Combination of the Two (13)

HB9
”At first there was nothing. Then beaches appeared after the film And God Created Woman. Each was different, funny and unconventional. There was joy, it was a symbol of freedom.. But with this reorganization project, this beach will become monotone when it was so charming. It’s tragic.” (Bardot in DT on demise of St Tropez, 20th July)

If anything smacks of physical fertility in a habitat to match it’s the Bardot of the 50s and 60s (HB9). “Convincing rightness” is the language of the dollar which monetises (numerically) previously pristine landscapes; a compulsion of the (acolyte) head that is most complete in transhumanism.

This is the favoured realm of Musk; an algorithmic habitat where the monetary/numerical have a convincing rightness of straight-lines, hyperloops, speed.

Hyborian Bridge 9 picked-up on Stuart Hameroff of Quantum Consciousness (a transhuman application) and I basically said that from sensual movement (of a worm) you get a powerful symbolism (of action). Of rebirth, of creation from destruction.

Consciousness isn’t a “thing in itself” (numerical quantity); it’s sensual reality, active (Pictorial 46) and from that it’s symbolic. Actually, I was looking up Hameroff online and got instead Dawkins and Branson; just goes to show they’re all the same thing.

Along with publicists like Michael Anissimov, they inhabit a universe of “convincing rightness”, straight-lines and speed. In their universe there is no Bardot of sensual fertile beaches with scuttling crabs.

Sensual movement (of a worm, of the moon) in their universe doesn’t exist’ and so the powerful symbolism of action, of decay and rebirth also doesn’t exist. The dream of the universe; the sinuous serpent of the unconscious weaving between pleasure and reason (cave, treasure Pictorial 1).

“Convincing rightness” is the realm of rational consciousness as opposed to the sensual unconscious (which is reality). The more convincing it gets, the more straight-line, numerical (dollar) hyperlooped speed, the less real is our sensual (free-thinking, irrational) subconscious.

Transhumanism is simply the ultimate face of a modern order that destroys primordial shape. The shape that is the simple and communal presence of a Hyborian city-state. Just as the 14^th century chansons of Lescurel have the stately bearing of communal settings of grace and distinction, so the clamour and throng of a city-state are its distinctive bearing.

What is this living presence? It is something disordered and irrational, the smell of sea breezes, the sound of sea shanties, lusty voices raised by the decaying wharves.

AMSTERDAM

A symbol of freedom is not order, and particularly not a competitive one. An order where trade is “convincingly right” in dollar, numerical terms of perspective and speed; the order of the (acolyte) head where the immaterial becomes real (algorithms) and fact becomes fiction.

Their cold-blooded compulsion of a numerical order – irrespective of physical desirability, irrespective of the universe as it was known in the Middle Ages – Newton Combination of the Two (6) – irrespective of physical reality (rotation of Earth against the cosmos).

This is where it gets quite thorny, since Newton was known as a physicist (originally Natural Philosophy). Yet optics (“Opticks”) is the study of the immaterial (light) and the end-product of that line of research is Relativity (to the sun).

That entire branch of physics is induced from Newton’s research into light (C6), which seems to be why the universe is no longer deduced from the general – the physical reality of moon and stars and planets – but induced from what is really the immaterial (Newton’s knives C5).

This is why it seems quite reasonable to say an induced universe is sorcerous, and parallel to the physically desirable one. Since so much of physics is Newtonian, it is certainly not as material as “they” (and Madonna) would have us think! One ends up with transhumanism and Anissimov’s “accelerating future”, which is basically quantum physics (numerical) and not physical reality, which is the sensual grace of the human habitation – the Hyborian city-state.

The numerical compulsion of the mind that looks at a “convincing rightness” (of the sun) is actually the end-product of “accelerating future”; quantum consciousness (which doesn’t exist) and the black hole of immateriality (Hyborian Bridge 56). As a side-note, I attended a meeting of self-employed types and got reels of figures recited by rote; what universe is that? The modern.

These compulsions work irrespective of primordial rhythm, primordial shape, which are the basic fabric of the universe and of our unconscious (Pictorial 1). The physical universe; strong and simple but also subtle since without the simplicity (shape) the complex whole will just be complex and not graceful and sure, like the seaborne Valeria.

