RADIO FREE BARBELITH

A Swarm of Readers

2012-02-23T09:12:00.000-08:00

A THOUSAND THRESHOLDS

Behead yourself! Dissolve your whole body into Vision: become seeing, seeing, seeing!

- Rumi

The mechanisms of identification frustrated, the reader beheaded - one has no option left but to SWARM, to infest the text. Parallel (and perpendicular) venues of entry are sought. Instead of pushing the reader back into the distanced point of view of the objective and omniscient Scientist-Godhead-Reader ("the Third Person" - reeks of moralism, doesn't it?), The Invisibles presents a plenum of perspectives. The Third Person, the omniscient & featureless God-Sphere, is already present within The Invisibles, as BARBELITH. The position is occupied, outered and made explicitly alien and inaccessible. In place of a single satellite-probe circumambulating the work, the reader is injected as a swarm of autonomous nano-probes, suffusing the flesh and coursing through the blood of the world. Denied the position of privilege, he must shift and slide through whichever points of vantage that are presented and accessible.

HIS MASK AND SUIT OF FLAYED HUMAN SKIN

Life in the late 20th century is a supermarket stocked with appealing self-images. Why not shop instead of hanging around outside, trying to maintain a cool, "detached" attitude?

- Grant Morrison

Characters themselves mimic the flow of reading - entering nested realities from a higher level (gods and demons entering our world, operatives traveling back in time, magicians negotiating with cultural operating systems), always willingly and willfully reducing themselves, taking on the grammar of a system in order to interact within it. Bernard Suits, in The Grasshopper: Games, Life and Utopia, defines a game as "the voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles". To play a game is to put on its rituals, to operate within its boundaries, to enter a virtual reality. Reading is a game.

All play moves and has its being within a play-ground marked off beforehand either materially or ideally, deliberately or as a matter of course. Just as there is no formal difference between play and ritual, so the ‘consecrated spot’ cannot be formally distinguished from the play-ground. The arena, the card-table, the magic circle, the temple, the stage, the screen, the tennis court, the court of justice, etc, are all in form and function play-grounds, i.e. forbidden spots, isolated, hedged round, hallowed, within which special rules obtain. All are temporary worlds within the ordinary world, dedicated to the performance of an act apart.

- Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element in Culture

Double Oh Nothing

2012-02-21T05:32:00.002-08:00

THIS THOROUGHLY UNPLEASANT YOUNG MAN

A monk once asked Ummon, "What is the Buddha?" Ummon answered thus: "A dried shit-stick!"

The Invisibles tosses you into the maelstrom, the clamorous sea of a world hungry for bodies. Pulled swirling into this vortex, the reader seeks the support of a familiar flotation device: the Protagonist, the Everyman, fiction's life raft. The protagonist is a form of insulation between the reader and the fictive reality, a mechanism of orientation, a ficto-symbolic body simulation through which the reader inhabits the text in a proscribed manner. Your fingers brush against him in the noisome clamour, and as you try to grasp his position as center of a heroic narrative, to cling tightly to the buoyant force of his "journey" and let yourself be carried passively along a well-worn trail of growth, you come across an issue.

He is a shithead.

Your hands slip.

I WANT TO BE BURIED IN A WHITE COFFIN

We have been led to think of virtual realities as something on the screen of a computer, or presented through a headset, but that's an electronic virtual reality. The primary technology for the building of virtual realities is language. Once you start talking about race pride, loyalty, our destiny, our God, our mission, it's like building virtual realities; and people begin to treat these things as though they had the substantiality of real objects, and to build their lives as though these things are real.

- Terence McKenna

Hero and Anti-Hero collide and annihilate each other in a burst of hot white light.

Narrative is a technology. Story frames time and space according to certain rules and rubrics, providing a sense of perspective and progress. As a technology it is also a distinct argument, a rhetoric shaped by boundaries or rules defining what is meaningful and what is not within its discourse. Within this discourse, actions in accordance with rules, or rituals, generate readable and substantial meaning. Outside of this discourse is the realm of the meaningless and the unknowable. Interplay between these realms, between symbolic life and symbolic death, is fruitful. The Invisibles aims to push, pull, shatter, recast, dissolve and transcend these boundaries. It is a probe injected into the environment of narrative, as you are a player injected into the game of The Invisibles.

AND YOU'LL NEVER FUCKING UNDERSTAND ME

It’s ragged at the edges but you can play any of 300 characters, some more involving than others. It’s a thriller, it’s a romance, it’s a tragedy, it’s a porno, it’s neo-modernist kitchen sink science fiction that you catch, like a cold.

The Invisibles is a virtual reality that is shaken, not stirred.

