Fit 8, pg. 81/1 … I ♥ Darkness

At the heart of every story, epic or romance ever written, chanted or gurgled in the shower lies what literary experts call the "darkness" — hence the phrase, "heart of darkness" — the place where the malevolent gist of the entire plot keeps itself warm and dry.

We've arrived at such a "heart of darkness" in our Hunting of the Snark and unlike certain sissy-boy writers who needlessly tie their literary loincloths into Gordian knots over such naughty anatomical dilemmas, we shall bash on regardless. They haven't made the darkness yet — hearty or not — which can't be crosshatched into submission by any ink-sodden, nib-drunk illustrator worthy of the name.

This business of "it's a boo" has troubled the minds of Snarkologists (both of them) through the centuries because it functions just like the murder weapon in a classic, Golden Age detective story — with one slight difference: there's no murderer, no motive and possibly not even a victim. Plus, the detective is really dumb* …

Has the Baker just been conked on the head by a Snark-subspecies-Boojum? Or has he been conked on the head by someone whose name begins with the letters "boo?" Or has he been conked on the head with a Snark-subspecies-Boojum by someone whose name begins with the letters "boo?"

Plausible candidates for the latter position could include John Wilkes Booth, Daniel Boone, Booth Tarkington or even George Boole, the English microcephalist anteater. But eventually, suspicion will fall on the head of the Mistuh Kurtz of our sordid little Snarkian Hearty-Darkness, the Boots.

Oh yes, Boots, we've had our eye on you for quite a while now, ever since you showed up for work disguised as Charles Darwin. Who better than Charles Darwin to play the role of a Snark-Hunter's Heart of Darkness, the man who more than any other toppled the edifice of Victorian thingum-a-jig with the shocking fritter-my-wig of Evolution, a theory so radical that it makes American politicians' heads explode to this day?

I could go on but frankly, I've evolved and I think you should too. If you need more "evidence", you can console yourselves with the cheap thrill of realizing that the paintings on the wall behind our bewildered Snarkistas refer to both the Boots and the Boojum at once.

I can't remember how or why anymore though, this illustrator's heart of darkness has spread to his brain and he's unable to 'ink rationally. Cue sabre and jewel-rattling from the Gods …
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*The final evolution of the mystery genre will be the creation of a fictional detective so mind-numbingly stupid and thick that he does not even know that a crime has been committed. The name of that other sublime Polish peddler of heartful darkynesses, Witold Gombrowicz, comes to mind as a literary candidate for such a venture … and for readers who crave the genuinely obscure, yet another sublime Polish fresh-lit peddler, Stanislav Lem, actually did write such a mystery (The Investigation), or at least one in which no crime was committed, practically the same thing, logically speaking.
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NB. The death of Moebius is the end of a glorious era in comix. If you make a living dipping a pen-nib into India ink and then ensuring that the final results are both camera-ready and legible to the average viewer, you regard Moebius as the undisputed master of the art.

If time permits, I'd like to do some posts about his pen technique, but for now, what I would like to point out is that Moebius proved, over and over and over again, that the thorough mastery of the basic, fundamental skills of art trumps being fashionable every time.

No matter what today's critics may say, draftsmanship matters. Very few of them can even define the term, much less understand why it is the god of all the visual arts. Cultivating good draftsmanship starts with being honest to your eyeballs.

Look at crappy art, you will make crappy art. Look at Moebius, draw happily!

Oh, 'tis better to sleep with a sober Boojum than a drunken Christian

I'm very pleased to announce that Melville House is publishing my comixed version of Lewis Carroll's The Hunting of the Snark in the Fall of 2010. Alas, it will have to appear without the Commentaries which I've been working up so assiduously over the years but no matter, that will be remedied when the book goes into multiple printings after its appearance on Youtube in a blurry surveillance camera video of some American TV celebrity shoplifting it in a opiated stupor.

Melville House is run by the same discerning folks who put out the excellent blog, MobyLives, all of which is meant as an homage to Herman Melville, a man who knew a thing or two about long, fruitless quests for annihilating animals. Melville chose to clothe his Boojum in the blubbery lineaments of the fat, white whale, Moby Dick, (not the excellent kebab joint in Georgetown) and he also made certain that the whale's pursuers got a snootful of insane, nonsensical, contradictory ravings from their leader, Cap'n Ahab. In these critical matters, it's quite obvious that Melville was plundering Carroll's Snark in a classic example of what literary scholars call Anachronistic Plagiarism.

None the less, I'm in a forgiving mood today, as you might imagine and so we'll put aside these petty insinuations concerning the Second Greatest American Novel and move on to the far more pressing matter of Snarkian Ontology, exemplified here in the unassuming person of the Boots, seen above. Carroll makes little mention of this rather pedestrian character except for some perfunctory business with a spade in Fit the Fourth, and some commentators have even insinuated that the Boots did not really exist or that he might have been the actual murderer of the Baker, sharing as he does a "Boo" with the dreaded Boojum.

To all that I say phooey. However, drawing phooey is a bit trickier and it was only after considerable research by my crack team of crack-head researchers that we came up with a solution to all of the above: the Boots was Charles Darwin!



Carroll was probably present at the infamous 1860 debate on Darwinism between T.H. Huxley and Soapy Sam Wilberforce; we know that he owned and read Darwin's works; we even know that he and Darwin corresponded but we are uncertain as to the Great One's exact opinion on Natural Selection.

