Pictorial 48

History of Fuller’s Earth,

Robert Robertson (at my sister’s graduation, via my father’s clay mineralogy)

I put this in mainly because Fuller’s earth is a found object that Man makes use of with no processing (see Levi-Strauss Hyborian Bridge 58) Like peat, its properties are unbeatable. Like teak and hardwood planks for shipping.

The reason for that is something to do with primordial rhythm and the stars above, the very things that don’t concern our Martian buddies. Yes, since this is Earth Mother (Traylor’s anthem).

If the Martians have their land of order and perspective illusion, we have the anarchy of things that are active (body) and not inert (head). As I’ve been hinting for awhile, the society of free communal action was the norm up ‘til the modern era. No competitive order; low-level disorder, minor unrest, quarrels or even all-out brawls.

This is a quote I took from a review of Chaucer: A European Life (Marion Turner)

On his many diplomatic missions Chaucer himself travelled through a dynamically networked continent in which small kingdoms like Navarre and Hainaut, and city states like Genoa and Florence, were engaged in continuous cultural and economic exchange. Chaucer, a merchant’s son engaged in high-level diplomacy for much of his life, closely associated with the internationally powerful house of Lancaster, saw and understood far more of this than one would ever guess from his bumbling narratorial personae. (Tim Smith-Laing, DT)

It’s a vision of freedom or, in other words, primordial rhythms of polyglot humanity under the stars and over the earth. In that situation there is no perspective reality and we are not “bugs in a jar” (Traylor). You wonder if that’s what the French artists like Raphael (Caravane) to Capdevieille are struggling to decipher?

Capdevieille later turned his hand to early Renaissance opera with libretti in 14^th century Italian – about the same era as Chaucer. Are we hearing windows into the freedom of action that we, as human beings with bodies, have lost to competitive order and perspective illusion?

This is the modern world that has no physical substance or psyche, children of DNA – processed meat a la Aristophanes’ sausage seller – profane and misplaced. The basic point is that without physical substance (of proportion) and psyche (narrative content) we cannot know what is the cut of the “beef” we see. It’s just a fact, like Katie Bouman’s famous black hole. There’s no light there, right?

Elena is adding some taglines to her series of “Songline” prints, now called “The Age of Acolytes”

sword and sorcery

the land of the treasure hunt

physical and psychic substance

 hidden by the dragon

Hyborian Bridge 58

“People create their own questions because they are afraid to look straight. All you have to do is look straight and see the road, and when you see it, don't sit looking at it - walk.” (Ayn Rand)

If you’re following this, then, the acolytes (of sorcerers) live in the order of perspective-AI, which is the vanishing point of technique (AI is always perspective because it is built virtually, in straight lines).

To give a concrete example, one of David Atten-bore’s programs on Planet Earth illustrates the competitive order. What that means is the images you see purport to be ordered – as opposed to disordered. Is a shoal of fish ordered or disordered? I’d say it’s both: if you look at ancient Minoan frescoes, they were attracted to what you could call the mermaid romance – as were Greek vases.

Wild Horses

This is the graceful reality; but the mind in a perspective order is prone to illusions and to see order where there is none. What you see is actually primordial rhythm implicated in serene movement. The order of competition is an illusion fed us by acolytes of sorcerers (in this case Darwin).

There is style (proportion) and psyche - behaviour, hunting - see Pictorial 5 on matriarchy of the high aerie. The fish you see are hunting or being hunted, so that is balance or the lifecycle. They are fluid and easy in their manner. This primordial grace is there in the film Countryman about the eponymous Jamaican fisherman who lives in a shack on the beach with his family, stray goats and Rastas. They live alongside the mainstream Kingston, and it struck me Countryman, who speaks of “guidance” from “elements of the earth” that will “defend I”, is not in the slightest competing in his seaborne lifestyle.

COUNTRYMAN (catching and cutting prey a la Gavin Maxwell Pictorial 42, 43)

Like Hannam (The House of Elrig) he is a mix of practical maritime (woodland) skill with seaborne (earthbound) philosophy.

..close to his heels as a shadow while with the wisdom of a lifetime he outwitted birds and beasts classified by his rules as vermin, listening to the low rumble of his voice as, sheltering behind a stone dyke from some blinding hill shower, he would try to impart to me his intimate knowledge of wild life. At the end of some long speech or reminiscence he would pause, tamp the black tobacco dottle on his pipe, and add, “Ay, you come to know through time.” (page 108)

Is the order of competition then an illusion of perspective reality? In other words, the reality that is always ordered (always “straight”). What I mean is, whatever the theory (of sorcerers) the same order pertains, the one of straight lines and therefore the vanishing point (of technique). In nature things are crooked (disordered); take a look at the two pictures contrasting Objectivism and Wildness inPictorial 46

Rand is dwarfed by her monuments; in the other there is a merging of buildings with disordered nature (see Rome). Rand’s universe by her own reckoning is straight, disorder is disallowed. That’s another way of saying it’s a perspective illusion – one that will be run by AI one day.

Intensive beef lots are another case of the same thing; hygiene or lack of disorder. Conventional farming uses the strength of fertile loam, of dirt and cleansing. One world is inert; the other is active.

I know Rand said mental processes are active (Pictorial 46), but if you live in a world of the mind you are not physically active. There is no balance between body and mind. The mind in a perspective order is prone to illusions so the way out of the dilemma is action. The world of action is figurative – figures in a landscape with meaning (epistemology Weird 11). A landscape or a wood (or the sea) have labyrinthine qualities in which the action takes place, a type of rustic or seaborne disorder.

