Hyborian Bridge 96

Believe it or not, the preceding could still relate to Howard’s Hyborian Age! A lifecycle which is ritualised then becomes sanctified as a faith, with priests and disciples. Welcome to a typical Hyborian city-state! (see next post)

In the Corinthian city where Conan first encounters the priest of Anu (#10), the rascally nobleman Murilo fears for his life when the Red Priest Nabonidus finds he has been selling state secrets (#11 Rogues in the House). Much like the later yarn of the siege of Makkalet (#s 19-25), the priest-sorcerer is the real ruler of the city’s nobility. Both are laws unto themselves, as this panel from #19 shows.

HB19

Back in #11, Murilo and Conan find themselves in league with the Red Priest when, in the house to hunt and slay him, the Red Priest’s man-ape Thack runs amock

 

As you see, the technology of mirrors figures here, as it does for the sorcerer in #20 HB20

The obvious reason is that mirrors are an optical illusion and hence the most fundamental of all technologies (P83). In this story, Nabonidus is clearly a cultivated man, and his house and garden give BWS ample scope for employing art-deco flourishes.

 

It’s not that there’s anything innately nefarious about technology. BWS’s print The Ram and the Peacock features a prism that is there to represent the fallen wizard’s broad and cultivated idealism.

(BWS says somewhere that the wizard is a fallen hero)

It’s not that mirrors or prisms are nefarious, it’s that in a world of mirrors (or prisms) the sorcerer is then the law, as opposed to the city guardians and aristocracy. The sorcerer’s law puts the devious head in a dominant position.

In Howard’s world, the barbarian is on his own ground and there is no real dominion (outside of Stygia). In both these tales, the king and the faith of the city – or cities in the case of the Tarim – hold dynastic and legitimate sway. The sorcerers may be laws unto themselves, but they also keep themselves to themselves.

Reason being, their powers are not global and omnipotent, they’re quite localised and they can be cut by naked steel. So Howard’s stories tell of a world where sorcery and barbarism and civilization are all very evenly balanced.

The cultivated sorcerer has a bond with humanity that is well illustrated by Zukala’s Daughter

Conan #15 HB21 

The bond, as I would say, is the bodily sense of line and movement that gives activity to the world. A dance of life and death. The disorder of the hunt; the strength of revival from decay. Once this bond is broken, the sorcerer enters the looking-glass world of the immaterial (sun, reflection). This is Newton’s world of the induction of technology (head). Because the head can’t deny the physique (Pictorial83), the result is physical boredom and a type of compulsion to a numerical order of a hygienic reality (of the ego), and its compulsive behaviour in a world of straight lines - sun, reflection.


Induction is the world of straight lines (speed), of compulsive behaviour by the ego - numerical or psychotic - that cannot deny its own physique. A two-faced reality of anodyne machines in a  hygienic order, and the reptilian urges underlying it (see next post)

The order is induced; it becomes a reality, replacing what was there. In Howard’s stories, the shared experience of aristocrats and priests and citizens in cities that are fairly filthy (representing decay and lifecycle) are never replaced by the sorcerous reality.

Quite similar things are seen in CL Moore’s Northwest of Earth sci-fi yarns, where the borderland cities of the Martian drylands have decrepit, derelict districts.

Northwest Smith bought his shawl in the Lakkmanda Market of Mars. It was one of his chiefest joys to wander through the stalls and stands of that greatest of marketplaces .. So many songs have been sung and so many tales written of that fascinating chaos..

He shouldered his way through the colorful cosmopolitan throng, the speech of a thousand races beating in his ears, the mingled odors of perfume and sweat and spice and food and the thousand nameless smells of the place assailing his nostrils. Vendors cried their wares in the tongues of a score of worlds. (CL Moore, Scarlet Dream, Gollancz Omnibus, page 208 Pictorial 23)

Spacetravel is only hinted at, as Northwest never sets a foot in one! It’s also true that both CL Moore – in Judgement Night  - and Leigh Brackett in her later works, raise all sorts of qualms about the clash between civilizations at different levels of technology.

In Judgement Night, the prospect of a parallel world planetoid of “resolved space” is quite close to the physical boredom that breeds psychotic behaviour.

Juille's reason told her that she had stumbled into one of the darker levels of Cyrille.. This undulating reptilian horror must be one of the hopeless addicts, wealthy enough to indulge his madness even when civilization was crumbling outside the walls.. (page 484 Pictorial 8)

Yes, because inductive worlds breed compulsive behaviour of the head. It could be a numerical compulsion; it could also be psychotic sexual behaviour as a consequence of physical boredom. There’s a scene in Frank Thorn’s Ghita of Alizarr where the sorcerer performs a bizarre sexual ritual with a reptile. We may not sleep with our iphones, but there’s a cold-blooded reptilian urge underneath the innocuous exterior.

