As was said in P151, CL Moore's Jirel of Joiry is replete with decadence and ultimate revival. There are dark and sorcerous tales but the one with the most pronounced medieval feel is probably Hellsgarde.
This is an ominous castle set in a marsh with one sole causeway to its threshold. Marshes are places of strength and vigorous revival as well as mossified wastelands. The primitive roots of Venice remain that it is set on a lagoon.
On a political footnote, our dear progressive leaders - be it Trump or Modi - don't get the idea that one can stake-out claims to the moon and Mars and still retain primitive roots on the home planet
Progress is not a one-way ticket because then it is simply weakness - the ego triumphant in a sterile world. Modi, in a bid to banish backwardness, has taken on the small farmers, and I can't do better than quote (again) from The Light.
However, the ultimate goal is to displace 400,000,000 from rural areas in India into smart cities. Make no mistake: these bills are integral to the globalist's Agenda 21 strategy and the Sustainable Development Goals they want in place by 2030: for land and food acquisition and the elimination of SME's of any description, with the populous being beholden to megalithic, monopostic corporations, same as everywhere else on earth. Yogeeta Mistry (that para told me a whole lot I never knew before, such as the UN's nefarious SDG. See
bit.ly/indian-uprising, trolley times.online
Strength lies in nature that is left to perform.its journeys of metamorphosis, while Man is merely the keeper who cannot ultimately change its foul odors.
The sense is accurately drawn in the story.
The hall was as Andred's murderers must have left it two centuries ago. What shields and armor had not fallen from.the walls were thick with rust in the damp air of the marshes, and the tatters of pennons and tapestries had long ago taken on a uniform color of decay. But Alaric seemed to savor the damp and the desolation as a normal man might savor luxury. (page 186)
There is an obscenity here that in this case feeds on death. It is indecent and gives Jirel the willies. Her muscular physicality is set against their downright decadence.
Slowly the stars wheeled by the arrow-slit windows high up.in the darkness of the walls.. How much it might avail her she did not know, but they thought they had disarmed her, and Jirel hugged her greave-sheathed legs in the darkness and smiled a wicked smile, knowing they had not.(page 196)
The cultish antics of devotees are not always pleasant. There is a connection to the Dionysian ecstasies described by Mishima (prev) and to the obscene fertility cults of the old Hyborian gods described by Yaple (HB140).
Man lives and dies and there is a strength and savagery to both occupations.
And now suddenly fright was past and the familiar winy exultation of tension before battle rushed along her limbs and she looked up.into the darkness defiantly and shouted to the great vaults of the ceiling, "Come out of Hell, dead Andred! Come if you dare, Andred the damned!"(page 201)
This is so like Byron's quote that, " The best of life is but intoxication. " (from Don Juan). Byron's decadence seems to give him easy access to the damned, and that's part of his everlasting appeal!
The strength of death is to be a strong ghost who haunts people's memories (Dead Poets Society). Strength as an independent personality that persists and conquers time (the musky strength of Zappa is with us still).
To Byron, all that was part of a mysterious "Fortune" that to moderns doesn't exist. That could be because the ego has no Fortune in its universe of sterile logic.
Fortune could be the missing ingredient in the world of advance and the likes of Modi and bin Salman of Neon city are plumb wrong.
Is it not fortunate that developmental lines move in circles to form.eyes, to forge crinkly ridges and lobed ears? I previously mentioned the likeness of descriptions in Jirel Meets Magic to early Disney.
As the irritating two notes began their seesawing tuneJl Jirel saw something amazing happen.. In a queer way they were visible, pouring in twos from.the flute and dashing outward like little needles of light. The walls reflected them, and those reflections became swifter and brighter and more numerous until.the air was full.of flying slivers of silvery brilliance, until shimmers began to dance among them and over them, and that bewildering shift of mirrored planes started up once more.(page 108)
Isn't early animated cartooning fortunate in that the artists' lines have such facile shapes? What I'm meaning to say is that linework in nature has such a sense of perfection and correctness that it amounts to fortune.
A world of information is completely outside that sense of rightness; it has no story of metamorphosis (P151). The Plains Indians and their totem poles had a primitive sense of story in line and anthropomorphic shape that tied them to natural strength.
The fact that something is primitive doesn't mean that people can't advance and go to live in cities; there is room.for both, as Modi may one day find out.
This sense of primitive symmetry in people and arrangements is contained in the aforementioned Love and Rockets - see Jaime "Ghost of Hoppers". Being a Hispanic subculture, they bring-in a tribal feel of beat-up neighborhoods and decadent undress.
The foul-smelling waters of an abandoned swimming pool mix with the zestful abandon of radical sluts. These things have their obscene aspects, but the strength is palpable.
If - as suggested in P151 - DNA copies the cosmos, one has to be aware of the thing being copied, or merely exist as a copy. The danger of that is contained in Jirel Meets Magic, where a sorcerous reality is enacted by means of a dual-note played on a magical flute.
If form is function, DNA has the dual-structure that denotes accurate copying; the two-tones that attract the ego into a logical universe that is really a sorcerous illusion.
That reality is analogous to digital information (ones and zeros) or parallel lines (see P151). All information can be digital, but it leaves out the cosmos, or the source.
This danger was possibly prophesied by Byron's daughter, Ada Lovelace, writer of the first algorithm, who called herself a " poetic scientist". Poetry being rhythm and shape and charm and all the things that are not information.
Basically, that means everything, because information does not describe things accurately. What it mainly does is attract the ego of acolytes, often by way of words (the news). See Alan Moore's essay, Blood From the Shoulder of Pallas (Watchmen).
Alongside Plains Indians there were also cowboys, and the fact is that action on the range itself is a producer of useful information. The vernacular way of living, of building and sharing. It's a way of safeguarding strength that results from the primitive lines and shapes of things that are left to their own devices.
The independent personality relishes strength and the ambiguities of living in the primitive reality that is lost to a science of numbers.
