Fairly shoddy Halloween-themed effort (published on Halloween), a stand-alone Latent Oats strip that does not have the correlating fictional sources of the four originating strips. This one musing on Stevens' "Man Carrying Thing." I don't remember how I stumbled upon it, but now, a year later, it still strikes me as standing out:
The poem must resist the intelligence Almost successfully. Illustration:
A brune figure in winter evening resists Identity. The thing he carries resists
The most necessitous sense. Accept them, then, As secondary (parts not quite perceived
Of the obvious whole, uncertain particles Of the certain solid, the primary free from doubt,
Things floating like the first hundred flakes of snow Out of a storm we must endure all night,
Out of a storm of secondary things), A horror of thoughts that suddenly are real.
We must endure our thoughts all night, until The bright obvious stands motionless in cold.
"Uncertain particles of the certain solid." What was he on about? And, again, the sharp cold New England morning refining the abstraction into a clear truth.
The strip starts with an amateurish Squid Man featuring someone having disembodied themself, with some relation to trying to end the feeling of disconnect. I don't know if SM is speaking sarcastically here or not, though I do sadly notice that I forgot the speech line, so it's not clear who is actually speaking the line.
The second panel no less unsatisfying, taken from an old comic ad for hypnotism, I think (but embarrassingly rendered).
The Pharm Life panel is satisfying. Are the masks breathing masks, or halloween masks? I think it was supposed to be the latter, with the added satisfaction that their substitute face is just a blank flat surface, like their own faces. Because they would be.
And Stevens evokes the resolution, which may or may not have been what he was talking about in the poem: the quiet hours are the time of torture.
Fairly shoddy Halloween-themed effort (published on Halloween), a stand-alone Latent Oats strip that does not have the correlating fictional sources of the four originating strips. This one musing on Stevens' "Man Carrying Thing." I don't remember how I stumbled upon it, but now, a year later, it still strikes me as standing out:
ReplyDeleteThe poem must resist the intelligence
Almost successfully. Illustration:
A brune figure in winter evening resists
Identity. The thing he carries resists
The most necessitous sense. Accept them, then,
As secondary (parts not quite perceived
Of the obvious whole, uncertain particles
Of the certain solid, the primary free from doubt,
Things floating like the first hundred flakes of snow
Out of a storm we must endure all night,
Out of a storm of secondary things),
A horror of thoughts that suddenly are real.
We must endure our thoughts all night, until
The bright obvious stands motionless in cold.
"Uncertain particles of the certain solid." What was he on about? And, again, the sharp cold New England morning refining the abstraction into a clear truth.
The strip starts with an amateurish Squid Man featuring someone having disembodied themself, with some relation to trying to end the feeling of disconnect. I don't know if SM is speaking sarcastically here or not, though I do sadly notice that I forgot the speech line, so it's not clear who is actually speaking the line.
The second panel no less unsatisfying, taken from an old comic ad for hypnotism, I think (but embarrassingly rendered).
The Pharm Life panel is satisfying. Are the masks breathing masks, or halloween masks? I think it was supposed to be the latter, with the added satisfaction that their substitute face is just a blank flat surface, like their own faces. Because they would be.
And Stevens evokes the resolution, which may or may not have been what he was talking about in the poem: the quiet hours are the time of torture.