Pictorial 160

 As a quick way of tying-up the "P" series - prior to transplanting to the website and uploading pictures, natch - it might be an idea to have a simplified summary.

Simplification is often the province of spiritual beliefs which are dismissed by the modern science of "facts". However, the facts of our illusory system contain no.primal symmetry. They are applicable to the logical and factual egos of acolytes of the mirror of illusions (electromagnetism, algorithm).

As was said back in HB132, Darwinism is a way of replacing the sublime symmetry of the erotic and feminine with egotistical "facts" of competition. Competition then becomes a fiction of the illusory system.of facts.

Symmetry is a manifestation of cosmic fecundity and the circularity of natural forms. We enter the mirror into a land of sterility (that enables rubbish-removal) and not a physical manifestation of fertility. Within the mirror exists the profane serpent that corrupts natural rhythm and physique.

"Clean meat" was taken as a case of this corruption into sterile pathways without the use of physique. Bill Gates' pathogen-killing toilet was taken as an example of a sterile system that is a culture-destroyer in terms of the natural pathogen-killing function of a healthy soil (microbes and humus and loam). See "Adastra in Africa".

Another obvious example is Amazon's super-efficient economy of delivery that has led some drivers to an economy of excretion, that they then treat as rubbish-removal in the Amazon bags.

The spokespeople for the sterile system - Greta Thunberg, Brian Cox, David Atten-bore, Richard Dawkins - exist outside of any sense of morbid decadence; of foul-smelling waters and dissolution that presage restoration (see Jaime Hernandez prev.)

Decadent strength is seen in the ruinous, archaic settings of Howard, and in the French symbolists (Pelleas and Melisande, prev.) The morbid fertility that also inhabits the mangrove forests of the deep South (P159).

Modern settings have none of this rustic strength and simplicity, and their illusions of endless mirrors confound us so that we no longer recognize fertile situations.

Against this is set the spiritual and physical vision of Kanye West's cotton-plantation in Wyoming. Design and fashion, if they can be integrated into a spiritual revival, restore old-school taste and relate it to flesh and bone.

Elsa Peretti, Tiffany bone cuff (inspired by the catacombs of a monastery in Rome)

THRASH CITY (PS)

Pictorial 159

 Jeff Jones, Idyl with redwood

Jeffrey (Catherine) Jones' series reminds me somewhat of the South with the great redwood. Their physical strength seems to mirror the psychic investigations of the eponymous heroine.

While Idyl - and "I'm Age" - are white females, one suspects they might equally be dusky or black with no significant changes in the dilemmas posed.

I say this as I intend to take by the horns the charge that my comparison of the American South to a rustic Idyl is tantamount to a support of historical slavery.

This is a tedious argument. Tina Turner, born Anna Mae Bullock of a Tennessee broken home and in a long-term fractious relationship with Ike, said,

'You adjust to what was given, and that is what was given at the time."

My attitude is that was the given economic situation at the time of the Confederacy. I don't support it, but neither do I support a future situation where everyone is created the same.

GENETIC ENGINEERING (PS)

To say that something is an Idyl is simply a statement of rustic fact going well outside the political requirements of equality. People have bought-into the modern acceptance of sameness.

Poly, in one of the two political-statement songs on Generation Indigo (2009) does so herself.

Since the assumption is so current, it's worth going into the confusion of meaning (epistemology) at length. Where epistemology is confused, one can be sure the natural power (ontology) is also lost in the mist.

First of all, differences in nature contain sameness. Idyl's curves are mirrored by the curves of the redwood's roots deep in the mangrove.

Genetic engineering inhabits a world where there is assumed to be no physical substance, only information.

Information becomes predominant, when in fact information is tied to a world of sameness (straight-lines, algorithms, AI). In this world where there is no difference of substance, there can also be no sameness in terms of the metamorphosis of line (see prev.)

