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)
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.
