“People create their own questions
because they are afraid to look straight. All you have to do is look
straight and see the road, and when you see it, don't sit looking
at it - walk.” (Ayn Rand)
If you’re
following this, then, the acolytes (of sorcerers) live in the order of
perspective-AI, which is the vanishing point of technique (AI is always
perspective because it is built virtually, in straight lines).
To give a
concrete example, one of David Atten-bore’s programs on Planet Earth illustrates
the competitive order. What that means is the images you see purport to be
ordered – as opposed to disordered. Is a shoal of fish ordered or disordered?
I’d say it’s both: if you look at ancient Minoan frescoes, they were attracted
to what you could call the mermaid romance – as were Greek vases.
Wild Horses
This is the
graceful reality; but the mind in a perspective order is prone to illusions and
to see order where there is none. What you see is actually primordial rhythm
implicated in serene movement. The order of competition is an illusion fed us
by acolytes of sorcerers (in this case Darwin).
There is style
(proportion) and psyche - behaviour, hunting - see Pictorial 5 on
matriarchy of the high aerie. The fish you see are hunting or being hunted, so
that is balance or the lifecycle. They are fluid and easy in their manner. This
primordial grace is there in the film Countryman about the eponymous
Jamaican fisherman who lives in a shack on the beach with his family, stray
goats and Rastas. They live alongside the mainstream Kingston, and it struck me
Countryman, who speaks of “guidance” from “elements of the earth” that will
“defend I”, is not in the slightest competing in his seaborne lifestyle.
COUNTRYMAN (catching and cutting prey a la Gavin
Maxwell Pictorial 42, 43)
Like Hannam (The House of Elrig) he is a mix of practical maritime
(woodland) skill with seaborne (earthbound) philosophy.
..close to his heels as a shadow while
with the wisdom of a lifetime he outwitted birds and beasts classified by his
rules as vermin, listening to the low rumble of his voice as, sheltering behind
a stone dyke from some blinding hill shower, he would try to impart to me his
intimate knowledge of wild life. At the end of some long speech or reminiscence
he would pause, tamp the black tobacco dottle on his pipe, and add, “Ay, you
come to know through time.” (page 108)
Is the order of
competition then an illusion of perspective reality? In other words, the
reality that is always ordered (always “straight”). What I mean is, whatever
the theory (of sorcerers) the same order pertains, the one of straight lines
and therefore the vanishing point (of technique). In nature things are crooked
(disordered); take a look at the two pictures contrasting Objectivism and
Wildness inPictorial 46
Rand is dwarfed
by her monuments; in the other there is a merging of buildings with disordered
nature (see Rome). Rand’s universe by her own reckoning is straight, disorder
is disallowed. That’s another way of saying it’s a perspective illusion – one
that will be run by AI one day.
Intensive beef
lots are another case of the same thing; hygiene or lack of disorder.
Conventional farming uses the strength of fertile loam, of dirt and cleansing.
One world is inert; the other is active.
I know Rand said
mental processes are active (Pictorial 46), but if you live in a world
of the mind you are not physically active. There is no balance between body and
mind. The mind in a perspective order is prone to illusions so the way out of
the dilemma is action. The world of action is figurative – figures in a
landscape with meaning (epistemology Weird 11). A landscape or a wood
(or the sea) have labyrinthine qualities in which the action takes place, a
type of rustic or seaborne disorder.
You can easily
see this in action-series such as the jungle and hill-country set Nyoka.
The rocky terrain of gorges would look equally at home in a Hyborian story. I
noticed the interior sets are deliberately made for the actors to clamber and
vault around during set-piece combat. Ragged balconies, knobbly walls with
hidden levers, trap-doors, twists and turns in the gloom.
In Britain we have
children’s icon Enid Blyton who’s Famous Five always have adventures in
hidden coves and what not. In such rustic or seaborne settings there is always
far less order and therefore much more freedom of action. Similar things could
be said of classic Noir set in dingy neighbourhoods of run-down tenements where
each winding alley is an event. Val Lewton’s Cat People, for example,
where nothing is really clear apart from the suspense.
There is very
little perspective reality, yet a lot of atmosphere. Similarly, in Nyoka,
galloping around the bluffs the figures and horses are in their element, with
no straight lines to impede them. Likewise their costumes are loose jodhpur-ish
riding gear which accentuates the figure.
In the Randian
universe everything is convincing because everything is an illusion. If you’ve
seen A Boy and his Dog, the film has two parts. The first is above
ground in the dirt and mud of Spartan desert hunts, everything is grey or
mottled by desert sun. The second part is down in Topeka, and everything is
spangly and glowing in red, white and blue, bands playing, voices braying and
yet the entire society is illusory, a bad recreation of olde America. The neon
fantasy is quite a Randian one.
Now, an illusion
can be very convincing (reflection). If you take DNA, it is always taken to
support a competitive order. But, as I said inDrama, what you see in
nature is primordial rhythm implicated in movement, which is a mixture of order
and disorder (or order and freedom from order).
Basically, the
scientific method has a very convincing order (DNA) but a very ambiguous or
non-existent freedom (primordial rhythm in movement, action and physique).
