Hyborian Bridge 62 (part2)

Is, then our logical order an illusion of sorcerer’s promulgated by acolytes? That makes it pretty Weird Tales, but where’s the convincing proof?

Well, it’s like Harlan Ellison’s phrase, “It seemed like a good idea at the time.” It seems like that’s the way it is, and if you wanted proof you’d have to go to a super-computer – which is electromagnetism.

We live in a convincing world – and that’s all the proof you’ll get. For example, ads are designed to be convincing. Here’s another quote from Grace Slick’s memoir.

(page 70)

If everything you see or hear is convincing, then that is the proof that the world is illusory, because the acolytes of sorcerers make it so. The moon or sun or stars don’t have to be convincing, they just are.

The Africa described by Van der Post is wild and partly civilized and reckless under livid skies; there is no overall design to it or, if there is, it’s a laissez-faire design, red and ragged. These are the two sides of life. Apollonian which is appearance and the established order. And Dionysic which is reality untamed and rambunctious. The denial of Dionysus leads to macabre and tragic consequences – see Euripides’ The Bacchae (The False Apollo)

What seems to have happened is that sorcerers have established a convincing order of illusion; Apollo as appearance is everywhere but, of course, appearance is reflection (electromagnetism, sun Pictorial 27).

Those who deal in reality are often scurrilous or lewd, like satyrs. One thinks of San Francisco stalwarts Slick and Zappa. The attitude is what Slick calls “Chaucerian”, which is just bawdy peasant badinage. You may know of the joke in Chaucer which is ruled too scurrilous for some editions, of a peasant girl presenting her other cheek to an admirer.

The physical scene is lusty and rude; this was the main origin of the San Francisco scene, described by Slick.

As you walk onto the dance floor, you have the feeling you’ve just entered seven diffefent centuries all thrown together in one room. The interior of the building is turn-of-the-century rococco, and a man in red briefs and silvery body paint is handing out East Indian incense. A girl in full Reanaissance drag is spinning around by herself listening to some baroque music in her head, while several people in jeans and American Indian headbands are sitting in a circle smoking weed.. Over in the corner, people are stripping off their clothes, and while the acid is taking effect, they’re getting body-painted so they’ll glow in the dark as the night progresses.. Sometimes there are chairs, sometimes there aren’t, so people sit, dance, or lie down on the floor. Electronics and Indians, dsco balls and medieval flutes. Day-Glo space colors and Botticelli  sprites. The howl of an amplifier and the tinkling of ankle bracelets. (page 97)

She describes the farmland of Marin County, the ranch held by The Grateful Dead, the community of spirit. What she calls the “purposely fragmented” commune is just the rough-and-tumble of previous eras (see “Indian Summer” Hyborian Bridge 61).

A society that is pure order is always an illusion because it is of the head, not the rambunctious body of free expression. When “they” say “the future is space”, at the same time it’s not one of free communal expression.

The Apollonian head will travel into space because what they see is a perspective illusion of order (all is convincing and all is false).The only way out of that is to have hippy communes in space as in Paul Kantner’s 1970 album Blows Against the Empire

STARSHIP

Kantner’s vision is rough and lewd and shrewd since Dionysus is aboard the vessel. This is why the visions of Musk and Bezos &Co have to fail since they are not bringing on board Dionysic lusts. It’s a false vision (the false Apollo) of pure order by algorithm, a rerun of Euripides.

perspective order (head)

communal free-expression (body) - Magnum-type spontaneity of chaotic action, Venezuela today

COMBINATION OF THE TWO

Dionysic revelry, gaiety

Courseness and roughness are a clasical trait because they deal in reality. This brings in the question that, if we live in an illusion of (acolytes of) the head, how real by comparison are the naked fantasies of Weird Tales?

Even though we seem to live in a convincing world, it’s still of the living, not the dead (or “The Dead”). By comparison, tribes such as the one in BWS’s Adatra in Africa venerate the dead, and live in a spirit world.

The spirits of the ancestors sanctify the earth so that the strength of the soil and harvest strengthen the tribe. The cycle is that of decay, or natural cleansing. The modern alternative to that is hygiene machines (see Gates prev Hyborian Bridge 31) which weakens the land and destroys the tribal culture.

In other words, the entire cycle of decay which regenerates life (from the dead) is missing in modernity. Actually, there is a US company that is composting corpses but, without the Dionysic culture of rustic nonchalance and dreamy dancing under starlit trees, it’s a bit late!

