Transcript of a lecture on Toc Fetch given by River Scout Finnagain

Thanks for coming.

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 desire 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 autonomy.
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 apologize 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 only three weeks.)

School.

This is the meandering story of Toc's religious conversion to...Comics.
Together he and I 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 by the trajectory of his direct observations.
He mimic thinking because he is barely human,
as a kid he was on the side of the animals before he knew he had a choice,
so he learned to mimic his humanity as well.
Toc is an animal, born from the Nothing, a No-man disguised as a man.

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 their incessance.
As a kid the voices would not be denied.
Yet he had among them some 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 father’s brushes for a nickel apiece.
Blackalice, tall and spooky,
always walked behind him in the woods listing all the things that were not him.
Another voice watched from behind his right eye
his name was Horseyhead he was a kind of designated idiot.
Toc's mother gave him Jesus as a friend.
Jesus was a tall 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 small form,
a kid all in white who was hard to like, a little pope-boy in white cowboy boots.
And then there was a huge black silhouette,
The-King-of-Cats and all dead things, PapaWolf, Toc's protector.
None of them would come to school with him.
None of them would speak to Toc in the presence of others,
accept for Toc's grandmother and the mute girl next door.
By the time Toc was ten, teachers had closed him up tight
and his anger was a well-kept secret,
when puberty ascended all that were left were the darker 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 Softdoor.

(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, PapaWolf come in Toc's hour of need.
PapaWolf eventually sent Toc to Europe to study Advaita.)

As puberty and school had ended Toc's conversations with the world,
and all his friendly voices had moved deeper in
where they wouldn’t have to see him self-destruct,
Toc finally learn to read as a surrogate source for conversation and story,
and 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 know himself,
because all the stories he had left inside were too dark to live for.
He finally found his way back to his Heart, and to listening,
because he learned how to be quiet, completely quiet.
At nineteen on a mountainside in Switzerland
he began a ten years steeping in the sensory deprivation of Advaita,
in Topus.
(Topus meaning: burning-off or doing-without).
It was a way of turning his misanthropy on his self.
Advaita appealed to him because
it opened an infinite space between his Self and the incessance of voices.
In the beginning Advaita used the inherent mechanics of the mind as a doorway inward.
Early in the Upanishads there is a cognition that states
that ...All love is directed towards the Self by the Self.
This was love striped down to its teeth,
a truth in Toc's observations as well.

So …the first ten years of Advaita
taught Toc how to let-go into silence,
how to watch thinking,
how to win over his sub-conscious,
it confirmed his atheism - in maya,
and allowed Toc his animal humanity
because it taught him how to hold silence where these things come from.

Advaita 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 Rishi taught us a half-trick
in order that we could find the no-place within call Samadhi,
(the place where silence reins and no image opens,
where the mind is wide-eyed and quiet).
Then on the edge of Samadhi in the beginning place called Ritumbara Pragya
we were to pronounce the formulas that the Rishi wanted tested."
He was looking for safe formulas he could sell to the world.
And still, to this day, Toc hasn’t quite decided
whether the old man was a good witch or a bad witch.

Good enough to learn from.
To Toc's mind the Rishi’s 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 Rishi was full of cooing soporific pabulum,
and wonderfully funny misdirection’s,
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 daemons and demons,
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 Rishi gathered together a school
to validate and continue his experiments.
He wanted to document his findings,
he was, after all, a Physicist.
But the Rishi was, sadly, no poet.
What he wanted documented
lives only as hints 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 else’s image,
and no one’s image is more sacred than your own.
And so Toc, having survived the schools evolution from a sweet rogue summer
into a cold smiling rhetorical despotism,
left.
And began The Softdoor Land Alliance in the Olympic woods.

(While Toc was in the Rishi's school he met and made - but never published -
a book with a poet named Robert Bly,
this was his first complete 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 belly’s full.
Toc believes that we invented language 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.”
Even Malevitch had to describe his Desert-of-Feeling with metaphors.

The mind feeds on story.