(after BWS)

Combination of the Two (12)

frontispiece Savage Sword #47

Those three Hikers of C11 were consulting ordnance survey which gives you the topography of the landscape, like in those traditional old-school maps. Heights and features like woods, steams, bridleways. It struck me old-school landscapes are fairly organic; after all, this is the living planet.

In any organic system, shape is paramount. As Hyborian Bridge 61/4 says, molecules – particularly the proteins and hormones that control the body – depend on shape-recognition, like a jigsaw. That simplicity enables the vastly complex functioning.

If you take a typical medieval illustration – it could be anything – this is the sleeve for Veritas recordings of Binchois, Lescurel 14^th, 15^th centuries rondeau, virelai (Alternates 4)

 

What you tend to get are very easy-to-get shapes that could almost be models. Everything is fairly flat and one shape dovetails into another – could be horse, angel, minstrel, boat..

So, you could assume that in the Middle Ages almost everything was shape-dependent, there being no appreciable anatomy or perspective – in pictures foreshortening, distance. Is it possible, then, that these two Renaissance techniques can destroy shape? In a very gnarly landscape or a very gnarly harbour district (say) the irregularity of interweaving lines, contours of all descriptions prioritises everything away from straight-line perspective.

If you say that perspective is order (sun, light C4, 5) then disorder is an area which is less perspective-oriented. It could be a rocky copse, a hillocky hillwith rabbit droppings and rotten tree stumps dotted around along with a ruined chapel, slabs of worn stone, a few tall poplars with ambling branches surmounting an irregular stream with a rickety bridge –

 

BWS Cimmeria Weird 10

The extreme irregularity of moss, lichen, tangled roots on a forest floor is an area of shape-dependency and supplies habitats for innumerable creepy-crawlies. So, disorder is extremely shapely, whereas order has much simpler shapes – see Ayn Rand Pictorial 46.

Acolytes are attracted to pure order which feeds their numerical compulsion (C11). This compulsion is irrespective of physical desirability; which really means disorder, or the fertility of the earth we live on. Pure order is therefore a type of compulsion of the head (of acolytes)which goes against physical fertility, or the shapes of tangled wood, earth, organic humus (decayed matter).

The physical fertile reality that those hikers from C11 were surveying is built on shape. Actually, human beings are also built on shape, as opposed to the immaterial head! It takes a shapely human figure to navigate a hillocky habitat.

There are two types of habitats. One has lifts (elevators) and clean lines a la Rand; the other is hillocky with steep angles fit for a Cimmerian to climb. One habitat is perspective-oriented (sun, light C4, 5); the other is shape and growth – decay and regeneration.

This is the luxurious green and gold landscape of Diana, hounds, baying beneath the moon. This is where I think it pays to say that this habitat is also a type of rebellion, just as Weird Tales was a type of primitive rebellion against straight-line progressive-thinking

 Hugh Rankin illo to Red Nails

That’s one reason why our modernday acolytes have so much in common with Howard’s sorcerers who seek to crush the physical and intellectual freedom of Conan, Valeria and others. Whereas they may use dangerous rites or slithering snakes, ours use the cold-blooded compulsion of a numerical order, irrespective of physical desirability.

The area of Valeria is the area where physical rebelliousness and intellectual freedom exist. A shapely habitat for a shapely form; the two are completely interdependent.

Savage Tales #2 Red Nails

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In the scene from Gods in Chaos where Choublanc abdicates in favour of Nikopol, the feral pet Gogol draws blood in an unprovoked attack on the governor’s tattooed visage. This is what unruly physicality has to say to the pomposity of dictatorial minds!

The dictatorial mind molds in its own image the resplendent planet of archaic vintage, which in our era is the language of the wormdollar. The dollar represents competitive order of perspective (sun).

You guys in America probably know that Brexit has been going on for awhile now. I just saw in DT Yanis Veroufakis – ex Greek finance minister and now running MeRA25 a new Greek party – has a lot to say on the matter. Yanis is so typical of the academics who are seduced by a perspective reality of the dollar (or Euro) because the head itself is a perspective system (electromagnetism C4, 5)

Our reality of pure order is bound to seduce heads which admire logical argument, but it is pure illusion. Appearances are very convincing BECAUSE it is a perspective illusion. The physical reality is that Earth faces the cosmos of stars and planets. Artemis, huntress of the moon; also the capricious god Dionysus and satyrs of the wooded groves.

