Finished with this one…

…and then made a couple prints with the good art room inkjet…

Oh lord have mercy I do believe I’ve outdone myself this time. This photo does Not do the final print justice. I really hit the bullseye with this one. Just delighted with it.

A bit more on a black & white version of the figure I sketched out previously…

I was browsing the work of an illustrator whose ink wash techniques I greatly admire, for some pointers as to how to do shading on arm and leg joints, when I came across one of his that inspired some imagining on my part.

I did this in Procreate on the iPad Plus…I find myself doing more and more artwork digitally like this. It was easy…I knocked it out in just a hour or so, then went to bed. When I looked at it this morning I saw I’d got the scale of his head wrong in the initial drawing, and that was an easy fix in Procreate. I find I need to put things away for a while so I can look at them with fresh eyes later and see where I get it wrong in the detail. I’m going to keep working on this throughout the day here at Casa del Garrett, then get back to the next episode of A Coming Out Story.

I’ve no backstory for this character…I just spent a few moments visualizing him and then drew him adding detail as I went. He’s a character in some fantasy or science-fiction adventure but I’m fine with not knowing the details of his story as I draw. It gives him an infinite universe to exist in. I did that with several panels in A Coming Out Story episode 19. Three panels in that episode are fantasy imaginings that could be about anything. Consider them the beginnings of stories that could go anywhere.

Yes, yes…costuming in fantasy and science-fiction illustrations and especially in comics can look ridiculously scant. But then again…so what? It’s all wish fulfillment. The stories…the artwork…the sexy characters…

A casual stroll through the internet tubes this afternoon, brings me to a decades old argument between Steven Pinker and Stephen J. Gould. First, from Pharyngula…

One accidental occurrence is meaningless and forgivable, but when you keep hanging out with the same group of racists for over 20 years, and when you are repeatedly informed that these are bad guys, the correlation becomes rather more substantial. 

Then, following the links, comes this from Box of Rocks…

Even though Gould passed away in 2003, Pinker still fights his ghost on the regular, probably because burns like that leave you scarred for life. He urges the members of his field to write compellingly so that they can hold their own in the realm of public opinion, citing a need to rebut Gould’s clear, well reasoned arguments against their endless and transparent attempts at reviving race science.

It is working. Sociobiology and eugenics is once again being repackaged for the public as part of the TESCREAL ideologies, pressed into service to rationalize why those with power and resources are morally justified in doing everything they can to retain it. This rebrand is made possible by those like Pinker, Wilson, Dawkins, and Dennett, who have carried the gospel of biological determinism out of the NYRB and into the public sphere for the last 30 years…

You can find the argument here and yes it is totally engaging. Gould was amazing…

If we define poetic justice as defeat by one’s own favored devices—Robespierre before the guillotine or Midas in golden starvation—then we might be intrigued to find Steven Pinker, a linguist by training, upended by his own use of words.

Ages ago I read Pinker’s The Blank Slate with interest. I was a young man barely out of my teens when I’d come to accept the notion, by way of Robert Audrey’s African Genesis (Yeah, I know…), that to understand ourselves we needed to understand those ancient animal horizons from which we, as he wrote, made our quick little march. Pinker’s book seemed to be a useful exploration of that idea. But I am also a post WWII baby boomer child, and I also had a pretty good understanding of how the fascists prior to world war two had employed a deeply false understanding of Darwinism as justification for totalitarianism, their wars of conquest, and the Holocaust. Pinker lost me part way through the book with an approving mention of Thomas Sowell, but I gamely plugged on. 

There are books on science, politics, and ideas that I will return to and read passages from over and over again, some that I profoundly disagree with but which I think are important to engage with anyway. The Blank Slate isn’t one of them. When I closed that book I never opened it again, probably because the ideas in it that I felt drawn to were expressed much better elsewhere, and there seemed a lot of posing and fluff everywhere else. I never read any of his stuff again, initially and simply because he just didn’t strike me as all that interesting a thinker. I also suspected he was more right wing than he let on (Sowell? Really??). It was much later that I saw the drift toward Charles Murray land.