The Invisibles 1.9 - 23: Things Fall Apart (February 19 - February 25)

2012-02-21T03:43:00.001-08:00

[The Invisibles: Apocalypstick, pg 7 - 31]

Back-matter from The Invisibles 1.9

The Invisibles 1.8 - Arcadia Part 4: H.E.A.D. (February 12 - February 19)

2012-02-12T16:36:00.000-08:00

[The Invisibles: Say You Want A Revolution, pg 198 - 222]

Back-matter from The Invisibles 1.8

The Invisibles 1.7 - Arcadia Part 3: 120 Days of Sod All (February 5 - February 11)

2012-02-05T07:30:00.000-08:00

[The Invisibles: Say You Want A Revolution, pg 173 - 197]

Back-matter from The Invisibles 1.7

Glamour

2012-01-30T06:11:00.000-08:00

YOU CAN'T EVEN MOVE OUT OF THE SPACE YOU'VE BEEN GIVEN

You are enchanted. The Invisibles places you, plays you, works you over, wears you like a skin. It is prison warden and puppeteer, set and stage director.
"LOOK IN THE MIRROR," Tom commands, dictating Dane's gaze and our own. We stare into the blank space of nothing and are told that we are nothing. This is theater. The reader submits to being processed by the writer, the artist, the inker, the colorist, the editor, etc. The reader becomes content as sensory order is tweaked and tuned - palettes color the reader, words grip and constrain as spells and curses, panels and pages become the sacred geometries of a magic of boundaries, of constraints, of the collapse of potentialities into the actualities of print.
All of the violence in The Invisibles is against the reader - to read the page is to have it inflicted upon us. The page is a death sentence - awareness is drawn across the surface almost by rote, quartered by each panel. The reader haunts the page, but not as free spirit. Rather, every line and color are gestures in a grand ritual of summoning, every panel a circle of power framing the reader's space. The reader is not in control here, but awash in the mysteries of submission.

The Invisibles 1.6 - Arcadia Part 2: Mysteries of the Guillotine (January 29 - February 4)

2012-01-29T05:34:00.000-08:00

[The Invisibles: Say You Want A Revolution, pg 148 - 172]

Back-matter from The Invisibles 1.6

But There Is No War

2012-01-26T18:49:00.000-08:00

WHO IS THE DALANG?

The Invisibles 1.3 / City and Colour(ful Language)

2012-01-22T16:10:00.000-08:00

(If the following comes off as sweet, sweet crap n’ babble, know that I wrote it after a night of exactly 2.25 hours sleep with an unhappy teething boy-child, and further, wrote it on my lunch break at work, where I rub naked ladies with warm fragrant oils. That I could even get near this head space surprises even me... )

Before we move on to the Arcadia story arc...

Some thoughts on Mad Tom’s secret teachings in this issue re: the true nature of cities. Much like cities themselves, this little speech to the be-pigeoned Dane comes off as a kind of gloss, in my reading at least. The surface is a ‘truth’ about cities and their viral nature, their “one directive is to use up all available resources in producing copies of itself ... until there’s no more raw material left and the host body, overwhelmed, can only die.”

But what are cities if not coral accretions of matter around immaterial linguistic structures, conceptual frameworks, wire and steel cages for flocks of dualities/symmetries?

HOUSE HOME FLOOR WALL FAMILY WORK EDUCATION LOVE FOOD US THEM IN OUT COLD WARMTH ... these are the ideas that act as rich substrate upon which we build our michorizal relationship with a CITY, which is an idea also.

Note that no city is exactly like any other city: London is not Tokyo is not Calgary is not Moscow is not LA is not Mexico City is not ad infinitum... because we build them out of and because of our ideas and needs and in turn they shape us.

So on these pages, I think that GM (through Tom) is talking about language. Certainly the series has language as an obsession and running theme: control language, secret alphabets, the infranet, magic(al) words pulled screaming from the surrounding environment (here, IXAT, or, later, ‘Top of the Pops’ on the telly = TOTEP and hey oh! aneurisms all round)... language is the virus.

The panel in which Tom speaks about the original human homeostatic cultures shows us (I’m assuming) a traditional neo-lithic hunter-gatherer society, small, tribal, self-sustaining. There’s some goats next to that hut, but whatever. It’s been remarked upon elsewhere that the rise of agriculture saw a corresponding increase in our language skills as a species: the ability to describe and classify beneficial and toxic plant types, mark seasons, build calendars, make transactions, etc. That’s the gathering; hunting is a different story. To hunt as we do requires a large reserve of stoicism, a predilection for silence and, when needed, a minimal, succinct, instantly understood language, and most of that gestural. To farm successfully requires a massive vocabulary and a safe environment in which to use it. There’s speculation (only ever!) that women were largely responsible for the burst in prehistoric, pre-agriculture language usage. Quite aside from the various Gnostic interpretations given the ur-myth of the Old Testament, most can agree that the “first harvest” was accomplished by the hands of Eve.

And of course agriculture necessitates the building of cities. Gotta have a wall round your food stores, after all, cuz there’s starving rabble about. Are cities an ancillary/intermediary stage of the language virus? If the Word became Flesh, would it not have to undergo a period of transformation, of putting on technological clothing, wearing artifacts and cities, of “talking” to itself ie. the inhabitants of those cities (Tom again: “Catch sight of the reflection of a neon sign and it’ll spell out a magic word that summons strange dreams...”) before it could complete the cycle and make itself Word again?

The city is where it’s at. Country mouse don’t know shit, yo.

We, all of us, inhabit Burroughs’ conceptual Cities of the Red Night, cycling through every smoking iteration of ‘nothing is true, all is allowed’ on our way to some kind of transcendence through and beyond the consuming fires of language, that flaming, spinning blade blocking the gate to Paradise. This is something THE INVISIBLES points to as its final statement, with the last line of the series, in Volume 4 issue #0: “Our sentence is up.” That last/next spin into the black void of the “.” Language, like Tom’s viral cities, must in due course exhaust itself as a meaning generator. Perhaps when a species-wide immunity is built up? “Our world is sick, boy. Very sick. A virus got in a long time ago and we’ve got so use to its effects, we’ve forgotten what it was like before we became ill...”