It’s like a vicious circle since the more convincing our illusion of perspective – the more hyperloops, drones, speed – the more convinced are the heads who babble away in their illusions of the (hubristic) mind.

All this can be torn asunder with sheer physicality, as Gogol does to Choublanc. The unruly and the Earthbound reclaim the planet of myth, the one that Howard took to atavistic heights of blood and wanderlust.

The lifestyle is unruly, the physicality hits you. If you look at this photo you could be forgiven for thinking it’s some Indian game reserve instead of a rubbish dump!

 

"ragpicker" in Gauhati

Scavengers relish rubbish and their activity is the intrusion of nature that is strong and free. The scene you see is ruled by nature and not by the wormdollar. I’m not saying it’s cool, just that it’s a freedom of unruly physique and vagrant psyche. In other words, it’s not an order (diktat) of the head; it’s a freedom (physical) of the body, and so has the strength of activity.

Where you have freedom of activity (Man, animal, plant) there is a primeval rhythm that connects things, an irrational crowding, standing around and surveying the scene, flapping, scrabbling, hunting for trinkets.

Where the head is running things (as Modi might in India) the first things you get are perspective and hygiene (tidiness). Instead of animals wandering around (holy cows), birds flapping, humans pottering you would tend to get rational indices; numbers indicating scales and grades and levels of progress.

I quoted Grace Slick in Hyborian Bridge 62/1 on the “anal-compulsive” attachment to numbers (Lindsay Anderson also makes a similar reference in O Lucky Man Alternates 4). Whereas numbers in a physical world are usually irrelevant – with all the irrational crowding on Indian trains – in a perspective world numbers become attached to the compulsive head.

Because this universe is not physical – freely active – numbers are its compulsion, whether or not it is physically desirable. Hence Slick’s comment is very applicable. The freedom of the body to be active is basic to human desire. Here’s a picture I found of 30s hikers that might be seen to be slightly Enid Blyton, but it struck me there is a strong affinity to Howard

 

stylised realism, Hikers by James Walker Tucker

Female figures in loose garments pursuing outdoor activities with vigour and resolve; consulting a chart with close attention to detail in their quest for the wizard’s tomb (or whatever). It’s a picture of physical and intellectual freedom modernity has lost sight of.

Without the physical freedom the psyche cannot emanate (Blavatsky, prev), and remains stultified by the perspective order of countless acolytes. Note that the picture has decisive detail fairly irrespective of distance giving a sort of flattened perspective which has a sort of psychic energy – compare with BWS prints Hyborian Bridge 21.

Combination of the Two (10)

 

The dream of the universe; a train-ride through an African dream. Beware! I suppose Bilal could be saying here (bottom panel) as the unsavoury KKDZO have appropriated his Ark, and assigned to it scientific indices. This is what science as a methodology has done, by assigning to nature indices of rule in a competitive order, when in forest of night only the unruly rule; swooping predators and timid prey; the primeval rhythm.

 

This is where Niko becomes a type of scientific experiment hooked into his own head, mistaken for Nikopol (top) - see “Pets” Hyborian Bridge 56

The irrational side of the pulps I guess comes out full heartedly in Weird Tales, and it was the one where Howard sought to put distance between the scripted mind of civilization, with his blend of sorcerous deviltry versus the honed resolve of muscular might. The battle is fought in the irrational world of monumental city-states and jewelled kingdom.

If the sorcerer were to win they might establish a kingdom of civilized order such as our own. In Hyboria no doubt the sorcerer would rule, but in our own world no one rules save the cursed acolytes – the true believers. These are the ones who worship “The Idol of the Den”, the world of the head, and of Bilal’s “scientific indices” that assign a rational score, a numerical index, thus taking it out of the physical sphere.

