A Ramble of Stuff. 01

What a disguise I've put on just to have my say. True? I think my comics are for readers ten to twenty years from now. My comics (in the here and now) will be there (and then) waiting for them.

This is my jotting page. The page where, if I don't write down what the Daemon of Inner-Necessity would have me say, then …they will plague me till I do. They know they can do this because I invited them to, to use me - when I was a kid, and now that they know my accuracy and my good-dog-frendliness, there is no taking a stand now (besides ...that I love them). I only wish that they would use me less roughly (...I know you're listening).
It's another one of those: be careful what you wish for, you may get it.

Mostly I write this stuff to clear my pallet, otherwise I might chew on certain ideas past their nutritional value.

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I was listening, and I told Comrade-X (Kid King of my youth) that someone asked me if I really heard voices. We laughed, and he said, "If you don't, then you're crazy."

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At the beginning of the last century Abstract art was …discovered. Its story was like the discovery of a new infinite set of numbers. Abstract art today is the endless and arbitrary enumeration of that infinite set, start from anywhere and begin counting…why? Why-not? Brother ...It's just another religion grinding down.

I find it very satisfying that I don't have to explain my Work to kids.

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We can never talk about transcendent experience in a common language because that is the language we live in, and its terms are the definition of the mutual limited reality, and therefore must fail to hold the experience that transcends reality. So a new image of language must be adapted, until it also becomes common. And we refine towards a more and more desirable view of our transcendent humanity.
This is Hivel awareness.

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It isn't just Direct Observation (Di-Ob), of looking carefully, there is also transliteration and interpretation. And I am not very smart, just tenacious. So pretending I can, I begin to work, secretly watching for Comrade-X, who plays the part of Red-pencil. I work on steady waiting for him to recognize the elemental nature of the things I am drawing, and of course to step in, and correct me. He knows this (after forty years), and likes to watch me sweat through my fraud for a ways.
After paying for his darker nature - a little - he shows me the living substance of what I am drawing, and the work is redeemed.

The pencil drawing tell the same story that the inks do but with bardic volubility

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1/11/03. Tyler Derden asks, "Fella … what did you want to do before you died?" Listening to their answers, he buckles his seat belt and steps full on the gas.

This was far from the first time I've heard this Q, and I always reply, "I wanted to KNOW art." But then like an echo I immediately think that my desire is coming from the wrong direction, coming from history instead of towards it (as if to my mind it is a forgone conclusion). It is a hugely hollowing feeling that I've wore since I was a kid like a monkey hugging black blanket of despair, that I repeated over and over in Dreams and the in days.
The residue of childhood dreams are warn like my remembered face as if that is me.

And now with a few years close inspection of the "art world" - have come to see it as it is: "that man behind the curtain" - just another scene.
So … what did you want to do before you died? Tell-me Brother?

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I am proving the theory that Comics are an art form.

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Pencil as organized dirt

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"Luck is a flirting of free energy,
and whenever I am rude to Her
She winks."

(-Comrade-X)
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(9/01/04) Judy …(of) V6 No3 Pg24: Thank you Sister for keeping me alive working-The-Work this winter. (My Grand Circus Psyche thanks you too). I will be careful and make it last.
Thank you ODSeeus for helping that to happen, you are my brother.
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(9/11/04) Now I am working V6.3. pg32. The hero River Scout Finnagain stands before the cave of her subconscious-Self and shyly asks the question that is the summing of her whole life. While behind her, huge in the foreground, her small god tells us, (perking with humor), what is going to happen next. What happen next is what happens when you ask your subconscious-Self true questions? Pow!
It literally bites your head off
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I am making hand-made photographs - intensely hand-doctored photographs - in which I not only present the light but I participate in its life. I am the director of shadows.

"Mining the shadows" -AreBear

V6.3.32. I am having a dialogue with (Comrade-X) my younger sense of the mythic perception as if I were a dead man remembering life.
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Hamlet - Act 2 Scene 2 Lines 205-6

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Dear Mr. See-us. Of course I say this kind of squiggle-gut stuff because I know you will "get-it," (whether you have the time to spend on "it" is another matter […preemptive absolution]). I know that there is no need-of-reason, (accept on my part, in order to cognize my Self), to state any of this philo-sophia, (this love of Ideas). But there it is …I just don't belong to reason, I belong to compulsion, and I am awesome-lucky that my God (of compulsion) loves life (which includes humanity).