What Gould was saying there in those arguments about traits evolving from things that might not always benefit the organism strikes logical man of science me as obvious, and emotional intuitive artist me as beautiful. Think of the evolutionary process as occasionally being Bob Ross seeing a small mistake on the canvas and saying “we’ll just make that a happy little tree.” What the artist knows is that the work is an exploration, and that beauty can present suddenly and unexpectedly from the most commonplace of things…things that you would never have noticed until that one small detail that changed, ever so slightly, changed everything. You put down some lines…maybe you make a mistake…maybe you draw it a little differently than you intended. You go to erase it but you look at it again and suddenly you see a direction you can take that is better than what you were thinking before.

This is the face of Stephan Borgrajewicz, who like me was born in Poland. In plate 175 it is seen by the Polish artist, Feliks Topolski. We are aware that these pictures do not fix the face as explore it; that the artist is tracing the detail almost as if by touch; and that each line that is added strengthens the picture but never makes it final. We accept that as the method of the artist.

-Jacob Bronowski, The Ascent of Man – Chapter 11, Knowledge or Certainty.

Art, like science, is a personal exploration of nature. Every line we put down is tentative. Does it add to the work or subtract from it? And the work is never finished, never final. You take it as far as you can and then you stop. This is the likeness between science and art that Bronowski illuminated for me. And as it turns out, you can see it everywhere in nature too. Evolution explores, it deals in possibilities, it is chaotic but not random; there the laws of physics behind what it does. Sometimes it is a gift to the organism, sometimes it is a dead end, and sometimes it is a dead end that, should the environment around the organism change, suddenly becomes a gift. Probably the evolutionary scientist would say that nature does whatever it damn well pleases. And the thing is, there is no plan. Only the physics of it.

“Pinker has spent his life defending those who would rank humans from best to worst…” and it strikes me as something akin to the never ending search for the great watchmaker. Surely evolution must have a purpose, and surely that purpose must be the slow steady perfection of the rational brain. And just look at us…we are the men of the mind…the great intellects of our age…surely we are the purpose evolution was aspiring to! But there is no purpose. There is only what the physics allows, and what time could make of what it had to work with on our little blue marble. That’s beautiful. It is sublime. Yes, the rational brain works for us, and very well. But it could have appeared anywhere, or nowhere. As Penn Juliette once put it, we hit the cosmic jackpot. But those that would make of our little walk from the African plains a purpose, and from that a hierarchy of race, are no different from the feverish pulpit thumpers, babbling about the saved and the unsaved (I was taught to never, Never assume you were saved), and never really wanting to know what God, let alone nature, hath wrought.

The more I am forced to consider this man due to current events, the more stuff like this keeps bubbling up from memory. 

First…the Sage of Baltimore:

He was, in fact, a charlatan, a mountebank, a zany without sense or dignity. His career brought him into contact with the first men of his time; he preferred the company of rustic ignoramuses. It was hard to believe, watching him in Dayton, that he had traveled, that he had been received in civilized societies, that he had been a high officer of state. He seemed only a poor clod like those around him, deluded by a childish theology, full of an almost pathological hatred of all learning, all human dignity, all beauty, all fine and noble things. He was a peasant come home to the barnyard. Imagine a gentleman, and you have imagined everything that he was not. What animated him from end to end of his grotesque career was simply ambition – the ambition of a common man to get his hand upon the collar of his superiors, or failing that, to get his thumb into their eyes. He was born with a roaring voice, and it had the trick of inflaming half-wits. His whole career was devoted to raising those half-wits against their betters, that he himself might shine.

