I’m delighted and slightly panicked to announce that the book I’m drawing, Anthony Bourdain’s Get Jiro!, co-written with Joel Rose, is now available for pre-order at Amazon.com. Delighted, because this has been a giant project for me, and it seems unreal that it will become something other than a huge heap of pages on the corner of my desk.  Delighted also to see my cover with bold title text and the colors by the very accomplished Dave Stewart.

Panicked, since I can feel my deadline’s breath on the back of my neck, and there’s a pointy thicket of holiday between now and the last page.

I believe, (and I don’t use that word very often, but I’m trying it on now to see how it fits,) I believe that what I experience as my “self” is merely the superficial expression of a vast body of sensation and processing.

In fact, “body” is a good word for all that comprises me that’s otherwise invisible to me. This isn’t a new idea, of course, and it’s been validated repeatedly in recent years with studies illuminating the relevance of subconscious processes that holistically compute information and present its conclusions to the conscious mind as a physical feeling.  The “gut feeling” is truly one of the only ways a vast, alien, hidden brain can communicate with the superficial mind so that action can be taken in our environment.

But how does this subconscious self obtain its data? We certainly have a very accessible library of facts and relationships that we draw upon when we make conscious decisions.  We’d have to assume the hidden self knows English to access that library, or that there’s a layer of translation between that library and our visible, knowable selves, which is a pretty shocking idea itself. But that hidden self also has access to levels of subtle information that the exposed mind doesn’t- The quickness of someone’s stride, a fluctuation in their voice. The smell on their breath, or on the breeze. A change in temperature in the air.  Indeed, levels of unimagined resolution that would blind and overload the exposed mind if we were aware of it all.

Again, hardly a new idea.  But consider that all those sensations, themselves, are affected by everything in their own environments. Taking people as an easy example, the quickness in someone’s stride is a consequence of variables in that person’s recent history. Perhaps they’re late for an appointment. Perhaps they’re remembering a movie they saw in which someone was being chased. Likewise with the fluctuation in their voice, conveying a history unknowable to us, or an inner, private sensorium just brushing the surface of the knowable world. The smell of their breath, affected by the choices made by the guy who made their sandwich at the deli, who in turn, was affected by an article he read about umami, or the fact that he simply ran out of the good mustard.

Our hidden minds are the recipients of this fractal chain of interactions, and I can’t believe that it can sort out what’s an intentional message and what isn’t. If our hidden minds are holistic processing engines, computing in parallel a vast sea of information and passing it up to our visible minds, then our exposed minds, our decisions, and our experience is literally and fundamentally connected to the behavior of every person, and every event on Earth, and beyond.

I think this is pretty obvious, but the implications are profound. Individual minds must function like individual neurons in a globe-girdling meta-mind, connected to many other neurons, but experiencing, to differing degrees, signals passed to it by every other neuron in the network. I can’t imagine what the face of this intelligence looks like at a scale evolved to comprehend it, but it must manifest at a certain scale. It simply MUST.

Okay, I guess that’s not a new idea either, but it’s pretty shocking every time it occurs to me, not least for its obviousness. Yet, what utility can the acceptance of this reality afford, and what can this mean for the life of the neuron?

More thoughts later.

Even the mellowest yellowtarian will find hirself gripped by the hemp mittens of righteousness, and thrown upon hir enemy like a slice of marinated zucchini onto the biodieselly-combustive hibachi of duty.

Jiro finds the best food in town in its filthiest restaurant. Get Jiro! will be out Summer 2012, published by Vertigo.  Written by Anthony Bourdain and Joel Rose

I owe you one, my friend.

-Langdon

I just read about this Japanese fisherman who, at the discovery that the tsunami was bearing down on his small island, decided to flee the island in an effort to save his boat.  He knew that the tsunami would destroy every boat on the island, and that his community’s only chance of escaping isolation when he waters receded was to save his boat while the rest of the village fled to the hills. That meant steering his ship directly through the wave itself.

What touched me the most about the story is not his awesome selflessness and courage, but the fact that he bid farewell to the other boats in his little fleet as he departed, and apologized to them that he couldn’t save them all.  I’m struck by what a Japanese quality this is. My favorite places in Japan are the Shinto shrines, usually built to honor natural features- A great tree, or a rock, or a beautiful view is often adorned with a Shinto honorary braid, or a little shrine built nearby.  Ostensibly, these artifacts are intended to honor the Kami, or spirit or essence, that dwells within these natural forms.  Another way of seeing the practice however, is that by honoring these forms, we’re personifying them.

I think we all feel a little self-conscious when we’re caught naming our cars, or talking to our computers when they’re acting flakey.  It’s easy to dismiss the habit as juvenile, or simply a cute idiosyncracy.  But I think that projected personification is what we all do, every moment of our lives, and is a key element in cognition itself.

There’s a basic function of the human mind that imagines what another mind is thinking.  In children less than three years old, however it doesn’t seem to function very well. Beyond that, though, a child can simulate another person mentally, and make predictions about their thoughts and behavior. I think it can be argued that at a certain age we are suddenly able to ‘imbue’ another person with ‘personhood.’ In fact, there’s a specific region of the brain that activates during this imbuing, which can produce effects similar to reports of alien contact when artificially stimulated with magnetism.  So what we do every time we meet a person, imagine what our spouse is really saying, negotiate with our pets, or pat our car on the dashboard for once again not getting us killed, is projecting personhood upon it.

