Intros and Bios
I
Am That - V8 No1 - Animal Ethics of Lower Utopia
(Statement/Synopsis)
I
have been closing my eyes and spending time inside myself every day for
40 years. I have found a place inside that is a still-point where time
is not. This Place inside me has grown till now I feel more it than me.
In this sitting each day I do absolutely nothing, I let go of me and see
what comes. On occasions very lucid sights occur whose intensity dissolves
the-me, and whose scale is too huge to fit into my thinking. These drawings
are my best response to those experiences. They are almost accurate.
There is a story occurring between these images but I am carefully refraining
from imagining it - waiting for it to reveal itself. To me this story
can best be told in the medium of the pencil. Nothing holds more directly
the silent life of observation-in-light as a metaphor, undisguised, then
pencil; simple, direct, and so very elemental. My drawings are a careful
language of tiny vectors sculpting forms out of space, catching and move
perception with their continuous suggestions.
I am very interested in
James Joyce's "Aesthetic Arrest" - to experience observation
free of thought, free of time, held in silence..
Statement/Synopsis
No2: Through
the eyes of an animal the scared and realized awareness of Reality watches
and waits.
An animal is the perfect answer to its niche - its form is
the very shape of its exact need as sculpted by a million years of evolution.
It is beauty incarnate. Our criteria for beauty was sculpted by the same
principles of that formed that evolution. An animal looks out from the
vast ineffable nature which is our very nature as well. Animals are holy.
Animals live in a state of oneness with that ineffable nature - but humans
are blocked from experiencing that awareness by the incessant domination
of thoughts - by our ego/mind.
The absence of thought is blissful (blissfulness is not exciting, not
interesting, not attached to desires or its fears, it is not good or bad,
it knows no past and projects no future, it is a subtle ever present self-effulgent
completeness within all of us that is synonymous in experience with beauty and
peace. It is this realizations that is the essential
statement of
Go to: I Am That - V8 No1 - Animal Ethics
Kids
of Lower Utopia - V6 No3 - A Letter from the Front Lines
(The Realization of River Scout Finnagain)
Synopsis
After River acknowledges
her Self in V6 No 2 - Kids of Lower Utopia: Softdoor’s Older Sister’s
I-AM Knot
(The Realization of River Scout Finnagain), and having accidentally sacrificed
the last joint of the left smallest finger to
re-membering her Self, River awakens under a Dream as The Witness of her
inner world and naked as a newborn (pages 11). She gathers her clothes
by need (pages 14-19), and is followed to The Water by her most beloved
reflection of Self - her god: Beautiful (page 20). Together they drink
the water as equals (page 22), and begin to wander through the woods listening (page
24). Listening, River begins to hear the call of the Very Mountain (page
26). River climbs the Mountain (page 28), and talks to the dead (page
30). She is directed by a Chance encounter (with herself - page 32 ),
and stands before the warm dark cave of her Self Eternal. Standing before
the Unknown, River sums-up her life in a single question (page 34), and
is answered by an even more direct question (page 36), to which she gives
the right answer (page 37) she gives her whole life, and dies as her reply
(page 38 Hurray!). In this death she recognizes herself, who she is, and
ever was, and will be (she is YES, page 39). Now River holds her death
close (page 40), and opens her eyes inside Reality (page 41), realizing
the echoes of Truth (page 42). Now River moves inside the pattern of Life
(page 43) the instrument of her own Realization, and beyond the Three
Changes (page 45). River kisses good-bye to the Horse-of-Power (page 47).
And then returns to The Water to wash away her last words of inner necessity (page 49).
Now River begins to run, gather exuberance and momentum (page 51), until she
jumps off a cliff that appears in her way
(page 53) …and flies Home (page 55).
Her home is the warm dark and
vast space of awareness in the heart of her Self Eternal where all things
are her - where all is River (page 57).
Epilogue : Finally home, River hangs with the Gods, being ... One ...her
self (page 61).