In the meantime, you gotta hang your hat somewhere, and the rent is due. Now, where’d I put my keys?

Scott (urban polyp), writing in/as Victoria BC

The Invisibles 1.5 - Arcadia Part 1: Bloody Poetry (January 22 - January 28)

2012-01-21T11:31:00.000-08:00

[The Invisibles: Say You Want A Revolution, pg 123 - 147]

Back-matter from The Invisibles 1.5

Invisibles 1.1 - 1.4 "You Joined A Long Time Ago..."

2012-01-19T18:43:00.000-08:00

Notes towards a re-engagement with THE INVISIBLES hyper-sigil // a few thoughts on a quick reading of DEAD BEATLES and the DOWN & OUT IN HEAVEN & HELL story arc // (working from the TPB SAY YOU WANT A REVOLUTION)

DEAD BEATLES page 29, judge sentencing Dane: “senseless crime which went far beyond the limits of what might be regarded as legitimate youthful rebellion against authority”. Implies the existence of sensible crimes and affirms the existence of a legitimate, Machine-approved “rebellion”. When everyone’s a rebel (or, alternatively “special/awesome!” and if you haven’t read ‘HELLO I’M SPECIAL: How Individuality Became the New Conformity’ by Hal Niedzviecki yet, do so!) how can true rebellion be achieved?

Throughout the DOWN & OUT story arc, there are a number of comparitively subtle 4th wall breakages that, taken in context with the series as a whole, and GMs statements re: THE INVISIBLES as a hyper-sigil/call-to-arms to create/recruit (existing) Invisibles, are in fact quite punchy. Outstanding examples: first splash page in Part 1, Dane: “Got any change, Mister?”, KM in Part 2 (TPB p76, middle panel): “One day, when you least expect it, we’ll be there,” as in ‘how bout right now, as you’re reading this?’, Tom with a threat/promise (p91) “I’m a nightmare, boy... one holy fucking terror”, as good a descriptor (Holy. Fucking. Terror.) for THE INVISIBLES as I can imagine, and of course, the readers own initiatory experience with the white/blank page as Dane looks into the badge that’s bloodying his palm. That’s ours as much as his, and perhaps not subtle at all, UNTIL you compare and contrast with Dane and KM (p120) in the top panel: “What if I don’t want to join?” “You joined a long time ago. But if you don’t want to come with us now, if you don’t want to find out more about what this is all about, you’re free to go your own way. You might just survive.” Yeah, we could put the book down, but then again, he’s stating a truth: we joined all right, back on p95. If not long before, when THE INVISIBLES was just a fever gleam in GMs eye.

“Carlos Casteneda, these are your children,” Boy says, ages away in Volume 2, and here in DOWN & OUT Part 2 we see Don Juan rearing his inscrutable old head in Tom’s sorcerous teaching methods, from the “assemblage point shift” accomplished with a blow to Dane’s back (or that point on his ‘luminous egg body’, perhaps? p80) to the first panel (p85): “All of my teachings are done on this level of consciousness,” to the remarkable sequence of three panels (p90) in which Tom tweaks Dane’s path down to the riverbed confrontation with subtle hand gestures. I can’t imagine that these are just the random interpretations of the illustrator, as we know GM plans out his panels with some precision. Now, this I find interesting, because unless you’ve gorged on Casteneda, all these little touches mean nothing: it’s a call-out, a secret-ish handshake across the page barrier, and a reminder to perhaps read THE INVISIBLES as you would read Castaneda? Not as anthropology text/gospel or god forbid a literal grimoire, but as a framework of sociological questions? Either that, or, to paraphrase Jolly Roger (again, ages away in Volume 2) “It just means you’ve read the same stupid paperbacks they have.” Well, it’s both: Dane & Tom in the abandoned underground tunnels (p64) “What’s that there? Ah, somebody’s been down here before us. That’s crap.” “Guardian of this shrine. Totem and protector...”

Stylistic notes: I’ve never been keen on Yeowell’s art (too what’s-the-word? sketchy? When I feel like I could maybe draw about as well with some practice, I tend not to like the artist, but that’s my own Outer Church self-loathing program running, probably), but the covers for DOWN & OUT are brilliant. If I’d seen these covers on the racks, nothing would have stopped me from picking them up. I’ve read since that GM wanted KM to look like the actor Daniel Day Lewis at the start and I can really see that now upon re-reading, particularly in the final panels of Part 3. Which to me says that GM had not yet grokked what he was trying to do with the series. He’s yet to inhabit the fiction-suit of King Mob. Now I’ll be looking for that moment when he does. Which could imply that all those ‘subtle 4th wall breaks’ I was talking about earlier were not, in fact, deliberate, and I am merely seeing pattern and meaning because I want to. Or is it the story that manifests itself as a gestalt even before the writer/channel is aware of it? I’d like to think the latter, myself, ‘cuz apophenia just makes me mad.

Davis, thanks for a) getting me to look up apophenia and for b) getting this rolling! I think we can all have some fun here. Peace, gentlemen.

