The Heads of Cerberus (part 1)

 

 

I suddenly realized this intro to Harlan Ellison’s Hornbook is intended as a homage to Claimed. There are those who see Francis Stevens, ne Bennett, ne Barrows as a pioneer of Dark Fantasy. I wonder if that’s because the late 20^th century sub-genre is oft associated with women?

As a reader solely of three or four tales I think a much more likely claim is as a pioneer of heroic fantasy with a marine bent. Of her fantasy I have read that five are set on an island; Claimed tells of an obsessive seaquest; Citadel of Fear of a lost city on a subterranean lake set with war galleys.

The heroic stuff is for sure not that feminine – apart from Friend Island.

Stern of feature, bronzed by wind and sun, her age could only be guessed, but I surmised at once that in her I beheld a survivor of the age of turbines and oil engines – a true sea-woman of that elder time when a woman’s superiority to man had not been so long recognized.

The two stories I read tell of the love of a man for a woman; a courageous and foolhardy love even unto reckless, impetuous death. Bennett writes of fighters, and

The Dusk Lady came of a warrior people. At his rough command she sprang back out of his way, and the fight was on. (Citadel of Fear page 252)

The warrior inhabits a physical universe of blood and honour, and her fantasies are really no less sorcerous than Howard’s, whether the living demon Nacoc Coatl, or the fleetly floating and fleetingly psychic remnants of archaic Atlantis.

Friend Island is a not bad thematic intro to the larger work, a sea-shantie-ish tale of a long-in-the-tooth sea-woman’s reminiscences of being stranded on an island that seemed to respond to her moods.

Somehow, living there alone my natural womanly intuition was stronger than ever before or since, and so I knowed.

The loneliness of an island is a different kind of thing to sheer mental boredom that we suffer from nowadays, and make one ponder. Is intuition a response to a state of the universe – in this case an island?

What would a friendly universe be? She first poses the question, “Is it civil or wild?” so clearly an uninhabited island is wild. A wild universe isn’t safe – a thing of blood and honour – but it also isn’t under the rule of order (civilization).

However, in days gone past civilization was not just the rule of order, it was wild and free. A very good example is the St Tropez of Bardot’s day; in Hyborian Bridge 9 she bemoans its demise

“At first, there was nothing. Then beaches appeared after the film And God Created Woman. Each was different, funny and unconventional. There was joy, it was a symbol of freedom,” she recalled.

“But with this reorganisation project, this beach will become monotone when it was so charming. It’s tragic.”

Civilization always has been a merging with nature (see Rome Hyborian Bridge 2). It cannot replace the natural cleanliness and rugged rustic pursuits of Man UNLESS it is simply an illusion. An illusion is something that is visually convincing (sun, perspective) but it has not the inarticulate grace and flow (of Bardot or a beach). We are, after all, run by words (script) as never before in the history of mankind.

Words can be useful – descriptions as in Bennett or Howard – but they can also be pure routine. If we live in a routine world, it cannot also be a free-flowing inarticulate universe. The two are incompatible.

If civilization has routines (customs, laws, edicts) it also has to have the spontaneity of free communal expression 

Raymond Depardon, Bolivia

There are two sides of reality; the order of a robot; the beauty of a wild beast. An island is a physical presence – like St Tropez used to be according to BB – providing free food, songbirds, nectar, rock pools and tidal detritus. The pleasure is of the body to express itself wholesomely in a non rule-bound sense

LA MADRAGUE

That side of civilization – that was there in the 60s from France to San Fran – that might make it barely bearable, has never been deader. The side that merges with nature, that lives like an island isolated from outside interference (Hong Kong, prev.)

It’s because civilization has become a perspective illusion that convinces the head that it has become cutoff from the physical experience of nature (cosmos) and therefore the psychic expression of freedom.

A non-physical universe suffers from physical boredom and is nevertheless trapped by its own physique. There is no escape from physique and therefore – whatever “they” tell us – that is what the universe is.

