Combination of the Two (8)

In Gods in Chaos, physical divinities of Earthly proportion are hovering in their pyramid. Perhaps that is spirit hovering – the psychic aspect of the physical? Sun and moon are physical twins on Earth and that is proportionate strength.

Newton scattered light (sun) with his experimental knives (C5) and that is the parallel reality we are in. Travelling or colonising space, as Musk &Co plan, only makes that much more obvious. Space is not a physical environment; it consists mainly of light and to a certain extent travel will be an algorithmic experience of the head.

The environment is technical since light consists of three technical elements. Electricity (e-), magnetic lines (flux) and induced movement (in electricity of magnetic coils). If, let’s say, they start mining asteroids they might find platinum which is used for coating conductors. So you might get more platinum phones.

Everything they get in space will plug into the head, or go to supply energy (He 3+), energy that goes to power devices that plug into the head! You’re travelling in a perspective parallel reality because that is what light consists of. The travel is to a large extent illusory; mainly of the head in algorithmic space.

In order to travel physically in space you’d have to do something like 2001: A Space Odyssey and have a very attractive Earth-type culture complete with Johann Strauss waltzes! You’d have to have gravity (centrifugal – the ferris) and preferably gardens a la Silent Running, and even nuns of the veil nebula and backyard planetoids like Starstruck.

All of that might just be possible, if we (or “they”) didn’t already live in their heads that are buzzing with dollar-signs and off-planet algorithms. With the likes of Musk, there’s zero chance of a Paul Kantner-esque romantic hippy space odyssey.

Space is not a physical medium; Kantner, if you listen to Starship (HYborian Bridge 62/2) visualizes a community aboard with hippy pantechnicons and hydroponic gardens, tripping types with few clothes and babes-in-arms.

The beauty of Starstruck is its physical cultures are almost all irrational. It’s probably the closest of the sci-fi universes to Baudelaire’s “The priest, the knight, the poet” (C7). There are the ever occurring nuns of the cloistered veil; there are Galatia 9 and Brucilla who make fair chivalrous knights. As for poetry, how about this scene of a dandy at Freebetter’s Dome with a resplendent Kalif Bajar?

 

© Elaine Lee/MW Kaluta

Kalif’s sister is the poetic genius behind “Mind Spiders from the Planet Xenon”. These thoroughly irrational space universes are the complete alternative to what “they” are going to give us. They have to be created; the creative force, the poet. The range of fashion alone in Starstruck is astonishing! It has to be built of air, water, green grass, caverns.. to have a physicality.

 

© Elaine Lee/MW Kaluta

An alternative space culture means a lot of building to create the physicality, the lived-in monumentality, and that’s not a business proposition, it’s a poetic act (see Tales of Faith 7 on high altitude dirigibles)

What “they” give us is space per se; which is just the techniques that the medium of light allow; there is no physicality and there is no psyche. The pulp writers such as Leigh Brackett who write of Mars are writing of the psyche of the planet from an Earth perspective (as with Northwest of Earth).

The buildings, monuments, canyons, canals and denizens are full of poetry because of the build-up of psyche in the physical universe. Ancient and timelost, this is an Earth perspective of the planet because Earth is the physical planet.

Without the physical, space is the domain of the insubstantial head, and that is the prospect “they” have in mind. To what extent, then, is the Mars of

 

actually nostalgia for the lost physicality of planet earth? Yes, it’s still there, but our psychic attachment to it is being retarded by the year. The two aspects connect us to a planet, to a place.

Bilal’s monumental depictions of cities – Paris, London, Berlin – in the Nikopol Trilogy are supposedly set in the years 2023-2025

 

 

© Bilal The Woman Trap

The beat-up grandeur of the London Savoy is very reminiscent of the beaten-up grandeur of Paris in Godard’s Alphaville. Godard uses subdued light effects while Bilal uses ice-cream colors and sculturesque shapes, figures, fashions.

 

© Bilal The Woman Trap

To what extent are all these pulpsters’ ostensibly sci-fi fantasies actually nostalgia for physicality? Where there is powerful – and decrepit – physicality, there is psyche. The two are inextricably linked.