It's a basic linguistic trap, couched in scientific jargon. Where things are the same in terms of information, there is at the same time a distance created in terms of the physical substance of the metamorphosis of line.

This distance can be seen in the obsessive tidiness of modern societies. The metamorphosis of line is seen in decadence and decay. It is for sure seen in mangrove swamps.

When I say Idyl I mean the sense of closeness in nature that an apolitical social structure can give. It's not an illusion, it exists, but with the arrival of politics things have to change. I'm not denying that.

I'm simply saying that the sameness of difference is visible and tangible in the rustic fields of the metamorphosis of line.

The modern scene is confused because it cannot see that sameness and difference spring from the same root. You cannot have just one.

The same goes for life and death, or the sensual and the holy. Mishima in The Decay of the Angel has this quote.

What must it be like, to wear such a beautiful covering? To see people fall down before it. When admiration passed the gentle and docile and became lunatic worship, it would become torment for the possessor. In the delirium and the torment were true holiness. What Honda had missed had been the dark, narrow path through the flesh to holiness. To travel it was the privilege of the few. (page 215)

Pictorial 158

WHITE GOLD (PS)

Trapped in the repetitive news-cycle of optimistic infrastructure spending, the simple facts of life escape attention. One of those is that resources are free.in the natural state that is not under the bane of "smart" building.

In this sense, Poly Styrene's electro-power-pop-punk thriller seems to be aiming to fly away from straight-line news and into a rustic idyll, where water and the plants and animals of earth are the principle products.

This is not a bad link to Kanye West's free and sentimental location on his Cody cotton-plantation design/manufacturing base in Wyoming.

Rebellion of free-form types tends to take spiritual matters as a concomitant part of the physical activity - here cotton planting through to design and manufacture as an ecological unit.

Whether the Cody institution has built a temple I'm not sure, but it's worth quoting this from Mishima's The Decay of the Angel.

The perfect symmetry of the shining mandala holds at its centre the Court of the Eight-Petaled Lotus, abode of the Lord of Great Light. Twelve courts stretch out in the four directions, and the abodes of the several Buddhas are fixed with delicate and detailed symmetry.

If the dome of the art gallery, high in the moonless night, was taken for the central court, then the avenue where Honda stood, separated from it by the pond, was perhaps the abode of the Peacock Lord, to the west of the Court of Emptiness. (page 186

The psychic dimension contains powerful symmetries, simplifying factors in a world of perpetual information. Water, earth, air, fire. Religious structures where there are detailed symmetries and the metamorphosis of line is spotlighted. One enters the meditative mindset of a chapel (see prev. on Iran, Turkey, India).

This contrasts with a society where straight lines are the status quo, the setting for smart-buildings. This is even though smart compounds in nature like proteins metamorphose spontaneously into shape.

As was noted previously, the scientific attempt to predict shape via algorithms simply takes one further into the mirror of illusions - of number, complexity, information. It's a logical dead-end of smartness.

Cotton, cattle, crop-sharing, the symmetrical beliefs of American Indians (see totems, prev.) The physical signs of metamorphosis - in growth, seasons (even in shape of clouds - see Mishima) - invite the spiritual dimension, the chapels of meditation.

In The Decay of the Angel, the angel in question is Toru, a genius-level lad whose self-centered ruses lead to tragedy. In this scene, the imperious Keiko has his schemes in her sights.

Toru was for the first time afraid of Keiko. He felt not the slightest constraint of class, but there are persons endowed with a special nose for scenting worth. They are the angel-killers.. Toru had let the moment for an answer pass. He knew that he had let underestimated his adversary..

"..Your confidence and your dreams are groundless. If there is on this earth something exceptional, special beauty or special evil, nature finds it out and uproots it. We should all by now have learned the hard lesson, that there are no 'elect'". (page 201)

Toru's schemes in a sense are illusions of his intellect, an intellect divorced from physical reality. This is certainly very close to the predicament we find ourselves in, in a world with neither a physical reality, nor a brightness of spirit. The death of taste in a mirror-land of endless tidiness (P157)

False optimism.turns into the gloom.of a news-cycle constructed of numbers and charts. Pessimism in Mishima's book takes the form of " flesh that is latent death" (page 210). 

