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
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)
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)
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.
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.
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