Leigh Brackett, like CL Moore before her, seems to be writing of the dreamlike essence of Mars – as a dream-planet of the human psyche. Edmund Hamilton (her husband) quotes her “incurable romanticism”

It still persists, and she maintains that when the first astronauts land on Mars they will find dead cities, fierce riders and wicked, beautiful queens.. just as in this book. (preface)

When Mars was proved not to support life she stopped writing of it and created another fantasy world. All these pulpsters are writing of planets as they would write of Earth; in a physically nostalgic way. Earth is the physical planet and, from an Earth perspective, other planets are psyche.

Nikopol in Greek means City of Victory, which almost stands for the foundations of European culture. The foundations are of proportionate monuments that stand foursquare for the human figure and its relation to the cosmos.

The human figure is a physical reality; the human head is as insubstantial as light. The future we are entering is an illusion of light, and the monumentalism of the pulps is going in an alternate direction; if not back to classical Greece and lost gods of the Pharaohs. This seems a good place to bring in Howard (next)>

Combination of the Two (7)

There is a Franco-American alternative stream that encompasses the symbolist poets and reactionary medievalism. Bilal, in Gods in Chaos, quotes Baudelaire, the poet of the weeping city. Bilal is a master at drawing the minutae of really decrepit cities, especially fantastically stained walls.

I realized just recently that French city walls are exercises in painterly decay, grimy and pure poetry in sandstone.

(Lyon)

They say Bilal is influenced by fairy tale illustrator Gustav Dore - or is it more like realism a la Francais?-  the symbolist strain gotten from Edgar Allan Poe through to Arthur Rimbaud. In order to appreciate the bloody minded irrationality, one has to go back to Joseph de Maistre, the Savoyan medievalist.

Though de Maistre had a mystical almost Platonic idea of “divine rule” by monarchy (and church), he also admired the decisive man-of-action. In his eyes, there was no decision in rationality, only the irrational believer can know their own minds.

Baudelaire followed this critique with, “The priest, the knight, the poet; to know, to kill, to create.” They are counter-the-Enlightenment philosophy of Francis Bacon (Pictorial 22), and Baudelaire thought that rational government was simply a recipe for chaos.

These French dreamers, right the way through to Bilal – who’s French but of Yugoslav extraction – were temperamental rebels against solar Enlightenment (see The Magic Flute Hyborian Bridge 27)

The solar Enlightenment informs you of what’s true, rather than one knowing in one’s own mind. They are completely contrary views. One believes in an earthly figure, like Christ, and will kill in their name and make poems to the sacrifice. The other only believes in rational argument.

But this is where de Maistre’s critique of Bacon comes in. If (Hyborian Bridge 61/1) we are in The Idol of the Den, then we are in the head and not the body. The facts we are given are induced by the head of acolytes from observation of experiment.

The world we are in is an induction and not proportionate of body, sun, moon (and maybe Holy Ghost). That is why we seem to resemble the “Pets” of Traylor’s poem (Hyborian Bridge 56)

 Like pets, we are told everything EXCEPT everything we see for ourselves; such as body, sun, moon (and maybe Holy Ghost). The physical and the psychic worlds are out of our reach; that is what “they” tell us.

Nevertheless, that is what we see in the sky at night, the lusty moon shining through the

“forest wind’s going to blow all my cares away

My mind’s wandering like the wild geese in the west” (I know You Rider)

This is where French dirt comes in, or just laissez-faire grime. Bilal depicts the city as poetry, which is not clean; it’s a mixture of dirt and cleanliness (the washtub.) These French poets are rebelling against a Puritanical parallel reality that has its origins in Bacon, then Newton, and which became the Anglo-world we know (or think we do).. of sorcerers’ acolytes.

Pilote in the 70s contains more than its share of like-minded treatises – Caza, F’Murr etc Pictorial 14. It does seem likely that Howard’s characters contain more than a hint of this Frenchness, even if they are often thought of as very American or Celtic.