But the truth of the statement frees one from endless cycles of gloomy forecasts in the game of optimism where only positive information is allowed (see prev.)

"Positive information" meaning information that feeds the egos of acolytes(of the mirror of illusions). An illusion can or should be positive. My sense of Poly Styrene is that she felt intuitively the gloom in our modern prognosis of artificial advance. Into the mirror and into perverse AI, the profane serpent of corrupt rhythm.

Lost are stories of physical heartiness in the fields, the apple trees and the gentle maidens and the player of the lyre. The Grecian idyll of the South. 

False optimism is the handmaiden of the detached ego that is so like the angel of Mishima's that has to decay to be real.

THRILLER (MJ)

Pictorial 157

 ELECTRIC BLUE MONSOON (Poly Styrene)

As was said previously of Carrie Symonds ( ), how can anything that seems so right be so wrong? Those who live in their political cage of straight-lines are all infected by the same delusion (of the ego). That tidiness is good and, in fact, best of all are the sterile conditions of a global hospital.

The opposite is the case, and the untidy lines of ivy on decrepit, mottled walls of country mansions are colored by strength. The body is run by cells and antibodies and hormones that act as free-form entities. They react freely because of this untidy fact.

In a free-form condition, the cyclical condition of life and death is all too apparent (ie, cells die and are replaced). This is a sign of positive strength.

With untidiness comes good taste, in that it is simply a matter of leaving nature to its ways and adding decoration. The result is often refined decadence. The Japanese, with their wooden, carved shrines. Susan Ellison, the furniture-restoring wife of Harlan.

Restoration is reviving the old and appeals to a certain type. The type that like old things have taste, natch. The modern types only like new things that are all the same.

Thus is optimism the handmaiden of appalling taste! False optimism afflicts the ego of those who inhabit the mirror of illusions (parallel lines, numbers, the monotone two-tone of ones and zeros - see prev.)

Had I been closer to the Ellisons I might one day have visited The Lost Aztec Temple of Mars. Well do I recall a bust up, with Harlan firing on all cylinders. Having given Susan cause for complaint, I had to pay the consequence. 

Politeness was eventually restored.

Woodworking artisans and restorers are the strong alternative to the confident wrongness of moderns. Restoration, the metamorphosis of line that acknowledges decay.

Among clouds like antique white clay images of warriors were some that suggested dragons twisting angrily and darkly upward. Some, as they lost their shape, were tinged rose. Presently, they separated themselves into bland reds and yellows and purples, and their stormy powers left them. The white shining face of the god had taken on the ashen hue of death. (page 101)

Death and beauty and love are intricately connected. How can one truly love unless the object of the love dies? 

From this condition comes restoration. The circular lines of response guarantee perfection. How else is it possible that all species have their own innate perfection of proportion?

Metamorphosis is free-form line in rustic settings of power. Restoration is acknowledgement of this fact through the human attribute of taste.

The rebel (against the straight-line cage of modernity) is a free-form type with idiosyncratic taste. Who, for example, has taste out of ex president Trump or rapper Kanye West?

The answer is obvious. As a link to West, who comes in for more consideration next, this track from Poly Styrene could be felt to contain an insultingly mocking tone, and that's the way I like them.

I LIKE YUR SNEAKERS

Pictorial 156

 All things approach sameness - or the vanishing point of technique (perspective, prev) - when the illusion of straight lines convinces the ego. 

That is to say that the ego is susceptible to being convinced by "facts" and numbers. What that essentially means is that the ego that is susceptible becomes very dominant in the modern order.

The order that is led by science, usually in the guise of a white male. So, when people are approaching sameness, what that means is that they are approaching the rationalistic outlook of a white male scientist.

