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[three bells]
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DIRECTOR: Well, let's have a -- I'm ready to go when he sits down.
PRODUCER: Speeding. Nine-one. [clapper]
[WOODRING clears throat]
Uh, I'm getting some kind of a buzz.
-A buzz? -Yeah, well --
WOODRING: Oh, wait a minute, I hear it too.
-Is it an airplane? -It's an airplane.
-Or something.-Yeah, it's an airplane.
[three bells]
There it is.
I'll take this opportunity to sharpen some pencils.
Mind your ears. [electric pencil sharpener noise]
So I -- I honestly can't remember, I'm not trying to belabor a point, but just if --
In case we use any of the Brahman stuff: What is Brahman?
Brahman is... the ultimate reality.
The sum total of everything. It's the cause of everything.
One... it has many names in Sanskrit. One of them is Sat-cit-ānanda.
Which means existence, knowledge, bliss.
With the implication that they're the abs--
That... they are the absolute forms of existence, knowledge, and bliss.
Brahman doesn't exist, it is existence.
It doesn't think or know, it is thought and knowledge.
There's nothing that exists outside it.
And one of the ways they--
One of the designations or categorizations they make is that...
They say that when it's inactive, they call it Brahman,
and when it's active, it's manifested as...
Prakriti, or... um...
Actually, more accurately as the counterpart to Brahman, is Shakti,
the female principle of creation... the universe, the physical universe.
It's like...
One of the analogies they use is they say...
it's like a spider brings the web out of itself, and then it lives on the web.
They say that Brahman brings the universe out of itself,
and then it inhabits the universe as consciousness.
My name is Jim, and I am a cartoonist.
I've been told that I would be within my rights to call myself an artist instead of a cartoonist,
since much of what I draw is not particularly cartoony
in the generally accepted sense of that word.
But I don't see that as a promotion. I'd much rather be a cartoonist.
The cartooning tradition is magnificent,
and I am honored to be considered a practitioner.
What is cartooning?
I'm not... I've pondered that question myself: What is cartooning? How does it differ from...
...any other kind of, uh...
...fanciful or imaginative drawing? I'm not sure what the distinction is.
The word's definition, cartoon, is pretty straightforward.
This is the Webster's definition. There's no synonym for it.
Imaginative drawing, in an idiosyncratic style,
with didactic intent,
and a non-negotiable, built-in element of humor.
If the humor isn't there, it's not a cartoon.
By the way, those figures turned out to be true. [laughter]
It's hard work... learning to be a cartoonist.
Then it's hard work drawing the cartoons,
and then it's hard work to make a living at them,
and then you have to keep growing and keep developing,
so you can keep saying and doing new things.
The whole point of doing cartoons is to distort reality
for editorial or entertainment purposes, so that...
you can... impose your reality on the readers,
and make them see and think the things that you want them to see and think.
I should probably start this self-promotional puff piece
with some drawings from my childhood, but I destroyed all of them years ago,
so I don't have any.
Or at least I didn't until recently, when my brother sent me a package of them
he found in the ancestral home after my father's death.
This was in that package.
It is the very oldest picture I have that I drew.
It's a drawing of a horrid, jabbering little man made of electricity,
who used to come into my bedroom and terrorize me when I was a little boy.
He told me his name over and over:
Jiggety Jatters. The worst name.
Seeing it again rekindled vivid memories of the disorienting hell
my earliest years were.
Simply put, I had a lot of perceptual problems,
which I still have to some extent. When I was a little kid,
I had a hard time telling the difference between dream and reality.
I had a hard time telling the difference between animated cartoons
and films and reality. They all looked the same to me.
I have a condition called prosopagnosia,
which makes it so that I can't recognize faces readily,
which caused me all kinds of trouble when I was courting my wife.
I knew who she was, but I couldn't tell what she looked like.
I also, when I was a little kid, experienced real paranoia, which is no joke.
And I had a lot of other perceptual problems.
It was all kind of fun and stimulating and interesting to me,
because I was kind of strangely tough-minded about it all.
I didn't feel victimized by it, I didn't feel scared of it.
I learned not only to accept being frightened, but to enjoy it,
and to enjoy almost any unexpected and bizarre situation.
For over a year,
I went to bed certain that my parents were going to come in and kill me.
It was sheer paranoia, and I liked it.
I would go to bed at night, trying to stay awake as long as I could,
and listening to them through the door, because I thought they were out there
waiting to come in and kill me in my sleep.
And one day I mentioned this to my friend next door, and he mentioned it to his mother,
and she told my mother, and my mother went crazy.
Crazy how?
Crazy with, uh...
...anguish over me, volume two hundred, number...
...three thousand. It was just one more...
...straw on the burden that she had to carry of being disappointed in me.
This is really not such a great thing to be talking about.
There was something not quite right with my mind.
Almost every time I closed my eyes, I saw... something.
Sometimes it was a scary face that would not go away.
Frequently it was a huge staring eye.
Sometimes it was headless animals.
Once it was a screaming golden lion being devoured by maggots.
Sometimes these apparitions were benign,
like the brightly colored, radially symmetrical shapes
that hovered in the air over my bed.
When I first heard about angels, I thought that
these were what was being referred to.
This is an image...
...it's a single-page compendium of memorable events,
circumstances, props, and scenics from my childhood.
When I was about five,
I was lying in my bed,
and a man came into the room with a big wooden crate on a handcart,
and he stood it up, and the crate opened up, and my mother was standing in there.
And she was naked, and she was covered with little red spots like chickenpox,
and her hair was in her eyes so I couldn't see it,
and she had this rictus grin on her face.
And it scared me so much I put my head under the covers,
and when I came out, it was gone.
So, I went out to the kitchen and I asked her where the crate was,
because I wanted it to play with. And she said, "What crate?"
And I said, "The crate you came into the house in this morning. And where did the red spots go?"
And we had another in a continuing series of painful conversations,
where basically she just wanted me to tell her what the hell was wrong with me.
-Did you often hear the refrain, "What's wrong with you?" -Oh, Jesus.
I heard that, my mother screamed that at me,
probably ten thousand times during the course of my life.
She also screamed,
"I am sick, sick, sick to death of you!" And that turned out to be prophetic,
because she died at the age of forty-seven, of cancer,
after a long, long process that involved...
many surgeries, and... I mean, I can understand why my parents
didn't want to put up with any nonsense from me.
They really had a full plate.
I think they had an expectation, because their lives were going really well, you know, it was...
after World War Two. My dad had a good job in the aerospace/computer business... industry.
And my mom was a housewife.
They had a nice tract house in the hills of Burbank, and...
everything was kind of going along.
They went out and they heard Bobby Darin at nightclubs,
and went dancing, and they had a great old time,
and then I came along and kind of put the kibosh on all that,
because I was a weird kid, and that isn't what they wanted.
They wanted Beaver Cleaver.
In fact, my mother even compared me unfavorably to Beaver Cleaver,
and asked me why I couldn't be more like him.
I was just a weirdo, and they just didn't like it.
I was interested in monsters. I was interested in the Three Stooges, and...
...cartoons and things like that,
and I didn't know how to act, and I didn't know when to shut up.
And I don't think I did shut up very much. I was a real talker.
But... you know, it just became an established fact. Oh yeah, you know --
So-and-so is smart, so-and-so is talented,
so-and-so is ath... athletic...
Jimmy, he's just... I don't know what he is, he's a nut.
There's something wrong with that kid. There's something wrong with that kid.
Oh, Jimmy.
Oh God, Jimmy, no!
Not... oh, Jimmy.