Norman knights figure predominantly in his medieval adventures round Outremer and all points east (Norman Irish too). Of course, Agnes is a French swordswoman. Incidentally, CL Moore couldn’t have read this when she wrote Jirel of Joiry, though I’ve heard it said Jirel is her take on Howard’s sword and sorcery.

From what I’ve said previously, one way to look at sword and sorcery is as a knightly rebellion against rule by the disproportionate head – the solar serpent; the man-serpents of Thoth Amon. In a likewise way, French poets were rebelling against the Puritanical Enlightenment, or rule by head (acolytes of observational experiment).

A recent example of head versus body is this piece on the APR’s plan to reintroduce bison to Montana, where ranchers still herd cattle by horseback.

What we see is a great opportunity for us to co-exist.. we want to restore the native species on the landscape and cattle were not a native species, so we just have two different views of the best use of this primary habitat. (Beth Saboe of APR)

The APR wants to reintroduce bison as a natural native species that grazes the plains, and understandably cowboys feel themselves threatened. Unless they introduce natural predators of bison, like wolves, the ecology is seriously unbalanced.

The APR obviously wants to employ managed culls that produce the desirable ecology, which the cowboys fear will be without their ranches. What no one seems to have pointed out is, where you have cowboys, herds, bison and horses there once would have been Indians to control the native species!

That is a hunting ecology, which doesn’t fit with the APR’s rationalist bias that it’s better to manage things than to have them manage themselves. Anything that runs itself is active; physically active communities running over the landscape, hunting in packs. To “them” that is irrational, and that’s totally true.

Hunting, and blood, the kill, the dismembering of the carcass, the carrion crows, everything of that type of landscape and traditional hunting way of life is irrational. It’s also strong and lives off the decay and regeneration of the prairie. Modern management does not see that as fitting for humans because they want hygienic ventures for us, if not for animals (Drama3)


This goes back to the two contrary pictures, between on the one hand Rand and on the other French wildness (Pictorial 46) represented by

 

Alternates 6

Rand is the figurehead for the world of convincing perspective, which is another word for absence of decadence, the strength gained by rundown water-mills, the irregularity of wood and stone, overgrown prairie grass, scythe and butterflies, the cycle of decay and revival.

This is the setting for the picture of Perrine in her gumboots. Utilitarian clothes for utilitarian activities of the body expressing its physicality in run-down situations. The sort of setting that in French bande desinnee  often becomes imbued with decadence, in the sense of risqué behaviour. The two type of physical action are not necessarily separated, at least they overlap.

Jean-Claude Servais art Malmaison (A Suivre 1983)

Another example from France is Moebius’s The Airtight Garage, which ends when Major Grubert leaves the fantastical garage via a door into our own reality. Our own reality, hence, is only “parallel”, consisting of only straight lines and parallel tracks (this is Moebius’s ending, not Moorcock’s who wrote the original fantasy!)

Tales of Faith 12

What “they” always presume is that the convincing parallel world of straight lines is reality, the one we apparently live in. Rand represents the appeal of this in soaring monuments to the dollar, all as insubstantial as a forest of mirrors. The fantastical delusion of acolytes who can all trace their ancestry to the original sorcerer of knives that scatter light and let in a parallel universe. It’s convincing, and gets more so by the year.

As Fontella Bass says,

HOW STRANGE

Combination of the Two (6)

Some pictures from my neighbourhood, the Creative Quarter; I’m not so cock-a-hoop for it as your compatriot though I’ve always dug the lobster mural, which apparently predates the modern development by half a generation.  

 

Replacement of lobster – note straight lines versus curvilinear original.

As I recall, the Café Luca he mentions used to be a multi-level hairdresser to die for (I was cut by Frank, the Iranian). Now we have popup hairshops with themed interiors; one has a sign, “Enter a king, leave a legend”, presumably meaning they cut your throat!

(secluded garden)

 

This is another neighbourhood which has bits of leftover patches. What I’m getting at is a development is the opposite of decadence which is pure spontaneity. There is a sort of rustic feel evoked by tall grass and leaning shrubs. I was once on a rundown chateau in France and we went about scything long-grass, butterflies would fly about, psychically soothing. Reaping the harvest also has a certain grimness to it; in a decadent situation there is the cycle of life and death.

