Cartoons (Minimal Reading Required)
categories: Cartoons / Cocktail Hour
5 comments
So here is the second installment of my cartoon serial, Talking to Ghosts. I hope you like it, because, frankly, it kicked my ass. I’ll never whine about how hard writing is again. At least with writing the process, even to some extent the revision process, is electrified by thought, by the fact that your mind is connected to the marks you are making on the page. With cartooning, you have the idea and sketch it down but your work is just getting started. Inking in and crosshatching, for instance, are about as scintillating as cleaning someone’s teeth. In fact, the whole process reminds me of practicing dentistry (no offense, dentists.)
That said, there was a deep pleasure in living in the world of my second “ghost,” Samuel Johnson, for a couple of weeks. As it turned out, these were hard weeks (a dear relative died suddenly, the house we were living in, which we had hoped to buy, was sold to someone else, so it was good to have S.J. around. He is a tough-minded, non-flowery type of ghost, and he acts as strong medicine against the easy temptations of envy, worry, and whining in the writing life. (And, no doubt, in the cartooning life—he wouldn’t have liked my griping above.) So here it is. A peek into my particular sort of literary craziness.
P.S. During my weeks with Johnson, I naturally returned to my favorite books by and about him, and I’ve written a round-up of these at Reading Under the Influence.
Thank you for doing Talking With Ghosts. I enjoyed this installment just as much as the last one, and again, I share a lot of your feelings. In this case, I share your frustration about the baggage of the Romantics, whose aesthetic has been degraded in its popular form.
Therefore, I too take refuge in pre-Romantic writers who do not share the silly mysticism that appeared in response to Enlightenment Rationalism and scientism. Terry Eagleton has a great bit on this on iTunes University that I recommend–he claims that the Romantic conception of the “artist” or “writer” (no one says the word “writer” now the way they say the word “bricklayer”) was an invention to replace God, Who vanished from the lens of Rationalism. Therefore the cult of genius follows, as if the writer/artist had some exclusive access to creativity, whereas prior to these cats the artist/writer was considered a craftsman like a shipbuilder (shipwright and playwright).
Anyway, it’s all obviously silly: the work of art as groundless (like God–the Ground of all existence), the work of art as endlessly reinterpeted and glossed (like Scripture), the artist as a creator (when you and I know that we don’t create, we arrange–only God can create ex nihilo). I have no patience for this sentimentality and I sense that neither do you.
Please keep doing Talking to Ghosts. I, as an apprentice, find them extremely helpful and often guide me to a sane (non-Romantic) understanding of the task that lays before me each morning.
Thank you for doing Talking With Ghosts. I enjoyed this installment just as much as the last one, and again, I share a lot of your feelings. In this case, I share your frustration about the baggage of the Romantics, whose aesthetic has been degraded in its popular form.
Therefore, I too take refuge in pre-Romantic writers who do not share the silly mysticism that appeared in response to Enlightenment Rationalism and scientism. Terry Eagleton has a great bit on this on iTunes University that I recommend–he claims that the Romantic conception of the “artist” or “writer” (no one says the word “writer” now the way they say the word “bricklayer”) was an invention to replace God, Who vanished from the lens of Rationalism. Therefore the cult of genius follows, as if the writer/artist had some exclusive access to creativity, whereas prior to these cats the artist/writer was considered a craftsman like a shipbuilder (shipwright and playwright).
Anyway, it’s all obviously silly: the work of art as groundless (like God–the Ground of all existence), the work of art as endlessly reinterpeted and glossed (like Scripture), the artist as a creator (when you and I know that we don’t create, we arrange–only God can create ex nihilo). I have no patience for this sentimentality and I sense that neither do you.
Please keep doing Talking to Ghosts. I, as an apprentice, find them extremely helpful and often guide me to a sane (non-Romantic) understanding of the task that lays before me each morning.
I love this so much. Please do MANY of them– they’re funny, intellectual, moving. Please do one on Emerson & Thoreau.
