We have reached the point where the meaning of Duplo must finally be explained. It is with some regret that I write this post without any accompanying first-hand accounts from Duplo associates. Distressingly, former Duplo associates have given me the cold cybershoulder. I am utterly unable to wrest a single word from even the most verbose of ex-Duploistas. To present to you, courteous reader, alternate viewpoints on the Nod Gods and the vivification of doodles would be most beneficial in setting the scene and providing aeration to my one-sided ramblings. I have sent a few messages to Duplo associates via the two main modern networking mechanisms that are Myspace and the muse-stifling Facebook, yet not a single answer has come forth. On Myspace, I can see that my friendly greetings and pleas for some scraps of remembrance are eventually marked as read by the recipient by checking the message status in my 'sent' folder. Alas, no responses are forthcoming. This indicates that something is gravely wrong. Maybe they are worried about the dangers of dwelling on the past (particularly on thoughtforms), or perhaps they reckon me so far removed from society that I am beneath contempt. True, I seem to be deeply unemployable, but surely they wouldn't be so judgemental as this? Or would they? Society does stubbornise and alter people after all, and as I mentioned in an earlier post, it is thought that after a period of seven years a human body becomes wholly regenerated into a different human body. Or maybe they have become brainwashed by Myspace's "what you should be listening to" psychological assaults. Maybe the ex-Duploistas have become embittered taxpayers who despise my dependance on the state for benefits to fund my doodling. I do have respectable qualifications, but believe me, no warehouse, factory, studio, gallery, office, stable, salon, workshop, boatyard or apothecary will employ me, nor am I culturally synchronised enough to graze on those exclusive pastures allotted for creative propagandists representing the congress of current cool (illusory). Enforced idleness and lack of ventilation is primarily to blame for the recrudescence of Nod God mischiefs in recent years. Nod Gods appear in my mind's eye and demand that their postures be drawn onto paper. Recently, for want of interestingness, I was exploring a disused sewer when my torchlight shone over some apparently collapsed brickwork, and upon the illuminated mound of debris sat a massive silent Nod God about the size of a domestic bean-bag. It was an hallucination of course; a trick of the light, but it fooled me for a good few minutes and resonated the muse hysterically. It turned out to be a garden waste bag full of decaying bits of pillow. But I digress...It seems appropriate to begin by explaining what Duplo isn't. It is rather a misnomer to describe former schoolmates who fell under the Duplo umbrella as 'Duploistas'. Duplo was never and will never be a snottily exclusionist secret society or club (a la 'Bullingdon set'). In schools and colleges it is not uncommon for select groups of people to form illicit clubs amongst themselves - illicit in that the club would remain unrecognised by the overruling institution. There were 'illicit' clubs such as the 'Tazoids' (enthusiasts of the fight-inciting 'Tazo' picture discs that were found inside packs of Monster Munch and Doritos), 'Millennium Club' (Millennium Bug anticipators), 'The Porch' (a scholarly collective of 'The Fast Show' fans [neo-Pythonites] who prided themselves on being 'mad' but restricted themselves to parroting popular catchphrases, and who later attended each others' weddings) and 'The Biff' (an elusive group of quasi-situationists hell-bent on farting 'til kingdom come). The purpose of all these sorts of club is to generate fun and increase rapport between like-minded people. Rapport is created by emphasising the separateness of the club's ideals and interests from the wider order.