Anyway, a friend of Toc's he met in the Rishi's 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 didn’t 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 beloved 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 was remembering
how he read-the-world before he learned words.
As a kid we read the sentience of gesture and expression,
we read the story that is present without words ... because we are Present)

Form and Color.
((Slides of the Red series))

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 the heart.
(the heart or subconscious is what is conscious, what is always Present,
we are when we are conscious… mostly … unconscious). J.H.
The conversation between color interaction and 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 moments of color declarations later for in-studio works:
A dangerous doorway spoken in the colors of a dying leaf,
A naked woman turning under the colors of a spider’s 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
it’s dual nature as a symbol and a specific 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 mythic sub-conscious.

((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 wingspans of horns.
He discovered that the more perceptual intuition that you exact from the viewer,
the more internal energy they would experience.
This became his definition of subtle,
because the slightest differences cause the most work
and are the most exciting.
True in color, true in form.

The purpose of the work, of art, is to solicit in your audience that feeling
of a state of alertness, the state of the Surreal - the Beautiful -
that is the very Presence of their alert deep consciousness.
Feeling that Presence… of the alerted sub-conscious… 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.
The world is far more beautiful then you could ever imagine.
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 direct to the root of their consciousness?

“You need to find a song to open flowers,” says PapaWolf.

So ... Comics.
((V6.2, comic pages slides))

There is something quietly happening 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 if you will).
And funnily enough its realizations first arrived from Comic books.

There is a phenomenal sub-conscious event
that occurs in the gap between two panels in formal proximity as found in Comics.
It is an almost hypnotic demand on the part of the viewer's deep consciousness
to supply the story between panels -
and kids have been doing it for fifty years.
Bridging that gap between panels in the comic format
is an automatic leap beyond time and space
(a leap of intuition before thought) that makes the Lorenz Contraction look like kid stuff.
It is a silent moment of presence outside of time
in the viewers own personal pacing.
The gap between panels is in effect a node of forever
that require no-time to cross.

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 different but related points of view at something else entirely,
at something more then both together.
Comics equal art times words

It is a natural evolution that fits our time,
the viewer Now demands not only beauty
but the complete environment of its life.
How does it live? And how do I live?
The viewer wants greater totalities of cognition,
longer and deeper immersions,
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 niche that Comic's are evolving into,
though few even among the independent comic makers realize it.
A comic is a dialogue
between the artist and the willing consciousness of the viewer
that takes place in the gap between images.
And what takes place is only exactly what needs to.

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,
they’ll ask “what happened next”.

Toc has always asked kids to tell him what is going on in his work.
If a kid can't see it, then it’s not there.
(Most schooling tends to wipe out this ability to read visual clues,
or damages the spirit that holds on to its Self.
Schools believe in words more than the Things the words represent.)
But when you close your eyes and say the word Horse
you don’t see a word, you don’t see an abstraction,
what you invariably see is a very-very specific horse,
and …the trajectory of it’s story.
As if your VerySelf is saying with each image,
“Love this …and more will be given you”. (Equus)

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 it’s 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 huge comics)
in his work 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 sub-conscious.
(This is a culturally independent archetype,
we all 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 mostly are,
if a child is looking inside they are either a seer, or sick,
or Heart-sick from witnessing 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 of past and future.
Owls were always messengers of the gods because they could see in the sightless dark.
Every image is a complete story,
our “Reader” (our deeper consciousness), tells us, (if we listen),
how any image came about.
The sub-consciousness 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… back to Toc's story …why comics?
In 1989 Toc spent a year dying. 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 it were ready.
And every time he found his self There, In Delirium, In Alyssum he was met
(plagued in fact)
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 doesn’t 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 Night’s creek
in the woodlands of Schzotopia, speaking of art in this time),
“If you can’t print it… you’re on the wrong side."
(of your Self)
So in 1996, Toc, having found his way back to where life was going on,
with an imp of dry–mock as his guide, began making comics.
The Lost and Found Season of the Most Pope Joey,
8 volumes and 10 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, Sim,
McKean, Ali, and others.
As did Kenneth Patchen and Lyn Ward and Duchamp,
as did young Orson Wells and Akira Kurosawa with film.

Art.

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 it’s 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, your life
just to have it stay with you,
' …stay.'"

"And I swear by all things holy to me,
and that's everything,
I swear …it is worth it…
'or so he feel'.”

Thanks for the listening
River Scout Finnagain