Pictorial 102

Fishing is a good example of a line that has movement in a wilderness situation. In fact, the final long story in Papa Hemingway’s short story collection Big Two-hearted River Part 1 and 2 is about a lone fishing trip.

It is a very descriptive piece so a few quotes are in order.

Nick stood up. He leaned his back against the weight of his pack where it rested upright on the stump and got his arms through the shoulder straps. He stood with his pack on his back on the brow of the hill looking out across the country toward the distant river and then struck down the hillside away from the road. Underfoot the ground was good walking. Two hundred yards down the hillside the fire-line stopped. Then it was sweet-fern, growing ankle high, to walk through, and clumps of jack pines; a long undulating country with frequent rises and descents, sandy underfoot and the country alive again. (page 140)

Nick has hiked from Seney, which has been burned-out, and is on the trail of trout.

 

It gets even better than that as he prepares to pitch camp.

 

(page 143)

There’s several pages on just boiling coffee. Nick uses the “Hopkins” method, who was a friend who struck it rich in Texas. They were all going fishing again next summer but never saw Hopkins again. (page 145). That could be a pointed reference to the dollar breaking up communal bonds, as the Hop Head gave his .22 to Nick and his camera to Bill “to remember him by.”

We live in a world where the biggest company is a grocery, remember? Nick’s camp is very atmospheric, colored in shades of green and dusky brown, sweet-fern smells and ready for the kill.

There follows a long sequence on the techniques of fishing for trout with captured grasshoppers that went right over my head. One grisly aspect that stayed with me.

(page 151)

The impression I got was that pitching tents and fishing have techniques that are seriously real, but not heavy. The question is: why is the modern world so heavy?

Because a straight-line order is applied to all aspects – including pleasure. Meaning pleasure is supposedly an aspect of reason. But Nick’s pleasure is purely in soaking up the indifference of nature; the drowsy grasshoppers harvested under a log; the ferns crunching underfoot; really everything that is sensational and atmospheric in nature.

Alongside this, he employs techniques of hiking, pitching and fishing that are seriously real. But nothing is heavy since he is only an interloper in the pristine wilderness of line and movement that is Mother Nature.

In other words, he’s experiencing reality, and applying technique to it. The two are two different things. In a sorcerous reality, straight line reason is applied to pleasure; meaning that the reality itself – the primal serpent of myth – is null and void.

In Jean-Luc Godard’s Weekend (prev) capitalism is a hole with no sexual specifications or power (a repository). The sexual side of things comes from reality itself; from fecundity and the predator-prey cycle.

Underlying fecundity is the primal serpent of line and movement, which the sorcerous reality deems null and void. Amazon can give you anything – but it can’t give you that.

Man needs to breed well, which means not to be told everything – in a straight-line world – but to experience line and movement in rough areas alongside wilderness. It’s not a case of racialism; it’s being real in a world of life and death that breeds strength in places of rough abandon and power.

ONE PLUS ONE/SYMPATHY FOR THE DEVIL I point you to the bookstore scene (apparently not on YouTube owing to the smut) with no comment, as about three things are happening simultaneously (4/5 in).

Those who deny this are just misguided, like the Vegans who jumped Biden. It’s not so surprising, as they are bombarded by straight-line advance and logistical economics, but it can only lead to one thing. A repository that is to all intents a type of nothingness, physically and psychically and in terms of psychological content and strong style.

Pictorial 101

Howard’s historical adventures are “not under the dominion of fact” (do you know the source of this quote?)

The real question is: is the information we are given by “them” actually a sorcerous illusion that has its predecessor in Francis Bacon’s The New Atlantis, which foresaw “The Idol of the Den”?
Information is not actually reality – which is line and movement – but is numerical and attractive to the ego. It seems like it might very well fit and convinces the ego with numbers, but it is a fact rather than an actual process of transformation such as predator-prey.

 

Information replaces process with numbers, and rough abandon with straight lines. We are persuaded by flow-charts when only rough abandon contains the line and movement that give strength to nature.

The worm, the carrion crow, the blade of grass stirring in the breeze. The waving and diving and wriggling could be likened to the primordial serpent that is the active force in nature. The serpent is dangerous and powerful and sexual and in myth the warrior of pure spirit conquers it. You can say “myth is not fact” but, as stated above, information contains no line and movement, no rough abandon, no regrowth.