MOUNTAIN SONG

Sorcery has an innate tendency to keep itself to itself and so breed a type of diabolical boredom. This can take the form of bizarre sex – and there are hints of it in Northwest of Earth. Northwest’s savage core of masculinity saves him from being easy prey to such beings.

So, inductive technology is sort of two-faced, a sit inhabits a hygienic order (of the compulsive head) that cannot deny its own physique and so becomes physically bored, with possible psychotic behaviour.

Inductive technology makes the assumption that no bond is required with the shared experience of people (and animals, natch) in places of power – wilderness, cities of decrepit dereliction. The bond that is the disorderly sense of line and movement that spontaneously transfigures places to a naïve ambiance.

It’s our world, and that means it’s not a type of global nervous system, as Blake’s print of Newton seems to infer (prev.) What “they” always assume is that technology can replicate reality, when really induction is nothing more than an advanced mirror (reflection) in immaterial (resolved) space.

Irresolvable space is decrepit and sultry with goblets of gloom and vaulty doom. It is space where the cycles of life and death cannot be resolved into anything less than that; the aura of decay and finality. It’s no surprise that the resolved space of a Pixar animation becomes popular but, actually, the irresolvable space of Pinocchio has an eternal vigour. The vigour born of decadence, naivety of texture in places of humble origin and dismal colour.

PINOCCHIO

Where Pixar is all sorcery, classic Disney is finely balanced between the technology, the disordered expression of the barbarous lines, and the civilized restraint of the cultivated act. The fine sense of balance cannot be resolved down anything else.

The same really goes for the shared experience of people in places of power and texture and colour. It’s a type of cosmic balance that a cold-light, reptile technology of endless reflections can never have or, as Sheryl Crow sings

ALL I WANNA DO

 

Pictorial 83

So, a life-cycle is a story, with a beginning, middle and end. It has to stop, and only then is it possible to draw lessons from the story, lessons which can take the form of rituals. It could be Christian or Islam but it is the life of actions of an individual.

Rituals are shared experiences of the events that honour the establishment of a church and belief-system. What that seems to imply is that the churches, mosques and monuments of Christianity or Islam are a form of material wealth that is related to the lifecycle of an individual. Something that starts and stops and has a story.

Whereas materialism in our system represents the absence of shared experiences in places of power, the opposite is true in medieval belief-systems. What “they” call materialism could be taken from Newton’s experiments with lenses and light – inductive reason Hyborian Bridge 67, 76.

But this means we don’t so much live in a material world as an immaterial one (C13) since light is not material (reflection). The world we are in is really of the head, or electro-impulses. This goes back to Blake’s print of Newton (P59) as a brain that sprouts a body (rather than vice versa).

Pictorial 59

As the print illustrates, the physique cannot be denied, the mind becomes trapped by its own physique. The result is physical boredom, the compulsion to numerical/monetary facts.

The order we are in is of the head, which really takes the form of hygiene in that a body which is active in the rhythms and cycles of nature becomes exposed to disorder (decay, regeneration). The recurring cycles of flesh and blood, decay and revival that spell strength and purity.

A hygienic order sees dirt as “bad”; bodies are seen as extensions of what are really “hygiene-machines”. This quote from P59 shows the drastic “health” required for animals kept in wretched, inert conditions.

“It is inexpensive and can be sprayed onto a wound by farmers.. Dechra is applying for approval to launch Tri-Solfen for.. during castration for piglets.. to prevent their meat from developing a flavour known as “boar taint”.. in sheep when the skin is removed below the anus to stop blowflies from infecting them. (DT)

As noted then, I worked on an organic farm where the standard recipe for blowfly is shearing round the breech area.

In C13 it says that Newton, though known as a physicist (Natuiral Philosopher) advanced the study of “Opticks” or light, which is essentially the non-physical, immaterial reality of electro-impulses attached to a screen (reflection). This is the order of “convincing rightness”, of straight lines and speed (vanishing point of technique).

All of this is actually Newtonian physics; not the laws of Opticks, this time, but the laws of motion (action and reaction). So, how is it that the laws of optics now seem to obey the laws of motion? Basically because light is geometrical (C4). It creates an ordered space of straight lines. Light essentially is technology, it means practically the same thing. And technology is speed and straight lines.

Optics represents the fundamental technology of where we are now, while the laws of motion represent their practical application in speed (vehicles, rockets). The most advanced technology would probably be to travel at the speed of light, which is probably impossible physically (materially).

Not to put too fine a point on it, all of that represents a hygienic order, and Newton is really the sorcerer of compulsive hygiene. In a certain sense we no longer inhabit the regenerative cycles of nature, since the brain is just electro-impulses (sun). The end-product of optics is Relativity (to the sun); even if Einstein is considered post-Newtonian, in many ways he is still trapped in that geometrical light-box.

