Chins Vs. Beards: The Art of Rudy Rauben

Rudy Rauben has lived and died a few lives, from the sound of it. In a previous incarnation he once served as art director, graphic designer or illustrator for a variety of magazines, including Dragon, Amazing Stories, and Reality Hackers. You may have seen some his of illustrations in collectible card games like Magic: The Gathering or the H.P. Lovecraft inspired Mythos.

He first contacted me out of interest for Mythos Media, we got to talking, and developed a dialog that went on for quite some time. The first conversation here was transcribed in 2007, wherein we touch on everything from myth and creativity, the I Ching, internal Kung fu and the artistic process to bizarre times at Reality Hackers and experiences working for TSR and Wizards of the Coast. The second was in 2010, where we discuss a shift of perspective and challenges facing creative artists attempting to find a place for themselves in the modern marketplace.

James Curcio: To start… I’m interested in hearing more about your most recent comic project, and your past history as an artist.

Rudy Rauben: As my current project is based more closely upon my actual experiences (than The Medicine Show), I can kill two birds with one stone here, to some degree…

Here’s the skeletal version:

For better or for worse, I grew up near the home town of Dungeons & Dragons. It was just starting to get popular when I was in high school. Being a very rebellious, artistic teen, in a religiously conservative family and rural area, I soon fell in with the gaming community that the burgeoning D&D business was attracting nearby. I ended up working at TSR (D&D’s parent company) for a number of years, moving through the ranks, finally ending up as the art director of the magazine section.

At first it was great. The environment was very creative. My mentors were these laid back ol’ veteran newspaper men or beatniks with great record collections. One of my earliest jobs was to send out back issue orders and keep the LP record changer stacked and running! The offices were in an old, broken-down Victorian. Got to learn the tricks of the trade from artists and editors who had much more hands on experience and training than I, and I just sucked that up like a dry sponge. The atmosphere was so very congenial. It really spoiled me.

As D&D became more popular, TSR became more corporate. Eventually, our nice little publication staff was required to leave the Victorian hide-away and move into the corporate HQ with the suits. We all were stuffed into this windowless, industrial cubicle-land and subjected to the suit’s BS management tactics du jour — all your typical corporate horror stories basically. Rot set in.

That almost gave me a nervous breakdown: increasing stress and workloads, fewer and then eventually no carrots, lay-off anxiety driving horrific morale all around, almost every day for months and then even years at a time… I was still quite young and had little capacity to place it all in context.

About this time, I made the acquaintance of a guy (pen named Dr. Mabuse) who happened to be a writer for this Berkeley, CA magazine called Reality Hackers. We hit it off immediately. We were into similar things: Robert Anton Wilson, Peter Tosh, Church of the Subgenius, boho wackiness in general. As it turned out, this kind of thing was par for the course with Reality Hackers as well, and they happened to be minus an art director. By then I was so sick to death of D&D-land: I just bolted for Berkeley with “Dr. Mabuse,” to take the job, never really looking back or bothering to make sure that the contracts were in order.

So, at Reality Hackers (which later became Mondo 2000, after I had already left) I met Queen Mu, R.U. Sirius and St. Jude (the pseudonyms we routinely employed). Leary, Wilson, McKenna, Rupert Sheldrake and John Lilly were kind of routine fixtures of that scene, along with plenty of hackers, crackers, artists, hippies, anarchists, punks, occultists, swingers, Silicon Valley overspill, and designer drugs. The list of robust characters was endless. It was a tremendous amount of fun, creatively very stimulating, and I really loved the people I was working with. I became close friends with the notorious hacker grrrl-nerd St. Jude.

She had great taste in comics by the way, turned me on to a lot of great Indy comix stuff… poor little Errata Stigmata…

But eventually I ran afoul of Queen Mu (the publisher of Reality Hackers). First impression: she seemed to be this kind of brainy, psychedelic hippy hostess who espoused these very egalitarian ethics, but that later proved not to be the case, at least not when push came to shove with me. R.U. Sirius was the heart and soul of the magazine, but ultimately it seemed as though he had to defer to her, I guess ’cause she held the purse strings or something. She kind of sold me a bill of goods, and I bought it hook, line and sinker. R.U. Sirius tried his best to compensate me for the resulting disparity, but there was only so much he could do without jeopardizing the magazine’s financing. Later, Sirius and St. Jude would fall out with Queen Mu, but I was long gone by then. I wasn’t there all that long, when all was said and done, but they sure were tumultuous times.

