The Plumed
Serpent, page 273
This sort of
ancient and primitive unconscious has quite a lot in common with heroic
fantasy. Instead of abstract thought, there is a genuine moral attachment to
the earth. What DH Lawrence calls the “mental-spiritual” attributes of whites
is opposed by the dark unconscious and fleshily virile attributes of the
Indians.
Written in the
20s, almost a hundred years ago, the rise of the “mental-spiritual” has led to
a worship of “smart” things. In terms of Indian attributes, health and genuine
wealth are much more to do with the physical and erotic fleshiness of communal
living.
Peru, Raymond
Depardon
Naïve gaiety in
the flaunting of ostentatious eroticism are signifiers of wealth in the
primitive wellbeing DH Lawrence encounters in Mexico. I did mention somewhere (Hyborian Bridge 14) that this is the opposite of Freud,
where wealth (money) signifies the erotic (carnal).
What seems to
follow from that is that money (capital, Freud) – whether or not it signifies
the erotic – does destroy the flaunting of primitive eroticism. The type of
thing that Laurie Lee writes about in Cider With Rosie.
Money (or the $)
signifies “smart” as opposed to primitive; in that sense sexuality is yet
another activity that occupies the thought-process, instead of just happening.
I’m not one to decry fashion (being a fan of Gaultier) but the pornographic industry
has to be almost as big.
Real wealth is a
matter of health, and health is much more to do with the primitive spine that
articulates the body, if we’re talking communes that live on and from the land.
Pictorial 75
..where the body
is a supple, strong, counterpoised instrument for cultivating the land.
Howard’s heroes
and heroines often have primitive aspects of temper and temperament, but to
what extent is the genuinely moral primitive by nature? One can’t rationalise a
moral instinct, and if the circumstances dictate action to avenge a deed, so be
it. The same goes for the negative moral force of A Thoth Amon. There is no
rationale, only naked ego and lust for ungodly power. So you could say Howard’s
heroes and heroines and villains are all primitive, in the same sense DH
Lawrence means.
They are hippy
and fleshy and undulating as opposed to cerebral. This connects them to Ymir
and the bones of Earth, and to our reptile ancestors.
His flesh became earth
His blood the sea
His bones the mountains
His teeth, cliffs and crags
His skull, the heavens and vaulted Asgard
His brain floating clouds
Ymir, Pictorial
56
The reptile is a
destructive force, but its unconscious spinal manifestation is a power that is
ignored at the peril of one’s soul. The head that is “smart” as opposed to
moral is always impressed by information (DNA,AI) at the expense of the virile,
the manly and heroic, and the feminine and supple.
Human culture is
moral because it is flesh and bone, not because it is abstract thought. Flesh
dies and becomes part of the cyclical forces of nature. These forces are strong
and pure and provide health and wealth – see prev on BWS Adastra in Africa,
tribal mythos and power. The opposite scenario is Bill Gates’ pathogen-killing
toilet, a hygiene-machine or “smart” solution that also kills primitive culture.
Weird Tales, as seen through the prism of Margaret
Brundage’s sensual and mildly bondage-oriented covers, is fleshily supple and
virile. Set against this, the figure of death often stalks the covers, as with The
People of the Black Circle.
The creepiness –
which later recurred in EC’s terror titles – has been decried but there is an
undeniable moral aspect in the figure of a lusty damsel beset by evil forces
and, in the course of the story, thwarting them either through wiles or by the
aid of some heroic actor.
There is a vast
contrast between, on the one hand the embodiment of life and beauty and, on the
other, the possibility of the life being snuffed out and the onset of decay.
Lovercraft somewhere says that Weird Tales contributor Clark
Ashton-Smith is preoccupied with images of death, decay and
abnormality, or some such phrase.
The point is that for a magazine to be fleshily
sensual and virile at the same time as being prone to advance the spectre of
death is a type of honesty that one has to say is moral. For those who think
there is a fetishistic aspect to Weird Tales, the presence of death one
could equally say is a good counterbalance to the fleshly. The idea of a nubile
maiden who continually cheats death is quite a common pulp trope – as in Nyoka.
