Love Letter to ODSeeus. 01

2/15/99
Hello Roger,

Here is my new four page addition to volume 2.1 of Pope Joey (pages 7-10). It began as a letter, (never sent), evolving through four different people, and finally arriving with tongue-in-cheek to you in these 4 pages. All roads lead to Schizotopia.
My volume 3.1, (plus 4 pages from volume 2.1) is being taught French and is being published in Paris by L`association this spring. I love it that my own country's publishers praise my work but tell me it is not a comic, and therefore I should be published by an art publisher. A gallon of chicken piss!!! I suppose the American companies, for economic reasons, don't want to shake their delacate niche (and their bottom line is finally all about money). But imagine not even recognizing the future when it comes hello-ing, hi-ho. Viva La France!

Here is an interesting article a pal just showed me from the April 19 New Yorker, written by a guy who was given "the Pulitzer prize" for his comic.

It's a tribute to the medium's appeal that the comic book has bounced back from the grave several times in its history, though the industry has never been as close to death as now. Near-suicidal publishing and marketing decisions- for example, aiming at a narrow collectors' market rather than reaching out to mainstream audiences-have left the industry in a depressed state. Television almost killed what remained of comics in the mid-fifties; now new computer-generated special-effects technologies have robbed comics of even their near-monopoly on primal visual fantasy. Comic books must reposition themselves possibly as Art-in order to survive as anything more than part of the feeder system for Hollywood. Otherwise, like vaudeville, they will vanish. Art? It now seems natural to see Orson Well's "Touch of Evil" or a Howard Hawks Western at MOMA, but a generation of aestheticians like Manny Farber had to show people how to see movies for such programming to become plausible. In a landmark 1962 essay in "Film Culture" Farber looked at B movies with a painter's eyes and championed the neglected genre films he loved. He contrasted "the idea of art an expensive hunk of well regulated area... shrieking with preciosity, fame, ambition" with art made "where the spotlight of culture is nowhere in evidence, so that the craftsman can become, wasteful, stubbornly self-involved, doing go-for-broke art and not caring what comes of it." - Art Spiegelman.

So here are also some pages of "V6 No1 Kids of Lower Utopia" the story of a nine year old girl, (the most vulnerable creatures in America). Living on the edge of the suburban void, this girl (often sick), is being trained by her own dreams to be awake to the independent life of her image-nation, which she attempts to share with her friend. She is the stone that the builder refused (and later) becomes the head cornerstone. It's a story about that spooky beauty I love the most where the ambiance of dream tweaks the daylight.
These kids do not exist in the empirical common sense of the word. I have only on rare occasions seen kids speak and act like this and never as consistence as these two. They are a pair of comic book super heroes replete with the powers of insight, wit, imagination, friendliness and love. They live in a paradise of these talents, in a place called Lower Utopia.