Because the housing Queen Mu had promised me (to compensate for a lower salary set against a much higher cost of living) never materialized I ended up bunking with this peculiar computer programmer/hacker who I knew through Reality Hackers, another of their writers. I’ll just call him “Max.” Now Max had a rather elaborate resume, very little of which anyone seemed to be able to substantiate. I’m still not exactly sure what parts are fact and which fiction. He was adept with computer programming, that was about all that was certain. Max basically claimed to be on the run from the NSA. In his teens he had supposedly been caught hacking into sensitive military/intelligence databases. As a result he had been forced to work for the spooks or suffer the consequences. The spooks gave him specialized training: he acted like he was Jason Bourne or something. Once operational, he began crafting and planting computer viruses in foreign nations’ computer systems for the spooks, but then used similar viruses to blackmail his way out of spook service. Or so he said.

Max cruised along “revealing” bits and pieces of this sorted story, and that certainly gave him a certain cache that this nerdy young man would not otherwise have had. Strange people were always just across the street watching him. The easy answer would be to say it was all just BS crafted by a troubled personality to get attention. He tended to be “Mr. Know-it-all,” loved to hold forth, play at celebrity. The thing is I did repeatedly witness Max being visited by a man who others in the Berkeley scene identified as a Naval Intelligence officer who had been shopping at the local “alchemists’” pharmacies. The plot thickens. Whenever Max got a visit from this guy he was left swimming in cold, hard cash. Max was rather blasé about it all: yeah the guy was a spook, and yeah, he was designing viruses for him. Okay…

My savings were almost nil when one day I woke up to find Max sitting at the foot of my bed in lotus position, staring at me with way too much grim, unblinking aplomb. “Hey, what are you doing?” I ask. Max says to me, and he didn’t seem to be joking, “oh I’ve just been sitting here for the last few hours considering how any day when I find that I haven’t killed my roommate while he slept, so that I could observe the Rorschach pattern his splattering brains would create on the wall behind his bed, is a good day, I guess.” Okay. This is really psycho freak show time now…

That episode was just the beginning. I suppose it may have had something to do with me trying to explain to him that people were comparing notes on things he had said and claims he had made, and thereby he was losing credibility: people were discovering that he had said one thing to one person and then contradictory things to another. I tried to suggest to him that he might want to chill out and stop playing so fast and loose with the truth. Dead cold silence was his only response, and ongoing, brooding iciness thereafter. I was trying to be helpful, but he may have either seen me as the instigator of his undoing or just decided to shoot the messenger in frustration.

Around that scene the idea of there being baseline “truth” or “reality” was terribly out of fashion. Reality was generally considered to be wholly malleable (so personal ethics were similarly malleable)… I think it is our perceptions of reality that are malleable, but this is not to say that there is no baseline reality at all, you know?

JC: Yes…

RR: And Max loved to play with guns. He was endlessly reading pulp fantasy and sci-fi novels, like one or more a day, most days. He seriously claimed to me a Zen master as well as professional shaman, ninja and gambler… All at around 22 years old. Pathetic boy-man or seriously dangerous? My guts told me there was something seriously wrong there, I just wasn’t sure what the threat level might actually be. Queen Mu and I were at each other’s throats as well, so I just decided to split that scene before something tragic happened.

I wandered down through Arizona and worked odd jobs for a while, eventually started freelancing illustration again. Illustrated a lot of RPGs, some science fiction journals and various junk. The pay usually sucked. Tried working in comics a few times, but the pay was even worse — truly laughable.

Eventually the whole collectible card thing took off. Did many, many of those: On The Edge, Everway, Mythos, and Magic the Gathering most notably. The Magic illustrations paid better than usual, so that made getting by a bit easier than it had been since going freelance. The art directors were decent and respectful, there was a good deal of creative freedom, and they were attempting to freshen up the tired old sword and sorcery themes.

When Hasbro bought out Wizards of the Coast that scene quickly went to hell. The game was more popular and profitable than ever, but commissions and royalties were nonetheless cut. My art directors became increasingly demoralized. The creative freedom soon evaporated along with the multi-ethnic, cross-gender themes.

Marketing, toy and product tie-ins began to directly encumber the creative process. I began to feel like I couldn’t generate any sincere inspiration with all the awkward logistics that became involved. After a year or so of that continually worsening I just decided I needed a break from it. But then I never went back. Just couldn’t. Got my bearings back, finally, and they were markedly in a different direction.

So much so that, coupled with a brutal divorce, I shaved my head, renounced my vanity, legally changed my name and just wandered off.
I had been doing comics on the side for quite a few years already, and I finally decided “all right already, time I put my money where my mouth is here and give the comic priority — that’s what I feel genuine inspiration for, I need to be true to that.” I mean, my muse had been increasingly peevish with me for some time about this.

That brings us up into fairly recent history.

JC: I have seen this in media and arts businesses I’ve worked with or helped create. Succeeding “too well” in business terms is its own kind of curse.

I’ve also had a similar experience in my way, in terms of hitting a breaking point, dropping everything, shaving my head, and disappearing, right down to the nasty divorce — but I’m not sure I was really walking away from quite so much. My “fame” only extends to very small circles at this point… Back then, even less.

