Midnight winds are landing
at the end of time
a true story will be mine
"Evening of Light"
Nico's funereal ditties prompt thought of fertility deities. As was said of Hyborian trade (HB 177,178), the pragmatic exchange of goods is underlaid by primal beliefs in agricultural entities such as Ishtar, the mother goddess of revival (Yaple, prev.)
Pragmatic exchange is not a monetary system - which is a belief of egotists - but a facility for beliefs to interact. Stygian beliefs may be abhorrent to most Hyborian kingdoms; that's irrelevant to the pursuit of profitable trading.
Beliefs are strength, even though they may be abhorrent - the bloated and sacrificial Pteor of Shem. The strength comes from blood and sacrifice; the primal physical reality.
Without fertility there can be no hunting or fishing. The boisterous agricultural psyche of peasants is the mark of Dionysian gaiety, not Apollonian order.
Strength of psyche is a primordial quality that that affects human behavior at every level (see prev on comparison of Tchaikovsky's Pathetique to a modern piece).
Classical music is a technical exercise ), but without the strength of psyche one of empty excess. This lesson comes from primordial depths, both physical and of the soul.
HP Lovecraft's Shadow Over Innsmouth is an ichthyic journey of a tortured family history set in a fantasy fishing port of Massachusetts. The rewards of happy hunting - or fine fishing - comes at the cost of a human soul.
But, perhaps the ichthyic soul is good in its own way? Who knows, and that is the journey. It is born of slaughter, which is strength in-the-field, or sea.
With slaughter comes revival (see Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, prev.) With revival comes the boisterous psyche of fishermen and lobster-boats.
Where I live, incidentally, there is a "creative quarter" which is built over a harbour district. Where there used to be a fine fresco of a giant lobster and assorted crabs and shells is now a district of typical straight-lines (C6).
That's not only by-the-way but also pertinent, in that the symbols of trade of s port town have been eclipsed.
Meaning has been eclipsed by coffee and haircuts; the global sameness. If Lovecraft's story conjures-up atavistic visions, our age is vanishing into electromagnetic delusions (straight lines, logic, order, ego.) The ego is nothing without psychic strength and blood.
We live in the age of the sofa, artefact for the deluded ego, not the chaise longue, artefact for the reclining form. One has to go back to about 1930 and le Corbusier's collaborator, Charlotte Perriand. Like Corbu, she was a futurist, but she liked to design in a traditional way, using national materials.
Her chaise longue basculant is one example; she took this to Japan and made use of machined bamboo. She intended to inspire Japanese vernacular tradition with creative energy, to embolden not demolish.
Bamboo and vernacular tradition clearly rely on the fertility of natural products. There is also a certain sense in which the vernacular houses in "The Wool-sack" (prev) - set in the English Cotswolds in the 15th century - have futuristic leanings.
Because without strong traditions of a vernacular world there is no future (the Malay House, or Brazilian jungle dwellings). Just an electromagnetic illusion of the ego of the likes of Bolsaro that is attracted to illusory products such as iphones and Teslas and rockets to Mars.
They may well.work (through AI), while the human psyche degrades to the level of a "realistic" Banksy.
As 60s pop-art pioneer Joe Tilson says,
That's very transient art..it will.disappear without a trace. (DT)
Tilson is a study in fertile use of line, shape, colour and the musical word-world of James Joyce (or Eric Gill for that matter.) A fitting choice to design a new window at Rosslyn chapel, set in the heathen heather of the Scottish highlands.