I’d therefore argue that what this Japanese fisherman did with his boats is not simply touching, but the most obvious thing he could have done.  If our minds are truly islands of consciousness encapsulated within opaque skulls with only a few electrical signals to keep it company, then projecting personhood is a very personal, fundamentally subjective process.  I think there’s no difference between projecting personhood upon another human and projecting it on a cat, or a tree, or a boat.

I think all matter is alive and conscious.  I think a rock occupies a rung on the same seamless spectrum of consciousness that we as humans enjoy the tip of.  It makes perfect sense to me that under certain conditions, it would serve us to extend our umbrella of personhood to a rock, or a boat, making them in a real sense, people.  It’s part of how we make sense of the world, and I think a key to understanding the mystical experience of subjective universal consciousness.

If I’m going to imbue personhood to my family, friends, pets, or editor, there’s no reason to stop there, other than mere convention.  Isn’t that right, Mr. Toenail Clipper?

Encircled by the monolithic battlements of luxury condominiums, LA’s Inside The Ring is the private playground of the palate for the vapid, self-absorbed, Superich.

From Get Jiro! due out Spring 2012.

So I was drawing a closeup of a dangling hand the other day.  I was really pleased with it.  It didn’t come out fully-formed and appropriate, of course; I had to wrestle with it for fifteen minutes, but once it came out  it looked really natural, in a way that I feel most of my hands don’t quite.  I had that rare, eerie feeling of… satisfaction.

However, observing that the hand was so prominently placed in the panel, I felt it should be contributing to the action of the hand’s character of telling a driver to turn a van full of culinary henchmen into a sketchy part of town, and not just hanging there, looking well-drawn.  Great. Decision made. I’ll redraw it with a raised finger.  The problem was that that I didn’t want to erase it.

This happens so much in my art… I fall into the tidepool of a detail on a page, swim among these spinning diatoms of details, and the polyps of intuitive proportions, and surface only to realize that what I’ve drawn too big, too close to the vending machine, has way too many glowing buttons for 3th century Greece, or is directly behind the main character whom I totally forgot to draw.  Considering erasing it must be like what Abraham felt while figuring out the itinerary for taking his son on a really gloomy field trip.

But today it hit me- Once I’ve drawn the picture, it can never be undrawn…  Sure, it can be erased, but the act, once complete, is irreversible. No amount of erasing will erase that it had been drawn.  Indeed, its creation is burned into my body along with ten thousand hours of other draw-ings.

The act of drawing is a act of memory.  We imagine a subject we want to draw, so we send the instructions to our hand.  Our hand puts something down, and it’s probably a skewed, mocking vapor of what we intended.  But this isn’t our hand’s problem, nor its connection with our mind; It’s because our mind doesn’t really yet understand what it’s asking the hand to draw.  But the eyes and freshly seared muscle memory have recorded the image just drawn and convects it back into the brain, to  contribute to the concrescence of  the subject with another pass of refinement.  The paper is essentially external memory augmenting the brain in an effort to truly apperceive the subject of the drawing.

I think that’s the entire exercise of art.  Just like a Socratic lecturer isn’t trying to teach his subjects, rather he needs an audience before whom to explain his ideas to himself, so is the drawing merely a method for creating an object as saturatingly and penetratingly as possible.  This object exists in the memory of the mind and body; The drawing is merely its scaffolding, merely its consequence.

So, I feel better about erasing that hand.

]]> http://www.lllama.com/the-permanence-erasure-foretells/feed/ 0 http://www.lllama.com/communication/ http://www.lllama.com/communication/#comments Sun, 16 Jan 2011 08:00:28 +0000 Langdon http://www.lllama.com/?p=435 more »]]>

The integration of the halves must be a communication. No act can really be accomplished alone; I am here, now, only because of my interactions with the actions of other people.  Likewise, my art only exists through the communication between my brain hemispheres, is the product of a cooperation of my halves.

I know I somehow exist as a sum of two seperate, but equal halves.  I don’t know which startles me more, though- That idea, or that those two halvescan still communicate and constitute such a groovy thing as a person, and yet be so alien to one another.  If i am, (as I am) hovering above, around, between those two functioning participants of a conversation, am I not therefore the conversation being had?

By the Knights of Columbus, that was a crazy stretch.  The holidays are so dense and frantic that I feel like a little squirrel dashing around trying to remember where I stashed my acorns, or a bear stuffing as many grubs and berries in my furry cheeks so I can sleep until spring, except for a shrub break every couple of weeks or so.  Now that I put it that way, it sounds perfectly normal, and kind of inviting. Gone in this civilization are the myths born of shortening nights filling our hearts with the dread of a long winter; Rather, here are the days of baking cookies and packing as many calories into bodies and glucose into our bloodstreams as humanly possible.  Do we slow down in winter because it’s our biological imperative to survive winter, or because we’re in a constant state of sugar-crash?

In that vein, I made fudge using sweetened condensed milk instead of evaporated milk.  Megan told me after (after I ate a whole batch by myself, that is) that condensed milk adds almost 200 calories per two tablespoons. No wonder I feel like I’m ready to sleep until spring.  It wasn’t even that good- There was so much sugar that it couldn’t all melt into a smooth, creamy block of goodness.  It was more like eating a brick made out sand glued together with chocolate syrup.  Not that it was all that bad, either- A sand-brick glued together with chocolate syrup still contains chocolate syrup.

Anyway, be happy my friends, light some candles, play with your toys, and carry on until spring.