So, the offhand
reference to Fleabag Pictorial 69 was that everyone’s talking and
staring at the camera. Fleabag is ostensibly about horniness but actually about going away from the expressive body of Man.
My position is that everything is an illusion except the
physical reality (Aristotelian teleology – the mind can’t exist without the body).
How cultures develop means to transmit information, first with books
(storytelling). Modern society has many different ways to transmit information
and it’s all illusory without the elements of storytelling or melody (emotion).
It’s like the
scene in They Live! Where Piper dons his glasses and suddenly sees the
real images appearing on ads and magazines. The previous images have no
meaning, no “story”, and he sees the real story. If that happened with Fleabag
you would see the solar serpent, tongue clacking-away, a symbol of Eros run
amock. What is missing is missing is the physical, moral substance of the body
that glides about the dancefloor (as in Mon Pere, Ce Heros), the body that
is expressive as opposed to an adjunct of a runaway head. The body that lopes
like a wolf with spear in hand; the body that adopts stances of readiness; the
play-fight of two bodies together (also in Mon Pere, Ce Heros).
In short, the
entire smorgasbord of actions a body has that show its moral, physical status. In a society of
a million words a second, is it all actually illusion and not physical reality?
Hyborian
Bridge 62/1 - it’s all relatively convincing since the people who write
are trained acolytes of sorcerers (Adam Smith, Darwin etc.)
The same
post mentions that in The Wizard of Oz,
the wizard is a flawed technologist, which gives a link between wizards and
technology that Howard probably would have read when young.
I was trying to
get at a link between the early years of Howard, and the physical crudities of
early life, and the ancient physical reality of the body. Two of the rituals
are food and cleansing, and in his tales he is never a stickler for etiquette.
He set the platter on the floor, and she was
suddenly aware of a ravenous hunger. Making no comment, she seated herself
cross-legged on the floor, and taking the dish in her lap, she began to eat,
using her fingers, which were all she had in the way of table utensils. After
all, adaptability is one of the tests of true aristocracy. (People of the Black Circle) Hyborian
Bridge 61/2
Conan would be
regularly drenched in sweat, dirt, dried blood, and cleaning would be an
indispensable ritual. The earthiness of the life is also brought out in smells,
descriptions of naked stone, worked wall hangings etc.
This atmosphere
of the rudimentary earth is both early and ancient, and would be contained in
the Celtic folk-tales of his mother. The predominance of the melodic body in
folk-tales counteracts the predominance of technology and news-copy that would
have been apparent in the 20s/30s (nowadays “opinion”, which is just even more
words!)
The world of the
head was rapidly advancing, and to Howard the crudities of the body were the
physical reality that infused his writing. These crudities are both early and
ancient, so there could be a link between the two in the folk-tales of his
mother.
Stories that
have a melodic phrasing, like the Homeric sagas, stories of heroes skipping
over the ocean like a song. The moral and physical is what myths are made of.
This ancient world of figures in the sky is the proportionate cosmos, the
general sense we get of the universe. It is not actually illusory, since it is
simply what we see, in the physical sense.
Since Newton,
the general, proportionate universe has been on the wane and, seemingly, we now
live in a world of inductive reason from experiment. The original experiment
with light (C6)
has now given way to an entire universe grounded in perspective illusion, since
that is attractive to acolytes.
Whereas in fact
nature is a maelstrom of fishes and forms feeding and diving from the waves,
from the clouds, we are led to believe it is an exercise in competitive order. In
fact it is disordered, as the prey and the carrion rot and the carcasses
regenerate the substance of the earth.
Pure order is an
illusion borne of perspective (light). But a perspective illusion is highly
convincing to acolytes (and sometimes barbarians Hyborian Bridge 20),
and so their torrents of words pour forth. We, as a human race, should never
pay too much attention to words that are not stories, not melodies, that have
no emotion, since they come from the disembodied head (of the solar serpent).
Conan, in The
Tower of the Elephant, speaks with moral authority.
He had
entered the part of the city reserved for the temples. On all sides of him they
glittered white in the starlight—snowy marble pillars and golden domes and
silver arches, shrines of Zamora's myriad strange gods. He did not trouble his
head about them; he knew that Zamora's religion, like all things of a
civilized, long-settled people, was intricate and complex, and had lost most of
the pristine essence in a maze of formulas and rituals. He had squatted for
hours in the courtyard of the philosophers, listening to the arguments of
theologians and teachers, and come away in a haze of bewilderment, sure of only
one thing, and that, that they were all touched in the head.
Words which are
unattached to the body lose their spirit – since body has spirit (Aristotle) –
only a dead body has lost its soul. This from an inhabitant of Gettysburg, a
town caught between two rival “cultures”.
Ruth Dunlap,
60, owner of Dunlap’s Steak and Seafood Diner, used to have two televisions,
one tuned to CNN, the other to Fox News. Republicans and Democrats both got
wound up. “I just got tired of hearing the comments,” said Mrs Dunlap. “So I just
said, you know what, I’m turning them off. Now we have sports and the Weather
Channel, which is much better.” (DT)