When I sit down with my diary, the most important thing is to not spend much time staring at a blank page. Today I made a comic grid and started copying lines from William Blake’s “Proverbs of Hell,” from The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. (Seemed appropriate, with the solstice and all…)
I saw these images walking around Pasadena this morning, the day after the Day of the Dead. Later, back in my hotel room, I found out that Nick Cave has started The Red Hand Files, a site where he answers questions from fans. He’s written about boredom and Grinderman (two of my favorite things), and, in a truly lovely letter, his thoughts on grief after losing his son:
I feel the presence of my son, all around, but he may not be there. I hear him talk to me, parent me, guide me, though he may not be there. He visits Susie in her sleep regularly, speaks to her, comforts her, but he may not be there. Dread grief trails bright phantoms in its wake. These spirits are ideas, essentially. They are our stunned imaginations reawakening after the calamity. Like ideas, these spirits speak of possibility. Follow your ideas, because on the other side of the idea is change and growth and redemption. Create your spirits. Call to them. Will them alive. Speak to them. It is their impossible and ghostly hands that draw us back to the world from which we were jettisoned; better now and unimaginably changed.
Read the whole letter here.
The threat of nuclear war has been with us for over 70 years, and dreading the end of the world is an ancient human activity, but recent headlines have put it all all top-of-mind again, petrifying many of us. (The upcoming solar eclipse isn’t putting me at ease, either.)
We all deal in different ways. For me, it’s drawing comics full of skulls — little memento mori that keep bubbling up from some dark vat of goo in my brain. I’ll keep drawing them as long as they keep visiting me.
For this comic, I thought the skulls could illustrate a mini pep talk by Laurie Anderson I heard on the “Producers” episode of Meet The Composers:
The world may end. You’re right. But that’s not a reason to be scared. None of us know what will happen. Don’t spend time worrying about it. Make the most beautiful thing you can. Try to do that every day. That’s it. You know? What are you working for, posterity? We don’t know if there is any posterity.
Emphasis mine. More skulls on my Instagram.
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