Kids
of Lower Utopia - V6 No3 - A Letter from the Front Lines
(The Realization of River Scout Finnagain)
Introduction
AN INTRODUCTION TO V6 No3 KIDS OF LOWER UTOPIA
A
LETTER FROM THE FRONT LINES BY RIVER SCOUT FINNAGAIN
This
book is an allegory of the truth as I have experienced it. It is about
what is real. What is real does not change, that is how you know it is
real. For me, what is real, is the only conversation worth having - the
only story worth telling. So, the question at the heart of this story
and at the very heart of each image is; "what does not change - what
is real?"
Nothing I say here is new. What is true was true long before the woolly
mammoths stopped singing, and will still be true when this earth is no
more. We humans are always growing in two portentous directions equally
at the same time. In one direction we are destroying ourselves by destroying
each other and our environment and in the other we are learning ways to
live in peace. The way to a world of peace and love does not depend on
governments, leaders, new ideas, beliefs, concepts, precepts or religions.
It will and does occur when each of us recognizes what is true within
and lives it.
So there are two forces on the rise in the human story. One force is that
of the mind whose persona is the ego. The mind has dominated humanity
for some five thousand years. The mind's nature is that of comparison,
judgment, greed, fear, control, conflict, and ultimately separation. As
consequence it leads us towards war and suffering, and perhaps self-annihilation.
The mind is properly a tool of the body that evolved for our survival
but has grown to dominate our lives far beyond its healthy function. Because
of the dominance of the mind/ego we live with constant war and suffering
because the mind is running the world by its nature, and its nature is
… conflict (us against them).
The other force on the rise is that of truth, whose nature is peace, love,
and compassion. The truth is beyond thought; it does not belong to the
mind. The truth is not a concept or belief nor is it an idea beyond all
other ideas. The truth is an experience, an experience beyond the mind.
It lives inside you. It is you. It is life itself. It is available to
you when you completely realize that "what is perceived cannot be
the perceiver." You are not your thoughts, you are the perceiver
beyond all thoughts of identity in the mind, and from the vantage of the
perceiver you are free from the reactionary nature of the mind.
You are that close.
Thinking cannot think its way out of thinking. It is thinking that precludes
experience – it is thought that bars you access to that vast ocean
of peace beyond the mind. The work of life is to realize and experience
the truth that you are already within. But realizing the truth is not
a thing that can be “done” because doing is a function of time,
and time is an invention of the mind. In experience there is only now,
so all that you can “do” is to allow what is, in this moment
. . . to be. This is why "finding" the truth is called realization,
because you realize that the truth is who you are … already.
Perception without thought …is bliss.
So why would you want to experience the truth? Because "truth"
is synonymous in direct experience with love, peace, joy, freedom, beauty
- everything that we understand to be … The Good. You are, within
you, the very source of all that you desire in the world, but the world
only reflects what you have allowed yourself inside. So . . . why limit
your Self, why ration water at the great river? Why not be who you are
… already. There are as many ways to self-realization as there are
beings alive, and time does not exist on this path … so why not begin
now?
In
this, my 8th book, Kids of Lower Utopia: A Letter from the Front Lines,
I am drawing, through the lens of *Zen Nondualism, an allegorical
dream in which my heroine; River Scout Finnagain, travels through archetypal
stages of realizations to finally arrive at her beginning.
To me this story is best told in the medium of the pencil. Nothing holds
more directly the silent life of observation-in-light as a metaphor, undisguised,
then the pencil; simple, direct, and so very elemental. My drawings are
spoken in a careful language of conscious vectors summing into "still-points"
where life's attention waits, gathering silence.
The pages are a sequence of images in a formal proximity that initiates
a narrative flow which solicits from the viewer intuitive leaps to bridge
the space between pages - leaps through their own non-linear space of
Truth, of pure awareness. At first this book was a series of wordless
long-jumps, like visual Zen sutras describing the greatest of the hero's
journeys - the one of self-realization - but even my most perceptive friends
asked for words to encourage their jumps. So I created the "possible"
subtext pages (like diptychs) that are each a detail from their original
page. On these pages I added one-of-many "possible" subtext
dialogues, along with a piece of the origin letter (as an ongoing narrative).