I'm mostly sorry that my parents had such a rotten time of it.
That's my major concern. I got through everything okay, they didn't.
They deserved better than what they got out of life.
But in a way, that wasn't anybody's fault.
I was a little kid in the fifties,
and I've only recently realized how terrified my parents were.
You know, they lived under the shadow of nuclear annihilation.
They thought that bomb was going to fall any afternoon.
They taught their children that that bomb was going to fall any minute.
They wished they had a fallout shelter.
They were afraid that Russian soldiers were going to parachute out of the sky and take over Los Angeles.
They had just managed to attain a really glorious way of living,
and then along came all these monsters that wanted to destroy it.
Here came Little Richard.
That, they didn't need.
Here came civil rights marches, and beatniks, and communists.
They were scared to death of communism, rock and roll, homosexuality.
I think their chiefest fear was that I was gay, and they had no reason to think that.
I never manifested anything like that, but if they...
...saw me looking at a magazine and there was a men's underwear ad on it,
they would say "Why are you looking at that?"
I'd go, "What?" "You know what I'm talking about." "No, whu-- whu--?"
I didn't know what they were talking about. I was just a little kid, you know. I had no idea.
I remember in those days, everybody referred to the Beatles as "The Boys."
"Oh, what will The Boys do next?"
"The Boys really seemed to enjoy their trip to America."
And one time when I referred to the Beatles as The Boys,
my mother thought that I was expressing an appreciation for boys in general,
and she just unloaded on me for saying it, and I had no idea why at the time.
They were afraid of everything that made the 1950s the pivotal time that it was.
And I guess they were hoping that I would be some kind of comfort and joy to them,
but instead I... it's like I had absorbed everything bad
that was happening and was reflecting it back at them,
so they gave me a lot of grief. My dad brought home
this 8-millimeter silent cartoon called Boy Meets Dog.
It was in black and white, the version I had. And in this cartoon,
the mean father, who won't let the little boy keep a dog,
gets badly punished by this machinery which has been built to punish mean fathers.
And I liked that so much that he took the film away and destroyed it,
because he didn't want me to get any subversive ideas like that.
So that's how tightly wound up my folks were, and how concerned they were about me.
They wouldn't let me watch the Three Stooges, or read Mad magazine,
or Famous Monsters of Filmland, or anything like that. And...
...it's a painful reminder to me of how much grief I caused my folks.
That's the only thing that I regret about the whole miserable situation,
is that... it was rough on my parents.
Now, obviously all of these things that happened to me when I was a kid,
(the apparitions, the hallucinations, the voices) there's not... it's not unique to me.
Lots and lots and lots of young people have got that,
lots and lots of young people have it worse than I had it,
and lots of people have worse when they grow up.
But... the people who have it and outgrow it, tend to want to put it behind them,
because it doesn't do them any good in their life.
I decided early on that these sizzling, decal-like images
were what I wanted. I wanted things that had that charge.
I wanted things that horrified me and
knocked me off my feet and filled up my mind,
and seemed to indicate something... immense waiting in the wings.
That was it for me, that is precisely what I wanted.
There's a book... I just happen to have it right here...
The Golden Book of Science, that my folks gave me when I was about eight.
And this book... you can see how dog-eared and beat up it is.
This book was my Bible, for years and years and years.
I would look through this book, and look at these pictures, and hear music,
at some of the vistas contained in here.
Ulti-- I guess what it really did is it opened my eyes to the power of art,
because this guy obviously put a lot of work and a lot of soul into his pictures.
He tried to make them as good as he could, and he tried to make them loving.
I responded to that in a kind of over-the-top way.
I thought it was a mystical document.
There's a picture of a sliced watermelon in here, and...
when I used to look at it, I would hear a flute playing.
And I thought: "Oh yeah, there's something idyllic and melancholy and sweet about this particular thing."
Sometimes those things just had a kind of a glowing resonance
that made me feel,oh, I've found a clue,
this is a sign on the trail pointing in the direction that I want to go to.
Something synced up with my idea of what it should be, I would say: "There it is!"
And I would become a student of that thing, or that artist, or that sensation.
And the more I looked at those things and got into them,
the more I found the answers that I was looking for.
And then there was this guy, Boris Artzybasheff.
I remember seeing this in Life magazine when I was a little boy.
His style and his approach went right into my DNA. He was a superb technician,
and probably what is equally obvious is that I completely ripped off his
rendering style for my own work.
You can see that he doesn't adhere to the laws of light and shadow
and reflected light and variegated light that a normal illustrator would use,
and it really makes it his own. To me, he was a profound, spiritual prophet.
I found messages in his work that I used to ponder over.
I used to analyze his work as if I was looking at... some...
ancient cultural artifact related directly to my field of interest.
But, again, I think I projected a lot onto it.
I don't think he was intentionally creating metaphysical roadmaps of the mind,
...which is how I took it.
Does it have to be intentional?
No, I don't think it has to be intentional, but if you're looking for... clues,
and evidence, and a sense that other people actually know something,
you want it to be intentional.
You don't want it to, uh...
You don't want people to be sort of accidentally pushing your buttons
without knowing that they're doing it. You want them --
You want to be able to go to them
and feel... that they have been down a road that you want to go down.
Or at least that's how I feel about it.
That's a scary image.
So is that.
But this picture is a kind of a talisman for me, because
I remember looking at it, and my mother saying:
"Don't look at that thing so much, you don't... you know, it's not... it's not okay."
"Communism is not a joke."
And I..."But this drawing's so funny!
It's really scary, and it's really funny."
And that scary/funny thing is the dichotomy for me. It's what I really like.
I have one painting here that I'm proud of, that
nobody has seen much of, and that is...
this guy here, the so-called Dork from the Black Lagoon.
That was in a show, and it was priced at eight hundred dollars, and nobody wanted it.
There's... there's a propensity in your artwork to make the frightening a bit goofy.
Yeah, I guess so. I can see that.
Well, why not.
There's enough genuine, grueling... [laughing]
...unrelievedly grim, frightening things out there.
I don't see the need to add any more to it.
I've always had this interest in...
...peering into things, taking things apart,
looking into things, trying to figure out what makes things tick.
And the sense I've had that the world is a deep well of mystery,
and that the point of life is to explore it and discover it,
and not simply stay on the surface, is the thing that runs through all my work.
It's the thing that runs through my life. My work is really an accurate reflection of my major life's interest,
which is to explore beneath the surface of things.
That's driven practically everything I've done all my life.
When I was about four, we had this black and white television,
and I saw Bimbo's Initiation, the Fleischer Brother cartoon.
And it changed my life.
I felt that it was a documentary about a side of life that interested me.
And I wanted to go to that world.
I felt like it was a travel poster, or a...a...
a commercial for this world that I wanted to be in.
I mean, I was just a little kid, and I had terrible perceptual problems.
I couldn't really tell what I was looking at a lot of the time.
I couldn't tell what people meant when they spoke a lot of the time.
I had a hard time recognizing faces.
I had dreams that sometimes continued when I was awake.
I had hallucinations that I thought were real, and that I thought other people had.
So I was kind of adrift in the sea of messed-up perceptions.
And when I saw something that looked sane and straight and normal,
and seemed to point to an island of refuge, like Bimbo's Initiation did,
I thought: "This is it. This is my way out of this place."
"I don't have to live in this world of red-faced, screaming adults,
and children I can't relate to, and toys that don't interest me,
and... subjects that don't interest me. I can simply go and live with Bimbo,
in Bimbo's Initiation-land." And that's what I wanted.
This drawing is called...
Play Date.