By ignoring the physical reality, we are permeated by facts of convincing rightness that only exist in the heads of acolytes, irrespective of physical desirability. This “rightness” - it has to be said – is a male thing; a compulsion – monetary, numerical, algorithmic – of the head that is indicative of physical boredom.

An island – and particularly the female island of the story – is a presence of physical desirability, bodily pleasure. Intoxicating and inarticulate reality. Now, this is exactly the sort of reality that our male politicians/acolytes of dead sorcerers are not atall convinced by, since it’s not of the head! Therefore, they continually destroy the thing that allows free-flowing imagination unencumbered by rule-bound boredom.

The more speeches you hear the more you know you are in the realm of rule-bound boredom. What is the way out of this nightmare? Every man or woman is an island. Our bodies are perfect and capable of country pursuits of yore (as well as sailing, canoeing). Cowboys – and cowboy-hippies – need to get out of their heads and onto their saddles. Yeehar!

The Citadel of Fear (part 2)

In ruinous reverie is a type of revival, a revival of blood sacrifice that is the moonlit hunt of yore. The old writers like Bennett were apparently not impressed by electrification and the new assemblies of Henry Ford (“history is bunk”). See Grace Slick quote from her memoir.

Slick says the difference is “aesthetic”. Also I think the inarticulate state of stasis. Every age of the Earth has a certain stasis, making it detectable in the geological record.

Stasis means simply being left to its own devices, which actually amounts to a ruinous reverie. Things grow, die, decay, revive.. and that is strength. To seek to deny this cycle is weak perfidy.

Bennett’s descriptions hark back to candlelit siestas

Alone in the hall O’Hara looked about with a judging, curious eye. His first impression had been pleasant. The room was agreeably lighted by a hanging fixture, whose translucent, cream-colored globe diffused a mellow radiance. A log glowed in the depths of a fireplace of black dignity and size. (page 138)

The astronauts quoted in Citadel of Fear 1 are obviously convinced of the illusory reality they saw from space – that doesn’t mean it’s not an illusion! A perspective reality is by definition convincing (sun) but certain things go with it.

If, as I tend to suppose, it’s going towards the vanishing point of technique, then it is going to have to be various things associated with technique. Apart from electricity, it’s going to be algorithmic (AI).

You could also assume it might be other things, like DNA. But technique is only one side of reality; the other is flow (Bruce Lee). If things didn’t flow there would be no perfection in form (figures in the sky, constellations).

The moon – seen from Earth – is perfectly proportionate, hanging there in the twilight sky. The moon is Diana, huntress with indefatigable hounds lusting for the blood of hinds poking their noses out of moon-dark forests.

This is THE moon, the one of myth that signifies physical action over wold and through wood. With the spilling of blood comes decay and revival and strength.

Physical reality, rather than convincing illusion born of technique (sun) that leads to the vanishing point (of technique) in perspective illusion.

That is, an illusion of the head that is weak; that cannot revive through ruin and decay and reverie. These things all are from the Earth as it twirls in space.

What is missing is a cosmology, since a cosmology is not something that is visually convincing. It is inarticulate, but proportionate to Earth’s place in the cosmos. From that “perspective”, perspective is irrelevant!

The sun is illusory and so is water (Bruce Lee "Claimed" 2) but, taken together with air and Earth, they form a cosmology. A cosmology is strong; it is not of the head, it is of the body and blood and sacrifice (Christianity). This is the strong, heroic world that Bennett and Howard are looking back towards.

The modern world finds it impossible to leave things well alone and just to let them be what they want to be. Two examples at random: Hong Kong (China) and Russia’s national park at Yugyd Va.

The reason is the modern world has no cosmology such as Rasputin’s Mother Russia naturalism (Pictorial 5) or China’s Tao. You can hear this in music; I happened to hear Solomon Linda’s Mbube from the 30s, which was the original South African Zulu choir of The Lion Sleeps Tonight.

On the last chorus, Linda improvises a soprano melody that was later lyricised into “In the jungle, the mighty jungle”. From freedom and naturalism springs creativity – that is the lost world..

MBUBE

.. of tribalism, really, the Zulus as distinct from the ANC or civilization.