Sound familiar? That was from H. L. Mencken’s killer obituary of William Jennings Bryan. But then, and annoyingly because it really embarrasses me at this age to have to admit that I once enthusiastically read Ayn Rand (Ronald Reagan cured me of this), and even kept my hard bound copy of Atlas Shrugged, this passage from said novel (thousand plus page political tract-rant…) came poking into my thoughts this morning. It’s about one of the villains in her story, Wesley Mouch (“mouch”…mooch…Get it? Get it? No Charles Dickens this lady…), who eventually becomes the nation’s economic dictator by way of trading favors and betraying every benefactor he ever had for the better deal he could get from someone else…

From then on, people helped Wesley Mouch to advance, for the same reason as that which had prompted Uncle Julius: they were people who believed that mediocrity was safe. The men who now sat in front of his desk had been taught that the law of causality was a superstition and that one had to deal with the situation of the moment without considering its cause. By the situation of the moment, they had concluded that Wesley Mouch was a man of superlative skill and cunning, since millions aspired to power, but he was the one who had achieved it. It was not within their method of thinking to know that Wesley Mouch was the zero at the meeting point of forces unleashed in destruction against one another.

One small benefit I retain from my dalliance with Rand is that whenever she comes up in a discussion about the degradation of American politics I can easily tell who is and is not talking out of their ass. Paul Ryan for example, when he said some years ago he was both a Christian and a follower of Ayn Rand. Really? REALLY?

But I’ll give the lady this: she had some really good lines (but then so did Reagan). That “zero at the meeting point” of powerful forces warring against each other metaphor has kept tapping me on the shoulder ever since Donald Trump sat down in the oval office.

Ever since that day people, pundits, and political junkies have been trying to suss out what the hell is going on inside that man. I think it’s somewhere there in the paragraphs above. A cup W.J. Bryant, a tablespoon of Wesley Mouch…and a pinch of Roy Cohn (just a pinch because that spice is Intense…).

From Tony Kushner’s Angels In America:

ROY: Your problem, Henry, is that you are hung up on words, on labels, that you believe they mean what the seem to mean. AIDS. Homosexual. Gay. Lesbian. You think there are names that tell you who someone sleeps with, but they don’t tell you that.

HENRY: No?

ROY: No. Like all labels they tell you one thing and one thing only: where does an individual so identified fit in the food chain, in the pecking order? Not ideology or sexual taste, but something much simpler: clout. Not who I fuck or who fucks me, but who will pick up the phone when I call, who owes me favors. This is what a label refers to. Now to someone who does not understand this, homosexual is what I am because I have sex with men. But really this is wrong. Homosexuals are not men who sleep with other men. Homosexuals are men who in fifteen years of trying cannot get a pissant antidiscrimination bill through City Council. Homosexuals are men who know nobody and who nobody knows. Who have zero clout. Does this sound like me Henry?

HENRY: No.

ROY: No. I have clout. A lot. I can pick up this phone, punch fifteen numbers, and you know who will be on the other end in under five minutes, Henry?

HENRY: The President.

ROY: Even better, Henry. His wife.

HENRY: I’m impressed.

ROY: I don’t want you to be impressed. I want you to understand. This is not sophistry. And this is not hypocrisy. This is reality. I have sex with men. But unlike nearly every other man of whom this is true, I bring the guy I”m screwing to the White House and President Reagan smiles at us and shakes his hand. Because what I am is defined entirely by who I am. Roy Cohn is not a homosexual. Roy Cohn is a heterosexual man, Henry, who fucks around with guys.

HENRY: OK Roy.

ROY: And what is my diagnosis, Henry?

HENRY: You have AIDS Roy.

ROY: No, Henry, no. AIDS is what homosexuals have. I have liver cancer.

(pause)

HENRY: Well, whatever the fuck you have Roy, it’s very serious, and I haven’t got a damn thing for you. The NIH in Bethesda has a new drug called AZT with a two year waiting list that not even I can get you onto. So get on the phone, Roy, and dial the fifteen numbers, and tell the First Lady you need in on an experimental treatment for liver cancer. Because you can call it any damn thing you want, Roy, but what it boils down to to is very bad news.

There’s the man. Clout. It’s all about clout. And pecking order. And favors. Who owes me favors? What can I get from them? What animated him from end to end of his grotesque career was simply ambition. You could almost rewrite that scene as between Donald and some fictional last man standing political advisor and it’s about the latest current indictment over this nation’s nuclear secrets and get on the phone and tell Vladimir you need help with some witnesses in a very unfair witch hunt, because you can call it any damn thing you want, Donald, but what it boils down to is very bad news.