Sunday, 13 June 2021

Hyborian Bridge 176

 Gaiety is in the spirit of revival that springs from blood and slaughter. Clair Noto's tales of Red Sonja ("Red Lace", prev) go into the underworld where the power of blood is represented by the titanic rocs that fly high and are shot down by strong-armed Narca of Khitai, to feed the cycle of death and revival.

Like the Eleusian mysteries (or those of Samothrace, HB175), the only mystery is that of life and death. Mysteries occur in darkness; mere existence is no mystery, and takes place in the presence of the light-equation (ego).

Mysteries establish meaning (epistemology) and power (ontology) by way of destiny and death (eschatology). While light-equations establish the facts of our complex monetary world, the mysteries establish the simplicity of agricultural rituals that worship the rise of Persephone (spring) from the underworld.

All things must feed, and death becomes part of life, and the mystery is in this cycle. Thevl Earth spins and we have day and night; the seasons go round the sun; the eternal balance is the call of destiny.

Realism is in a state of balance if one values grace and timing on actions. In that sense, monetary rules have no value, and money itself has no intrinsic value. The natural.liberty of exchanging goods (Adam Smith) is not a monetary order (see HB6 on the Royal Exchange in Tudor times.)

We live in a world where the routines ofa monetary order have become the only value (which is valueless); where order has no taken-over from freedom and words lose meaning (similarly, the NRA touts freedom as a type of militia order!)

Routines never have value because value is always a product of both order and disorder; of theme and variation.

In order to understand nature one must experience its lightness and grace. Poetry is a means of doing this; the story and the sense are both found in the sounds and rhymes.

This mellifluousness is apparent in the ancient text of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (C3). The Green Knight is a manifestation of nature whose flesh and blood cruelty Gawain must make a pact with. Gawain's trust and purity are tested.

The tale is told as a sort of tension of opposites, with the courtly scenes interspersed with slaughtered deer; bawdy badinage and innuendo with knighly combat.

First he hacks off its head and hoists it aloft,

then roughly rives it right along the spine;

he gouges out the guts and grills them.over coals,

and blended with bread they are titbits for the bloodhounds.

Next he fetches out the fillets of glimmering flesh

and retrieves the intestines in time-honourwd style,

then the two sides are stitched together intact

and proudly displayed on a strong pole.

So with the swine swinging.they stagger home,

bearing the boar's head before that huntsman

who fought with his fists in the ford till the beast was slain.

The day dragged, it seemed,

before he found Gawain,

who comes when called, most keen

to countenance the claim. (page 75)

In a world of order, sameness is the order of the day. However, in a world of differences, conflicts are resolved through the drama of the situation (see prev.)

The light-equation only allows for a certain type of head, one which approaches the vanishing point of technique (AI or monetary number).

This attracts the ego of guys like Balsonaro (HB175), while extinguishing the gaiety of dark revival. Blood itself is in the balance. Argentine leader Alberto Fernandez

said Octavio Paz, the Mexican poet, wrote that 'Mexicans came from the Indians, Brazilians from.the jungle, but we Argentines came from boats, and they were boats that came from there, from Europe. And that is how we built our society. (DT)

Fernandez "apologized", but it's obvious he meant to imply the European type of head was more suitable. What he really meant was the type of head that runs Silicon Valley, which is the one that worships AI.

Jaime Hernandez (Ghost of Hoppers, prev) grappled with the idea of white America versus dusky Mexico with a more honest sensibility (see also The Plumed Serpent, prev). White in the modern world tends to mean a certain type of head that is ordered, routine, monetary and therefore that approaches the vanishing-point of technique (AI).

One can see that easily with China, which tends to replace all different cultures with a cyber-sameness. I mean the communist-state, not the Chinese as a race (or various races of Cantonese, Manchu, Han).

The ego is attracted to certainty and, at the same time, balance and disorder are left out of the equation. The equation of light (straight-lines, electromagnetism, Minkowski geometry, the illusion of number, reflections of reflections). The sorcery of Jirel Meets Magic where all reflections are real, and all reality is reflections.