Contrary to the quote at top of HB164, things that appear similar are facilitated by the same primal.rhythms that animate natural forms. The limbs of trees that appear like quaint or grotesque human apparitions. The fairy tale mystique.
You'd think a poet might have that in mind! It could be today's writers of fantasy - the likes of Philip Pullman (prev) - are yet another iteration of the egotists in our midst.
The contrast with Francis Stevens - and of course Howard - is blatant.
There was him whose flowing robes were woven of the beaded gray rain. White foam was his beard, and his eyes were like blue ice-caverns. Tlaloc was he, Neptune, and Mananan, son of that great one who dwells forever invisible in the Slieve Faud.(page 335)
Deities may be naive figureheads of Man's mystical youth; so, is it that "they" are saying the universe is not naive at core? The dilemma is it becomes an advance that only an insane AI can navigate - to what end?
The dilemma modernism poses is that in managerial systems things always go wrong because you enter a parallel universe of sterile logic run by acolytes of sorcerers of the mirror of illusions (electromagnetism, light, sun, DNA..)
What is missing is everything that is inherently interesting, that has tensions and visual contrasts. Sun and moon as counterbalancing cosmic forces.
That basic conundrum invokes primitive powers of decay (microbes) and the chthonic underworld that is indivisibly linked to the agricultural (se e prev.)
It's not so much a political problem as a paradigmic one. I happened to notice that Cathy Yan - the Sino-American director of Birds of Prey (the rise of Harley Quinn) - became known through Dead Pigs, her Shanghai debut at Sundance.
It seems Margot Robbie saw it and lobbied for her to direct. The Shanghai flic is a fairly obvious but sleekly done character-driven piece where all the pieces start to fall apart owing to the inherent contradictions of Shanghai's epic rise from a quagmire of pig-farms (see Tales of Faith2).
If you call that ironic parody, one can quickly come up with various examples in different cultures. I saw this piece in DT on the interwar writer's paradise set in a small Dorset village (Through the keyhole of England's last literary salon).
Long Crichel Rectory
Raymond Mortimer
Nancy Mitford
The house was exceptionally cold. There was no electricity, so light came from oil lamps and candles (so Barry Lyndon). The water supply was feeble. The septic tank in the garden was a typhoid risk.
.."Soft furnishings were designed by Duncan Grant (of Bloomsbury)". That truly is old-school elegance worthy of a medieval castle.
Talking of castles, Princess Leonor of Spain is taking-up studies at Atlantic College on the Welsh coast, an 11th century spread. I guess it's fairly decorous, and not quite the savagery of Lindsay Anderson's If with the cold showers and toilet humor (see Outtakes4-6).
Princess Leonor
Atlantic College
Old-school elegance has a rustic charm that puts one in mind of Greek tragedy; Electra stalking the halls and barns of Agamemnon's old spread in Argos while pondering the shedding of Clytemnestra's blood!
Staying with the gift-bearers, irony or parody or anything inherently interesting like tragedy or comedy rely on the individual destiny versus the power of establishment.
The individual is paramount and, as CC Beck has said (HB157), easy to stereotype. If the individual is paramount, what is an individual?
In dramatic terms, someone who breathes, speaks, sings - as well as swallows food and wine. The dramatic source is primitive; the reptilian throat that connects head to body (see P1).
In other words, there's a primal rhythmic source to the individual - person or pig. Rhythm creates action and manners have grace. To return to this primary source is to reestablish the individual as an independent type.
The reason is mainly because the establishment is anti-induvidual. If an independent individual is primal rhythm, the establishment is sterile logic. Sterile logic - see prev - tends to banish thoughts of the primitive, which means the behaviour of individuals from microbes to men.
Everything is an individual; a cell of the body is one, and so has primal rhythm. The ego is persuaded by sterile logic to do without this, and the results are seen in the disturbed ecosystems from which emerge infectious microbes on weakened hosts (see prev.)
"..these things depend on everything else happening - how the millions of tiny organisms in the soil.make it possible for the flower to grow: how the trees become home to lots of insects and give shelter to birds as they build nests." (Prince Charles, DT).
Our predicament is caused by sterile logic - and the solution is the same! An individual is something with a painterly quaintness that is irreducible. Their strong individuality which is a product of grace and charm.
This individuality has to be reestablished - be it the hereditary nobility or the aristocracy of pop - and then the rustic grace and charm that are also a product of strong individual types - be it pig, buffalo or germ (meaning seed).
The strong type is something that has been repressed - be it black, white, noble or common - by the weakness of a parallel system.of numbers and DNA-logic that is convincing to the eyes of acolytes of sorcerers of the mirror of illusions (Musk&Co).
This parallel reality is a sorcerous illusion; CL Moore's almost scientific descriptions of the scenario in Jirel Meets Magic give some very telling imagery.