The Dionysic spirit is strong inWeird Tales, the veneration of rustic antics and, particularly in Howard, the brawny sons of the earth who go from haywaining to hurling spears at the drop of a hat.

They pushed on without pausing, though Balthus gazed longingly at the squirrels flitting among the branches, which he could have brought down with a cast of his ax. With a sigh he drew up his broad belt. The everlasting silence and gloom of the primitive forest was beginning to depress him. He found himself thinking of the open groves and sun-dappled meadows of the Tauran, of the bluff cheer of his father's steep-thatched, diamond-paned house, of the fat cows browsing through the deep lush grass, and the hearty fellowship of the brawny, bare-armed plowmen and herdsmen. (Beyond the Black River, CH5)

Hyborian Bridge 62 (part1)

One thing I got from Flamingo Feather was the cosmic sense of adventure that is earth, moon and sun circling eachother as Man plunges into the interior of what was a dark continent.

(moonsong, page 202)

What that seems to mean to me is that the moon seen from earth symbolises physical reality, of the most primordial kind. The moon is larger seen from earth than it is seen from Apollo 13 and, actually, once you get there you find nothing!

The fullness of the moon is seen from primeval earth, and it is a physical reality. This is the way I can defend the seemingly indefensible position that space travel is a perspective illusion.

Man builds linear edifices or elegant circles, such as you find in Silent Running or 2001: A Space Odyssey. Nature breaks them up with irregularity; this is where you get the ethical theme of Silent Running (also found in Japanese anime Macross).

Planets are battered objects and Man, if he were to land on them, would add a perspective order of his own. Earth, because it is a living planet, has an organic order, not a logical one.

If interplanetary travel were attempted, all it would mean is that a perspective order would replace the natural order, which is rugged and carefree. No doubt the internet would connect them, or the infrastructure of electromagnetic perspective.

In other words, the solar serpent slowly emerges from the Earth, and it’s called space travel! That basic line goes back to Hyborian Bridge 37 (“luxury liner”). That everything – bar nothing – is electrochemical or electromagnetic. So all that would happen is physical reality (body) would be replaced by the head. It’s an illusion.

This is where it pays to go back to Howard and his savage ethic. Even if one can see similarities with van der Post’s African fantasy Flamingo Feather, in Howard the heroism is as muscular as the demons that face it.

One flailing talon-armed limb knocked his helmet from his head. A little lower and it would have decapitated him. But fierce joy surged through him as his savagely driven sword sank deep in the monster’s groin. He bounded backward from a flailing stroke, tearing his sword free as he leaped. The Talons raked his breast, ripping through mail-links as if they had been cloth. But his return spring was like that of a starving wolf.

No quarter is given nor asked in the red butchery.

The demon staggered and fell sprawling sidewise, its head hanging only by a shred of flesh. The fires that veiled it leaped fiercely upward, now red as gushing blood, hiding the figure from view. A scent of burning flesh filled Conan’s nostrils.

Red butchery and blood-red moon are one and the same, and you find the same imagery throughout pulps

(TCJ 90 1984)

In this one you’ve got three artists – Williamson, Krenkel and Frazetta – and it’s clear from the picture on the right something is added to Al’s pencils. There are more leaves, more waving tendrils and fronds, towering crags, an aura of romance.

Romance is fierce and lusty and primeval (even 2001 starts with apes!). Romance exists on primeval planets such as the ones imagined by Al and Wally Wood. It’s not something Krigstein is known for so he cannot add the raw savagery.

Primeval power is the power of earth and moon, not sun which can be illusory. If you think about it, EC science fiction always has two things: the sleek spaceship and the primitive planet. It goes much deeper than aesthetics; the aura of decay and regeneration. The entire area of the underworld is lacking in a solar culture. If you recall, in Greek mythology Pluto has Proserpine (Persephone) as a bride – but only for six months of the year.

She is spring and joins her mother Ceres (harvest) the other six months. This cycle is harvest moon, the mother earth. Robert Howard’s space fantasy, Almuric, is even more obvious as it is much more a pure fantasy set on an alien planet (of the imagination). Similarly for A Princess of Mars, there are no rockets, only prehistoric beasts. CL Moore’s Northwest of Earth contains no rocket descriptions, but a lot of seedy and dank underworld descriptions.

The future “they” prescribe is all about numbers. How do you think a rocket flies, detaches then lands back on the flight pad? Because there’s a gyro that is electronically tied to fins and ailerons and thrusters and there are a lot of algorithms floating around. Algorithms are numbers (machine code).

So, as CC Beck says, the fact that it’s very precise isn’t surprising. Here’s a quote from Grace Slick’s memoirs.