He knew himself for an impetuous man, more used to rough, forthright ways of the open then the ruled order of civilization. (page 156)

There is a wild, animal-like ethos about O’Hara that is somewhat similar to Howard’s.

The winds’ voice no longer defied him – it was calling, pleading with him in great shouts and gasps of terror. It was a reckless, impetuous messenger, tearing at his windows and his heart in gusty throbs of wordless passion. (page 158)

The similarity is fairly blatant, and could even have helped to crystalize Howard’s anti-civilization ethos round about 1920 when the stories came out in Argosy. Francis Xavier Gordon may even have been named after the writer, seeing as Howard had no way of knowing her sex!

The wildness also affects the fay maiden he rescues from Reed’s menagerie

Her green gown, wet as ever, clung to the body and limbs in the revealing lines a thin bathing suit. Her dark hair hung in the same beautiful but informal curls, and for the first time Colin was aware of those worn places in her gown through which bare limbs shone whitely. (page 172)

The green-robed one is surely the Moth-maiden he met in Tlapallan, who was captured by the high priests of Nacoc Yaotl. Now she is in the clutches of he who prays to “the god of science” – none other than he who O’Hara left at Tlapallan, the slithering Kennedy.

Once O’Hara finds himself in Kennedy’s clutches in a putrescence viler than anything that is not as verifiable as scientific method, what happens is not – as he expected – sudden death by claw and fang, but page after page of Kennedy’s explanatory reminiscences. “Fool!” etc.

This is so true of this type of modernist weakling. O’Hara, of course, recognizes the true power behind these self-serving ramblings as the carved stone demon of Nacoc Yaotl himself.

Bennett actually mentions The Island of Dr. Moreau and that is clearly a source (as is Shelley’s Frankenstein and Poe’s macabre anti-scientism), but the sorcerous plot I find easy to identify with. For science is only unbiased to a certain type of cold-blooded mind; the cold-blooded compulsion to convincing rightness, irrespective of physical desirability. “Convincing rightness”, meaning a scripted world of routine. The routine could be experiment, or politics, or economics – it doesn’t matter. As Bruce Lee says, that is one side of reality only (sun, perspective, rule, illusion). The other side is flow, or what might be called the physical perfection of primeval rhythm.

This is something that is the exact opposite of routine – it is a beast, but a beautiful one. I mean, have you ever wondered how all animals are able to swallow and how birds flit so meaningfully? It’s because they’re physically perfect; there’s no need for thought.

From the inarticulate comes poetic expression. This sense of opposites is what a scientific mind (acolytes of Newton and other dead sorcerers, including politicians, natch) can never comprehend. Just to take one example, Boris Johnson became our new prime minister, and he is known for glib speechifying. He’s clever enough, but the idea that some things cannot be classified by words (script) would never occur.

 

Hence, the entire universe of inarticulate, proportionate physical reality – sun, moon, Earth – is lost. The inarticulate that can be expressed by poetry, blood-red and wolfish. Howard and Bennett. The sense of decay, that there is a natural progression that should not be diverted, for that is evil. Perfidy.

We live in a world that is not physical, and therefore from decay cannot arise revival. A form of living death that is bound-up in scripted routines (of politicians).

From ruins and decay will come strength (predator-prey rebirth) and that means leaving things well alone. The very fabric of reality is cyclical rebirth, and that strength is undone by all the routines of a competitive order.

The way “they” deal with this is by continually speechifying, one routine following another, What we should realize is that if we travel to the moon, or Mars, it’s immaterial. The REAL moon and Mars are proportionate seen from earth. I’m not saying don’t go there, just that it’s not a physical flight. There is no hunting up there, only algorithms and experiments on DNA. The physical universe is seen from Earth as it rotates, facing first one way, then the other.

Why should that be? Why do we have four limbs? It just is.

