Pictorial 73

A world of realistic fantasy suffers from a significant drawback. Namely, “realism” is an illusion that resembles reality – the logical side. The Marvel Studio films are logistic tour de forces but, as Scorcese says, not psychically or psychologically interesting (enough).

One can confuse what looks real with reality, which is a mixture of physical and psyche.

Though not convincing in a realistic sense, the special effects possess an almost dreamlike quality, and do work within the self-contained comic-strip inspired world of the serial, a world in which only a handful of shots depicting normal, realistic scenery are allowed to intrude. (The Flash Gordon serials, Kinnard etal, McFarland 2008, page 13).

The world, the whole universe (to conquer), often resides in the imagination and is not realistic in the logistical sense. The lasting value of the Flash Gordon serials is their “innocent screen fantasy”; innocence that comes from fidelity to the original Alex Raymond classic, and a lightness of touch that the “rough” physical values might even favour!

Lightness is very difficult to pull off in modern blockbusters; it’s partly physical grace, partly speaking lines with nonchalant aplomb. Physical grace really depends on simple athleticism which Crabbe and Alexander (as Prince Barin) demonstrate with ease.

Barin, in his ornamental chestplate, resembles a circus strongman with luxuriant thighs. His type is almost the DH Lawrence ideal of a heroic individual who is both a natural aristocrat and a bit of a roughneck.

 

In fights, he is able to lift up opponents and casually throw them. This sort of primitivism represents an ideal balance between the resourceful mind, and the ability to carry things out with physical might.

The body is ideally balanced between the psyche and the physical, the definition of the super-man; one who is “more than a man” (Hyborian Bridge 81), who is not purely head. When the body is balanced with the head, it’s often true to say that song and dance come into their own.

Song comes from the throat, representing an ideal balance; dance is a rhythmic expression of the soul by the loose limbs.

APACHE WAR DANCE

Daintiness and delicacy of movement are signs of a balanced culture. Cultures that are romantic, that are not driven (to distraction) by the ego of endless acolytes of dead sorcerers. Whensong, ritual, ceremony, pageantry are meaningful there is grace, there is romance, queens and knights, kings of renown.

Flash Gordon, as a representative of heroic fantasy, has this enduring quality. Ming, as the techno-sorcerer run amock, bears comparison to both Wizard of Oz and Howard. Alexander, as Prince Barin, I noticed bears a passing resemblance to Scott McKenzie of..

SAN FRANCISCO

..The innocence of the 60s, where sex and drugs had a soulful sense of place. Innocence, song and soul and a rightful sense of balance is a culture of “people in motion”.

Innocence is truth because it is not realism – which is simply an illusion of the head (words). Innocence is the throat raised to the sky. It is the dainty pursuits of the body in motion.

AZTEC GAME

(compare with the grim pursuits of modern ball games)

Realism – in terms of words and news – cannot be light of grace, since it has no psychic/physical balance. It is the pure ego of a maddened Ming the Merciless.

Realism of news is not the physical grace of sun and moon, Earth and stars, it is simply the facts that happen to exist in the world “they” have made to rule - conquerors of their universe.

 

Hyborian Bridge 82

What CL Moore calls the “ambiguous symmetry” (Hyborian Bridge 17) of things is often really as aspect of the destruction that anticipates revival. As Kari Hohne notes in The Mythology of Sleep (prev) in the chapter on Brahman and the Unknown Self, snakes or sea monsters can be either “bad guys” or just the destructive aspect of eventual renewal. Sanskrit “Devi” is the root for both devil and gods (divinity).

Moses established Nehushtan, a snake-worshiping cult of healing that in Second Kings 18 was “broken”. The Christian priests in America (Mexico) went on the same path, the theme of DH Lawrence’s The Plumed Serpent. Religions that you could call naïve Earth religions, are dwelling in the physical aspect of creation. Because we are now in a solar culture, the Earth religions seem now to have the reality of Earth (soil) being both a destroyer (decay) and a renewer (fertility).

In Christian terms this would seem to be compatible unless Christianity is de facto a religion of “the white man’s advance”, which specifically means hygiene and not fertility (as a side-note, right-wing Christians in Rome smashed three Amazonian fertility figurines). Fertility always goes hand-in-hand with water – the womb, the moon – In The Mythology of Sleep (Pictorial 60) in the chapter on I ching and the way, Hohne describes the eight Pa Kua or forces that manifest in changes.

