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.
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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 Tricia's and my work. We create shrines to these beings we love - for those who love them as well.

Go to: I Am That - V8 No1 - Animal Ethics

Go to: Little Gods


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.

Go to: TriciaCline.com

 

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.

Go to: TriciaCline.com