Chaos Floss
Cameled Millie tends to scoff
Heavily into felafel
And her Office Box is boffo
Owing to her mishegoss
She’s the undisputed Boss
Doing a Chaos-themed work is like having a Get Out of Jail Free card. Any issue the viewer might have may be dismissed or resolved with “Well, it’s not SUPPOSED to make sense/be coherent/be consistent/be a well-balanced composition/rhyme perfectly/scan perfectly. It is a demonstration of Chaos, which is Randomness, or Disorder.”
But I don’t want nor need a Get Out of Jail Free card. Just as James Joyce cheerfully explained any passage of his landmark yet extremely dense Magnum Opus, Finnegans Wake, so too I am eager to demonstrate that there is a method to my chaos.
The title is “Chaos Floss.” What does that mean? It might mean Random Inconsequence, and I think it does, a bit, in this case. At left is a seeming agitated figure holding his head. He appears to be enclosed in an oval or sphere but is in fact enclosed in the negative space created by the two leftmost panels of a four-panel sequence. There are spheres, increasingly small, upward and to the right, which when viewed with the negative space of the figure’s enclosure might be remindful of a series of photos of a planet in orbital motion. The gravitational pull creating the orbit appears to be the “2019” of the signature/date slugline. Did the artist do that on purpose? Does it matter? Does it work with the rest of the page? (Note from the artist: I THINK it does, just as the rug in Jeffrey Lebowski’s front room “really tied the room together,” but I am not the best judge, being partial to my own efforts. YOU are the best judge.)
“Chaos Floss” may also mean the equivalent of Dental Floss, which is a stringlike product intended to improve dentition by extricating unwanted material from the gums and teeth. Chaos Floss in that case would be some means of demystifying the apparently chaotic and revealing the underlying order and-or purpose of the subject at hand.
In the second panel, there’s a guy in a chair, seeming to reach up to touch the underjaw of a giant bird. If you do an Internet search on “Jack Kirby Metron,” you’ll find a similar character, but one a great deal more sophisticated. Metron pops in and out of places using his dimensionally-transportive chair, and he is so hungry for knowledge that Orion of New Genesis claimed that he would “sell the universe into slavery” to get some. The bird I have drawn, that this Bizarro-Metron is reaching for, greatly resembles a creation of mine that I called “The Tutti-Frutti Bird of Benign Insanity.” So in my own private universe, this panel symbolizes the desirability of getting in touch with Benign Insanity. Even the most avid student of my oeuvre (and there are none such that I know of, avid or otherwise) would be hard put to have interpreted that panel without the help that I have just provided.
But I am not trying to be obscure. I would not expect anybody to struggle with the meaning of my image. I hope that, stripped of whatever meaning there may be, my images are visually engaging, and might lend themselves to storytelling that the viewer her/himself may provide. I try to make them so.
Friends, I could go on and on, but it is time, or past time, to wrap up. The poem has a bad and possibly meaningless pun in it, “Cameled Millie” (chamomile), and a lot of f-sounds and s-sounds and soft-o sounds. (“Asinine Alliteration and Upped Assonance?” he asked playfully, vulgarly.) The dark patterned bananas are a visual pun on “going bananas,” which is 1970s American slang for acting crazy. Even more than Chaos, Craziness seems to be the theme of this page. I trust and hope that it is benign craziness.
I would love comments and questions, as always, Friends. Thank you for your attention!