Maybe art, (the personification of which in my psyche is experienced as the impetus-toward relating to 'life' through the inhuman scale of beauty, [stated and updated]), maybe art, to me is what people in-general mean when they speak about that fairy tale creature called God.
(And now … when I hear people pray out loud in public-events it always makes me want to laugh a little, [I remember Tree pontificating a public prayer once where she replaced the word "God" with the words "Easter-bunny" with a seriousness of the purest dry-mock … and who's to say?]).

When I was a kid I caught a life-long serious virus. I caught it from Jan Vermeer. I caught an altruistic virus that lives on the super-ego. It's symptoms manifests as a belief that art is the only worthy God to sacrifice my life, my living, for. And also the belief that this ethics is aligned with my original human nature, (my natural animism). This belief is based solely on the evidence I have uncovered and presented in my work, (so that I am willingly redeemed or damned by the work) it is the archaeological-anthropological-science of Feeling .

(Though … to actually be a human you have to have caught some form of an Altruistic virus/symbiosis from early childhood otherwise you would [probable/possibly] grow an inhuman pathology in its place. Don't we see this all the time?)

The "Instinct of art" represents the best general response to life that a human can make. This constant response eventually turns the diligent perceiver into an Animist - which is the full creative attention (love) applied towards the perception of … anything, (attention is sacred).
I have (by the dictates of this private god: art) ignored the altruistic gravity of my projected audience as not being my part of the relationship with (God) art, confident that the force - guiding my work, living in the work - would take care of the audience when it is right, when it is necessary. (And now …I'm assuming that this will happen after I'm dead [probably so as not to distract me while I'm alive?] [Ha-ha, does this sound loony or what? Ho-ho! A self-validating-delusion]). But …True!

Everyone participates in the sacred by virtue of …being (alive). (Thus the sacred is a dangerous place to live).

As to art …I also sometimes feel fairly certain that God (art) doesn't care about the continued existence of the by-products of making art: (the pieces). This is a hard realization and I always find it a bit discouraging. The actual fabrication (concretizing) of the piece is just a means to keep the-worker honest (…proving out your observations [as in mathematics… right Blacky?]). And the work is a means of climbing down - up into the transcendent.

I suppose I believe that this creature living (continuously alert) inside of me (this constructed God) is so in favor of … comics (this is such a laughable statement) because it is the largest possible source of Soma/Manna that this culture, we live in, offers visual art in this time. Far more per quanta of attention=love=soma than the art-world offers.
I could therefore extrapolate from this that Art (one of the-trillion-Gods [of animism]), acts as all animals do, looking for greater food sources, greater sustenance (and in this… animal-ethics applies to Gods).
Because everything is sacred - there are therefore a-trillions-gods … or … there are as many gods as you are capable of feeling. To feel is to admire. To admire is to feed and be fed the soma of attention. Attention is Consciousness - everything is made of consciouness.
This realization of the-trillion-gods (or one-two-many) of a Sacred World (as Daniel Quinn insists) is an A-theism because in a sacred world there is no-thing less sacred than another thing. Only a trillion relative scales of size. A trillion ethics of esthetes that follows the effortless direction of love. A trillion blossoms. A trillion beings becoming.

So …is my on-going prayer aimed at the sky, at this mountain, at this Tree, at my face, at my body, at the faces of my sons, at my brother Arebear? What is the image, says the Heart? Prayer is like a search-light aimed at an Image that is the personification of a feeling. When we focus on It we feed it attention. Eventually the Image is awake enough to focus its attention back on us, into a state of reflective alertness. (And hopefully it says, I love you, I die for you).
When you close your eyes and think of a 'Thing' you do not see an abstraction inside you, you see a "specific truth". Your developed ability to admire that Image …is prayer, and is a dialogue. A "specific truth" is the perspective of the Heart, where each thing is perceived with reverence for its individuated life (without generalities, without "universals") … personal, as personal as possible, as if it were …you… your Self.
I am not all things, I am this thing equal (by love) to all Other things, (according to the Hearts perception).
"We're not one with animals, we ARE animals." (DQ)