I never... I never set out to be an artist, is the thing.
When I was a little kid,
people would ask me what I wanted to do, and I would never say "Oh, I want to be an artist",
because I had no idea what that even meant. And I was so bad at drawing,
my ninth-grade teacher sent me home with a note for my parents,
gently suggesting to them that they should discourage me
from trying to draw and paint, because I just didn't have it in me.
And I can see why he felt that, because at the time, I... I couldn't.
I mean, there were a few artists in my junior high school and high school,
and I was far and away the worst.
My parents didn't, you know, ever talk about sending me to art school or anything.
They just thought I was going to end up in the gutter. My father wanted me to be a blacksmith.
He thought that... that was probably the right career for me, to be...
pounding on hot metal in the back of some desperate, filthy shed somewhere.
He thought that was my true milieu.
Even after I was married and had a kid
and was working in the animation industry, and making good money, he
suggested that I learn how to be a blacksmith,
so that I could resort to that when this fluke...
of making a living as an artist fell through.
I didn't really know what an artist was until I was in high school,
and I went to a massive retrospective of Dada and Surrealism at the L.A. County Art Museum.
This is the catalog for it, this big Dada and Surrealism retrospective.
And I had no idea what Surrealism was.
I'd never heard of Salvador Dalí, or Max Ernst, or any of those guys.
All I knew was that I had these things that I was trying to express,
and then I found myself in a room filled with the greatest hits of Surrealism.
Right at the beginning there's a painting by...uh...
Giorgio di Chirico called The Song of Love. Very famous painting.
It's got a plaster bust and a red rubber glove hanging from a thumbtack.
I saw that, and I just was like "God! Can you do this? Is this all right?"
The Great Masturbator. That picture really knocked me for a loop when I saw it.
I felt I had discovered someone who really understood me.
That just went straight into my central nervous system,
and I thought: "You can do anything. You can break any taboo,
you can say any horrible disgusting thing you want,
and it can be fantastic." It's not disgusting.
It's like a laboratory for thought and feeling,
and a way of plunging in as deep as you want to go.
There are no limits and no restrictions.
And the amazing thing was, this stuff was venerated.
This wasn't the work of some lone nut working in his attic,
stuff that would be swallowed up by the sands of time.
This guy was a venerated master of art
for doing these creepy, crazy, pathological, crack-brained things.
I mean, Salvador Dalí was a huge figure in my life. He was a role model for me.
I wanted to be a version of myself that was that... brave, and bold, and out of it.
What I didn't have, that Dalí had, was the moral courage to stand up and say:
"This is me. This is the way I am. I'm great. You're gonna take it and like it."
That you could be a freak and an oddball,
and that you didn't have to run around slinking in shame about it,
that you could stand up and you could do things that other people thought were...
...would have been terrible if other people had done them,
but if you were a great eccentric artist, people thought they were fantastic.
I mean, look at William Burroughs, you know. He was a predatory pederast.
He shot his wife, and he...
treated his son so atrociously that he basically ruined his life.
But people love him, they admire him. They think he's wonderful.
If he wasn't a great artist, he would just be a standard, run-of-the-mill prick.
Same with Dalí, you know. He did a lot of really unsavory things,
and people stood up and applauded him.
I thought that was great! That's why I wanted to be an artist.
I thought: "I can turn all of my defects into some kind of professional asset."
"I can... I can be what I am, and not hide it. I can amplify it."
That was it! The gates opened. I thought: "This is for me."
"These are my kind of people. This is what I want to do."
Unfortunately, I still couldn't draw. I had the ideas,
but it took me forever to figure out how to put them into action.
I draw constantly when I was a teenager,
and just as constantly I threw out what I drew.
Looking at this, you can see why I didn't want to keep them around.
I guess I was about seventeen when I did this.
Every drawing I attempted in those days ended in frustrated scrawls.
The Inkhand theme was something of a talisman for me.
Inkhand was what I called the longed-for ability to use a pen fluently.
I probably made nine thousand drawings with the word "Inkhand"
scrawled across them, in fury at my ineptitude.
It was an incantation, a mantra.
Since I believed I was a born master,
it irked me to no end that I couldn't draw worth a damn.
I had to be an artist because all I ever wanted to do... was to express my total dedication...
to the examination of these experiences that, I felt...
...even though they were incomprehensible, were also...
transcendental.
I guess...
I guess I'm not really sure what these various things have actually been,
or how to categorize them. I know I've had a lot of hallucinations.
I've only had one that I thought had any deep, personal significance for me,
and that was that big green frog creature I saw on the movie screen at the Glendale Junior College.
After high school,
I briefly attended Glendale Junior College, but I didn't do well at it.
I took an art history class that included an overview of ancient architecture.
Watching slides of Assyrian, Abyssinian, Egyptian, and Persepolitan ruins put me into a ruminative trance.
And then, after the last slide, the screen went... white.
The classroom was silent.
The hair on the back of my neck stood up, and I knew something was going to happen.
And then I had an amazing vision.
This frog appeared on the screen, shooting up from the bottom and settling down into this pose.
And when I saw it, I felt such a blast of emotion
that I could feel the soles of my feet and the palms of my hands sting
with the blood rushing through them.
I should perhaps mention that at this point in my life
I had never taken drugs or been drunk.
I was so startled, I yelled and tipped my desk over backwards,
badly scraping the shin of the woman sitting behind me.
I left school, and I never went back.
It wasn't just seeing something,
it was more of a full-body, full-mind, full-awareness event.
And it really, really stayed with me.
I went home and I drew that frog over and over and over again.
I'll bet I've drawn that frog ten thousand times.
Do you still get that feeling from it?
No, unfortunately, because like almost everything else in my life,
age has dulled the edge of it. But it still means something to me.
I still like to draw it. I still like to look at it and think about it,
and I still feel... that it's somehow...
...a... friend of mine, or an asset in my life, or something.
So what did you do after that?
I, uh, got a job as a garbageman, for the city of Glendale.
And that paid me a working man's salary, even though I was just a kid.
So I rented a place to live, and I...
...got stinking drunk every single night of the week,
and I was so healthy in those days that I could...
turn in absolutely hammered at three in the morning,
and get up at six... bright-eyed, bushy-tailed, and fresh as a daisy,
and go riding around in the back of a truck.
-Did you do artwork during that time? -Oh, yeah. Yeah.
Well, I tried to do artwork. I...
I was still trying to be an artist, but I didn't really know how to go about it.
Suddenly, in 1978, when I was twenty-six,
I finally produced the sort of drawing that I had been striving to create.
I called it: Barnyard Trouble.
When I was done with this picture,
it was such a big moment for me,
because I had been able to complete it, and I was infatuated with this image.
I couldn't take my eyes off it, I would look at it for hours.
And I was amazed that it happened, because it made me realize, you know,
I've been working so hard and so blindly towards this, and it's true! It works!
I mean, I was headed in this direction for a reason.
I've created these things that mean a huge amount to me,
and I'll bet if I keep doing them, they'll mean something to somebody else.
[musical interlude]
Having no idea how to build a career as an artist,
I decided to self-publish what would now be called a zine.
It seems like a simple idea, but the formula eluded me until 1981,
when I put out the first issue of JIM,
a sixteen-page Xeroxed "autojournal", as I called it.
It had drawings and written pieces, and ads in the back
for things like the Fortune-Telling Stinkbug and the Weasel Silhouette,
all of which I dutifully made and sold.
But it did not have any comics in it.
Round about 1985, Gil Kane introduced me to Gary Groth,
the co-owner of Fantagraphics Books,
which was publishing the best comics coming out at that time.