8/11/99
Dear Roger...continuing that thread of conversation which obviously I can't let go of, and which you probably don't remember, it being just one of a hundred thrown toe lines. (And I apologize for using your remembered presence as the imp-etus for this didactic snake, I consider this to be one side of our conversation).
Yeah, I am making tiny film-like novellas about the aboriginal nature of daily humanity. (To me Duchamp's green-box is a comic. Anything placed in sequence is a story, a comic. A row of objects tells me a story of their relationships in form as well as use). So… the difference between what I do and Hal Hartley for example, the difference between comics and film, (or the question; why are comics? Other than the most obvious answer, being economics. [Comic being more proletariatly human in scale, which, in no-way disrespects the grand scale of film]), the difference has to do with the digestion of time. Grok speed. Film exists within the "now" time by mimicking the speed of time (somehow we believe in 24 f per sec). Film happens, like life it just happens with or without your awareness, and much of it is digested in memory. Art (as still imagery) can connote the "now" of time but exists in the forever of stillness, in the "stillpoint" (Elliot's -B.Norton). A still image acts as a door into forever (and forever is as long as you like [says Joseph Campbell]), and allows for a response in the viewers own time. The "Futurist" movement expressed time in single-frame images but it was not about human time, it was about way-big time, or time's time (and much of its kinetic language has been incorporated into comics). Digesting images in memory is as in Wordsworth's daffodils is a truth because the Heart forgets nothing! But complete immersion within an image's actual presence is still a necessary and vital food for the Heart (ergo dreams). The hunger of the Heart is deadly. Hal's statement that I told you of, that he wanted to make his films "difficult" (in which we both heartfully agreed) is up against the wall of the digestive speed of the "now". While this problem never comes up in the "still-ness" of forever, the forever has other problems; (its innate difficulty is its difficulty, how far is enough).Time is a force like gravity, whose direction is towards the Heart (I understood this at the end of an afternoon on the way to Cincinnati). The Heart, or "the subconscious" is understood to be what is completely conscious, and is the very self of identify, (…just defining my terms here). And there's no need for a god unless you just like the cut of his clothes (did Wide say that?). The Heart speaks to us through a language of careful images (the Heart is the image speaking). We speak to one another through a second hand abstraction of that language (that is as linear as time itself). Art talks the first language. And still, the image that is most fully stated and digested (in the forever of a fractured moment) is the closest thing to the Heart. And the Heart is where "it" is. (Alice, book-1, chapter-3, paragraphs-6 through 11)
A single image is a story because we are intuitive animals (inductive/deductive)."How did this moment (held in the image) come about, and how will it go on." We live for the dialogue with our Heart. We call it "imagination" (our Image-Nation). Imagination is food. The Heart is the center-that-holds, the place where silence 'lives'; it waits for invitation, invocation. The "difficult " (that Hal spoke of), the subtle, the muted, the topus, is the invitation. The Heart thrives on solving "the difficult" towards inclusion into our self… that is its hunger.

And "That's enough of that! "

A friend of mine just up and died.
Just ...died his last death.
A bushy guy with a bull-bear's heart.
A guy who gathered his self dangerously,
and carried open wounds happily,
building words that could fly green and cheeky.
(And he knew the secret of hugging me)
And he's just... gone
So anyway, "this is just to say,"
I hope you're getting some "work" done
in your new room box.

(Poem to my pal Tree)

Then when I see you
I see a lovely me,
and there is no one
I love more than me.
So we chat to see
if you are me,
bathed in the love
of me for me.
We chat to see,
we try to be
in love
and find it
even better than me.

The small bird of your mouth flies forever
in the tiny sky of my chest
and just now, longing for you,
she has bounced off another wall
I just painted blue.

We really enjoyed getting tipped with you guys and I just so happen to have a fine bottle of cognac (a drug I have never tasted before) given to me by a pal I barely know …thanks, and I wonder if it will make me dance?

Your Pal
Toc

1/23/00
Dear roger

Oh such paper I found! 200 pound of heavy headed history, almost hot pressed, toothless but rough as warm porcelain (...I like to speak my lines clearly), 51 x 356 inches, I'm in love. I felt her with my lips on the bus coming home and she was willing. She has the finest cotton skin and when I open her she curls back shyly. She is a modest girl from an old French family, and I am old enough …finally, to savor my own patients, kindly.
And when I eat her shy heart, as she does mine, we will sing in her smooth thin voice an ecstatic song of strong loss.

Can't help it.
Your veracious pal
Toc

2/13/00

Roger...will I spook you by saying that I've always known that I would meet you some day? Sorry, but I always thought you'd be woman, and of course you're a man...because that's PapaWolf's game. He always arrives from where I am not looking. What's the point of being a trickster without milking the juice of surprise?

And who could trust an artist who could sell his Self?

I am percolating with Ideas. My brother AreBear (of magnificent memory) pointed out (later) that you seemed reluctant to speak of my work as a product, that I might feel in some way delicate about turning it into money...the-fuck-no! My internal circus-psyche has, through years of close and loving horror, been beaten down into a kind and willing materialism.
I love the idea of making money, and even better than money, is to wake-up this medium into art, (and reverse). An art whose form fits the true proletariat mythology of our time (whispered: the proletariat being naturally materialist). An art innately designed by the technology of its form to be applicable to every economic strata..."UP WITH EACH, DOWN WITH ALL"...and maybe we should burn the originals!
Yeah!
Funny not-so-funny?