Scott

* * * * *
Scott R Jones -- writer, spoken word artist, naturalized sorcerer
for promotional materials, bio, upcoming shows and excerpts from
The Boy's Own Guide to Sorcery visit www.boysownguidetosorcery.com

The Invisibles 1.1 - Anno-Commencation

2012-01-08T07:03:00.000-08:00

AND SO WE BEGIN AND RETURN AGAIN

A bit late, but I thought I'd hammer out one last initiation, one last ritual of anno-commencation for the beginning of 2012, one last read through of the first issue with some final thoughts - WORD MACHINE GO!

POP!

We will only organize the detonation. The free explosion must escape us and any other control forever.

- Situationist International, The Counter-Situationist Campaign in Various Countries

A hot pink hand-grenade, blown-up day-glo menace filling the cover. A not-so-subtle suggestion of Warhol, the Pope of Pop. The one points toward the many here, a full spectrum of screen-printed hand-grenades gracing a panoply of canvasses, a rainbow of violent revolution. The Invisibles as weaponized serial, as pulp-Situationism. The conflation of cultural and artistic revolution with armed revolt. With The Invisibles in hand, you're armed and dangerous.

DOWN INTO DARKNESS

But what is the gnostic situation? A basic definition: you are in a trap and you need to escape!

- Marcus Boon, intoduction to Eric Davis' Nomad Codes

Morrison's opening move is to make a gnostic of the reader, throwing him into a closed circuit while pointing outside of it. With this new dawn over Giza, we have a new day, the beginning of a new cycle of initiation, a new reader being initiated, a new series taking its first steps, possibly an old reader beginning anew, a first issue in a serial - many births and rebirths here. Just another spin of the wheel.
Elfayed's spitballing is interesting to me. He throws out myth, speculation, and confabulation, then negates it. Morrison sets a tone of ambiguity and hints at the baroque fugue of myth, conspiracy and fantasy that is The Invisibles the first chance he gets. Themes, concepts and ideas are constantly being played and replayed, augmented and diminished, inverted and negated as events and players interact and overlap. Elfayed begins with notes of eternal return, ties beetles into the theme, then spins beetles off in another directio before bringing a playful doubt into the mix and sweeping the whole thing away.
One more idea that's been banging around in my head: writing as mummification of the living moment, the living event, the living word - removing the vital living elements and wrapping it in paper and ink, praying for rebirth on the reader's end. This puts communication as a whole into the realm of resurrection and recursion, makes The Invisibles itself a grand resurrection.

IT'S LIKE THE WHOLE WORLD'S BURNING DOWN

The simplest Surrealist act consists of dashing down into the street, pistol in hand, and firing blindly, as fast as you can pull the trigger, into the crowd. Anyone who has not dreamed of thus putting and end to the petty system of debasement and cretinization in effect has a well defined place in that crowd, with his belly at barrel level.

- André Breton, The Second Surrealist Manifesto

I think that pretty well sums up Dane's ethos here. Of other interest is the King Mob graffiti that Dane sees and seems to dimly recognize - looks to me like Morrison signing his work, via King Mob.

PICTURESQUE RUINS

I find King Mob and Edith's scene interesting here for the same reason as his earlier scene with Elfayed, and his later scene with Robin: it's almost as if Morrison, as King Mob, is just throwing out feelers here, probing, himself uncertain of exactly how this story is going to go. In addition we've got further intimations of a conflict between eternal resurrection/recursion and apocalypse here, with Edith bemoaning the "cold light of day", day as night and the ever-present death in life. "Soon to be picturesque ruins," King Mob states, as if everything carried within it the seeds of its own destruction, as if every form contained its own inevitable negation.

WAS IT MOLOTOV?

I’d started writing The Invisibles as a little rebel, as a left-winger from a very poor, radical Bohemian background; I hated the government and I hated the police and I was a rebel against all forms of authority. By the time I’d got to the end of it, I had destroyed all my own certainties by picking them apart. Because that was part of what it was all about, y’know, I wanted to critique the things that I’d been brought up to believe as well as all the things I was already against. I was after total rebellion and that included trashing even very cherished beliefs about what we are and what we do and why it happens.

- Grant Morrison, Interview with Arthur Magazine

Part of what interests me about The Invisibles is how there is a constant and anarchic building and tearing apart of historical framework, a very tactile rooting about through history for foundation to build off of, in which the search itself becomes the foundation. There's a sort of interplay between Mr. Malcolm's dire reverence for historicity and Dane's snarling indifference and indeference to it, between history as power vs history as prison.

ANOTHER NAIL IN MY COFFIN

It's interesting to see Lennon handled here, and what it hints at - Lennon's invocation by Morrison as parallel to Lennon's invocation by King Mob; time as collapsed state, with Dane and Lennon each a ghost to each other; Lennon as godhead invoked through mind-altering drugs and magic ritual; Lennon as Dead Beatle - iteration and reiteration, a multiplicity of resurrections!
Also interesting here is the arrival of a recurring specter, an icy shadow speaking of "good earthy method", a "strong owner", a "psychic land", and the dark side of the moon. How deeply ambiguous. I can't help but think of Ouspensky & Gurdjieff's idea of the moon as master of the unaware man, like some sort of cosmic psychic predator one step up the food chain.

Everything living on the Earth, people, animals, plants, is food for the moon. The moon is a huge living being feeding upon all that lives and grows on the Earth.

