Pictorial 70

Having got started on DH LawrenceThe Plumed Serpent, the tone of rampant individualism in a fluid racial societal mix has something in common with Chaykin’s American Flagg! There are various similarities. Lawrence has been accused of proto-fascism ( from the 20s) with the charismatic “cult” of Quetzalcoatl under Don Ramon gradually taking over Mexico.

The cult is a belief-system that imbues Ramon and his general Cipriano with god-like stature. Kate, the Irish aristocratic adventuress, is drawn into their mythical world; its savagery, its fascination and even

Why should I judge him? He is of the gods. And when he comes to me he lays his pure, quick flame to mine, and every time I’m a young girl again.. it leaves me insouciante.. What do I care if he kills people? His flame is young and clean. He is Huitzilpochtli, and I am Malantzi.

Cipriano is a “full-blooded Indian” whom Kate eventually marries, as the third of the deities. His dark Eros holds her in savage sway while, on a higher plateau, he a Ramon indulge in intimate yet mystical acts of unification.

Both this book and American Flagg! Posit extreme positions against the democratic capitalism run amock, and in both cases it is difficult to escape the label of fascist apologizer. The closeness of Ranger Flagg to the untouchable arm of a police state is somewhat uncomfortable.

American Flagg! #7

Both books can probably be criticised on similar grounds, and both are radical alternatives to global hegemony of one single authority: the unbroken advance of straight-line progress, represented by the dollar which symbolises the perspective of straight lines (sun, reflection). Other symbols, of the land, of blood, then become denigrated by fascistic slurs.

Both are racially frank, abusive and insulting

American Flagg! #8

The freedom to come out with racial invective is a basic human freedom because it is describing a physical reality. In The Plumed Serpent, the physical reality of Mexico is described with picturesque pathos – which is the other side of the coin.

Humans in their primitive, savage state cannot become alike, because when different things become alike they lose their vital flame. This vital fire of human society is the subject of both books. The physical reality of blood we are born into (on the battlefield), rather than a liberal abstraction (of the dollar) we are not.

This is a quote from the intro by Cedric Watts

One of the most credible passages appears at the end of Chaper 22, when common sense seeme to find its voice:

..‘Oh!’ she cried to herself. ‘For heaven’s sake let me get out of this, and back to simple human people. .. Horrible, really, both Ramon and Cipriano. And they want to put it over me, with their high-flown bunk, and their Malitzi..'

If only Kate could have maintained such scepticism about the cult and the principle of the charismatic leader, the novel would have been relatively balanced and credible. (page XVIII)

“Common sense”. The common sense of the head divorced from the vital and instinctive lusts for love and power of the physical body, in all its grandeur and honesty.

Hyborian Bridge 79

For the sun and the moon are alive, and watching with gleaming eyes.
And the earth is alive, and ready to shake off his fleas.
And the stars are ready with stones to throw in the faces of men.
And the air that blows good breath in the nostrils of people and beasts
Is ready to blow bad breath upon them, to perish them all.

The stars and the earth and the sun and the moon and the winds
Are about to dance the war dance round you, men!
When I say the word, they will start.
For sun and stars and earth and the very rains are weary
Of tossing and rolling the substance of life to your lips. (QUETZALCOATL LOOKS DOWN ON MEXICO, chapter XVI)

Quetzalcoatl is quite nasty here to the Mexicans and peons, and one could easily turn round and say: what of your own temple in Chichen Itza?

The old temples of the Mexican plateau demonstrate mastery on several levels. They have mathematical mastery of the heavenly motions. They have technical mastery of stone-masonry. And they have a great dramatic sense of staging that gathers it all together in one great showpiece at el Castillo.

These were the spring and fall equinoxes when the shadow of Kukulkan fell over the monumental shapes thrillingly, signifying the serpent’s return to Earth. Such subtle theatricality isn’t only technological since it is of the Earth, the rains and the harvest of good will.

KUKULKAN SHADOW

The view of Kukulkan descending to Earth at equinoxes is a view of cosmic reality. Such views cannot be changed – they are Earth-power – and are defined entirely by cosmic time.

The odd thing is an illusory reality has no absolute definition of time – everything is relative. But every living thing that develops in time has to have absolute time. For a living thing to develop – in the womb, say – it is exposed to cosmic time.