A Poor Little History Constructed of Toc-ish Opinions

So...from storytelling -- to plays -- to Gutenberg -- to novels -- to films. Film began as a technology that had to entertain for its supper. The early films were gross parodies of life, child like imagery full of human caricatures of flat heroes and thin villains. Art was just...out of reach, an embarrassing idea (because art is never a good Reason).

I imagine many stage actors, during early films, felt that they knew art in their Self, and held that knowing in their presents during filming. But mostly film's early perceptive head was still too heavy to get out of the way, (and heavy headed giants don't make art, they steal it). And then one day there was young Orson Wells and Akira Kurosawa, and you probably know (earlier) others who began it, and suddenly film, like every medium, reached a moment when it could finally, naturally (as if invisibly), speak its own language fluent. As if it had fallen in love for the first time. And then it just… was an art form.

Art is a skilled intention. Though the word "art" is slopped around on everything now. It's just a big wet word, or worse it is like the word "shit", "hey buddy, is this your shit? ...I like your shit". Yeah-thanks. But it is better that no word is sacred or we'd all have to eat dogma. More …shit.

The life of comics have paralleled film, they also began in the magnified realm of human caricature, super heroes and super villains, telling the stories of the most common denominators. Appealing through images to the innate 'Reader" (the subconscious). Comics appeal to the simplest observational deduction, to the pre-literate non-literate in us all, to the kid who still reads images (no matter his age).

Prior to art there is reading the world and its dialogue of story. A baby looks at the world and learns to recognize it, learns to read it, first there are senses, the colors and the patterns with the good stuff, food and touch and those beautiful cooing sounds of love. The kid then learns to read the minutiae of face and place. Soon enough the simple language of humanly-predigested images, of storytelling, becomes a food shared. We give Picture books to kids because they still love to read images, naturally. As a kid we read the potential story in anything. Throw a metaphor at a kid and they won't cock an eye at you, they'll ask "what happens next," because they see.

I have always used kids to tell me want is going on in my work if a trusted kid like Jyothi, Isham, Bean or Ivan, don't see it, then it's not there. School wipes out this ability to read, school believes in words more than the things the words represent. But …when you close your eyes and I say the word "Horse" you don't see a word, you don't see an abstraction, what you see is a very specific horse, and …the trajectory of it's story (clues to the where and when). As if your Self is saying with each image, "Love this …and more will be given you." (-PS-)

I remember when you showed me Dargar's images for the first time and Dragonlenny acted surprised that I could read his images without doubt? Even without speaking of the more abstracted feelings stated by color interactions, there are learned clues in visual symbols. Symbols that have been repeated and handed down because no image, as yet, can state it better, (they are abbreviations of metaphors). This world language of images that are used in comics, has yet to be codified by "scholars" and therefore it is still alive and growing, it is still allowed its mysteries, and everyone who puts their hand in, adds to its possible life. A doted line around words is whispered because it is half-invisible, half unseen like the wind. Eyes that are black are turned inward, they are looking inside. For example, some of Dargar little hermaphrodites have black eyes: children, having just arrived from the Inside are still part-here part-there, and are usually still closely connected to their subconscious origin. This is a culturally independent archetype; we say "out of the mouths of babes," wisdom. It is a given that children don't need to look inside because that is where they live, the worlds of inside and outside are still somewhat equal. Therefore if a child eyes are turned towards looking inside fully they are acting as a seer, or Heart-sick, or witness to an atrocity. (In some ways all three are the same because of their similar impetus in the realization of mortality). But black eyes are just one clue in the total image to be verified by other clues. Oden had to give one of his eyes to gain in-sight, to gain the two black ravens of wisdom. Owls are always the messengers of the gods because they can see inside the dark. It is our oldest language, pre-literate.
Every image is a complete story, our "Reader" (our un-subconscious), tells us, (if we listen), how any image came about. The Reader also reads the trajectory of where the image-event will go in the gestalt of clues. It is this innate ability to read, (inductive/deductive), which creates an on going story from two divergent images in a formal proximity as in film and comic-panels; it is what reads the continuity between juxtaposed images in a poem. A comic initiates the Readers participation in that virtually-alert subconscious space between two images.