RR: I hardly consider what notoriety I had much wider. And yours seems like a more accurate reflection of the artistic concerns we seem to share. Anyway, that which we call a bull thistle by any other name would smell…

I still remember that day’s message via the I Ching:

“He lends grace to the beard on his chin: Regards form (the beard) being treated as more important than content (the chin on which the beard grows).”

In my case it was amusing, and occasionally slightly disturbing to see how marketing was cooking most of this minor fame up. It’s rather ingenious how that gets done, with the bigger collectible card operations, for instance. The slightly disturbing aspect is how some folks actually start to take that ersatz PR/marketing-generated “star power” seriously when they’re given a moment in the spotlight… but hey, it’s the cult of celebrity that most of modern society and commerce bows down to, I guess. Me, I’m thinking of Hokusai, or Sun Luc Tang…thinking how much more there is to learn and do, no time to rest on laurels, especially plastic ones. Or I’m thinking “what would Joe Strummer say?” It just embarrasses me.

So, to get back to your initial question… Part of my current project draws upon some of the characters and scenarios of these circumstances, particularly the Berkeley experiences. Subtexts having to do with the I Ching, internal Kung fu and lucid dreaming are also involved — inner and outer dimensions kind of riffing on one another. I’ll likely be exploring how Leary’s and McKenna’s ideas about human “mutation” or “transformation” stack up against those of people like Chuang Tzu, Jiddu Krishnamurti and David Bohm. The protagonist’s understanding is gradually developed, through various circumstances and encounters, in a way that’s roughly analogous to my own. You know how it goes: elements from multiple actual people get conflated into single characters, the names get changed to protect the innocent, banal events get downplayed or omitted, history is jiggled, and your Dakini gets to take on flesh and walk the pages so Her otherwise unseen influence can be made visible to others.

JC: I know exactly how that goes, yes… it’s the same process I’ve been following for as long as I can remember… For better or worse.

RR: My contacting you initially was prompted by reading that interview with you on Reality Sandwich. I was impressed with your take on art and myth; it very much parallels where my own head is at these days, and for seemingly similar reasons…

JC: I’m happy you did. I’ve been reading The Medicine Show… it has the added benefit of fitting in surprisingly well to the general cosmology we created for some of our other Mythos Media… How do you look at the world-building and literary aspect of it?

RR: In the past, I’ve tended to relate to my comics more like poetry than prose. As such, I’m surprisingly content with they way The Medicine Show turned out. But this next comic project is looking less allegorical. I’m referencing experiences I’ve actually had more directly now, so it’s likely to be more contemporary and naturalistic in that way. Nonetheless, as the Medicine Show’s underlying “cosmology” is basically expanded upon in this current project.

I’d certainly be more curious to hear more about your take on this tree we both, apparently, seem to be barking up. For instance, this “agent” business, which seems to come up a lot in your work: Privately I’ve been employing the term “agents of evolution” for quite a few years now, never realizing others were also using it in a similar context — for this whole loose, elusive, subterranean current of people conscientiously working, each in their own way, with their own resources and talents, to somehow evolve the conditions on this planet. That seems synchronous with the notion of “wayfarers” or “wanderers” (found in classical Taoist literature): having to find your own path, steadfastly go your own way, and thereby organically and psychically improving the conditions for the whole environment, naturally. These “agents” are an unfolding element in my current project.

JC: That’s kind of eerie, actually. It is one of those things I never really bothered to fully explain because I don’t think it can be fully explained — you kind of either get it, or you don’t. And we definitely seem to be coming from a similar corner on these things… Which is, quite frankly, pretty rare.

RR: Generally I just stand clear, keep my mouth shut and observe; but in your case the affinities seem pronounced enough that I feel as if I would somehow be doing them a disservice if I was to remain too circumspect.

I tend to think it occurs when people start to really tap into their own creative voice, be they a visual artist, writer, musician, yogi or yogini, martial artist, weekend gardener, parent, small child or whatever; everybody can drink at this “well,” whether their conscious of it or not. There is always the creative, inspired option in Life. I mean, that is how it unfolded for me — it started with the Zen-like experience of learning how to let inspiration come through unimpeded.

It is like there is this instinctive impetus coming through that so many of us are feeling. We each cloth that in our own way, but the underlying signal seems to be basically the same. We’re not just fantasizing, this isn’t escapist, there is some serious mojo percolating up. It’s the “mysterious pass” — it’s wuji — it’s the pregnant void — it’s the lotus blossom floating on the pond of our minds. You don’t know exactly where that insight or inspiration emerged from, but that doesn’t diminish its vitality or cogency.

It tends to be very personal, meaningful and developmental, even if that doesn’t necessarily communicate to others so readily.