Information persuades the ego with numbers which, in an electrical future, can lead to a straight line world where numbers become expressive via algorithms (prev.) It’s a copy of reality born of physical boredom whereby the numerical and sexual become one.

I’m calling that a sorcerous illusion because it is not the physical roughness which alone supplies strength in the abandon that leads to regrowth. The realm of the gay frolicking Dionysus and the vine.

The sorcerous illusion of electricity is null and void, or what you could call a mere hole (see Weekend). I’m reading Papa Hemingway’s short story collection The Snows of Kilimanjaro (Penguin) and it was fantastically obvious how physically acute was the writing.

In the title story, a guy is rotting from the leg up from gangrene, and the pustulence and smell pursue the reader across the open Savanah. He tosses off phrases like “urine-yellow” and writes about lumberjacks as much as about failed writers on safaris.

In The Three-day Blow,

There was a big fire in the fire place. The wind made it roar. Bill shut the door. (page 59)

In patent clipped phrases, natch. Later, Nick

..had noticed while looking into the fire that the fire was dying down..

‘Bring one of the big beech chunks,’ Bill said. He was also being consciously practical..

He came in carrying the log and Bill got up from the chair and helped him put it on the fire.

‘That’s a swell log,’ Nick said.

‘I’d been saving it for the bad weather,’ Bill said. ‘A log like that will burn all night.’

‘There’ll be coals left to start the fire in the morning,’ Nick said.

‘That’s right,’ Bill agreed. They were conducting the conversation on a high plane. (page 64)

Yeah, it is a physical plane that can affect the psychical one! That’s because we live in a physical world of the body and not a numerical one of the head.

If the old bear was off on a jaunt and a wind blew up, he might get cold and start a fire. It’s a physical situation, not a numerical one. That’s the difference between Papa’s latter day fairy tales of dark candour, and the sorcerous information that is algorithmically expressed via an emotional net. One is manly, rough. The other isn’t.

Papa is channelling the caveman who lives physically like the animals and for whom the fire is his strength, his psychic charm against the terrors of the night. Animals live physically from which the psyche emerges in the form of behaviour (instinct). Do you see where this is heading?

Information is not physical; flow-charts are not line and movement; electricity is straight lines (algorithms). The entire spectrum convinces the ego with a type of nothingness of numbers, powered by electricity via algorithmic imitations of heads (prev.)

Once the numerical can have expression – as with the previous example – “they” will write a story to facilitate the use of algorithmic faces (in ads or messengers or maybe sex-robots). It’s a good copy, but without the physical reality – that is built of line and movement – there is no psyche (soul). There is no psychological content (behaviour) or strong style.

I was watching seagulls wheeling on the beach and it’s clear they have a psyche (behaviour) directed at scavenging sand the sea and being irritable. It’s simple but real, like staring at a fire, and has strong style, cartoony form that is strong and pure.

Why do seagulls scavenge? To fulfil their lifecycle as seagulls. So, in other words, they are living things (that die). All these fairly obvious observations go straight under the heads of our masters, who think everything can be a copy and therefore nothing.

Seagulls inhabit littoral areas which are quite rough and tidepool-like, where the physical has a distinctive psychic content of freewheeling seaborne ways.

Wild Horses

I might have said awhile ago that where I am an archaic lobster mural

C6

got obliterated by a new “creative quarter” development? The naïve simplicity of the mural was more to my taste, reflecting the seaborne ways of this ancient southeast port.

Many things are “before information” (a priori). The primal serpent; the symmetry of sun and moon. Day and night; social order and rustic disorder; Apollo and Dionysus; straight line certainty and the harmonic womb.

This entire mythical dimension of line and movement is lacking in a world which is merely a convincing copy. The ones who run this world – our masters – are weak because they deal in methodical tidiness. Whether it’s Netanyahu with his West Bank numbers, or Merkel with her lumpen frau grin/grimace, they are masters of expression in a world that is null and void.

They are the acolytes of a sorcerous illusion that convinces the ego by means of straight lines and numbers, flow-charts and information theory. Yes, it convinces the tame ego, not the body that roams the wilderness by horse and hunt, that needs fire for warmth and to eat (canned beans) and where physical needs impinge on the psyche in the shape of woodsmoke and carefree campfire ways.