.. sweeping his Dusk Lady with him the Irishman made a rush for the doorway. Under their running feet the floor had a give and resilience like thin ice. Reaching the door, Colin would have closed it but lacked time. On the very threshold he turned to meet the first assailant, a thing of innumerable legs, rather like a magnified centipede, but whose head belonged somewhere in the mammalian scale. (page 251) C9

“I personally do not believe in the word style. Why? Because, unless there are human beings with three arms and four legs, unless we have another group of human beings that are structurally different from us, there can be no different style of fighting.” (Bruce Lee)

The Citadel of Fear (part 1)

 

The story of a living Aztec city hidden in a lost valley illustrates one of Gertrude Bennett’s common themes: the ruins that revive.

Revive not just physically, but the fires of feudal battle between Quetzalcoatl and Nacoc-Yaotl. Midway through the book there is an intermission, as giant Irish adventurer Colin O’Hara is expelled from the MesoAmerican stronghold and returns to his sister’s east American bungalow.

Colin’s height missed the seven-foot mark by a mere four inches, while Cliona O’Hara Rhodes.. measured no more than five feet five. Her raven’s wing hair shadowed eyes that were wonderfully blue; from beneath straight, fine brows the lashes curved thick and long.. Yet a resemblance to her brother might have been traced in the girl’s generous forehead..(page 94)

Not alone, though. He carries a certain clay figurine of the feathered serpent. When he and Rhodes leave her in the isolated bungalow, there is an overnight visitation.

..this thing of the midnight that thrashed and snarled and ripped clean through a door with its pale, enormous claw – it had robbed her of the capacity to think or reason.. A deep swoon is the anaesthetic that Mother Nature offers her children when horror and pain becomes too great for bearing.. when she at last opened her eyes the goblin-be-friendly moon had been ousted by the honest sun.. (page 105)

The deep swoon that revives from the ruins of reverie. It transpires that the clay ornament also fell and broke off a piece of serpent crook. Whatever was on the other side of the door gave up, but its retreat was marked by ghastly upwellings of blood that stopped only at the boundary brook. Could be another case of psychometry? (see Claimed).

The matter-of-fact acceptance of the gory supernatural truth by Rhodes and O’Hara contrasts with the police, who he

Had taken an instinctive dislike to.. and his cocksure way of speaking. By the very look of him he was a man of no imagination, and the type had no appeal for Colin. (page 113)

Deviating somewhat, the pyramid of the feathered serpent in Teatihicuan is covered in ornate relief carvings of the zoomorphic Quetzalcoatl, as well as tenon heads tethered with pegs

 

It would have been painted, complete with jewels for eyes, making a fair comparison with the naturalistic statues and friezes of the Parthenon (Hyborian Bridge 66) in terms of dramatic effect, if not ritual.

The animated effects of carved ornaments would have inspired awe amongst the credible Aztecs – or were they credible? The cosmology was probably adopted around the four cardinal points, with Quetzalcoatl representing west, identified with the vortex of wind, wisdom, light and Venus (morning, rain and maize). East (Xipe Totec) representing farming and spring; north (Teozcatlipoca) representing night, deceit, sorcery, Earth; south (Huitzilopachlo) representing war.

As I’ve been saying for awhile, we live in an illusory system that is only convincing because of its perspective realism (sun). If one travels in a perspective illusion, one travels towards the vanishing point of technique (see “speed” prev.) Apollo astronaut Schweickart is quoted a saying,

I was suddenly looking at this incredibly beautiful planet, which contains everything you know and love, and you could cover it all up with your thumbnail.. (DT)

While Harrison Schmitt of Apollo 17 is quoted,

I think 50 years from now at the 100^th anniversary of Apollo there will be settlements on the moon.. Helium 3 is an ideal fuel for electric power generation.. and demands for electrical power are not going to decrease, civilization depends on it.. (DT)

So, you could have an electrification process and thereby create a perspective system – an illusion of the human head.

All illusions are convincing, so they could be real. The only problem is they’re not cosmologies that contain the overlap of opposites. With this come festivities of thanksgiving of human tribes to their gods of plenty.

Dance and ritual are expressions of the contradictory nature of reality that is strong, bloody and sacrificial. This is the lost world that modernity is striving to extinguish forever. The one the old writers like Bennet strive to bring back with gay abandon.

