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)