Pictorial 110

What was referred to in P109 as the transformative enabler of the sungod is really what Walt Whitman might have referred to as Kosmos. Somewhere in his Song is the line, "Do I contradict myself? Very well, I contradict myself." Ralph Waldo Emerson's line, "A feeble consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds." is pretty much a spin on that.

The  great American barbarian is set against the logic-chopping European. However, since Whitman's day atmospheric decadence in the garden has not made many inroads - apart from the brief flowering of the late 60s. India is maybe the main country that retains that flowery decadence; unfortunately, the UK is now run by logic-chopping Indian politicians such as Richi Sunak!

The problem with logic-chopping is it deceives the intellect. I happened to read some of BWS's Opus online, and he has to resort to quantum physics to explain his brain's delusions when it could just as well be intellect itself.

Whatever quantum physics is - apart from something mathematical and abstruse - I don't know; but I do know what a garden is and it is this that occupies a lot of Leaves of Grass.

Nature is contradictory, so that is reality. It may not be the logic-chopping reality of Sundak or Zuckerberg, but it is the one fitting for animals and plants (rather than Martian interlopers).

A garden is enclosed space, atmospheric and expressive where things happen.C6

There are no laws except those of blood and kin. The jungle is a place where light is absorbed by green chlorophyll in the photosynthetic effect (that provides rain to nourish Earth).

This is where the hunt reigns and Artemis runs free and wild. The pulp version of Artemis is Nyoka. In the comics, Nyoka is "athlete, world adventurer, explorer, animal trainer and gift-shop proprietor" (AE #94), but in the Republic serial she is just a jungle girl.

The jungle is somewhere where adventurous white explorers can cope admirably. There is no logic-chopping to nourish the ego, only devious games of cat and mouse. I was reading in AE of Bill Black's homage The Return of Nyoka; called a chapter play, or episode in an imaginary yarn. He proudly recounts how he shot it very fast in Florida with a feather budget using a handheld camera, no storyboard, a guy in a gorilla suit, Nicola Rae (granddaughter of Kay Aldridge) and CG only for the pendulum scene.

Maybe so but, watching Jungle Girl with Francis Gifford, there are a wealth of sets with tribal crockery, snakeskin drapes and a vast amount of devious subterfuge by witch doctor Shamba and Latimer.

In Nyoka and the Tigermen, the fight scenes are interlinked and sequential with galloping horses cutting this way and that. Nicola Rae talks of, girlish and strong heroines in control of their destiny." I'm not blaming her, but really the action sequences in the old serials are all about split-second timing. There are multiple camera-angles, either shot with several cameras or several takes; about half is sets with lighting; the props are used to perfection.

The point is the old serials are all about sequential action, and without that there's not much there. The white heroes are extremely competent, both physically and mentally. In one scene concerning a machine-tooled blow-dart Tom Neal comments, It took a white man to figure that out."

For that cultural epoch undoubtedly it was true. What modern Africans have gained from the white-man's ways they have lost in the tactile and animal. What I'm meaning to say is that the jungle is Walt Whitman territory. The body-in-action gains a sense of the self, which is not the brain isolation. It is a harmonic exercise of wits while mounted or running or negotiating trails.

The self is something which cannot be exercised in straight lines because other animals and plants are excluded. This is the great modern delusion. Think of Bin Salman's projected city of flying cars in Saudi Arabia, Neom. Each car is an ego-trip rather than a real trip (on a camel to Wadi Barta).

The modern confusion is that the logic-chopping brain is the human, whereas it's merely the ego. The human is expressed by wits in athletic exercises of strength that don't take place in flying cars but in caravanserai. An oasis is a place where the sun (logic) no longer has ascendancy. It is an enclosed, atmospheric space where things happen.

Photosynthetic woods absorb light and therefore destroy its logic-chopping effect. White Rabbit made that point about the wood enclosure of BWS's splash to Conan #24, The Song of Red Sonja.

 

 Enclosures, like an Arabian tent, are expressive places that cut-off light. Where there are logic-choppers one is under the dominion of fact, but facts that relate to a logical order. A tent, or an oasis or a wood are not logical; they are enclosed spaces that cut-off light and are quite rough, smelly or nomadic (like Tudor retinues).

Moamer Kadhafi's tent

This sort of active life is there for the survival of the human soul, not the shekel (the soul - or the body - as Whitman says, contains nothing vile.) But this is not good enough for the number-crunchers who want experimental zones of light and hygiene, such as Neom.

Yes but, as noted previously, where this happens the transformative enabler of the moon goddess Artemis is rendered null and void. There are no hunts in wooded glades.

That is why cities such as Neom represent the black sun of hygiene; an imitation or false god, rather than the traveling sun that soars with the spin of the Earth in the cosmos.

The problem really is that in a kingdom of light we're all supposed to be mini-Einsteins with logic-chopping capabilities. But, actually, all that does is lead us into the black sun of hygiene rather than the true sun that nourishes the soul of the wanderer in the groves and oases.