 

"Claimed" (part 2)

Tell me that you saw the tail of the world serpent, Midgard,

just whisking out through the broken window, and I'll meet your

statement with tolerance and belief!"

 

He had exaggerated lightly, meaning to give the woman confidence; but

the words were sooner out than he experienced a sickening wonder. Why

had he cited that particular prodigy for his example of the hard-to-

believe? In the old Norse mythology Midgard, the serpent that girdles

the world, is none other than the sea--the green, hissing, marauding,

and claimant sea. (CH V “The Sinking Inscription)

 

The world serpent, the moon-dark sea from which this jade box has come, with the inscription that ever sinks to the bottom through its green depths, like a nameless wreck.

Then there is the white horse that curio-shop owner Jacob Lutz – who was sold the box by sailor Jim Blair – has bought for a blood sacrifice. This is where the story takes another twist, for the horse

was a blooded animal. Mirror, out

of Sunlight, by Chalmers III, and Trimble wanted a higher price than

the stranger wanted to pay. (CH VI “White Horses”)

 

By this, are we meant to suppose the name of the horse, Mirror, signifies an illusion (hallucinogen)? Perhaps, but Sunlight signifies more than illusion, it signifies high sorcery as has beennoted here for awhile.

 

They flung themselves on the land, and the land vanished beneath their

thunderous hoofs. A wailing rose in the night; earth shook and

shuddered; mountains crashed into mighty flares of flame, and by the

leaping light of those awful torches he saw the shrieking race of men

devoured, swept away, made nothing. He saw earth open yawning mouths

that swallowed whole cities, gulped and closed again. And where the

cities had been--the ten glittering, scarlet cities--there surged and

thundered the white-maned hosts of him. (Chapter IX)

 

“The white-maned hosts”. As you may have guessed, there were the ten scarlet cities of lost Atlantis. Water, like the sun, is illusory - at one moment it reflects lights, at the other it has hidden depths; it is flat, it is vastly deep.

“To the great deep. To the abyss.”

An illusory object, like the sun, has great strength and it’s worth quoting Bruce Lee (again!)

“Be like water making its way through cracks. Do not be assertive, but adjust to the object, and you shall find a way around or through it. If nothing within you stays rigid, outward things will disclose themselves.

Empty your mind, be formless. Shapeless, like water. If you put water into a cup, it becomes the cup. You put water into a bottle and it becomes the bottle. You put it in a teapot, it becomes the teapot. Now, water can flow or it can crash. Be water, my friend.”

The flexible medium that has the strength to conquer the ten cities of timelost Atlantis - something very close to the Lee ethos. This sort of begs the question that, if sea and sun have illusory qualities, air is fairly empty while earth is just earth.. what of those counts as reality?

For answer, one has to go back to ancient Greece, which is that reality is neither one thing nor another, but expression (Lee again). Reality is neither technique nor flow, but both together. Technique by itself is a living robot, flow by itself is a primitive beast.

Sophisticated artforms have a restraint, a poise of line and style that identifies them as uniquely human. 

  Knossos fresco (Wild Horses)

You may recall Melina Mercouri’s quote (Hyborian Bridge 66)? If the Parthenon is unique, Sir Arthur Evans’ reconstruction of the palace of Knossos is savage locale brought to lithe life from ruins.

One can argue similar things at Delphi; an invocation from the ruins of lithe rituals from out of time (same goes for Chichen Itza of the Mayans in Mexico). This same sense of life and lines that one gets from Tintin in Peru – and Red Nails naturally.

What I’m getting at is the life and line is a ruinous state; out of decay comes regeneration. A crumbling ruin is a sign of strength in that it is help up by microbes and vines and clods of clay – signs of life all.

Life is more variegated than the modern establishment gives one to think. The mysteries of Samothrace or Delphi are the mysteries of a cosmic destiny. The Earth is turning, and as it turns becomes one with sun, moon, planets.