The Abysmal Water, K’an, is a sea of shape-shifters that we take with us in our dreams. It is the well of inspiration in the same way Odin finds secrets in Mimir’s well (Pictorial 56)

Living things are 70% water – and yet what is water? In scientific terms it’s H2O, but in terms of Chinese philosophy it has deep crystal symmetries that are “attuned” in homeopathy.

The idea that water attunes itself to minerals is older than Rome (Weird 11) Water’s unique properties are the product of hydrogen-binds by which oxygen pulls the two hydrogen electrons closer, making the molecule bipolar. Water is therefore “stickier” and forms liquid easier.

So, can the stickiness explain the symmetries of attuning to minerals? Well, the real point is that water is very simple, consisting of 3 atoms in a repeating lattice that is intricately mobile. If this intricate mobility is practically infinitely variable, then it could be attuned like the strings of a harp.

Dr Strange #46

Scientifically there’s no law that demonstrates this property but, again, water is unique, the stuff of life. If it is uniquely variable then it could have that property – but anything unique doesn’t follow scientific laws. If something is a priori, there’s no real explanation.

Why is there a sun and a moon that are highly symmetrical (Greek Phoebe, personification of moon, and Phoebus the radiant Apollo)? There’s no scientific reason for it but it is unique. The Chinese rationale for it is Yang and Yin, the male and female principles of action and receptivity.

This is another Earth-religion that sees what is the physical reality of the Earth in the cosmos. The Chinese dragon or Tao is moving two ways at once, a ssnakes do. This principle of two things becoming one is present throughout religions. The destroyer (Shiva); the creator (Brahmnan); the preserver (Vishnu).

As I’ve been saying for awhile, if we live in a solar system (viewed from the sun) it is an illusion of the sun. It is not a physical reality, which is viewed from Earth. The sun is light, which is geometrical perspective (C4 etc) If you look at your screen on your iphone, that is what you are seeing. It looks realistic because it’s a good illusion. It’s not physical reality.

The geometrical perspective is attractive to the ego, especially of acolytes. This essentially means we live in a world of the head, not the body. Appearances to the contrary, that is the physical truth of the situation!

In order to live in a physical reality, we have to become our bodies – in the symmetrical sense – and that is at least partly the subject of DH Lawrence’s The Plumed Serpent (prev.) Our bodies are highly symmetrical, and we access this power through balance and proportion (Greek games).

The “secret places” Lawrence mentions – our fronts and rears – are sources of power when our bodies are active in a balanced manner on the Earth. By being balanced, it means not being in our heads because this disempowers our physiques.

The numerical obsessions of acolytes (politicians, economists, scientists) are a form of physical weakness, a compulsion as described previously. Where humans have physique, the planet has its own symmetries of cyclical seasons.

Out of nowhere, a flash of lightning explodes in brilliant color as Thunder Birds, Feathered Serpents and Dragons scratch their long talons against the sky. Although the lightning illuminates the scenery of a distant horizon, we feel the reverberation of the Thunder deep within our bones . (The Mythology of Sleep, page 235)
Whether the earth is aroused during the storms of spring, or whether we awaken to the myths we live by, Chen (Thunder) sets the stage to allow the creative to be reborn. (page 236)

If we live by Earth’s powers, we live in a cyclic system and not in a solar system. There are two different perspectives; one is linear, the other is cyclical.

It’s all very well to say that both are true, but one is actually an illusion, not a physical reality. A civilization of the head will always be illusory because it does not have the cyclical proportionality of either body or Earth.

Yes, it is very realistic – that’s why the egos like it. Apollo is an ego-maniac – watch Richard Strauss’s Daphne! The metaphorical power of nature is contained in Sun the Gentle Wind, a force for renewal (autumn) that will combat unconscious jinxes or the Shadow Self (Pictorial 65). The gentle ease of nature is our reality that we can repossess as the heirs of Earth from the puny acolytes of base nature.

Tui the Joyous Lake is yet another Taoist metaphor for inner strength.

Like the path of joy in Hindu philosophy, Tui offers a lesson about removing judgement and an attachment to a specific outcome to find the pleasure of discovering life on its own terms. (page 238)

“In the old days our people had no education. All their wisdom and knowledge came to them from dreams. They tested their dreams and in that way learned their own strength.” (Ojibwa elder, page 243)

BUTTERFLY DANCE

 

Hyborian Bridge 81

Is there a lost Earth-power that is not given by Man to Man but by the cosmos to men and women? A civilization that speaks always to the individual cannot have that power.