A lot of this comes down to words. While “they” say is we are in the material age, most technology clearly is immaterial and composed of electro-impulses. This in turn means we exist inside a giant brain of which our bodies are just an extension. This in turn means we are not exposed to the recurring flesh and blood lifecycles of decay and revival that ensure strength and purity.

In a loose sense, that is the world of dirt and action that Man through the ages has kept clean in. The idea of cleanliness without dirt is just a figment. We live in the age of hygiene and are attached to electronic hygiene-machines. Strength is not ours – psyche or physical. I just read that Princess Anne is concerned that, “In a society obsessed by health and safety culture, we’ve all but overrided” our own innate sense of risk taking. (DT 28 Dec.)

Yes, because risk taking applies to the active body with its own sense of line and movement in the world of dirt and revival. There is no compulsive hygiene in a stable, as the princess will be all too aware. The filth of past ages may offend us (castles, Jerusalem, Rome); our robotic-hygiene would mystify them.

The underlying reason is that a society of the body is active in line and movement in an active world of dirt and cleanliness; a society of the head is inert and suffers from physical boredom that manifests in a compulsive (numerical) order attached to (electronic) hygiene-machines (screens).

Orthodox Jews from Pittsburgh Yeshiva School (DT)

Pictorial 82

Book three – Neq the Sword – struck home for reasons that are too personal to go into. Neq, the 2^nd or 3^rd sword of the old empire, isn’t gay but is scared of being rebuffed and when, in the course of a quest to uncover renegades who are ambushing crazy trucks (distributing equipment and weapons from Helicon), he finally meets a desirable stranger who takes his bracelet (wife), they are ambushed and she is raped by a pack of fifty, Yod, the leader, killing her in a defensive gesture. Neq has already killed, and Yod cuts his hands off. They cauterize the wounds with fire, Yod having spared his life as a moral gesture, and he is cared for by the crazy they earlier freed from the pack.

Neq’s mind is set on vengeance, and they trek to Helicon where the crazy attaches a sword to Neq’s stump. He stalks the pack, putting their heads on spikes. Even though he is determined to make them all pay the price, a couple of decisive events occur, and he has a Damascus conversion. This is the thing that struck me, since he decides by rational thought that vengeance will not achieve his aim. With the destruction of Helicon, the crazy supply chain has been cut and this is at the root of the renegade phenomenon: plunderers who are no longer served by the system.

Therefore, the system itself has to be restored so that Helicon restarts the crazy supply chain and thereby the nomad system of fight-circles. This struck me as a type of revivalism, since the nomad tribes are self-organizing places of power, with distinctive textures and colours (pennants). But they require a rational system to service their needs and, actually, this is how organic things work! The self-organizing principle doesn’t mean things are irrational, it means the places are powerful, places where the body gets dirty.

Piers makes a point through the books of saying, “dirt doesn’t matter”, and it is simply a sighn of the strength of the earth, smell of manure or puddles of mud. What Neq is referring to is a rational system, but it doesn’t require much organizing; mainly routes of trade from a centre of manufacture. Our modern system is confused because it assumes everything can be rational. But a living system is not rational, it is cyclical, it self-organizes. Therefore, it cannot be organized externally.

Our systems are run by politicians who are the top managers of a race of managers. Their confidence is misplaced because they are only dealing with the nervous system (or external nervous system) and not with the active body in places of power. In order to regain power, we need untidy places with no politicians. Because these places are so hard to find, the head becomes dominant and indulges in compulsive behaviour of “facts” (numerical, monetary - Grace Slick quote Hyborian Bridge 62/1).

But facts exist in places that are tidy, are not self-organizing or dirty and are run by heads that gain confidence in hygiene systems that supply them with facts. A hygiene system happens to be electronic and attached to the head via screens (reflections, see prev.) Our system is Apollonian (sun) and cannot encompass the playfulness of the moon (waxing and waning.)

It’s not so much a case of rational vs irrational as hygiene versus dirt. One can have a rational system that is dirty since this is the one Neq proposes. It has power and playfulness in places of texture, colour and song.

Our masters, because they exist in the head, are attached to hygiene-machines (screens) that flatter the ego with facts. A hygiene-system is simply one where electro-impulses are attached to machines; one with neither content (or strength of psyche in a place) or style (action of body in a place).

In the trilogy, the action of the body is enshrined in the circle code. There’s a similarity with western rodeos; in places of power, codes come into force which safeguard the body. Any threat is regulated by the system, as with the Western duel.

From our modern standpoint, arbitrary violence is wrong, but we all die and a much greater question is the meaning one places on death. What happens in book three is that Neq kills Var over a misunderstanding, and he and Vara (Soli) are forcefully brought together ina battle between vengeance and understanding.

What you could say is that, in a naïve society where relationships are based largely on physical action, these circular relationships are bound by the welkin – the vault of the stars. Life and death are no longer simply material things of fact; they have circular relationships bound by the welkin (vault of heaven), having the mutable sense of destiny that can make a negative become a positive. Irony is there; disaster and death can mutate into affection and love with the shared experience of the welkin (cosmos).