So, a development as such may have good coffee and art but has much less meaning. Your compatriot has a picture of happy people – see the false dream C4. Quite a lot of French file through and they seem to like it too. It’s the old problem that an illusion can be very convincing – like Newton’s knives C5.

Here’s a picture of stained walls from Bilal’s Gods in Chaos…

 

..where outer Paris is a pigsty of urban resentment and actually fantastically picturesque. Perhaps a festering sore is picturesque? The quote is apparently Baudelaire.

In the story – part one of the Nikopol Trilogy – powerful divinities of Earthly proportion – Horus, Bastet, Thoth, Anubis – are forced to apply to Paris’s totalitarian governor for fuel for their hovering pyramid. I suppose that can be taken as a comment that the divinities have lost their power over Earth and instead need power to fuel their rocket.

If rockets travel through perspective space (prev.) can one assume that is a parallel reality? A parallel reality is usually taken to be something that runs on rails, as CL Moore describes (Tales of Faith 12)

However, all our technology tends to follow Newtonian principles (C5). Before Newton scientists tended to proceed by way of deduction from the general. Scientists observed the world then deduced, say, that the sun rises in the east.

Newton changed that by initiating controlled experiments that were induced from the particular, making observations on the experiments. So, he induced from observation of the particular to general statements (principles).

This has been taken to be scientific method till our own time. But what you can infer is that, by inducing from observation of the particular (experiment), one can do without proportion of the general. Meaning sun and moon.

So, did Newton invent a parallel reality that does without a general sense of proportion? Proportions are always deduced from the general, which one sees in trees, animals, stars, sun and moon.

In olden days, that would have been the universe; after Newton that is just what we see, but it is not the universe. The universe is now disproportionate or, as I tend to say, it exists in the head (the observer of the experiment.)

That was Newton’s revolution, because a certain type of head is needed to perform experiments. This was a danger foreseen in The New Atlantis (Idol of the Den Hyborian Bridge 22). Experiments, which are linear and logical, then become general statements of principles on our reality.

The inference is we can do without proportion in the general, meaning trees, animals, moon and sun. The ancent reality of death and revival. Man chases animals through forest and over hills. Diana hunts with her hounds by the light of the moon.

Man kills and the carcass is dismembered. Blood, ravens, the scavengers of the air, harbingers of battles. Carrion nurtures carrion feeders; decay regenerates life (see Elrig prev.)

This entire cycle of dirt and cleanliness is denied by what you could call a parallel reality of hygienic experiment. Anything to do with dirt and decadence is proportionate of physicality (physique). It’s the physical world of strength the modern world has left behind.

Combination of the Two (5)

“I know you, Lauzier”; the French Algerian who’s satirical Tranches de Vie appeared in Pilote in the 70s – or alongside western artist Alexis (Pictorial 44)

I knew his talent for acerbic wit, seemingly against both the bourgeoisie and “les babas cool” or trendy lefty hippy druggy flower communes. In subsequent years he took his talent to films, most famously in Mon Pere, Ce Heros with Gerard Depardieu (1992). The version with Marie Gillain, not to be confused with the English language version (also with Depardieu). It can only be seen in French, trust me.

Having been aware of his seminal bande desinnee Souvenirs d’un Jeune Homme, this became the film P’tit Con (stupid jerk) with Guy Marchand and Souad Amidou playing the Algerian love interest (1984). Since Mon Pere, Ce Heros is set in an Algerian beach resort, there is a connection between the two.

It’s sort of the less rule-bound and more communally chaotic spontaneity. Some of the scenes of Algerian street-life in P’tit Con could equally be Harlem, Spanish or black, there’s so little difference.

In our societies the same rules of competition apply across the board so –surprise surprise – we turn out similar types. One way to put it is that chaotic communal spontaneity has more of a Claude Levi-Strauss structure – predator, prey, intermediary Hyborian Bridge 59.