Gary offered to publish JIM if I would put comics in it.
Everything in the series was straight autobiography,
recording, as it did, things that occurred to me, either while asleep or awake.
Fantagraphics Books has been my publisher since 1986.
They've released fourteen volumes of my work,
most of which are concerned with this cartoon character called Frank.
I first drew him in 1988,
after I'd kicked the idea for him around in my mind for six months or so.
What I wanted was a cartoon character,
a generic anthropomorph that was the equidistant synthesis of all cartoon traits.
A cartoon character who was not a caricature of any kind of animal or human being,
and who was capable of absolutely anything.
This is what I came up with.
This is the first drawing ever made of that character, long before he had a name.
And this is the second drawing of him,
which was used as the cover of the aforementioned JIM magazine.
A friend's mother saw this and said, "You have to name him Frank!"
after her cat.
So that was that. His name became Frank.
In every Frank story, he gets up in the morning,
and as soon as his eyelids open, he runs out of the house,
and he is thrilled at what he sees.
Frank's world is called The Unifactor.
It is a closed system of motivated cause and effect
where everything balances out and resets in the medium-long run.
The Unifactor also subjects its residents to terrible and frightening experiences,
whether for fun or for some deeper unknown reason, who can say.
The Unifactor is the main character in these stories.
Like, in the same way that... God is the main character on the Earth.
And it's not really a direct one-on-one representation-- symbolic representation of that.
It's a literary construct, or an artistic construct.
And I think sometimes it feels to us like life is having its way with us,
and I think it's a representation of that more than anything else.
The Unifactor is doing this stuff, God knows why, but it's doing everything,
and it controls the situation the way it wants to be controlled.
[musical interlude]
I can't... meditate.
I try, but I just can't do it.
But I can get myself into what I call a sticky mood pretty easily,
which is a warm, gray, gluey,
semi-conscious... --I'm going into it right now--
...state, which is very receptive.
So, when I'm writing a Frank comic,
what I will do is I will go off to some quiet, secluded place,
and I'll sit down with my notebook, and I'll invoke that mood,
and I'll write a phrase. I'll write:
"Frank is throwing rocks... at a... hot-water heater."
No. Nothing.
Okay, "Frank is peeling potatoes." No.
"Frank is pitching a tent." No.
"Frank is sitting in his room reading." Okay.
This is one of the very first Frank comics,
and it was written in the process I'm describing.
Okay, Frank is sitting in his room reading. Okay, good.
What gives me the go-ahead, when I consider an idea, is that it has a kind of a spectral glow to it.
So, and then I come up with another line. He... Frank... there's an earthquake.
Nothing. Um...
Manhog comes charging... charging into the house.
No.
A dried leaf blows in the window. Mm... That's got it.
So, put that line down next. Frank is in his room reading,
a dried leaf blows in the window.
Next one comes easier: He looks out the window.
At a certain point, everything I come down with glows,
and I don't think about what they mean, I don't think about where the story is going,
I don't think about whether it is a story or how it's going to wind up.
I just do it until something happens,
then I realize: "Oh! We're back where we started."
And that's it. Then I have the story.
This is the book that I did the work in for the book that became FRAN.
And there's a lot of tortured agonizing over the story.
You can see I carried this thing around for a year,
and filled it up with notes,
mostly documenting how frustrated and unhappy I was
at not being able to come up with anything.
And this is a book I'm working on,
or this is my workbook for the... the current story.
And it starts off kind of nice and orderly,
where I set out my task for myself,
but as it goes on and I fail to find the elements that I'm looking for,
it just sort of degenerates into a nasty scrap heap of half-finished sketches.
Telling silent stories is difficult,
because you can't have a label that says "He goes to the store".
You have to show him leaving the house and going to the store.
You have to draw a lot of extra stuff.
I wanted these stories to be beyond time and place,
and if the characters had spoken, that would have tied it to this time and this place,
and to the particular kind of idiomatic English that I use.
Having no words means that anybody,
in any country, at any time, can get the same thing out of these stories as anybody else.
That means a lot to me.
So, in other words, it's a... it's a slow and painstaking process.
It's hard to come up with these ideas.
You mentioned that... the difficulty. Is it that you don't enjoy it?
No, I don't really enjoy it. It's... It's hard work. It's hard work.
I kind of enjoy it more when I can...
...when I know what I'm going to do, and I can just sit down and draw it.
But in a situation like this,
where I'm having to draw every panel four and five times,
and work out the composition, and get the flow right,
and the postures right, and the hookups right,
and the continuity right, and all that stuff...
It's just work. And it's frustrating.
And in the case of a page like this, by the time I have it all penciled out,
it may be so marred from drawing and erasing, and drawing and erasing,
that I'll just have to trace it onto another page.
So it can take me a week to do a single page.
But it's a lot of work for the results, I think.
[musical interlude]
I have a similar process for doing the drawings that I do.
I keep a notebook in my pocket at all times.
I fill up one of these things every month.
I've got a bookcase with well over a hundred of these things,
and I use them for idea batteries.
But as I was saying, if I need an idea for a project, whether it's a commission--
See, I said that wrong too. Goddammit, I'm getting self-conscious.
-Let's try that again.-Let's... let's... it's not a speech.
It's not a speech, but I don't want to... but I'm making it sound like a speech,
because I'm being self-conscious. So I'll just say...
Well, let's talk... well, let's talk about your dreams for a little bit more.
-My dreams?-The dream theater. The movie theater.
[Frustrated noise]
So is it... is it a... it's a movie theater just for you, it's the single seat on top of a pedestal,
and there's nobody else in the theater...?
Yeah. I don't know if it's a movie theater just for me, but it's a theater... that is...
...reserved for who... for one person. One person can go in there,
and they ascend to the top of this column, where there's a chair.
And there's a big, wrap-around movie screen, and films are shown there continuously
that are relevant to different situations in different ways.
And I see films about...
biology, and history, and technology, and myself.
And I have gotten lots of ideas in that place.
And do you keep a record of those ideas?
Yes, I do. In fact... because ideas are the hardest things to come by in this process,
I started keeping...
...these, these little pocket-sized Moleskine sketchbooks.
This is my current one. I try always to have one of these things on me.
This bookcase here is full of 'em. This goes from 2004 to 2015, so it's about ten years.
And when I need an idea, what I do is I just get out one of these books,
and I usually haven't seen what's in them for years and years.
I go through them, and I look for...
something that will be useful to me.
This one... got wet. [laughs] Maybe on purpose.
Sometimes when I do a drawing I don't like, I just get it wet,
so that it will be somewhat obliterated, but there will be a sort of a trace record of it.
Here's three little vignettes. Okay, look at this. Look at this one here. See?
Here's four distinct images.
I've drawn these two as large drawings,
but I haven't done either of these.
But I could!
And in fact I need to make a drawing, so...
...what I would do is I would pick one of these two, because they'll do.
And then I would just pencil it up and ink it, and there would be the picture.
So you can see how easy it is.
-What do you think? Do you think that would make...? -Sounds good.
Which of these two do you think would make a better picture, this one or this one?
I kind of like this one, because he's being wafted on a cloud of smoke.
Interesting. They don't... So you didn't do all of them together?
It looks like a... it's not a triptych, but what would it be... a quadrych?
Well, it's... it's just four drawings.
I just drew these four squares, and then I put four pictures in them.
But they're all very similar, in terms of Frank.
Well, they're... they're... yeah, they are, but that I think is just a coincidence.
I wasn't trying to do anything in particular, I was just...
just as an exercise, just decided to do four Frank pictures.
