You’re walking. And you don’t always realize it, / but you’re always falling. / With each step you fall forward slightly. / And then catch yourself from falling. / Over and over, you’re falling. / And then catching yourself from falling. / And this is how you can be walking and falling at the same time.
— Laurie Anderson
, “Walking & Falling”

My first attempt at this essay, which was about the ways in which comic books and/or graphic novels can act as a catalyst toward better understanding of (so-called high) literature and art (a theme on which much good has already been written—please see, for example, the obvious but still wonderful and relevant Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud (a book I may yet, in this essay, cite)), ended with this paragraph:

By working in that (hallucinatory) space between text and image, comics becomes the gateway drug, and, if used properly, can make the harder drugs of James or Duchamp more accessible. Whether or not this particular gateway leads to death, destitution, or insanity is debatable. Personally, I would rather overdose on heroin than smoke myself to a slow, cigarette death.

The metaphor is tired, and I appear to be endorsing drug use. I endorse neither the use of drugs nor the use of tired metaphors. To both, I think you should just, you know, say no. However, I do wholeheartedly endorse the use and possibly even abuse of the (hallucinatory) space between text and image, or the space between image and image, or the space between text and text, as it is the space wherein we as readers and writers make sense of things. It is also the space wherein we also often lose that sense.

Each of the four Gospels tells a slightly different story, and while each of those stories is worth reading by itself, it is what happens between and among them that has concerned readers for hundreds of years. The two page spread showing some strange, possibly alien life form and the near total destruction of New York City in Alan Moore’s Watchmen is compelling and frightening , but the image itself is nothing compared to what the reader thinks as she then turns the page. Achilles’ imperviousness is cool as hell, but it is the gaps at his ankles, created by his own mother’s grip, that make his story truly interesting.

In his best-selling science-fiction series, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams describes a universe wherein a person can learn to fly, but only if that person first falls, and then forgets to land. This of course happens to Adams’ main character Arthur Dent when he trips down a mountain on some far-flung planet, and is distracted by his own leather suitcase which had gone missing en route to Heathrow airport some years before, and it is, perhaps, exactly this kind of relationship with the void that I am here proposing—not one wherein an extended gaze is met with reciprocity, but rather one not unlike the relationship a person might have with a pair of Gloves: Without their intrinsic emptiness, gloves would not be able to cradle a person’s hands in the way they do.

Scott McCloud, in chapter three (“Blood in the Gutter”) of Understanding Comics, writes about what happens in the space between panels as “closure,” or as “observing the parts but perceiving the whole.” He goes on, in the same chapter, to name and describe several different types of transition that can happen from panel to panel. The names and descriptions of those transitions are unimportant here; suffice it to say, however, that McCloud is effectively describing an ever widening gap (gutter) for the reader to jump over in order to get from one idea to another.

Closure happens everywhere that we read or write: It happens between chapters in a novel; it happens between stories in a collection; it happens between lines in a poem (and there it is called enjambment); it happens between every word (though sometimes to a lesser, sometimes to a greater extent: let’s say you’re driving down a street, trying to find something, and reading signs—what happens in the spaces between reading “church,” “burger,” and “gas”?); and it can, in works such as Finnegans Wake, even happen inside of words.

But these gaps, these spaces that need to be “closed,” are not, as McCloud suggests, places to jump over. They are, instead, places to walk through, to fall and catch ourselves through, to fall into and forget about falling into. They are—now expanding, now contracting; now clear, now cluttered; now sensical, now bewildering—places in which the writer and the reader can play.

I wrote the first draft of this, the second (third?) attempt at this essay, in pencil, hoping that the slowness of the writing would open the space-time between my words and allow me to walk/fall/fly in. I sharpened the pencil frequently so as to allow more white space to surround my letters.

The very tip of the pencil lead only broke once, but it did not fly up into my eye. I squeezed my eyes shut, and then remained very still for several minutes.

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