This is mainly carried in the water, the moon, the planets. Cosmic time is physical reality in the universe we see. Anything almost infinitely vast contains within it the idea of chance, and hence our astrological charts and mystic tarot fortune-telling.

Salvador Dali painted tarot deck (of 78). The context of Dali’s designs is

The cannon of Western art.. filled with archetypes, symbols, stories, all shimmering with meaning. (Iona McLaren, DT)

Tarot developed from the physical (cosmos) of moon, stars.. and the human figure. Symbols that have a psychic plane – as Kukulkan – as well as a physical one. The psychic plane is absolute (cosmic) time. In this plane, the human body and the moon and the sun correspond to eachother, as in a deck of tarot cards.

The problem with a relative universe of light (sun) is that there can be no absolute correspondances. An absolute correspondence is determined by the Earth, since that is the centre of the universe in terms of balance and proportion (sun, moon and planets).

Now, you can ask: where do balance and proportion come from? They come from the physical universe that we see on Earth. If you don’t think Earth is the centre of things then you’re welcome to stay in your perspective reality of light (sun, technology, straight-line advance) but it is an illusion that only has the appearance of reality (mirror, reflection Hyborian Bridge 20). It has no physical substance (body).

The Mayans and Aztecs of el Castillo were primitive in the sense of lithe, animal-like, head anchored to body, while the conquering Christians had doctrine and rule (which banned the Aztec ball-game mentioned previous post). It may be time to consider whether Christianity has tacitly entered the illusory world born of technology – a world of acolytes who worship at the shrines of dead sorcerers (head).

The universe is at one time structured and imprecise, which gives its infinite variety. If we are in an illusory reality, it is attested to by the fact that it is as precise as a hall of mirrors where each reflects the other. Each is relative to the other and each is equally real; there is no absolute physical substance, but it is all relatively convincing because it is all relative! 

Dr Strange #46

Air and water are illusory in themselves (Claimed2) but on Earth and with the approach of fire (sun) they can appear in the shape of Kukulkan, the representative of wind and rain and harvest. Kukulkan is absolute in that it’s not illusory; it partakes of all four elements, not just light (sun). The cosmic, physical reality is not as convincing as an atomic clock – but neither is it as illusory!

Once illusion becomes as fact, at the same time there is no absolute, physical substance and this was a theme of Dr Strange #47 featuring master of illusions Ikonn

 

Stern makes a play of the 60s by having the illusions of old-school convention shattered by Ikonn

 

When our illusions are vanquished, we will once again feel the wind and rain of a world that faces the cosmos physically, with its body, and that will be our destiny in the fields and forests and hills of this land – as much as in the myth-laden fields and forests and hills of Hyboria.

© BWS

Hyborian Bridge 78

The stars and the earth and the sun and the moon and the winds
Are about to dance the war dance round you, men!
When I say the word, they will start.
For sun and stars and earth and the very rains are weary
Of tossing and rolling the substance of life to your lips.
They are saying to one another: Let us make an end
Of those ill-smelling tribes of men, these frogs that can't jump,
These cocks that can't crow
These pigs that can't grunt
This flesh that smells
These words that are all flat
These money vermin.
These white men, and red men, and yellow men, and brown men, and black men
That are neither white, nor red, nor yellow, nor brown, nor black
But everyone of them dirtyish.
Let us have a spring cleaning in the world.
For men upon the body of the earth are like lice,
Devouring the earth into sores.
This is what stars and sun and earth and moon and winds and rain
Are discussing with one another; they are making ready to start.
So tell the men I am coming to,
To make themselves clean, inside and out.
To roll the grave-stone off their souls, from the cave of their bellies,
To prepare to be men. (The Plumed Serpent, chapter XVI)

From one of the hymns, QUETZALCOATL LOOKS DOWN ON MEXICO. Lawrence seems to be wrestling with the notion that the soul of Man can take the form of superstitions – like the feathered serpent – that represent a people; represent an individual in the greater whole.

Quetzalcoatl is the Moring Star – Venus, harbinger of the rains – and is wind, rain and star all together. Jesus, and the saints in their carved wooden icons, have grown tired of Mexico and the peons, and the president of the Republic, Ramon has, after a vision, called back the one god that is truly Mexican.

