| Thanks
for comin It is amazing to see you-all as willing to allow me to stand
up in front of you and have my say, I represent the No-man (Whispered:
And yeah
he blinded the Cyclops
but Cyclops started it.)
I
thought I would start with a poem by Toc Fetch so as to jump straight in
it. This poem is called The Last Page of Water. "Here
we are warming in our own friction after the great myths have gone home.
Religions grind down like the millstones of dry beds. The water has
gone underground. Raw belief turns the stone for fear of Nothing. Superman
gets laid and soon after dies. We finally recognize that there are quiet
killers among us full of fresh water. And it is the water that scares us.
We are buoyant with fear of Self. The water stirs and lifts its head,
and babble speaks the familiar words, What do you want?
And the rain re-members us. (When my sneakers get wet I hear them squelching
about the distance between ideas. And that, ideas are just images with a
quantum of spiritual autonomies. So now you can imagine, I am there for the
rain.) As water fills the eyes of the kid chosen to play god when he whispers,
we want what you want, his hands drift about him in slow
currents, his fingertips are blind. The water snakes its own way, and waits
below in the sky. Other children visit the water deep down in the alert
black vastness of that careful sky. The water orbits its own voice, waiting
for the kid that plays alone. Waiting to re-member him."
(I apologies for the mucky slides, Toc lived in Hawaii for three years,
and mold grows even on plastic in Hawaii. In Hawaii dead Momma-cat melted
down to clean bones in three weeks.) School.
This is the meandering story of Toc's religious conversion to ...Comics.
Together we have tried to think his life backwards to list forward the
causes that arrived at his conversion. But Toc is not a Thinking creature
he is a Doing creature, in other words he does not arrive where he ends up,
he appear. He wakes-up THERE, wherever he finds his Self and then attempt
to triangulate his place. He mimic thinking, and he is barely human,
as a kid he sided with animals before he knew he had a choice, so he learned
to mimic his humanity as well. Toc is an animal born from Nothing
Toc befriended his interior Voices as a kid. Voices, he told me, are just
a way of listening to your self, a way of living separate from there incessance.
As a kid the voices would not be denied. He had among them some very consistence
...friends. One lived in a big rock in his back yard, his name was
Peter-in-the-rock, Peter took Toc down through deep cave tunnels to a river
made of slow fire, a river called Heart, near the center of the
earth - to warm Toc's hands. Another friendly voice lived in any book Toc
opened if he marked it with ladder lines, He said he got in trouble for that,
and learned to make them very small. One voice was present only with the
smell of turpentine while cleaning his fathers brushes for a nickel
apiece. Blackalice, tall and spooky, always walked behind him in the
woods listing all the things that were not hers. Another voice watched from
behind his right eye his name was Horseyhead he was a kind of designated
idiot. Toc's mother's Jesus was there. Jesus was a sweet guy but not
much fun, too bloody too weak to play. And always near, always watching,
always ...a small smart clean smiler, an echo of Toc's form, a kid all
in white who no one liked, a little pope-boy in white cowboy boots. And then
there was a huge black silhouette, The-King-of-Cats and all dead things,
Toc's protector. None of them would come to school with him. None would
speak to him in the presence of other males, and among girls only Toc's grandmother
and the mute girl next door, could chat with his friends. By the time
Toc was ten, teachers had had their way with him and his anger was a well-kept
secret, when puberty ascended all that were left were the dark voices.
If Toc had not already become serious about art by then, he imagined he might
possibly have become a-performance-misanthropy, (a monster).
"Monsters are everywhere practicing tolerance, monsters pass you by
everyday." Says Eeo. (During Toc's years in High School he met one
of his early voices, returned, personified as a math teacher. It was
The-King-of-Cats, come in his hour of need named PapaWolf. He sent Toc to
Europe to study Advaita-Vedanta.) After puberty and school had ended
Toc's conversations, and all his friendly voices had moved deeper into his
Heart where they wouldnt have to see him self-destruct, he had
to finally learn to read as a surrogate source for conversation and story.
It was really Batman who taught him to read, what could Batman say to make
evil men cry. What could Kazantzakis say to PapaWolf to make him cry?
Toc learned to read because he needed story as a mirror to stay alive, because
the stories he had left inside were very dark and not worth living for.