WENCESLAS

The meaning of events is no longer factual and serious, and is given an ironic tinge that is almost playful. Tears flow and mutate into tears of joy. Life lived as a code can no longer be 100% serious because it is no longer factual (material); it is the psychic strength in a place of texture and colour and song.

Materialism is simply the absence of shared experiences in places of power. Power means the wilderness strength of dirt and texture and colour, where the herds roam, where cowboys poke, where Indians have a home. The dirt of the Earth, where worms and buffalos have a place. It’s a cyclical system, and therefore not a material one – which is just the facts that the ego can comprehend in a hygienic order, one that the ego compulsively attaches to numbers and facts.

Outside of materialism – or serious fact – are the shared experiences in places of power that connect us to the cosmos. The meaning placed on cyclical events has a dose of irony, since that is the reality of the situation. Our lives and deaths are part of a wider ambit of shared experiences.

Materialism is just the absence of that, since it is a fact such as a 1 or a zero. A shared experience is a psychic reality. I mean, to take the obvious example, a Nativity scene is the commune of Christ.

Kasimir Zgorecki, French Poles 1930s

The solemn faces seem to tell the story of naïve acceptance that is so lacking in a material world. Acceptance of cyclical events that tell a story of life and death much wider than that of mere fact. Birth and death are “facts” if we take away the psychic content and activities of the body in a place of power. (They remind me of my youth in Spain; the “unthinking” culture of the body).

There seems to be a dual aspect in that psychic relationship. I’m a Pisces by sign and have always had a sense that my sign reinforces my sense of self! It’s my connection to the cosmos, telling me how to behave. It’s not factual, but   - the psyche affects the world of facts via behaviour. In a sense, modernity is the exact opposite, even though a material fact has no meaning beyond the fact it exists as an electro-impulse.

That reality is weak because it is not dominated by line and movement; it is complex and not simple, attractive to the ego. What is simple and strong is actually the human body in action. The politicians with their tentacular heads are the enemy to a revival of shared relationships in places of power, of self-organizing, of dirt under the welkin.

“Give back what you have taken this day.” (page 119)

Is Tyl’s stricture to Neq..

(page 125)

Well, the answer is that Var was sterile and Vara wants a baby. So the circle turns. Story versus atomic fact (sun).

IF I HAD A HAMMER

(page 161)

(Neq had a glockenspiel soldered onto his sword)

Pictorial 81

Book two – Var the Stick  - is really a running farce as, first, the lumbering Var is send to reconnoitre the mountain by the warlike Nameless One (Sos) and, unknown to him, encounters Sosa in a rat-infested storeroom of a mountain tunnel. Then, to break a stalemate, is sent to fight Helicon’s champion on a nearby Mesa, who turns-out to be a girl of 8 or 9. Following a string of mishaps, they decide to call it a draw, while declaring a victory for Var.

Of course, the girl is Soli – Sol’s child – but birthchild of Sos by Sola, and

 

The Nameless One swears vengeance, and Var and Soli are forced to flee the land, the pursuit taking up most of the book. At one point they reminisce about the land battle that occurred following the mishap of his discovery in the mountain tunnel.

He summarized his foray to Helicon, before the first battle. “But the Master said she would tell them, so it would be booby-trapped..”

“She never did.. Sosa didn’t say a word.”

 

Towards the end, they wind-up at New Crete, which is the most modern society so far encountered, run by barter where the only non-modern feature is that chaste maidens in the temple are sacrificed to the god Minos in the canyon. While Soli is “fattened up” Var gets  a smelly job as a garbage disposer for modest wages, while plotting rescue. He finally gets to meet the god, and they chew some maiden-meat (not Soli, natch.)

The classical dimension tells you quite a lot, since sacrificial maidens who are eaten end up at the other end, so to speak. It’s a crude reality, much like Arisophanes’ The Knights (Pictorial 47). Since so much of life revolves round meals or sex, the primitive cycles are ever-present, even if they are swept under the carpet. The modern sense of “self” as a nervous system (or external nervous system) that processes data is the furthest removed from the reality of food and sex that civilization has ever been.

Life seen as farce may be false to the humour-free zone of ideology, but it is true to the primitive reality of lifedeath; the irony of hunters who become prey. A good place to see that “unserious” reality is a Bugs Bunny cartoon – or even better Roadrunner! Life in the raw may be deadly, but it’s only 100% serious if the nervous system becomes dominant.

Rather than the natural world being a continual competition where there are no larks, it’s a place where things just happen in a cartoon sense of line and movement. Native Americans were infamous for playing larks with dead bodies, cutting off appendages and placing them elsewhere. A type of savage farce.