Then, on October 30, 1939, at Chicago Hope Hospital, Virginia Wing gave birth to Grace Barnett Wing at 7:47 A.M. Well, not really. I don’t know my actual time of birth or the name of the hospital, because they weren’t written on my birth certificate. Back then, record keepers weren’t as anal-compulsive as they are today, so I’ve always made up my own stats when it was time to fill in the blanks. (page 12 - compare with Lindsay Anderson's quote on "numbers" Alternates 4)

“Anal-compulsive” is right. That is the world where numbers have overwhelmed the carefree, rugged simple act of living and giving birth. That is what Musk &Co are because the world they live in is an illusion.

By heading straight for “the heart of the raging sun” (Pictorial 25) they enter an electromagnetic world that is not strong and physical. Without the physical, muscular strength of the active body, they are in their heads and the end-result is often the compulsive plying of figures (meaning numbers!)

Similar remarks apply to Wall Street POWER IN THE BLOOD

I’m not anti-dollar or anti-rocket science, but the idea that their notion of interplanetary colonisation is anything more than random figures by mad algorithms is madness. Whether it’s Bezos, Musk, Zuckerberg or Gates all are in the same electromagnetic illusion that denies the physical body its cultural reality on Earth. One word for it is hygiene (machine); another is compulsive (order).

The carefree life is the physical reality of the body, not the compulsions of the head (pornographic or otherwise). This is the land of folk-tales and folk music

(page 57)

ODETTA

From 50s folk is a small journey to Rocket 88 and the new era. The carefree sounds of the early soul/r’n’b have been regurgitated so often, it really does pay to listen to the original facility.

FONTELLA BASS

Rescue is what the muscular, heroic figure is often doing on Weird Tales covers by Margaret Brundage.

Pictorial 50 (part2)

Van der Post paints a dreamlike sequence of the great trek from where they stumble on the startling Flamingo Bay, hidden by a cleft in the cliffs and by maritime cunning, pursued for countless days and nights following the elimination of his pack-bearers, leaving three of them – the young ‘Takwena Tickie and the grim Arab Said – to forge through, to forge comradeship in the land of unforgettable images.

I found it within a few minutes on the side of the broad vlei wherein the rain-water was still a shining silver among long dark reeds and a couple of long-legged herons stood black and motionless and so like Japanaiserie on a lacquered screen that I was almost startled when one of them gave a melancholy croak as it stirred restlessly in its sleep. (page 165)

When they encounter a lone ‘Takwena, prey turns hunter

‘Quoish, Effendi,’ Said remarked with grim Arabic approval; ‘Quoish Khitir: one for nine; it is a good beginning but the reckoning is still far from complete.’ (page 175)

in a real el Borak moment, while the unbelievable truth of Flamingo Bay has the geopolitical finesse of Talbot Mundy’s The Eye of Zeitoon, with along the way scenes of timelost uncertainty.

I scrambled up the crack in the first light and was back on my seat of ancient learning in time to see the whole Homeric wine-red sea of morning swell on the horizon. (page 187)

Where The Eye of Zeitoon makes heroes of the Armenians and ruffians of the Turks, here it is the Russians (written well before Bay of Pigs). The snaking lines of well-drilled ‘Takwena pack-bearers become dragons of the jungle, dragons who feed off ill-gotten gains of the wormdollar Rouble.

You reckon they’re different? I’m not so sure if they both are there to eclipse the lost landscape of rustic activity.

I saw the round huts, neat cattle kraals strangely black in the green grass, stockade maize, millet, and pumpkin fields bleached a wintry yellow with stubborn little pig-tails of smoke over them all, and familiar blood-red footpaths stretched out like the nerves of a human hand ready to take their naked traffic down into the dark bush or over the hump into the arrogant blue. (page 184)

Today, Tanzania is eclipsing the largest African nature reserve with a massive dam – who’s funding it this time? China.

I agree all those three countries politically couldn’t be less alike, yet all inhabit the same illusion – the vanishing point of technique (see Drama2 “speed”). All three regions live under one master – the solar serpent or wormdollar, cold-blooded denier of Earth and moon. When van der Post says “Homeric wine-red sea” you are in the simpler world of billowing breezes and recurring dawns that tell the story of Man (the adventurer, wanderer on Earth).

“They” or the Martians in our midst inhabit a land of tricks or illusions where rivers are diverted, flood plains ravaged, citizens ejected. You might say, “All life is a trick, dog”, as Howard does in one of the Conan stories (or was it Thomas?) and it might be, if it’s human and personal.