The physical sphere is the strength of the cycle of life and death, of decay and regeneration, that enables the luxurious form of Diana to go bounding over hill and dale in search of prey. The springy terrain is ancient with the eternal cycle of the leaves that fall, the hounds that spring, carrion that is prey to scavengers of every type, heartless tricksters of the skyborne night.

Where things are unruly, the planets rule, travel is not about destination but about carefree spontaneity. Where the sun rules, travel is all destination and indices on graphs. As I tend to say, this has the effect of making things relate to the head, the non-physical head that is the vanishing point of technique (“speed”).

Here’s the latest on hyperloops, a guy called Giegel who is building trial roads in India for Branson. Giegel, like all these types, is convinced he’s on the right lines because he lives in the world of perspective or convincing illusion (sun). He calls himself an engineer but it’s obvious these things are run by algorithms, same as the rockets of Musk (for whom he used to work, natch.) Like CERN, they build pure perspective, and a hygienic science that convinces the head with indices, numbers, and not physical reality trundling through the jungle night in steam and fury.

One reality is directed at the head (electromagnetism); the other is a physical reality that the body experiences in all its chaotic, animal splendour. If one reality can be called relativity (to the sun), the other is absolute to the Earth of the psychic realm of planets, of the physical twins Artemis and Apollo, of Diana of the bounding fens and springy ferns.

One is weakness of disproportionate head; the other is strength of the proportionate body where the physicality hits you and the psyche emanates from the unruly physique. We’re back with the pulps, and I took a few notes on The Sword of Rhiannon (Leigh Brackett) which seems to take equally from Howard and CL Moore.

Rhiannon was the one who gave the Serpent race scientific knowledge in Mars’s past; Earthman Carse travels there through the tomb that binds the cursed one, and they become mentally joined. Brackett makes quite a big thing of the immateriality of the mind. When Carse is tried for his treasonous joining with the cursed one, the learned of both sea and air are there.

Their eyes were the most awful things Carse had ever seen. For they were young with an alien sort of youth that was not of the body and in them was a wisdom and a strength that frightened him.. Looking up he saw on the shadowy ledges three brooding figures, the old, old eagles of the Sky Folk with tired wings, and in their faces too the light of wisdom divorced from flesh. (page 84)

Later, Rhiannon is forced to speak through the mouth of Carse, and explains

“I fitted the immaterial electric web of my mind into his brain. I could not dominate him, for his brain was alien and different.. I thought that through him I might find a way to crush the Serpent whom I raised from the dust to my sorrow long ago.” (page 88)

As Brackett implies, the mind is electrochemical impulses, not physical reality, and it is the cold-blooded serpent who are most suited to this solar reality (needing heat). This is also why, here on Earth, we are run by serpent acolytes of dead sorcerers, convinced by the electromagnetic universe; built of perspective, harnessing speed or the vanishing point of technique.

The narcissistic tendency of technicians to value their own minds (over physicality) contributes to the malaise. The malaise being that hygienic science is not a physical reality; it is a production of the electromagnetic universe (light, sun, speed).

In Greek mythology, Apollo is appearance, not reality. The lusty, carefree abandon of satyrs in woodland groves is what has been lost to alien science. Appearance is very convincing, but it’s immaterial, a reflection of a reflection.

There has to be a reason for travel, and the only possible reason is physical since the brain itself is only electromagnetic impulses. These impulses are convincing, but they are immaterial. The more narcissistic we (or “they”) get, the more immaterial our civilization, the more we become mere impulses (like Niko/ Nikopol).

If this is a solar (non-physical) reality, the alternative is Earth facing the stars, the planets, sun and moon. Diana bounding through night-dark forests, the twang of the bow, the bark of the deer, drops of blood on rustic fern of green.

This sort of lifestyle is untidy and unruly, unhygienic and dirty – and that is its physical strength. It’s Enid Blyton as well as the pulps. It’s the primal strength of Man amongst the physical cosmos of stars that give life meaning. Anything else is a convincing illusion of the mind; a mere immaterial impulse that disconnects us from the physical body.

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The Nikopol Trilogy starts with the hibernetic return from deep space of Nikopol and his encounter with the renegade Horus, and their pursuit by the inhabitants of a floating pyramid.. which continues into The Woman Trap. The woman being Jill Bioskop, reporter in a London that reminds one rather heavily of Alphaville.. as does Berlin which she heads for after the apparent murder of her Alpharatzian friend.