Speaking of us “barking up the same tree,” as well as alluding to my own cosmology: while attempting to familiarize myself with Mythos Media, I encountered an interview with you on Greylodge, and was, once again, intrigued by the uncanny parallels with my own experience and artistic intentions. I was pleased to hear you advocating interacting “laterally” rather than hierarchically. Some folks suggest that the classical Taoists like Chuang Tzu were anarchists, but I think this notion of lateral cooperation is the more graceful way of framing those ethics, given how much baggage now comes with the word “anarchy.” It certainly is a central message in the I Ching, once you strip out the feudal and patriarchal overlays that were interjected over the centuries of Chinese history to maintain hierarchy by twisting or obscuring the egalitarian message.

I work almost exclusively with Carol Anthony and Hanna Moog’s version of the I Ching these days, and it really emphasizes that dichotomy there; which made the whole function of the I Ching far more clear to me.

JC: I would be very interested in seeing this work translated into a language that would be more accessible to people living in today’s world, rather than the world of China quite some time ago. Some things about our lives, and many things about the world haven’t changed, but many have — especially the language and mental maps we use to describe it.

RR: It is a great psycho nautical tool once all that clutter is cleared away, or at least pointed out. These ladies really did something beautiful here. Please understand, this isn’t your average fortune-telling version of the I Ching. If that’s what your looking for you’ll likely find it disappointing or even heretical. This one is an incisive tool of psychological yoga and self-reflection. It’ll burn your ego if you give it half a chance! Very liberating.

JC: About anarchy… The Chuang Tzu was somewhat anarchistic, at least it seemed like that kind of an ideological, political motion when compared with Confucianism. There’s always that pendulum swing between chaos and order, you see it in the history of any culture, anywhere on the globe, throughout time. The Chuang Tzu was also more political than the Tao Teh Ching. On the other hand, I’m the asshole who gave his Taoism professor in college a blank page, when she asked on a written test “What is the Tao?” “Whatever isn’t asking this question,” right? …She gave me an F. I guess she was looking for it in a historical context. Stupid stunt, but what a question!

RR: I’d say you were right on! I give you an “A,” for anarchy, in the finest sense of that word. The classical Taoists were oh so wary of indoctrination and misguided pedagogy.

Makes me think of something from years ago… I was watching as this Kung fu teacher spent a great deal of time lecturing his would be followers on what he framed as traditional “martial code of conduct”: social duties and obligations to your “superiors”, how to kowtow to “superiors” properly — even in public, outside his classroom — why you should never challenge the price your “master” sets his fees at, just this endless array of Confucian-inspired B.S. Finally he aroused the trickster in me and I had to pass him this quote from Chung Tzu:

Confucius visited Lao-Tzu and lectured him regarding the virtues of charity and duty to one’s neighbors. Lao-Tzu listened patiently, but then had this to say: ”The chaff kicked up from winnowing grain will blind a person’s eyes so that he cannot see whether he is coming or going, much less the points of the compass. Mosquitoes will keep a person awake all night long with their incessant biting. And just in the same way all this talk of charity and duty to one’s neighbor drives me insane! Please sir! Let’s try to keep the world’s affairs in their original state of simplicity. Let us try to maintain our natural modesty. Just like the wind blowing where it will, let virtue establish itself. Why do you feel the need to force these issues so? It’s like you’re trying to hunt down an escaped convict while all the while beating a loud drum.

“The snow-goose is white without having to bleach itself. The raven is black without having to apply any dye. The original simplicity of black and white are not something you can argue about. The fabricated worlds of fame and reputation are not worthy of expansion. When the pool in your courtyard dries up, and the fishes you have supposedly cared for so lovingly are left on dry ground, moistening them with your spitty kisses will provide pitifully little consolation to them. Better that you had left them in their native waters in the first place.”

When Confucius left Lao-Tzu that day he would not speak for another three. He returned to his disciples and they grew concerned: “Master, so how did it go? Did you set that old codger Lao-Tzu straight?”

“I saw a rainbow-colored creature,” replied Confucius, “soaring amid the clouds as naturally as he lingered upon the meadows and threaded through the trees.

Wavering hues danced upon his hide as he lead us to a sparkling stream, both lit by the same dance of sunlight. He fed on earth and sky, the formed, and the unformed, the visible, and the invisible. How could my mouth not fall agape? I struggled to close it. How then would you suggest that I should set Lao-Tzu straight?”

He tried to not reveal his agitation, but then he launched into a lengthy refutation of Chung Tzu’s message, suggesting how society was falling into dangerous chaos because of such ideas. As an example of this he offered this seemingly exaggerated story of a “hippy” student who would not wear his uniform and supposedly belched and farted at formal meals with his “masters”. It was both sad and hilarious, how his ego was struggling to maintain his privileged status in the face of this classic egalitarian message that basically says “be yourself and stop trying to lord over other people, you’re making matters worse, not better.”