Pictorial 100

If we live in the era of appearance (Apollo) then it’s not also green, since the two are different. While electricity is expressionless light (P97 Edison) representing capital-economics, woodsmoke or candle-light are a hazy combination of shadow and light that impinges on the psyche (P96 The Norse Shaman).

The point is that nature isn’t just appearance; it’s transformation from one thing to another. From wood to charcoal (woodsmoke). Diana runs through the woods with her bow firing at stray deer. The hunt; life becomes death; there is carrion and carrion-feeders.

The life of the hunt is quintessentially green because it involves cyclical processes of lifedeath. A hunter is liable to start a campfire since they live an active life in the woods. The carbon emitted goes into the carbon-cycle, which is an active process of renewal between plants and animals.

 (Pocket Chemistry)

This is the physical world that affects or impinges on the psyche of Man, the active hunter and gatherer of yore. The problem with electricity is it’s immaterial and so has no expression. It’s the predecessor to a robot future whereby facts (numbers) are given expression via algorithms – see the Japanese animated face (P96 made in Japan)

The expression is a good copy but has no psychic content (soul). Someone can write a story for it, so the problem is how to say if the story is true or false?
The only real way to do that is physically via the predator-prey cycle of lifedeath.

 

Anything that is physically active in nature has a lifecycle that decays and renews. That is not appearance, but it is green. But that is not what “they” are telling us, which is that everything electrical is green and we should not make woodfires.

Electricity is immaterial and doesn’t relate physically to the human psyche as woodsmoke does. What you could say is an electrical future is very difficult to tell fact from fiction because of this lack of physicality.

Yet this is the future they are selling as green, particularly through mouthpieces such as Greta, the Swedish climate activist. They are really selling a cyber-future – one that is null and void – masquerading as green. Greta is really spearheading a movement whereby humans and algorithms become more and more indistinguishable, owing to the lack of physical reality, our lack of contact with predator-prey relationships and other psychically influential realities such as woodsmoke.

 

 

The problem is that the carbon-cycle is a branch of familiar scientific information founded on fact. A fact is nor expressive, so it doesn’t tell you that woodsmoke or a diving falcon have an influence on the psyche.

It’s something you could guess, but it doesn’t amount to scientifically accurate information. The carbon-cycle is usually used as something abstract that happens to be out there and that numbers are attached to.

The expressive factor consists of line and movement: the world that Doug Wildey cartoons in Rio. The world of expression is different to the world of information in that it has a roughness, a toughness, a sense of abandonment, of things that are just left to be under the stars above.

 

That world is not straight lines – which is represented by electricity. It is not appearance (Apollo); it is transformation from decay to growth and back again.

Within this world one can build straight lines, have industries and combustion (see chart); but they are still two different worlds. The wild roughness where rebirth springs is the realm of lusty Dionysus.

 

The problem with information theory and flow-charts like this is it doesn’t tells us that not everything is order and information. There is disorder and expression – line and movement.

Rather than the carbon-cycle being an abstract phenomenon of numbers, it is a product of line and movement in a process of decay and rebirth. We as humans are products of line and movement and not of number.

It is the strength of roughness in nature and the abandonment that leads to regrowth. This land is the land of Dionysus and his donkey, of rebel-rousing ranch-hands. People who build campfirtes on the prairie.

The rough strength of nature that influences the psyche isn’t necessarily apparent in a flow-chart where it may seem to be the case that electricity can reduce the carbon-output of combustion (fossil fuels).

Yes, it can, but that’s just numbers. It doesn’t include the psychological human component of rough influence in nature.

There’s also the question of light; a starless sky is psychologically different to a star-filled one (Grace Slick, prev.) The reason has to be that electricity is an immaterial order, outside of the physical influence on human psyche.

I don’t want to cast aspersions on Greta, but it could be she is used by “them” as justification for a cyber-future that is essentially null and void, whereby numbers become expressive, or the numerical and sexual become one (though physical boredom).

Is the future they dance eagerly towards.. The Pied Piper of Hamelin..

.. in the shape of the human algorithm? It’s not enough for people to have expression. They also have to have a physical reality that is rough and tough, where there is a sense of abandon that leads to regrowth. The land of Dionysus and his donkey and not of Apollo and image.

