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