But yeah, he's at his ease in all of them.
Maybe I did have something else in mind, I can't really tell.
I can't really remember why I've drawn most of the things I've drawn.
And... sometimes if I can't find anything I want in here,
because I sort of have to feel a resonance with what's in them...
...I will go to another source. I have other sketchbooks,
I have... boxes of loose drawings, of paper.
Whenever I get a pad of paper, I... here, let me show you something.
This is characteristic. I buy one of these pads of cheap paper,
and I number all the pages,
and then any... any time I need to do a sketch for anything at all,
I do them in this book,
and because I'm keeping absolutely all of the pages,
I try my hardest to make them worth doing and worth keeping.
This is a drawing that I did of a huge frog,
kind of lurching up onto the land and swallowing people by the handful,
and the people are loving it.
But I decided to do something else with it.
I decided to have the frog coming up on the shore
and disgorging people into the landscape,
and they're happy to be there.
So... I guess they are immigrants... fleeing some terrible situation.
So, if I can't find something in one of these small books,
I have bunches of these too.
These are all sketchbooks in here that are full of ideas.
These drawers are full of sketchbooks that are full of ideas.
That box there is full of drawings and sketches,
and there's boxes and boxes of sketches and drawings in the other room.
I've got so much of this stuff, and so little of it ends up in finished form.
I'd like to think they would mean something to somebody somewhere.
I mean, I'm devoting my life to creating these things, I'd hate to think it was pointless.
But I know it probably is.
It's just a pastime, something to keep me engaged.
You don't feel at times that there's some...
...meaning that you're delving into, or revealing, or...?</i
Oh, I feel that all the time. I feel that everything I do has some meaning.
Almost everything. I mean, I draw some stupid, arbitrary stuff, obviously. But...
most of the time, I feel like I'm doing something that's worthwhile, to me.
I'm really not trying to create entertainment,
as much as I'm trying to present ideas and...
situations that I think are fraught, and worth considering,
worth thinking about. And for me, they're fun to contemplate.
I mean, I look at this little drawing here of Frank, it's just a sketch,
and I'll have to do it because I made him too big,
I'll have to erase that, so here it goes.
I made him too big. I have to make him about a quarter of an inch shorter,
so that he'll be in his scale with his antagonist.
But I like that drawing of him standing there full of knives.
I think that's a nice image. He's standing there, he's not hurt, he's a little surprised,
and he's got knives sticking out of him like porcupine quills.
That's an interesting point that you raise, though, in terms of...
he's not really hurt, just surprised.
That seems to be kind of a feature of Frank, that
he's rarely really injured by anything in the Unifactor.
Nobody is.
Nobody is. It's like a science-fiction story where nobody can die.
The thing about the Frank stories is that whatever happens in them,
at the end of the story, everything has to be reset back the way it was.
The hammer never really falls.
Terrible things happen, but they never annihilate anything.
Which is the way I feel about life in general.
I feel that... the hammer never really falls.
Terrible as things can be, awful as people suffer, that...
ultimate annihilation never occurs. It's all just play-acting.
Which is... [laughs] I'm sure there are... [laughs]
that must be insulting to people who have suffered terribly,
and don't see it that way, and I guess...
Maybe I shouldn't have said it, but it's... that's how I see it.
I don't want to trivialize people's suffering, but...
I really do believe that this is sort of a field of...
illusion, where nothing is permanent. Nothing matters, really.
You know, I guess I... I'm...
I'm speaking in a highfalutin way
about something I'm not really qualified to talk about. These...
This is... a bunch of loose talk, and it should be considered as such.
I don't really... None of the things I'm saying
would stand up to serious philosophical scrutiny.
It's mostly just because when I'm...
when I'm sitting here doing this work, I have to...
I kind of have to think about what I'm doing,
and I try to get as much fun out of thinking about it as I can.
So it's not a grounding for your spiritual beliefs?
Oh, no. It has nothing to do with that.
I mean, my spiritual... beliefs are...
You know, that's... that's something that I'm just... moving around the periphery of.
I have no real understanding of what I'm doing there.
I understand what I'm doing here. I don't understand what I'm doing when I... you know...
sit down in a devotional attitude.
I don't know what that's all about. Something's going on.
You can feel it. You can feel its influence in your life.
It does something. It is something. But what it is, why it's there,
what its relationship to me is, I have no idea.
I'm going to end up having to do this page over.
Are we too distracting?
Well, no, it's not that at all, it's just that that's...[laughs] par for the course for me.
I do... I frequently do pages over again,
because it takes me so long to get to the point that I want to get at.
This is a... sort of a more rendered sketch for The Nudist Colony picture.
What's the idea behind The Nudist Colony?
Uh... well, the... I just came up with that title. It was a little specious. I...
This is a case of a situation where I had to do a picture.
I had to work. I had to do something, and I didn't have an idea.
And so this thing... just accrued.
I drew this thing, and then I drew this guy hitting its nose with a hammer
as if it was one of those ring-the-bell attractions at a fair.
And then I just... put in the rest of it. It... it's kind of arbitrary, and...
if it means anything at all, I don't know what it is.
This is the first version of the image that I'm drawing in charcoal now,
where the frog is shoveling people into its mouth,
and clasping this woman with its bifurcated tongue.
And the people like it. They enjoy the fact that they're disappearing into the frog.
And this is the sketch... one of the sketches that I did for the charcoal drawing.
At this point I had the frog
with this kind of natural crown growing out of its head,
kind of like a star-nose mole's nose.
I called it an exit-wound frog, but then I decided to get rid of it.
This is a sketch I did for a picture that I really like called
Interfenestration on the Veranda.
What's the idea of this one?
Well, it's... it's pretty straightforward.
This fellow is meditating.
You know, there's a metaphor for meditation,
which is that when your mind becomes like a completely still candle flame, that is...
that is the effect you're trying to achieve in meditation, to still your mind.
So this guy's doing it, and his... head, or mind, or consciousness, or something,
is breaking through these dimensions.
In the paintings there are different things to be seen in these...
...different dimensions that his mind is punching through.
That's... he's sitting in front of a doorway, and so it's going through the door,
but it's also going through the surface of the picture,
into these other realms.
The final painting was a little, tiny bit different in terms of layout.
Do you have any care at all what happens to these posthumously?
Well, I would not like them to be thrown away.
I think some of them are finished enough
and interesting enough that they would look good in a frame.
And, you know, when you see, as you see here, maybe ten drawings for one picture,
they are the ten that I thought were the ones worth preserving.
I did many, many more.
I'm not real deft.
I've reconciled myself to the fact that I'll never be a virtuoso draftsman.
I always felt that I should be able to do work as good as anybody,
and of course I can't.
But I... I feel like I should be able to.
That's always been a big source of frustration to me.
I always felt like I was a great virtuoso at heart, but I never was, and I probably...
Now I guess it's too late to ever be that. I just don't have it in me, you know.
Why would you say that about yourself?
Well, you... you can see by looking through these sketches...
...how many times I have to draw things over again.
How long it takes me to arrive at the right pose, the right balance,
the right composition, the right line quality,
the right fold patterns, the right face structure, the right...
[sighs] ...everything. It's just... None of it comes naturally or easily.
I have to do it over and over and over again until I do it right.
And when you look all the stuff that didn't make it into print,
and that I've thrown away, it's... I've done a lot more than that. It's a lot of work.
And I guess I... I... no, I'm definitely proud of myself for doing all that.
But I'm not particularly proud of the work itself.
All I can see is what's wrong with it.