It's fairly easy to see that in social-media, where each news-channel has a specific factual outlook (for example, Watching the Throne on Kanye West). I'm not saying it's necessarily wrong, but it gets samey. The modern world is infinitely factual.

West happens to be fairly immune to this type of analysis, having established his own spiritual and physical socioeconomic setup in Wyoming (see prev.) but that is vanishingly rare.

A socioeconomy that is atall realist - as opposed to being based on an illusion of.number and "facts" - has a strong sense of untidiness in "the animated universe".

Untidiness, meaning letting things be. Letting people develop differently; differences jar and moral force is established with the settling of differences (using insults, chivalry P155).

Differences are settled in this way whereas in the modern order nothing is settled and there are eternal protests! In an ecosystem animals eat each other; human culture is less aggressive, but the principle of balance can't be denied.

Basically, instead of things being similar, in nature there is a sameness of difference, rather than sameness per se. The metamorphosis of line connects different things in nature, as has been mentioned.

Mishima's The Decay of the Angel, the 4th and last of The Sea of Fertility series, has this description of sunrise.

It finally made its appearance at five past five. From an opening in the dark gray clouds at the horizon, just above the second pylon, came the first glimpse of the sun, carmine, melancholy, as if it were not rising but setting. The top and the bottom were cut off by a screen of clouds, like shining lips. An ironic smile of thin lips rouged in carmine floated briefly among the clouds. Thinner and thinner, fainter and fainter, they left a sardonic smile that was there and not there. The higher stretches of the sky carried a warmer, brighter light. (page 31)

Metamorphosis and decay are somewhat similar things, in that the lines weave shapes that dissolve into thin air and dissolution is part of the process. The entire process is completely untidy and incapable of being ordered in a rationalistic sense.

With decay there are foul-smelling waters and dissolution, which is part of the overall process of metamorphosis. Page 51 of The Decay of the Angel has a description of the various signs in Japanese mythology.

"There are thirty-three angels and one archangel, and the signs of death in them are fivefold. Their flowered crowns wither, their robes are soiled, the hollows under their arms are fetid, they lose their awareness of themselves, they are abandoned by the jeweled maidens."

These Japanese angels appear quite like European fairies to me (see the dying tree-dryad quote from Jirel Meets Magic, prev.) Fetid aromas and soiled robes are signs of the cycle of organic materials.

The modern order doesn't really like the physical scene, and takes refuge in arcane theories, such as Stuart Hameroff's "quantum consciousness". As I said to Hameroff awhile ago, though, worms wriggle and their physical reality has to inform their psyche. If a worm has emotion, it is through the act of wriggling, not some ineffable consciousness.

The illusion we are entering (daily) is one of smart-towns where everything approaches AI. There is no decay (no worms) and therefore no strong revival. The grotesquery of revival in the spiritual realm was brought out in Mishima's previous book, The Temple of Dawn, with the descriptions of Benares' Hindu rituals (prev.)

The symbolism of Pelleas and Melisande is strong (prev.) One honors the dead in terms of physical and psychic realities, rather than ambiguous pseudo-facts of flakehead ego-scientists.

RIP Susan Ellison, woodworking artisan and furniture restorer par excellence.

Pictorial 155

 43 years late, I finally discovered the neurotic queenbee of pop-punk, 

Poly Styrene

OH BONDAGE, UP YOURS

With her tubular plastic dress-sense she is like a Gaga with meaning. As a half-Somalian, there is a bit of a connection with the Arabic side of Zappa.

Like Hannibal roaming through Italy, their wild animal strength is like a primal serpent weaving round the parallel lines of a logical Western order.

Styrene was neurotic to the extent she was wrongly sectioned as schizoid, later joining a Hare Krishna commune and turning to electro-pop-punk of a high order.

It's particularly the early stuff from Germfree Adolescents that seems eerily predictive of a world where germs are outlawed and end up turning on their masters.

