“I
had a contempt for the uses of modern natural philosophy. It was very
different, when the masters of the science sought immortality and
power; such views, although futile, were grand; but now the scene was
changed. The ambition of the enquirer seemed to limit itself to the
annihilation of those vision on which my interest in science was
chiefly founded. I was required to exchange chimeras of boundless
grandeur for realities of little worth.”
– Mary Shelly, Frankenstein
“For
I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worthy to
be compared with the glory that is to be revealed to us.”
– Romans 8:18
“Life
boils down to brutality. It's fucked. Life is brutal and fucked up.”
– Noah Van Sciver, Saint
Cole
Living
ain't easy sometimes. Misery, mourning, heartbreak, and suffering
continue to engulf the world despite our technological advances,
oftentimes because of them. The darkness of sorrow is the constant
shadow cast in the bright light of joy. It's thick. It blankets. It's
universal.
There's
this compulsion to utter some sort of statement like, “Ah, life...”
and weasel the self into the comfortable confines of the community of
despondency – that warm, liquid space we tend to float in when it
all gets too much, you know, to keep on keeping on. Because, yeah,
life can be fucking brutal sometimes.
Have
you been reading about the spate of abandoned children being found in
fecal smeared houses lately? Or those homeless people being doused in
gasoline and set aflame? Have you heard of the massacres in Nigeria?
Have you been following the waves of horror that passes itself off
nightly as news?
Fuck.
It's incredible what we do to each other. The pain that people bring
to the lives of others is seemingly unending.
Then,
of course, there's the pain we put upon ourselves, the sharpened
sticks we poke into our own eyes out of guilt or shame or some sad
dysmorphia. When you slam your head against the red brick walls, the
blood that gushes covers you completely. When you spend two years of
your life carefully planning on how to end it, your pain is whole, it
is who you are.
And
even though you keep turning your head, you always end up facing
something.
It's
pretty fucking amazing how many of us actually make it through.
Noah
Van Sciver's new book from Fantagraphics, Saint
Cole, has got me
thinking about my relationship with misery. It's also got me thinking
about the obligations of the artist to his or her art, and, maybe
more importantly, to the audience.
Because
Saint Cole is part of
the long tradition of the balladry of brutality. It sings the song of
the sink hole caused by a life lived in response to expectations it
could never fulfill. It's the chant you hear in the places people
gather to drown out their sorrows, it echoes in the alley behind the
neighbor's house whom you've never met, it rings in your own head
from time to time, that is, if you are sensitive to it.
See,
I had a former student call me the other day and say, “Elkin, why
didn't you tell me it was going to be like this?” “Like what?”
I asked innocently. “Like life...” he replied at 28 years of age,
up to his eyes in student debt, working at a job he hates for people
he hates even more, licking the wounds of a failed marriage,
questioning what he's still doing playing this game.
What
answer could I have given him?
Yeah,
brother, life is hard. Obligations. Expectations. We're fed a crock
of shit so often that it starts to taste like ambrosia, and it
suffuses even our dreams.
We
do it to ourselves all the time. We curl up our fists in response and
end up only punching ourselves in the neck over and over again. And
we reach out, because we've only got each other after all, to our
family, our friends, our lovers to save us from self-harm. And yet
even that, sometimes, ain't enough.
Sometimes
the expectations and aspirations of our family, our friends, our
lovers adds to or transmutes our own and the weight of that shit can
be measured with truck scales.
So
it is with Noah Van Sciver's Saint
Cole.
Saint
Cole follows the story
of the everyman Joe, saddled with a live-in girlfriend and an
unplanned and unwanted newborn baby boy. It's a story of the lower
echelon of society, the ever growing mass of those of us living
paycheck to paycheck constantly slipping down the ladder we have been
teased to climb, trying to hold on to what we have while the top
keeps telescoping to the heavens and the lows are just as low if not
getting lower.
When
you get beaten down over and over again and that light at the end of
the tunnel dims daily like it's powered by a seven-year-old Duracell,
despondency becomes the constant voice-over actor narrating every
aspect of your life. In Saint
Cole, that's where we
find Joe. And, like so many others who are caged, cribbed, and
confined by the jail cell of poor choices and worse economic
prospects, he turns it up to turn it down.
