Hyborian Bridge 118

While Caravaggio (HB114,115) has heavy, spotlit folds in an intensity of light-effect that convinces the viewer of realism, the old noir-ish films I wanna bring-in (such as Detour) are subdued and atmospheric.

The darks are more gray than straight black, and the highlights are whispy rather than smacking you in the4 face a la Cara. The noir-ish films don't strive for realism in that a photo doesn't have to; they strive to underplay form and let the contours of figures and grace of movement carry the day.

In a way, noir is trying to do the opposite to Caravaggio by downplaying realism and really going for shadowy effects and mood - as opposed to overpowering light-effects.

As a side-note, David and Goliath would never be lit like that in reality, so the realism is itself unreal or super-realism. Super-realism always has to do with light and nowadays, by extension, with algorithms (electromagnetism).

Super-realism is convincing - like the SpaceX Falcon landings on a sixpence. It reminds me of CC Beck's quote in TCJ #90,

One of the early aviators took an airplane over to China,and the Emperor was not impressed at all... "Look, emperor, it's flying!" And he said, "Well, that's what it's supposed to do, isn't it?"

The Falcon landings are convincing because they are so precise. They exist in the precise world of straight-lines and algorithms (light). This is what I call the Dark Sun that is a sterile creation of the head or, in this case, algorithms.

While the true sun is attached to the sky - if you think naively - and fertilizes the plants that feed the creatures that move, the Dark Sun is attached to the head (brain), which becomes the body. The result is physical boredom, and a fixation on sterile machines. This in turn becomes a fixation on rubbish removal and renovation.

Whether it be a spaceship or a smart-house, the result is physical boredom and the same predisposition towards sterility. Whereas in a decrepit house or a decrepit spaceship rubbish and bric-a-brac build up and dirt proliferates letting in germs and strength (of immune-system), a smart spaceship like a smart-city is always going to be robotically clean-and-orderly (see Mr X).

This area can seem illusory, as if a mirage or a video-game. The only thing that is not illusory is the continual evaporation of rubbish. The reason is that illusory space doesn't exist a s a physical substance that is allowed to develop a patina of age. It is continually rebuilt and the result of this is that rubbish must be continually carried away.

Whereas I was saying previously in a place like Detroit buildings become dilapidated and overrun and the patina of age and use is ever-present and strong, a type of feminine decadence, this fertility and strength is abhored in the era of the Dark Sun in which nothing is left to gradually decline and everything is new and therefore at the same time everything is rubbish!

The two tendencies are the same, taking place in resolved space, where there can be no possibility of revival from age-old patina and decadence. Resolved space is the parallel universe constructed of light, where everything is straight-lines and perspective. Everything is new and so there is a predisposition to rubbish removal; the two are the same.

Resolved space is attractive to the ego (of acolytes) who spout words. Words often become numbers (did you get Musk's new son?) and numbers become the expressive algorithm (prev) which "approaches" the human. "They" will write stories for these artificial faces, stories that have no decadence, no feminine spirit and therefore no revival (Artemis,Dionysus). Instead all is weakness and rubbish.

Only logic-systems have the quickness to facilitate precise maneuvres, which could seem advanced. Yes, but it depends if you wanna be run by smart-machines that are moving INTO resolved space. Resolved space is the logical space of the head. Some things are missing; mood and atmosphere - age-old patina and decadence; sinuous line and movement - the feminine ideal, the androgenous snake; temperament that is poetic and favors sturm-and-drang over pristine machine.

In short, action that is cyclical as opposed to the movements of things that are logical. From this comes psychic introspection to the rhythms and moods of nature, the eternal cycles of renewal.

Thy shores are empires, changed in all save thee-

Assyria- Greece- Rome- Carthage- what are they?

Thy waters washed them power while they were free,

And many a tyrant since; their shores obey

The stranger, slave, or savage; -not so thou,

Unchangeable save to thy wild waves' play;

Time writes no wrinkle on thine azure brow-

Such as Creation's dawn beheld, thou rollest now

Thou glorious mirror, where the Almighty's form

Glasses itself in tempest; in all time,

Calm or convulsed- in breeze, or gale, or storm-

Icing the Pole, or in the torrid clime

Dark-heaving- boundless, endless, and sublime-

The image of Eternity- the throne

Of the Invisible; even from out thy slime

The monesters of the deep are made- each Zone

Obeys thee- thou goest forth, fathomless, alone.

And I have loved thee, Ocean! and my joy

Of youthful sports..(etc -Childe Harold, Canto IV stanzas 182-184)

The unthinking harmony of physical substance carries the poet on the epic journey. Without rhyme and rhythm what are words? The advances that technology makes are somewhat illusory. I'm watching the Republic cliffhanger Haunted Harbor, with Kane Richmond and Kay Aldridge (of Nyoka) from about '45. The creaky, elemental patina of banged-up shacks goes hand-in-hand with radio-controlled sea-monsters and wireless dictaphones. Ingenious illusions of sea-serpents etc all organized from a hi-tech control-station.

It's pretty surprising how techno it is - or is it? Their radios aren't "smart" like ours, but the tech is the same. Nothing changes in the resolved space of electromagnetism. What changes is the atmosphere, the gritty, sultry ornately woody darkness that is pretty charming.

Republic also has a good line in primitive tribal cultures with bongo-beats and ancestral laws that are immutable (here, burning Kane for the killing of their chief). Nowadays, primitivism is supposed not to exist - the great modern hoax of the acolyte's head.