“They” are the dark impersonal forces who convince is with tricks - illusions of technique. As you may have guessed I’m referring to Musk and his algorithmic rocketships. This

 

is a quote from DT business

To watch SpaceX’s reusable Falcon boosters land elegantly back on Earth after launching a satellite into space or delivering a capsule to the International Space Station, as it did on Saturday, is a sight which defies all logic. Your brain insists it should not be possible to land a rocket on its end, precisely in the right place, on a launch pad in the sea. But it is.

Yeah, the brain may be seeing things, since all these SpaceX/NASA rockets must be comprehensively programmed with flight algorithms. What you are seeing is the vanishing point of technique, which is the land of illusion.

In the land of illusion, everything is perspective, and you travel through the perspective illusion  whether you use rockets or petrol-fuel (see “speed”). As CC Beck says of flying,

Let me tell you a story about the Emperor of China, back in nineteen aught four, as we old-timers say. One of the early aviators took an airplane over to China, and the Emperor was not impressed at all. One of his assistants said, “Look, Emperor, it’s flying!” And he says, “Well, that’s what it’s supposed to do, isn’t it?”  (TCJ 95, 1985)

The land of illusion is the land where perspective always approaches the vanishing point; what you see (the rocket) is an illusion of perspective. You will always be in this perspective illusion, whether you go to Mars or Timbuktu.

It’s not real; it’s just technique. Reality is a physical thing, and it’s symbolised by the moon (aether Drama2)

So there we were, soon after eight, crawling through long grass towards the crown of our valley barely a hundred paces away, solemn under the unbelievable moon.. I lay for one lovely second staring up at her, seemingly so close in that moment of trumpet call on this far peak in the mountains of Umangoni, until Tickie touched me on the shoulder whispering with an odd tremble in his throat: ‘Oh! Do you hear Bwana? My Bwana, do you hear?’

Rivers are real; dams are false (apart from Robert Robertson’s, natch). The Forbidden City is real; Beijing is false. Hutongs are real; Shanghai is false. NASA if it’s seen as a trick is real; NASA/Silicon Valley is false, the wormdollar of the future.

Savage Tales 2

GENERATION

Pictorial 50 (part1)

Artistically, BWS’s Pre-Raphaelite style prints are a very good illustration of throwing down the odd vanishing point in a basically disordered universe (Cosmic Curmudgeon)

 

The Book of Samothrace is interesting because the flaming book seems to have created a mirror image of the maiden on the gracefully curving bench, which is drawn with perspective accuracy. I don’t suppose he meant to imply that order – the sun or flaming book – and perspective illusion go together, but that is one interpretation of the mirror image!

Certainly, in prints such as The Ram and the Peacock, BWS is at pains to employ imagery of that type (a sundial, a prism that refracts light into rainbow colours). That type of imagery is also representative of science; since an illusion of the sun is very convincing to the ordered mind (see “Pets” Hyborian Bridge 56) it can overwhelm physical reality – the sequence of events we see on the Earth as it turns in the cosmos under the stars above.

Already it was dark and cold. The stars were out and very clear with a crisp crackling silvery winter shiver in the light.. Down the western shore of the great False Bay, past the Naval Base just clear of a faint mountain line, the Southern Cross was sinking to the sea like Arthur’s sword returning to the waters of Avalon. (Laurens van der Post, Flamingo Feather, Penguin 1955 page 59)

The physical universe is strong and provides a source of myth (psyche.) Stories that you could think of as sequences, traditions that have origins. Children learn them and the early and ancient come together (Hyborian Bridge 61 part2).

The physical reality then has a type of psychic strength in the young who are taught tribal myths. The relation between the physical and the psyche goes much deeper than simply origins and tales. Whereas an illusion is a sort of trick of the head, the physical universe provides the senses with evidence of primordial reality.


The night was without a moon, clear and very still, and the sky was as packed with great, flashing stars as the purple Umangoni shade with freesias in the spring. Here and there in the valley the night fires were lit, and as I got further away from the main road they spread on the clean air that lovely scent of burning African wood and coals of dry animal dung which I would not exchange for all the perfume of Paris. (page 85)

The sense of ease van der Post feels is the ease of a man-of-action, his mood matching what he sees, hears, smells. In the land of action strength reigns, and it is a strength which cleanses. In our world of hygiene, these types of sweet and woody smells are almost a thing of the past. They are pungent and pleasing because there is a natural cleansing process at work. For that there has to be dirt present. The two cannot be separated; like Fulling where two strong processes come together to create one pristine product (woven wool Hyborian Bridge 60)

All this takes place in the world of action where Man hunts under the stars in wide open spaces, the physical place where the Earth is turning and there are no illusions of the mind. It’s a simpler world, and many things are simple. Music to be musical has to be simple since it’s defined by rhythms and tempo.