At one time Kate says something like “the direct blows of words” injure her and she desires “veiled elusiveness” in the “third person”. Is it not true that in the modern world we are addressed directly, as individuals? What do an infinite number of individuals comprise, though? Could it be nada?

The direct form of speech is the land of logic (sun) but there is another land, where the sun is weak. It is actually the figurative language of primitive naivety that signifies Earth’s face turning to the cosmos. This is the land of balance and proportion where individuals can have Earth-souls and not word-filled emptiness.

I tell you, the day should not turn into glory,
And the night should not turn deep,
Save for the morning and evening stars, upon which they turn.
Night turns upon me, and Day, who am the star between.
Between your breast and belly is a star.
If it be not there
You are empty gourd-shells filled with dust and wind.
When you walk, the star walks with you, between your breast and your belly.
When you sleep, it softly shines.
When you speak true and true, it is bright on your lips and your teeth. (ch XXI The Opening of the Church)

The ceremonies are infused with virility - against “fascist” salutes (this was in 1923). It’s clear Lawrence was convinced the technological life was not suited to all men – by which he menat the virile.

By “virile” it seems he meant the masculine body in all its glory.

Four men came to him. One put a blue crown with the bird on his brow, one put a red belt round his breast, another put a yellow belt around his middle, and the last fastened a white belt round his loins. Then the first one pressed a small glass bowl to Ramón's brow, and in the bowl was white liquid like bright water. The next touched a bowl to the breast, and the red shook in the bowl. At the navel the man touched a bowl with yellow fluid, and at the loins a bowl with something dark. They held them all to the light. (ch XXI)

The body has power in its symmetrical proportions. In likewise way, a dragonfly has power in its finely honed thorax, abdomen, wings, antennae. So it’s a pretty animalistic way of thought.

One can think with the virility of the body. Not only that, but nothing is left out, and “the secret places” indicated in intimate ritual seem to mean genitals and anus.

Ramón bound him fast round the middle, then, pressing his head against the hip, folded the arms round Cipriano's loins, closing with his hands the secret places. (ch XXII The Living Huitzilpochtli)

Once Cipriano becomes the living Huitzilopochtli, the native Indian Earth-dances are brought to life with spear brandished to sun. The dance is “thinking” rain, wind, Earth and moon in the virile expression of body to earth.

Cipriano speaks

'Man that is man is more than a man.
No man is man till he is more than a man.
Till the power is in him
Which is not his own.

The power is in me from behind the sun,
And from middle earth.
I am Huitzilopochtli. (Ch XXIII Huitzilpochtli’s Night)

This is Nietzsche but also Aristotelian teleology (Hyborian Bridge 76), which says that minds cannot exist without the body. The body has a soul and that soul is the Morning Star (“behind the sun”).

Now, all of this is implicit in the Earth turning its face to the cosmos or the Morning Star. It is Earth-power, the Indian dance on the earth, bending low, rising to salute the sky.

All this is to do with balance and proportion on a cosmic scale. We who live in the modern world may live in our bodies – but which part of the body? If it’s the head (“the brow”) we are under the dominion of acolytes of age-old sorcerers who have constructed a universe of straight lines and numbers.

If this universe is in the head, it is also in the body since (as previously noted) we cannot escape our own physique. However, it is not the physically virile body that dances on its feet to the sky above.

A body which is physically weak, which has numerical compulsions of the head is often called anal-compulsive (Hyborian Bridge 62/1). Reason being, one can’t escape one’s physique, and it is either strong or weak, expressive or inert. The acolytes are under the illusion that words – to us as individuals – are reality, whereas reality is the sky and the earth, sun and moon.

This is the naïve physical reality. To believe in the gods is a naïve thing, when one could believe in words in a universe of straight lines. One belief is strong and virile; the other belief is weak and of the head.

It all gave him a certain wild, childish joy. The strange convulsions like flames of joy and gratification went over his face!

'Ah, God!' she thought. 'There are more ways than one of becoming like a little child..'

.. As she sat in that darkened church in the intense perfume of flowers, in the seat of Malintzi, watching the bud of her life united with his, between the feet of the idol, and feeling his dark hand softly holding her own, with the soft, deep Indian heat, she felt her own childhood coming back on her. The years seemed to be reeling away in great circles, falling away from her.