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Roger (as per our conversation [you-me-Tree] last night [8/29/04]) Art is "A creative ethics of esthetes" James Hillman. You are making constant micro/macro decisions of yes-and-no's as a process for making art (thus an ethics of esthetes). It is what is called in old India, Shivism or Niti-niti (meaning: IT-is-not-this IT-is-not-that, and "IT" is the personal measure of the Absolute [of perfection] that you are comparing your choices to - this is ethics).
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Dear Judy, I projected a 'look' on your face when I was yammering about the religion of art once, as if I were excluding anyone who doesn't make an old-stylie material art. I'm not.
In all honesty raising a kid by acting as a living example of the "instinct of art" is by far the most powerful enactment of art. Art is a religion that worships the one whole and complete animal (equal to a universe) that is You. And no matter in what you apply the "instinct of art," in that you are performing art, (a religious act: [a refresher definition: Religion - linking back to our origin]), in art you are observing your Awareness, looking back at you (from out of it's origin). The mechanics of art (as we study it from performing it) is just a simplified ritual of the same myth that everyone enacted in living: the act of becoming your Self. The "instinct of art" is an aesthetic dialogue with action. It is the question: what is 'perfect' action? (Or what is its closest approximation?)
What is the residue of a perfect statement? (We call that: art). Art can not be perfect - it is a map, a direction, a container of just enough silence to remember perfect by.
But the art is actually the act of (or ritual of) realizing the statement. The simplified aesthetic dialogue of art is what Duchamp called the bride stripped bare by her bachelors.

Ultimately the only perceptive tool that we have, (will ever have), through which we can verify our Heart's voice, and alluring quanta's of shared language (ideas), the only tool is our self. The axiom of this experience is that no one's Images could be more sacred then your own. And your own images are the key to the entire universe of You. Your Images has been carved by your Heart as the perfect fit to open You. We are, by virtue of our human nervous system, essentially all the same, we are sublime (…and living in the constricted hell of our own fears, the fear of death [and luck as it relates to moral-relativism]).

Rituals

I spent my childhood in art learning this: "To be in a desirable mental condition is the work." (Agnes Martin). This realization led to hundreds of unconscious rituals as a kid. Rituals to break from the ordinary and into the Surreal. Small acts to pay recognition, to remind both myself and my Self of my willingness and desire to see. (Little acts, almost unconscious, such as:): simply holding hot water before I work, counting touch coup on free animals, speaking honestly to animals, befriending Death, eclectic pujas of the heart, and shrinings, hundreds of idiosyncratic acts. The rituals were/are reminders of the subconscious realm that is called 'The Surreal' or 'Beauty'. The rituals open the door of Feeling that is the art. When you add words to the feeling-of-ritual you have poetry and story. When you add pencil-and-paper you have drawings, and so on. Reverence is an innate response in the presence of beauty. It is a heliotrope of the Heart. So what do you do with a weight of reverence when you honestly don't believe in any of the big-belief-assumptions that have been handed down, when the only God-like reality, that comes to you from You is the perception of beauty? The answer is art. And you let that exuberance that that perception of beauty feeds you, do all the work. But at some point in your observations you begin to recognize the disciplines of art as languages of ritual. As if ritual is a door, a Soft-door into your Self, and a way to enact perfection.

The problem of organized religions

Of course we banded together in the past under Religions, strength-in-numbers. But looking at the evolution of Religion in the western world it becomes obvious that it was aiming towards individuality, toward each human -- being directly responsible for their relationship with their own Heart (The Protest nailed to the door). This evolution of ideas then gave rise to a politic of government to protect this delicate truth from …religion itself.

When two people are organized to agree in a religion and their very Heart's images are each overlapped on the other they lose their distinctive edges and end up with a blurred thing that has been rounded off to fit both. Those two distinct languages of Heart then begin to carry a small gray noise. Now multiply this overlap by millions and you have lost the very personal and thrilling voice of your Self. Religions even create elegant lawyerly strictures against Hearts striding off on their own (only a couple of hundred years ago I would have been burn alive for thinking as I do). Yet when the ascetic returns as "a voice crying in the wilderness" the religion is quick to co-op their research (dieing for lack of fresh blood).

The problem in organized religion comes when you compromise your image of your Heart in order to share it. Our human desire to share is a given, it is a cornerstone of our animal ethics, our hivel nature, and is documented as an inescapable impulse by ascetics through out history. But the only truly successful sharing of this image that has ever been done was done by art …acting alone. Religions sprung from moments of art, religions harnessed art; the success of religions is by-product of art, of poetry, songs, storytelling, acting, architecture, this is the manna, this is the living blood of religions.