It’s not pretty but, then, life in its raw state is a savage game where there are no winners. Modern civilization kids itself that it is winning whereas it is only winning the war of competing nervous systems, which exists outside of these primitive cycles. Farce can happen because a body is composed of separate things which are interlinked. In other words, a body has simple symmetries and is identified by the simplicity of features.

A nervous system – which actually contains all of Man’s ideologies – is just one aspect of this. We enter a world of much greater complexity and correspondingly less meaning (epistemology Weird 11).

This is really going back to the roots of our cultural origins, since irony and farce are at the root of Greek comedy (Aristophanes and contemporaries at the Dionysia). Without that, nothing is simple enough to understand in its primitive origins of food and sex.

A body has elegant, cartoonish lines and is there to hunt, forage and breed heirs. This is at the root of most of the 30s pulps, be it A Princess of Mars of Conan. Conan doesn’t stray too far from that template in his life as a thief or a corsair, or a king with a son. It’s a world where irony is ever-present; where a king becomes a slave overnight and a king in a fight – as in Hour of the Dragon.

A world without irony has no sense of the difference between men, women or Man and machine (prev.) It has no sense of the cyclical strength that death brings; the farcical reality of being roasted for others.

Frans Snyder (prev)

FORTUNA

It’s a farcical situation because a body – animal or human – is composed of different things that are still one aesthetic creature. Without the comedy, we would just be electro-impulses attached to machines, which is fast becoming reality!

Piers’ muscular fantasy contains quite a lot of that body comedy which is quite true to a life of physical rawness where men and women are close and there are few machines. At the close, Soli becomes the Chinese warlord Ch’in’s betrothed, and only the fact that Ch’in has severed the Nameless One’s left thumb, as a gladiator in his arena, enables Var to meet-up with him and Sol, who joined the chase, and attempt to spirit her away.

Earlier, Soli had been advised by Sosa (of Helicon), “If a man is strong and honest and kind – like your father – trust in him and make him your friend” and she reflects that,

Men like Bob and the Nameless One were awesome, because their minds were more deadly than their bodies. (page 158)

While Bob perished in the gutting of Helicon, it is just this awesome mind that enables the Nameless One to tactic ally plan their getaway to a nicety. With four of them in the getaway truck and approaching almost certain death, only two have a chance of survival.

Sos and Sol sacrifice themselves, the other two are safe.

Var has reached the conclusion that organized empire is the face of war.

 

Is he right? Whether or not, what is true is that, in their actions, Sos and Sol were strong, honest and kind. Were that not the case, Sos’s strength of intellect would count for nothing.

By “strong”, Sosa meant physical might of the body. Intellect which is not tied to the activities of the body in a place, where line and movement flourish, has no moral heart. This is the ideological world of preening politicians of the head, forever gazing at flickering screens. The more they smirk, the more you can be sure the world of action in a place of texture and colour is lost forever, because they believe in a world of logical principles that satisfies the intellect (ego).

When you see that ego, you are seeing the confidence that arises, not from strength (of body in action), honesty or kindness in a place of colour, but merely from the logic of the screen (reflection).

Denying their own origins, the wellspring of creativity that happens in a self-organizing place of cartoonlike simplicity.

ROADRUNNER

Pictorial 80

The cosmic serpent (Pictorial 1)is the dangerous a priori knowledge that the hero steals; the knowledge of our undulating link to the past. The truth that the shape and power of our bodies is knowledge unto itself, that shape is destiny and a power unto itself. The sword that melds to the hand like a living thing, strong, but flexible.

The servants of Set have usurped this strength that now feeds their cold-blooded lust for information that saps the body of its self-organizing potential that is age-old.

This information feeds a cold-blooded, electronic appetite that is the modern face of Set, the corporate-capitalist serpent. Set steals our power, in a reversal of the myth. The cold-blooded machine takes us out of the eternal cycle of destruction and creation that happens in a particular place, and that gives us power. The distinctive ambiance of feeling and texture of place.

All the power is taken-up by the information-machine that twists around our lives hideously. The power is ours to regain by freeing our heads from a world of data, and applying them to the naivety of the story of what happens in a place.

Confusing? Yeah, that is what a world of data is intended to be, by persuading us our bodies and the undulating power therein are insufficient. The weakness of hygiene that takes us out of the world of strength, dirt and cyclical activities, the hunt, the scavengers, the white moon of Diana - or the blessed Mary of repose (Pictorial 71 The Plumed Serptent)

“They” tell us that a culture is created by information, whereas true strength is athletic grace (compare the slapstick touch-and-kiss joie-de-vivre of The African Queen with Phoebe Waller-Bridge HB92)

   

In a culture of power, the body has knowledge of place and is honed by the mind to a state of fitness to prevail over nature’s rough wildness. Patrick Woodroffe’s (Metamorphosis 2) panorama to Piers Anthony’s trilogy captures the post apocalypse culture that is based on the fight-circle.

