Walt and Skeezix in: The Hall of Mirrors of Nature

-Frank King

"...so we see the search that characterizes the deluded mind is for a profound “answer.” The simple answer is that the simple and the profound are the same thing, that flatness and roundness and identity and non-identity coexist in a larger dimension of emptiness. Simple obvious everyday mind, thoughts, and things are in fact “profound” and a path to liberation in the sense that they make up part of a wide and deep co-ordinated co-dependent symbol space which is always dialectically in motion. And this dialectic movement proceeds, via the mirroring of emptiness itself-as-itself-mirroring to itself in itself-as-mirror, and we now comprehend this as a hall of mirrors in infinite "space." The stepping to the side and seeing the line between one image and the mirror and an infinite "meta-space" of meaning and non-meaning, this is how mirroring is itself seen. From this angle we see the frame mirroring itself. This movement is not our movement but is in fact stillness, is seeing that the mirror itself moves."

-Jean-Luc Heilegra, from a footnote about this Gasoline Alley Sunday strip in

Method and Being

4 Kings on the 4th





Here are four political cartoons all drawn by Frank King in 1916. My understanding is that these were not necessarily his personal views (though they may have been) but were topics assigned by the editors of the Chicago Tribune. I don't really know how it worked back then.

The Bankruptcy of the Imagination and Civilized Warfare

"Mr. Lloyd George, at the Peace Conference, said that he was persuaded to the League of Nations idea when recently he saw in France the innumerable graves of the fallen covering acres.

Perpend. The statement is worth considering. Note that it is at the end of the war he is speaking, that it is the number of graves he is moved by, and that what moves him to realise the horrors of war is the graves of dead men. What was Mr Lloyd George’s imagination doing before he went to France and saw the graves? Would it help on the League, think you, if someone took his child by the hand and showed him all the acres of all the graves in Europe; or all the mutilated in the hospitals when their wounds are being dressed; or all the asylums when the madmen are having their morning rave; or all the St Dunstan’s in the world; or all the dying and dead babies?

The war has beggared the imagination. If a woman loses five sons, she is not smitten five times as much as if she lost only one. All suffering has limits beyond which the heart is insensible. We are no more appalled at the death of ten million men than at that of ten thousand, or, indeed, if it be under our eyes, ten or one. It is a fact that we are forgetting the war- already — those who weren’t in it. Skating, dancing, political squabbles are all the go — pigs over their pannage. If a woman has lost a son, compensations are manifold — e.g., some gewgaw from the King’s hands at Buckingham Palace. What the son thought or suffered no one knows, because he’s dead. If he survives he wants to remain dumb, or lacks capacity to express his thought about the hell and damnation of war. If he had such a capacity, his hearers would lack the imaginative sympathy to be scalded by his boiling ink."

-WNP Barbellion, Feb. 16, 1919.



-Frank King, Feb. 16 1916 political cartoon

Update: Also see here.