Hence our reality could be an illusion of order (sun). This clearly goes way
back – not just to Kant (prev.) but to the Church and Galileo in the 17th
century.
The first
innovation of that order was the practical advance in lenses (optics) and the
telescope which enabled them to see planets and the moon clearly. Obviously
that innovation was revolutionary and led to a new outlook. Now that we live in
an innovative order of competition and “Randian architects” you can begin to
see that we’ve lost the freedom not to be ordered!
Every innovation
adds another bit of order, and it is inevitably leading to AI
(electromagnetism). Our universe of order ultimately takes place in the head
(electrochemical impulses see Hyborian Bridge 37) and not in the
universe of primordial rhythm – the body or free-and-easy grace of action (Hyborian
Bridge 18). The church was clearly very cagy to the point of paranoia about
the dissemination of ancient Greek knowledge, with the exceptions of the
mystical Plato and the pragmatic Aristotle.
Actually, the
city-state played a vital role in preserving ancient texts. I’ve just ordered a
book called The Map of Knowledge (Violet Moller) telling the story of
seven cities from 300BC – 1500, on the basis of a review by Tim Smith-Laing.
Arab scholarship was prevalent, and the cities included Baghdad and the Cordoba
of the Moors.
In his Hyborian
tales, Howard gives the odd hint of a scholarly class existing alongside all
the riotous revelry.
He had
entered the part of the city reserved for the temples. On all sides of him they
glittered white in the starlight—snowy marble pillars and golden domes and
silver arches, shrines of Zamora's myriad strange gods. He did not trouble his
head about them; he knew that Zamora's religion, like all things of a
civilized, long-settled people, was intricate and complex, and had lost most of
the pristine essence in a maze of formulas and rituals. He had squatted for
hours in the courtyard of the philosophers, listening to the arguments of
theologians and teachers, and come away in a haze of bewilderment, sure of only
one thing, and that, that they were all touched in the head. (The Tower of the Elephant)
Howard doesn’t consider such things to be understandable, but the more
blatant point is a church attempts to impose a moral or metaphysical order (of
the philosophical mind) on the world of action. A medieval city-state was much
like those depicted in Howard’s Hyboria; monumental but disordered and rife
with free and easy human flesh (and animals, natch.)
No society bar our own has sought to do without the freedom of action
of people in communal settings. This is why I picked the example of Detroit
that seems to go counter to the universal planning ethic. As I was saying, what
you want in a city is style (proportion) and psyche (or narrative content or
behaviour) of citizens. In other words, you don’t want universal order or
competition or any of those things.
This is true throughout history. You probably know that in Spain there
was a centuries old battle between Christians and Muslims, called the Reconquista by the
Catholic Church. Ivan Espinosa of Vox (a right-wing party) says,
“We admire what’s left of the Islamic
culture in Spain,” he says. “It’s part of our history.” He pauses, then adds:
“By the way, part of our history is also fighting against them for 800 years.” (DT)
That immediately made me think of Howard’s Outremer (Pictorial 11,
13) and the psychic affinity of the different breeds of men that fought
there. To have differences in medieval times was the norm and, for all the
bloodshed, there was an affinity between warriors.
Basically because a strong psyche, with a seductive narrative content
as with the Moors in southern Spain, will be different, so there is an affinity
of differences. Note that this is not a competitive order, since there is no
order!
This is roughly what I was saying in Pictorial 13 - that there
is never order in traditional societies because there is low-level conflict.
The conception that there is a competitive order in nature is essentially to do
without action, because action is not order. It is a mixture of style
(proportion, balance) and psyche (behaviour or narrative content). It’s quite
like an adventure serial in labyrinthine terrain.
Pictorial 5 has the view from the high aerie, matriarchal
province of high flying eagle, serene and gliding on high dappled skies, perfection
of primitive rhythm. You will see exactly the same picture in an Atten-bore
film and be told, “eagles are ferocious competitors and killing machines.”
So, you are now in a competitive order, rather than the serene freedom
of airborne skies. All these animals do is hunt or scavenge (crows) or be
hunted (prey), the primitive lifecycle, not competition; they are hunting as
Man used to do.
Weird 10
What you see is an irregularity and freedom – order is just a
perspective illusion (of acolytes). This has to be why we assume things are
ordered when visually speaking they have free behaviour as hunter and prey.
This ancient universe was described by Claude Levi-Strauss (the French
anthropologist who, on his annual visits to US tribes, popularized the jeans
which bear his name on buffalo hunts on horseback with his Hopi friend, Chief
Seattle).
Levi-Strauss describes scavengers (crow, coyote) as “tricksters” or
intermediaries, a common theme in myth (Prometheus, who stole fire from the
gods). This entire ancient universe has nothing to do with Darwinian
competition and everything to do with Man the hunter.
A competitive order is the perspective illusion we inhabit (sun); it
has no basis in anthropology; it’s a pseudo-science of acolytes (Vincent of UVS
says the same of CERN). How did it happen and what can be done? It’s over to Conan
the Conqueror again.