This is the destiny of Man, for we not only live, we die. This was Van der Post’s quote from Flamingo Feather

 Hyborian Bridge 62/1

The sense of nostalgia that we, humankind, are kindred to the stars has been wrenched from us by acolytes of a sorcerous establishment. Yes, that’s what I said. The British Museum may seem staid and serene but it holds the Elgin marbles (of the Parthenon) for reasons that are beyond human comprehension.

Not quite, as I’ve been trying to spell out for awhile! The physical reality of sun, moon, planets has been replaced by an illusory reality of perspective (light C5).

This is a type of living death because only a physical reality revives from decay. Things decay, in other words become dirt, and from this is cleanliness born of strength. This is an ancient cycle from Samothrace and Delphi but not from the British Museum! No, since a museum has to be a hygienic institution. I’ve nothing against relics in their place (the Acropolis Museum) but it’s the things themselves – Knossos, the Parthenon – that have ruin and grace upon them.

This is our Earth, and it’s not for institutions that might as well be from Mars to bar the way to organic fields (where things grow, die, revive). This brings us back full circle to Claimed and this quote that could very well describe all the lost cities that have ever appeared in Weird Tales

In the immediate foreground, where canal and sea were united, the land

retreated in the shape of a great bay. This bay was lined with built-

up terraces of red stone, out from which jutted many wharfs and docks.

Its waters were not empty, but thronged with shipping of a type as

anachronistic, though by no means so time-rotted, as the galley of the

dolphin figure-head. Great triremes, with the shields of their

warriors ranged glittering down the length of their bulwarks, shared

the anchorage with ships of more peaceful appearance, merchant-vessels

carved and gilded from stem to stern and of sails vari-hued as bright

banners.

The living ruins of landscapes, the places of power that revive through decay, that no establishment born of lifeless hygiene should be able to deny.

Even as the demand left Vanaman's lips a strange change overswept the

ancient trireme; a shocking change, if there be shock in witnessing a

revivification of a rotting corpse; in seeing a dead ship come to

life.

Without such rebirth of ancient lineage all is illusion. Illusion that lives in the heads of acolytes; that is not part of the physical universe where opposites meet.

Between Red Dolphin and the steamer a towering blackness roared upward

toward the clouds. The clouds themselves had already dipped to meet

it. Whirling, cyclonic, the dark upper vapors descended in a vast cone

shape. The tip joined the raging cone of black water beneath; the

powers of the air had mated in thunder with the ocean, and as one

monstrous being stalked across the groaning abyss. Deep had called to

deep, and the waterspout was born.

The tyrant hoarder Jesse Robinson might in some sense represent the illusory greed that lives in the head and not on the Earth where sun, ocean and air all meet.

"If that story you've told me is true--I believe it--then I admire Mr.

Robinson's nerve, but I can't admire his judgement. He set himself

against a power just step lower than that of the Almighty. What? Oh,

yes, I can believe that the big fellow out there"--he waved his hand

in a sweeping, significant gesture--"has a life and will of his own.

If you'd spent most of your life in his company, like Blair and me,

you wouldn't be so slow to believe it yourself, doctor. (CH XV “Claimed!”)
ALEXANDER THE MEDIUM

"Claimed" (part 1)

What is inchoate in reason has got to be the primeval serpent twisting between sun, moon and Earth, the dangerous serpent, the cosmic predator that animates Man’s imagination. The dark folklore of startled prey and circling predator that came out of the pulp writers like Gertrude Bennet and, of course, Weird Tales.

The chthonic romance that inhabits a large proportion of the tales lurks back to the fact that Orpheus was one of the early (legendary) Greek poets. Modern reason denies the chthonic aspect of the serpent, and instead allies it solely with the sun.

This denial of the physical reality is illusory but, as noted elsewhere, verifiable proofs are very convincing to acolytes. Not only that but, if the physical universe can be denied the physique can’t, and we have the ludicrous sight of Katie Bouman’s black hole (Hyborian Bridge 56).

Added to that is the compulsion for numbers and routines (see Grace Slick quote Hyborian bridge 62/1). So, even though Man is thinking in the head, he/she is actually in the physique which is actually part of the physical universe. So it is still a type of illusory reality.