All three cities – including the Paris of part one – are like hermetic encapsulations of something from the 30s. In Berlin, the scene outside the cabaret; the acrobatic elegance of high board divers in sophisticated foyers (again, there is a similar scene in Alphaville – somewhat bloody – and blood flows through The Woman Trap, enwrapping the luxurious body of Bioskop.

 

Jill’s in Berlin ostensibly to cover the return of the deep space Europa 1 but, of course, “rockets are boring”. Part 2 ends with the three of them heading south on a madcap adventure, still pursued by the pyramid.

All this, I have to say, reminds me of the idea of decrepit travel in package steamers from Neptune. One travels, not to arrive, but in the Homeric sense of experiencing sun, sea, waves, spray, the decline of the day (with a margarita).

“I can see the stars tonight
would you like to go up on A deck and look at them with me
I can see the stars tonight
would you like to go out for a stroll and keep me company” (Have You Seen the Stars Tonight?)

Sings Kantner on Blows, in the same light-hearted way. The adventure is an alternate passage away from scripted space travel of the rational mind, and towards the wanton thrill of the chase.

For Nikopol this starts with Jill, but he drops her at the start of Cold Equator and heads for the deep interior, where Niko chases him. What’s with the wild animals that seem so at home on the south-bound train? Niko (son of Nikopol) even has a drink with them and gets ratted.

 

Again, it could be travel not just in the physical sense, but in the sense of putting distance between the rational, scripted mind of civilization.

The animals are game for a laugh, and could almost be viewed as Claude Levi-Strauss’s intermediaries – neither prey nor predator (prev.) On the way down, Bilal has a running gag about fake scales (7.3 on the Steiner scale) and counts (450,000 citizens killed).

The “scientifically pure indices” are “their” standard way of keeping us in line, by giving everything a number and rational score. “Chessboxing” seems like another typical gag since the scales for the mind and body have utterly no connection!

 

A lot of modern life is like that. I just read of a fungus hybridised with killer funnel-web spider DNA that kills mosquitoes

Things that have no connection in nature usually it is a bad idea to splice. If you go to a wild bit of growth that’s been left awhile, what you might get is brambles, sputum, a lot of insects, birds that feed off them, sedge and stones and snails and worms. What connects the species is the predator-prey cycle, the build-up of humus (decayed matter), the strength and fertility of the wild patch.

Nothing can replace that strength; it builds-up over time and is intricate with nooks and crannies. The intricacy of strength provides homes for innumerable bugs and beasties; it’s a mixture of dirt and cleanliness.

Modern hygienic science tries to do without that cycle, and so loses the strength. Their hybridised forms are signs of weakness. They cover up their weakness with “scientifically pure indices”; scales and grades and numbers.

Grades of weakness, because strength is simply earth, air, water, plant, animal undivided and free. It’s the Africa that Laurens Van der Post speaks of (). So, the decrepit train ride with smells and beasts is a sort of metaphor for travel and adventure; where the physicality hits you and where the psyche is free.

It’s the other side of blood and the chase, where animals dose on the bough and idly eye eachother; where the Ark-like differences are raw and untamed. The utterly irrational crowded together is the spirit of freedom – physique and psyche. A journey through a dream. The dream of the universe. The psyche emanates from the unruly physique, and this harks back to Madame Blavatsky’s Theosophy.

Where things are unruly, the archaic bloodlust peaks beneath the surface and establishes a rapport with beasts. I happened to read an article on the unruly Bloomsbury sisters – Margery, Brynhild, Daphne and Noel Olivier.

“Usually rather serious and always noble in looks and manners and in attitude of mind, they could be as unthinkingly cruel as savages. Sometimes they were savages.”.. “ Shocking flirts, and their manners were disgraceful.”(DT)

Their beastliness was described by Noel

she and her sisters “can bear with all kinds of folk at first, extracting from them what is good until they are, as it were, boiled dry; whereupon we at last look at them critically and […] conceive for them a bitter contempt and ennui.” 