GERM FREE ADOLESCENTS

If our objective reality is essentially an illusion whereby facts merge into fictions, that is plain in the supremacy of words over action (of the balanced body, proportionate head on versatile neck.)

The more we hear the more words merge into the fictions of an illusory reality.

PLASTIC BAG

The neurotic subjective type sees the animation underlying the world of words and numbers that propagandize the illusory reality.

Yes, because germs are animations, as are cows or anything of flesh, blood, bone (vampire bats, say). The type that are seers, and similar remarks apply to Zappa - even with his well-known techno-fetishism.

To the neurotic subjective, animation is the reality, and they are bewildered by a world which to them appears like a lot of synthetic nothingness.

Similar observations would apply to Kantner of Jefferson Starship. The reality to them is people dancing, breeding and worshipping as a communal experience, whether on Earth or on a starship.

The lack of animation in modernity is a case of something becoming nothing. The "nothing" just happens to be an objective illusion of facts that merge into fictions.

Quite a good contemporary example is the Royal/Meghan confrontation where fact and fiction merge into one smorgasbord of confusion. Even the racism is confusion personified.

In animated reality, races are different and worship in varied ways, such as the gospel black tradition of the South. This difference was brought-out in the Harry/Meghan wedding ceremony to brilliant effect.

Where differences exist in colorful exuberance, they can come together in ensembles. The animated (spiritual) reality is not solely of words that simply sow confusion.

Something becomes nothing, and the same trend is clear in the supremacy of DNA to the establishment of acolytes of sorcerers of number and parallel lines (see Jirel Meets Magic).

If - as suggested in P154 - DNA is simply the apex of the metamorphosis of shapes in an animated universe, that entire universe is made into nothingness.

The primacy of DNA is a sop to the primacy of logic, number and a calculating universe (the Black Sun). Behind this illusory reality exists the primal serpent, which then becomes corrupted into profane rhythms.

To live is to worship the strength of shape rather than the inert accuracy of number. The moral force of shape comes out in the figures of men and women in action, in the brute strength of animals, in the need for etiquette to quel violence.

Take, for example, the Royal/Meghan scenario. Instead of the modern trend of fearing to recognize physical difference, imagine it set in a medievalist framework.

The scene is a group on horseback.

"Zounds, sirrah, the royal maiden has spirit."

"That she devil? She is not of our color, man. Have you not heard her tongue is of the viper?"

"I speak not of tongue. She rides like one born to the saddle. Do you challenge me on it, sirrah?"

"I - I have no time for this, villain - Hyaar!"

"Ha ha! Wait for me, Meg!"

The modern world fears to recognize difference, where the psyche is strong and free. Differences jar, and then the moral force of psychic freedom comes into play.

Man fires insults in the same sense ladybirds eat greenfly (see Journey, prev.) It's in the nature of the physical reality of social untidiness. There is chivalry born.

The alternate is a world of the head where people fear to insult their neighbour and the psyche is weak. This is what is called 'objective reality', but the object is itself an illusion. A mirror of parallel lines where all things approach sameness.

The mirror is outside the negative side of things, the reality of growth and decay. The mirror that sees only objective information is outwith time (see Bruce Lee quote, prev.) 

Outwith the sequence of events of life and death; of the religio-culture of shrines; of the hunt, horses and estates.

Abandoned farmhouses dotted around the town, once named the 12th most beautiful in Japan.. Nana Matsumoto is one of the youngest to have made the move..

"We were just trying to get the message out that people could come back to Iitate, that people were living here again and that we intended to rebuild the community".. The view is of fallow paddy fields that rise into a steep-sided valley. Snow caps the mountains in the distance. Soon the white egrets will return to the stream that winds along the valley bottom.(DT)

All.physical acts in-the-field that are outwith an illusory system.of parallel lines. The mirror of illusions.

IDENTITY

Pictorial 154

 If the strength of growth creates line and shape, one place to look at is the heroic drawings by such luminaries as Smith, Alcala, Leifeld and Buscema.