I once heard a great vedic scholar say that the only thing from the deep past that has survived the "scholars" unmolested, without being bludgeon to death with the Hyzenberg-Uncertainty probe of knowledge ("knowledge is a polite word for dead but not buried imagination" -eec-), are the Puranas (the children stories). And now today, the avanti-guard of Jungian psychology are devoutly mining the old fairy tales and myths, which they have found, amazingly, to parallel human psychological growth. These miners of old stories have come to the conclusion that we actually need stories in order to be healthy in our Heart. Interesting? So… we need stories says the quazi-science of Psychology. We need…the art of stories. OK(and that 's as close as it will ever get to science admitting the necessity of art). And what is a Fairy Tale? It is an image rich story of heroes and villains.

My generation grew up with comics in the late 50's into the 60's. Comics have, on and off been demonized out of fear of its potential freedom and direct voice, and literally forced to wear a code badge like a yellow star under the stern eye of Christian moral fascism after the Kefauver Hearings in the fifties. Towards the end of the 60's, Zap comics said, "Fuck you" and did whatever it wanted to. It shat in its pants and picked its nose and cummed on everything. Zap got a bit sloppy-high on its own freedom and couldn't seem to ever take itself seriously. (And now we call it "art" but it requires a cloud of verbiage and care not to put it anywhere near Vermeer or Agnes Martin).

In the late 70's the first self-published independent comic was begun by Dave Sim (Cerebus: written as an ever sharpening parody on the medium, and it's very self) it was a kind of first sighting of Self awareness. Later in the early 80's other Independent comics began telling stories that finally disregarded the "comic code" (though the majority were still aimed at kids), the most important of these was the Hernandez brothers; Love and Rockets. A comic without gross heroes and villains, just stories about a small eccentric village in Mexico, and young barrio punkers in California, beautiful stuff, worthy of feeling, alive under the influence of love and humor. Jamie Hernandez greatly stylized his images in the comic tradition but still carried a feeling of honest observation, which for me changed comics for good.

So …a small hand full of people begin to apply the criteria of "inner-necessity" to this (old) fledgling form; comics, (as did Patchen and Ward earlier on). For me comics really began with my death in 89. So many times I came close to the end of my story, that exact place of my death, inside, carrying my small snarling heart opened wide, as if I were ready. And all through my deliriums I was met (plagued) by an imp of my Very-Self, a small Pope in white cowboy boots named Joey Fool, Pope Joey, a self-proclaimed Lord-of-Cheek. He was my guide into Elysium, and I began to listen carefully to him… (I hope this kind of thing, a polytheistic personality doesn't creep-you-out it is unavoidably standard fare in my head. The Eskimos say that we have many souls in us that seem to be my take as well). Pope Joey once said to me, (speaking of art, as we huddled in the dark over a small campfire along The-Night's-Creek in the woodlands of Schzotopia), "Brother…if you can't print it… you're on the wrong side."

Very few comics ever seem to realize art… there is maybe a single hand full of people who are not bowing to the limits of its history. You know that substance between "real-things"? It reminds you of "the real", though it is not real, it is filler, it is Maya, it is that syrup in which the bits of apple float inside the pie, it is the holding pattern while you wait to come down to earth, and it is 50 years of comics. 50 years of one tiny niche done-to-death.

(Toc-says): Reading the "intention" of a work, and the necessity of it's …everything, tells me if a (comic) is serving art or otherwise. The intention cannot be to make art. What is art? And besides, art is by any honest definition, impossible. (The Audacity! Imagining your self soliciting a resonance of perfection, who do you think you are?!) So the intention is then to be utterly honest, without reserve, to a feeling that is more worthy than life. A feeling that is what is meant by living fully. To tell a story so utterly that your chosen audience feels redeemed by it, and holds it as a place inside their Self by their Self. This is art … for me (my religion [to bind back to the source]). My question (to my Self) is … is the work a conduit for this "necessity," this truth, or is the work acting out limitations from outside its necessity, desires that are not the work's desires?

In comics acting out limitations is obviously an easy thing to do because the expectations of its existing audience are so limited that they are a little frightening, it is as if no one is looking. I mean, who cares about comics? You might then ask why I care, and I have no (Reason-able) answer, just a Feeling that I recognize as my Self. A feeling of sublime potential that is living my life.