Duplo, however outwardly similar it may appear to these illicit clubs, was not 'real' and nor was it necessarily intended to generate fun. Duplo was intended to exist only within the futuristic otherworlds of thought, taking the form of a fictitious authoritarian organisation devised to keep the increasingly erratic Nod Gods in check. In that respect, Duplo was for everybody. It was a means of ideologically grouping certain types of pen-conjurations so that the individual 'motives' of each conjured-up character could be standardised and immediately recognised. Duplo stands for 'Diplomatic Ultimate ParLiamentary Organisation' - a deceptively officious title - and is also a nod [no pun intended] to the Duplo building blocks ("big Lego" as it is known) of the same name, where geometric freeform jazziness is supplanted with regulated 'low resolution' blockiness in which reality becomes more manageable. The head of Duplo was the fictitious 'Duplo officer' - a bespectacled cod-authoritarian bald bloke who often wore a uniform with an armband bearing the Duplo emblem. His presence immediately attracted the mocking attentions of the Nod Gods who often 'bit' his thighs with their toothless mouths. Whenever I, or anybody else, drew the Duplo officer (whose character and features appeared remarkably consistent whoever rendered him) there was immediately an irrepressible urge to include a Nod God performing some mischief upon him. A few other muse-sensitivised people started dabbling in Duplo by designing creatures, characters and weaponry exclusively for Duplo, in turn energising their engines of inspiration, and as these ideas were shared dimensionality was increased. Of course, many people at school, when they caught wind of Duplo took an immediate dislike to it, and these people were determinedly uncreative, therefore I can assume that Duplo has no attraction for those who have never required a means to divert those chaotic waves of thoughtform that dangerously lap upon the shores of reality.
The formation of Duplo and its purposes were things that passed me as rather unimportant at the time. This collectivisation of the Nod Gods under the supervision of the Duplo officer appeared simply as an opportunity to create more interesting themes and situations for drawings - that wonderful act of near-automatic drawing which served to make lessons and breaktimes so much more interesting. In hindsight, it can be seen that the institution of Duplo was an attempt to regain some artistic control over the Nod Gods, who up to that point had begun to inflict their own concepts from without - that is, the Nod Gods had seemingly evolved sentience without me being conscious of having any input. I have already described how the Gods escaped from the paper and began making their presence felt in the real world. Whenever a sheet of paper was placed within reach I would draw a scene involving Nod Gods. During classes surreptitious drawings were made in notebooks - and people I sat beside would often begin drawing the Nod Gods too, after all, the Nods were easy to draw and exuded a genuine curiousness that was contagious. The potency of the Nods to instil bemusement was impressive, and I was especially impressed when I saw this reflected in other peoples' brilliant drawings of Nod Gods and Nod-esques. Then I began thinking about the Nod Gods constantly and fantasised about them appearing in class and assaulting bullies, giving them a taste of their own medicine as it were. After sharing these kind of fantasies with a few close friends, the mental image of the Nod God crystallised and it became possible to summon an apparition of one if I was particularly bored. Knucks (Nods drawn onto the hand) offered theatre that could be presented to other people, a practice that served to extrude the world of inkmanship into reality and thus court hallucinatory states. By mid 1995 it was clear that for the millions of thoughts which flitter across the mind during the day there was a Nod God to represent each of them, and this was quite chaotic. I also started wondering whether this kind of intense visualisation could actually affect the real world, particularly after the destruction of the school's P.E. building (recounted in the previous post). Therefore, Duplo became a necessity.
Duplo isn't strictly about forcefully exterminating virulent doodles - it is rather about rewarding ingenuity, conducting research, analysis, brainstorming for ideas, making classifications, dignifying scant inkmanship with peripherals, providing some kind of meagre government for 'character-rich' doodles (those 'character-rich' doodles being on the cusp of fully fledged thoughtform). Having said that, many drawings have been made of Nod Gods being slaughtered by Duplo forces, but since pen-conjurations are infinite it is obvious that tragedy in the Nod world is unknown. Sometimes when Nods dog thought processes as severely as any irate teacher or bully, an impromptu doodle-slaying is called for: a drawing is made showing conflict between forces recognisable as Duplo (often involving the Duplo officer) against non-Duplo forces. Non-Duplo forces occasionally took the caricatured form of a real-life aggressor. However, to complicate things further, Duplo itself became unintentionally invested with a life-force of its own(!), and it began to outgrow itself and resemble a totalitarian nightmare with the Nod Gods being too oppressed. Here, it was necessary to help the non-Duplo/anti-Duplo forces by temporarily swapping sides and pushing Duplo back. These anti-Duplo forces became known as 'T'. Countless forms of Duplo officer were devised to replace any Duplo officer killed in such skirmishes with 'T' forces. Later, however, when Duplo stabilised, 'T' came to be used as a convenient 'bin' in which to stow all anti-Duplo (and anti-muse) sentiments. To be continued...