You could say Moore is more high-fantasy even than Stevens, but at the same time her intuition is at work in a way that builds on Stevens' earlier yarns.
On a quest to track down and kill (vis split to the teeth) the wizard Giraud, Jirel meets the witch-queen of a seemingly fair land, Jarisme. For more on this story see P7, especially the ambiguity contained in landscape, where a tree is a snake, a snake is a jewel, and there is a steaming decadence of swift change.
Jarisme plays a flute melody on two notes, and the music dances in tune with the chaotic surroundings of her palace.
The whole place was a chaos of blaze and confusion.. Queer reflections danced through the dazzle of it..
Then she saw Jarisme in her violet robe watching her from a hundred identical golden couches reflected upon a hundred surfaces. The figure held a flute to its lips, and the music pulsed from it in perfect time with the pulsing of the sorceress' swelling white throat. Jirel stared round in confusion at the myriad Jarismes all piping the interminable monotones.page 107)
There are a couple of noteworthy things in her descriptions. The way she describes the animated notes is reminiscent of early Disney and especially Fantasia (which could be about contemporaneous).
Jarisme pipes on two notes, as in the finale where fantasticallt disparate representatives of the cosmos are arranged in ambiguous symmetry.
They were grouped with a queer irregularity which, though meaningless to Jirel, yet gave the impression of definite purpose and design..
Then Jarisme's flute spoke softly.. it hsrped still on the two seesawing notes, with low, rippling sounds so different from.the other two that Jirel marveled at the range of the sorceress' ability on the two notes. (page 113)
Another feature is that a dual-tone becomes both a monotone, or a multiplicity, able to split into parts (or copies).
That is a very accurate description of our digital reality, which is composed of ones and zeros. The information contained in ones and zeros is able to copy anything in the "real" physical world.
Jarisme's dual-tone flute is an instrument that copies, and at the same time confuses. If one relates that to our digital reality, the reason is that a digital reality is synonymous with parallel lines.
Two parallel lines have a space between them, so they are equivalent to 1,0,1.. etc. In that sense, a dual-tone reality or a parallel lines reality are the same and both are digital.
Jarisme represents the ego of acolytes who operate within the mirror of illusions; her flute both directs and confuses. In the story, the dryad who dies at the start could represent the physical world- of trees - that has a decadence that regenerates over time. The dryad gives Jirel the means to kill Jarisme.
Trees have growth-lines that curve every which way, and that is the natural order. This natural - or cosmic - order is able to manifest metamorphosis because growth-lines contain primeval rhythms (of the cosmos).
The strength that draws different things together is really the mythical story of Man, from.the anthropomorphic deities of Egypt to the ever-shifting licentious attributes of Zeus (see prev.)
What you could say is that, in a digital world where everything is a copy, there is no ground-root of fecundity. In the ancient world the opposite is true, for the very stars spread like seeds on the face of the cosmos.
A copy is a reproduction, whether sexual or not. In fact, the two become confused! DNA is a copy, but is it sexual? "They" would tell us so, ie that it is a fundamental component of sex.
To the ancients, the fecund universe itself is sexual, and Man copies the universe with his acts. The fundamental component of that universe is metamorphosis - or the similarity of different things (seen in fairy tales).
Metamorphosis is an elemental.story of the growth of lines in nature. Of decay and revival. Of strength.
In the modern universe DNA is equivalent to the digital order in being pure information. But, really, this goes away from the ancient idea of fecundity (or seed). DNA is essentially contained IN seed. Even a virus is essentially a pod (protein capsule) containing DNA. The DNA is necessary, but that doesn't make it the fundamental component of life, which is fecundity (ie we are not "composed of information" despite what "they" continually drone on about in their seesawing monotones.)
DNA is a way of copying the cosmos. Copying is not necessarily sexual; in fact, it can become a type of profane sex (see prev on profane rhythm, clean meat, the basic lack of decay and organic growth).
Sexuality retains the elements of grace and charm (seduction). If "they" seek to tell us these aren't essential, that's only so from a perspective of pure information.
Health and cleanliness are to do with physical strength in a world of decay and revival. These principles are ever-present in CL Moore's Jirel of Joiry (of which more in the next post.)
The weakness of a parallel system of numbers ans DNA-logic is heading forever towards a digital future. This is where Musk is heading, in that rockets are controlled by algorithms.
Any future colony on Mars will.be largely algorithmic, so the choice is, by heading into space Man also becomes as one with the machine. Space is sterile, so that's the logic. And that's what attracts the ego, natch.
As a footnote, what are NASA playing at? The samples collected by Perseverance are to be collected in 2031. Why wait all.that time to answer the question, "Is there life on Mars?" Couldn't they ask Musk to launch a rocket and pick them.up next year? Is the real.conspiracy that they already know the answer to that question?