In a mixture of Robin Hood and Indian braves, the green swards resound to the sound of ritual duel. Sos craves Sola, squaw of the reigning Sol. Sos is learned, and establishes the tribe on badland overrun by mutant shrews. Sol is grateful, yet Sos desires Sola and the triangle can only end in one place: the circle.

Defeated, Sos must go to the mountain, from which none return. Leigh Brackett probably wrote the template for this type of thing in The Long Tomorrow (). Here, however, Sos is rescued by the “underworld”, and is taken to the rec room where an elfin girl takes his bracelet.

 

To cut the scene short, the woman is a trained gymnast and martial artist who is able to floor the mighty Sos with a straight-arm blow to the neck!

In Myhopoeikon () Woodroffe comments that

The best superheroes, though strong and ruthless, usually have a subsidiary gentleness built in. (p110), and the book does read much like a comicbook future history, where fineness and grossness of form create a distinctive world.

“Worlds” actually, since the mountain underworld and the pagan exterior are separate enclaves. It can’t last, and is foreshadowed when the elfin one keeps Sos’s bracelet to become his wife, Sosa.

Sos is sent out into the world again – after undergoing Wolverine-style upgrades  - Sosa training him in weaponising his body. While Sosa ism something of an exception, the demarcation between men and women is something like Imperial Japan.

 

In this heroic society, sex between unknowns is not often withheld, and is more of a transaction (denoted by bracelet). Somewhat reminiscent of a wild west code of wooing strange women with chivalry.

TREAT HER LIKE A LADY

At the end of book one, Sos has quelled Sol’s empire by brute force, so clearly the underworld has not made the mistake of Brackett’s canyon-culture, by relying on super-computers and human intellect. The mountain they call Helicon – which Sos recalls is the home of the Muses.

So we’re in classical territory, where the lithe and frolicsome grace of form – masculine and feminine – are still king and queen. While it’s true the books do make some apologies to Darwin – and the trail up the mountain is called a survival of the fittest – the beauty of the human form – in its muscular masculinity and elfin femaleness – is an aesthetic counter to the fantastical chase for profit at all costs that is so tied to Darwin and our own aberrant culture of the detached head (that plugs-in to the nearest appliance).

The empire in the trilogy is much more akin to Rome, and the quarrel between Sos and Sol akin to Mark Anthony and Caesar.

 

Pierse is wrestling with the monstrosity civilization has become, and I read his American upbringing was an Elysian one of rustic bliss, and that’s clearly what he’s writing about in the trilogy.

Civilization tends to deny the cycle of life and death that Woodroffe’s panorama explicitly explores. Or, to put it more honestly, Rome doesn’t deny it but seeks to impose the image of the Caesars as eternal conquerors.

One can abhor Rome, but it is honestly brutal! Their enemies die and they honour them in coinage (Vercingetorix). One can hate tyranny while admiring the glamour – somewhat like Talbot Mundy’s depiction of the Greek socialite/athlete Helene in Tros of Samothrace ()

There is glory and grandeur there along with the scum of rottenness. What is so aberrant in modern times is that male/female, Man/machine are becoming closer by the day. Only different things can have the affinity of psyche that makes for interesting frisson (HB94).

That’s what chivalry is; the attraction of differences. Honour in combat too. Towards the end of book one, Sos has to fight the great clubber Bog, an affable simpleton. A misplaced kick has the effect of breaking his neck, and

 

Compare this iron rationality with the current credo for keeping paralytics alive indefinitely (Michael Schumacher). Let me suggest that “their” scruples are not so much aimed at the human but actually at the machine!

They are already hybrid-humans and have no care for the sublime grace of primitive form in action, only what they take to be the mental process that a machine can prolong. The end result is to be one with the machine with no independent action, no moral identity.

All this centers reality on the ego, at the expense of the primitive spine and the supple expressions of the body in rustic pursuits and harvesting the earth. This is the primitive reality that connects Man to the great cycles of destruction and creation round the undulating earth.

WARRIOR

Hyborian Bridge 95

GET READY

The brass intro is a primitive stomp that sets the blood racing. Lest you think this is all aimed at black musicians, this strumpetty rendering by Fairport is a rhythmic revival to stop the blood cold.

THE DESERTER

The folk revival was a mix of the primitive and the clever. The best pop also has a folk-primitivism. The best of both combine both

STEPPIN’ OUT (42 mins in)

Why is the primitive clever? For the reason that life is a song that cannot be rationalised. The more scientists attempt to rationalise reality, the more hopelessly complex. Life is a combination of the simple and primitive with the clever and subtle. If we live in the age of politicians, the reason may lie in that rationalising process, in that politicians are the spokespeople for acolytes of the modern maze of logic.

Politicians therefore inhabit a world which is ordered –Pictorial 24– either left or right (see Latin America). Nowhere does it occur to them that a society needs both order and freedom. The NRA champion machines of destruction as individual freedom when it is actually a type of militaristic order. Our societies champion cleanliness (hygiene) and the individual but – see Pictorial 21 – that is not the same as empirical traditions of sanitation which rely on dirt (cowboys on the range; the nomadic Indian).

