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the archive(s):
issue no. 4:
Thought it was over for Rockwell... / Uzodinma Okehi
The sad fact was that, for me, inspiration was almost always useless. So useless, to the extent that I began to doubt if it might even exist, rather, that it was likely just another of those commonplace myths, exploded by everyday experience. On the other hand, there was a purpose to life. There was something in every day, some growing certainty that I was convinced of, no matter how far things got out of hand. I was in Hong Kong and alive for some good reason and if I couldn't count on inspiration to deliver me then there had to be some other way . . . But you thought it was over for the Rockwell . . . Vaulting, leaping over the fence, like counting sheep, I was capable of almost anything to procrastinate, filing any act under that grand heading of inspiration . . . I was up at three in the morning, splashing water in my face, I was outside playing basketball in the rain . . . Drinking quarts, gallons, of oolong tea, then jogging through the corridor in knee-high socks pumping my arms like a marathoner . . . I'd give myself innocuous, hopeful-sounding names . . . Bobby Auspices, like Rockwell, inexplicably, but you could say that it was sometimes necessary in those days to escape my own skin just to put down the first word . . . Which was probably how I started drawing . . . Because I was writing first, for years, stories about this and that with little pictures and doodles of cities bridging over the margins. Or was it vice-versa? Drawing, writing, but mainly procrastinating, sitting at the desk over blank sheets then back to bed, untroubled sleep as if I'd put away the pen for years, only to wake hours, days later in fevered sweats . . . I was listening to avant-garde jazz, to Jamiroquai and Cantopop tapes I found half-crushed in the garbage can . . . An odd recording from somewhere that was nothing but the tympani drum . . . All part and parcel of fighting the good fight, which was what I told myself, in fact this was one of many chimerical notes I jotted down while working on comics, writing right over the margins beside the panel borders. These notes then became new ideas, new credos and plans for other books, like riddles of science and pseudo-poetry concerning crocodiles, cyborgs, monkeys . . . Not only that, but other pictures, little sketches, breakdowns . . . treatments of water, which were tricky . . . futuristic skyscrapers and more mythological beasts, rearing up . . . More morphological schemes concerning flamingoes and sunken treasure . . . Anything, at all, in fact, aside from concrete solutions to the problems that lay before me on the drawing board. Before I had come to Hong Kong I had hardly worked a day in my life and maybe this was part of the problem. If I was a fool to believe that inspiration alone would save me then this was the ripcord process of crashing, freefall, through my own delusions. I had no worries, no real responsibilities but the pen trembled in my hand and the world was at stake in my dreams . . .
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