Well-oiled Carrollians suspect that he disapproved of this logical undoing of the basic tenets of all revealed religions on mainly philosophical grounds. Carroll's faith was unshakeable and more importantly, the Master of Nonsense certainly would have understood the difference between Faith and Logic as far as religions go, a simple mental operation which still seems beyond the limited cognitive abilities of many noisy commentators upon the subject today (so much for evolution, eh?). What might have perturbed Carroll could have been the spectacle of publicly quarreling over such private things, and hence, our choice of Darwin as the Boots.

Both Darwin and the Boots lurk in the shadows of Victorian England and the Snark alike. The former utterly and categorically demolished the entire logical basis of all organized religions almost apologetically, the latter utterly and categorically demolished the entire logical basis of Carroll's Snark almost apologetically. Both belief systems of religion and Snark are solely premised upon revelations, the verbal revelations of a god or a poet who presents us with a priori facts about the fictional Multiverses they have created. Carroll's colorless, practically blank persona of the Boots is a dead giveaway that there really is nothing going on here, that the Snark is just a sound and fury signifying nothing.

Nature and poetry alike shun vacuums, they make such an ontological mess of things and clever, up-to-date gods and poets alike eschew 'em. There's nothing worse than Nothing in the midst of your Something, it's a dead giveaway that you really are up to something and that's the very last thing you want your acolytes and readers to suspect. Fictional suspension of disbelief and all that, don't you know.

In short, there's something going on here, as usual. I'll leave it to the Carroll boffins to sort out the sticky details of all of the above revelations, for now, just take my word for it.

Fit the Fifth, Page 30, Panel 1 … mens sana in corpore snarquo

They sought it with thimbles, they sought it with care;
They pursued it with forks and hope;
They threatened its life with a railway-share;
They charmed it with smiles and soap.

Forcible posthumous collaboration … it's not a pretty phrase and it's not a pretty sight. Sure, you could turn away, you could pretend you didn't see anything, you could tell yourself that this is just another episode in the Hunting of the Snark, and you could even shrug your shoulders and admit that its author, Lewis Carroll, deserves it.

Or maybe you'll just brush it off. You could tell your wife that you saw something on the net today, something horrible happening to somebody and you couldn't quite figure it out because you were in a hurry, you had googled the word snark, hoping to get some quickie cocktail-party-talking-points on the latest craze that’s sweeping the NYC chatteratti, but you landed up here …

Somebody ought to do something, somebody else should help out because you can’t get involved — who knows what kind of crazy people are involved in this, look at 'em! They seem to be high on something, and that girl, she’s half-naked! Probably some kind of some druid cargo-cult of home-furnishings shoplifters and they're chanting something about forks and hope, smiles and soap, some kind of wiccan juju, I bet. And that man at the far left, the Polynesian one with the glandular problem, and the other one holding the railway share from Moggs & Spicer, how do these kind of people get past Immigration?

Yes, it’s a bad scene so you better move along, somebody might get hurt and it's none of your business anyway. Instead, breathe deeply and say it slowly … forcible posthumous collaboration … forcible posthumous collaboration … when it happens to Henry Holiday and Lewis Carroll it's just a shame but when it happens to you — it’s a tragedy!

NB. If this week’s posting seems a trifle addled, I apologize … a congested brain-box, accompanied by gales of sneezing fits and a feverish inability to think clearly has rendered me semi-snarked. In addition, the current brouhaha over Charles Darwin’s 200th birthday (known here-abouts as the Boots) and the concomitant efforts in certain quarters to apologize to the unwashed masses for inadvertently exposing them to Science, the Enlightenment or even Copernican Cosmology has left me feeling vaguely … overly-evolved.

Fit the Fourth, Page 27, Panel 2 …der Schnark des Nibelungen

The Boots and the Broker were sharpening a spade —
Each working the grindstone in turn:
But the Beaver went on making lace, and displayed
No interest in the concern:

The circus-like atmosphere of this Snark hunt has turned dangerous, dangerous to a degree that Lewis Carroll would certainly never countenance! As a pedagogue, Carroll was very aware of the dangers posed by throwing sharp objects at others; he frequently had to remind his young charges to cease throwing sticks and paper clips and buttered scones at each other lest they put out someone’s eye!

The fact that the above-pictured Snarquistadores are all nominally adults does not lessen the culpability of their criminal negligence. The Broker, played here by Erik Satie, is recklessly endangering the very person of the charming Beaver with his lethal spades, whilst the Boots, embodied by the respectably hirsute Charles Darwin, says nothing.

Perhaps the Boots is afraid of Satie? Perhaps he is afraid of remonstrating with this mysterious person who founded his own religion (The Metropolitan Church of Art of Jesus, Leader), who promulgated the use of boredom as a musical motif and who took up smoking to give his physician extra income?

We shall never know for certain, this drawing furnishes as few clues as Carroll’s stanza does. The Mona-Lisa smile of the Beaver, the inscrutable visage of the Satie-Broker, they all hint at some deeper mystery … perhaps the Boot’s odd position is a clue … yes … that may be it … how does he manage to remain so firmly affixed to his trapeze board whilst upside-down?

Is he transfixed there by boredom? Can it be that he is listening to the Broker’s 14-hour long solo masterpiece (which Gavin Bryars described as a sort of "Ring des Nibelungen des pauvres"), a work of music so maddeningly dull and repetitive that the ordinary laws of gravity have simply given up in disgust and gone somewhere else — somewhere less plagued by such boojum-like Vexations?