This is the medievalist world of psychic differences where we are ruled by planets and not by the scales and grades and numbers of “scientific indices”. The order of the sun, a mirage in the desert (of the wormdollar).

The pulp universe of Madame Blavatsky’s planets was taken-up by Talbot Mundy, and in 1975 BWS came out with The Book of Samothrace (Pictorial 50/1) I hazarded that the book was the flaming sun, but another way of viewing it is as a prophecy of solar expansion, one that produces mirror-images (reflections) in a perspective universe.

In the world of reflections there is no freedom, only order. Who are the free spirits of the modern world? There are some tramps in my neighbourhood who had a local feature written on their plight; they are the closest I can think of!

Diagnosed with schizoaffective disorder, she had been on an anti-psychotic medication for 15 years. When she was unable to get this from a GP after moving back to Folkestone around seven years ago, she said her symptoms increasingly affected her state of mind. She said: “All five of my senses, I get hallucinations, I hear voices, I get visual hallucinations, tactile hallucinations.”

For him, reading provides a temporary escape. “I want to go back to college,” he said. “I would love to do graphic design. “Michaela is brilliant at drawing but she has learning difficulties, so you get people looking down on her.”

Combination of the Two (8)

In Gods in Chaos, physical divinities of Earthly proportion are hovering in their pyramid. Perhaps that is spirit hovering – the psychic aspect of the physical? Sun and moon are physical twins on Earth and that is proportionate strength.

Newton scattered light (sun) with his experimental knives (C5) and that is the parallel reality we are in. Travelling or colonising space, as Musk &Co plan, only makes that much more obvious. Space is not a physical environment; it consists mainly of light and to a certain extent travel will be an algorithmic experience of the head.

The environment is technical since light consists of three technical elements. Electricity (e-), magnetic lines (flux) and induced movement (in electricity of magnetic coils). If, let’s say, they start mining asteroids they might find platinum which is used for coating conductors. So you might get more platinum phones.

Everything they get in space will plug into the head, or go to supply energy (He 3+), energy that goes to power devices that plug into the head! You’re travelling in a perspective parallel reality because that is what light consists of. The travel is to a large extent illusory; mainly of the head in algorithmic space.

In order to travel physically in space you’d have to do something like 2001: A Space Odyssey and have a very attractive Earth-type culture complete with Johann Strauss waltzes! You’d have to have gravity (centrifugal – the ferris) and preferably gardens a la Silent Running, and even nuns of the veil nebula and backyard planetoids like Starstruck.

All of that might just be possible, if we (or “they”) didn’t already live in their heads that are buzzing with dollar-signs and off-planet algorithms. With the likes of Musk, there’s zero chance of a Paul Kantner-esque romantic hippy space odyssey.

Space is not a physical medium; Kantner, if you listen to Starship (HYborian Bridge 62/2) visualizes a community aboard with hippy pantechnicons and hydroponic gardens, tripping types with few clothes and babes-in-arms.

The beauty of Starstruck is its physical cultures are almost all irrational. It’s probably the closest of the sci-fi universes to Baudelaire’s “The priest, the knight, the poet” (C7). There are the ever occurring nuns of the cloistered veil; there are Galatia 9 and Brucilla who make fair chivalrous knights. As for poetry, how about this scene of a dandy at Freebetter’s Dome with a resplendent Kalif Bajar?

 

© Elaine Lee/MW Kaluta

Kalif’s sister is the poetic genius behind “Mind Spiders from the Planet Xenon”. These thoroughly irrational space universes are the complete alternative to what “they” are going to give us. They have to be created; the creative force, the poet. The range of fashion alone in Starstruck is astonishing! It has to be built of air, water, green grass, caverns.. to have a physicality.

 

© Elaine Lee/MW Kaluta

An alternative space culture means a lot of building to create the physicality, the lived-in monumentality, and that’s not a business proposition, it’s a poetic act (see Tales of Faith 7 on high altitude dirigibles)

What “they” give us is space per se; which is just the techniques that the medium of light allow; there is no physicality and there is no psyche. The pulp writers such as Leigh Brackett who write of Mars are writing of the psyche of the planet from an Earth perspective (as with Northwest of Earth).