He finally found his way back to his Heart, and to listening, because he
learned how to be quiet, completely quiet. At eighteen on a mountainside
in Switzerland he began a ten years steeping in the sensory deprivation of
Advaita-Vedanta, in what Vedanta calls Topus. (Topus means to burning-off
impurities). It was a way of turning his misanthropy on his self. Advaita-Vedanta
appealed to him because it opened an infinte space between his Self and the
incessance of voices. Vedanta used the inherent mechanics of the mind as a
doorway, Toc's humanity was so poorly tended as a kid, that it was of no
use to him, and as a teen, even he knew that that lack would eventually get
him killed. Early in the Upanishads there is a cognition that states
that ...All love is directed towards the Self by the Self. This is love striped
down to its teeth, and it certainly was his teen-observation. So
ten
years of Advaita-Vedanta, and it taught him how to let-go into silence, how
to watch thinking, how to win his subconscious, it confirmed his atheism
- in maya, and allowed Toc his animal humanity because it taught him how
to hold silence. Advaita-Vedanta has its own dangers, because you have
to find someone to teach you, a Magus, and Magi are tricky creatures.
After serving a year in Risd, he found a Magus in Switzerland and took the chance.
Toc said, "The old man used us to experiment on. He taught us a
half-trick in order that we could find the place call Samadhi, (the place
where the subconscious makes no images, where even the Subconscious is wide-eyed
and quiet). Then in Samadhi in the place called Ritom Baragh Progya
(the beginning place), there we were to pronounce the formulas that the old
man wanted tested." An interesting number of people went crazy,
(whether because they were crazy to start with, or that the formulas reeked
havoc with some inherent weakness, who knows). But no one paid much attention
as the nuts were bundled away by the quiet warriors in dark suits. The
old man was looking for safe formulas he could sell to the world. And still,
to this day, Toc hasnt decided whether the old man was a good witch
or a bad witch. Good enough to learn from. To Toc's mind the old
mans love for axiomatic riddles, such as, Do as he say not as
he do, (an exact piece of nonsense repeated far too often), was
a dead give away. The old man was full of cooing soporific pabulum,
and wonderfully funny misdirections, so of course, in Samadhi, Toc
began to invent his own formulas. He had his own (sensory deprived) chats
with old voices winking from new skins, he befriended familiar demons and
daemons, found his own song to open flowers, and best of all he found
a small scrap of his Heart he could wear like a towel-cape, heroic, in the
lands of listening. The old man then gathered together a school
to validate and continue his experiments. He wanted to document his findings,
he was, after all, originally a Physicist and careful for his goals.
But the old man was, sadly, no poet. What he wanted documented lives
only in the potentialized air of metaphors and images. And I imagine you
will understand this, (since most of you make art), that is - that people
intimate with images always stumble on to knowing that Knowledge,
(all that ancient and sacred stuff), was, and so... is, just someone elses
image, and no ones image is more sacred than your own. And so
Toc having survived the Magus evolution from a sweet rogue summer into
a cold smiling rhetorical despotism, left. We left (a tribe's worth).
(While Toc was in that school he met, (and made - but never published)
a book with a poet named Robert Bly, this was his first comic book.)
((Slides of the Bly drawings)) Storytelling is the nature
of what Toc hears when he listened to his Heart his observations tell him
that storytelling is the human hungers that come right after survival, like
- right after the bellys full. Toc believes that we invented languages
just so we could elaborate on our stories. Art itself is a kind of religion
of storytelling. And religion is
dead but not yet buried imagination.
(Says eec) Even Malevitch had to describe his Desert-of-Feeling with metaphors.
Its the Heart that feeds on story. Anyway, a friend
of Toc's he met at that Magus School who liked Toc's work, gave him a house
on the Straits of Juan DeFuca above the meandering whales, and the going
and coming salmon, and the mother eagle with her bright white head who lived
next door. (Big-Thanks for that brother, says Toc.) Toc said that the
Woods of the Olympic peninsula still doesnt know that America happened.