But now that art lives in a protected secular humanistic time, it's life no longer threatened by religions, (my deep thanks to America) art shies from religions, no longer willing to support the gross limitations of religions (my thanks to the bourgeoisie's Renaissance). And so religions die, are dieing, cut off from their source of manna. Murder and war are the hideous death throes of religions that can not evolve, (murder and war are the age old techniques of religions using Death as a catharsis for freshening the old blood). And…art by its very nature says, I belong to no one but my Self (…Beautifully).

Sooo, many sweeping ideas, but you see the pattern here, I look to my Self for the truth, I follow a very old pattern of enactment that we call art, in which I am learning how to perceive.

(Returning to - "In what you apply the instinct of art," - the more aligned you are with You the more that that instinct is alert. And thus …I met a ditch-digger rock-splitter once when I was working on a tar-gang in Switzerland who taught me this more truly, (without a word), than the random Rishis I've met).

My own observations do not lead to a supreme personality. All images are relative to a perception that will die, my perception. All that ancient and "sacred" poetry of every holy-book is just someone else's images, and in the words of eecommings, "Knowledge is just a polite word for dead but not yet buried imagination." No ones image is more sacred than your own.
I have seen and felt sublime beauty, and I have seen that all things die. I trance in and out of the eternity in a virtual second but the clock is unforgiving, and I pay towards my death. If I was going to realize anything as God it would have to be … my observations … and then …everything else, so what would be the point of the word.

"The quiet keep of the Jesusleaf," says PapaWolf.

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Dear pal Zinskey, going back to that conversation we were having about the death of your Mage-father in South America. Going back to the point at which you told him to be careful with his heart. (What follows is the Toc-ian mechanic of prescience [or visions]).
Imagination is the economically concise use of images and metaphor to define feelings. Feeling is the perfect language of the Heart (the subconscious or in Vedanta and Buddhist terms: the Self). The Heart reads every nuance of ever clue of perception (inductive/deductive) and extrapolates out feelings that, if the imagination is lucid (through habitual use), can be recognize as the Heart's voice and directions.
The Heart is indirect. It is indirect so as to not burn-out our feathery delicate nervous system with the scale and energy of its perception. Our ability to feel is the best metaphor for knowing. To feel is the language of your original/animal nature, your Heart. (I know that you know all of this, I am just showing all my steps to satisfy Mr. Barlow).
The animal is still alive in all of us despite our civilized shell, the Heart is the animal. The Heart, as animal, reads the breathing patterns, the heart beat, the dilation of the iris, the smoothest of gestures, the posture, the flare of nostrils, the smells coming off the skin, the cadence, tones, and timbres of the voice, the gestalt silence of the body (or lack-of), and the very thoughts as they shiver through the physiology. These are just Direct-Observations that the simplest dog perception reads. It reads all this not as a list but as a response, animals are much more honest towards living for their feelings (and therefore not very civilized). So how much more complex is our own perceptual capacity, so many more times folded and layered beyond our brother Dogs. We are the predator of all predators. And …this plethora of animal readings doesn't even include the blindingly reveling labyrinth of triangulating words, trumpeting their Freudian revelations. The Heart misses none of this, reads relatively everything, and feeds us feelings of response. If your imagination (your Image-nation) is supple enough (through habitual use) the feelings will find forms, they will come to you as images … like: "Be careful of your heart"
And by this you don't even need to invent a future.
I draw your attention to the studies where dogs were used to sniff out cancers that doctors hadn't been able to detect. Is the Dog a prescient soothsayer when she sniffs out the cancer in a patient, is the dog predicting the future or just paying attention to subtleties, and being the Animal that it is.
I have said all this because I want to draw your attention to what is "actually" special about Zinskey's perceptions. It is that she pays attention; she listens to the feelings and images that her Heart relates to her from the gestalt of her perceptions (motivated by her loving empathy). This is a delicate skill far more wonderful and real then the left-handed luck of inventive prescience.

You see, with 'presence,' it is really time that bothers me. I've given my self over to the concept of time, felt my way deep into it, and I can understand dividing "Now" by an absolute number (eg: the speed-of-light), and arriving in a relatively infinite variable out of virtually …no-time. "Forever." But … there is no actual future, there is just a relatively infinite probable/possible based on an intuitive inductive/deduction.
"And then," says Mrs. Constantinescu, "…a bet."