Leaving her sitting there like a girl in her first adolescence. The Living Huitzilopochtli! Ah, easily he was the living Huitzilopochtli. More than anything. More than Cipriano, more than a male man, he was the living Huitzilopochtli. And she was the goddess bride, Malintzi of the green dress. (ch XIV Malintzi)

These images are so Weird Tales it’s untrue. It’s like the innocence and purity of naked bodies that have a strong sense of physical reality; the strength that is manifested by idols.

How else, she said to herself, is one to begin again, save by re-finding one's virginity? And when one finds one's virginity, one realizes one is among the gods. He is of the gods, and so am I. Why should I judge him? (ch XIV)

Innocence is lost when words are deployed in all the areas outside of physical reality.. the brain of the acolytes, physically weak and obsessing on numbers (see Pictorial 59 Blake’s metamorphosis of Newton).

Like the Trolls of Norse mythology, their cleverness with abstract words hides their origin as maggots on the face of the Earth (Pictorial 56 Kari Hohne). The abstraction is a clever illusion; the physical degradation is the truth.

But the illusion is attractive to the ego of those who deliver torrents of words (politicians, natch.) In the final chapter of The Plumed Serpent Kate agonizes over her destiny.

Kate was a wise woman, wise enough to take a lesson. It is all very well for a woman to cultivate her ego, her individuality.. Kate knew all this. And as she sat alone in her villa, she remembered it again. She had had her fling, even here in Mexico. And these men would let her go again. She was no prisoner. She could carry off any spoil she had captured.

And then what! To sit in a London drawing-room, and add another to all the grimalkins? .. 'No!' she said to herself. 'My ego and my individuality are not worth that ghastly price. I'd better abandon some of my ego, and sink some of my individuality, rather than go like that.' (Here!)

Previously, Kate agonized over the question of whether the individual is an illusion. Is a world of individual egos (a la Trump) merely an advanced form of illusion? Not physical substance; not the hidden star of inner strength and psyche?

She had a strange feeling, in Mexico, of the old prehistoric humanity, the dark-eyed humanity of the days, perhaps, before the glacial period. When the world was colder, and the seas emptier, and all the land-formation was different. When the waters of the world were piled in stupendous glaciers on the high places, and high, high upon the poles. When great plains stretched away to the oceans, like Atlantis, and the lost continents of Polynesia, so that seas were only great lakes, and the soft, dark-eyed people of that world could walk around the globe. Then there was a mysterious, hot-blooded, soft-footed humanity with a strange civilization of its own..

Cipriano was going down to bathe. She saw him walk out on the masonry of the square basin which was their own tiny harbour. He threw off his wrap and stood dark in silhouette against the pale, unlit water. How dark he was! Dark as a Malay. Curious that his body was as dark, almost, as his face. And with that strange archaic fulness of physique, with the full chest and the full, yet beautiful buttocks of men on old Greek coins. (ch XXVI Kate is a Wife)

The lost world that is physically pure and strong. When “they” want order, it has disorder; when “they” want hygiene, it has strength. It’s like the difference between Bill Gates’ hygiene-machine (pathogen-killing toilet Hyborian Bridge 31) and BWS’s Adastra in Africa. The former destroys native culture while the latter honours the ancestors in trees that grow ancestral roots (Tales of Faith 1-4).

WHEN THE EARTH MOVES AGAIN live (from Bark)

It starts with the loam of the land and ends with the cosmos. Sift through the fine crumbs of fertile loam and they contain water, air, the fire of seed, the earthworm turning. This is primeval symmetry that is a priori a factual world or words. One is strength, the other is weakness; one is body, the other is head; one is blood, the other pure abstraction to kill hope, daylight sorcery.

 

 

 

Hyborian Bridge 80

Don Ramon opens his heart to Kate, where he yearns to relate to women in a transfigural or metaphysical realm, his Morning Star where souls of men and women can meet. Lawrence is possibly having a go at the liberal mores that reappeared in the 60s. As far as the 60s go, the sense of soul-camaraderie that appeared in San Francisco and radiated outwards is the transcendental side of things, so maybe he was hip to that? As far as the 20s go I can’t comment; only that our present state of emptiness may be more what Lawrence is driving at.

Having got that off his chest, following the burning of Christian effigies and the installing of the “men of Quetzalcoatl”, there is a rebellion and a turreted scene of savagery that is well worth quoting at length.

Suddenly she gave a piercing shriek, and in one leap was out of her retreat. She had seen a black head turning the stairs.

Before she knew it, Ramón jumped past her like a great cat, and two men clashed in mid-air, as the unseen fellow leaped up from the stairs. Two men in a crash went down on the floor, a revolver went off, terrible limbs were writhing.

