For every new Secret Knots comic I make a Patreon post with sources, references, and bits of world building. This is the dossier for the comic The Reclusive Artist
Inspiration.
The main prompt for this story was a short sentence I read in social media, a straightforward, non-viral tweet that kept buzzing in my mind. I want to think it was by cartoonist Gabrielle Bell, (did she even use Twitter?) but I’m not sure. It was something like: I’d like to be very famous, so I could become a reclusive artist.
This comes from a few years back, maybe even before the concept of privacy gained the urgency (and sense of privilege) that may have today. It seemed funny then, superficially a tongue-in-cheek contradiction (not unlike Picasso’s “I’d like to be very rich, to live in peace like the poor”). But under further personal scrutiny, probably while doing the dishes and hanging the clothes -which are the kind of moments that social media memetic thinking attacks- it sounded more like a candid thought (an actual goal!), and an attack on the commodification of anonymity. It stuck with me, and became the motif of the vanishing singer Roman.
The second important prompt was the following text:
This dazzling Black Light heralds the annihilation of the ego in the Divine Presence. It announces the Nothing that exists beyond all being(…) The Black Light marks the region of the Absolute, the Deus absconditus, the unknown and unknowable God.
You may find that several words in this string made it to the actual text of the comic. I was trying to replicate the sort of mental frame that reading this paragraph put me in, when I found it by chance. It was attributed online to philosopher Henry Corbin, but digging further I found that it apparently comes from a text about Corbin, written by one Tom Cheetham. I liked the calm place of dissolution that these words suggested, so I linked them to the story about an artist quest for disappearance. They would be the summary of the revelation that transforms the character.
I’ve done many times stories about disappearing things and people. I’ve always thought that if I concluded these tales by saying that the things in them are no more, they could lend themselves easily to the Borgesian game of made up references. (“You can’t look for them on Google, because organically, or magically, all trace of their existence is gone”). To avoid the repetition, I thought about a different direction this time: Roman, the made-up singer, would become omnipresent instead of absent. And in the process, he would rant about the modern lack of privacy, and the anxiety caused by putting one’s life in the public space for the sole benefit of the big tech machinery. His speech was the part that kept changing the more through the script, getting angrier and louder. I realized he wasn’t speaking for me, or at least, the conscious me, anymore. He began to overload the point of the story. I changed the ending then, in the direction of a horror story, because the premise 80s singer resurrected by contemporary show breaks all your apps was detached from the sort of strange savior that he was in a first version. By the end, it’s implied that an important change is operated on the world. There are no more songs, only his, and the mood is a sort of quietness, all under the gaze of a big screen where he stares at us like an eye in the sky. Even the signs in that screen, whether it’s subtitles or an advertisement for something, have changed to the unknown language of Roman’s revelation. It’s not said that this is salvation, nor doom, only something radically different.
References and sketches
*****
This comic became hard to “solve” at some point. It demanded lots of changes and rethinking, but I’m glad that the reception it has had on Discord, and here, has been really positive. I thank you all, once more, for your support and comments, which is the main drive for me to move forward with stories like this one, even when they get demanding and take longer than expected.
I hope you enjoyed these extras!
See you soon with the rest of the portraits, and new stories.
Juan.