It's
nothing new. We've seen this story of self-destruction in the
protagonists of other works of fiction of this type. From Hubert
Selby, Jr.'s Last Exit
to Brooklyn to Darren
Aronofsky's take on Selby's Requiem
for a Dream, from the
prose of Charles Bukowski to Figgis's adaptation of John O'Brien's
Leaving Las Vegas,
we see individuals make the decision to numb themselves from the
confusion and the stress and the self-loathing infusing their lives
in a way that is, sadly, almost inevitable. It's hubristic in its
way, the choice to escape, and sometimes it becomes the final act,
sometimes it becomes something else, but regardless of its end, the
journey itself is brutal.
Of
Saint Cole,
Van Sciver said, “Sure it's brutal, but in my own experience it's
not unrealistic. I know these guys. You have to work harder for less
today. And when your life is like that, just a grind for nothing,
you'll turn to chemicals to dull it. And you'll make rash decisions.
Sorry to rant, but I get so frustrated with how badly everyone is
fucked in this era.”
And
that frustration is palpable in this book. Saint
Cole is a downhill
slope of unleashed grievance, unrelenting and unremitting in its
pace. As a reader you catch your ski on a rut at the top of the run
and tumble end-over-end gaining momentum as your body darkens with
new bruises and blood starts to run from all the wounds re-opened in
your fall leaving you searching for a bag for your teeth. And just
when you think you're almost to the bottom, there are still new deep
black holes in which to fall.
Yeah,
it's brutal.
Brutal.
I
keep coming back to that word. I'm stuck with it. Saint
Cole is brutal.
But
to what end is this barrage? What purpose does it serve as a work of
art other than as an opportunity for the artist to unload? Why does
Saint Cole
bore into my consciousness, prompt me to put aside so many other
responsibilities to write all these words about it? Why does it make
me want to share it with everyone I know?
Is
it that “transformative power of art” – that purging of pity
and fear that Aristotle was so keen on? Is it that somehow by going
through this with Van Sciver we come out the other side a better
person?
But
really, there's little that's redemptive in this book.
Maybe
Saint Cole
functions as the viscous wallow instead – the comfort of “you're
not alone” that makes this book such a personal experience for me?
Questions....
I
guess I'm brought back to my earlier rumination, about the
obligations of the artist to his or her art, and, maybe more
importantly, to the audience.
By
creating a work like Saint
Cole, does Van Sciver
don the hospital whites of well-trained nurse who's come to our room
to help us with our pain? Is he the cardigan-wearing, pipe-smoking,
belly-rubbing therapist practicing counseling with some tough love
techniques? Or is he a cop in full riot gear swinging his baton with
impunity at our heads as we fall to the street, tight in a fetal
position.
What
is the role of the artist in this situation? Does he have a
responsibility to his audience? Or does the act of creation,
especially one that is this purgative in nature, operate in a moral
vacuum?
If
a work of art beats the living shit out of you, is that the
responsibility of the artist or is it the albatross of audience. When
we carry our reactions to confrontational creative acts chained
around our neck can we still point our finger at the creator?
I'd
like to think that in a perfect world, an artist would be allowed to
create unfettered by any sort of moral compass. That the act of
creation alone is a sacred thing, and that, once created, the art
exists in its entirety, a thing of beauty insofar as it is an act of
imagination. As it holds neither good nor ill in itself, the power is
not in the piece but in our experience with it. When things go south,
it's because of our apperception and all that that entails.
Doesn't
that make it our responsibility then? Maybe we shouldn't hold the
artist accountable at all for what they make us feel or do or say in
reaction to their creation.
Then
again... I began this review, or whatever this is, with a quote from
Mary Shelley's Frankenstein...
I
offer no answers, only more questions. But a work like Saint
Cole demands this sort
of debate insofar as it punctuates as it punches, illuminates as it
beclouds.
Saint
Cole begins with a
black hole centered on a white page. On the next page a text box
overlaps the hole and asks, “How
did I let things get so out of hand?”
The final page of the book, after everything that happens within,
returns to that same black hole. Darkness is the framing device for a
brutally unyielding story of a man who systematically smashes gaping
wounds into his own life with an industrial-sized sledgehammer. From
the sickly colored cover to the too-tight binding of the book itself,
everything about this work forces you to confront some ugly truths.
And
somehow I know this has value. For some reason I cannot shake Saint
Cole from my mind. I
want to shove it into the hands of everyone I know, though I worry,
of course, what it will trigger in them.
But
then again, is that my responsibility?
Saint
Cole can be purchased from Fantagraphics
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