talent like that … ask questions, have synchronistic chats with the world, watch the special-effects that come from all that sensory depravation, witness dreams, study images from your childhood, document your responses.

Documenting… that is what Thanks and Love Letters from Joey Fool is, documented moments-of-truth about a Place called Truth. Epiphanies of Lower Utopia. I have one of those beliefs that are unshakable, a faith in an unprovable supposition. It is based completely on nonverbal knowing. The belief is that there is a Place that is Truth inside you, and that you can access it, no matter your age or intellectual acuity. I believe it is the core identity of the subconscious. It is not bound by morality. It is (luckily) too old and too instant to refer to civilization. It is a non-verbal preliterate positive knowing - whose potential of Presence makes even the most tedious horrors of life worth living. I think of it as a Presence or Place because as you get older it takes a true effort to get There. As you get older it seems that the impetus for accessing it always requires a kind of dangerous wake-up smack or a long sensory depravation -- or some association with Death.
So it is, that Horror and Death are our constant companions with whom we flirt. Every generation is willing to war… why? Imagine war as a mass flirtation of the oh-so-ready young who desire to find out what it actually feels like to be alive (and Death's nearness is a shortcut). (Women have the awesome and mortal experience of child birth but men have to go out and find Death). The feeling of actually being alive is the feeling of the truth.

Kids live in their subconscious and look out on the world from a full-blown live interior Place, it comes with being a kid. (Did you forget?) As a kid, events clued-me-in to death, and then never let me go. So …Death and the tragic sweetness of being alive is the essence of the first book of The Lost and Found Season of the Most Pope Joey. Pope Joey himself is my cheeky personified superego who has accepted the authority to exist and the authority to answer for it.

(A refresher definition; superego: the moral or judicial branch of Self, the ideal rather then the real that strives for perfection and truth rather then pleasure)

So the point of Pope Joey is not "mystical" muddling or Dadaist comedy but a kind of anthropomorphic psychology (observing the human qualities projected on concepts - like god and death) from the perspective of an observant atheist (or maybe it is more like paleo-psychology with first hand reports from a bicameral refuge). You see a great deal of my stories are about how you perceive them. Perception is the pattern from which story is cut, and arriving in that story holds my warm interest like my heart beats.

Two (Statement One as told to my 10 year old friend, Bean)

A bicameral self analysis...
(Imagine that I have two brains, one is a talking animal, the other is very civilized, and lives in the far future, from where he watches the animal. The future brain watches the animal brain because he is fascinated by the way the animal does things. The future brain, [who we will call Nicedog], lost many good and simple things along the way to arrive so far into the intelligent future, and from there he writes reports on what he sees but he uses the animal-brain's voice and way of speaking to make the report. Why does Nicedog use the animal-brain to speak? It is because the animal-brain, that we will call Oldwolf, speaks as if he has not forgotten where things come from. The Nicedog is studying to be the Oldwolf, Nicedog is trying to take the far future back to the place where things come from. And from the reports he writes I have made this comic: Thanks and Love Letters from Joey Fool V1 No1.)

First off, I'm a Joe ...
(But the Nicedog doesn't want you to confuse him with the Oldwolf just because he uses Oldwolf's voice. And Nicedog wants you to know how much he admires the Oldwolf's ability to do really hard things.)

Toc Fetch occurred ...
(Once upon a time Nicedog was dying and began throwing away all the stupid unimportant things that he had carried around with him for the dumbest reasons. Things like "ideas" and "beliefs" and all sorts of stuff that he pretended were true things but now that he was dying his truth became truer, and he just couldn't bear to carry to his own death such poorly made things. Things that felt cheap and shoddy in the honest and kingly presence of Death. Nicedog found Oldwolf sitting and singing quietly hidden behind piles of crumby stuff. Nicedog was so amazed by how fearless and easy the Oldwolf was with their comming death that Nicedog brought Oldwolf along with him to face Death because it made him feel stronger just to see Oldwolf's calm strength.
And it was Oldwolf that gave the Nicedog the edge of strength to stay alive. Oldwolf also taught Nicedog some great stuff like how and when, to be really quiet.)

Toc very doggedly pushes me ...
(Now, Nicedog won't do a thing without Oldwolf with him. Nicedog loves the Oldwolf, loves his honesty and ability to work for long hours all by himself without any question… or thoughts. And he loves most of all that the Oldwolf does it happily. The Nicedog is amazed by happiness, to him it is the rarest thing.)