- G. I. Gurdjieff, quoted in P. D. Ouspensky's In Search of the Miraculous

REVOLUTION 9

Then in 90's I joined the rave party and spent every single day of the decade getting totally wrecked on mind-altering substances which, I have to admit, I enjoyed immensely. I was never keen on stimulants like cocaine and speed because they did nothing useful or interesting for me but I loved the psychedelic drugs which could twist my head, erase my name and address, open up my subconscious and turn my brain into a super-conductor, so I dosed like a madman for ten years, studied the effects and wrote it all down in The Invisibles and Flex Mentallo.

- Grant Morrison

Morrison puts the pop in apophenia! Morrison dialing up the porosity, the pliancy, the noise of the text, forcing the meaning back into the reader's court - the reader is forced to rely on his own pattern recognition here. You've got to be comfortable playing with The Invisibles, probing for meaning instead of waiting for it, trying on different options and weighing them against each other, ready to swap points of view as required. You're never going to see a definitive reading of The Invisibles because there's always a gap for the reader to fill, to re-evaluate and refill, to engage and disengage. "What does it mean" isn't a meaningful or interesting question here - what does it mean to you?

WELCOME TO HARMONY HOUSE

And so, after a quick GTA jam session and a thorough browbeating from a bewigged judge, Dane finds himself in The Harmony House, under the care of Mr. Gelt and Ms. Dwyer. They seem nice.

IT'S THE MOON AGAIN

Ambiguity is a sign of human maturity.

- Bob Dobbs / Bob Marshall / Robert Dean

The moon card and the tarot in general play into the recursion/resurrection and apophenia themes that keep showing up, but what's got me thinking here is King Mob's "apple for the teacher" comment. King Mob's applying the role of teacher to Robin for her random, disbelieving draw of a card - almost letting the noise of the situation, the flow of events, the vortex of environmental currents be his "teacher". And at the end of the issue, after what has essentially been fourty-something pages of people fighting over authority positions, especially the position of teacher to Dane, King Mob just... disappears. He sets himself up as an authority figure and then negates his position, goes invisible, leaving Dane on his own. Which may or may not be the same move that Dane's father pulled, it looks like.
As an aside, King Mob's outfit reminds me less of some swinging 60's psychedelic superspy and more of some late 80's primitivist-punk action figure, complete with removable mask and plastic pistol. Once he's in the full get-up, it feels less suave and more brutal, material, and tactile. Very BDSM, like The Invisibles itself.

IT WAS ALL THAT NOISE WOKE ME UP

Monstrum in fronte, monstrum in animo. [Monstrous in appearance, monstrous in spirit.]

- Latin proverb

Dreams, virtual reality - more recursion here, worlds within worlds, worlds for us to put on and experience. In Dane's nightmare, the endless antiseptic halls of Harmony House are transformed into a succession of comic book panels ending in chains. Dane is a prisoner of his medium, already mummified, wrapped up in paper and dried out ink, in the series itself, in the paper in your hands. How the hell do you escape from that? Is it being implied here that The Invisibles works over the reader in the same manner, with the same violence as that being displayed in Harmony House? Is the world of The Invisibles as much a dream, a virtual reality, for The-King-In-Chains as it is for us?
And then, hey, King Mob storms the place like a Punk Buddha, offering enlightenment with a quick castration and a bullet in the brainpan, an easy parallel to the Harmony House technique. Nyuk nyuk.

YOU KNOW MY NAME

    Pleased to meet you
    Hope you guess my name
    But what's puzzling you
    Is the nature of my game

- The Rolling Stones, Sympathy For The Devil

I can't be the only one who thinks of Elfayed's little story from the beginning of the issue as Gelt's insect escape pod is accidentally crushed under Dane's sneaker. Is the Outer Church and its cronies "a swarm of golden beetles carrying the sun of pure understanding out of the abyss"? What are the "mysteries of submission"? What would King Mob have seen in Gelt's "new eyes"?
Radical zen on display here. King Mob comes off here as Dane's frustrated teen power fantasy - shoot the teacher and burn down the school, then race off in a cool car! As stated before, King Mob sets himself up as authority figure and then, after implying he may have just been a ghost, disappears, ditching Dane with a whole load of questions. I can imagine an alternate Invisibles in which King Mob is Dane's ghost, folded back through every point in time to orchestrate everything...

The Invisibles 1.2 - 1.4: Down and Out in Heaven and Hell (January 8 - January 21)

2012-01-06T16:41:00.000-08:00

[The Invisibles: Say You Want A Revolution, pg 48 - 122]

Back-matter from The Invisibles 1.2

And from The Invisibles 1.4

Riverrun, Past Resurrection Silhouettes

2012-01-04T06:01:00.000-08:00

DAYS OF FUTURE PAST

Dusk over the Giza Necropolis. The pyramids, resurrection machines of the pharaohs, stand in silhouette, flanked by the here-unseen Sphinx. Though it is at a considerable distance, we see/hear a voice rise above the nearby village to observe, or perhaps declare: "AND SO WE RETURN AND BEGIN AGAIN." But what is the nature of this return?

The greatest weight.-- What, if some day or night a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: "This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything unutterably small or great in your life will have to return to you, all in the same succession and sequence - even this spider and this moonlight between the trees, and even this moment and I myself. The eternal hourglass of existence is turned upside down again and again, and you with it, speck of dust!"
Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus?... Or how well disposed would you have to become to yourself and to life to crave nothing more fervently than this ultimate eternal confirmation and seal?

- Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science

UNHEIMLICH

As I was walking, one hot summerafternoon, through the deserted streets of a provincial town inItaly which was unknown to me, I found myself in a quarter ofwhose character I could not long remain in doubt. Nothing butpainted women were to be seen at the windows of the small houses,and I hastened to leave the narrow street at the next turning.But after having wandered about for a time without enquiring myway, I suddenly found myself back in the same street, where mypresence was now beginning to excite attention. I hurried awayonce more, only to arrive by another detour at the sameplace yet a third time. Now, however, a feeling overcame me whichI can only describe as uncanny, and I was glad enough to findmyself back at the piazza I had left a short while before, withoutany further voyages of discovery.

- Sigmund Freud, The Uncanny

Space-time is bent back on itself: we enter a space-time with no center and no margins, space-time as electric circuit. Jack can be haunted by both his future and his past, by all future and all past, by no future and no past, because they are all one and the same. The narrative becomes a hologram, Indra's net as hypertext, every moment tied to one another and reverberating in sympathy. The cosmos is suffused with uncanniness. The Invisibles is a succession of echoes and reechoes.

BLACK IRON ESCAPE HATCH

[W]hen it is desacralized, cyclic time becomes terrifying; it is seen as a circle forever turning on itself, repeating itself to infinity.

- Mircea Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane

This eternal return is balanced against, or played with, or consumed by a fluid novelty, a liquid mirror open to all change. However, the two sides are never concretely divided - one always contains the other, or is in the process of metamorphosing to or from the other. Anarchy and order are always in flux. The dead are resurrected and the living die, forms are shed and flows are shorn as the wheel turns. Death is overthrown: dead men are mummified and live forever, become ghosts, are invoked as gods. Life is overthrown: living men are stripped threadbare and zombified by the malevolent spirits of unlife, and life becomes a cyclical nightmare haunted by history. Harmony House is an inverted pyramid of sorts, a resurrection machine offering rebirth into the bland terror of a meaningless infinity, the doom of passive nihilism. The circuit, the resurrection machine, the initiation, the hero's journey - a mechanic of sleep and wake as the animating force of the serial, an anchor for the narrative, one possible foundation among the many.

Scholars today are acutely awareof a discrepancy between their ways of treating subjects and the subjectitself. Scriptural scholars of both the Old and New Testaments frequentlysay that while their treatment must be linear, the subject is not. Thesubject treats of the relations between God and man, and betweenGod and the world, and of the relationsbetween man and his neighbor - all these subsist together, and act and reactupon one another at the same time. The Hebrew and Eastern mode of thoughttackles problem and resolution, at the outset of a discussion, in a waytypical of oral societies in general. The entire message is then tracedand retraced, again and again, on the rounds of a concentric spiral withseeming redundancy. One can stop anywhere after the first few sentencesand have the full message, if one is prepared to "dig" it.

- Marshal McLuhan, Understanding Media

The opening move of The Invisibles is to turn the tale back in on itself, to form a circuit and gamble that it can be jammed, to double down on feedback. I find myself reading the individual issue as closed system, the first page, the first panel itself as endless recursion. I am drawn back to the first panel again and again. It becomes a heiroglyphic mantra running through my head. The book is always the same. The reader is always noise.

There is no reason to hesitate before setting out on a sea voyage, because the mythical Hero has already made it in the fabulous Time. All that is needed is to follow his example. Similarly, there is no reason to fear settling an unknown, wild territory, because one knows what to do. One has merely to repeat the cosmogonic ritual, whereupon the unknown territory (= 'Chaos') is transformed into 'Cosmos'.

- Mircea Eliade, Myth and Reality

The Invisibles - Resources

2012-01-03T06:02:00.000-08:00

BOOKS

ANARCHY FOR THE MASSES: THE DISINFORMATION GUIDE TO THE INVISIBLES by Patrick Neighly & Kereth Cowe-Spigai
OUR SENTENCE IS UP: SEEING GRANT MORRISON'S THE INVISIBLES by Patrick Meaney (Preview)
GRANT MORRISON: THE EARLY YEARS by Timothy Callahan (Preview)
GRANT MORRISON: COMBINING THE WORLDS OF CONTEMPORARY COMICS by Marc Singer
SUPERGODS: WHAT MASKED VIGILANTES, MIRACULOUS MUTANTS, AND A SUN GOD FROM SMALLVILLE CAN TEACH US ABOUT BEING HUMAN by Grant Morrison

DOCUMENTARIES

GRANT MORRISON: TALKING WITH GODS (Trailer)

INTERVIEWS

BARBELITH INTERVIEW WITH GRANT MORRISON
POPIMAGE INTERVIEW WITH GRANT MORRISON
DISINFO NATION INTERVIEW WITH GRANT MORRISON (TRANSCRIPT)
SUICIDE GIRLS INTERVIEW WITH GRANT MORRISON
JASON LOUV INTERVIEW WITH GRANT MORRISON
ARTHUR MAGAZINE INTERVIEW WITH GRANT MORRISON (1996)
ARTHUR MAGAZINE INTERVIEW WITH GRANT MORRISON (2004)
KCRW'S GUEST DJ PROJECT WITH GRANT MORRISON

ANNOTATIONS & MISCELLANY

THE BOMB Annotations and more from the Barbelith community

Amy Poodle (of MINDLESS ONES) on The Invisibles and Hauntology:
BOMB LIGHT IN FARAWAY WINDOWS: THE INVISIBLES AND HAUNTOLOGY
HAUNTOLOGY AND THE INVISIBLES PART II
HAUNTOLOGY AND THE INVISIBLES PART III: THE MIRROR WE MADE TO SEE OURSELVES IN