I put a little tiny upward bend in that, just to give it a little interest.
Again, if you imagine this drawing without Pupshaw,
it's completely different.
And the expression on her face...
is some kind of a clue as to what is going on.
But I notice that I made her body too long. That's odd.
So, I'll push her back a little bit, condense her a bit.
There we go.
Now, normally, would... I'm looking at your pencil lines there,
and they're pretty deep. Normally would you redraw this, then?
No. No, because it's a soft pencil. It's not indenting the paper in any way.
And there... I haven't done a ton of erasing on it.
So the surface is still intact.
This erase... these... these lines will come up...
with an eraser. It may take a lot of scrubbing, but they will come up,
and the paper underneath will be pristine.
This is good. Now she looks more spooked.
So the fact that Pupshaw looks...
...sort of defeated and flummoxed and unhappy with what's going on,
completely changes the significance here. Because Frank...
...is so stupid that he'll fall for anything,
and he'll get into any kind of trouble without knowing.
She knows what's going on, and she doesn't like this.
So there's something wrong with the situation here.
One thing about Frank...
is that he has a real appreciation for the institution of leisure.
He can sit and stare...
...stupidly into the sky for hours...
...without doing anything. And that's something...
...I used to do, and I don't do it any more,
because I feel like I can't afford to waste the time. And I think it's...
...hasn't been good for me.
-Hasn't been good for you? -No. I think...
...disengaging your brain and simply falling into a reverie, or...
...sort of... Not even a meditative state...
I don't know what else to call it, except for "leisure".
You mentioned meditation.
My initial thought when you were talking about it was...
...that it sounded like meditation, but... you differentiate it.
Well, yeah. Meditation is concentration.
It's work.
The primary source of information
that became the codified approach to meditation
is a book called The Yoga Sutras,
which lays out the process in scientific detail.
You know, people sometimes say that they...
...you know, when they're painting or playing music or something,
and they're focusing for hours at a time on it, that that's akin to meditation.
But it isn't, because they're doing something that they want to do.
It's not a discipline.
Now I have to figure out how to render this lid.
I don't know whether to do it with concentric circles,
or with just plain old shade lines, but I'll just do that.
I hate making decisions like that.
Why is that?
Because I never know if I'm making the right one. Frequently I'm not.
One of the things that's hard for me to do is to attain line consistency.
That's a real important aspect of ink drawing.
The line work has to be...
All the lines have to be harmonious in their relationship to each other.
So if you have too thick a line in the distance... that's not good.
If you have...
...lines that are too small and too close together next to lines that are
thicker and wider apart, even though they create the same gray value,
it doesn't look right.
A lot of people would be surprised to hear,
from those few shade lines on the lid of the jar,
that that's such a difficult decision right there for you.
Well, you know, see, the thing is I could have done it like this.
And that would have been more in keeping with the rest of the inking.
In fact, I think I'll change it. [laughs]
Not everybody who draws has to turn their paper.
I do, because I'm... self-trained, and I never learned...
...and I didn't develop all of those drill techniques.
So this is... better, I think.
All right.
Well, I have this penciled to a point where I'm ready to ink it in.
I do... most of my inking with these little Brause finger feder nibs here.
People see this nib and they think it's a novelty item, but it's a great working tool.
-There's only one maker of them, I'd guess... -Yeah. Yeah, they're Brause nibs.
They're made in Germany.
And generally speaking, they have to be special ordered.
The palm of the hand here holds a lot of ink, and...
...sometimes, if I'm doing a certain kind of inking,
where I need to do a lot of lines without breaking,
I'll build a reservoir out of tinfoil,
and wrap it around it, and it holds the ink in,
like the peanut butter in a sandwich.
And the point is sufficiently fine,
that you can get a really thin line, and it's sufficiently flexible
that you can get a really thick line. But it's stiff enough...
...that you have to lean on it in order to...to get the thick line,
and that gives you more control. At least it gives me more control.
I have this device here for looking at them,
to see how worn down they are.
I know exactly what I want that point to look like, and this one is perfect.
This is... Bombay india ink.
And the first thing I'm going to do, just to sort of get warmed up,
is to do this little bush down here in the lower corner.
[musical interlude]
And this image here, which is called The Artist's Eye,
if you were to get a copy of Vermeer's Allegory of Painting picture
and compare it side by side with this one,
you would see that it is a mirror-image reconstruction,
element by element, of that painting.
This picture was not so much inspired as it was concocted.
I wanted to show the idea...
...that this artist here... it's called The Artist's Eye,
and if you look, his eye looks like an oat. He's oat-eyed.
And he's wanted to draw this creature here. This is the thing he has wanted to capture,
and he's got some sketches relating to it here, and he's finally nailed it.
And what he sees is this kind of porthole,
he's looking at it through kind of a tunnel vision.
He doesn't see this sort of horrible feminine creature here,
that is cradling the thing and eyeing him with some kind of otherworldly lust.
He doesn't understand what he's getting into. I guess the overall message
is that artists frequently mess with forces they don't understand.
That's the simplest way of putting it.
It's a cynical picture. It's an anti-art picture.
I was going to do a collection of pictures like this...
package them up in a case, and call it The Case Against Art.
But I only did a few before I realized
it was a spectactularly non-commercial venture.
So I gave it up.
People ask me sometimes why I draw so many frogs.
And aside from the fact that they're beautiful...
which is the reason...
If you think about it, frogs are actually wonderful
symbols for a drawing.
They don't look like people,
but they can be made to be weirdly anthropomorphic.
For something as unhuman as a frog is,
they lend themselves amazingly well to stand-ins for human beings.
And I would always rather show an army of frogs fighting than an army of people.
It's occurred to me that...
...my life has been...
...maybe unusually...
...single in its trajectory.
I've only wanted to do exactly what I'm doing right now,
which is making this kind of picture, pictures which...
...are significant to me...
...and which...
...usually turn out to be significant to other people.
Some other people.
I guess the question is: Why do people have ideas?
Why do people want to create?
Why have I devoted my life to making pictures like this,
instead of doing something more concrete and constructive and beneficial to mankind?
It must have some significance, because so many people are drawn to do it.
And if you believe in the Joseph Campbell theory of...
...universal spiritual meaning
informing the myths and...
...fables of the world,
there's no reason why that wouldn't pertain to this work,
and other work where people are doing pictures
that cannot be understood or explained even by the artist,
but they're doing them simply because the impulse came to them.
Maybe if you were to look at the work of...
...Kenneth Grahame, who wrote Wind in the Willows, in that light,
you would see that as Joseph Campbell says,
it's a roadmap to enlightenment, if you just look at it the right way.
But you could read it into almost any other kind of a story as well.
Maybe there's just really the one story,
and it's something that's constantly being told in a million ways.
And it's not just entertainment, or recreation, or for killing time.
Maybe it's really deep.
But I guess that gets down to the proclivities of the person who's looking at it.
It's an interesting thought,
that there is actually deep, deep meaning...
...in human creativity.
That we create in order to bring ourselves closer to some truth
that we can't reach any other way.
But... the meaning of it is obscure,
and has to be sussed out,
and especially has to be seen through the lens of spiritual discipline
which enables your mind to see it.
It's a nice thought.
It's nice to think that this just isn't all an exercise in futility,
that there is meaning behind it, that meaning can be found it.
Not in the literal interpretation of the work itself, but in the hidden symbolism of it.
Maybe on some level we are all trying to help each other get...
...to a state of enlightenment, or deep understanding.
I certainly can't tell why I'm doing this right now.
I'm on automatic pilot. I'm just knocking out one picture after another,
even though it's hard work and it doesn't really do much for me.