I was given this letter by River in a lucid dream that was the original
impetus for this book.
And, after all is said, it is in essence just a comic book - a child’s
story in words and pictures.
Art is a metaphor about being fully conscious. It mimics self-realization
by seeing so thoroughly, so seemingly instantaneously "now"
that the viewer is suspended in "Aesthetic Arrest" and experiences
observation free of thought, free of time. This …is our Work.
*
Definition - “Nondualism” (meaning; not two), or what
Joseph Campbell and Aldous Huxley called the Perennial Philosophy which
is the observation of a universal recurrence of philosophical insight
independent of epoch or culture, universal truths on the nature of reality.
It recognizes that all things have, and are made of (in their essence),
consciousness. One consciousness that is empirically beyond mind and matter,
and the direct
experience (2) (3)
(4) (5)
of
which is the same to all, independent of epoch or culture.
It is this experience that my images attempt to be a metaphor of, in both
my visual language and narrative.
Go to: Kids of Lower Utopia - V6 No3 Letters from the Front Lines
The
Single Songs of Schizotopia -V7No1
An Anthology of Lower Utopia
(Introduction)
This
book is made from a collection of single page comics that in their original
form combine digital-ink and pencil-drawing. Every page measuring 26"
x 40". This is a collection of spiritually tongue-in-cheek observations
from that place in the Heart called Lower Utopia.
Lower Utopia is our metaphor for the truth. To realize Lower Utopia is
to recognize what is real. The "real" is that which does not
change. What does not change is true. Nothing we say here is new, what
is true was true long before the Woolly Mammoths stopped singing, and
will be true when this earth is gone. But …what is true is an experience
that is beyond thought; it does not belong to the mind. It is neither
a concept, nor an idea beyond all other ideas. The truth lives inside
you. It is you. It is life itself looking out through your eyes. So, the
question at the heart of each image in this book is "what is true?"
These pages are a tongue-in-cheek remembrance of that unchanging reality
that already exists within everyone and everything.
Once you have realized basic truths about reality there is no going back,
and you find yourself exiled from the world you knew, the everyday world
of the mind and its ego intent on suffering. I would like to say, for
the sake of words, that you become a seeker of truth, but that is not
really true because the experience is more about letting-go. To experience
the truth is to let-go of ideas, concepts, beliefs, ownership, and all
other illusions of habit that define you. And soon you find yourself an
exile on pilgrimage in Lower Utopia towards the shrine of all wanderings
- to the Very City: Schizotopia. It is called Schizotopia because there
everyone is you.
In the country of Lower Utopia and in the City of Schizotopia where all
the art in the world is made, the people live in love with Love and practice
Love on everything. The deeper you go into Lower Utopia the closer all
the different stories become. Closer to being the one story about recognizing
the sacred within until It is ...without.
This book is the sweet self mockery of a worker in consciousness (living
in a transitional time when the world is choosing between planetary annihilation
and inner peace). Each images is a puzzle piece from the heart of a story
whose trajectory is grok-able from the clues within the image (for those
who like such deductive puzzles). These pages are a series of softly comic
spiritually surreal metaphors that present the juxtaposition of the inner
in the outer world with love.
Go
to: The
Single Songs of Schizotopia
- V7 No1
Bio
Exiles in Lower Utopia - Tricia Cline
- Toc Fetch
(Bio statement 2008)
I was born in Brooklyn in 1953. Since my father was a painter I grew up
with art, and have been obsessed with making art longer than I can remember,
(or so I'm told).
After serving a year in RISD in 1973, I knew that what I needed was not
more academics, what I needed was to understand my self - the primary
tool of the work. So in 1973 I entered a work/study program in Switzerland
to begin the practice and disciplines of Non-dualism (while continuing
my work in art).
