For my senior Independent Study, I plan on writing and drawing a full length graphic novel, titled “FISH THAT DON’T EXIST” (FTDE). I hope to complete at least 100 pages.
FTDE is about the adhesion of myth that binds science, religion and art. It is about the impossibility of human knowledge and of human faith. It is separated into four sections, which span from 1650 to 1960, and include characters such as Sir Isaac Newton, Charles Darwin, Albert Einstein and the biblical figures Adam, Eve and Noah.
FTDE takes place in London during the Wonderful Plague of 1666, aboard the H.M.S. Beagle, in the giant shell of a musical mollusk (the first concert hall), and in a bathysphere plummeting to the bottom of the ocean for three impossible weeks.
Replete with fictional fauna, made-up theories, ersatz cartography, nonsensical diagrams, pseudo-science and fabricated zoology, FTDE tells the story of the Homo sapien, from Genesis to Revelations.
I’ve been posting my art and fiction on Facebook, so feel free to join the group “FISH THAT DON’T EXIST”; a forthcoming graphic novel from Will Santino,” and check my stuff out!
ó Will Santino ’11
Eve’s first dream didn’t have Adam. Instead, it was filled with the animals. She had glimpsed them in her first few moments of existence, dark patterns against a purple sky. When the purple drained into black she could feel where her body ended, and everything else began. The taste of dirt was thrilling. Throughout the night she awoke from her dreams, terrified and confused, and listened to the hush-rumble of so many nocturnal conversations. We might say that she was experiencing ontological angst, or that particular brand of weltshmerz that arises from recognizing your shadow in a photograph. We can never know how Eve felt the first night, alone in paradise.
The next day, Adam and Eve began to name the animals. Eve found it fun at first. They spat syllables, laughing. Cat! Giraffe! Ox! But the day was so bright and the animals so multiform and everywhere that soon it overwhelmed her. The names of the animals ran together, like colors mixed to brown.
Catoxpelicanantratdeerratantpelicanoxcat. She sat down in the grass, breathing hard; her day-old lachrymal glands responded to something/somewhere and initiated a release of warm saline water. She wanted to ask Adam questions, so many questions, but she didn’t know what questions were. That was one of her questions. The only words she knew were the names of animals, those dream-shapes running through the trees. Later (hours hadn’t been caught yet), she saw her face reflected in the eyes of an unnamed animal. She was walking in a grove of fruit trees, tasting everything. Dirt was just the beginning. The animal had orange hair and black skin and walked on its knuckles when it wasn’t swinging from a tree. She was reaching for another small-purple when a hand so similar to her hand also reached for a small-purple. She turned. Her face was bent across its wet eyes, two obsidian cabochons set deep in high, wrinkled cheeks, and her face ó who she was, the boundary of where she ended and not-her began ó caught in both, bent, obscured in each by an asterix of light which appended to that cracked, simian face a footnote of intellect and for the first time she felt as if she had communicated. She wanted to know: do I exist? She wanted to know: how do I know who I am? The taste of fruit made dirt seem disgusting; this was a discovery that gave her hope. She was uncovering a system to the nonsense within herself, decocting the raw emotion, separating sadness from happiness. The next day Adam pointed at the four legged animal with the sandy mane and the roar, and said ëLion.’ She repeated him. But she was thinking: lion? Adam pointed at the animals soaring in the sky, and said ëBird.’ Eve pointed at a bird-shaped cloud. ëBird?’ Adam shook his head. Eve wanted to know: what was the difference? What if she was not truly herself, but an exact non-her floating whitely in the overhead blue. She couldn’t wonder: am I an imitation of myself? Her cheeks grew hot and she felt tears gather again on the lip of her lower eyelid. She looked towards the trees, for her friend. The apple was a kind of prison-break.
A very long time after the fall of Mankind, on a flat earth ensconced in celestial layers, one of Adam and Eve’s great-etc. grandchildren was magically impregnated. A zygote named Jesus began to grow. Fifteen hundred and forty three years after the birth of a cosmic sacrifice the earth was round, and a Polish priest named Niclaus Copernicus published “De revolutionibus orbium coelestium”, which advanced a heliocentric model of the universe. A century after that Galileo Galilei magnified the heavens on the lens of a telescope and discovered flaws in Aristotle’s quintessential spheres: solar acne, mountains on the moon. But stop: what comes next? Newton’s “Principia,” that mathematic grimoire? Gravity? Listen to this: a chapter of the scientific revolution has been forgotten. On the eighth of October in the year 1660 an incandescent color-changing cephalopod was caught in the nets of an English fishing vessel, and the crew went insane. According to the Wiffelwoolian wharf’s dockmaster’s official report, the fishermen were “laughing and crying, declaring Paradoxes, and asking Im-possible Questions.” A sixty three year old professor of Theology and Natural Philosophy at Oxford University named Maximilian Van Duult was called to the wharf to inspect the squid. He barely survived. He would later announce that it was impossible to truly study the specimen, for “in the first second, the Colours of its Tentacules expanded to-wards mineself, a Wormth washed over me, and a Happynes did purvade my Hole Body. The next second Ideas & Concepts became multiform. By the third I began Seeing colors & shapes, and I felt as if Drunk, and almost fell to the grownd.” The next day, when he had recovered from his headache, he wrote down a phrase: “Ocular Inebriate.” What was the first organism to experience a dream? What came first, humans or clouds? Did Eve do it on purpose? Did Maximilian Van Duult exist? Did he really discover and name a species that plunged Europe into a decade of incontinence, nimptopsicality, and outrageous expression, called by most historians “the Doodle?” In this article we will seek to understand the impact of the “benthic neurobachanalian,” Spirula absurda (Loop, 1905), with special attention spent on Van Duult’s theory of Nephoneirogenesis and his microfaunal explanations for sense.† The Doodle, or ëThe Wonderful Plague,’ (Iris-Green, 1867) was a cigarette dropped on the map of the seventeenth century; we can never know what disappeared in that crisp hole, but we can examine its edges. First, we will review the events of the proto-party of 1602 as recorded in the Pisseldorfian papers. Then we will attempt an overview of the Great Hangover of 1671.
Does everything begin with nonsense? What happens during the adolescence of an idea?
Catoxdogeaglehipposnakewormleopardsheepiguanakoalapolarbrownpandabearcatvulturecheetahchameleonmolesquirrlbatjackelanacondacayotepeafowlhentigerarmadillotapirmousehorsebuffalobuffalobuffalobuffalobuffalobuffalo
All drawings are hand-drawn by Santino to accompany his “Fish That Don’t Exist” IS project.