In P’tit Con street-life is guys and dolls and mopeds, maybe some gangs. Guy Marchand acts as the intermediary between predator and prey in that, even though he chases Souad Amidou with a view to a kill, even putting her up after her neighbours get surly, he doesn’t sleep with her for awhile. His reasons are something like he will when the time is right (that’s why he’s a con). So, it’s a typically French intellectual ride! Marchand is looking for meaning.

Meaning is also the theme of the other film. Fourteen year old Marie Gillain’s character meets a young scuba diver and to impress him starts weaving a fantasy life round her rotund dad. Some of the best scenes are of an Algerian evening band oozing smarm, Gillain dressing well and gliding round the floor, the rotund Depardieu in tow and scuba diver well and truly hooked.

The spontaneity of action in the Sea Breeze Algerian resort again is much less rule-bound and so much more lusty and freely expressed of desire and maybe carnality (she resists). There’s a touching scene as Depardieu casually offends a sweet thing then chases her sobbing through the dusky sand.

Les babas cool in P’tit Con are certainly less rule-based and Marchand is introduced to a threesome which he flunks out of. When Amidou arrives things liven up, and she has a good line debunking their Freudian pretensions on capital (like Godard inWeekend ).

Amidou wears hot-pants and a loose Arabesque kaftan that allows for a very expressive street vibe. In fact, the hippy garb of les babas cool makes their bawdy ways appear very natural, part of the scene. This made me think that sexuality in communal settings that are not capitalist and rule-based but more like matriarchal and patriarchal is an inevitable part of the physical actions of the household (and its corresponding psyche). Even if Lauzier makes sarcastic digs at the flower people, he prefers them to bourgeois.

In both films, the communal spontaneity produces the structure for the chase (predator, prey - a combination of spontaneity and structure.) Well, do birds do much else? Isn’t it true to say that the competitive rules we follow take us out of that area of spontaneous action?

So, is it true to say that spontaneity is structured in that naturalistic sense, that frees the instinctive actions? Mon Pere, Ce Heros reminds me a bit of Godard (Neptune) who uses myth in modern settings, more or less to subvert the too rational man of doubt and uncertainty (or the AI which runs Alphaville)

Myths are actions; they are structured (predator, prey, gods, man) but are outside the rule-bound society. In societies with a  mythical substratum, physical lustiness is employed in active pursuits – harvest festivals, trampling the grape, such earthy things as fulling (Hyborian Bridge 60), maypole dancing.

The structures of these societies are physical; in other words, related to the Earth’s rotation. Since a perspective reality is mathematical, not physical (C4) it could explain why in some sense we are all prisoners of “Newton’s knives”.

These were the shiny instruments he used in a dark box with a single light hole, to test the throwing of shadows and multiple “infractions” (refractions) of the beam against a white card. A shining knife is simply a thin mirror which reflects or refracts.

In the universe of the knife, everything is perspective – mathematical – whereas the physical reality is a relativity of proportions – sun, moon – to the Earth’s rotation. Acolytes will always tend to go for the mathematics of a case – as with Einstein’s Relativity – just because that is the universe they are in (“Alice”)

In other words, Einstein has become a prisoner of Newton’s knives, just because that universe is so attractive to acolytes who dabble in numbers. You could say anything  electromagnetic is also a prisoner of the knives since it is bound to be digital.

That universe is simply one that is constructed of perspective (light) and not structured by means of the Earth’s rotation (sun and moon).

A structured universe does not have rules, since they are products of order. It has physical action of physical needs (on Earth), primarily the chase (hunt), the search for a mate, homemaking and, with Man, the harvest.

This is why Howard’s brawny and lusty heroes and heroines are so true to the physical history of Man before we became prisoners of these very convincing knives of the sorcerer Newton (“Pets” Hyborian Bridge 56)

I noticed from this quote that Newton prefigured a parallel universe, which seems to show that it’s intrinsic to the phenomenon of light, not to the proportionate reality which is physically true to this Earth of myth.