The buildings, monuments, canyons, canals and denizens are full of poetry because of the build-up of psyche in the physical universe. Ancient and timelost, this is an Earth perspective of the planet because Earth is the physical planet.

Without the physical, space is the domain of the insubstantial head, and that is the prospect “they” have in mind. To what extent, then, is the Mars of

 

actually nostalgia for the lost physicality of planet earth? Yes, it’s still there, but our psychic attachment to it is being retarded by the year. The two aspects connect us to a planet, to a place.

Bilal’s monumental depictions of cities – Paris, London, Berlin – in the Nikopol Trilogy are supposedly set in the years 2023-2025

 

 

© Bilal The Woman Trap

The beat-up grandeur of the London Savoy is very reminiscent of the beaten-up grandeur of Paris in Godard’s Alphaville. Godard uses subdued light effects while Bilal uses ice-cream colors and sculturesque shapes, figures, fashions.

 

© Bilal The Woman Trap

To what extent are all these pulpsters’ ostensibly sci-fi fantasies actually nostalgia for physicality? Where there is powerful – and decrepit – physicality, there is psyche. The two are inextricably linked.

Leigh Brackett, like CL Moore before her, seems to be writing of the dreamlike essence of Mars – as a dream-planet of the human psyche. Edmund Hamilton (her husband) quotes her “incurable romanticism”

It still persists, and she maintains that when the first astronauts land on Mars they will find dead cities, fierce riders and wicked, beautiful queens.. just as in this book. (preface)

When Mars was proved not to support life she stopped writing of it and created another fantasy world. All these pulpsters are writing of planets as they would write of Earth; in a physically nostalgic way. Earth is the physical planet and, from an Earth perspective, other planets are psyche.

Nikopol in Greek means City of Victory, which almost stands for the foundations of European culture. The foundations are of proportionate monuments that stand foursquare for the human figure and its relation to the cosmos.

The human figure is a physical reality; the human head is as insubstantial as light. The future we are entering is an illusion of light, and the monumentalism of the pulps is going in an alternate direction; if not back to classical Greece and lost gods of the Pharaohs. This seems a good place to bring in Howard (next)>

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There is a Franco-American alternative stream that encompasses the symbolist poets and reactionary medievalism. Bilal, in Gods in Chaos, quotes Baudelaire, the poet of the weeping city. Bilal is a master at drawing the minutae of really decrepit cities, especially fantastically stained walls.

I realized just recently that French city walls are exercises in painterly decay, grimy and pure poetry in sandstone.

(Lyon)

They say Bilal is influenced by fairy tale illustrator Gustav Dore - or is it more like realism a la Francais?-  the symbolist strain gotten from Edgar Allan Poe through to Arthur Rimbaud. In order to appreciate the bloody minded irrationality, one has to go back to Joseph de Maistre, the Savoyan medievalist.

Though de Maistre had a mystical almost Platonic idea of “divine rule” by monarchy (and church), he also admired the decisive man-of-action. In his eyes, there was no decision in rationality, only the irrational believer can know their own minds.

Baudelaire followed this critique with, “The priest, the knight, the poet; to know, to kill, to create.” They are counter-the-Enlightenment philosophy of Francis Bacon (Pictorial 22), and Baudelaire thought that rational government was simply a recipe for chaos.

These French dreamers, right the way through to Bilal – who’s French but of Yugoslav extraction – were temperamental rebels against solar Enlightenment (see The Magic Flute Hyborian Bridge 27)

The solar Enlightenment informs you of what’s true, rather than one knowing in one’s own mind. They are completely contrary views. One believes in an earthly figure, like Christ, and will kill in their name and make poems to the sacrifice. The other only believes in rational argument.

But this is where de Maistre’s critique of Bacon comes in. If (Hyborian Bridge 61/1) we are in The Idol of the Den, then we are in the head and not the body. The facts we are given are induced by the head of acolytes from observation of experiment.

The world we are in is an induction and not proportionate of body, sun, moon (and maybe Holy Ghost). That is why we seem to resemble the “Pets” of Traylor’s poem (Hyborian Bridge 56)

 Like pets, we are told everything EXCEPT everything we see for ourselves; such as body, sun, moon (and maybe Holy Ghost). The physical and the psychic worlds are out of our reach; that is what “they” tell us.

