These are erotic bodies, languid frustrated bodies
September 27, 2024 2:17 AM Subscribe
We expect language to function in a very linear sense. One word comes after the other. One sentence after the other. But the moment – let's say even in language, right? – when you start using parentheses, you start hyphenating, you are interrupting the flow. Even just referring back to an earlier moment in the text, you can go back to the text. All of these things make you realize like it's not linear. You realize that linear is just how we are taught to experience things. It's not really how we experience things. from Sequential Bodies by Helen Chazan [The Comics Journal]
An essay drawing on Cutting Season by Bhanu Pratap and Perception Through a Gap by Katie Lane
An essay drawing on Cutting Season by Bhanu Pratap and Perception Through a Gap by Katie Lane
I'm not generally much into comic books or graphic novels, but these look pretty good. That first one in particular looks like it captures a bit of the existential experience.
And yeah, linear time is an inane projection of the rational mind. It's certainly not how we experience things. There are enough examples of people having intuitions or visions or dreams or whatever where an event that couldn't be rationally anticipated is clearly prefigured in experience that the rational empiricists' rebuttals always come back to some version of the Dude's "Yeah, well that's just like, your opinion, man."
Anyway, it's nice to see comics that grapple with complex interiority and surrealism in a serious way (note that I'm sure there's others out there that do this, like I said this really isn't my artistic medium of choice, typically). There's a shop in town that will probably have these. I'll have to swing by and take a look at them.
posted by Smedly, Butlerian jihadi at 4:19 AM on September 27
And yeah, linear time is an inane projection of the rational mind. It's certainly not how we experience things. There are enough examples of people having intuitions or visions or dreams or whatever where an event that couldn't be rationally anticipated is clearly prefigured in experience that the rational empiricists' rebuttals always come back to some version of the Dude's "Yeah, well that's just like, your opinion, man."
Anyway, it's nice to see comics that grapple with complex interiority and surrealism in a serious way (note that I'm sure there's others out there that do this, like I said this really isn't my artistic medium of choice, typically). There's a shop in town that will probably have these. I'll have to swing by and take a look at them.
posted by Smedly, Butlerian jihadi at 4:19 AM on September 27
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read this as: literally figurative
posted by HearHere at 2:32 AM on September 27 [1 favorite]