Then in 1989 while living in Hawaii, the toxic nature of oil painting
led to a year of cancer. During that year I came close to death and studied
life from that perspective. That time away from the world opened
up a grand circus pantheon of interior personas and revelations. Also
epiphanies about the wonderfully proletariat nature of comic books and
the virtually untapped possibilities inherent in that medium as art. In
1990 I moved back to New York, and began making comics as art.
At this time I met Tricia Cline, and together we began to do what we call
Direct-Observation work. Direct-Observation of an inspiration is a careful
love of it without mental interpretation. This approach was greatly influenced
by the writings of psychologist James Hillman. When in life an imagine
shows up, as in dream or in a lucid stillness, an image like a great black
snake, if the dreamer, upon awakening, decides to interpret the meaning
of the snake, he kills it. And thereby the relationship with the image
is lost, because the vast Unknown that is speaking to you as a black snake
has been limited to only what is Knowable. The image is a transcendent
guest coming through you into form. But through interpretation you cut
off its link to that transcendent Reality.
In the our work every iota of its space deserves total care and attention.
Attention equals love. This approach towards detail is a kind of deliberate,
very present meditation and allows a transcendent quality to enter through
you.
Tricia Cline and I make (for lack of a more succinct label) a kind of
tribal art - we don't really own anything - much less that which arrives
from the transcendent. People have forgotten the transcendent power of
art. Here in the west art has been glorified as a product of the ego,
as personal revelation, this couldn't be less true, art comes from beyond
the personal, from the transcendent whisper that is ever present to everyone
(and every thing), and therefore there is really nothing personal about
it. So the images that come to us are not based on ideas out of mind,
the images that come are transcendent guests - friends - that we develop
ongoing relationships with. The image is a friend that has come to teach
you its life through the direct (non-interpretive) observation of it.
To then be possessive of it is to "kill the snake." It is through
respect that the relationships open outward into beauty, respect that
allows the image to be who it is and not just a thing in relation to us.
Exiles
in Lower Utopia - Tricia Cline - Toc Fetch
(Our mutual statement 2006)
We
are telling the story of the Hero’s pilgrimage into the Self. Certainly,
all stories, by virtue of being a story, are metaphors of the inner life.
Metaphors and Allegories are a kind of sign-language of the deep subconscious
or the Heart. The Heart speaks to us in the language of images, dreams,
feelings, inspirations, metaphors, and the extended metaphor of allegory.
We work only in the most elemental of materials - simple graphite and
clay, anything more is nonessential to a Direct Observation – the
simplest direct experience. We solicit the most precise voice of these
elemental materials in order to articulate consciousness as it echoes
through the metaphor that is Form, and all this as the subtext of the
Real (our direct observation of the Real). Our images come out of a mutual
allegory in which the emphasis is on what is inwardly Real.
Our story then is a metaphor for the pilgrimage inward. Our work, as we
feel it instinctually, is to offer all that reaffirms life, feeds life,
all that makes this hell-of-a-world a heaven. It is the Hero’s story
because there is nothing harder in this world then to become your Self.
It is the simplest thing and the hardest. And, once you realize the sublime
existence of the Self you become an Exile from this world searching for
your way home. The way home is Inward.
Utopia is another metaphor for the Self. The word Utopia, means ‘not-a-place’
or ‘no-place,’ Utopia only exists within the timeless no-place
of the Self. And Lower Utopia is its border lands.
The deeper you go into Lower Utopia the closer all the different stories
become, closer to being the One story about recognizing the Sacred within
until
It is without.
Art is a metaphor about being fully conscious, seeing through to the Real.
Art mimics Self-Realization in that it sees its subject so thoroughly,
and yet presents it as so instantaneous, that the viewer is suspended
in the very Awareness of the work, which is their own Awareness, (the
actual object of the work is just a glass for the water of perception)
— the viewer is suspended without question, without desire, without
fear, in the very Now - Aesthetic Arrest (as Steven Dedalus defined it
by way of James Joyce). The art work presents a language of perception
in which every utterance is as close as possible to being absolutely necessary.
The result is experienced as an effortless Direct-Observation, in which
all things within its frame of reference are intelligent with life.
We work until we feel the transcendent awake and sentient in the Image.
That is the work. The story then comes out of the works as feelings of
realizations strung together by time in which there is no Real set beginning
or end, only these epiphanies in which all of life is heroic.