Why is it not – Pictorial 66 – that Jesus and the saints cannot take their places alongside such native superstitions, when all these things rely on belief? This, at any rate, is how the plot unfolds, possibly seeing as Mexicans have a certain temperament, a mixture of Spanish and peon (the mixture of Indian races like Aztec and Mayan).

Poor old Jesus and his Mother are sent back to heaven, where she sleeps on the white moon the sleep of exhaustion, while the drums thud to the hymns of Quetzalcoatl.

For the old dances of the Aztecs and the Zapotees, of all the submerged Indian races, are based upon the old, sinking bird-step of the Red Indians of the north. It is in the blood of the people; they cannot quite forget it. It comes back to them, with a sense of fear, and joy, and relief. (chapter XVII)

This reminded me of a story in DT about the revival of an ancient Aztec ball game that involves rotating the hips to hit the ball. The guys had an almost racial pride, at ease and free in themselves. It is a pretty peculiar thing that all ball games appear to be British inventions, with the exception of lacrosse!

Lawrence pursues this idea of theme and variation, largely through the persona of Ramon, who has become the voice of Quetzalcoatl – here speaking to General Cipriano.

Then I, Cipriano, I, First Man of Quetzalcoatl, with you, First Man of Huitzilopochtli, and perhaps your wife, First Woman of Itzpapalotl, could we not meet, with sure souls, the other great aristocrats of the world, the First Man of Wotan and the First Woman of Freya, First Lord of Hermes, and the Lady of Astarte, the Best-Born of Brahma, and the Son of the Greatest Dragon? I tell you, Cipriano, then the earth might rejoice, when the First Lords of the West met the First Lords of South and East, in the Valley of the Soul. Ah, the earth has Valleys of the Soul, that are not cities of commerce and industry. (chapter XVII)

If only it could be so again! General Cipriano meanwhile, is peon – or maybe hale Indian – and seems to embody the typical preference for running everything.

Cipriano in town was amusing. He seemed to exude pride and arrogant authority as he walked about. But his black eyes, glancing above his fine nose and that little goat beard, were not to be laughed at. They seemed to get everything, in the stab of a glance. A demoniacal little fellow. (chapter XVII)

The Fourth Hymn of Quetzalcoatl is probably the most intriguing, and rounds on the Mexicans and peons for their technological stupidity. That’s all very well, but why should all countries of the world be identically lit at the expense of local colour?

I’ll quote from Fourth Hymn at the end. Lawrence wrestles with these topics and it makes one wonder if there is an a priori error at the heart of technology? We live in a world of the solar serpent – which is essentially order (light) – while Quetzalcoatl represents the feathered serpent of the Morning Star (Venus) – rain, wind.

Rain and wind exist in cyclical symmetry with the Earth as it revolves in the cosmos. That is essentially a type of order – not pure order since it incorporates disorder, the tornadoes and whirlwinds, the sludge of heavenly downpours. Order and disorder have a dynamic intensity that modern life cannot abide. The reason is really that they are cyclical and incorporate regeneration at the harvest.

Our modern system of order is run by the words of acolytes, telling us what to do. It is not run by actions of nature. It is not run by the rustic actions of herds and cowboys on the range. What moderns do is put more order on top of order (“Order order”, the parliamentary refrain). It’s a type of tautology (Pictorial 67), since what is wanted is disorder that revives through the cyclical regeneration of decay and rebirth. This is also a religious question; hence the comradeship between Quetzalcoatl and Christ in The Plumed Serpent.


Those that have mastered the forces of the world, die into the forces, they have homes in death.
But you! what have you mastered, among the dragon hosts of the cosmos?
There are dragons of sun and ice, dragons of the moon and the earth, dragons of salty waters, dragons of thunder;
There is the spangled dragon of the stars at large.
And far at the centre, with one unblinking eye, the dragon of the Morning Star.

Conquer! says the Morning Star. Pass the dragons, and pass on to me.
For I am sweet, I am the last and the best, the pool of new life.
But lo! you inert ones, I will set the dragons upon you.
They shall crunch your bones.
And even then they shall spit you out, as broken-haunched dogs,
You shall have nowhere to die into. (chapter XVII)

 

Hyborian Bridge 77

The swaying expression, line-dancing, shifty footies, whether hairy or lissom, are something else. I’m talking about Coconut, natch.  The body is moral and musical in its natural movements.