Ramón's revolver was on the floor. But again there was a shot from the tangled men, and a redness of blood suddenly appearing out of nowhere, on the white cotton clothing, as the two men twisted and fought on the floor.

They were both big men. Struggling on the ground, they looked huge. Ramón had the bandit's revolver-hand by the wrist. The bandit, with a ghastly black face with rolling eyes and sparse moustache, had got Ramón's naked arm in his white teeth, and was hanging on, showing his red gums, while with his free hand he was feeling for his knife.

Kate could not believe that the black, ghastly face with the sightless eyes and biting mouth was conscious. Ramón had him clasped round the body. The bandit's revolver fell, and the fellow's loose black hand scrabbled on the concrete, feeling for it. Blood was flowing over his teeth. Yet some blind super-consciousness seemed to possess him, as if he were a devil, not a man.

His hand nearly touched Ramón's revolver. In horror Kate ran and snatched the weapon from the warm concrete, running away as the bandit gave a heave, a great sudden heave of his body, under the body of Ramón. Kate raised the revolver. She hated that horrible devil under Ramón as she had never hated in her life. Yet she dared not fire..

.. She stiffened her wrist and fired without looking, in a sudden second of pure control. The black head came crashing at her. She recoiled in horror, lifted the revolver and fired again, and missed. But even as it passed her, she saw red blood among the black hairs of that head. It crashed down, the buttocks of the body heaving up, the whole thing twitching and jerking along, the face seeming to grin in a mortal grin.

Glancing from horror to horror, she saw Ramón, his face still as death, blood running down his arm and his back, holding down the head of the bandit by the hair and stabbing him with short stabs in the throat, one, two, while blood shot out like a red projectile; there was a strange sound like a soda-syphon, a ghastly bubbling, one final terrible convulsion from the loins of the stricken man, throwing Ramón off, and Ramón lay twisted, still clutching the man's hair in one hand, the bloody knife in the other, and gazing into the livid, distorted face, in which ferocity seemed to have gone frozen, with a steady, intent, inhuman gaze. (chapter XIX The Attack on Jamiltepec)

The primitive resilience laid bare is a matter of life and death; no words as even a word could mean death. The sheer primitivism of Lawrence’s ideal man and woman was too much for Aldous Huxley, who satirised him in Brave New Word. Aldous came from the establishment family of Thomas Henry Huxley, known as “Darwin’s bulldog” for his enthusiastic support.

And then Ramón glanced at Kate, as she stood near the stairs with the revolver. His brow was like a boy's, very pure and primitive, and the eyes underneath had a certain primitive gleaming look of virginity. As men must have been, in the first awful days, with that strange beauty that goes with pristine rudimentariness. (chapter XIX)

The primitive naivety continues in like vein, with Ramon’s strange wish to bring back “the vision of the living cosmos.”

It was one of those little periods when the rain seems strangled, the air thick with thunder, silent, ponderous thunder latent in the air from day to day, among the thick, heavy sunshine. Kate, in these days in Mexico, felt that between the volcanic violence under the earth, and the electric violence of the air above, men walked dark and incalculable, like demons from another planet. (chapter XX Marriage by Quetzalcoatl)

The link here with pulps is close (Almuric) and is made clearer when Kate is gradually transmogrified into the wife of Huitzilopochtli

They were men of flesh and blood, they understood her presence, and bowed low, looking up at her with flashing eyes. And she knew what it was to be a goddess in the old style, saluted by the real fire in men's eyes, not by their lips. (chapter XX)

The marriage ceremony – the transfiguration – is conducted at twilight in the rain.

Kate did not quite know how to put on the slip, for it had no sleeves nor arm-holes, but was just a straight slip with a running string. Then she remembered the old Indian way, and tied the string over her left shoulder; rather, slipped the tied string over her left shoulder, leaving her arms and part of her right breast bare, the slip gathered full over her breasts..

.Kate lifted her face and shut her eyes in the downpour.

'This man is my rain from heaven,' she said.

'This woman is the earth to me--say that, Cipriano,' said Ramón, kneeling on one knee and laying his hand flat on the earth.

Cipriano kneeled and laid his hand on the earth.

'This woman is the earth to me,' he said.

'I, woman, kiss the feet and the heels of this man, for I will be strength to him, throughout the long twilight of the Morning Star.' (chapter XX)

Followed by the pledge to “the star that is between night and day.”