Starting with a Greek figure vase as a graceful foundation.

#1

Black figure vase

Straight-up I'd better say I'm no great admirer of Buscema's draftmanlike flair, and point you to the ink rendering of Alfredo Alcala.

#2

Savage Sword #7

Buscema, by sticking to anatomical figure-work, tends not to bother with ornate line-work which Alcala deftly renders. BWS is much more of a linesman, and the fluidity he is able to engender contrasts well with his use of classical perspective technique.

#3

Opus

This determined style of rendering does come out in fussy gadgetry, which is not a million miles from Liefeld (despite Smith's evident disdain).

#4

Lady Deathstrike & Friend

Focusing on the rigor of line can create a wonderful simplicity, as well as a powerful sense of shape.

#5

Turlough O'Brien

All of that tends to imply there is a powerful simplicity at work, which is not just the delineation of anatomy, but a sense of balance in line and shape.

If we live in a sorcery of straight-lines (the mirror of illusions), the mirror will tend to detect things that are composed of information. IE, DNA by means of X-ray diffraction (see prev.)

Information then becomes the fundamental constituent of living matter. However, an alternate possibility is that information is simply the apex of the fundamental constituent of living matter - which is the metamorphosis of rhythmical line (see Ovid, prev.)

Line cannot be explained by information but, on the other hand, information can be delineated by line - as in the double-helix.

By that criterion, all.our sorcerous illusions (of electromagnetism, number, algorithm) do is cover-up the strength of primitive shape with the weakness of information.

The information -as with DNA - convinces with its ultra-accuracy ("facts"). However, it is the strength of shape that produces information by growth over time.

The strength of shape is a fundamental constituent of primitive economy - see prev on Radin - in the fields of hunting, fishing, agriculture.

Associated with all that are primitive rituals such as Maypole dancing. What that seems to imply is that the entire area of fertility and the sexual dynamic are outwith the dogma of information.

This leads to confusion over whether DNA is a sexual component or simply a tool. This is where the profane serpent of corrupted rhythms can enter the fray (see also "clean meat" prev.)

Metamorphosis, and the strongly sexualised rituals, bring in psychic connections to the primitive physical. The rituals connect Man to the fecundity of nature.

#6

Duncan Grant, harvest mural of seasons on chancel of Berwick church (religio-economy of the Middle Ages). Grant was part of the Bloomsbury group who harked back to PreRaphaelites.

The physical world also decays, and is another fundamental component of nature. The florid lines of BWS hint at decadence and moonlight.

The "dark blood" of Satoko (Mishima, prev) or the Darkchilde (prev) are symbols of the life and death struggle.

Darkness is again something that is outwith modernity, where positive news creates a lot of nothing (ie information). The stories of negativity constituting history are airbrushed away (see prev on Redskins, Cherokee, the route out of Southern bondage).

You could almost say the world of the South had a primitive economy of line and shape that tallies with religious rites. The entire milieu was fecund swamp-ridden redolent of steaming jungles.

The strength of that rustic simplicity is airbrushed out of modern accounts. The premise of modernity is that a primitive rustic economy is negative, when the truth is it has the strength of grace and line and shape.

That strength and that simplicity apply equally to white or black or red. If you take the music of gospel and Appalachian, there was s cross-fertilization of differences.

Difference are paramount in establishing strength of living systems, otherwise a certain type tends to predominate. As Radin has said (P153), the shaman was a neurotics compulsive type of dreamer.

That type for sure appeared amongst the legends of the blues in the South. The shaman or magician is able to imbue disproportionately a spiritual foundation on the "day-to-day" type.

That historical situation is now reversed, in that our magicians are no longer subjective dreamer-types. They are objective-scientists, but the object is itself an illusion (see prev.)

The illusion - electromagnetism, parallel lines - doesn't recognize differences, or negatives, or the dark decay that regenerates. It is pure information of the sorcerous ego.