DRAFTED INTO THE INVISIBLE ARMY by Timothy Callahan

"THERE'S ALWAYS A WAY" - GRANT MORRISON VS. NIHILISM, AND THE STORIES WE TELL OURSELVES by Dylan Ratigan

LAST NIGHT THE INVISIBLES SAVED MY LIFE by Bob Temuka
LAST NIGHT THE INVISIBLES SAVED MY LIFE (24 MONTH COUNTDOWN REMIX) by Bob Temuka
LAST NIGHT THE INVISIBLES SAVED MY LIFE (ONE YEAR TO GO REMIX) by Bob Temuka

POP MAGIC by Grant Morrison

GRANT MORRISON'S DISINFO CON SPEECH

The Invisibles 1.1 - Dead Beatles (January 1 - January 7)

2011-12-27T08:48:00.000-08:00

[The Invisibles: Say You Want A Revolution, pg 7 - 47]

AND SO WE RETURN AND BEGIN AGAIN

I just wanted to toss out a couple thoughts before we get going here. First of all, if you don't have posting permissions yet, send me your e-mail address at Davicimo@gmail.com. Otherwise, you'll only be able to leave comments. Which, if that's all you're interested in, is fine.
Secondly, on format - I'll post an entry like this every week with the next reading. If you've got brief comments, drop them here. If you've got longer thoughts on the entire issue, feel free to post a new entry. If you've got a subject you want to talk about, feel free to post a new entry. If the post is issue-specific, it probably wouldn't hurt to either include the issue number (The Invisibles x.x) in the title, as above, or in the tags/"labels", just for clarity's sake. I'm not attached to any of the above, so if some other system emerges that comes out on top, great.
Alright, let the conversation begin. I'll have some preliminary thoughts up tonight, or bright and early tomorrow morning. I'm like a beetle in dung here!

EDIT: Here's the back-matter from the first issue.

Reading "The Invisibles"

2011-12-22T05:22:00.001-08:00

[For the next week or so, until we all collectively crack open the first issue and begin to read The Invisibles, I was hoping to read around The Invisibles, a sort of geotextual survey. And where better to start with The Invisibles than... "The Invisibles"?]

"THE INVISIBLES"

It's like calling a novel "The Unreadables". It comes off as a challenge - how do you engage with a comic book if not visually? The mechanical, repetitive sequential mode of reading is being rebuked, before you've even opened the comic. It's evasive. Not only evasive, but multiplicative, multiplicitous. The InvisibleS. For every form of sight you ply against it, it has a retort, a new counter-form, a new invisibility. It claims an anti-rhetoric, a pliable, responsive dis-engagement. You have to pursue, you have to hunt. You shift to other senses, other modes of perception, of processing. What other choice do you have?

I can't stop thinking about different kinds of reading, different modes and stances you could be forced into... What does tactile reading look like? The Invisibles by braille, immersion into the texture of the medium. To manipulate the elements of the comic to understand - to bend, fold, twist, wring, arrange and re-arrange to make sense - play and interplay. Comic serial as sculpture. Haptic, proprioceptive - reading your stance, posture, receptivity as much as the comic's. Reading as balance. Brings to mind the old clichés of VR. What about The Invisibles as immersive environment? I've still got images of The Invisibles as an MMORPG rattling around in my head. What kind of priorities come to the fore when you're approaching a comic as an interactive space, a zone of play? How do you approach that? Morrison, in an interview excerpted here, drops the following line:

Although many current video games are constructed on a narrative spine which follows the basic action movie hero-beats-baddie script, it’s never that aspect of the player’s interaction with the virtual environment that’s important.

What about a performative engagement? Invisibles as theatre, as mime - a muscular reading, a nervous reading. Doing as understanding, as meaning. We're back to the idea of proprioceptive reading, of improv as a way of engagement, an embodied rhetoric. You don't read The Invisibles, you act The Invisibles! The Invisibles as ritual, as drum circle, as chant - oral, aural, a call and response, a beat, a swagger, a dance! Hell, vibes! Reading as ESP! This thing is beckoning you to fire up all your senses, dust off your old dead senses, sprout new senses... with one caveat: No eyes.

"NOTHING MORE THAN A DESPERATE, PASSIONATE APPEAL TO MURDER"

1994: The speculator boom has turned around, and the comic book industry is coming crashing down. Marvel and DC are, of course, too big to fail, but smaller publishers and distributors don't have that luxury (see Eclipse, NOW, Aircel, Continuity, and so on).
1994: The King is dead.
1994: The Invisibles #1 is published.
But let's look back to 1977 for a moment.

All The Slits really left behind is an object screaming with muteness: a nameless lp in a blank bootleg sleeve. I like to think the disc is called 'Once upon a time in a living room,' but there's no way to be sure; with phrases scrawled at random across the label in lieu of titles, you have to decide the names of the songs from the choices offered. 'A Boring Life,' then: once the music starts I've never tried to understand a word.

[...] This was music that refused its own name, which meant it also refused its history - from this moment no one knew what rock 'n' roll was, and so almost anything became possible, or impossible, as rock 'n' roll: random noise was rock 'n' roll, and the Beatles were not. Save for the buried productions of a few cult prophets [...] punk immediately discredited the music that preceded it; punk denied the legitimacy of anyone who'd ever had a hit, or played as if he knew how to play. Destroying one tradition, punk revealed a new one.