Pictorial 99

You start out thinking Rio is one of the most nicely balanced Westerns, between Indian and cowboy, mighty landscapes and miniature townscapes.

The Indians in The Hide Butchers are portrayed as savages, merciless killers of cavalry troops who yet have a code of honour that repays Rio with his life (and horse).

Gradually it dawns on one that the stories aren’t as impartial as might first appear; this is borne out in probably the best finished yarn, Red Dust in Tombstone. As you are aware, the Earp brothers shot down the Clanton ranch gang at the OK Corral, and this story follows the aftermath. Wyatt is now a bona fide legend of the Old West and running for Sheriff, while Virgil is Marshal.

Several things in the story point to Wildey’s not liking the Earps, and having vastly more affinity for the wild, rowdy rough-house characters of the frankly irrational old west. This could include the Clantons. In the one scene they are pictured, Wyatt is philandering between two women, and makes a short speech on the merits of electricity.

“Tie that bull outside”

, is the Clantons rebuff, as they yeehaw out of town.

 

Mind you, I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with the female element brightening up the promenades.

 

What Wildey is good at is the rough-hewn textures of roads, walls and stairs where nothing is ever straight. The rough and beaten road contains less order than will subsequently appear, but has a virile sense of languid figures owning the place.

The symmetries of the body in an old west setting have a fluid sense of power that really gives the scene meaning. In the days before electricity, all the gear such as wagons is run by humans and animals in a cooperative way that engenders a feeling of harmony.

The harmonic or female vibe is very evident in the macho context. Now, I’m not saying in a Luddite way that electricity is all nasty; I’m saying that this time – and setting – just after the shootout at the OK Corral was when an industrial change took place that is only now finalising.

Electricity isn’t bad in itself – as can be seen from 50s scenes of Harlem that are fairly similar and rickety (P95). It’s only a function like any other. But there is an order implicit in electricity that has the capability of changing the symmetries and harmonics that you see here.

Electricity is the device that enables the logistics of capital-economics to vastly outweigh the harmonics of a commune. The Earps, with their passion for order, are the first to usher in this new era. In their zeal, they almost resemble killer-robots.

 

Further on, Doc Holliday foils a fake lawman’s attempt on Wyatt’s life, and Wildey carries on the electrical zeal with the notion that the plot was hatched by the gaslight company!

 

Wildey has a nice line in shadow that calls to mind Grace Slick’s quote on the aesthetics of 1790 versus 1990 (Prev.)

 

Gaslight or candle-light certainly engenders a communal harmonic in a way electricity doesn’t (as in Barry Lyndon

)

 

The way Wyatt equates it with order makes it clear that he is a forerunner of the modern order of capital-economics vis-a-vis the gentler, feminine harmonic of the commune.

The order itself (light) is essentially Apollo, meaning appearance.

 

Appearance is everything in the modern order. However in nature appearances are constantly changing. Buffy Saint-Marie’s (98 ) motto of “dry it out” so that dried buffalo manure makes campfires is very germain. Other things occupy this such as song in the communal atmosphere of a campfire.

The strength of nature works in transformation, leading to regrowth and renewal. Whereas Apollo is simply “the appearance of order”, a natural transformation is strength and fertility. Dionysus, the wild, lusty god of the vine.

 

 

Pictorial 98

Mr Howard’s Son weaves a droll bit of Western tomfoolery around the legend of the James brothers. Here, Bob Ford buttonholes Rio while his brother Charley waits. Later..

 

Frank James survived the numerous sprees, and wasn’t averse to quote Shakespeare and Francis Bacon (The Old West Gunfighters, TimeLife, 1974 page 56)

 

(Page 87)

Wildey is clearly an admirer, and portrays Jesse almost like A Marvel superhero (having started his career drawing Atlas westerns). I’ll get back to Wildey’s plot presently, but Frank’s espousal of Bacon caught my eye.

As previously noted, The New Atlantis is the basis of all later scientific methodology involving gathering data (facts) from the natural world, and conducting experiments. In a way, this process of induction has been vastly profitable (eg Newton’s optics.)

What exactly is wrong about it was foreseen by Bacon’s 4 Idols (Tales of Faith 10.) “The Idol of the Den” being the type of mind that correlates facts. With Newton’s optics, science enters a world of appearance (Apollo) – as opposed to reality.

