Saturday, 3 April 2021

Hyborian Bridge 166

 Going by the previous couple of posts, a reasonable question to ask might be that the modern system might be an experiment in tidiness.

X-ray Spex

From.the fertile ground of the 16th century Renaissance, the modern path leads downhill all the way through the mirror of definitive truth.

As was noted way back in P12, the Northern Renaissance master Durer perhaps marks the split from the romantic Gothic style of the late medieval.

Durer practiced this style, but incorporated the Italian geometry. The primacy of geometry in the human figure from that time became inevitable.

Geometry is the way of entering the mirror of illusions (perspective) where things become the object of the forensic lens (HB56), and therefore true. As Godard has said, a film camera is "truth 27 times a second".

Another way of saying that is the stories of his imagination are rendered truthfully. But what happens when there is no imagination? We still get truth, but with no imaginative input. This is the current situation of social media, and it's worth quoting CC Beck.

My family talked me into seeing ET, which I think is one of the worst movies.. Cat Yronwode and others agree it's manipulative..

Groth: How would you answer the rebuttal to that, which I often encounter, and that is that all art has to bring forth or evoke an emotional reaction?

Beck: if the reaction takes place in your imagination and is provoked by the medium, fine. If you can lead a guy right up to the edge of a cliff, and then stop the story, his imagination takes over.. Conan Doyle did that with.. Sherlock Holmes. He killed him off, but if he had shown him falling over the cliff, and falling panel after panel, from all different angles, and dying and being eaten by worms and wolves and everything else, he'd have gone too far. Well that's what ET did, it left nothing to your imagination, it showed everything.(TCJ #95)

Imagination essentially means the restriction of information to that deemed appropriate (by the creative agency).

Going even further, when in.the Middle Ages belief was a fact - as was still.so with Durer and his contemporaries - hearsay counted very high in the realm of psyche. Stories of Prester John from the far east influenced the mindset of adventurous souls to keep plugging on at the conquest of the holy land (see prev.)

In other words, the medieval mindset was exactly contrary to the modern mindset. Then facts could be hearsay that launched psychic onslaughts of faith. Now, facts are definitive truths and the psyche is weak or nonexistent.

What I'm coming to saying is that these facts apply to a world of systematic tidiness, rather than to one of fertility and decay. The former world is convincing to the ego of acolytes of the straight-lines of number and algorithm, while the latter is fairly offensive, dirty and smelly.

The universe is untidy (fecund) if you believe the stars are strewn across the heavens haphazardly, as befits the realm of Fortune. Unthinking untidiness is therefore the province of absolute Time.

Time is master (Chronos, original Titan and father of Zeus). Within the mirror of illusions the definitive truths have got to be relative. Within a mirror everything is relative to light (see induction from Newton's knives, C4-C6).

Light is the means we determine the accurate existence of things like DNA (x-ray diffraction, prev.) so that information becomes the fundamental component of reality.

In an absolute universe, time is the master because the flow of lines in the moment determine the tensile stress of molecules (proteins) and ultimate symmetrical shape of developing organisms.

Symmetry is outwith a universe of information; as has been previously noted, the sacred symmetries in countries such as Iran and Turkey are a source of psychic strength.

I noticed that American belief in terms of church attendance is at an all-time low; a type of weakness. Sacred symmetries simplify living which otherwise is pure fact (news). Instead of the psyche informing news events - as in the Middle Ages and "hearsay" - words that deal in facts and number are "the truth".

However, it is a truth without the sacred reality of symmetry. To be a bit more pedestrian, Kanye West's development in Wyoming has a spiritual temple as a concomitant part of the physical act of cotton-picking.

This seems almost like turning the clock back, and I think that's true. Symmetries are accidental events that happen within settings that occupy milieux where different things are interacting, as in an ecosystem.

Belief and acts of faith celebrate these accidents of Fortune. The temple is the heart of such communes. The religious affiliations of American blacks in the 50s was a concomitant part of being within milieux that developed accidentally.

It's true that places could become ghetto-ised, but it's still true to say that differences - the structure of a family, the priest and their congregation, artisan shops and buskers, animals - are interacting.

Today, the bane of sameness dissolves differences - and hence the affinity of difference (see P159). Biden's trillion dollar infrastructure expansion is simply going to emphasize sameness at the expense of milieux where differences coexist (see Ghostworld). Politics is simply the egotistical high ground of the reality that exists within the mirror of illusions.

The ego of a politician is inexorably attracted to the convincing illusions that lack symmetry and time! This is so from Russia to Scotland. The odd news-item catches the eye. In Edinburgh a street brawl between a man and an apparently high woman resulted in her kissing him and then biting through his tongue. When he spat it out, a seagull swooped.

That type of savagery is fairly rare, but s neat example of social untidiness. The seagull establishes the ecological morality of blood, while the chivalry of the man prevents him responding.

Scottish pitch invasion 1977

In a traditional milieu, acts of deadly intent are possible within a moral framework that is neatly contained in Lloyd Price's classic

STAGGER LEE

Differences, symmetries and time are the pre-modern realities of absolute existence, and the fundamental components of fantasy storytelling. So, there we finally get back to Hyborian times. The primitive activities of blood and bone (Ymir) as the Earth spins twixt sun and moon eternally.