The illusory world that isn’t physical cannot revive because revival is a product of decay. We’re back with active country pursuits, the hunt, Diana and her faithful hounds, carrion and crows. The animated, chthonic universe of Weird Tales. It’s a revival of dark folklore that dwells in sombre timelost places of potent mystery. Really, the mysteries of Samothrace or Delphi rather than the public display of the Parthenon.

In Gertrude Bennett’s (Francis Stevens) Claimed (1920), her description of the obsessive hoarder Jesse Robinson speaks for itself.

The old man, whose finger-nail slowly followed these characters, as if

by doing so he might trace their meaning, was as perfect in his way as

their draughtsmanship. He was a perfect specimen, that is, of the hawk

or predacious type in the genus homo. It was night, and the rays of a

hanging lamp brought out his face in bold lights and shadows.

 

In the chthonic universe, the presence of death is a given as is the predator. It is much like the classical universe of ancient tragedians. In Sophocles’ Antigone

Eteocles and Polynices, leading opposite sides in Thebes' civil war, died fighting each other for the throne. Creon, the new ruler of Thebes and brother of the former Queen Jocasta, has decided that Eteocles will be honored and Polyneices will be in public shame. The rebel brother's body will not be sanctified by holy rites and will lie unburied on the battlefield, prey for carrion animals like worms and vultures..

Carrion feeders exist in wilderness, which is just the Earth left to its own devices, outside the claw-like grip of Man. Wilderness is life and strength and primal rhythm.

This closeness of life and death is brought home in Claimed when the mysterious jade box summons a hallucinogenic sea-tide.

He recognized the thing well enough now. He had seen it flood

devouringly up and across smooth beaches where the gray-brown sand

gleamed wetly and the clean salt tang of its breath filled one's lungs

with life.

Life and death in the classical universe are two poles of the same reality. That reality contains the mysteries of Samothrace, and also the noble bearing of the Parthenin marbles (prev.)

The mysteries are to do with life and regeneration, revival out of chaos or disorder. The one-sided reality of pure order cannot exist in a balanced universe because out of decay springs life. The mysteries are a way of giving this a moral recognition.

It’s intriguing that Bennett’s story starts with a description of a ruined city, upthriust from the sea depths.

Near the center the rock has been flung up in ridges, forming

rectangular and other shapes, quaintly reminiscent of the ruins of old

buildings. Though, from some distance off, I observed that in several

cases the warm rain which has been falling intermittently had washed

the ash away from these ridges and that the rock so bared is uniformly

of the same brilliant metallic-red with which the chocolate-colored

formation near the shore is streaked.

 

From where we stood the illusion of ruins was nearly perfect, and

indeed--who knows?--we may to-day have looked upon the last surviving

trace of some ancient city, flung up from the abyss that engulfed it

ages before the brief history we have of the race of man began.

Where there is ruin there is revival; the two go together. This is really to do with line. A ruin has a quavering line. The ravages of weather and insects and rabbit droppings take their toll.

It’s the very height of irregularity; but by the same token, irregularity is a sign of life. Living things create irregularity. Irregularity is also a sign of classical art. If you take a Greek vase, the line is the product of two things; the technical knowledge of the potter, and their spontaneous skill with line. The two together make the expression.

  Diana slaying Actaeon

Where you have line you have recognition. No one anywhere on Earth could fail to recognize all the traits of a Greek vase. But, what is line? It’s not one thing, it’s a product of two things; technique (training) and spontaneity (flow).

The same goes for any living thing. We recognize a fish, an eel or seaweed because the line is irregular and spontaneous, and not simply technical. The same goes for vernacular architecture. It is the product of more than one thing. It is the expression of Man.

Above all, the same goes for the Parthenon. It might be – as Melina Mercouri says Hyborian Bridge 66 – a unique monument, but it still weathers and crumbles like all things on Earth.

That is their chthonic strength, their attachment to the underworld. In myth, Proserpine (Persephone, spring) spends six months of the year with Pluto, her spouse. The next six months she spends with Ceres, her mother (harvest).

This is the world of mystery; the physical world that connects life and death.