Nilsson’s Caribbean-come-harmonic tendencies could almost be taken as a rebuke to the over-intellectualisation of (mainly British) prog rock. He and The Beatles got on well which, in view of Lennon’s devil-may-care personality, isn’t surprising (Pussy Cats, Nilsson’s tenth album, is their collaborative drollery).

That was when music meant something outside of profits and investing in the “rock market”. Like Elvis, it meant the gyrating body as an expressive instrument.

 

Like “the devil’s music”, DH Lawrence (Pictorial 68/69) came under sustained fire from the establishment for his dirty ways with the body. The fact that he married Freda, a German, gave them more ammunition for slanderous claims during the Great War.

The Introduction to Apocalypse is written as a letter to Frieda Lawrence by a guy called Aldington, who must have known them, and it’s worth quoting a few extracts.

The rejection of the sovereignty of the intellect is the cause of much of the misunderstanding and hostility Lawrence endured. It made him look like a crank, and thereby estranged the intellectuals.. Thus while Lawrence informed mankind they were scarcely living at all, they retorted by calling him a cretin, a sewer, and a pornographist. A sad imbroglio. (cf  Alan Moore Lost Girls). Page XVI

His ideas on sexual liberation strike me as no different to Paul Kantner’s in the 60sw and, as previously stated, the liberation of the body was found in rustic pursuits such as Fulling (Hyborian Bridge 60). What leapt out was this quote.

Before Lawrence, the primacy of the intellect had been doubted by Bergson, the psychology of the unconscious had been formulated by Freud (ps and Jung), and the whole system of values of European civilization had been rejected in their different ways by Tolstoy and Nietzsche, and even Dostoievsky. Lawrence differs from them, partly because he was English, but chiefly because he was essentially a poet – a poet who for various reasons found his more effective medium was prose. Page XV

This paints the impression that not only is there an anti-intellectual trend in Western thought (to the mainstream), but the poetic stream of consciousness is a close connection to the American anti-intellectual Howard (ps Nietzsche also is a poet).

Both Lawrence and Howard were convinced that Western civilization was following a wrong path, a falsity that had death at its conclusion (Weird 8). As Aldington says, these things are difficult to pin down in words, and Lawrence’s poetic Mexican jaunt, The Plumed Serpent, is full of esoteric symbolism and blushing colours.

Yes, but it still begs the question, is a universe which is very convincing to the intellect actually a mirage? Which comes first, poetry or intellect?

Poetry is strong, passionate, fiery. Lawrence’s Apocalypse  is about his rejection of the fiery rhetoric of Revelations. So another question is: what is the truth of poetry?

As previously noted, if we live in an illusory reality, the fact that it’s very convincing is meaningless. The world it describes is not the reality that is poetic revelation.

So, what is that reality? It’s a physical reality that describes the cosmos we see with our eyes. It contains the general and the particular; therefore it also has to contain different viewpoints – such as Lawrence’s intensity of personal sexual experience in the cosmos.

Do you follow the point? The cosmos has no one single viewpoint or perspective vision (sun). That is death. Our experience can reach to the cosmos, but without the experience we are nothing.

Lawrence wanted (liked) that experience and, in his American way, so did Howard. One thing about the State, it’s not the pivotal obstacle to experience. That is the intellect that tells us our bodies are just adjuncts to a world of brain and machine-brains.

This is the death-force of Western civilization; the solar serpent of the head, tongue clacking insistently, eyes drilling into our consciousness.

Whether Howard, Lawrence, Nietzsche or any of the others (Jean-Luc Godard is another, as is Jean-Jacque Rousseau), there are claims that the Western civilization we live in takes away our intensity of sensation, our experience of the cosmos. As human beings, they’re our lives and natural justice says we should be able to live them.

CAN’T GETCHA OUT OF MY MIND

(The road to Mexico and The Plumed Serpent)

Hyborian Bridge 76

EVERYBODY’S TALKING

So, the offhand reference to Fleabag Pictorial 69 was that everyone’s talking and staring at the camera. Fleabag is ostensibly about horniness but actually about going away from the expressive body of Man.

My position is that everything is an illusion except the physical reality (Aristotelian teleology – the mind can’t exist without the body). How cultures develop means to transmit information, first with books (storytelling). Modern society has many different ways to transmit information and it’s all illusory without the elements of storytelling or melody (emotion).