It brought to mind the image of that wandering Taoist who, on a cold night, happily warmed his bare ass by wagging it in front of a camp fire stoked by a large wood carving of a Buddha. You know, fuck the idols, fuck worship, get to the practical essence of the teaching: Liberate your own true self and thereby liberate others! That is the most respectful, loving and dynamic thing a person can do. Society won’t crumble if you do, quite the contrary. Contrary to the common propaganda this is not a recipe for unbridled licentiousness or mental disease.

JC: It would seem to me that both extremes wouldn’t really be ideal from the perspective of Taoist alchemy. Or any sane perspective, for that matter.

RR: It is foolhardy for beginners to focus on that before they have the insight to see how ego, cause and effect interact, thereby naturally having good reason to moderate their behavior without any need to rely on external controllers; yet somehow the value of autonomy, adaptability and transformation can hardly be emphasized enough, in their proper context, with an eye out for the underlying principles and ethics that are not just there arbitrarily…

JC: You’d think any would-be sefu should realize that the whole point of the training is that an untrained, undisciplined individual, when told to “do as they will” would be an unruly barbarian. The training itself, if it holds any value whatsoever, results in someone who can “do as they will” and accomplish goals, make sensible decisions, and yet take things as they are and live life from the perspective that it is transient and can’t be possessed. If the training can’t do that, why bother with it?

RR: To make money, flatter one’s ego, collect followers? Join their cult?

JC: Even punk rock kids these days don’t seem to get that anti-authoritarianism requires discipline, of a sort, discrimination, and responsibility. Not very punk rock sounding, those words… But it’s the truth. Authorities make it so we don’t have to really venture into the wild, and accept that there are no static answers, no promises.

RR: When you were interviewed on Greylodge (2005) you made a brief mention of using Baguazhang in a manner I haven’t heard many people openly discuss. Being steeped in the I Ching — and Joe Campbell for that matter — for quite a few years before ever coming to Bagua, I recognized certain shamanistic elements in it and began employing them before I ever realized that was not exactly considered kosher (or even possible) by the broader internal Kung fu community, at least not among the folk I’ve encountered. Between that, and the hierarchical brinkmanship so often involved, I generally hesitate to discuss such issues with anyone who hasn’t personally expressed interest in those more psychical aspects.

JC: That might be because I was initially taught Bagua by an individual with a background in Ericksonian Hypnotherapy, B.O.T.A. Qabbalah, and method acting. Initially the training was very internal, it was much more of a creative than martial exercise. A lot of visualization, trance induction, breathing and partner sensitivity exercises… He was a really sweet and incredibly knowledgeable man, but also at times very paranoid. So it goes sometimes when you try to work within so many models all the time, I guess.

RR: “Empty Cup”, my first internal Kung fu instructor, was a rather ancient Benedictine priest who had been involved with martial arts for a long, long time. He claimed to know like seven different versions of Taiji, then Bagua, Xing Yi, Escrima and Kenpo, too. He tended to be very rather pretentious and tight-lipped about everything. He had been advertising as a Chi Kung teacher and I was looking to deepen my understanding of that– looking for someone who had more practical experience with it than I had. Turned out that his sense of Chi Kung was little better than my own, but I he did introduce me to Baguazhang and I took an immediate shine to it. I’m still totally in love with it.

Empty Cup’s second was this easy-going, old Harley biker musician guy we’ll just call “Neil Pert,” and it was he who was assigned to mentor me. Empty Cup was the boss, but Neil was a far better teacher — friendly, unpretentious. He instinctively appreciated the value of playing around, not being so dour, mechanistic or hierarchical about it all. Eventually I discovered that Empty Cup was very often just parroting Erle Montaigue’s training tapes, so I invested in that same resource myself so as to be able to digest the lessons more fully, more directly. Meanwhile, I also researched for and then practiced whatever credible training insights I could find from other sources as well; weeding through them one by one, checking for actual efficacy, looking to triangulate in on those much vaunted but often poorly defined “core principles.”

When my Bagua suddenly began to excel beyond that of other students in the class who had been with Empty Cup longer, and my explanation involved recommendations of Park Bok Nom’s training approach, it was suddenly revealed that I had apparently violated some unspoken code of conduct and I was asked to leave. You see, Empty Cup liked to use that ol’ “empty your cup” routine. He used it on me. You ever hear that one?

JC: Don’t think so, no.

RR: There’s this classic story about a Zen master who received a curious professor. The Zen master served the professor tea. He began pouring the professor’s cup, but then wouldn’t stop as the tea reached the cup’s brim. The tea flowed over the top, still the Zen master kept pouring and pouring. The professor watched this perplexed, but finally thought he had better intervene — perhaps the Zen master was a little daft or something, “it’s full already, why do you keep pouring when it is full?!” The Zen master replied, “Like this cup, you are full of your own opinions and speculations. How am I supposed to show you Zen unless you first empty your cup?”