And since Space is divisible in infinitum, and Matter is not necessarily in all places, it may be also allow'd that God is able to create Particles of Matter of several Sizes and Figures, and in several Proportions to Space, and perhaps of different Densities and Forces, and thereby to vary the Laws of Nature, and make Worlds of several sorts in several Parts of the Universe. At least, I see nothing of Contradiction in all this.

Not to put too fine a point on it bawdiness is completely to do with proportions and those of genitalia especially! Greek myths abound with incongruous pairings. In P’tit Con, Marchand finally gets together with Amidou and it doesn’t go to plan, the bodily mishap is typically bawdy. I wouldn’t say pornographic as nothing is visible (as CC Beck says Pictorial 4).

All the stuff about bodily fluids might just have something in common with Fulling Hyborian Bridge 60 The basic physicality of active pursuits that can be sexual or can be just productive. The two are not separated. The sorcerer Newton obviously takes all the physicality out of production (as we now see) and so sex becomes totally separated.

So, the film seems to portray an alternative to the cold-blooded capitalist dating game that seems to have pornographic outlets that are totally distinct from home and hearth (is that 50 Shades?) If that is actually a parallel reality, then there might be thought to be something puritanical in it that divorces us from the body.

You almost wonder if Freud is a consequence of that puritanical divorce that makes moral rules for the body! The sense I got from P’tit Con was that Marchand is almost pathologically in his head and that plays out as bawdy farce. For awhile he ends up in a sanatorium – is that the fate of modern Man in his pathological hygiene?

Rustic areas are intrinsically dirty, lusty and brawny and that is their strength. Our age of hygiene seems to be a consequence of sorcerers who have really created a universe of the head and not of the physique, or psyche. Myth.

 

CROWN OF CREATION

Combination of the Two (4)

The Improved Order of Red Men

The Chief of Records of the New Jersey Pohatcong Tribe

To an outsider this looks like another hysterical American ritual (was it in Neil Gaiman’s American Gods?) nevertheless, at its height membership was about half a million rebels (against Britain’s overseas rule) and I guess it was intended as a progressive tribute to native Americans.

Despite what I said about spacefarers, one can imagine an America that is able to reclaim its rustic heritage as well as harbouring colonies in space. In fact, the combination of the two is a common enough sci-fi trope, as in Starstruck. The sense is that it strikes a chord with the psyche; while space settings are high-powered micro-grav illusions, the Galactic Girl Guides perform homely feats with hen-houses and corn-dollies.

Archaic rituals that hearken towards dreams of yore; American or African? Towards the finale of Flamingo Feather (Van der Post, prev) our heroes approach the gathered throng of ‘Takwena at a sacred plateau where stands the Keeper of the People’s Memory, the Umbombulimo.

As I watched him standing there with extraordinary satyr’s dignity, a strange crepuscular compromise of man and beast, and the light of an uncompromising spring morning upon him, I became aware of the extraordinary silence his words and appearance had imposed upon the gathering and I feared greatly the power of the people’s associations from childhood with him and his craft, and its effect on the aboriginal element quicksilver element in the massed African tribal mood. (page 273)

The young and the ancient come together in this figure out of time. Our heroes have to challenge his fairy tale authority over the interpretation of a Great Dream that will set South Africa aflame with rebellion.

As Van der Post emphasizes several times, the Umbombulimo mujst serve the Dream – the truth of the vision – and not the other way round. In the end, the Umbombulimo is found to have betrayed the Dream and he, together with his allies, must follow custom and walk over the edge.

The others followed obediently with bowed heads, all except the Umbombulimo who first laid down his forked stick, took off his trappings one by one until all his discarded finery lay like dead animal shapes upon the ground. Then naked as he had entered the world he proceeded behind the others to walk out of it. (page 279)

Fantastical rituals of a lost age; however as Van der Post says at the end of the book, the vision is ever greater than the self and it is not happiness or unhappiness we need, but meaning.

To Americans that might sound odd, but the American dream has always had a dark side to it. In the age of modernity, happiness is almost impossible to define, and the intangible myths of cowboy and Indian much simpler.

