Testament Part Two: Heiuper

This week, part two of my epic poem Testament became available. I was pretty excited when I submitted for a proof, but when the proofs showed up…

Ever work on a thing for so long you lose sight of what it is? What it was? That is how I feel about Testament. I’ve spent year illustrating and writing and rewriting and designing and carving and printing and sewing. I lost sight of what I was trying to do in the flow of doing it. But getting it in my hands…

Man that is the juice.

I know it is weird. I know poetry isn’t a thing people give a shit about. I know it isn’t a gaming thing. I know it sucks as a product.

I also know I don’t care.

So if you indulge me once more, I am going to share the author’s note for the second part of my opus. If you love it, order the book from your local shop. If you really love it, pick the highest tier subscription for my newsletter here and I will ship you out every part, my magazine, and art at the end of the year.

If you just like it, share it on your socials and help me out. You never know who artwork will speak too.

If you don’t like it, don’t fret about it. Not all art is for all people and no one should be ashamed of disliking art. But thank you anyway for reading what I write. Maybe something here will click for you.

Author’s Note

I have always been consumed with the origin stories of people, places, and objects. Their beginnings. Why they are the way they are. What shaped them. To understand a thing is to understand how it came to be.

I have this clear memory that haunts me. I am eight or nine reading the back of a children’s dictionary. There, the origin of the English language was laid out. Full color illustrations of Angles, Saxons, and Jutes in longboats crossing the sea stared at me. Their too large eyes carrying their own stories as I learned about the origin of our words.

That moment shaped me as much as anything. It is the shining point from which I can draw a line to so much of what I have done in my life. There is a line to my shelves and shelves of books on history, examinations of design, literary explorations, documentaries, and behind the scenes movie extras. There is a line to my time studying religion in college. There is a line to my incongruous career in computer engineering and design.

My life is a series of actions both big and small all related to an obsession with origin stories. A web of desires that all make their way back to that central moment. To that seemingly innocuous flipping of pages on a berber carpet.

Or is it?

It’s a nice story. It is entirely true. It is also a lie. A wonderful lie like all memories. Like all origin stories, it is an attempt to interpret the present with a memory.

Origin stories are inherently mythological and gloriously messy. Like all things human, they are complex and contradictory like our memories. Not complicated and predictable like a watch.

That notion of complexity versus predictability is probably why I set out to write Testament in the first place. Well, hand write, illustrate, block print, paint, and bind with a coptic stitch to be exacting, but you get the idea.

Personally, I am not interested in complicated, predictable machinery. Plenty of people are, and the shelves of bookstores are lined with wonderful examples of consistency in world building. You can turn on any Marvel movie and cloak yourself in the warm blanket of canon. If that is your jam, my work is probably going to feel less comfortable. Less familiar. Less linear.

I embrace the inconstant nature of people and the stories we tell each other. I am fascinated by the fact that the only constant in religion is that it will contradict itself at every turn. I think it is a good thing that Robert E. Howard didn’t have a series bible when he was writing his short stories. I wish I had thought up Grant Morrison’s approach to writing Batman where he “decided to treat the entire publishing history of Batman as the events in one man’s extraordinarily vivd life.”

I think the unreliable narrator is far more compelling as a storyteller than any omniscient voice ever could be.

All of this has been dancing around in my head for years. Bouncing off each other like when you get a multi ball play in a pinball machine. Messy. Unpredictable. Chaotic.

Sometimes it would manifest something. A painting. A comic book. A notebook full of descriptions of people. Maps with names that have no context. A roleplaying game. Each of them having some piece of the whole, but none of them satisfying the demands of those dancing ideas.

My friend Luke Crane once wrote, “I could not fight me and win.”

I hate him for saying that. It is just so fucking perfect.

I have spent the better part of twenty years fighting myself over my work. Every page written. Every brush stroke. Every-single-fucking-thing I have made came out of that fight. None of those pieces were victories.

I would love to say that at the outset of creating Testament, I had that revelation and stopped fighting me. I would love to declare that it is my first victory. That would have been another wonderful lie that is also true. A fantastic memory.

There are no clean lines in origin stories. No easy answers.

Instead, at some point, while working on this thing in your hands, I had a moment of clarity.

Maybe.

I was deep in a fight with myself. Nothing was making me happy. I was at war and losing. The pieces were there, but none of them were going in the same direction.

At some point I looked at one of my book shelves and saw my copy of Alamut by Bartol. In it are the words that grace the front of this book, “Nothing is an absolute reality; all is permitted.”

A simple phrase beaten to death by a video game franchise, but it gave me the catalyst to translate what was a bunch of ideas into Testament. It freed me from the fight with myself.

Another lie that is also true. A really good one.

That is what mythology is though. It is a bunch of lies that are also true. The world is both flat and round. God is love and wrath. Existence is eternal but also has a beginning and ending.

Mythology is the collection of contradictions that reflect our lived experience. We use it to explain what we don’t understand. To explain the world around us, certainly, but more importantly, ourselves. Whereas science fiction uses the future to explore today, mythology uses our memories to do the same.

Testament is a mythology. Every page is littered with memories. References to art, history, fiction, politics, religion, and my lived experiences. I mean, what is a memory if not an imperfect reference to the past?

If I had any rules I adhered to as I worked on it, it was that everything I did had to be true, even if it was a lie. Despite all of my desire to embrace the complexity, I couldn’t help but build some structure.

Something is baked into our monkey brains that yearns for order. We catalog things. We put them into groups. We gather numbers together and declare, “this is the reason the world is the way it is.”

We want reality to be a watch even though it is really a memory.

Testament is an origin story. A memory. A memory of a place that isn’t. A memory of a place that could be. A memory of a life lived and all the lives that life touched.

And this? This introduction is a memory of it’s creation.

Keith Senkowski
September, 2024

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