I'm compelled to do it. It seems significant to me.
But, for now, in the real world, in the here and now,
there's just this tedious squeaking of the stump on this paper,
as I move these molecules of carbon around.
It's pretty mundane... at that level.
And I'm wondering if I can sell this picture for enough money to make it worthwhile.
In a way, that's pretty important too.
I've always felt that there were...
...sort of two kinds of people. You...
You go out hiking, and you go up into the mountains,
and you come across some incredible vista.
You may feel overwhelmed by the beauty and the majesty of it all,
and you may regard it as sort of a...
...you know, a heavy and beautiful experience.
But some people will fall down on their knees and thank God that...
for creating it, for putting them there, and...
...say thank you for showing me this, show me more, this is a wonderful billboard,
show me the experience that it represents, bring me closer, I want to know more.
They address that environment as if it were alive and thinking,
and controlling itself, and presenting itself to them.
And they say: "Yes, yes, I see you, I venerate you."
Show me more. Show me more.
That picture is called The Holy Land. That's another Case Against Art picture.
In this case, Manhog has crept into this place,
in the dead of night, to vandalize it, or to in other ways enjoy it.
And he finds himself caught by the foot, and at the same time,
this nightmarish, fleshy, animal thing is coming down the hall to get him.
And Manhog's way of dealing with this crisis is to appeal to this work of art,
which appears to depict Manhog being born from the fetus of a piglet
and blossoming into all this ectoplasmic effluvia.
And he's about to make his escape from the museum in this... through these vents here.
But of course it isn't real. It's just a meditation upon it.
Somebody else's meditation upon it.
If he were to start meditating on it, maybe he would get results.
Instead of, you know, heading for the door,
he's trying to escape reality through art.
And the whole point of this picture was to point out that
that is a foolish attitude, and a waste of time.
So then you're not trying to escape reality through your art?
No, no, I don't... No! No, of course not.
You know, I've never... I... Some people say art is their religion.
I think that's semi-tragic.
Because it's a dead end.
Really, there's no escape.
No escape...?
No escape. The question I've asked myself, during the whole of my career,
is whether or not there is any correspondence between the way I perceive reality
and the way I express my ideas in my work.
There is a... a question I have as to whether or not
doing the work that I do is actually some sort of a path.
Maybe just by virtue of keeping my mind off of other tracks.
It's an elusive thought, but I feel that...
...all these things that I thought that I was doing because they interested me,
and they stimulated me, and that I was doing simply because I was driven to do it,
may actually have some kind of interior meaning that is emerging over time,...
and that will actually benefit me, once I'm past my...
...my usefulness. You know, when I have nothing to do but live and contemplate the past,
and prepare myself for the future, it may... be, I hope it will be,
that I've pre... that I've prepared myself for it, simply by...
...developing and maintaining... my trajectory on this particular path.
[musical interlude]
I'm a strong believer in philosophy.
I think it's much easier to get through life if you have one.
Philosophical truths can be real,
where statistical and seeming other truths are not.
I've learned to pay a lot of attention to my subconscious,
and I've come to believe that it is the largest sphere in which I operate,
and that my conscious mind is a... a tiny and ephemeral fragment of it.
I really have stayed true to these impulses.
And the thing about art not being adequate
is the conclusion that I came to a while ago.
I wouldn't say that I was ever anybody for whom art was my religion,
but it was the most important thing to me, and I realized at a certain point,
I thought, you know, art has to take a back seat to something bigger.
This is my life I'm talking about, this is reality.
Spending my whole life in a room making pictures,
and letting that be the whole thing, that's not enough.
And I thought: "Okay, I've got to start trying to...
...have...
...something more than that."
And I thought: "You know, I... I want a religious framework.
I want to have some kind of a structure...
...a brotherhood, a fellowship. I want to be around other people who want this too."
And I had no idea where to look for any of it. I thought:
"Since I'm living in a Christian country and I know something about Christianity,
and I know something about Christian mysticism,
I should just try to be a Christian." The idea of...
...the possibility of there being somebody like Jesus Christ,
who is so different from every other human being,
that he's not really recognizable as a human being.
He's incapable of selfishness, He's incapable of pettiness,
He is incapable of a shabby act or telling a lie.
He does two things: he worships God, and he serves mankind.
That was an ideal that I instinctively believed in,
and so I embarked upon finding that,
and that's what I've been doing for the past thirty years.
I was in Los Angeles,
in 2011, I think,
because one of my books had been nominated
for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize,
and they flew the people in to attend the ceremony.
And I was riding on a shuttle bus with one of the nominees,
who actually won. I didn't.
And she had written a book on autism, about which she was an expert.
And I was talking to her about that,
and I asked her to tell me something about autism,
and she told me that it was on a spectrum, and told me what people were doing to treat it.
And then she said: "When were you diagnosed?"
And before I could reply...
and I guess the reply would have been: "Diagnosed with what?"
I thought: "She's an expert."
"She thinks I'm autistic. Could there be anything to it?"
"You know, there might be. Something's up with me. Maybe I'm autistic."
"Maybe that's what this is, that I've been contending with my whole life."
"My God, I'll bet that's true."
And I've done a little bit of thinking and a little bit of looking into it,
and I've come to the conclusion that she very well may have been right,
and that I am a little bit autistic.
And it's kind of surprising to me
that I first had this idea
presented to me at the age of sixty.
You would think that word would have been brought up in connection with my behavior before that.
But on the other hand, maybe it was, once again,
the hand of providence keeping me from being afflicted
with a label that would have put paid to my process of self-discovery,
because if I had been told earlier in my life:
"Oh, you have a condition: You're autistic."
"And here's what it means for you. Here's what it means for your parents."
It would have given my parents a coping mechanism.
It would have given me something of an out,
because I could have said, "I'm autistic! Don't blame me!"
And it probably would have changed the course of my life, because instead of having that,
I spent so many years just trying to figure out what the hell I was.
This is my mother, and this is my grandmother.
They weren't professional models, but... they posed for a friend,
who put this poster together.
-Was it always in your house? -Yeah, we always...
We had a couple copies of it. My brother got one, and I got this one.
One time...
I was up at this place called Ananda Ashrama, and one weekend,
one Sunday, I was there, and there was a Catholic priest who was visiting.
And he was doing good works in Cambodia,
helping victims of the Khmer Rouge, at the risk of his life.
And he told the anecdote about...
...Saint Francis embracing the leper.
And when he reached the punchline,
which is that he took this wretched, starving,
filthy leper in his arms and kissed him,
he looked into his face, and it was the face of Jesus Christ...
...well, that's a... that's a bit of a chestnut, but...
...when he told it, a mood sailed out into the room.
And I think everybody felt it. Certainly, when we walked out of there,
everybody was going: "My God! Did you feel that?"
This man... this man managed to convey,
through entirely occult means,
the sense of what it meant to experience communion with Christ,
and he transmitted it to everybody in that room.
It was a real heavy experience.
That's what I was looking for when I was investigating Christianity,
but I never found it until that time.
I'm sure that I was surrounded by people like that,
but it's hard to recognize a holy person when you're worldly, like I am.
I love this painting here.
Look at this guy.
He loves that ketchup, and he loves his wife for buying it.
What a world! So beautiful.
This of course is Sri Ramakrishna.
The story of Ramakrishna and Vivekananda is,
as far as I'm concerned, the greatest story ever told.
Vivekananda is the older, or the younger?
The younger. Sri Ramakrishna was a working priest at a temple,
and Vivekananda was brought to see him by a friend,
and Sri Ramakrishna recognized Vivekananda.
