Dave Rawson revs up his eclectic guitar
By Dave Rawson – A mind once stretched can never return to its former size. Powerful stuff, comics. At best and worst, they provide us with images that feed our experience, reinforce our sense of self, and allow our subconscious to subtly choose what we will become.
My first stories were from the Old Testament: Samson the mighty warrior, blinded and humbled, yet able to destroy the enemies of his people with a burst of self-sacrifice. David, the teenager who slew the giant Philistine, Goliath. These were lessons to struggle against the odds, because who knows what can happen, really, when you put your heart into it?
From there it was a short step to the stories of ancient Greece, and from there to tales of the Norse and of the American Indian. A wonderful collection of books published by Colliers is the Junior Classics. These have everything from Jack and the Beanstalk to Alice in Wonderland to Hans Christian Andersen and the Brothers Grimm to Homer’s Odyssey.
While The Odyssey and Virgil’s Aeneid are absorbing, Homer’s Iliad is riveting. God against god, hero against hero, mortals thwarting the gods, gods unfairly tricking heroes, but mostly it’s the heroes—hero after hero after hero after hero. Mighty warriors, each the best of their land, brought together in a futile battle that brings the death and desecration of the best of them, noble Hector, at the hands of Achilles, the most powerful.
I devoured all the science fiction available at the local library. I collected all I could afford. The Complete Sherlock Holmes was my first hardback purchase.
My 20s and early 30s brought the most profound reading of my life. I no longer absorbed like a sponge. I was provoked to wonder. From then, here are books I found notable:
On culture and perceptual reality—Bertrand Russell’s A History of Western Philosophy, Harish Johari’s commentaries on Leela (a wonderful, wonderful dice game of snakes and arrows which raise or drop the player through various realities within the eight planes of consciousness in the Hindu cosmology), G. Spencer Brown’s Laws of Form (a slim book which Alan Watts calls “the most wonderful contribution to Western philosophy since Wittgenstein’s Tractatus”), and The Time Falling Bodies Take to Light, by William Thompson (a book as profound as the intentional ambiguity of the title).
On societal norms—R. D. Laing’s The Politics of Experience, Thomas Szasz’s The Manufacture of Madness, Marshall McLuhan’s Understanding Media, and Edmund Carpenter’s Oh, What a Blow That Phantom Gave Me!
On one’s sense of self—Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning, Buckminster Fuller’s I Seem To Be a Verb, Richard Alpert’s Be Here Now, Dane Rudhyar’s The Astrology of Personality, and Gregory Bateson’s Steps to an Ecology of Mind.
For sheer pleasure, I read Henry Miller and Charles Bukowski, two spare and brutally honest introspectors. When they suddenly hit a lyrical stride, you feel as an angel/ape loosed from the many-footed beast who binds us, unknowing.
Dave Rawson has written many Donald Duck and Uncle Scrooge adventures for Denmark’s Egmont Publishing and is currently scripting the DC/Vertigo mini-series Chiaroscuro: The Private Lives of Leonardo Da Vinci.