Nevertheless, that is what we see in the sky at night, the lusty moon shining through the

“forest wind’s going to blow all my cares away

My mind’s wandering like the wild geese in the west” (I know You Rider)

This is where French dirt comes in, or just laissez-faire grime. Bilal depicts the city as poetry, which is not clean; it’s a mixture of dirt and cleanliness (the washtub.) These French poets are rebelling against a Puritanical parallel reality that has its origins in Bacon, then Newton, and which became the Anglo-world we know (or think we do).. of sorcerers’ acolytes.

Pilote in the 70s contains more than its share of like-minded treatises – Caza, F’Murr etc Pictorial 14. It does seem likely that Howard’s characters contain more than a hint of this Frenchness, even if they are often thought of as very American or Celtic.

Norman knights figure predominantly in his medieval adventures round Outremer and all points east (Norman Irish too). Of course, Agnes is a French swordswoman. Incidentally, CL Moore couldn’t have read this when she wrote Jirel of Joiry, though I’ve heard it said Jirel is her take on Howard’s sword and sorcery.

From what I’ve said previously, one way to look at sword and sorcery is as a knightly rebellion against rule by the disproportionate head – the solar serpent; the man-serpents of Thoth Amon. In a likewise way, French poets were rebelling against the Puritanical Enlightenment, or rule by head (acolytes of observational experiment).

A recent example of head versus body is this piece on the APR’s plan to reintroduce bison to Montana, where ranchers still herd cattle by horseback.

What we see is a great opportunity for us to co-exist.. we want to restore the native species on the landscape and cattle were not a native species, so we just have two different views of the best use of this primary habitat. (Beth Saboe of APR)

The APR wants to reintroduce bison as a natural native species that grazes the plains, and understandably cowboys feel themselves threatened. Unless they introduce natural predators of bison, like wolves, the ecology is seriously unbalanced.

The APR obviously wants to employ managed culls that produce the desirable ecology, which the cowboys fear will be without their ranches. What no one seems to have pointed out is, where you have cowboys, herds, bison and horses there once would have been Indians to control the native species!

That is a hunting ecology, which doesn’t fit with the APR’s rationalist bias that it’s better to manage things than to have them manage themselves. Anything that runs itself is active; physically active communities running over the landscape, hunting in packs. To “them” that is irrational, and that’s totally true.

Hunting, and blood, the kill, the dismembering of the carcass, the carrion crows, everything of that type of landscape and traditional hunting way of life is irrational. It’s also strong and lives off the decay and regeneration of the prairie. Modern management does not see that as fitting for humans because they want hygienic ventures for us, if not for animals (Drama3)


This goes back to the two contrary pictures, between on the one hand Rand and on the other French wildness (Pictorial 46) represented by

 

Alternates 6

Rand is the figurehead for the world of convincing perspective, which is another word for absence of decadence, the strength gained by rundown water-mills, the irregularity of wood and stone, overgrown prairie grass, scythe and butterflies, the cycle of decay and revival.

This is the setting for the picture of Perrine in her gumboots. Utilitarian clothes for utilitarian activities of the body expressing its physicality in run-down situations. The sort of setting that in French bande desinnee  often becomes imbued with decadence, in the sense of risqué behaviour. The two type of physical action are not necessarily separated, at least they overlap.

Jean-Claude Servais art Malmaison (A Suivre 1983)

Another example from France is Moebius’s The Airtight Garage, which ends when Major Grubert leaves the fantastical garage via a door into our own reality. Our own reality, hence, is only “parallel”, consisting of only straight lines and parallel tracks (this is Moebius’s ending, not Moorcock’s who wrote the original fantasy!)

Tales of Faith 12

What “they” always presume is that the convincing parallel world of straight lines is reality, the one we apparently live in. Rand represents the appeal of this in soaring monuments to the dollar, all as insubstantial as a forest of mirrors. The fantastical delusion of acolytes who can all trace their ancestry to the original sorcerer of knives that scatter light and let in a parallel universe. It’s convincing, and gets more so by the year.

As Fontella Bass says,

HOW STRANGE