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The early Jewish and Islamic Prophets (nabi'im: to rave - prophetic-ecstasy: literally, "to stand outside ones self" (or "inside your Self," says early-Vendantic-period Animism), of which our western world derives the concept of prophet, were not people who predicted the future… they were culture critics (A.J.Levine). They spoke to their people, and the king-of-the-time, about what was the best way to live together, and they did it with an eloquence of poetry and music. It was the poetry that proved the prophets clarity of thought and allured the audience with a beauty of eloquence. Beauty feeds the Heart. It was the art of poetry that separated them from the priest-politicians. The prophets said to their people if you keep-on doing this-and-this you will end up like 'this'. This is not "presence" this is intuitive logic based on stripped observation, Direct Observation. And…very few of the prophets we know about, ever got past their tribal arrogance, (but then who writes the history).
In ancient Israel there was actually schools of prophecy that traveled in groups (safety-in-number) who would arrive in a town and begin rapping, sometimes just in rhythms of sound (speaking in tongues) and sometimes in poetry, (psalms) and always with instruments.
There is archaeological evidence that they used opium and wine in their performance pieces …(fact!).
The prophets were a hold-over from pre-theocratic times, from the time before the 'one-god' idea was enforced.

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Hello again DanielQuin.
I agree that civilization will end soon, but I think that you are playing a trick by pretending to think like a "Taker" when you imagine out-loud that we should not curiously accept civilizations end in favor of the Woods rebirth.
You have storied the truest definition of nilism, but …you have offered the company of the Heart in place of the Nothing. (Is coup)! And the Heart is far more beautiful than humanities best flying-dream. Far more beautiful then a thought. It is a glow of feeling. The Heart is the linking-back, the back-track home, because the Heart was carved by a billion years of wind, rain, rock, animals, Death, and fire, and It does not forget a single thing. It re-member every thing, it remembers it's Self.

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"We secretly long for evil, when in the presence of the mundane because we know in our hearts that where evil concentrates, love will personify and conquer, and by this - life quickens appreciably. And doesn't this look like a trick to you?"
- PopeJoey

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Mr. See-us…If you don't observe that this is your only life ever you will miss out on the only possible heaven in you, you will devalue life, and living it, pretending your immortality will find some heaven for you. If you don't abandon your immortality and strive for heaven in this life the world will never appear … sacred (like a bobcat in the woods).

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Craig Thompson, I loved your book it was fully felt in the scale of your Heart and well done brother.

Laughing it up with baby Jesus and we still cry like Christ for more red.
- Comrade-X

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The phone is strictly your thing O-my-brother, and I love to provide you with good sounds from my heart and from out of the depth of our friendship but my senses close down on the phone, all my animal senses are mostly lost over the phone, I have to keep remembering that my face is all on its own and can't be heard, I am a seeing animal above all else. So I definitely prefer this slower and more digested version of … chat. 'The Letter'.
And I agree that the hand is naked. To see something hand written has always shocked me with shyness because a person's whole life seems to be exposed in the very way they form their each letter, each word, each number, each sentence. The superego does most of that work. But this simple crafting of images in the context of words (through e-mails) is workable also. And I feel it reveals itself closer to the Self then the phone conversations ever do.

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I keep thinking that I should send Dave Sim a letter that says that since both of us (in the exceptional sence of two = Dialogue) since both of us evolve in term of focusing perception, that, if he ever wanted to alter the wording of any idea or image presented in our letters 0 -19, that all he'd need to do was to send me a corrected version which would go in place of the earlier edition of the letters as the perfected version the updated version. I would say to him that I want the dialogue to survive as a "thing" because he had helped me so wonderfully to delineate my image of reality.
Loony yeah? Gota-gota-do-it!

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"First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, and then you win." (MGandhi)
This pattern occurs with the subconscious/Heart as well. First you ignore it, then you are incredulous and amused by it, and then you fight it (depression and all of his dogs) and then …it wins! Yea! Hurray for the Losers!

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This is what has happened from all those year under the influence of Vedanta - I can now (and this now is a retroactive perception) always read meaning in everything I see, (I want to say 'The' meaning because that is the right of each Heart to say), it is the meaning of my Heart, but it matters only so much as it opens to the experience of my heart …opens to feeling 'It's' presence. That feeling, of It, is so big and so truly dangerous, that it blindingly burns off your self in its presence. In the quiet of my life I have become a process of fractional blasts with longer spans of healing between. Ho-ho what a way to go!

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"May luck curse you."
Your pal
Toc

Brother AreBear 12/4/99