In one sense, this is meant to suggest that a student must be open-minded, prepared to leave his assumptions, expectations and erroneous ideas behind. And that is crucial, it’s true. But there is a flip side to that as well. There is also a danger in this when the teacher fails to be conscientious enough in terms of his own ego’s mischievous influence: when the “empty cup” mantra becomes an underhanded way of basically saying “just do as I tell you to do and don’t question it.” This is dangerous. For the teacher it can become an unfortunate way of insulating themselves from having to empty their own cups — remain open to new ideas, questions or insights that may challenge their own assumptions, expectations, erroneous ideas or status as an authority figure.

In the original story you see where the guy who needs to empty his cup is a professor, he’s not portrayed as a student without reason. The Zen master can be seen as another authority figure too, but traditionally that image is meant to suggest a sage or wise insight advocating a more instinctive and personally empowering awareness. I tend to be willing to pull back the Great Oz’s curtain, to advocate “lateral” cooperation, if or when others will not. There seem to be a lot of those “wizard” flunkies out there…

I find this whole business of knocking people around with chi at a distance fascinating. When the person getting knocked around is a student of the supposed “chi master” it all seems perfectly viable: the master projects his chi and the student is thrown back accordingly. But bring in someone who hasn’t worked with that master and nothing happens. The excuses these “chi masters” offer for this lack of effect are pathetic. It suggests how much voodoo can be involved in these esoteric arts. The more nebulous the practices are the harder it is to substantiate what is being accomplished, the easier it is to delude oneself and dupe others. The power of suggestion and a person’s suggestibility need some very careful examination.

JC: Yes. It’s often hard to know what is what. The downside of the more flow-based, intuitive kind of teaching is that though it was really incredible in terms of giving me creative tools to work with in my own work, music, writing, visual art… it wasn’t actually teaching me valuable martial tools. I didn’t realize this until I later went to a school out in California and my sefu there was like, “in terms of martial arts, you really haven’t learned anything.” I was of course pretty skeptical of that, but within a matter of minutes he proved himself right. It’s pretty embarrassing not being able to push back a middle aged man with a cane, when he can knock you over with his fingertips.

RR: The last few years I’ve found Wang Xiang Zhai’s (founder of Yi Quan / Dacheng quan) insights very key in all this. He basically, confirmed the suspicions I had about Xing Yi, among other things. I actually just recently discovered a Chinese-speaking Finnish martial artist who has produced a very, very good English translation of Wang’s treatise and interviews.

I’m finding it all incredibly helpful: cutting out even more of the extraneous mumbo-jumbo, getting at the truly functional training methods and the genuine meanings behind so many of the metaphors that have so routinely been misconstrued. Amazingly clear take on internal Kung fu with minimal B.S.

But this is not to underrate that more instinctive or aesthetic approach to Kung fu that you speak of. You certainly don’t want to lose sight of the applications that show the way to the core principles, but neither do you want to lose sight of the personally adaptive, intuitive evolutions on the theme. In the Taoist approach at least, dogma is anathema. It’s not like most of us modern westerners are in imminent physical danger from bandits; that is not our reality. But the threats to our health and psychological well-being are very much part of our reality. So, the health and psychological functions are actually more prescient now. We need to learn how fear and insecurity can be placed in a healthier context, but physical competition proves very little in the bigger scheme of things, and can actually become a very problematic character defect. Does might make right?

Another model some people kick around a lot, when bringing this into a more western framework, is Leary’s 8 circuit model, however it has always struck me as unnecessarily hierarchical. That just doesn’t jive with the Trigram’s 8 transformative functions (“energies” or aspects of consciousness) as I have found them to apply: which is more lateral, cooperatively or holistically.

JC: I completely agree. At the very least, it’s linear, if not hierarchical. When you try to take this stuff into practice… shamanism, reality hacking, chaos magick, whatever paradigm you want to play in… you have the same situation where it can take you a long way, but you can just as easily think you’re lifting mountains with your mind when in reality you’re sitting in a corner masturbating.

RR: I laugh, but it is sad to see people’s very genuine longing for a deeper experience of life diverted into such nonsense. Tantric and sexual yoga, for instance, has been so used and abused — diverted into this egoistic demonstration of male prowess, masquerading as something healthy and empowering. People… please… the finest thing you can do with sex, the most arcane and healthy simultaneously, is make it a genuine expression of love as sincere heartfelt affection. You don’t need to collect energy or suck it from other people with your penis. You don’t need to go for hours and hours — tends to be rough on vaginas.

Come on now. You can’t meaningfully direct Kundalini or chi without first removing the ego-driven conceits that obstructed its flow in the first place. There is no end run or short cut around how we’ve been erroneously programmed since we were small children about sex and our animal natures.

JC: I’ve been saying the same thing for quite some time. Also interesting to compare the Taoist sexual practices, which are strangely male-oriented, with certain Hindu Tantric practices, which place more of an emphasis on the female… quite to the contrary of their social inflection. That aside, without a connection it’s just masturbation, which I suppose isn’t bad but there’s no opportunity for growth there either. Without some amount of humbleness, play and adoration it’s just “sport fucking” as Tyler Durden said.

