Simplfying
things rather a lot. Earth orbits the sun; the moon orbits Earth; Earthspins.
We are prisoners of a sorcerous illusion that takes out 2 of the 3 components,
leaving the sun as undisputed master. There is a sense of stasis because the
large movements of moon and Earth vis-à-vis eachother and the sun are not
deemed worthy of note.
The sun supplies
the ego with illusory data via screens, or “the mirror of nothingness”. The
illusion is simply the lack of physical substance; action in the cosmos, the
hunt and Diana, decay and rebirth, blood and moon.
Wizards of the Black Sun
Wizards of the Black Sun
Physical
substance is the subject of Renaissance art; line and movement and the
investigation of both through cartooning (Hyborian Bridge 91). Frank Thorne is much closer to Leonardo da Vinci than the mainstream for that
reason. Formal development of the human physique takes place in the womb, one
of the missing components of our sorcerous masters (Pictorial 89)
From form obviously comes style, as well as psychological content
(psyche), and form is the primary thing that a modern order lacks. From form
arises the predator-prey relationships, and thereby the cycles of decay and
rebirth. Destruction, the hunt, Dionysus. Without form there is merely an empty
charade of competition - information, and the numerical/sexual fixations of the
ego.
This leads neatly into Jean-Luc Godard’s La Chinoise (67), his
satire on 60s student revolutionaries. It has his usual tricks of fourth wall
breakdowns in the picturesque communal household of confirmed Maoists.
Farcical it may be, it’s a sympathetic study and does take one back to the
Chinese revolutionary spirit of ruralist idealism; shades of The Water
Margin. The fact that it all quickly became hell on earth points to a
radical wrongness. The film consists of students plus a few assorted drop-in
teachers, and these are often depicted (by Godard) as reciting robots.
When one girl says (rightly) that aesthetics is imagination, the teacher
trots out the mantra:
“Art doesn’t reflect reality, it’s the reality of a reflection.”
Such nonsense-speak points to the illusion at the heart of what left-wing
revolutionaries call “objective reality.” Veronique falls for this linguistic
mash-up and, in a long sequence on a train with the one teacher who talks
sense, her phalangist credentials are brutally exposed.
Science itself is partial; a masculine version of nature that lacks the
feminine harmonic (moon). Revolutionaries are forever stuck in “objective reality”,
which is simply the world that exists without a feminine harmonic of the womb
(moon).
“The lessons are very abstract”; “Culture
is cutoff from action.” Again, very correct statements. To Veronique,
action against an inactive culture (throwing bombs and killing people) is
justified. Her over-enthusiasm is rebutted by her teacher, who explains that
she is not a recognizable sector of society, more like an angry girl (note that
the film is 67, the year before the failed Paris uprising).
Nevertheless, one’s sympathies are with the students, for what is action
in the modern world? We live in the world of the false Apollo, which is simply
speech-making about ideas without the physical substance; the hunt, decay and
revival, blood and moon.
Sibyl
Godard’s film is a horrendous hoot, and all too real about the way ideas
twist people in knots in a masculine universe that consists of nothing else.
This is the mirror of illusions that traps us in a land of nothingness –
products, information, screens Pictorial 87
They are also wise to this, and the “revisionists”
who make ideas the prostitutes for capitalist luxury (shades of modern
China).
Godard’s other meta-fixation in the 60s was the tenacious hold of myth on
the psyche. Myths are the lost world of the harmonic cosmos where male and
female components are happily (?) balanced in the vigour of sea, land, sky,
Earth.
If you’re wondering where America has gone to, it’s gone to the past
where actions speak louder than words, where men are men, ladies are ladies and
hosses are hosses. The land, in short, of physical substance on the Earth as
she spins merrily through the cosmos on high (Chaparral).