Where life is seen in such fairly primitive terms
of flesh and threat – as opposed to being seen in purely cerebral terms – fetishistic
aspects are difficult to deny. That is a type of honesty. Pornography, which
pretends everything is all about genitalia, is peddling a type of profitable
lie.
Where death is present, then the powerful forces of
decay and rebirth are also there. This entire area is vital to life, and really
governs the entire process of organic farming which depends on predator-prey
relationships. The humus in the soil is built-up of decaying organic matter
that plants thrive on.
This type of culture is strong because it involves
cyclical relationships. Whereas modern culture tends to be built-up of
information, this is built-up of constant transformation, as one thing changes
into another.
Where living is seen to be fleshly, that is going
to be the case. Flesh is sensual, virile, feminine. Really we’re in the world
of the power to act through the shape of things – animal, plant – to put them
to use (see prev.) This world has a story, a myth; the seasons turn; the
harvest moon shines down. The story has to invoke the face of death or it would
be immoral, a mere façade.
Opposed to these moral forces of the fleshly and
the decaying, modern science proposes “smart” machines that more or less
pretend there is no such thing as death and decay. They kill pathogens, but
only to sterilize a process (as in Gates’ toilet). The idea that the process itself
is death, and that this supports life, falls outside the range of “smart” or
hygienic-machines that operate outside of cyclical processes (eg pesticides
kill, they do not balance the prey with a predator).
I know Weird Tales isn’t a farming magazine;
it’s simply that the primitive fleshiness has the same moral basis as an
organic farm! The question is, how much of the information in modern science is
immoral because it is outside of cyclical forces?
For a start, cyclical forces are not hygienic; they
are smelly and degrading. Their power is in the continual change of one thing
into another through a process of corruption. Almost all the information in
modern science is hygienic. Hygiene is needed to sterilize an area so that no
cyclical process (of degradation) can occur.
If you say that fleshly living has story that
involves death and corruption, maybe the scientific story is different – but what
is it? It seems to mainly be composed of information; but if the information is
obtained via sterile processes, it could be immoral.
Semiconductors have to be kept airtight and
watertight to ensure they function in sterile conditions (“A vagrant charge,”
said Gutierrez, “A speck of dust, a relay too worn to function right” – The Long
Tomorrow). CERN is another machine that requires a near-vacuum to function.
If you take DNA, in order to isolate it there must be a surgical procedure of
sterility or it would just disintegrate in a trice.
Is it true to say, though, that these procedures
are outside of a cyclical system of destruction and creation? I think so,
because they are not fleshly. DNA only exists in a microscope; inside a cell it’s
invisible. The sterile process isolates information. But that information is
outside of cyclical processes that give living things strength.
As far as CERN goes – or the reflector telescopes,
see Hyborian Bridge 56 – the information gets more abstract by the year.
If we lived in an abstract universe that might be ok, but we live in a physical
one. Seen from Earth, that is sun, moon, planets, stars.
The question is, why is the scientific information
getting so abstract (and indecipherable)? I tend to suppose it’s because only physical
information is balanced and proportionate. The Earth is the domain of life. I
know “they” keep saying there’s life out there – show it, then. Earth exists in
a delicate balance, and that is the physical reality. The psyche emanates from
the physical, in the Theosophy of Madame Blavatsky.
This pretty well takes us back in a circle to Weird
Tales (and Talbot Mundy’s Tros of Samothrace). The way heroes and
heroines unflinchingly face the dark or reptilian forces – such as Jirel’s
descent through insane geometry to a dreamland of fallen idols – has a fleshly
aspect that traces back to lost ages.
The stories have meaning and power and a moral
force that is simply the human figure in its guise of hunter, knight,
adventurer; keen spirit under the orbs of the mighty cosmos above.