Then, hearing music in the street I crossed slowly over to the window and saw a Zulu walking easily under the palms by the road.. a guitar slung from his shoulder like that of some medieval minstrel, he strummed as he went a little tune of his own invention, five urgent bars only, played over and over again, faint, soft, loud, louder, loudest, up down, down up. (page 72

GHOST WORLD

The simplicity of music echoes the simplicity of our sense of physical recurrence as the Earth circles and things come around again. Animals have this ritualistic sense of ease at familiar watering holes and places of repose.

 

At its feet, the water had long since spread a wide cloak of fine white drift sand beyond which lay an oval pool, black, smooth and filled with untroubled water. By the edge of the glassy water, like a bundle of oriental silk, lay a young male cheetah, his ardent life glowing within him, lighting a flame  to the shadowy water. (page 166)

 

Howard evoked this eternal ritual of musical refrain in the character of Ridondo in By This Axe I Rule.

 

Kull shook his lion head. “No, Brule, he is beyond my reach. A great poet is greater than any king. He hates me, yet I would have his friendship. His songs are mightier than my sceptre, for time and again he has near torn the heart from my breast when he chose to sing for me. I will die and be forgotten, his songs will live forever.”

Beyond the Black River is the Howard tale which most recalls van der Post's descriptions of trailing through the last vestiges of the primal bush, in the hunt for "the dark impersonal forces" (of the wormdollar?) which care only for gain. In both, Fenimore Cooper woodcraft is pitted against demons to whom the forest is but a staging post to the overwhelming of primeval reality by dragons of hellfire.

Then Balthus forgot his exasperation as his ears were outraged by the most frightful cry he had ever heard. It was not human, this one; it was a demoniacal caterwauling of hideous triumph that seemed to exult over fallen humanity and find echo in black gulfs beyond human ken.

The view looked guileless enough. There were no dragon's wings, no vampire dactyllos or prehistoric apparitions of evil hanging over it to warn the trusting earth. The only sign of hidden activity was a long line of hunters and their bearers carrying loads on their heads.. (page 185)

Hyborian Bridge 61 (part 4 of 4)

BWS, Thoth Amon, The high priest of perspective illusion

In their dens of esoteric mumbo-jumbo, the acolytes of sorcerers strive to overwhelm our physical reality with perspective illusions. This is the “Idol of the Den” as prefigured in The New Atlantis  (Drama1) which Howard’s sorcerous tales also seem to foreshadow in reptilian colours.

Some things are actually quite simple. If you investigate human metabolism you tend to get swamped in chemicals – ketones, amino-acids, bipolar lipids. Nevertheless, the way molecules work is by shape-recognition; like a jigsaw they fit together. (What is shape? Symmetry, proportion).

In other words, something very complicated also needs simplicity or it wouldn’t function. Another example is a record player. The grooves contain all the information but, until you spin the disc that’s all it is. The simple act of spinning at 33 1/3 rpm acts to decipher the grooves.

Planet Earth is spinning, and that simple act deciphers the vast complexity of the universe. Acolytes of sorcerers in their dens of iniquity do not actually care for sun and moon and stars above. Proportionate physical reality is of no interest to them. What they want is the overwhelming of that physical reality, and its simplicity, by one of perspective illusion (see Traylor “Pets” Hyborian Bridge 56)

This fact seems to have fooled quite a few people since, without a physical reality there can be no figurative interpretation – just facts.

So, the simple fact that the Earth spins against the cosmos is physical reality. All heroic fantasies from Homer onward have this physical reality as their sine qua non. It implies a strength and simplicity of verse or, in Howard, poetic prose.

In the modern world, simplicity is supposed to be primitive and just “wrong”. In fact, it just means that things are physical and of the body and not of the head. Howard foreshadows the “Den of the Head” in his serpentine denizens of hidden crypts, staring at illusions of the

SUNFIGHTER

Hyborian Bridge 61 (part3 of 4)

Swedenborg’s Heaven and Hell are reached via the “imaginative consciousness” or “cognitive imagination”. One facet is the Grand Man, the Ultimate Human which makes up the body of the universe (comprised of all the angels, who are transformed human souls).