Then she put on another of the slips with the inverted blue flowers that had been laid on the bed for her, and over that a dress of green, hand-woven wool, made of two pieces joined openly together down the sides, showing a bit of the white, full under-dress, and fastened on the left shoulder. There was a stiff flower, blue, on a black stem, with two black leaves, embroidered at the bottom, at each side. And her white slip showed a bit at the breast, and hung below the green skirt, showing the blue flowers.

It was strange and primitive, but beautiful. (chapter XX)

Pictorial 72

Two more illos from American Flagg! #5 which are not far off the 20s milieu of Mexico in The Plumed Serpent – main difference is it’s Havana. It’s still shabby and doomy though, as you can see!

I really love that, personally, probably owing to my early years spent in Spain. Grace Slick is also convinced she has Spanish roots; it’s obviously nothing racial seeing as she’s fairly Nordic, more of a psychic affinity (Pictorial 11)

The psyche that emanates from the physical frame of the body, that is not abstract. DH Lawrence, in chapter one of The Plumed Serpent, has this type of mental abstraction in mind for the two Americans who accompany Irish adventuress Kate to the bullfight and I’m not saying it’s a particularly American thing – well, I’ll stick my neck out and say it is – fairly.

Abstraction is an Anglo characteristic, whereas colour and physicality are Hispanic ones

It was fascinating. But at the same time, there was a heavy, almost sullen feeling on the air. These people came to market to a sort of battle. They came, not for the joy of selling, but for the sullen contest with those who wanted what they had got. The strange, black resentment always present.

By the time the church bells clanged for sunset, the market had already begun. On all the pavements round the plaza squatted the Indians with their wares, pyramids of green watermelons, arrays of rough earthenware, hats in piles, pairs of sandals side by side, a great array of fruit, a spread of collar-studs and knick-knacks, called novedades, little trays with sweets. And people arriving all the time out of the wild country, with laden asses. (chapter XVI)

American Flagg! Has this sardonic reference to “United Fruit Co” which is the Anglo-American profit motive – an abstraction of finance. The same abstraction can be carried into every field of life in that we end up with no colour and no physicality at all (no bullshit).
There are so many Americas so, again, one should go back to the America that Flagg tries to portray that is NOT all head. It started with the dollar hegemony so it’s up to others to say when that was precisely as I’m not American. The shabbier and doomier America of yore

Americana

That would make it the America of small towns and small holdings, so perhaps we’re talking the 50s time of Lil Abner? In that strip of Al Capp, the physical reality is home and true, while the city is the home of the slimy dollar.

So maybe it starts with Dorothy, going through to Lil Abner, all the way into the split decade of the 60s that saw radicals like Paul Kantner viciously assault mainstream monetary values. If you say they were trying to get back to the psyche that emanates from the physical frame of the body that might be fair?

DH Lawrence for sure has that attitude, and in chapter one has a go at the pansy toreadors hitching their fat hips effeminately! At the risk of offending the bellicose, Havana in the Soviet era was a haven of the svelt body with a nationalist consciousness second to nun – I mean none. Musical by temperament, the place oozed sophistication in the nooks and crannies ofslight dilapidation.

This type of ease and grace of manner that is not beholden to the dollar is akin to city-states of yore (Pictorial 71). In a way, the post-crisis Cuba became a sort of hostage to that clichéd picture – but it’s still true.

I was reading of Alicia Alonso, the Cuban who left under Batista and went back under Castro, who became the first “ballerina assolutas” to have shows playing at both the Bolshoi and Havana (Carmen). The living grace of the place is truly born of the musical body and not of the abstract mind.

Alicia became autocratic in her defence of her nationalist line – and that is typical of someone who is not thinking abstractly – in dollar values – but in terms of physical values. These physical values – of line and body – are our human history.

Further on in the book, General Cipriano asks Kate to marry him (to further the cult of Quetzalcoatl) and there are some deadening passages at the market.

When dark fell, the vendors lighted their tin torch-lamps, and the flames wavered and streamed as the dark-faced men squatted on the ground in their white clothes and big hats, waiting to sell. They never asked you to buy. They never showed their wares. They didn't even look at you. It was as if their static resentment and indifference would hardly let them sell at all.

Kate sometimes felt the market cheerful and easy. But more often she felt an unutterable weight slowly, invisibly sinking on her spirits. And she wanted to run. She wanted, above all, the comfort of Don Ramón and the Hymns of Quetzalcoatl. This seemed to her the only escape from a world gone ghastly. (chapter XVI)

Is this a type of pungent sorcery of the night? We live in a sorcery of the day (sun) which convinces the head with its abstraction (the Anglo-world view). The Latin and peon world cannot abandon the night with its cosmic physicality and gloomy beams of fuzzy light. In Mexico City electricity is intermittent and the starborn glory is quick to fall haphazardly on the heads of man and woman.