What is a comic? What is art? What art is -- is utterly elusive, and that is what keeps it alive, Art seems to be repelled by the fuss and noisy attention of money. It seems to demand its own voice and if you fuck-with-it you lose it. It is a very private wild animal. You try to find out what it wants and …you give it, you give it your everything, your love, your family, your Heart, just to have it stay with you.
"…stay…"
And do I need to tell you it is worth it?

Your pal
Toc

4/27/00 Page Six
Dear Roger

I finished page six, and I was so high for love of it, that I got a beating; I did a shoot for pages one, two, and three, and almost all no good. Wrong time of year, the trees are not yet full, those pages are about lost splendor, and where the fuck was I, impatient boy, and Tree even risked her life on page three clinging to a rock face. I jump back two spaces to find me looking lost. The subtle horror of life is wasted time. And way too much work for my brother (eats my time like old Cronus), soon he'll be mistaking me for an authentic union film electric who actually cares.

Oh to be like Comrade-X, always working, always in there where the work is.

5/10/00 Obsessing on Heart…again
Dear Roger

Can't believe I forgot Karin's name, what a bloody clown I am. Please tell her what a bloody clown I am. Joe-bo the bloody clown! Please tell her I hadn't forgotten Her. What she does, the quiet of her hands, her stones of nomenclature, the restless anger in her daughters eyes, her familiar Bear shadow, her (beautiful) direct face, and her eyes, only I forgot her name. A dog-eared name as useful in describing her as Bob. Joe is that guy who receives my Pics-pay paychecks, and he is a bloody clown. Joe, Karin, and Roger are the names of plastic zippered slipcovers on hungry couches. She should have a name like Holdstone, named after that distance inside her eyes. But still I'm a clown (who can't remember names), and one who hadn't washed in days, I smelt like a street dog. You and Karin and D-lenny and Carlos must come over to the Beanhouse (the twin's new home) where I am clean, and we can drink and eat and chat, they have all manner of rooms and chairs, the lovely stuff. Any time, any time, or any time …and you owe us Milwaukee.

My small hot mildewy ROOM, seems like a prison cell to everyone but me, I do love it. And you caught me solving an image lost in its own piddling, oh the shame!

