Infinity Smashed archive

This is the winner of the comics/art poll this month! Please enjoy this goofiness... and for added bonus, I'll add the sketch as well!

This was a silly 2016 cooldown sketch from back when I did livestreams. (I have been saying for years that I'd like to start doing them again, but sorry y'all, our art program just doesn't work on Linux. We haven't been able to do digital art on this comp reliably since we got it in Thanksgiving.)

Some smartphone door-to-door salesmen were going around my neighborhood a few days ago, but they made the terrible mistake of getting me at the door, and I easily banished them with the words, "I don't have a smartphone."

Later that day, as I was hauling my laundry for washing, I encountered the salesman again, along with their colleague, both of whom looked to be young, in their early twenties. The one who hadn't encountered me complimented my "necklace," which I said, "Oh, it's a compass!"

"What, really? Can I see?"

"Yup!"

I opened the compass, dazzling both young sellers. They very well may have never seen a compass before in real life.

"Can you really use that?"

"Yup! I use it with maps so I don't get lost!"

"Like, on paper? YOU CAN READ A PAPER MAP???"

At which point the one who'd encountered me said, "They don't have a smartphone either!"

"REALLY?!"

With a flourish, I whipped out my dumbphone and flipped it open. The two salespeople watched as though I had done a magic trick, utterly enchanted, staring at me like I was some kind of Amish wizard. I should've bowed.

So now we and the salespeople are on good terms. ...they probably won't try to sell to us again.

Mori: Rawlin pencil doodle behind the cut!

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Mori: we are still plugging away at Thunder Shaman: Making History With Mapuche Spirits in Chile and Patagonia by Ana Mariella Bacigalupo. It’s super interesting and opening our mind in all sorts of cool new ways, but it’s really dense and about a people we had never known about prior, who have a vastly different cultural context, so we have to take constant breaks to just think about it. (Also this book really could’ve used a glossary; we’ve had to handwrite our own in the blank pages and have filled two already.)

The chapter we are on now talks about Mapuche ideas of text and books as ritual objects, and written law and documentation as sorcery to be countered and appropriated. And at first I went “what?” But then I thought about how the legal disability system controls the romantic relationships, job potential, and finances of those it identifies, how it fucks with the heads of those under it, and I went, “hey, you know... where’s the lie?” There’s a lot of talk about subverting the colonial legal system as acts of countersorcery, how the Mapuche make their own counterhistories not recognized by the state, and it got me thinking about how we’ve used story ourself.

Even as it was happening to us as kids, large swathes (the most IMPORTANT swathes) of our life was deemed “not real.” The concept of reality, objective fact, was used as a tool to control and harm us: crazy child can’t be trusted! And if it ever became our word against our attacker’s, we insta-lost because of who we were, no matter the circumstance. Sorcery indeed!

We couldn’t say directly what happened or was happening to us, because then we’d get caught and it’d get erased. But we could make our own twist on being unbelievable narrators: we could write fiction! And we could imbue it with all the shadow narrative of our truth that we could, interspersed with loads of nonsense, distraction, and noise, so nobody would suspect. We were, to the best of our ability, keeping our own history safe for our future selves. Though lots of sifting and salt is required, we still rely on those shadow histories today for records work! We have found ways not only to hang onto our “fake” history, but to spread it around so other people can use it and hang onto it too! So many of our comics and zines are just us trying to keep our life from getting derealized out from under us again!

And much like how the Mapuche aren’t above trying to use the legal system and its documents to their own purpose, we too use “real” records: dated photos, medical records, school calendars and report cards, etc.

We never considered this a battle of sorceries, but it’s a fascinating new lens with which to look at this stuff. Because if our digging around in archives has taught us anything, it’s that derealization, that erasure and erosion of history and reality, is constant. What gets buried, or retracted, or forever prefaced with “alleged” “identified as” or “perceived as,” what gets endlessly converted into symbolic metaphor instead of flat statement... it’s here all the time, and it affects us. I do believe that an objective reality exists, though I dunno that any one human can perceive it, but what becomes “history” and what becomes irrelevant footnotes is about way more than that objective truth. It’s so much harder than that (or the reverse of believing whatever damn fool thing your brain tells you no matter what).

We’ll probably post more about this book; I think Rogan was like, “I’ll do one big post when I’m done,” but there are so many angles and things to pursue in this book, that ain’t gonna happen. I didn’t even TOUCH the Mapuche concept of multitemporality and how it’s affected our ideas on memory work yet!