Without dirt there can be no cleanliness, since dirt is the strength of the earth and the lifecycle born of decay (revival). There can only be hygiene, which is a figment born of the head attached to its electronic masters (AI). Empirical traditions of sanitation rely on dirt because they are attracted to primitive places of power

 

In The African Queen, Bogart and Katherine Hepburn first start to get closer when he realizes they both need a wash. They take to opposite sides of the boat, she swims around in her knickers then (of course) can’t get back aboard. He hauls her up; “Don’t look!” she intones. Small hope. In a primitive locale with crocs “waiting for their supper”, gay bankside flowers and the ternsion of the rapids, Hepburn’s physical excitement mounts, and the ending is forgone.

In a primitive situation, with a man and a woman, there is always every going to be one ending. The situation is very similar to Conan and the Devi in The People of the Black Circle. What does primitive mean but something strong and fertile that advances life in its myriad forms? Romance. In both film and story, enemies circle the duo. In the film it’s the organized Germans; in the story the Masters of Yimsha.

Organization is not self-organization which is a primitive act of unthinking development. The film – set in 1914, about a hundred years gone – sets the two against eachother in an adventurous river chase. Modern politicians are simply the heirs of the hapless Germans, forever attempting with organized thought to quell primitive romance.

Organized thought (of politicians) is itself the enemy since – see HB42 – human passion depends on the creative-unconscious of the unthinking cosmos. When politicians say they are “passionate”, they mean about words and ideas, not about the reality that is outside of these. Egotistical, forever gazing at their own reflections, where a “reflection” is a fact, the head attached to its electronic master Narcissistically.

The primitive reality of blood and slaughter that allows gaiety into the world of revival is outside there conscious reach. I made the same point about the history of Western ranching and East coast slaughterhouses.

The primitive cycle breeds unthinking gaiety, found in the heavens and in the emergence of a single flower. The same feeling is found in The African Queen and it is the same primitive exhilaration of using one’s wits that is found in Howard. Organization is not self-organization. One applies to thought (head); the other applies to development (body). We live in a society of the head that in Howard’s Hyboria is epitomised by the followers of Set.

They want an ordered world in order to run it with man-serpents and serpent-men, vassals to the great AI. Politicians’ egos become inculcated with “facts”, reflections that flicker on a screen.

Primitive strength is far from their minds, because it is a product of body. The body that self-organizes and is self-governing. Without this primitivism, all that is left are detached Martian tentacular heads in human guise; reading from the same hymn-book of profit-motive that weakens the ambiance of unthinking realism in the skies and silent biers and flowers of the Big Country.

 

 

Hyborian Bridge 94

Well, I noticed one of your compatriots has restarted his ancestral pile, Hopwood Hall, near Manchester North England. There’s something about airy, ramshackle halls with bats roosting that is bracing to the spirit; all that’s needed to restart the ancestral culture is a meadowland of peasantry loyal offerings of produce to the new laird.

Nothing of that could happen without a paradigmic shift of practically 180%. Instead of information being a god it would be trampled underfoot as a false idol, and the gods of the mighty orbs raised to prominence (again). DH Lawrence had the idea that all deities were variants of one primal theme. All religions have a moral force, which one could imagine as the original wellspring of creation.

The demise of information would mean the demise of Darwinism, since an unthinking dance of creation is not evolution; it just is. Competition would then be trodden underfoot as merely a possible pastime rather than a creative act – of story. It’s noticeable that Howard’s historical stories are very fair and even-handed to the faiths which congregate around the common middle eastern watering holes in the early to late medieval.

The Blood of Belshazzar features a giant Norman Cormac FitzGeoffrey, Arab Yusuf el Mekri, Persian Nadir Tous, Turk, Venetian di Strozziand a Jewish retainer of the ogrish Skol Abdur. The mix of religions is never a bone of contention, only the various allegiances and shady dealings or outsight treachery of the races on display. Races often tend to band together, though the mix of the story seems merely to balance the scales. The pack only turns on FitzGeoffrey when el Mekri employs psychological ploy in a foaming fit of avarice.

…the Sheikh suddenly tore away and pointing a lean arm toward the giant figure at the foot of the stairs, screamed, “Allah akbar! There stands the thief! Slay the Nazarene!”

(page 216)

John Watkiss

The medieval principle, which Howard fully embraces, is that a particular place – here an outlander castle – harbours a diverse, ragtaggle assortment of wayfarers. Their very differences manifest a distinctive ambiance of mystery and intrigue. There is not a sign of the modern tendency for bigotry – save Howard’s habitual depictions of Jews as househould majordomos, natch – and one could hazard that the underlying reason is that at that point in history they viewed their faiths as variants of one spiritual wellspring.

