LYRICS

The applications are to blameAll the people do all dayIs stare into a phone (Placebo, Too Many people)

“Take nothing but memories, leave nothing but footprints!” (Chief Seattle)

When rock stars were myths (Sandi Thom, I Wish I Was A Punk Rocker)

Machines were mice and men were lions once upon a time, Now that it's the opposite it's twice upon a time (Moondog)

Time is an illusion (Einstein)

Monday 22 July 2019

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 100th 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.