RR: There is a lot of denigration and repression we have to shake off here. Ego demeans genuine love, and genuine love dispels ego. I mean, I’ve been there, I’ve naively played with these techniques, and I’ve come out the other side of that dark forest. Men, listen to what intelligent, truly liberated women have to say about it. There’s a great deal of patriarchal conceit operative in these practices. The absence of equally strong feminine voices in these techniques’ traditions makes me very wary of them these days.

My own personal take on yoga in general (with the capitol Y, as sublime “union”) has come to be that to the degree a person internally dispenses with ego and faulty conditioning, they reconnect mind with body, restore instincts and awareness, clarify perception and thereby eventually find reality is exactly what it needs to be, and that there is really no need to try and tamper with its external aspects. Avoid too much forcing, instead entrain finesse. There are no magic bullets. Fix yourself before you presume to fix the world. That’s where you can exercise the most significant affect.

JC: Yeah. I feel like it’s far too easy to lead yourself astray turning everything into a purely conceptual system… having led myself far astray with it in the past. I kind of branded myself initially in the ‘occult world,’ publishing through New Falcon, but by the time the Generation Hex anthology came out with Disinfo, I was getting pretty wary of talking too much about the occult…

RR: I segued into the Taoist and Zen approaches purposely to avoid falling prey to that myself. I mean, I did catch myself falling into that at times. Zen and classical Philosophical Taoism both offer methods that can safeguard against that, but even those are not entirely immune. Maybe there are others as well, but those are the ones I’ve had the most resonance with.

JC: It’s funny because I think it’s a really valuable tool, but if you take it as your primary means of interpreting reality it becomes a means of driving yourself perfectly insane. Some of us need a little of that, to break us out of whatever we might be sleepwalking in, but if anything my natural disposition is to walk in the ‘ether’ and have no fucking clue what’s going on around me physically.

RR: I certainly did. Robert Anton Wilson kicked my ass forward early on. That was crucial then and there.

JC: Working so much on the computer doesn’t help. So my Occult need is to probably spend more time stretching or cooking food or lying in the sun, not “traveling the aethyrs.” That’s totally just me though. A lot of people are completely stuck in other habitual patterns that require a hard look at the big picture. There’s such a thing as being too grounded. The Prince of Pentacles is described as a dullard in Crowley’s Book of Thoth.

RR: Eventually one will become embarrassed by how the talking has exceeded the doing. Personally, my chagrin was enormous, but it propelled me forward, made me “transform.” It’s never-ending.

Maybe it could be framed in terms of healthy maturation, phasing out of adolescence, but not losing creative vigor in the process. Simple things become more precious. You learn you can make just as much progress, if not more, without having to press forward so zealously. You can abandon the training wheels.

I’m not so occultly- fond of tall pine groves, full moons on September nights, comical dogs and buccatini myself.

Part 2: (2010)

James Curcio: You’ve been talking about a shift of creative focus in your work…

Rudy Rauben: An early spring allowed me to finish up several sculptures that had been lingering about. So I delivered those commissions and placed the others before the public, and the response has been very promising and immediate.

It got me to thinking why make the carving a second-class medium to my comic work… which I have always done just because I was failing to see I had some rather arbitrary preconceptions about which was the stronger medium? The sculptures can communicate everything I’ve been signaling in my comics, and the audience finds them far more accessible, seemingly; so why resist that? Why not work with that artistic opportunity? None of the birth-struggles of publishing, just inspiration, visceral execution of the imagery, and tangible completion; then move on to the next.

As you may recall, this all comes on a strong push to complete more comic work last winter and earlier this year. And I did rack up a lot of pages. But in the process I kind of painted myself into a corner — brought myself to a dead stop and a rather painful reckoning.

Simultaneously, I had been studying David Lynch’s more recent approach to story-telling. Inland Empire, especially, caused me to ponder why he had loosened the narrative threads so. Mulholland Drive ventured into this territory, and Inland Empire was like the coup de grace to me. I trust Lynch artistically, but that film’s troubling ambiguity really pissed me off at first. I guess, at first, I thought he was just abusing the audience with a kind of self-indulgent, even petulant, or sloppy — communication style.

However, reading interviews with him or about this film I later came to appreciate what he was attempting to do, even if it didn’t necessarily succeed.

His rather oblique explanation strikes me as an old poetic and surrealist concern made prescient again by our latest media/marketing environment: As a creator, why not insert more ambiguity?

In a mass-media marketplace now over-filled with pre-progammed — in a Skinnerian/Pavlovian sense — images, sounds and plot-lines, mostly expected to engender specific, commonplace, reactions in an audience… often quite divisive in their over-all cumulative effect on people’s psyche’s… Ought not an artist consider throwing a wrench into such workings? Ought not an artist consider an approach that returns a person to having to think and feel for themselves, so that they must derive their own meanings rather than having them all too conveniently and routinely delivered, along with product placements and advertising and contemporary political mythologies…?