Swedenborg’s “modernist” vision is radically different to the medievalism of Dante’s seventh circle, and even more to the cosmic maelstrom of Milton’s Old Testament-ish Paradise Lost. The one thing they have in common is that there are vast gulfs between chaos and order, between self-obsession and transcendence. However, Swedenborg was a Lutheran scientist and evidently felt religion could only be safeguarded by placing it in the imagination (not reality).

Even so, Swedenborgians believe that the imagination is more real than any physical reality (because it is imagined, and any physical place has also to be imagined to be real.) If you’ve been following what I’ve been saying about lenses, neither the universe above, nor the bugs below, are physical reality, they are perspective illusion (Traylor “Pets” Hyborian Bridge 56).

What IS physical reality are the constellations of the stars, or figurative myth (narrative content of the universe). So, anything that has a physical reality in the universe is Man’s interpretation. The universe as viewed through lenses (and algorithms) is not physical reality, it’s perspective illusion. The bind is that only interpretation can be physical, since it is what the human figure sees on the Earth as it rotates in the cosmos.

So therefore any seemingly fantastical interpretation is based on physical absolutes (the sky at night, sun, moon). Contrariwise, scientific “facts” are not based on physical absolutes; they exist in a relative universe of light (reflection, illusion).

Therefore, the figurative imagination as mapped onto the universe that we see is a physical absolute. It’s not "convincing facts ready for the latest algorithmic model of the universe" (along with Katie Bouman's black hole, natch) but it is a physical interpretation. Science is convincing, but is an illusion of perspective reality. So what is truth? The invisible things, balance and proportion, represented by the figure.

This is by way of a Platonic preamble to Indian Summer, the Manara/Pratt graphic novel set in Hawthorne’s Puritan universe of the 18^th century. The Puritan reality puts lust at the forefront, in the sense that lusts are practiced then hypocritically denied. The plot is summarized by Zack Davisson of ComicsBulletein

A young man tries to save the poor blonde girl, but comes too late and can only avenger her. He takes her home to his family, a clan of outcasts that live outside the main fortress settlement. The clan is overseen by a beautiful matriarch with a scarlet letter branded into her face. Knowing that the Indians will come for the brothers who slew their chief’s nephew to avenge the rape, the unwelcome clan moves inside the fortress walls and into the domain of the righteous Pilgrim Black. Like the sternest of preachers, Pilgrim Black is quick to unleash shouts of hellfire and damnation, but only to cover up his own unholy lusts. Before the Indian attack is over, many old secrets are uncovered, wrongs revenged, and old debts paid. And the true story of the letter-branded woman and her children is at last told. 

The point I made in Alternates 7 is that, while our societies are run logically, Puritan settlements were bred in the bosom of nature where naked wood and naked sex are as one. The irregularities of the buildings echo the irregularities of the congregation. Hypocrisy is the way priests attempt to deal with the powerful erotic forces of nature. The matriarchal Earth Mother figure of irresistible natural and psychic power.

While our societies have hygienic pornography, Puritan societies emit carnality and attempt to cover it up with hypocrisy. In that sense they are real, if dishonest, while ours are mere illusions. The Manara/Pratt book is a masterpiece of sequences – another reality of an action-oriented society. If you basically look at the pictures they speak for themselves – rough, raw and vital.

Societies that live in nature are physically active; societies that live outside nature are physically inert. One way to put it is we sequence DNA – which is not physical reality (Hyborian Bridge 56). We sequence algorithms – which are not physical reality.

The reason for this is an a-priori assumption which goes right back to The New Atlantis (Drama1). That the head can interpret reality without the need of the body. But, if the universe requires a figurative interpretation of physical reality, that assumption is wrong.

What seems to happen is that we are now in “The Idol of the Den” and not in physical reality (which is figurative). That physical reality is what the human figure sees on planet Earth which is spinning against the cosmos. The physical reality is sun, moon and constellations; anything else is a perspective illusion.

The New Atlantis does not consider physical reality – that is, symmetry, balance, proportion – since it is only a logical order. The end-result of that is “The Idol of the Den”, or DNA-sequences and algorithmic sequences (electromagnetism and perspective illusion).

Science gives “facts” but not physical truth, which is figurative. Physical truths apply to active societies existing alongside nature, since everything in nature is figurative – horse, pig, rat, donkey, chrysanthemum. If that sounds a bit oriental you’re not wrong as I’ve been talking to Dr Zanyu Chen of Herbal Art!

The a-priori assumptions of western science are not figurative, and therefore not of the body (human, animal, plant) but of the head. We are prey to acolytes of sorcerers and the time for physical action is nigh.