Jerusalem – see Tales of Faith 11, 13 – was a spiritual nexus rather than a political capital. Politicians are the ones who gaze at their own reflections through the mirrors of technology, the spokespeople for a world built on information that smooths all differences. The logic of this is that – at root – we ARE the same; but it’s based on false logic (the false Apollo).

The logic is that by dispensing information our needs are fulfilled. This misses out the wellspring from which we (all) spring, which is the dance of life itself. In The Blood of Belshazzar, the assorted types conjure up a distinctive ambiance of bibulous effrontery, such as when Jacob calls for FitzGeoffrey.

“The Great Prince, Skol Abdur,” announced Jacob in pompous and sonorous accents, “would grant audience to the Nazarene who rode in at dusk – the lord Cormac FitzGeoffrey.”

The Norman finished his goblet at a draft and rose deliberately, taking up his shield and helmet. “And what of me, Yahouda?” IT was the guttural voice of the Mongol. “Has the great prince no word for Toghrul Khan, who has ridden far and hard to join his horde?” (page 201)

The sense is that the very differences make for the interest – and hence the story. They don’t necessarily like eachother, but neither do they necessarily kill eachother. There is a rough frisson that sets one against the other. Previously I made this same point about the TV comedy Rab C Nesbitt (Pictorial 13), whereby there is a low-level fight – and this creates the humour. Humans, unlike animals in an ecosystem, don’t kill and eat eachother. They indulge in a low-level ribaldry, banter or maybe brawling.

This sort of wild west atmosphere or frisson creates an ambiance made of differences. In medieval times mean and women could bridge their differences because their faiths were assumed to have a common wellspring. So, the political notion that all we need is information actually seems to destroy the ambiance of what you might call creativity.

In other words, different faiths, or races, have a rough frisson and it is this which creates the ambiance that makes life interesting and creative. The differences epitomise strength of temperament, and strengths have an affinity. This is seen in Howard’s tales of camaraderie between Christian and Saracen, such as in Sowers of the Thunder between Haroun and Red Cahal (Pictorial 11).

The lie of the modern era is that living things are information rather than a primitive dance that is as unthinking as the stars. Information is taken to be DNA; but where something grows it grows into different places (parts of body), and each place is surrounded by ambiance. DNA is the necessary order without which all would be chaos. Ambiance and place are the dance of creativity which makes things interesting.

Politicians, because they deal solely in facts, cannot see this unthinking truth of story and myth. Different myths for different peoples from the wellspring of cosmic creativity. Why have scientists come-up with an “information theory” (quantum string) of the universe? Because the idea of an unthinking dance is far from their minds, and so things get fantastically complicated.

For a start, how are songs written? If you take the Blues, they’re written as a simple framework of chords and loose-rhythms that accentuate a certain style. Simplicity is crucial for subtlety – a mixture of the two.

LET IT LAST (33 mins in)

To me that execution is as good as Mozart. Mozart is also simple and irresistible. The modern scientific mind is really following Ayn Rand’s doctrine that mental processes are a form of activity (The House that Rand Built 1). But music is harmonic, not logical, and Black music is rhythmically loose. Songs with a loose framework make improvisation easy – as Armatrading’s band do on most of her tracks.

All this is something that happens in a particular place between different performers, resulting in a distinctive ambience of feeling and texture. Performers will rehearse, but you have to assume some of what they do is instinctive - in time (see Grace Slick Hyborian Bridge 67 and Bruce Lee prev.)

The ambient universe is almost what makes life worth living, or one may as well live in a concentration camp with Martian overlords. Empty space can generate ambiance

local Carnegie library

Ambiance is the “unthinking” quality that bypasses the profit-motive of contemporary civilization (compare current and historical Shanghai!) Ambiance is what you discover under the starlit skies. What “they” would say is that it’s a subjective feeling of the mind. What if it’s the opposite? An objective reality of the creative-unconscious cosmos.

Even if there is no definite proof of this (since the universe is not logical), the proof is in the decline of ambiance in our major centres under the anonymous profit-motive (see cowboy ranch demise Hyborian Bridge 56) I was reading about the decline of Black sharecroppers in the south and Michigan and, while it’s true there were iniquities, the profit-motive of large owners heralded by FDR’s New Deal didn’t help. Prices went up while tenants went out (or up North).

The profit-motive rewards competition, while downgrading the ambiance of places. It really depends on the value one places on ambiance. What “they” say is that nature is forever competing and hence evolving; if, however, the growth of living things – and by extension neighbourhoods, shantytowns, ecosystems and ranges – is a song set to the music of the spheres, then it’s not a competition. Competition can only occur as part of a much wider ambit (of creation).

Hence, the idea of abstract competition is merely a figment of acolytes’ brains. It does not occur in the real world of action, moral purpose and the songs that express the wish to self-rule.

ME MYSELF I (12 mins in)