It’s like the scene in They Live! Where Piper dons his glasses and suddenly sees the real images appearing on ads and magazines. The previous images have no meaning, no “story”, and he sees the real story. If that happened with Fleabag you would see the solar serpent, tongue clacking-away, a symbol of Eros run amock. What is missing is missing is the physical, moral substance of the body that glides about the dancefloor (as in Mon Pere, Ce Heros), the body that is expressive as opposed to an adjunct of a runaway head. The body that lopes like a wolf with spear in hand; the body that adopts stances of readiness; the play-fight of two bodies together (also in Mon Pere, Ce Heros).

In short, the entire smorgasbord of actions a body has that show its moral, physical status. In a society of a million words a second, is it all actually illusion and not physical reality? Hyborian Bridge 62/1 - it’s all relatively convincing since the people who write are trained acolytes of sorcerers (Adam Smith, Darwin etc.)

The same post mentions that in The Wizard of Oz, the wizard is a flawed technologist, which gives a link between wizards and technology that Howard probably would have read when young.

I was trying to get at a link between the early years of Howard, and the physical crudities of early life, and the ancient physical reality of the body. Two of the rituals are food and cleansing, and in his tales he is never a stickler for etiquette.

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) Hyborian Bridge 61/2

Conan would be regularly drenched in sweat, dirt, dried blood, and cleaning would be an indispensable ritual. The earthiness of the life is also brought out in smells, descriptions of naked stone, worked wall hangings etc.

This atmosphere of the rudimentary earth is both early and ancient, and would be contained in the Celtic folk-tales of his mother. The predominance of the melodic body in folk-tales counteracts the predominance of technology and news-copy that would have been apparent in the 20s/30s (nowadays “opinion”, which is just even more words!)

The world of the head was rapidly advancing, and to Howard the crudities of the body were the physical reality that infused his writing. These crudities are both early and ancient, so there could be a link between the two in the folk-tales of his mother.

Stories that have a melodic phrasing, like the Homeric sagas, stories of heroes skipping over the ocean like a song. The moral and physical is what myths are made of. This ancient world of figures in the sky is the proportionate cosmos, the general sense we get of the universe. It is not actually illusory, since it is simply what we see, in the physical sense.

Since Newton, the general, proportionate universe has been on the wane and, seemingly, we now live in a world of inductive reason from experiment. The original experiment with light (C6) has now given way to an entire universe grounded in perspective illusion, since that is attractive to acolytes.

Whereas in fact nature is a maelstrom of fishes and forms feeding and diving from the waves, from the clouds, we are led to believe it is an exercise in competitive order. In fact it is disordered, as the prey and the carrion rot and the carcasses regenerate the substance of the earth.

Pure order is an illusion borne of perspective (light). But a perspective illusion is highly convincing to acolytes (and sometimes barbarians Hyborian Bridge 20), and so their torrents of words pour forth. We, as a human race, should never pay too much attention to words that are not stories, not melodies, that have no emotion, since they come from the disembodied head (of the solar serpent).

Conan, in The Tower of the Elephant, speaks with moral authority.

He had entered the part of the city reserved for the temples. On all sides of him they glittered white in the starlight—snowy marble pillars and golden domes and silver arches, shrines of Zamora's myriad strange gods. He did not trouble his head about them; he knew that Zamora's religion, like all things of a civilized, long-settled people, was intricate and complex, and had lost most of the pristine essence in a maze of formulas and rituals. He had squatted for hours in the courtyard of the philosophers, listening to the arguments of theologians and teachers, and come away in a haze of bewilderment, sure of only one thing, and that, that they were all touched in the head.

Words which are unattached to the body lose their spirit – since body has spirit (Aristotle) – only a dead body has lost its soul. This from an inhabitant of Gettysburg, a town caught between two rival “cultures”.

Ruth Dunlap, 60, owner of Dunlap’s Steak and Seafood Diner, used to have two televisions, one tuned to CNN, the other to Fox News. Republicans and Democrats both got wound up. “I just got tired of hearing the comments,” said Mrs Dunlap. “So I just said, you know what, I’m turning them off. Now we have sports and the Weather Channel, which is much better.” (DT)

COCONUT

Pictorial 69

WINDOWS OF HEAVEN

As the LP’s title implies, Kantner once more finds himself gazing both inward and upward at the wonders of the psyche and the cosmos. Granted, he doesn’t always discern much of a difference. Rolling Stone

HAVE YOU SEEN THE STARS TONIGHT?