That is the world we are in, where appearances are highly convincing to the ego, but also illusory. What is missing is the physical substance, consisting of line and movement. This is the world cartoonists like Wildey explore with atmospheric grace.

Cartooning explores line and movement – ie action – while appearance is just accuracy. Hence, The Idol of the Den – appearance – convinces a certain type of mind that is numerical and egotistical. This is where methodology has brought us.

Again, as stated in P93, the movements of the moon and the spin of the Earth are actions that take away the dominance of the sun (light) by having the moon as the equal-and-opposite partner. While the sun is straight lines (perspective), sun and moon combined are the symmetry of movement. In a world of facts, symmetry can be ignored since it basically isn’t part of the experiment.

So, for example, DNA is “fact” but not the symmetry of the body. The Japanese animated face (P96) is not a whole body. “The Idol of the Den” – or a certain type of mind – is convinced of these “facts”. Meanwhile, the symmetries of the body are ignored. By that I mean up-down, left-right, back-front – see Weird 11 “The Enchantment”.

Facts are often things which have no symmetrical basis in the world, but are numerical and therefore convincing. The whole of economics, as well as DNA, algorithms and so on. The problem is that symmetry is probably a-priori to fact. All atoms have symmetrical orbits; galaxies are spiral. A human body above all has a back and a front; a top and a bottom; a left and a right.

From this comes meaning and power – for details see W11 above. So a world of facts (The Idol of the Den) is highly convincing and numerical, but with no intrinsic symmetries. In a sense it is null and void – hence the metaphor from P97. Meaning and power are derived from manhood and maidenhood and strong symmetries. The universe is sexual while the world of facts is asexual; the universe is active while the world of facts is inert.

This seems to relate to the entire “industry” of green. Buffy Saint-Marie’s motto HB70 (link to Andrea Warner) of drying things out, making fires of dried buffalo manure, is a process of disorder that changes something into a useful product. The appearance is changed through the process of drying.

This happens a lot in nature so that useless things are changed to useful ones. In nature, appearances change through processes of decay and renewal (action). That is a good description of “green” yet it is exactly the opposite of what “they” mean. Usually they mean hygienic tidiness and the use of electricity for travel. But electricity – P97 – is not green! It is expressionless light that cannot be burned as wood can.

What “they” say is that electricity is green, while wood-burning is not, but the reverse is true. Electricity simply creates a world that is null and void, that has no physical substance, that is just light (electromagnetism).

This world is numerical (algorithms), whereby the numerical and the sexual become one through physical boredom (the Japanese animated head). It’s not green; it’s psychically dead, psychotic.

A green world is an active one where Man is free to work among trees, to make log cabins and log fires. This world has symmetries that place Man in a landscape of sky-Earth, day-night. The world of symmetries is much simpler than a numerical/electrical one. They’re trying to persuade us that black is white, but the reality is that a forest is a forest and some things never change.

Trees have roots and they aspire to the sky. It’s simple and true rather than complicated and false.

(page 66)

Woodsmoke is a physical substance that has line and movement and that impinges on our psyche as we gaze into its depths (P96). The romance of such an image is intrinsically outdoor and active. It is the body as a symmetrical construct of nature in a milieu that supplies story and myth.

What “they” offer is “the mirror of nothingness” (electromagnetism); appearance without the meaning or power of a world of physical substance.

Pictorial 97

Man has gazed into the flickering flames of the campfire for thousands of years (The Norse Shaman prev.) The rapid combination of shadow and flame acts on the visual apparatus of the neural cortex to induce dreamlike states.

The same holds of the flickering flames of candle-lit medieval halls. Man’s old and fierce friend fire has fed his dreams as well as his belly since the dawn of prehistory.

 

Does that mean that Man’s dreams came to a stumbling stop with the invention of electric bulbs in about 1880 by Edison? Certainly after that period dullsville entered Man’s life in the shape of industrial products – not to mention industrial warfare.

 

Doug Wildey’s Rio is set round about that time, when frontier towns were the crucible of in industrial advances that were fated to tame the West and drive (pun?) the cowboy off the plains. Just at this time, halls are still lit by flickering wicks, and seemingly the only electrical appliance is the telegraph.