I love the fact and the idea that Reg Saner had you pegged a certain way. It’s like when I did construction work. One of the older guys on an apartment remodel in Manhattan held a Yale PhD in philosophy and had chosen, philosophically, to work as plumber. He did his reading and writing very early mornings. We’d sit and talk about, say, Wittgenstein (“The world is everything that is the case”), all the while sweating pipe or dragging bathtubs into freight elevators or whatever we were up to. He spoke like seven languages and was one of my great teachers. And we’d talk and pack oakum into cast-iron drain pipe seams. And then the architect would come and address us like we were gorillas in a zoo. That particular job was on Park Avenue and after work one day Teddy took me to the Yale Club for drinks–you just had to put on a jacket and tie, which they kept available at the door for the likes of us, and Teddy was beloved by the maitre d’, even in overalls. I guess the architect had gone to Yale, too, because we ran into him there. A little drunk he came over and tried to make conversation, leaning over our table, but Teddy snubbed him, made fun of him to me in French. The architect kept trying–probably several Friday martinis in him–and after a while Teddy signalled the Maitre d’, who asked Monsieur to return to his own table, funny stuff….
Mr. Gessner, Samuel Johnson approves of what you’re doing, apparently: “Those authors who would find many readers, must endeavour to please while they instruct.”
A couple of verses from Van Morrison’s “Professional Jealousy” may be apropos, but coming from the other direction:
Professional jealousy makes other people crazy
When they think you’ve got something that they don’t have
What they don’t understand is it’s just not easy
To cover it all, and stand where you stand
Professional jealousy, makes no exception
It can happen to anyone, at any time
The only requirement is knowing what’s needed;
And then delivering what’s needed on time
In other words, if you’re good at what you’re doing, some asshole will come after you, the twins on his two shoulders. Dave, you’d better watch your back, cuz this cartoon is great….
A writer acquaintance from the other side of the globe saw a comment I made on a discussion forum about vampires representing societal parasitism. She asked what my take is on ghosts, what they mean. We exchanged a few e-mails before, I guess, I got into hallowed territory and she abruptly stopped replying.
While investigating supernatural, fantastical, paranormal archetypes at the time, werewolves, zombies, angels, gods; fairy tale, fable, and fantasy folklore stock character types; and so on, prospecting for central characteristics and traits, personalities too, I was looking for what they mean. I’d overlooked ghosts. Thinking about the others had my brain ready-wired for asking what about ghosts? This skeptical disbeliever woke up to the proxy realities of ghosts.
Ghosts to me now represent the legacies of ancestors and antecedents, the collectives of consciousness, subconscious psyches, the artifacts and cultures of the present and that’ve gone before right on back to the first human story told as it was lived. Reimagining the first human story, I imagine the “storyteller” couldn’t share it once, or retell it, just remember its ghostly legacy as long as possible, keep it inside wanting language to emerge so it could be shared. I feel the ghost of that story haunting, inspiring, taunting, entertaining, enlightening me.
Genetic legacies of a grandmother I never knew haunt me. Through Dad, I’m haunted by her personality issues I inherited: leadership, approval, and social dysfunctions. Grandpa was no greatly enlightened family humanist either, nor were Mom’s ancestors. They did shed some undersirable legacies of their ancestors, heroically stopping the buck, bucking the tide of as it was before so shall it be forward just because that’s the way it’s always been. So did Mom and Dad.
A watermelon-sized piece of anthracite coal stranded on a shoreline after a big blow, a ghost from the Carboniferous period, 300 million years old. Ghosts of plants from the past released into the atmosphere haunt our present and future environment.
Gifted writers who have gone before and who will come in the future haunt, inspire, taunt, entertain, enlighten me. I used to envy them, as I envy the envyless nature of sacred nurturing motherhood. Now I celebrate their accomplishments unreservedly because I understand their journeys accompanied by their ghosts they inherit and acquire on the way. They have my empathy. In common cause, I become them. Their works and accomplishments are mine, vicariously, to celebrate; their ghosts mine as really as they belong to them.
I’ve railed at the hardships of life, of writing, and they’ve railed back. I’ve been bitter more than content. For a brief moment when I fully realized my bitterness and its alienation, I blamed my ghosts and saw how I had it backward. They’re just apparitions I can abide or I can think and act for my best behalf, courteously mindful of less ephemeral, everyday ghosts’ sensibilities. Defusing my ghosts showed me the purpose of a life’s journey filled with hardships and too few joys. Joys as parsimonious rewards for enduring the hardships. Hardships as nutrition for the soul, nurturing personal growth, soul food. My soul is obese, I realize, about on time to balance my diet by appreciating the growth-inciting riches of hardships.