An online reviewer said Kantner “may be confused – aren’t we all?” which seems about right. I mean, if advance has been an exercise in entering an illusory hall of mirrors devised by arcane sorcerers, that is an intentionally confusing situation.

How, for instance, is it conceivable that photography is an illusion? Or recorded music? Photography is light, while recorded music is sound vibrations. Well, it’s the old chestnut that everything could be an illusion, so how do we know it isn’t? (Hyborian Bridge 37); in terms of phenomenology, everything is data (Dark Star Pictorial 21)

The real point is music isn’t data, it’s musical so affects our emotions. Photography and cinema have stories that are myth-making, glamorous. So, the idea that everything is illusory has to take into account emotion and storytelling.

The story of New York; the city of a thousand stories (O’Henry)

LIZA MINNELLI

Then, you could go back to 50s EC comics’ stories of invisible invasions and infiltrations of the highest echelons (They Live!) The illusion I’m talking about is an effect of light – reflection, perspective – and so is completely realistic.

A good example to take is the Hong Kong disturbances. For five months nothing physical has happened – only sound and fury caught on social media. Why haven’t they physically taken over the government? Because they believe their social media acts are physical acts. That is confusion (they get shot).

A physical act involves the physical overwhelming of one group by another. A rebellion or revolution. In the modern scene we only talk and take images. In other words, where there are no physical acts that produce physical results, we live in an illusory state (the whole of China is such a state.)

In China they have storytelling and music – but they cannot be related to physical reality, only to the illusory non-physical reality. In western culture the situation is more complex.

All you can really say is the ’68 rebellion and the hippy state of mind have gone and been replaced by words and images. The physical state of being is not there (Gilets Jaune in France do have a physical encampment of guys who seem happy to coexist fraternally, but no sign of it spreading).

It seems to be what happens is that the stories that do well are those that affect the heads of people, and to that extent are non-physical (body).

For example, Game of Thrones is highly political only with gratuitous blood. If you compare old-time cowboy films, they are highly physical action in remote landscapes and the physical action is usually highly moral (communal). Anti-social elements are carefully delineated. The moral tone is physically quite clear-cut.

In Spaghetti Westerns, it is still quite clear that the money-grabbing anti-hero has moral scruples. This physical, moral world is no longer present in western culture, as I see it. This is the world that Howard’s historical adventures describe in all its purity. The physical, moral world is not ruled by man (politicians) but by the spirit of place and the spirit of people.

In The Sowers of the Thunder, Red Cahal relates the news of the fall of Jerusalem to a stunned retainer.

“Jerusalem – taken?” he mouthed stupidly. “Why, good sir, that cannot be! How would God allow his Holy City to fall into the hands of the infidels?” (page 276)

The Machiavellian wiles of Baibars that ally him with the red-winged infidel make him the villain of the piece.

“I have conquered,” answered Baibars, shaken for the first time in his wild life, “but I am half blind – and of what avail to slay men of that breed? They will come again and again, riding to death like a feast because of the restlessness of their souls, through all the centuries.” (page 289)

Unexpected romance peppers the yarns, as when the Masked Knight is shown to be none other than his treacherous lady love, gone in penance to the Holy Land.

“Ah, Cahal, I have done bitter penance! I have died for the Cross this day, like a knight.”

(Page 287)

John Watkiss

These are stories with romantic melodies set against the physical, moral tone of faith and the great cities of the Earth. As Nietzsche said, “Without music, life would be a mistake” and psalms and songs speak to the spirit of Man in the cosmos. Howard, as a type of primitive, sees through to the essential meaning of living, which is to perceive melody in the way things move both on Earth and in the heavens above.

The psyche is a mirror to the cosmos which is borne of primitive lusts. Living is a primitive act, a romantic playing out of lusts. Without the romance (melody) one is left with the Machiavellian brain which seeks to affect the head alone through words and expression – would that be Waller-Bridge?

