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)