Introduction to a Strange Subject

2007-08-18T14:11:00.001-07:00

OKEY-DOKEY
Statement of Purpose
By Bobby Campbell

Running riddle and fluid answer, OKEY-DOKEY is a mighty allegory of the fall and resurrection of mankind. It is a strange book, a compound of fable, symphony, and nightmare-a monstrous enigma beckoning imperiously from the shadowing pits of sleep. Its mechanics resemble those of a dream, a dream which has freed the author from the necessities of common logic and has enabled him to compress all periods of history, all phases of individual and racial development, into a circular design, of which every part is beginning, middle, and end.

That’s actually Joseph Campbell’s description of James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, a book from which I’ve borrowed a basic structure and used towards creating a new myth. Not unlike how Joyce used The Odyssey to generate Ulysses. OKEY-DOKEY attempts to overwhelm the reader w/ information, using pastiche, pun, & parable to disengage belief and suggest fantasy, amor et hilaritas! (love & cheerfulness) E.E. Cummings is said to have exclaimed at Ezra Pound, while visiting him in asylum, “I know what you’re up to you goddamn sadist! You’re trying to make people THINK!” To that charge I am at least guilty of premeditation. Marshal McLuhan suggests that Information Overload provokes Pattern Recognition, and the kind of Isomorphic Associations that often yield innovation, a resource more precious than $$$. The first 2 issues of OKEY-DOKEY have mostly just baffled the few people goodly enough to read them, but I think/hope that whatever the reader can parse together out of the chaos comes w/ a unique value that might somehow make their effort worth the while. The 3rd issue has over 75 pages of art already completed, whatever may get made of the story as current, will soon give way to something else entirely.

OKEY-DOKEY divides into 2 Narratives:

@gnosis! w/ art by Marcelino Balao III & JOKELAND w/ art by Todd Purse.

These 2 plot threads personify the dichotomy of Sun & Moon, which in Chinese translates as Intelligence. When you read the book you move through an intelligence. Intelligence & Movement translates as Tao or Process. OKEY-DOKEY is the process of @gnosis! & Jokeland weaving together such that no real division exists, suggesting the same of such famous bifurcations as Time/Space, Body/Mind, Man/Nature, Life/Death, Subject/Object, and whatever else. This union of opposites comes to expression in all the great myths of the world. I have tried to amalgamate this diverse multitude into a brand new form of forms and/or fart joke.

"in Filth, sublimity, in sublimity, filth."
-Giordano Bruno