Hyborian Bridge 61 (part 2)

Seeing as all good Americans read L Frank Baum, it might be worthwhile to note facets of The Wizard of Oz that also appear in Howard. Baum peppered his stories with moralising dictums and, as we know, Howard often adopts a moralising tone when the when the wolflike earthpower of Conan bests the sophistry of civilization.

Baum’s stories are sometimes thought of as political allegories, with large canvases of war and conquest (grotesque bloodshed, as in the arrival). In The Marvelous Land of Oz females lead an army to dethrone the men. The obvious difference is Baum’s wizards are hopeless, if charlatans; however, of all the influences on Howard, such as Jack London or Talbot Mundy, only Baum has wizardry (?)

In the film, at least, the wizard’s apparatus appears technological. If one made the assumption that the gimcracked illusions of the wizard of Oz actually worked, then one would have a perspective illusion of sorcerers run by acolytes, so it could be taken as a symptom of advanced civilization, such as Acheron in Conan the Conqueror.

Xaltotun makes the explicit statement that his allies will be vassals in the coming order

“Conan is wiser than you.. He already knows what you kings have yet to learn.. Xaltotun is the real master of the western nations… all the nations of the world we shall weld into one vast empire.” (page 168)

Of course, they will be all-powerful vassals (acolytes), that’s the attraction. In Howard’s morality, civilization degrades the raw nature of Man. If you assume, then, that he read Baum (as seems almost sure) the parallel between sorcery and technology seems quite close too.

In Howard, the muscular physique is really the ne plus ultra and signifies an earthpower as against the solar serpent of the sorcerers. In our world, the solar serpent has come to dominate, and no more so than in the news channels that bombard us with Stairway to Cleveland topics, via lenses of perspective illusion.

Has it ever struck you that there are more head-lines per square minute nowadays than probably in the entire Middle Ages? Does that not suggest to you that the head has come to dominate and that the body is inert?

Somebody to Love? page 27, Grace Slick (continued from prev.)

Why are our bodies inert? Because our physical reality is an illusion of perspective order. In Howard’s world of muscular physique, there are ancient and early physical realities of the body and of the earth. The smells of the earth, the texture of naked wood, the flaming fire. Howard’s descriptions are full of naked stone, worked wall hangings, nothing superfluous. It seems possible Howard identified his early life in quite rudimentary surroundings and the strongly felt presence of his mother with both an Earth Mother figure and an ancient predominance of the body.

Howard is never one to skimp on food and drink, or the rudiments of the home and hearth (Dorothy?)

He set the platter on the floor, and she was suddenly aware of a ravenous hunger. Making no comment, she seated herself cross-legged on the floor, and taking the dish in her lap, she began to eat, using her fingers, which were all she had in the way of table utensils. After all, adaptability is one of the tests of true aristocracy. (People of the Black Circle)

A roving warrior with a muscular physique is always going to have two paramount rituals. One is that the body needs fuel; the other is that body and clothes need periodic cleaning from sweat, filth, encrusted blood (chores of the hearth). If you imagine the young Howard was forever listening to his mother’s Celtic folk-tales, the link between early and ancient is self-evident.

Maybe Grace Slick is his soul-mate, as her disdain for etiquette is apparent

SILVER SPOON

What have such crudities to do with early or ancient physical realities of the body? Might as well ask what has Aristophanes to do with the origins of classical culture! (Pictorial 47) Slick the Earth Mother figure also opened the doorway to time in “Hyperdrive” (CH5). Physical and deadly (“Black Widow”), one of her greatest performances was captured on film at Monterey by Pennebaker, and you can tell she means every word of BE Wheeler’s ode to the power of death. Howard would probably have approved.

HIGH FLYING BIRD

Hyborian Bridge 61 (part1)

“A madman is not someone who has lost his reason but someone who has lost everything but his reason”(The False Apollo)

Or, as I like to say, one who is stuck inside their head, denying the physical reality of rudimentary living on the Earth and under the stars. The physical reality rotates under the stars above, and this is where one found the Delphic oracles, dancing in the moonlight to the strains of Chaquico on guitar from the Starship… hold on, something wrong there? Yes, of course, only women!

Mad, screeching Greek divas. After all, what makes modern Man think the universe is rational and ordered? His a priori assumptions that the head (psyche) is separate from the body (physique). The end-result of that line of thought is the universe we have of perspective boredom.

Robert Robertson, erudite and eclectic, gathered multi-lingual and multi-geographical examples of Fulling through the ages which tell the opposite story. Namely, that there are ancient and early physical (bodily) origins for human practices – cleansing skins and cloth, wool-making.