The dream – both African and American – is physical; the actions of people to achieve a goal together. Any dream can be a rebellion and can involve bloodshed; for every goal there is conflict. That’s the danger and the reason for the interpreters of dreams to hold sway in African tradition.

In Van der Post’s book the Umbombulimo – the sorcerer – is found to have sold a false dream. If we – in modernity – are living a false dream then it is much more than simply a case of happiness or unhappiness.

As I tend to say, everything is electrochemical impulses, so it would be false happiness! No, what is more relevant is the meaning we can adduce, and meaning often implicates a mythical substratum.

BWS, The Ram and the Peacock

BWS in The Studio (as I may have mentioned) says the wizard is a fallen hero and the barbarian an intruder. For the sake of argument, the wizard could represent modern science symbolised by the prism – Newtonian optics – and the sundial – spacetime (Relativity). I know that isn’t what he intended; it’s a way of testing the “truths” of science in a mythical setting.

I did a bit of reading on the “Opticks” in wikipaedia, and the main thing I got was that light by its nature is geometrical, splitting always at the same angles (diffraction, rainbow), irrespective of any medium. What that says is that any investigation of light (optics) goes into a perspective world, since that’s what geometry is. Newton essentially replaced rational deduction with controlled experiment (observation) and this has been so up to our own day.

Controlled experiments are supposedly “factual”, but in Newton’s case they take place in a perspective reality. Since so much of science is Newtonian, that applies to so much of what we are told. The perspective reality is essentially solar (light) and not physical. In BWS’s print the physical reality is the ornamental garden with wind-chimes in the trees, peacock and the signs of the cultivated country gentleman.

The sundial you could say IS physical, since it indicates the sun’s passage through the sky (Earth’s rotation). If that is so, then you could also say Einstein’s Relativity exists inside the prism (lens) of Newtonian optics.

In other words, these sorcerers are not in the physical reality of the garden (above), only in perspective reality. So, how does that account for “proofs” of spacetime, such as the recent algorithmic image of a supermassive black hole (Hyborian Bridge 56)?

As I mentioned there, it’s a perspective image through a great telescope (lens). The “proof” we have is in perspective reality. Now, I’m not saying perspective doesn’t exist; it does is a prism or lens (“Pets”). But the other reality is Earth’s rotation which involves relative proportions of sun and moon (prev).

The proportionate reality is the invisible or absolute one; the sun is only order. This goes back to “White Rabbit” and Alice Through the Looking Glass (Hyborian Bridge 48) where everything relates to the speed of light. Relativity is like a reflection in glass where all the images move through electromagnetism, or the vanishing point of technique.

Einstein I quoted awhile back 'Since the mathematicians have invaded the theory of relativity I do not understand it myself any more.' Exactly, because a perspective reality is a mathematical, not a physical reality. It’s implicitly confusing. We are in the sorcerer created land of infinite mirrors (Hyborian Bridge 20)

This is why we appear to live in a Looking Glass world rather than a physical one of rustic pursuits, country gentlemen, refined gardens, prairie riders and other things on the hoof.

I KNOW YOU RIDER

Combination of the Two (3)

It’s confusing, isn’t it? Man evolves for untold years, and then apparently he’s got it wrong and along comes modernity. Fontella Bass may be ahead of the game; her Chess move carried her out to sea and to the avant-garde jazz scene in Paris

EVOLUTION II

The physical universe is seen from Earth; anything else is a convincing illusion, the universe of perspective we are in. This is the one sorcerers have created and that acolytes serve. The physical universe is also psychic since the two are intertwined. Evolution, it stands to reason, can only be physical, and so we are back to the primeval kingdom of the chase, blood and everlasting hunt (Sir Gawain and the Green Knight ).

The hunt is blood and rebirth. One bounds over hill and dale, the domain of the woodsman who sees stags framed against twilight trees, who cuts and plants to secure the prey. Strength is in the decadent world of death and rebirth, the strength that is symbolised by the full moon rising over majestic sights of yore

 

In its heyday a castle was communal, physical and psyche; dirt and cleanliness; housebound and womanly; horsebound and warrior; young, old, maiden and monk. As an example of physical evolution, that takes some beating!

