INTRODUCTION

I painted Jasha Explains Death at the University of California at Santa Cruz as one of a set of comics my friend Dave Self (creator of Deep Duck) and I jointly submitted for a philosophy class. Most of the comics were short satires on the local subcultures--surfers, nudists and so on. Deep Duck, our narrator/straight man, interviewed the locals in each. Here, I thought he'd interview a hippie or a talking redwood. Then Jasha strode in... and hijacked the story to talk about mortality.

NOTES 40 YEARS LATER

• Jasha the krelkin: Krelkins, mostly Jasha, had been recurring in my dreams for about a year. But Jasha's portrait here had nondream sources/influences too:
  1. The redwoods. Living amid near-immortal beings thousands of years old, mortality started looking like just an evolutionary strategy--one we could change.
  2. UC students often sunbathed nude on campus in meadows by the redwoods. I did, and flirted with some quite Jasha-like girls.
  3. Peter S. Beagle's The Last Unicorn not only looks a bit like Jasha, she too is concerned with how mortality (or immortality) shapes consciousness. Curiously, just three months after painting this reaction to The Last Unicorn, I met Beagle; he visited our writing class and read us Come Lady Death, another tale about im/mortality. Life really does imitate art.
  4. The magical seahorses, beautiful but vain, who tease Moomintroll in Tove Jansson's Moominpappa at Sea; lower left Page 9 even echoes Jansson's book-illustration a bit.
  5. A doe I met that summer at 10,000' in the Sierra Nevada:

     74/6/30 Nine Lake Basin under Mt Kaweah
     Walk downstream, photographing flowers. A doe on an islet only twenty feet away! Such grace. See Jasha Linsombres in her. Water-unicorn. Immortal, but part of the organic world. “With that wild grace that deer possess only a shy shadow of, and goats a wry mockery.”--The Last Unicorn.
     Let’s analyze the mechanics of grace. She let me get so close because I'd been trying to move lightly, quietly, tracklessly... moving like her. Grace. Felt it. Humans in motion are normally in a state of dynamic equilibrium, so if they stop they may fall and hurt themselves, unlike deer and other quadrupeds who are more stable. So deer can be so loose as to be fluid, yet so controlled that if danger rises they can pause in any pose. We're usually stumpier & clumsier because we’re saving energy! Who cares if others see us? Nothing much preys on us now. But when we take the trouble, in dance, running, or stalking, we can (though need not) show grace.
     Someone like Jasha, with 1000 years of life, is likely to progress from lazy uncontrolled grace to conscious control to conscious grace which becomes automatic. I fantasize a dialog with Jasha about it. She says “These stages probably apply to a much broader spectrum of attributes than mere grace. True of all deep learning.”

• The deaf British bugs: from Walt Kelly's Pogo. I loved Kelly's mix of intellectuality and low comedy, his vivid character drawing and the scenery. I wanted a West Coast redwood equivalent of his Okeefenokee Swamp, with Deep Duck as Pogo (or Sancho Panza) and Jasha as Albert the Alligator (or Don Quixote).
• "You seen one eternity, you seen 'em all": Ronald Reagan said "You seen one redwood..." explaining why we should cut 'em all down.
• The art: ink lines, shaded and colored with acrylic on oversize paper (that was really too thin). Fragile, warped, yellowed and spotted, the pages needed a lot of digital restoration. I relettered bits, and even redrew a few faces and hands to clarify expressions.
• What surprises me: the continuity. 40 years ago, and I was already deeply strange. I mean, even for Santa Cruz.

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