These empirical traditions (of practical or accidental discovery) continued, as previously noted of Mosaic Law (Tales of Faith 10). Only with Francis Bacon’s The New Atlantis (Drama2) was the empirical tradition abandoned for the new empirical reason (head). Bacon realized the dangers of this, which he called “The Idol of the Den”. If you say we are now in this “Den”, it is the den of acolytes. In this den, the physical, rudimentary origins of our psyche are abandoned, and we are beset by “facts” (fictions of the perspective order).

What I mean by physical, rudimentary origins are the earthily smells, physical presence of animals round Man, of rustic dances and unwashed peasants, as well as ancient arts like Fulling that are psychically very free (loose or hippy-like activities). The smells and textures of a hovel, or

Somebody to Love? Grace Slick, Warner 1998

Physical rough-play and psychic freedom are closely linked, and both are strong. Nowadays we like to be hygienic but, the fact is, being rough and unclean is just the other side of the coin to cleanliness and psychic strength (rough treatment – Hippocrates Hyborian Bridge 60) The hairshirt aesthetic.

How is it we are still in this “sane” world of acolytes continually mouthing off on the sacred principles of sorcerers? It could be a type of mass-hypnosis, and this is where Howard’s aesthetic of the warrior versus the ethete sorcerer has a lot of strength and clarity.

The Masters of Yimsha, in People of the Black Circle, are adepts at hypnosis, or the ability of the psyche to overwhelm the physical reality – and make it illusory. It’s worth going through the story a bit as the contrasts are pretty self-evident.

 

Buscema/Alcala art, Savage Sword #17

For a start, the Devi may be aristocratic and refined, but she is woman enough to not be offended by Conan’s rough ways (see Buscema/Alcala art prev.) “Adaptability is the test of true aristocracy”. Yasmina is forever clenching her hands in strident defiance, bosom heaving and her physical lustre all too plain. Conan’s muscular feat of manhandling a steaming stallion into submission is almost like a metaphor for the physical allure that plays between Devi and hill-chieftain.

Her head is already full of ways for stringing Conan to her bow – when she is spirited away by the four acolytes. These four, who defeat Khemsa with naked stares, are pure head and hardly even bother to shuffle around, ferried as they are by their conoid cloud. This is the Howard story that I would say is closest to sci-fi as Conan and his allies storm up the hill and are beset by what could be a robot hawk of “burnished steel” and combustible puff-balls.

Once past the watchtower, what they see are the fleeing acolytes falling through mist that refracts light, distorting it and the figures within it.

..there suddenly came to him Khemsa's cryptic words—"Follow the golden vein!" On the brink, under his very hand as he crouched, he found it, a thin vein of sparkling gold running from an outcropping of ore to the edge and down across the silvery floor. And he found something else, which had before been invisible to him because of the peculiar refraction of the light. The gold vein followed a narrow ramp which slanted down into the ravine, fitted with niches for hand and foot hold.

Visually, you have in the mist what could easily be a giant lens surrounding the castle of the Seers. The lens represents the reality of the Master of Yimsha, which is distorted and illusory. The psyche of the Master distorts physical reality and he is all head; his voice intones like a bell, pleasant to the ear, he is not unhandsome.

Once Conan and his allies gain access to the castle, the four acolytes put up a fight. After some bloodshed, Conan utters “an involuntary cry” and breaks free of their mental control. Rushing past the crystal sphere, “his reaction was almost without his own volition,” as he whirls to strike it.

The way to defeat an acolyte of perspective-sorcery (sun or lens Hyborian Bridge 56 “Pets”) is always with action. The muscular symmetry of the proportionate physique. Conan reacts exactly as Bruce Lee in Jeet Kune Du (The Big Pretence). There is no pre-thought, no plan, no routine and no technique – just pure instantaneous reflex.

Whereas the Masters inhabit the technical world, Lee and Conan inhabit the instinctive, primal world. What Lee says is that routines are learnt and the body honed but, in the moment it is pure action with no thought, no technique, no pre-learnt routine. Muscular coordination and conquest.

The question is, whatever we are told nowadays by the acolytes of perspective lenses, to what degree are we still ritualistic cavemen and women? Conan represents the roughness of absolute power on Earth, and not the perspective illusion of the sun.

The rough ways are reciprocated by the Devi, who has been taught a lesson in humility. Without the earthpower of the body (physique), even the mightiest of empires can fall to the acolytes of perspective illusion (head).

STAIRWAY TO CLEVELAND