Parallel lines - or basically ones and zeros of a two-tone reality of sorcerous illusion (see Jirel Meets Magic, prev) - are a case of, "The more you look, the less you see" (Max Romeo).

There is a lot more to see in the bold patterns of BWS's figure design, redolent of primitive pleasure as well as of sophisticated allure.

#7

Adastra

Pictorial 153

 The idea that shape produces information is one of the original thoughts that Man had as a primitive magician.

In Radin's book, magic is above all a coercive act aimed at subjecting an.object to the will of the ego. The entire process is subjective and founded on the persuasive power of the shaman performer. Although he doesn't mention it, the power of the mask is very typical.

The subject of this particular book is the transformation by the priesthood of primitive magical rites into a religion with spirits and deities. For example, tribes such as the Winnebago envisage spirits in stone, water, buffalo.

The Winnebago are an advanced tribe of hunters, fishers, agriculture, and Radin persuasively argues that there is a strong interpenetration between the economic reality and the folkloric background. Religion gives the priesthood political power and freedom from the need to supply their own food.

In other words, religion is realistic as well as being a "fantasy" of spirits. While magic is a compulsion of the ego (of shamans), religion is more realistic.

But the origin of religion in primitive magic acknowledges that a certain type of individual -the shaman - had precedence. These individuals are characterised as neurotic, introspective, dreamers or in some sense disturbed.

These dreamers prancing about with masks are subjective compulsive creatures of the ego, while religion is a tendency of social order and agriculture. "It's the economy, stupid", as Clinton said.

So Radin's book is saying religion has a primitive, folkloric basis that gradually becomes more economically formulated. Economy - hunting, fishing, agriculture - is the temporal sphere which in my lexicon is the strength of shape in producing information - ie by growth over time.

So, even if the economy is physical and realistic, it is still shape-bound. The basic point of that is that primitive magic is still noticeable in rituals, such as corn dollies, scarecrows, harvest festivals, maypole-dancing (rituals of the type found in Laurie Lee's Cider With Rosie).

In Lindsay Anderson's O Lucky Man (Alternates 4-6) there is a scene in a country church where Malcolm McDowell ends up festooned with floral tributes.

In a church, stained glass windows idolise the strong and simple lines of patrons and saints.

Lady Godiva

To the primitive mind, the shape of things is a type of magic, as the discs of sun and moon (Patrick Woodroffe employs their smiling faces to sympathetic effect, see prev.) The primitive, or the child-like, is always with us in that shape is magic and powerful.

Now, that entire subject-matter of primitive religion - meaning advanced socialised tribes like the Winnebago in America or the Ewe in Africa - is no longer the subject-matter of our modern elites (or acolytes).

The ego, instead of being based on reality - even if the subjective reality of a coercive shaman - is based on an illusion (see prev.) The illusion is very convincing - being composed of numbers (electromagnetism, sun) - but it doesn't have the realism of primitive shape.

Proteins have primitive shape (see aromatic herbs P152), it's purely automatic. In the active field of living, things tend to conform and there's no rational basis for it, it's just what happens when things grow.

Not only do they grow but there is the negative area of death. This enthire negative area is again outwith modernity. The reality of decay, odor, revival.

Negative facets are strong and produce strong revival. One finds this in comic books quite frequently. The malodorous settings in Hoppers as described previously (Ghost of Hoppers, Jaime).

The stylishly decadent Parisian settings of Bilal (The Nikopol Trilogy, prev.) Bilal's mixture of retro-fashion with dilapidated monumentality practically throbs with nervous energy (is the guy maybe a shamanic throwback?)

Basically, if things are left to decay there can be a type of magic of visceral reality, shape, contour, odor, colour. It's the realism of growth and decay that the modern.illusion lacks. In itns place is a type of nothingness of the ego. This time the ego is not subjective but objective, but the object is itself an illusion.

Mechanics, Love & Rockets 1985