So, by-the-by, have you ever noticed how every bloody esoteria says that there are people without souls walking about, as if their lack, were evil. And then they want you to buy some degree of the claustrophobic philosophy of "us against them", (a spiritual form of "class-ism"). And yet everyone's heart (the first citizen of their Heart) knows that Love says, that such classism, is shit. (Love's exact words! Love is crude, and scarred, and filthy like the Heart. Yeats once wrote; "...for love has pitched its tent in the house of excrement..." said Crazy-Jane to the bishop). Love says anyone can gather a Heart (or a Heart of Hearts).
So what of all these people we meet that are so frightened of owning their own Heart. So deaf to their heart that they become adapt at walking-talking as if dead. I want to know? Is it the "class" thing, of struggling so hard to eat and sleep that life does not afford the time to consider owning a Heart. Or is it that virile-idea, that if they adhere (despite feeling) to the automaton of virtuous principles, they will be given an abundant Heart at death, as if your final death were the beginning of life. What a joke!
Maybe, quietly, they believe that there would be anarchy if everyone lived up to their Heart. They might believe that their Heart is potentially an evil one, from maybe having once made curious contact (as a child) and having found how little the Heart cares for such vague parameters as good and evil. And maybe they mistook that lack of care as Evil its Self. The Heart is evil...and good... and dog...and pop-cycle.
Recognition that the Heart is evil puts evil in the hands of the Heart, and allows the Heart to feel …responsible (a rather important idea). If anything, the Heart is the place where feeling is the vocabulary. Feeling is the Image-nation. Feelings the size and breath of erupting tectonic plates or as fleeting as the speckled eyelid of a starling.
Maybe people who have fear-of-Heart fear what would happen if their passions (the direction their Heart faces) took control of their life and did not provide some place to wash their hands. Could be messy.
And what about people who mistake their Heart for desires, who can not distinguish between passion and desire. Or they mistake their Heart for something easy! Or mistake it for power, and order, like spooky cops, religious moralist, and politico's. Or maybe they mistake their Heart for "security", which is the antithesis of change, and change is the medium of feeling.
Christianity, read bluntly, says the Heart is evil, and "the good" is a spirit projected outside of your Self onto a feeble man, broken and bloody, and utterly trashed. A powerless philosopher nailed on a stick with a poor fish joke over his head. As if, that's what you get for listening to your Heart!
A later thoroughly fucked version of that philosophy and its attending joke, has taken form of "America", (congratulations to the sales department). The best way to keep people enthralled is to control their access to their own Heart, (congratulation to TV).
The Heart finds it's own …Self...eventually. Because there are many ways to climb down from the spirit into a dark and carefully lit Heart. A deep abiding conversation with death is one way. Suffering's another way. Art is an-Other way. Art (according to Pope Joey) is where you keep on talking in precise images until the Heart (who is a sucker for images) jumps into the chat, and soon you just realize you had better shut up and listen.
Love is a way into the Heart. Poetry exists just to qualify that statement (Duenda).
The "difficult" is a way into your Heart. Do something impossible or die (the Heart loves a good proof). America, besides all the old cake-eating throwback classism, is the closest thing too impossible in the history of history (closest is not to say it's quick, it is a blunt vector).
Rilke, other than his devotion to direct-observation (Di-Ob), seemed devoted to talking about "the difficulty" as a direction in. And if you take any way, eventually all ways become the same way. Love is difficult. Love becomes art. And art, speaking with difficulty, from the vantage of forever, talks about a-good-day-to-die.
Pope-Joey says you've got to eat a lot of your own Heart to be strong enough to actually consider being your Self. His comments are always snakes eating their tail, like the blue feathers of a different horse. "The soul is a house of ill repute but with good reputation" ( -William Shakespeare- should have said this). The Heart eats its own dreams, like the best storytellers, until there is nothing left, until you've cleaned your plate, (cleaning your plate is a warrior thing). Dream food!
The other night PapaWolf had me run an obstacle course while he swam close under ground just behind my heels! I was running freaky like a happy-dog. It was thrilling and the knot that was my body sang with salt. With the electric help of good and liquid fear, I made it! Another guy, confident with song, did not. PapaWolf dived out of the ground into the air over him as he ran, and pushed him down under, and then ...ate him. I love Papawolf. HE will eat me.
Tree made me realized later that the big guy eaten was my friend Bear-chuck who died last summer. Duh!

Your pal Toc

6/8/00 Page Four
My friend Roger

Page four is done. And I've revamped Comrade-X's commentary to include the elemental dialogue of each page, in darker letters. And the lighter letters are Comrade-X's commentary to Toc ("present!") on the event of living through each page. I have left the pages in the order that they were made, so that the newest pages are last. I was waiting for summer to do the first three pages. Though I am now beginning page ten because it caught me in a weak moment, and demanded to have his say (it's coyote, [who was really PapaWolf in his youth]).
I can not tell you what a horror and relief this comic is to me, if I could believe in a god beyond my Self, I'd say we were having some serious chat, but as it is, I suppose it's just art.

"Art! What-the-fuck! That's counter-revolution, you mealy-mouth bastard! You piss-poor wannabe cake-eater. Art-my-arese, it is a proletariat voice pointing at its own humanity. The conscious hive! It is a comic first, and art, only by its lack of class. Honestly Toc! Step-up!" says Comrade-X.

Oops.

Sorry I missed you on Monday. I was nominated, by default, as animal handler at Beanhouse while Holybean and the twins were in California. I worked in Tree's big studio (no phone), where I could stand back, from the pages, twenty amazing feet! So cool. These pages are killing me but I'm definitely facing heaven.
I just finished writing a kids story that goes with the inky pages of volume six, number one, of the "Kids of lower Utopia" (of which you have the first 18 pages). It is just a sweet little story about the younger sister of the woman I am drawing on these big pages. But it is thirteen pages of long text, a dream, and it is mostly for kids, (despite the occasional "fuck you") so I imagine you would not have the time to read it…?
Forgive me that I just rattle on about my self, but I can not quiz you without obligating your time to write back, writing is a pain in the arese. And there is something true and honorable about the protocol of silence.

