The default
setting for modern commentators is that society is progressive because ordered.
I quoted Juliet Samuel of DT in Hyborian Bridge 4
In New York, grime and underdevelopment
are crammed in alongside excess and ambition. “The oculus”, the new transport
hub of the World Trade Centre is a study in both. I entered it on the Path
train, a transit link from New Jersey that rattles slowly and unimpressively to
a stop by a grubby platform.. you emerge into the brand new concourse of the $4
billion oculus..The whole thing is totally impractical.. But damn, it’s
impressive.
Actually, New
York districts of yore were self-governing and existed on the basis of “the
logic of the illogical”; the movements of people with interrelated habitats and
attitudes.
There is the
example of Detroit (Drama3) which became derelict and still is able to
thrive independently. The federal state can only impose order, but actually
disorder – spontaneity of movement and leaving things well alone (C5 etc)
– is much more true to the cosmic spirit.
Order can come
out of disorder because it is a cyclical system (growth, decay) whereas order
is mainly a type of illusion of words. Words come from the head. The cosmos
resembles a body in its symmetry and proportion.
This brings
round another quote of Juliet Samuel; this time round she’s visiting an
Austrian spa, and made a couple of odd observations
Sigmund Freud
once wrote that rapid shifts between hot and cold, as when a person cosy in bed
slides her arm out from the warm bedclothes and then back in again, are nothing
more than “cheap pleasures” that hold no benefits for the mind. But this must
be one of many things the founding father of psychology didn’t understand about
the human brain, because actually, somewhere along the way in the intense cycle
of cold and hot, a mysterious change takes place. The mind seems to reboot
itself, as if refreshed by a deep sleep,and lapses in a calm, alert state.
Aside from which, as “cheap pleasures” go, most spas certainly
aren’t cheap... The real alchemy here, of course, is to turn Grade A
nonsense into cash. For all that, though, the massage I bought did feel rather
good.
Aside from the
implication of quackery, the focus on the brain is odd since a spa, or sauna,
is all about sweat. The fat of the body sweats; and then with a plunge in an
Alpine lake (which she also did) the blood rushes to the peripheries, natch.
A spa or sauna is
all about blood, flesh and sweat; as a consequence the brain in its bony
casement may be affected, but it’s all about body.
This is sort of
typical of the tendency within the media to put head before body in all events.
This has to be a consequence of the fact we inhabit an ordered universe; one
essentially designed for and by the head.
Her intimations
of quackery are aimed at the fringe medicine that a spa represents, relying on
fluctuating energies of the body somewhat akin to Chinese traditional medicine.
Only the body has energies, obviously, since the brain is just a way of
organizing the disreputable body.
In short, the
idea that things are ordered is an illusion of the head, when most things in
nature resemble the attributes of a symmetrical body. Something that is active,
fleshy, bloody, hot, sweaty, cold, clammy (a lot like a Liza Minnelli concert,
let’s say!)
All this speaks
of balance and spontaneity; the sort of thing gamekeepers deal with in their
treks round grouse moors and so on. In this country that is another bone of contention,
as grouse moors and the whole gamekeeping practice of hunting and shooting is
under a creeping marginalization.
Ian Botham – the
England all-rounder of legend – has taken this up as a rural resident of
Yorkshire, and had this to say on the RSPB’s
approach to stoats (raiders of ground-nesters)
..many of
them seem destined for the Orkney Islands, where the RSPB has won a contract to
kill stoats, with a stated purpose to eradicate them.. Packham.. recently
accused grouse moors of committing “genocide” by using traps to kill animals “relentlessly”..
Packham – who hates countryside sports – as (the BBC’s) main presenter..
passing him off as an impartial expert and giving him a huge platform.(DT)
Botham is a
hunter and shooter, while the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds’
Packham is not – it comes down to that. There is a way you could say that
nature resembles the vicissitudes of fortune – and that’s just the way it
works.
Stoats or
weasels are killers and it’s the job of gamekeepers to keep an eye on their
numbers, grounded as they are in the cut-and-thrust of day-to-day living and
dying (C6 House of Elrig).
Again it’s the
difference between the body, which is flesh and bone and honest labour under
the sky above; and the head imposing arbitrary order – when order doesn’t
exist. Pure order only exists in the head (of acolytes) – and this is the
system we are imprisoned in. Instead of the symmetry and proportion of the
body, we have DNA and algorithms. An illusion of ordered, scripted routine
(Apollo), without the spontaneous grace of motion, animal action (Dionysus).
Because we live
in an ordered system of acolytes (of dead sorcerers), it infects all the other
levels of control (actually just one level). From the acolytes (scientists) to
the media to the political establishment – and via them to the people.
When we say
“political control” we really mean sanity, reason, order. But, as GK Chesterton
says, “A madman is not someone who has lost his
reason but someone who has lost everything but his reason”(The
False Apollo). Because, what is the opposite of reason? It is the stoat
preying on ground-nesters with blood in its jaws. It is flesh, blood and the
thrill of the chase.
It’s the
cyclical existence of flesh and blood (body) in nature. Strength and fertility.
Reason, to the acolytes of modernity, applies to the competitive order of
advance (unbroken progress); but this is only an advance of the head, since the
body has a cyclical existence of flesh and blood in nature.
The head
occupies this illusory order, beamed at us through the media. Their voices are
so reasonable they just have to be insane, because what is missing is the
disorder of the active body in the cyclical existence of nature.
Chinese
landscape with Hong Kong in all its glory to the right
When the
spontaneous movements of grace of interrelated activities of human bodies hold
sway, there is an independence of spirit. One harks back to the days of the
free-ports – Shanghai, Hong Kong C17
– and the sense of anarchic freedom, sordid or picturesque (both), dirt and
cleanliness all together.
Nowadays, one
lives in a world of “script” – the financial order, algorithms – while in the
19th century the gods of place held sway. There can be no gods of
place in a numerical monetary order. This seems to be part of what is happening
to Hong Kong, because it exists in an immaterial, parallel reality of script (numerical
data, algorithmic heads.“A lot of Westerners try to stay away from it,
because they just want to work, make money, go home,” says Daniel, 26, a
consultant, DT). When a human society is physically speaking flesh
and blood.
Flesh and blood
and the spirit of place are colliding with the usual media onslaught of words
and pictures. Nothing is real in that situation; it’s all a type of play-acting
illusion. If the Hong Kong people were serious, they would simply grab the
reins of power – power to the people. The onus is then on China to invade; but anything
is better than words and pictures and no action. The UK will support you,
people.
In lyrical
tragedy, the hero/heroine is forever dominated by the forces of Nature, the
gods and Destiny (Tarot). This happens again and again in the classical idiom
that is the western tradition. Idomeneo(Sacrifice: Sombre Gaiety);
Gluck’s Orpheo; Les Troyens, Berlioz’s opera based on Virgil’s Aeneid.
Destiny is a
place where there is no rational order. There are cities – like Carthage, Troy,
Knossos – and there are the gods and goddesses of nature and shrines and sacred
groves. The cities may be ordered, but the gods are fickle instruments of
Nature. You may say we have tamed nature, but it’s an illusion of the head. The
body has a flesh and blood existence that exists in the cycles of Nature.
Strength and fertility.
Strength, and
the pure signs of nature – the sacred groves – are a fertile destiny that the
reasoning heads can choose to ignore. It can ignore the strength of the hunt
and choose to impose arbitrary order. Order is weakness without the disorder of
flesh and the cycles of blood in the field – and this is the world we are in.
We no longer need political control; we need rural pursuits that reconnect us
to land, lakes, rivers of flesh and blood, decay and substance, root and bone,
the body of Ymir.