It's so convincing to them, this order of numbers, but decadence has its own charms; feminine ones of savage grace that chases and rends and tears (Diana the huntress and her hounds). The prey, the carrion, the age-old patina of wood and limb, of fungus that grows in time-lost caverns.

Hyborian Bridge 117

The Black Sun - from Clair Noto's Red Sonja story in HB109 - is as illusory as the city from which its sorcery exudes. Since light is destroyed by forests and transformed into fertility, that sun is the real sun that chases the moon across the sky.

The Black Sun is built of hygiene, and within its bounds there is a compulsion towards sterility, whereby sterility becomes a compulsion towards rubbish - the two are the same. In the real world (of the sky, day and night) fertility is always associated with dirt and decadence because it signifies strength - in the soil, in trees or even in dilapidated dwellings (C3 D3 C6).

With the Black Sun come equations and numbers; with the sky (day and night) comes rustic harmony. The question is: am I going so far as to say that the equations of dynamics - starting with Galileo, through to Newtonian ballistics, and on to Einstein - are a type of sorcerous illusion of the Black Sun rather than the true one?

It's not that ballistics doesn't exist; it's that it is movement without fertility. Where there is a rustic presence, women of the fields wear bunched garments that accentuate the line of the body and the strength of spine (P13). The Old West, with its stampeding steers and jangling cowboys on hooves of iron and lightning, heaved with the primal lusts of beast and Man (see also Cider With Rosie).

It's all very well for bin Salman to envisage flying cars and robots in Neom (prev.) but what exactly is the purpose of the flights? There doesn't seem to be an apart from money, and money is not fertility.

If you compare, let's say 19th century Bath with its Georgian crescents, women in bustles and horse-drawn carriages, the movements are gay, sensual, to a particular and gentle rhythm.

The leaves of a tree too have melodic rhythm, and with the addition of wind-chimes. Movement is not a purpose in itself. There has to be strength, and that means dirt (soil), trees, the landscape and the figures in it that till the fields (Ruth the gleaner, prev.)

So what i really mean is that the purpose, or meaning, comes from the sky - through which the sun travels. The sky (sun) represents power; the Earth (moon) represents fertility. The true sun is always associated with fertility; Daphne of the laurel is the Greek icon for this (notice in Strauss's opera she calls out "bruder" to Apollo, prev.)

The sorcerers from Galileo's time onwards have invented a sun that is sterile; the equations are to do with ballistics (flight or rotation) and not with fertility. I'm not saying it's factually inaccurate, just that it's weak. Where there is sterility there is a compulsive psychology towards rubbish and constant renovation. It's an ego-trap because equations and numbers are persuasive to the ego.

The world of weakness is always directed at  rubbish, whereas the world of strength reuses, recycles and leaves things to be transformed into use (see Buffy quote HB70). Be leaving things, by enabling dilapidation and strong shoots of new growth (meaning weeds), the strength of dirt and the cycle of growth and decay is reestablished.

What this means is that there is a primitive rhythms to things, languid. Growth of trees is a way sunlight is destroyed and the cool and dappled arbors restored. Along with all of that, the atmosphere also becomes languid and relaxed, poetically inclined, introspective, philosophical. It's also noticeable that films that are shot with very subdued light effects are a lot more atmospheric.

For example, there's Detour with Tom Neal, Ann Savage and Claudia Drake (as the nightclub singer). Shot in black-and-white, it really is misty, a dreamscape. The scene switches with Neal's voiceover simply by changing the light-effect to his face to sharply defined shadows.

That's just one example (from 1945). Shadows are the destruction of light and produce atmosphere. Along with that, shadows are noir, femme fatale, blood and the less than clear-cut.

So, what I would say is that this film harks back to a primitive universe of sky and Earth, as opposed to the sterile Black Sun (of hygiene). Therefore, that gives quite a good connection to the primitivism of Howard. It's the primitivism that cannot abide black sorcery and likes good old-fashioned dirt. Trees and flowers bloom, and there is a string psychology of muscular body.

The sky is king and the Earth is queen, and the gods (Mitra, Pteor) and goddesses (Ishtar) reflect it. Strength is primitive, after all, the body is not a logical thing of equations, it's a cosmic harmonic of blood and bone. Once that harmonic is challenged, the brain (ego) becomes one with the body. Since the physique can't be denied, the result is physical boredom, a compulsion to hygiene. The words of acolytes, persuasive to the ego of lethargy; the sleep of the Black Sun of sterile culture that exists in resolved space (straight-lines, sun, Apollo).

This is weakness that manifests in cities of light like Neom. The smelly,romantic Bedouin encampments are the reality to this mirage of the desert. Byron, the arch-orientalist, I can't help thinking wouldn't have thought otherwise.

Within the place of thousand tombs

That shine beneath, while dark above

The sad but living cypress glooms

And withers not, though branch and leaf

Are stamped with an eternal grief,

Like early unrequited Love,

One spot exists, which ever blooms,

Ev'n in that deadly grove -

A single rose is shedding there

Its lonely lustre, meek and pale:

It looks as planted by Despair -

So white- so faint -the slightest gale

Might whirl the leaves on high;

And yet, though storms and blights assail,

And hands more rude than wintry sky

May wring it from the stem- in vain -

To-morrow sees it bloom again! (The Bride of Abydos)