Wednesday, 11 August 2021

Pictorial 182

There must be people out there thinking who is this guy to badmouth established environmentalusts the likes of Zac - the unmentionable - Goldsmith, Chris - hare-brain - Packham, David Atten-bore? What can he possibly know that the established order doesn't?

The clue is in the word "established", since this is the order that says ecology is just one subject among the paradigm of science, which is supposedly superior because it is a neutral observation of the natural order, unbiased by belief or witchcraftery.

This neutrality may have been what led Edward Goldsmith into a cybernetic dead-end. The point is that neutrality is itself biased since nature is red in tooth and claw; a mixture of bestiality and innocence that is as far from neutral as Richard Dawkins is from godhood.

It's not neutral and it's not hygienic; it's filthy and with repulsive aspects. These obscene aspects are seen in the Hyborian old gods described by Yaple - see HB140.

The link between repulsive and obscene in animalistic rites that celebrate the fertility of the Earth. This sexual aspect can also take the form of frolics with donkeys - see rehsongcycle (suspended)

The fact is that pornography and repulsiveness are clearly related. The film previously discussed, I Married a Monster from Outer Space, has that subcurrent running through it, obviously muted owing to the 50s puritanical ethos! (Alien Vows is a recent "remake" that centres exclusively on the dirty side of the encounter.)

The fact that sex is related to the blood and bestiality of nature is something that a neutral science naturally tends to mute, so in that sense it's not atall neutral. It's only neutral in the sense it's not filthy.

This brings in Alan Moore and Clair Noto, both of whom (along with Melinda Gebbie) have taken pornographic aspects to extreme. The Moore/Gebbie "Lost Girls" was noted previously (rehsongcycle, suspended).

Perhaps more notably, Noto in "The Tourist" creates an entire alien underworld of devious sexual expression. Possibly there is some relation here to the literal underworld she created in Red Sonja ("Red Lace" prev), where blood is mixed with clay to fire an unholy furnace of carnivorous plants.

The strength that comes from the underworld is far from neutral since it is death and decay and the resulting irons and minerals that give plants growth.

Fertility, death and the relation between love and death are again far from neutral topics. This is the subject of Maeterlinck's Pelleas and Melisande (see prev) from a French fable of a water sprite.

Foul-smelling waters, or at least an abandoned swimming pool of moss and lichen, was a theme of Jaime Hernandez's Ghost of Hoppers (P144)

Anything that reeks of abandon and the intrusion of moss and lichen also reeks of fertility and the abandon of passion.

The power of that theme can't be equated with a science of numbers since it's much more to do with experience and the strength of psyche.

Experience and the strength of psyche are not neutral topics.. What happens is that neutral science underpowers the very things that have power and longevity in nature.

I guess I'm a type of outsider, and maybe others of the comic book industry such as BWS may be. Blood and passion are strong, fertile and pure, as well as bestial and innocent.

We live in an illusory world of acolytes of scientific neutrality, and they are just as likely to be ecologists. Only the German Greens' Baerbock (the love-child of Paul Kantner, apparently) has grasped the bull by the horns and said that ecological issues have to trump all the rest.

It remains to be seen whether they achieve power, or another mini-Merkel is installed.