- Greil Marcus, Lipstick Traces

#BlankSleeve

It's a slap in the face to the shambling zombie corpse of a collapsing industry-aesthetic. I'm getting ahead of myself trying to tie The Invisibles to punk, but the idea I'm trying to feel my way around is this: there's a sense of radical newness to this denial of the past. It's like the title is declaring a blank slate. "Fuck all the rest of this shit on the shelves with me, fuck the catalogs - it starts HERE." How can you not picture The Invisibles #1 with a blank cover, no illustration, no logo, no comics code, no barcode, nothing? An object screaming with muteness. But not a Fukuyaman End of History, more like a radical reboot of history. Forcing a blank slate. A third way, a circuit breaker, a line of flight. "...it starts HERE." A fleshy invisibility, a white hole spuming possibility, empty space pregnant with spirit. Fiat nihil as cosmic start point.

Back to "The Invisibles" as a comic book title - I've got a problem. There's no ready action to the name, no muscular adventure there. It just keeps bouncing back and forth in my head, between suggestions of 90's XTREEM ACTION and some kind of contemplative inaction that is anathema to the standard industry serial. I mean, "The Invisibles" as a superhero team, to take the more pedestrian suggestions of the name... what the fuck do they do? The Avengers avenge, the Justice League inflicts justice, the X-Men do manly Xly things... I can't even articulate what comes to mind when I try to tackle "The Invisibles" like this. At best, I see vague hints of telluric pulp, trashy underground adventure-occult, flashes of weird heroes in the vein of The Shadow... but "The Shadow" is an inversion, hero as unseen mastermind with mysterious abilities. "The Invisibles" is... something else. It's suggestive because it's radically unsuggestive. Like the superhero equivalent of the Ganzfeld effect, it's hallucinatory by sheer unresponsiveness. By being nothing, it opens up the possibility of everything. If it's a vacuum, it's going to suck the air out of your lungs, pull out your insides - you can't help but outer yourself in the face of that. I've got this plenum/vacuum dialectic tearing my head apart here, but it's the resonant interval between those two spaces that I'm trying to draw out. Minding the gap.

#BlankEyes

"IT ESCAPES THE FIELD OF VISION. IT PRECEDES OR FOLLOWS VISION."

The logo itself carves the letters of the title out of non-substance - "Invisibles" is crafted from negative space, visible by virtue of its invisibility. It is a meaningful invisibility filling the emptiness between carved blocks of dross ink. It suggests the invisible as plenum. Meaning in the erased, aborted, left out and taken away. Forcing an embodied-gnosticism, dragging the eye to emptiness and forcing contemplation of the intangible presence of the unseen. Literary dark matter.
And what discussion of a Grant Morrison work would be complete without mention of the "Fourth Wall" between the interior works of the fiction and the reader, the ever-shifting proscenium arch of the panel, the page, or the book itself that sets us outside of the action, gazing in. The rational-detached position of the literate/scientific observer, peering at the bustle of narrative through a lens and taking notes, the presumed invisibility of the reader, is thoroughly rebuked by an entangling with the narrative, an engaged interplay between the work and its reader. The Invisibles as creeping paranoid infection - the series not as an air-tight lead container of story but as a porous hazard, breathing, breeding potent and penetrative microfauna and hungry nanomolecular architects, shedding cosmic mutant radiation in dense transparent sheets, haunted by ethereal spirits and malicious spectres, with fluxing borders of occult influence reaching past and through the reader, putting him on, working him over, dragging him into an unknowable nexus of invisible effects...

It is therefore not a de facto invisible, like an object hidden behind another, and not an absolute invisible, which would have nothing to do with the visible. Rather it is the invisible of this world, that which inhabits the world, sustains it, and renders it visible, its own and interior possibility, the Being of this being.

- Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Visible and Invisible

TL;DR:

Read The Invisibles with your whole body (and more).
Fuck a comic book industry.
Nothing is really something, huh?
G-g-g-ghosts!
#Blank[Blank]

INSERT COIN

2011-12-21T10:00:00.000-08:00

It’s ragged at the edges but you can play any of 300 characters, some more involving than others. It’s a thriller, it’s a romance, it’s a tragedy, it’s a porno, it’s neo-modernist kitchen sink science fiction that you catch, like a cold.

I consider RADIO FREE BARBELITH a convivium, a gathering grounds, a tribal assembly, a coming-together of readers looking to breach the walls of Grant Morrison's The Invisibles and loot and pillage the contents together. This will be an exploration of fertile noise, a networked ebb and flow of dialogue and discovery centered around, but certainly not limited to, The Invisibles. We'll read through the series at a relaxed pace, aiming to wrap it all up on December 21, 2012.

The proceedings will most likely operate with the shambling in-efficiency of a working prototype - my sincerest apologies in advance for any kind of technical/social/cultural/national/personal issues that float to the surface or muddy the waters.

We'll start with the first issue in January, so until then, relax! Any questions? Comment here, or drop me a line at Davicimo@gmail.com.

ROLL CALL

Join up! Join in! Don't consider this an interrogation, an inquisition, but a friendly probing, an opportunity to set some initial experimental conditions - Cast your role! Build yourself a body an immerse yourself! Select your player! Who are you? Why do you want to engage with The Invisibles? Why now? Why here?