Huge deciduous rainforests and primeval valleys. Just follow the water and
you are never lost. There, we camped, (The Softdoor Land Alliance),
and Toc continued painting condensed stories, single frame summation, (what
our pal Eeo titled "Stilldance"), Toc's paintings were mostly animal
stories, he was listening to a lot of animals in dreams, ("Animals are
holy, they look out at you from pure Being," he says). So Toc was spending
more and more time alone in the big woods, stalking his dreams. (When
I say he was listening to animals, you understand that he remembered
how he read-the-world before he learned words. As a kid we read the sentience
of gesture and expression, we read the story present without words ... because
we are Present) ((Slides of the Red series))
Form
and Color. There in the Olympic Woods Toc began discovering moments of
color that were like trumpeting declaration, far richer and subtler
than anything he had ever seen or invented in art. Color, as a language has
a direct conversation with your Subconscious, (your subconscious is what
is conscious, what is always Present, we are when we are conscious
mostly
unconscious). J.H. The conversation between Color language and your
Subconscious, your Heart, is a conversation between equals, a conversation
that is sentient but not human. Color language is a free ride into your Heart,
if
you can hold silence. So starting in the Olympic Woods Toc became
obsessed with refining a color voice, and developed a traveling system for
noting it where it lived, this also kept him in the woods where Listening
and Presence are, for him , at its best. He used these found color declarations
later for in-studio works: A dangerous doorway spoken in the colors of a dieing
leaf, A naked woman turning under the colors of a spiders eye,
And Eeo dreaming in the colors of a sunning northern water snake. ((Slides
of the Gray series)) The forms of his stories at this time were told
by silhouettes. He found that when you strip down a Thing to its shadow
its dual nature as a symbol and an individual, coexists in a kind-of
shared alertness. The singular individuality of a thing lives in our sense
of now, the symbol of the form, as silhouette, points to its genius title,
and lives in the ancestry of the human dreamtime, as a part of the mutual
story of the Subconscious. ((Slides of the White series))
So what did he find, all that time in the woods alone, besides how curious
black bear are, or how fearless are elk-buck crowned with nine foot wingspan
of horns. He discovered that the more wordless perceptually-work that you
exact from the viewer, the more internal energy they would experience.
This is a definition of subtle, because the slightest differences cause the
most work and are the most exciting. True in color, true in form.
True. The purpose of the work, of art, is to solicit that feeling
of a (surreal) state of alertness in your audience, that is akin to an echo
of Presence. The Presence of their alert Subconscious, and feeling that
Presence
of the alerted Subconscious
is Sublime. Toc also discovered
that
when you've made art long enough Eventually you realize that Direct Observation
is infinitely more fascinating then imagination. You just have to boot
your infantile ego and its endless desire to express to itself, and consider
what-is-it your chosen audience is experiencing, and how can you create a
dialogue with their consciousness? You need to find a song to open
flowers, says PapaWolf. ((V6.2,
comic pages)) Comics.
There
is something quietly happen to the aspect of Time in art that has come to
the forefront in drawing. Something that began with the futurist and has
now resurfaced in drawing. Though now, it is much more conscious of itself,
much more in control of its own speed - it's Timing. And funnily enough
its realizations first arrived from Comic books. There
is a phenomenal subconscious event that occurs in the gap between two panels
in formal proximity as found in Comics. Its is an almost hypnotic demand
on the part of the viewer's subconscious to supply the information between
panels - and kids have been doing it for fifty years. Bridging the gap
between panels in the Comic format is an automatic leap of time and space
(a leap of intuition) that makes The Lorenzen Contraction look like kid stuff.
And yet it is a quiet interactive relationship with the viewer that naturally
respects the viewers own personal pacing outside of time. Each panel is in
effect a node of forever that require (a subconscious amount of) time to
cross. Take a moment to think about that! In
the last few years the unique characteristics of Comic books have found there
way into art. The (here-and-now) immediate voice of the word bubble,
derived from comics, has merged two languages into a new medium - in which
the words and the images on the page - dialogue with each other. The image
doesn't simply illustrate the words and the words don't just explain the
picture, the two components of each panel are like twin vectors, each
pointing from a different but related point of view at something else entirely,
something more. And at this point the interaction with the viewer steps
up a notch. It
is a natural evolution that fits our time, the viewer demands not only beauty
but the complete environment of its life in time. How does it live?
How do I live? The viewer wants greater totalities of cognition, longer
and deeper emersions, an art that moves at a speed equal to our sense now.
The viewer now demands of art, as Joseph Campbell once said, the pedagogical
aspect. This is the empty nitch that Comic's are evolving into. This
silent storytelling is a dialogue between the artist and the willing subconscious
of the viewer that takes place at the viewer's individual pacing and
carries very personal elements of the viewers interpretation. Reading.