Vivekananda thought that Sri Ramakrishna was out of his mind for:
(A) having an acquaintance... a pre-acquaintance with Vivekananda,
and (B) regarding him as an exalted being.
He argued a lot with Ramakrishna when Ramakrishna would say:
"You will do the Mother's work after I am gone",
you are this, you are that... and then just as Sri Ramakrishna had foreseen,
Vivekananda went on to be the man who brought Vedanta to the West.
And he became the most eloquent exponent
of Sri Ramakrishna's being and teachings.
The stories surrounding Sri Ramakrishna and Vivekananda,
and that whole scene, are just fantastic. They're so great.
I say fantastic as if that means that they're not true,
but, you know, they're all heavily documented.
There's no real doubt that things unfolded as described.
Although it could all turn out to be a phony, you know.
It could turn out to be that the whole story was contrived and none of it was true.
That would be...
...a catastrophe for me. And I don't think it will happen,
but I have to acknowledge the fact that I'm capable of being fooled.
Especially in this realm, you have to test it constantly,
and be prepared to admit that you're wrong, and that none of it's true.
You have to be able to do that, in order to really...
...be sure that you're being honest with yourself.
In one of your early stories, you talk about being given the Bhagavad Gita.
Oh, yes. It was the Hare Krishna Bhagavad Gita...
...which is... just one version of it,
and it has a special emphasis...
...meaningful to the Hare Krishnas.
I was warned off of that book with a spectacular vision
of something in the book that upset me so much...
...that frightened me for a week just thinking about it.
A Lovecraftian thing.
Do you... can you describe it? You didn't draw it in the... in the comic.
No, I... I didn't draw it, and I... I don't think I could describe it, except to say...
You know, imagine an H.P. Lovecraft nightmare, something that...
...you just would never, ever want to see, because it was just...
...so bad and so wrong, and shouldn't exist.
It was like that. It wasn't so much what it was,
it was just the way that it struck me as being something I should never have seen,
and that I never wanted to contend with.
-And when you looked for it again? -It wasn't there.
I... I actually became pretty familiar with that book.
I didn't know how to find out anything about legitimate Hinduism,
and all I had was the Hare Krishnas, so I...
...for a while, investigated the possibility of being a Hare Krishna.
I like their restaurants.
I love that satvic vegetarian food.
But...
...I just couldn't be a Hare Krishna, even though I was attracted to Hinduism.
They take the traditional Hindu mythology...
...very seriously, and at face value, so...
You know, they believe in a Hindu hell, and... and that karma will boil you alive
if you cook too many chickens. That kind of thing.
I think one of the terrible evils is the notion
that if you don't have a religion or practice religion, God will punish you,
or abandon you, or turn...
...turn Its back on you.
I think that's a...
...that's an evil, evil construction, that concept.
One thing that my subconscious tells me over and over and over again
is that the hammer, the ultimate hammer,
the hammer of annihilation... never really falls.
God plays rough, and the world is a place that is full of things
that are so awful they don't bear thinking about,
and ecstasies that are so vast that they can't be contained.
And this maddeningly irreconcilable situation that we all have to cope with...
...it's the funny/scary thing, again.
It's the über-joke. It's the cosmic joke.
It's the great cosmic joke.
Vedantists say that Brahman...
...is the ultimate reality, it's absolutely everything...
...but that it is undifferentiated and unmoving.
The traditional philosophy says that Brahman is beyond...
...comprehension. The human mind can never understand it,
which I call The Certainty Principle.
That no matter what happens, science will never be able to tell you
what Brahman is, where it is,
what it's made of, what it does, or anything.
The... the machinery does not exist
that can measure or describe Brahman.
It's totally beyond that. The only instrument on Earth
that can see and understand Brahman
is the purified human mind.
According to Vedanta, the mind is a part of the physical world.
The only aspect of your makeup, which is a reflection of Brahman, is the...
...is your consciousness, your Atman.
One of the main...
...reasons for embarking upon...
...the path of Vedanta is to purify your mind,
so that you can experience your Atman.
You can experience that aspect of you which is eternal.
Vedantists believe that...
...the physical world...
...is a source of the energy that is your mind.
Not your consciousness, your mind.
How do they differentiate between consciousness and mind?
Well, your mind thinks, and your consciousness knows.
This physical universe is
ever-changing and temporary.
It came into existence, and it will pass out of existence.
But the consciousness that is responsible
for it coming into being, I mean, the consciousness, and the...
...the omnipotent power of the absolute,
which is behind the creation of the physical universe,
is eternal and infinite,
and...
...real, in a way that the physical universe is not.
The goal of a Vedantist is to live in the world without being...
...run by it.
Without being manipulated by it, or frightened by it, or fooled by it.
-You know the word maya?-Yes.
Well, that would be the enemy of enlightenment.
And it's interesting to think that there are people who really have...
...followed that path all the way to the end, and truly seen what is...
...what is real.
And that that is an option that everybody has, to go down that path,
to turn their backs on all the things
that bring them temporary pain and temporary pleasure,
over and over and over again, and to...
...to perceive the...
...the whatever it is [laughs] that is beyond that,
-whatever it is.-The ineffable.
The ineffable. Which, you know, people who meditate,
they get little signs of encouragement along the way.
They have visions, or they... they see the famous white light,
or they...
...have, you know, sort of extra... ...extra physical sensations,
and perceptions that tell them that they're on the right path.
Because people wouldn't do that, people wouldn't spend years meditating,
and pursuing these things, if there wasn't something in it.
It's too much work.
There has to be something...
...that makes it worthwhile for these people who spend decades
doing this difficult work of practicing austerities,
or they couldn't possibly do it.
If I told... if, you know, if somebody suggested that you sit for a half an hour, or an hour,
or two hours every single day and try to focus your mind on something,
but there is no payoff, you wouldn't do it.
And if they told you there was a payoff,
and you did it for years and years and there was no payoff, you wouldn't keep doing it.
And it's plainly not for everybody. Not everybody is interested.
And I think in the long run, it doesn't matter whether people do this or not.
If you're not attracted to meditation or spiritual practice,
there's no reason for you to be interested in it.
If you are...
then probably nothing else will ever satisfy you.
There's an application to which form and color and...
...the implication of something...
...cosmic and rich going on...
...that I have not figured out how to do. I know it can be done,
of course. But I... haven't figured it out.
That's sort of something I'm always trying to do.
I feel that there is something... something real behind all this,
and that the single-minded pursuit of it, over all these years,
is getting me closer to it.
I don't think there's anything...
...innately heavy or spiritual in my work,
but there is something definitely innately spiritual in my...
...approach to it, and in my approach to life.
And... as time goes on, I become more and more convinced...
...that simply pursuing it with single-minded conviction
can lead to that ultimate
revelation to man.
[wind and chimes]
[end credits music]
English Transcription by Eli Bishop
Spanish Translation and Synchronization by Iván Payá
Subtitles - SUBTITULARTE
If you want, I can give you a quick glimpse of a painting that has been rejected.
-Rejected? -Yeah.
-By whom? -By me.
But you can only have the quickest possible glimpse of it.
I'm just going to turn it around once, so... catch it.
Because I'm going to paint over this. I'm not happy with it.
-Say when!-When.
When did you paint that?
Oh, a few years ago.
No freeze-frames.
There's something really nice about seeing a... a shore across the water,
realizing that you can't get there easily.
Hm.
[windchimes]
[WOODRING whistling]
[rustling papers]
Well, what do you want to do now?
SUBTITULARTE