Just a storyline and yes, it’s another self-portrait (I’m the hybrid). This is more or less a scene in a story, a medical examiner sent to pick up human remains, but finds instead a hybrid, part human, part… something else, they believe. Ears like a sheep or goat, perceptual abilities that are unimaginable by ordinary human standards, extraordinary intelligence, yet quite vulnerable as extreme sensitive creatures, as well. What they don’t yet recognize is that these are not hybrids at all, but another human species, highly evolved, but their extremely evolved mental capacities come at the cost of being unable to separate themselves from being severely bombarded by every aspect of their environment beyond human comprehension. Of course, I’ve given visual form to the sensory sensitivities of hearing by incorporating the large ears, though this was just a 5 minute sketch with 2 cheap colored pencils from a dollar store pack (purple & blue).
As is so typical of many humans when encountering a new life form or culture or race, the early hybrids faced persecution, even torture, were viewed with fear and treated as monsters because they couldn’t help but be themselves. Out of fear, the early ones were hunted, eradicated, or locked up in institutions where they were warehoused with the rest of the society’s perceived “freaks.” And predictably, this store turns on our eventual dependency upon these very creatures for human survival, because they have special gifts, abilities of perception that they can draw upon to find and expose the truth, the reality of situations, to be able to detect every nuance of what adds up to how a system is operating, whether the system is a multinational corporation doing business with other corporations, or the system is a single individual, and their behavior—speech, actions, believes, attitudes, condition, must be correctly understood individually, or when combined with other humans (systems). To wrap your head around what life is like for these creatures, imagine what it would be actually like to be born able to actually talk to the dead. Or to all kinds of animals via mental telepathy. Or to see the future. And you can’t turn it off, though you might take toxic, noxious substances to try to numb yourself to it sometimes, but that only makes you sick, and it’s worse for you after you get clean again.
Hybrids, especially “seers” are exquisitely sensitive, and are super perceptive far above the range of human perception in multiple ways. And while it is possible to find non-hybrid humans who have one sensory perceptiveness close to a hybrid level, you don’t ever find non-hybrids with multiple sensory awareness, much less a global sensitive. Humans often will reject what they do not understand, and prefer to rely on what they already know and use that to label or categorize hybrids. When people first became aware of hybrids, not as an isolated freak accident, but when trends in their numbers began to be evident, when the powers of that time got wind of this, what happened next looked like they took a chapter out of Frankenstein, rounding them up like animals and slaughtering them, as they were deemed non-human and needed to be culled before it spread like some infectious plague.
There were survivors, and they pulled away to themselves to avoid capture. Eventually, though, their gifts were noticed and someone realized that they could be exploited as “seers” or “truthsayers”, and they could investigate any kind of system in the world, build a 3D working model in their heads, tell you what is wrong with the system and how to fix it. They could “read” systems, provided they had access to information. Seers were indispensible to world leaders, and they had a constant presence on the court. But they were not free to come and go as they wished, because of the risk that someone would steal them or harm them thereby disadvantaging the government who relied on them. So they lived in the most lavish palaces in the world, confined to cage—a gilded cage most of the time, but a cage nonetheless.
And now they have started dying off, and no one seems to know why that is happening. Even the ancient ones like this one, with no apparent connection to the others, has died. And that is where this story begins, with a mystery—the death of a seer, specifically MY death. Not that I am suicidal or anything, but it seemed apt.
The background is done in acrylic, with the scene’s dialogue written in white gel pen in my cheap, $.25 lab notebook from Walmart. You can do more in these things that I imagined! Having the pages sewn in, versus perforated is a sturdier option if you abuse these notebooks as much as I do. This one, started just over 2 months ago, has almost all of the 100 pages filled with journaling now. My next journal will be an actual sketchbook, and I’ll do the writing as I’ve been doing, but it will be interesting to see how it holds up compared to this option. My hope is that at least I won’t have the bleeding that sometimes happens when I work with markers in these thin pages, though I’ve managed to work with them and incorporated them into that pages entries.
It might seem morbid to write about one’s death, but death is a part of life, after all, and writing stories that reflect my views and insights about the world and myself, as self-portraits, isn’t at all troubling to me. It doesn’t make me think of hastening my death, or worrying about death or any such; it is simply part of my story, but told via a fictional character.
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Pretty Real Behind the Veil 