And I wait for the final day, when the dragon of thunder, waking under the spider-web nets
Which you've thrown upon him, shall suddenly shake with rage,
And dart his electric needles into your bones, and curdle your blood like milk with electric venom. (What Quetzalcoatl saw in Mexico, chapter XVII)

Well, seeing as every appliance we get is electrical, this could be so of those in thrall to this Anglo-mastery. After all, there is an Anglo-world which may be multinational but springs from Newton and his ilk.

The “electric venom” will incapacitate those cultures which are different. Cultures which are night and day; cosmic. Night is mystery – anything twilight or gloomy – exposed to the cosmos. Electricity is the opposite of this, requiring an abstraction of mind to operate.

Here we enter a racial field, where some races are “superior” at some things. Yet, the fact we are in an Anglo-world would seem to suggest that. The question is: is the abstract characteristic of mind the right one?

I’ve been saying for awhile that it’s an illusion that is only convincing through the parallel world of light that fulfils a perspective vision of straight-lines. We are prisoners of that illusion.

So, what’s the point of Latins or peons – or Chinese for that matter – competing with Anglos when in the process they lose their own fire and finesse of culture? It’s a race towards nothingness (the vanishing point of technique).

If the universe were an abstraction it wouldn’t matter, but it is savage and physical and cosmic. Mythical, as that is the physical reality we see from Earth (sun, moon, wind, rain).

'So I rose and stretched my limbs and looked around. The sun was below me in a daze of heat, like a hot humming-bird hovering at mid-day over the worlds. And his beak was long and very sharp, he was like a dragon.

'And a faint star was hesitating wearily, waiting to pass.

'I called aloud, saying: "Who is that?"

My name is Jesus, I am Mary's son.
I am coming home.
My mother the Moon is dark.

Brother, Quetzalcoatl,
Hold back the wild hot sun.
Bind him with shadow while I pass.
Let me come home.

'I caught the sun and held him, and in my shade the faint star slipped past, going slowly into the dark reaches beyond the burning of the sun. Then on the slope of silence he sat down and took off his sandals, and I put them on. (chapter XV)

These descriptions of Quetzalcoatl are akin to Milton’s Paradise Lost (Tales of Faith 5) in the 18^th century on the Christian myth; a psychic reality emanating from the physical. There is a naivety that is in the physical reality of the cosmos that we see with our eyes; the one of balance and proportion rather than abstraction and theory.

The physical/psychic sense of reality comes from our savage forebears, the fire and finesse of stone and god, myth and heroic fantasy.

 SKETCHES OF CHINA

Pictorial 71

They are saying to one another: Let us make an end
Of those ill-smelling tribes of men, these frogs that can't jump,
These cocks that can't crow
These pigs that can't grunt
This flesh that smells
These words that are all flat
These money vermin.
These white men, and red men, and yellow men, and brown men, and black men
That are neither white, nor red, nor yellow, nor brown, nor black
But everyone of them dirtyish.
Let us have a spring cleaning in the world.
For men upon the body of the earth are like lice,
Devouring the earth into sores.
This is what stars and sun and earth and moon and winds and rain
Are discussing with one another; they are making ready to start.

(Quetzancoatl Looks Down on Mexico, chapter XVI)

American Flagg! #5

Physical and racial reality fizz with exciting contrasts. This must be why Chaykin’s Flagg reads like a 20s throwback - as it does stylistically - so this is one more similarity to The Plumed Serpent.

In fact, this brings in yet another similarity

'I said: Go thy way, for the dust of earth is in thy eyes and on thy lips. For me the serpent of middle-earth sleeps in my loins and my belly, the bird of the outer air perches on my brow and sweeps her bill across my breast. But I, I am lord of two ways. I am master of up and down. I am as a man who is a new man, with new limbs and life, and the light of the Morning Star in his eyes. Lo! I am I! The lord of both ways. Thou wert lord of the one way. Now it leads thee to the sleep. Farewell!

'So Jesus went on towards the sleep. And Mary the Mother of Sorrows lay down on the bed of the white moon, weary beyond any more tears.

