tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-176727671111610357.post1293087370012649607..comments2023-12-14T05:11:09.416-05:00Comments on The Latent Narratives of Oats Gulwick: Ties That BindOats Gulwickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08438790700771505167noreply@blogger.comBlogger1125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-176727671111610357.post-21481677786430939962017-02-10T12:30:35.804-05:002017-02-10T12:30:35.804-05:00When I was in high school I would escape home by v...When I was in high school I would escape home by visiting my siblings, who had both ended up at Indiana University. One summer, my brother was living in a small silver bullet trailer and studying ancient Chinese poetry. At the time, I wrote a poem about the steam rising from a cup of tea, the scribbled pen-mark characters on his Chinese ideogram practice grid, and how each night he swept up a small pile of dead insects from the floor beneath a bare bulb that hung from the ceiling - the crumpled, jagged limbs of the insects mirroring the skewed lines of the practice ideograms.<br /><br />Twenty plus years later, my brother died from cancer. While terminal, he let clear his anger about my having recently broadcast a personal family matter in a cartoon I had drawn as part of my B.A. He saw my doing so as a violation of privacy, a frustrating continuation of our family dynamic, in which I, the younger brother (by nine years for him; seven for my sister) would vie for attention by poking at open wounds. He made me promise that I would never use his illness as the subject for my trivializing comics.<br /><br />His censure became one of the preeminent issues of my adult life, and I have spent over a decade trying to work it through. For years, I would second guess every joke I found myself beginning to voice, wondering at whose expense the joke was made. (This is no way to gauge humor.) I also spent over a decade without drawing a single line.<br /><br />"Accretion" was an oblique strategy (Schmidt/Eno) card that was pulled as I was considering this comic, and that, indeed, did feel like the right address. The meditation here is that I will never find resolution to that problem; that we do not work through issues. Rather, we become an accumulation of our problems, and they coexist within us, and we are but a palimpsest of our own life's markings. Guy is holding an oblique strategy card.<br /><br />I am particularly happy with this comic: The chair pose works; the Pharm Life pills turned out perfectly; and the image of the tea, ideogram sheet, and the window is satisfying.Oats Gulwickhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/08438790700771505167noreply@blogger.com