Combination of the Two (9)

The Nikopol Trilogy starts with the hibernetic return from deep space of Nikopol and his encounter with the renegade Horus, and their pursuit by the inhabitants of a floating pyramid.. which continues into The Woman Trap. The woman being Jill Bioskop, reporter in a London that reminds one rather heavily of Alphaville.. as does Berlin which she heads for after the apparent murder of her Alpharatzian friend.

All three cities – including the Paris of part one – are like hermetic encapsulations of something from the 30s. In Berlin, the scene outside the cabaret; the acrobatic elegance of high board divers in sophisticated foyers (again, there is a similar scene in Alphaville – somewhat bloody – and blood flows through The Woman Trap, enwrapping the luxurious body of Bioskop.

 

Jill’s in Berlin ostensibly to cover the return of the deep space Europa 1 but, of course, “rockets are boring”. Part 2 ends with the three of them heading south on a madcap adventure, still pursued by the pyramid.

All this, I have to say, reminds me of the idea of decrepit travel in package steamers from Neptune. One travels, not to arrive, but in the Homeric sense of experiencing sun, sea, waves, spray, the decline of the day (with a margarita).

“I can see the stars tonight
would you like to go up on A deck and look at them with me
I can see the stars tonight
would you like to go out for a stroll and keep me company” (Have You Seen the Stars Tonight?)

Sings Kantner on Blows, in the same light-hearted way. The adventure is an alternate passage away from scripted space travel of the rational mind, and towards the wanton thrill of the chase.

For Nikopol this starts with Jill, but he drops her at the start of Cold Equator and heads for the deep interior, where Niko chases him. What’s with the wild animals that seem so at home on the south-bound train? Niko (son of Nikopol) even has a drink with them and gets ratted.

 

Again, it could be travel not just in the physical sense, but in the sense of putting distance between the rational, scripted mind of civilization.

The animals are game for a laugh, and could almost be viewed as Claude Levi-Strauss’s intermediaries – neither prey nor predator (prev.) On the way down, Bilal has a running gag about fake scales (7.3 on the Steiner scale) and counts (450,000 citizens killed).

The “scientifically pure indices” are “their” standard way of keeping us in line, by giving everything a number and rational score. “Chessboxing” seems like another typical gag since the scales for the mind and body have utterly no connection!

 

A lot of modern life is like that. I just read of a fungus hybridised with killer funnel-web spider DNA that kills mosquitoes

Things that have no connection in nature usually it is a bad idea to splice. If you go to a wild bit of growth that’s been left awhile, what you might get is brambles, sputum, a lot of insects, birds that feed off them, sedge and stones and snails and worms. What connects the species is the predator-prey cycle, the build-up of humus (decayed matter), the strength and fertility of the wild patch.

Nothing can replace that strength; it builds-up over time and is intricate with nooks and crannies. The intricacy of strength provides homes for innumerable bugs and beasties; it’s a mixture of dirt and cleanliness.

Modern hygienic science tries to do without that cycle, and so loses the strength. Their hybridised forms are signs of weakness. They cover up their weakness with “scientifically pure indices”; scales and grades and numbers.

Grades of weakness, because strength is simply earth, air, water, plant, animal undivided and free. It’s the Africa that Laurens Van der Post speaks of (). So, the decrepit train ride with smells and beasts is a sort of metaphor for travel and adventure; where the physicality hits you and where the psyche is free.

It’s the other side of blood and the chase, where animals dose on the bough and idly eye eachother; where the Ark-like differences are raw and untamed. The utterly irrational crowded together is the spirit of freedom – physique and psyche. A journey through a dream. The dream of the universe. The psyche emanates from the unruly physique, and this harks back to Madame Blavatsky’s Theosophy.

Where things are unruly, the archaic bloodlust peaks beneath the surface and establishes a rapport with beasts. I happened to read an article on the unruly Bloomsbury sisters – Margery, Brynhild, Daphne and Noel Olivier.

“Usually rather serious and always noble in looks and manners and in attitude of mind, they could be as unthinkingly cruel as savages. Sometimes they were savages.”.. “ Shocking flirts, and their manners were disgraceful.”(DT)

Their beastliness was described by Noel

she and her sisters “can bear with all kinds of folk at first, extracting from them what is good until they are, as it were, boiled dry; whereupon we at last look at them critically and […] conceive for them a bitter contempt and ennui.” 

This is the medievalist world of psychic differences where we are ruled by planets and not by the scales and grades and numbers of “scientific indices”. The order of the sun, a mirage in the desert (of the wormdollar).

The pulp universe of Madame Blavatsky’s planets was taken-up by Talbot Mundy, and in 1975 BWS came out with The Book of Samothrace (Pictorial 50/1) I hazarded that the book was the flaming sun, but another way of viewing it is as a prophecy of solar expansion, one that produces mirror-images (reflections) in a perspective universe.

In the world of reflections there is no freedom, only order. Who are the free spirits of the modern world? There are some tramps in my neighbourhood who had a local feature written on their plight; they are the closest I can think of!

Diagnosed with schizoaffective disorder, she had been on an anti-psychotic medication for 15 years. When she was unable to get this from a GP after moving back to Folkestone around seven years ago, she said her symptoms increasingly affected her state of mind. She said: “All five of my senses, I get hallucinations, I hear voices, I get visual hallucinations, tactile hallucinations.”

For him, reading provides a temporary escape. “I want to go back to college,” he said. “I would love to do graphic design. “Michaela is brilliant at drawing but she has learning difficulties, so you get people looking down on her.”