The Walking Dead hate this ambiguity. They get very frustrated when left without a predetermined, spoon-fed, program or state of conditioning.

JC: That was my perspective when I started doing creative or artistic work. And I was criticized, especially by friends, for just being obscure to be obscure, and being all over the place. There is maybe some real validity to the second part because I was trying to play free jazz before I’d gone through playing all the standards. But in your case, that’s clearly not the case. It’s not like you don’t have a solid grasp of the foundations. It comes down to the intention of the work at a given time, I think. I mean, you can have this turn of direction, and maybe in five years another one will come… as we both know, that’s all part of the process.

For my part, I’ve been working more on honing my craft, telling the things I want to tell in a way that I know — or at least hope — will convey that content. Now my challenge is that I’ve been focusing more and more on scripts, and those can just pile up when something doesn’t work out with this or that producer or production company, and no one ever gets to experience the work. Eventually I may come full circle, it’s hard to say.

As you point out, people are so conditioned to look at media in a certain way, and if it doesn’t take off its clothes and lie down in front of them, legs spread, the stock response will be “this is too confusing,” “this is boring,” “what is this garbage?” I’m an advocate of trying to meet the audience half-way, but even then…

On the flip side, the art-world can play a funny trick. If something has the right magic wand waved over it, it becomes “a great artistic work.” And in the context of “a great artistic work,” people then go “oh, my need to delve in and understand this is due to a lack in myself,” whereas when something is commercially available outside that setting, the onus winds up being on the creator.

RR: Yeah. With you I need not belabor the mechanics of this approach, but further a psychiatrist — writing on Lynch’s work, especially Inland Empire — suggested this: anyone familiar with dream analysis will see parallels in how Lynch is increasingly structuring his films. The psychiatrist (or psychologist, whichever he was) suggested that dreams occur, basically, as a sequence of disconnected images or scenes. Any sense of narrative is created by the psyche after the initial flash of these images, scenes, symbols.

Now, I’m not exactly sure if that’s completely true or not. I can’t say that is always the case in my dreams, although it certainly seems to be at times.

JC: I think that thing about narrative is true so long as it implies the “meaning” behind the conjunction of symbols in a dream. Dreams are essentially meaningless, as are myths. But we don’t experience them “essentially.” The meaning comes from us.

RR: It all did chime powerfully in terms of sequential art.

That Understanding Comics guy made it quite clear how a reader fills in between the panels, and this is what Lynch is playing with, and what dreamers often do as well.

All this then prompted me to contemplate just how much “filling in between the panels” a reader or viewer can do and how much an artist might allow?

I flashed on early manga like Hokusai’s 100 Views of Mt. Fuji — how there could be a narrative there, albeit it begs more of the viewer than a modern comic book would, just as Lynch’s last few films beg more of movie-goers than most Hollywood films do.

And then I flashed on how exhausting drawing all these panels was– minor variations on one another just to indicate the passage of time and supply space for word balloons: Is that really necessary? Is it really effective?

For me the gut feeling to these questions was NO NO NO. Finally.

My style is one of environments and dreamscapes, not drawing talking heads so that word balloons have a place to call home. My imagery could actually work better with a graphic composition more like Hokusai’s, and a narrative approach more like Lynch’s. Die-hard comics people might find some offense in that, but a much broader range of potential viewers made available to me more than compensates.

There are many, many people who are put off by the comic book format itself. A lot of people have a lot of negative preconceptions about what comics are, and not always without due cause.

I’ve long been hankering to dispense with word balloons. It has definitely not been feeling “wu wei” to me for a long time now. I feel I now have the insight and a satisfying resolution to dispense with them confidently.

Of course, this means confronting the loss of a great deal of accumulated artwork; though it seems like an urgent necessity, at this point. I’ve been loathe to accept that, even though it has been nagging at me for quite some time, like some chronic low-level bacteria that just slows you down for months on end, but never completely makes you bed-ridden.

JC: I like to think that even unreleased work isn’t lost. It still may affect people, and even if it is never seen, it’s a stepping stone for your own transformation and growth. Or at least, I like to think that, because otherwise many years of my life have been “wasted” on collaborative projects which, for one reason or another, wound up stillborn.

RR: Truth be told, I’ve out-grown so much of it anyhow. In order to move forward, a sacrifice needs to be made. The basic themes and images are still sound, as they ever were, if they ever were, it’s just a matter of adapting work finished in the old format to the new one. It’s really just a matter of losing redundancies.

Long-winded, but there you have it: Rudy is saying “fuck-off” to the conventional, modern comic book format in favor of something more like a manga of 200 years ago. There will be continuity between the page panels, and captions, but far more room for the reader to dream in between them.

This interview was first published on Alterati.net in 2007.