A
baby looks at the world and learns to recognize it, learns to read it,
first there is color, than the patterns with the good stuff, food and touch
and those beautiful sounds of love. The kid then learns to read the minutiae
of face and place. Then the simple languages of human images; storytelling.
Storytelling
is a shared food. As a kid we read the potential
story in anything. Throw a metaphor at a kid and they wont cock an eye at
you, theyll ask what happens next. Toc has always used
kids to tell him what is going on in his work. If a trusted kid like Bean
or Ivan here, dont see it, then its not there. School wipes out
this ability to read, or damages the spirit that hold on to its Self, school
believes in words more than the Things the words represent. But when you
close your eyes and say the word Horse you dont see a word, you dont
see an abstraction, what you invariably see is a very-very specific horse,
and
the trajectory of its story. As if your Self is saying
with each image, Love this
and more will be given you.(P.S.)
There are learned clues in visual-stories. Symbols that are repeated
and handed down because no image, as yet, can state it better, (abbreviations
of metaphors). This world language of images is alive and growing, it
is still allowed its mysteries because it is a pre-civil language, and everyone
who puts their hand in, adds to its possible life. A doted line around
words is whispered because it is half-invisible like the wind. Eyes that
are black are turned inward they are looking inside. For example, Dargar
(who is a dead Outsider artist from Chicago who made comics) his little hermaphrodites
always have black eyes: children, having just arrived from the inside, still
part-here part-there, are mostly, still closely connected to their subconscious.
(This is a culturally independent archetype, we say out of the
mouths of babes
wisdom). It is a given that children dont
need to look inside because that is where they mostly are, if a child
is looking inside they are either a seer, or sick, or Heart-sick from witness
to an atrocity. But black eyes are just one of many clues in a total image.
Odin had to give one of his eyes to gain in-sight, to see inside, to
hear the ravens. Owls were always messengers of the gods because they could
see in the sightless dark. Every image is a complete story, our Reader
(our subconscious), tells us, (if we listen), how any image came about.
The subconscious reads the trajectory of where the image-event will possibly go.
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. A comic initiates the Readers participation in
that virtually-alert subconscious space between two images.
Why
Comics? So
Toc's story
why comics? In 1989 Toc spent a year dieing. He wondered
around inside close to the end of his story looking for the exact place of
his death, carrying his filthy snarling little heart opened wide, all
toothy and glaring, as if he were ready. And every time he found his self
There, In Delirium, In Alyssum he was met (plagued) by an imp of his Very-Self,
named Joey Fool, Pope Joey a self-proclaimed Lord-of-Cheek. Toc himself
was mute at that time for good reason
so he began listening
(Toc said to me, "I hope this kind of thing, a polytheistic personality doesnt
creep you out, it is unavoidably standard fare in his head. The Eskimos
say that we have many souls in us and that seem to be my take as well.")
PopeJoey once said to him (as they huddled in the dark over a small fire
along Nights creek in the woodlands of Schzotopia), speaking of art
in this time, If you cant print it
youre on the wrong
side. So in 1996 having found his way back to where life was going
on with an imp of drymock as his guide, Toc began making comics.
The Lost and Found Season of the Most Pope Joey, 6 volumes and 7 comics later.
There is out there a big-enough subversive audience who support
a quiet but growing genre of storytelling vaguely called, alternative or
independent comics. which are more like "Free-range" comics.
A small hand full of people are now applying a criteria of "inner-necessity"
(V.K.) to this fledgling art-form. (an art form kept in its infancy
for 50 years) Woodring, Ware, Ghermandi, Max, McKean, Pope, Mazzucchelli,
Ali, and others. As did Kenneth Patchen and Lyn Ward and Duchamp, as
did young Orson Wells and Akira Kurosawa with film. In a recent conversation
I asked Toc, What is art? He said, "What art is, is utterly elusive,
and that is what keeps it alive, Art seems to be repelled by noise.
It seems to demand its own voice and a lot of quiet, 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 then you give it. You offer it a little
milk. You give it anything, your everything, your love, your family,
your Heart, just to have it stay with you,
stay. And I swear
by all things holy to me, and that's just about everything, I swear
it is worth it
'or so he feel'. (EEC)
(Thanks
for the listening. River Scout Finnagain)
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