I spent years practicing ...
( Once-upon-a-time Nicedog spent 20 years sitting still with his eyes closed a few hours a day practicing a way of settling into the quietest parts of his brain and waiting there listening and looking. There he began chatting with any Thing that would come and talk to him. Sometimes whole scenes from his childhood would come to him there, and with them would come older things like rocks who knew him, and animals, and women, and demons, who would talk to him. A lot of demons. One of the best things he learned from Oldwolf was how not to put words into the mouths of the things that came to look at him while he was in that huge and very quiet place in his brain. The most powerful and brilliant things he met in there all seemed to have been introduced to him in his early childhood. They all knew him and said that they liked him when he was a kid, and always asked him when he was going to be a kid again.)

But what can you do ...
(Nicedog was so blown-away by his experiences in the quiet parts of his brain that he wanted to show them to his friends and other nice dogs. So he gathered the best images and with the help of the Oldwolf drew and wrote down the oddly funny things that happen when he sat watching in the quiet part of his brain.

Nicedog met a kid there in the quiet, who, even though he was small, seemed to be the boss of the whole place. His name was Pope Joey and he wore a pope-like dunce hat that was given to him by the very King of wolves. The Hat of Authority (as Tree calls it). Pope Joey spoke in riddles, and despite his small size was afraid of nothing. The Nicedog found out later that Pope Joey was the Oldwolf when the Oldwolf was a kid. Small world, huh?)

Kids live ....
(Nicedog met Pope Joey often in the huge quiet part of his brain, and also in dreams [which is almost the same place but with slightly different game rules]. Pope Joey usually brought with him someone or something in disguise with recognizable clues ["Nothing ... is easy, everything else is difficult" says PapaWolf]. Pope Joey was like a guide who knew everything worth knowing about the big quiet place.

Nicedog knows that it was because he almost died that he threw away all the junk he carried that kept him from seeing the beautiful things that he knew as a kid. Things that are beautiful even if he hadn't seen them. And if not for almost dieing he wouldn't have been introduced to Pope Joey. Nicedog thinks that maybe that is why his friends, do such dumb and dangerous things once in a while, just to feel the rush of being alive and to clean out their brain room of all the junk that they bought for the dumbest reasons, just like he had.)

So the point ...
(The reports that Nicedog is writing [the comic; Thanks and Love Letters from Joey Fool, part one] has no beginning or end, it just wonders around in this "real" place looking for the clues to a game that is actually …life. This game is real life, and you have to solve the riddles given to you, "or die like a dope in a dump of your own junk," says Comrade-X.

Hi-ho! )

(2/26/04) I thought you might find my ostentation funny in this letter I sent off with packages of comics to four "comic scholars" at four different universities.

Hello

I am looking for my Guilliame Apollinaire or Clement Greenberg and was wondering if you had seen them in the mirror, and if so, could you give him these comics and the words below. If not then keep them as my thanks for looking (at your Self).

"So …to me Duchamp's green-box is a comic. Anything placed in sequence is a story, a possible comic. A row of objects tells me a story of their relationships in form as well as use. One painting in a show on a wall next to another is a story that is usually about the life of the painter (but could just as easily be about the personified life of the work).
When I was a kid reading words in comics was optional. But it was really Batman who taught me to read. What could Batman say to make evil men cry? When I was a kid art books were also comics, a kind of problem solving in describing to my selves the stories that accrued between the paintings on any page, a story of the world they came from. Every image carries it's own innate story, an inductive deductive trajectory, and that is the very charm that comics live under. I understand that we are interested in conscious comics, the sequential that is conscious of it's self as comic, but then what is conscious, (and this from an atheist)? This open-definition does not seem to live even in Free-range comics. The desire there is towards a tiny protective exclusivity with lip-service to art.
But outside that tiny definition of comics there is a potential that is the equal of art in form (…as well as name). Hell is too small for an angel to fit in, said CSLewis in The Great Divorce (a funny and telling image). Even in the (supposed) independent comic world they seem to love the word art but (funnily-enough) do not like …art. As if art is an image that agrees, a friendly dog who only looks like A wolf. And all this coming from a (supposed) visual realist, (but who reads the fine print).
I know that the limitations all come down to their bottom-line and the word art is really just a selling point in the jingle. And …that you must find my posture of direct naiveté laughable … but it's funny for me too.

And you can't help but love an audience who cares so much even if they're blind authorities on the very now of daylight.

So I have taken to a new aggressive expression when sending off my comics to strangers, I say, 'Be warned… my comics are not entertaining they demand that you give as much as you get.' "

What follows is a brief run-down of the five comics I've been able to publish so far that I've sent you here, and you can have your choice of why. (Could I be more presumptuous? Yep.)

With friendly tension
Toc Fetch

So write a letter....

or read on below...