I guess that might cause a culture-shock, but I’m comparing it with Mon Pere, Ce Heros  (C5) which has scenes of sensual dancing amidst remote seashores and plant-life galore. The modern mind, being “advanced”, is always going away from the primitive, sensual body, when it is the body that expresses life and lust.

Without that, without melody, we are the prisoners of a land of pure mental illusion.

So he stayed in the cave in the peace and delight of being in touch, delighting to hear the sea, and the rain on the earth, and to see one white-and-gold narcissus bowing wet, and still wet. And he said: ‘This is the great atonement, the being in touch. The grey sea and the rain, the wet narcissus and the woman I wait for, the invisible Isis and the unseen sun are all in touch, and at one.’ (DH Lawrence, The Man who Died, prev.)

Strong, primitive feelings to do with life and death, moral issues of good and evil alongside the feeling of cosmos and psyche. Such primitive descriptions are at the polar opposite to weasel words of clever heads, or of machines that imitate them.

Pictorial 68

A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm. A robot must obey orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

Ah yes, Isaac Asimov’s1950s classically logical 3 laws of robotics – who could improve on them? Mathematics prodigy Stuart Russell, of CHAI Berkeley, has stepped into the breach with

 

Deep thought or shallow throat? Pictorial 1

 

This to me was proof that “they” are all the same. After all, “human behaviour” could be anything from Palaeolithic hunter-gatherers to Neolithic proto-city dwellers to Modern Man.

It’s clear he doesn’t mean human behaviour in the slightest; only the behaviour of the human head when attached to algorithms that facilitate its behaviour. I propose to take this as the ultimate example and prototype of everything else in the modern scene. When “they” say human they mean the detached head that is attached to a machine-facilitator.

To “them” this feeds their egos since they are in a perspective illusion of light (electronics) as opposed to the physic al universe of balance and proportion under the cosmos of stars.

This latter universe is the universe of moral squareness where Man faces his destiny in the flesh and blood movements of action. These are the bastions that have been declared off-limits by the acolytes of perspective illusion – the straight-line logic of finance oiled by words of weasel politicians.

The athletic movements and lifedeath economics of cowboys on the west and meatyards on the east (Pictorial 27). The rumble of buffalo hoofs and the holler of Indian braves. This is human behaviour in the realistic sense of the proportionate balance of the body-in-action.

In that sense, Howard’s historical adventures are realistic and not overburdened with facts that may have the effect of hurting the head without the startlingly grand vistas evoked by prosody.

The moon was setting as Cahal splashed through the calm waters of the Jordan, flecked with the mirrored stars. The sun was rising when his horse fell at the gate of Jerusalem that opens on the Damascus road. Cahal staggered up, half dead himself, and gazing on the crumbled ruins of the shattered walls, he groaned aloud. On foot he hurried forward and a group of placid Syrians watched him curiously. A bearded Flemish man-at-arms came forward, trailing his pike. Cahal snatched a wine-flask that hung at the soldier’s girdle and emptied it at one draft.

“Lead me to the patriarch,” he gasped throatily. “Doom rides on swift hoofs to Jerusalem – ha!”

 (The Sowers of the Thunder, Sword Woman and other Historical Adventures,

page 269)

John Watkiss

The great cities of those far off days – Vienna, Alexandria, Samarcand, Athens – existed under the cosmic symmetry of a physical reality that escapes Modern Man. We who live under the authority of straight-lines and words (Pictorial 67) can no more experience the power and glory of the physical shape of the universe.

That is to say, the universe that reveals its shape in the emanation of psyche. The universe that has an uncertain timescape related to movements of planets (Hyborian Bridge 67). In this setting, there can be no human authority, since none can command the planets.

The physical reality that emanates psyche is distinctly primitive, since there are no straight-lines, nor accurate Rolex watches. Nevertheless, one experiences primitive things and one can’t experience accuracy.

Accuracy is simply the convincing illusion that approaches the vanishing point of technique, or nothingness. One experiences time through the body as a visceral process – the eternal sunset – the power and the glory.

member of Tembe tribe, Alto Rio Guama

el Borak by Jim & Ruth Keegan

Coco Gauff

BWS Fantastic Islands

Howard’s historical adventures take place in a universe that echoes the physical power and glory of the human figure. It’s a universe where the general prospect is mythical, where figures stride like giant shadows over fiery landscapes.