Your pal Toc

11/11/00
Roger

How's your work, is it killin-ya? Hi-ho! A willing heartfelt slave eating your very Self to death for your Daimon. Do you know that poem by Eeeecummings that ends with, "….Does this sound dismal? It isn't. It's the most wonderful life on earth. Or so I feel." And if it makes you cannibalize your self … well …Yee-ha!
So here is my question for you at the very end of this piece of a letter to a friend (it is very abstract… but how else?):

Tree and I finally realized we are not artists, what a relief! For us that explains a lot. We just don't believe that expressing our most privately obsessive feelings out on to canvas (or the like) is valid enough to be worthy of anyone else's attention.
The most proletariat act of observation is the most basic form of value. What we pay our attention to makes valuable. Money is an overt statement of value in denoted objective numeric terms. What does money buy…freedom in time, freedom to spend your attention where it wills? And to observe is to make worthy.
An idea is a living observation; it exists in its own lifetime, its sustenance is attention.
Tree and I are Observers of the empirical world which we hold sacred, it is very much our religion. We admire Direct-Observation over all things. Concentrated Observation in art is what attracts us to it.
For kids receiving attention, to be seen, and admired as they are, is what they want most. Kids enter the world stripped down to truth, if you gain the privilege (and trick) to listen-in to a kid, to have there confidence, you can hear holiness speaking. For kids there is no substitute for attention, because they know intuitively by the laws of the heart that attention is love. (Love is not some intangible reality it is the expression of honest attention in the eyes, the face, and body looking at them, opened towards them. And this gestalt is read by their subconscious Observer observing, who silently feeds the truth perceived, into their "conscious" self in the language of feeling and images).
Observation is the act of love. It is giving the most limited, limited by life, and thereby precious substance of attention to another. Our work, Tree and I, is about observation; our innate expression of feeling is in how skillfully we observe the world reflecting that expression, and in the subtlety of the directed hints of our stories. We listen to observation by being quiet and obedient to its voice. Our feelings are present in the respect we offer our audience by the careful skill of our work, (though our audience is also carefully chosen). We are just not artists; we are skilled Observers, we are silent storytellers.
Things change, what became art in the twentieth century has returned full circle to its beginning where the voice of things can be heard independent of the speaker."

(The question: Is this the two chambered view; the bicameral-mind?)
This book of the bicameral mind I can't read it! The words swim, three times I've tried, but my head is indolent with novels. The book hasn't enough focus in terms of its imagery, (too many words that have no form), and it seems that I can't force my mind into that mode anymore. I can't even read Hillman anymore. Though, I can listen well, and I am very good at induction and deduction. I now hold an off-hand description of the Bicameral mind by Robertson Davies from "The Cunning Man". I would easily trust a paragraph by you to sum up this idea, and then to allow maybe some questions by me. I am very interested and have projected a concept of the bicameral mind, which matches some things I have heard and held for years ever since I was young and studying Vedanta. Tell-me tell-me I am as good as Magnus Eisengrim, I'll extrapolate, triangulate, and accelerate.

A friend asked me about your gallery, (like I know anything, ha!). I said that Roger represents what he calls "Outsiders Art" And he asked, " What's that?" So I said that you show people's work who don't believe in art as it is defined by this end of history. What Roger presents is the sovereign voice and tangible sight of consciousness. (singing, exacting and distilled stories of life). And I thought… that was pretty good, and it's true, right?

This is really an addendum to this letter… last night Tree and I got drunk with Gerald and he showed us his newest music-video. It is brilliant! I have no idea whether I am out of touch, (of course I am), with the experimental side of music-videos, or whether Gerald is doing exactly what I am doing with comic's, that of shifting the paradigm within the work from a second-rate disposable entertainment to …art, without a traceable thread of evolution, like the N-squared hypotheses in physics. Suddenly a new art form takes a full breath. Brilliant!
Obeisance to story, and the sense of the easy disposability of (his work and mine) music-videos and comics, allows for the new hivel need for, a virtual-half-commitment to perception (at the latest edit-speed of consciousness), and a plague-scale addiction to passive emersion at an affordable price. An eatable contradiction; disposable art. Dada for dinner. Yee-ha!

Your brother, chained to the left, sustained by contradictions,
Toc

The Long Love Letters to ODSeeus