 

Wildey’s artwork is highly atmospheric – somewhat indebted to Caniff – and his linework conveys the shimmering shadowy disorder of the times

 

The ruffians of a border stronghold in riotous mood

The fact that undulating, shadowy line creates a sense of reality is quite germaine to the idea that an electrical universe – the one we now inhabit – is a factual illusion.

As was said back in HB75 facts or precise data are one side of the universe (like DNA). The other side is the experience of undulating lines in our bodies, in the landscape. Line and movement are explored in cartooning; the reality of expression that has a serpentine, primitive rhythm HB91

Another form of this line is the hazy shadow and flame of a log fire. A line that is expressive in that sense is not electrical. This argument is slightly muddied by music, since a musical line of an electric guitar expresses the movements of the fingers of the person playing it.

A lot of the sounds we hear electrically are non-electronic. Similarly, a lot of the sights we see are au naturelle. So, what I’m really saying is electricity is an illusion; the reality is the organic line that has musical expression.

Electricity can only copy this accurately, but is itself expressionless. This points to the fact there is no line in an expressionless world of light; this affects our psyche badly, starting from about 1880 with Edison’s invention of the electric bulb.

This brings in a very interesting question, since we are told now that electricity is a “green future” (eg by the small Swede). However, psychically-speaking, electricity is null and void only able to copy (or repeat) organic sights and sounds.

If we live in a reality of constant electrical copying, it should be obvious from that that electromagnetism is not the reality, only what it is copying (the organic). However, that is not what we are told. We are actually told that computer algorithms can approach the organic. This is the biggest lie of all time since that side of reality (the factual) has no expression.

The only thing it can do is copy (repeat). For example, the Japanese animated face (P96) is an accurate copy of an organic face. The fact that we see it as expressive is just an illusion; the face has no soul, it is null and void. You could say, “but the face can express a story”; right – so the story is real, otherwise it is “the mirror of nothingness”. Stories are inventions that relate to reality; they can’t be switched off like a machine (on/off, ones and zeros). That’s all you are seeing.

a rugged story

An algorithm is a numerical construction, but the numerical and the sexual become one through physical boredom (see prev.) That is what that face represents; the prototype of a robot sex-toy. It’s as meaningless as that because there is no actual physical content in an electronic construction. Our destiny as humans is physical, which means blood and death and restoration through decay and rebirth.

This physical reality impinges on the deep psyche of Man in our relation with the cosmos (P97) Meaning can only come from physical substance that deeply connects to the psyche, and not from electrical copies. Repeats that are basically immaterial.

One way to put it is that the electronic universe is essentially anal, or a mere hole. In Weekend, Jean-Luc Godard’s 1967 satire of capital, the passion for consumer goods is related to the anus, or

The sexual organ that does not recognize gender. (Speaking About Godard, page 87)

The male figures inWeekend, cling to their illusions of mastery.

Hence, Roland ends up being killed, cooked and eaten by the hippy cannibals, and his ex, Corrine (HB75) In the film, Roland is the sacrificial male who clings to his illusions, that the male is dominant in the capitalist world of consumer goods. That could be the traditional or Freudian view, but Godard subverts it (at one point “Anal Ysis”) appears on screen, to make the point clear).

The problem with the modern world is that “order and method” – the masculine virtues – are applied to consumer goods which are essentially null and void. They have no physical substance and are in fact disposable – as Weekend implies with the famous traffic jam and abandoned cars

WEEKEND

Only physical reality can have psychic meaning – and, actually, sexual meaning. Physical reality has the serpent’s line of primitive undulating rhythm. It has the hazy smoke of a log fire, the sparks igniting and flaring.

Traditional Swiss chalet

A fire is a good example of physical substance that is ignited, the flame represents its consumption. We gaze into its depths in a hazy dreamland, our psyches attracted to the curling tongues of flame and shadow. These induced dreams are the product of material substance; of wood that becomes charcoal. An electric-green future (Tales of Faith 2

) does not have that material substance, and we are continually being told that material substance – the burning of carbon – is not green.

Native American rock art

However, Man has been burning carbon since the day we came on the scene; it simply enters the carbon-cycle. An “electric-green future” is outside of all that because it is immaterial. By the same token we, as humans, lose our souls to the immaterial future of copies that are not real. Burning wood is the prerogative of living a life comparable to the beasts that scamper amongst the trees. “They” cannot take that away from us; if these essays have any revolutionary aspect, that is it.