Is it coincidence that the image of a cowboy riding into the sunset has a similar giant shadow? The frontier society departs from straight-line orthodoxy. We are still prisoners of inductive reason and Newton’s knives (C7 etc); prisoners of acolytes who speak because they cannot act.

 

Pictorial 67

It was the mania of cities and societies and hosts, to lay a compulsion upon a man, upon all men. For men and women alike were mad with the egoistic fear of their own nothingness. (page 146)

Lawrence is talking about death, and it could be said that a world without death has no destiny, no cyclical sense, only the strident march of advance ever-onward into the nothingness of the future. Maybe so, but nature has its own “strident advance” (Pictorial 66.) The two types oppose one another in every way. The society of cities is authoritarian and – save a few examples like Detroit – follows a straight-line unbroken progress.

The origin of straight –line progress is the sorcery of light (C4 reflection, perspective). Our authority is simply a parallel system (sun). The certainty of this system is substantiated by words, the words of acolytes – financial, political – of the sorcerous system of straight lines (of light).

So, outside of this system is the Earth power that has a glorious simplicity. In this alternate system we can contemplate on the majesty of unthinking nature. In the beginning was poetry.

The strident advances of nature are cyclical, as Earth turns her face to the sun or moon, exists in the forests that Modern Man fears as enclaves of ragged lines and sensual uncertainty; of human dreams in the cosmos; of the mythology of dreams (Pictorial 64 etc.) Here, Man hunts under the pale white moon of Artemis, blood flows and the lifecycle of decay and regeneration is reestablished.

If you call that the pre-industrial world, then it may take atavistic types like DH Lawrence and Howard to physically think themselves back to the world of bodies-in-motion in a romantic landscape of poetry as opposed to facts (words).

 

 

 C7 - C11

Have you ever wondered why entrepreneurial business types are always so preternaturally confident? They pretty damn near have to be, seeing as they live in a convincing illusion of perspective vision, a vision that feeds into their sense of ego.

Where Pictorial 66 says “You can’t think ABOUT thought”, this is because the perspective illusion is also the world of neverending words, a type of nothingness, or saying the same thing differently (tautology). In themselves words may be accurate, but they refer to an inward-looking system of the ego, and not to the wider system of planets and a cosmic labyrinth.

But the man looked at the vivid stars before dawn, as they rained down to the sea, and the dog-star (Sirius) green towards the sea’s rim. And he thought: ‘How plastic it is, how full of curves and folds like an invisible rose of dark-petalled openness that shows where the dew touches its darkness! (page 169)

Don’t get me wrong; I’ve nothing against superhighways and hopping around by plane or on Harley Davidson. However, the egoists are under the impression this system of staright lines keeps expanding till that is all there is.

On the contrary, there are two systems which oppose one another. One is an electronic brain that feeds the ego, originating from the light of the sun. The other is a labyrinth of fear that faces a cosmic spendour.

The fear is of everything the ego isn’t; the flesh of the animal; blood, bone, the sudden death and the regenerative cycle of lifedeath. In a word, it is antiauthoritarianism. Authority, in our system, means straight lines, and this perspective illusion feeds into the ego of those people – whether financial or political or business – who confidently tells us what they think and what we should think.

That’s why it’s a neverending nothingness that runs round again to the preternatural ego of the guys like Boris Johnson who have no doubts. Doubt only comes out of the cosmic wonder that is reality (the stars). I noticed, reading about Uninhabitable by David Wallis-Wells – the bestseller on our frightening climate prospects – that the author is one of the square-jawed ‘I’m right and I know it’ types.

The other is that young Swede (not square-jawed, square-faced). How is it that they know what is a very complex situation? I suspect they are confident in their own egos. Then there’s Prince Harry who is also confident he’s right; what they never have the gumption to say is the one thing that might be right. That we should look squarely at the cosmos which is vast and to which our own world’s vastness is but a speck.

In material terms ($) we are nothing. In cosmic and psychic terms we are the stars and planets (Hyborian Bridge 67). If the physical world we live in faces the cosmos squarely, we can be sure that our moral state and our destinies are on sure footing. It’s big a scary and it dents the ego – and that could also be a description of Howard’s historical adventures (and Weird Tales C20).

There are also small and dainty naturalistic moments. It’s poetry and motion and not egotistical fact that the likes of Mantel are prone to.