Physically speaking, Detroit has all of that apart from horses and warriors (Drama3). The point I’m making is that modernism stands for hygiene – lack of decadence – and not for any of the above. Detroit declined through decadence, and that was a sign of communal living. Decadence breeds strength and revival – evolution. In the US, where capital has not yet got a choke-hold, some of that is still evident. Latin America, for all its left/right lunacy, still breeds decadence in its poverty-stricken communes (Hyborian Bridge 62/2). Physical and psychic strength; dirt and cleanliness.

What that seems to say is that where capital doesn’t rule – Detroit, quite a lot of Latin America – decadence does and, with it, physical evolution. Physical evolution is not factual, it is poetic – the sun and moon are physical twins; rusticated cottages twine with the vine; Puritan maidens throb in the bosom of nature (Hyborian Bridge 61/3)

HOME.^[1] 

Letitia Landon poem set to this picture

Aye, here, dear love, is just a home,
    Like what our home should be;
A home of peace—a home of love—
    As made for thee and me.

A cottage with its roof of thatch,
    Its porch of the red rose,
Its white walls hidden by the wreath
    The bridal jasmine throws.

The rooms are dark, for the green vines
    Have twin'd each lattice round;
Where, veil'd by leaves, the wild wind harp
    Breathes forth its lonely sound.

And round are many landscapes hung,
    Each of some foreign shore,
Of rock, and storm, to make us prize
    Our own calm home the more.

A green turf lies before the door,
    A fairy carpet spread
With silver daisies—pearls of dew,
    Meet for the Elf-queen's tread.

About are beds of many flowers,
    Sweet shrubs, and blossom'd trees;
Beside that elm the dove-cote's plac'd,
    Beneath that ash, the bees.

And there the little green-house stands,
    A refuge for the spring ;
Where, even in the winter time,
    The rose is flourishing.

There is a murmur on the wind,
    Of the far billow's sweep:
Come on this mount of scented plants,
    And you can see the deep.

Look to the east, where the grey wave
    Is blent with the grey sky,
To where the setting sun has left
    It's purple pageantry.

How pleasant, in another hour,
    Our wand'ring there will be!
When the dim ships, like shadows, ride
    Over the star-lit sea.

When sailing in the deep blue heav'n,
    The moon, like a young bride,
Comes timid, as she fear'd to claim
    Her empire o'er the tide.

Then, to return from the white cliffs,
    Where winds and waters beat,
How shall we love the leaves and flowers
    Of our own calm retreat!

We should be happy;— yet let all
    Sweet dreams, like these, depart:
It matters not whate'er his lot,—
    Love's home is in the heart.⁠

Landen was as facile as Byron; a fallen woman who painted physical tableaux as eternal as sunrise. The physical universe of fate and melodic trees (with wind-chimes, “The Ram and the Peacock” BWS) changes very little. The description Howard gives of an Aquilonian woodsman’s home is very similar (Hyborian Bridge 62/2) 

Rembrandt’s painting Susanna and the Elders (prev) has the same languid ease of limbs and trees. The merging of Man with nature that has the languid grace of vine-laden walls and sunken wells, of deer nibbling, of sweetgrass grazing.

Romantic nature is the physical decadence that inspires evolution. If you pick-out Howard’s illustrators of dreamy rusticity the pattern becomes clear.

Roy Krenkel, Satyrs Fighting from AMRA#6

Evolution is a physical power, brawny and lusty, of the type that Weird Tales covers are famous for. That is, the human physique and the psychic luster of scenes of erotic danger.

Our physical sense of the universe is proportionate between sun and moon, between man and woman, brawn and beauty, life and death. Above all it is an earthpower, an earth that rotates between sun and moon.

That physical power has been abandoned by the acolytes of a hygienic universe of perspective, or the vanishing point of technique (“speed” Pictorial 47). A parallel world of the lens that is as devilishly convincing as a mirage in the desert.

Dubai