Tale Of Fiction

#3: Accept thy inner Bison!

I’ll just come out clean and admit that I’m a reader. I’ve followed the stupid web-strip since the first day it went online, probably before most of you even heard about it. That was before a new episode was out two times a week. Of course, I wouldn’t slouch about with those shirts you see all around these days now, I wouldn’t even admit it in public then, but somehow I found it quite amusing, never figuring out why exactly: No real punchlines, no characters to speak of, and let’s not even start with the sheer repetitiveness of redundancy. But since Bison and the Boar Boys are becoming something of iconic phenomena nowadays, I’ll throw in my few cents of thought. There is a reason why ‘Bison Style!’ is getting this omnipresence as a Graffiti Tag in Catherinebourough streets, and I’ve heard it’s worse in, say, Cull Haven – which makes sense to me now, I think.

I never cared much for psychoanalysis in the usual form: Us, caught in a bargain about power and influence between some instinct-ridden subconscious drive, on the one hand, and some reflective, authoritarian uber-consciousness on the other – that might have made sense millennia ago, but our reality just doesn’t seem compatible with it. On the other hand, IF there is an inner agency of your’s truly, that’s somehow responsible for a lot of all this shit that’s going on in my mind, it might come pretty close to a potently bored, inattentive inner Bison. Somehow the bison seems to know what’s going on, somehow it’s in possession of all the punchlines, the rules and codes of ‘what’s the deal around here’, but it couldn’t care less as to tell me anything. Try adopting some Bison Style, but you’ll fail, because you are just – well, clearly not a Bison, are you? And if the Boar Boys think it’s Bison’s job to act as a moral guideline for their behaviour, then go figure! Sometimes I can actually HEAR my uber-ich farting in disgust, because it’s clearly refusing to accept any responsibility for those cute miserable creatures in my soul.

On the other hand, our Inner Bison is structuring all of our symbolic reality, because he’ll have the punchline on the third panel, no matter what. And that’s a pretty accurate description of our political situation right now. Probably that’s why the strip is even more popular in Cull Haven, with the strict DUF-censoring and everything. We are not ruled by our fears, but our desires, after all. Sure, sometimes they can be pretty hard on you, but in general the DUF won’t bother you much if you just play by the rules. And they are cool, in a way, are they not? Problem is, we don’t really comprehend them, not quite, never quite. The lawmaker’s laws are like an invisible framework that rules the logic of our episodes. But no matter how hard we try to “get it”, the punchline will be with The Bison, because that’s how the strip is conceived of in the first place. See, there’s the symbolic, the imaginary and the real. The imaginary is how we imagine our role models to look like: Like some Boars, for example, looking up to the Bison that just won’t move, and we know it. It’s in plain sight, there’s no secret conspiracy going on, the whole story is even named after it! The symbolic however, now that’s the beauty of it: Because it’s not only the things that are said, but the things that CAN be said (and done), within the logic of the strip: It’s the possibilities to act, all of them! But since they are all placed within three panels, and since we know we will never out-bison the Bison, all we can try to archive is figuring out how to BE a Bison: Somehow, HE seems to have figured it all out, anyway! The Bison is, in a way, structuring the symbolic reality around himself, always in the center of the panel AND the center of the gags, even though he MIGHT just be imprisoned like the rest of us. So why is it we don’t ask for that?

That would be the real. But the real, well… That’s just outside of the panel border, and we won’t ever know. If we’d ever get to see any other location – and I’d doubt we will ! – It’d just be another symbolic area, well within the next punchline. We’ll never leave the strip, never “get” the gag, never arrive at the real narrative. But we’ll be there for the next try.