Monday, February 6, 2012

Fit 8, pg. 79/2 … The Snark, O Muse, inform, that many a way wound with his wisdom to his wished stay



Our Snark hunt has entered the ultimate phase of its prosodic peristalsis, the infamous Fit the Eight, the Vanishing.

Big paradox, huh? The final product of the greatest Nonsense Epic Ever Written will be the Nothingness of being Vanished Away. That's pretty Heavy, so Heavy that it's plunged all the way to Light 'n Trivial.

Which brings us to another textual dilemma: from whence comes this sudden penchant for capitalizing things? Is it a suppressed orthographic memory of this artist's oddly Teutonic heritage? A sticky caps key? Or is it just another haphazard attempt at maintaining the pretense of Deep Meaning without actually doing anything about it?

Smarty-pants readers will sneer at this back-handed attempt at defining Carrollian Nonsense, they will scoff derisively at all this muddling of Form and Meaning. Less intelligently clothed readers can gape, slack jawed, at the above drawing which illustrates a band of Snarquistadores wandering through a room which is lavishly adorned with portraits of their communal Creator, the Admirable Carroll — and their soon-to-be-vanished colleague, the Baker!

Muddling through a hagiographic tribute to one's creator (a self-generating universal mono-iconostasis if you're a particularly old-fashioned Hindu) is pretty much shorthand for life itself if one happens to be religious. The frisson of it all is made even more frissony by the fact that this particular creator, the Rev. C.L. Dodgson, was a genuinely religious man who puttered around his own creator's world in the mad gardener's guise of Lewis Carroll.

It all means something and I'm sure it's pretty amazing and really cool if I could only think of what to call it* … which is, of course, the Illustrator's Primal Dilemma: I cannot say it, I can only draw it. Like the Beaver, I keep bounding along on the tip of my tale, at a loss for words but well-stocked with pictures.

NB. I'll be appearing at the Poetry and Visual Arts Roundtable, February 17, 2012, 2 - 4 p.m. at the Lillian Vernon Creative Writers House, 58 West 10th Street, between 5th and 6th Avenues, NYC. This will provide a rare opportunity for myself to publicly rant about comix and poetry with other ranters in a location that is nominally warmer than the one I rant in now … featured poets will also include Sommer Browning, Matthea Harvey, Mark Leidner, Bianca Stone, and Paul Tunis. More info here
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*Recursive ontological solipsism with a pictorial side-order of temporal glaciation? Lost in the fun-house? Total perspective vortex?

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