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.”
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,