'And I, I am on the threshold. I am stepping across the border. I am Quetzalcoatl, lord of both ways, star between day and the dark.' (chapter XV)

Venus, the Morning Star, signpost of the Earth-spin, the eternal cycle of the seasons and the rains on the plains (of Spain and Mexico). Quetzalcoatl is not a “linear, progressive” god, like it seems Christianity may have become (prev.) He looks two ways, or you could say to the past as well as to the future.

Often looking to the past gives a clue to the present and future. This was surely Chaykin’s motivation for using hair and fashion from the 20s. The flapper zest gives a devilish sophistication to the future milieu.

It also seems to be a good way of instilling charisma in many of the characters – women and men – another theme of The Plumed Serpent.

Yes, sexy sophistication – male or female – and a degree of racial stereotyping (a la CC Beck Pictorial 63) are good counters to a modern order of basic uniformity regardless of race or place (east, west, north, south).

The underlying reason for this is the dollar is the symbol of straight-lines. Any country which advances adopts straight lines; so China is rapidly uprooting independent peasantry and retransplanting into apartment blocks.

  Pictorial 58

The vital and fluid, fiery lines of traditional landscape painting; Tao and the Chinese Dragon. What “they” term advance is simply an illusion of straight-lines. This makes it very convincing and a readymade resource for technology (the electric green future Tales of Faith 2 Babcock Ranch)

The vital and the fluid and the fiery are the physical as well as the racial reality of life on Earth (under the stars above, natch.) You only have to look at any bit of electioneering, and it’s all the same dollar bill.

Pete Buttigieg, the mayor of South Bend, Indiana, accused Mrs Warren of having a “multitrillion dollar hole” in her plan, making thecountry “even more polarised” and wanting to engage in “infinite partisan combat.”

Other candidates criticized Mrs Warren over her plan for a “wealth tax” of 2 per cent on individual income over $50 million. (DT)

I could have picked Boris Johnson – it’s all numbers in our system of dollar hegemony. But the dollar is physically zero. It has no physical reality (not even gold – see Hyborian Bridge 6) The only reality it represents is the illusion of straight-line advance (into the sun – Icarus). This makes it convincing to acolytes.

Politicians speak the language of acolytes extremely glibly – either because they’re genuine believers or they’re just glib! The language says we are in a perspective illusion of straight-lines which is symbolised by the dollar (capital).

Back in Hyborian Bridge 6 you see that originally (16^th century) money was used to exchange goods – mercantilism. The money symbolised the exchange of goods. In other words, the value being exchanged was in the goods: the silks, fruits, spices.

The value was not in the money; money was only a symbol. Only goods have proportion and beauty; money has very little. But nowadays, money does have value in that it symbolises straight-line advance (of the wormdollar Pictorial 50/2)

The value of straight-line advance is that it is an illusion that is convincing through the language of acolytes. Straight lines are conducive to techniques aimed straight at the head. The problem is, straight lines represent cities. This goes back to ancient Rome (Hyborian Bridge 2) and their cities that were laid out in grid patterns (as are US ones generally). The same applies to other ancient cities.

I was reading about Funan in Cambodia that about 700 AD was established as an Indo city-state with strong trading routes to the coast. The Hindu enclave sent emissaries to China and may have facilitated the spread of Buddhism. The city was laid out as a grid; but of course a city is just one side of the case. The other is the geography, wild life and plant life.

If you look at one of the EC sci fi by Wood or Williamson, you often see edifices in savage locations and that is exactly the case with ancient cities.

  

Same for Mesoamerican settings. The savage truth is that savagery is the innate state of nature – paraphrasing Howard. Savagery is strong and vibrant with the lifecycle of countless things. The savage dynamism of such ancient kingdoms can always be linked with fascism to those “ill smelling lice” of the modern persuasion (see Pictorial 70 on American Flagg!)

Human beliefs are not the beliefs of the city – which is a type of illusion. They are beliefs that reconcile the savagery of narural lifecycles. Not all beasts are savage; some are humble. Flowers are gay; bees are joyful addicts.

Beliefs reflect an unconscious sense of destiny beyond order and beyond human law. At the end of Hyborian Bridge 6 is the belief of Kukulkan as a cosmic cycle, which is not a belief in the stock-exchange as a human destiny!

“Stock-exchange” means trading in money, while originally it meant trading in goods; this is the illusory reality that has no reality because money is valueless. Its only value is as a symbol of straight-line progress.

This “value” is then sold by acolytes (politicians) even though it has no savage values of land, water, wind, rain. Natural strength and natural justice outside of the cities of Man.

CAMBODIA