You can easily see this in action-series such as the jungle and hill-country set Nyoka. The rocky terrain of gorges would look equally at home in a Hyborian story. I noticed the interior sets are deliberately made for the actors to clamber and vault around during set-piece combat. Ragged balconies, knobbly walls with hidden levers, trap-doors, twists and turns in the gloom.

In Britain we have children’s icon Enid Blyton who’s Famous Five always have adventures in hidden coves and what not. In such rustic or seaborne settings there is always far less order and therefore much more freedom of action. Similar things could be said of classic Noir set in dingy neighbourhoods of run-down tenements where each winding alley is an event. Val Lewton’s Cat People, for example, where nothing is really clear apart from the suspense.

There is very little perspective reality, yet a lot of atmosphere. Similarly, in Nyoka, galloping around the bluffs the figures and horses are in their element, with no straight lines to impede them. Likewise their costumes are loose jodhpur-ish riding gear which accentuates the figure.

In the Randian universe everything is convincing because everything is an illusion. If you’ve seen A Boy and his Dog, the film has two parts. The first is above ground in the dirt and mud of Spartan desert hunts, everything is grey or mottled by desert sun. The second part is down in Topeka, and everything is spangly and glowing in red, white and blue, bands playing, voices braying and yet the entire society is illusory, a bad recreation of olde America. The neon fantasy is quite a Randian one.

Now, an illusion can be very convincing (reflection). If you take DNA, it is always taken to support a competitive order. But, as I said inDrama, what you see in nature is primordial rhythm implicated in movement, which is a mixture of order and disorder (or order and freedom from order).

Basically, the scientific method has a very convincing order (DNA) but a very ambiguous or non-existent freedom (primordial rhythm in movement, action and physique). Hence our reality could be an illusion of order (sun). This clearly goes way back – not just to Kant (prev.) but to the Church and Galileo in the 17^th century.

The first innovation of that order was the practical advance in lenses (optics) and the telescope which enabled them to see planets and the moon clearly. Obviously that innovation was revolutionary and led to a new outlook. Now that we live in an innovative order of competition and “Randian architects” you can begin to see that we’ve lost the freedom not to be ordered!

Every innovation adds another bit of order, and it is inevitably leading to AI (electromagnetism). Our universe of order ultimately takes place in the head (electrochemical impulses see Hyborian Bridge 37) and not in the universe of primordial rhythm – the body or free-and-easy grace of action (Hyborian Bridge 18). The church was clearly very cagy to the point of paranoia about the dissemination of ancient Greek knowledge, with the exceptions of the mystical Plato and the pragmatic Aristotle.

Actually, the city-state played a vital role in preserving ancient texts. I’ve just ordered a book called The Map of Knowledge (Violet Moller) telling the story of seven cities from 300BC – 1500, on the basis of a review by Tim Smith-Laing. Arab scholarship was prevalent, and the cities included Baghdad and the Cordoba of the Moors.

In his Hyborian tales, Howard gives the odd hint of a scholarly class existing alongside all the riotous revelry.

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. (The Tower of the Elephant)

Howard doesn’t consider such things to be understandable, but the more blatant point is a church attempts to impose a moral or metaphysical order (of the philosophical mind) on the world of action. A medieval city-state was much like those depicted in Howard’s Hyboria; monumental but disordered and rife with free and easy human flesh (and animals, natch.)

No society bar our own has sought to do without the freedom of action of people in communal settings. This is why I picked the example of Detroit that seems to go counter to the universal planning ethic. As I was saying, what you want in a city is style (proportion) and psyche (or narrative content or behaviour) of citizens. In other words, you don’t want universal order or competition or any of those things.

This is true throughout history. You probably know that in Spain there was a centuries old battle between Christians and Muslims, called the Reconquista by the Catholic Church. Ivan Espinosa of Vox (a right-wing party) says,

“We admire what’s left of the Islamic culture in Spain,” he says. “It’s part of our history.” He pauses, then adds: “By the way, part of our history is also fighting against them for 800 years.” (DT)

That immediately made me think of Howard’s Outremer (Pictorial 11, 13) and the psychic affinity of the different breeds of men that fought there. To have differences in medieval times was the norm and, for all the bloodshed, there was an affinity between warriors.

Basically because a strong psyche, with a seductive narrative content as with the Moors in southern Spain, will be different, so there is an affinity of differences. Note that this is not a competitive order, since there is no order!

This is roughly what I was saying in Pictorial 13 - that there is never order in traditional societies because there is low-level conflict. The conception that there is a competitive order in nature is essentially to do without action, because action is not order. It is a mixture of style (proportion, balance) and psyche (behaviour or narrative content). It’s quite like an adventure serial in labyrinthine terrain.

Pictorial 5 has the view from the high aerie, matriarchal province of high flying eagle, serene and gliding on high dappled skies, perfection of primitive rhythm. You will see exactly the same picture in an Atten-bore film and be told, “eagles are ferocious competitors and killing machines.”

So, you are now in a competitive order, rather than the serene freedom of airborne skies. All these animals do is hunt or scavenge (crows) or be hunted (prey), the primitive lifecycle, not competition; they are hunting as Man used to do.

Weird 10

What you see is an irregularity and freedom – order is just a perspective illusion (of acolytes). This has to be why we assume things are ordered when visually speaking they have free behaviour as hunter and prey. This ancient universe was described by Claude Levi-Strauss (the French anthropologist who, on his annual visits to US tribes, popularized the jeans which bear his name on buffalo hunts on horseback with his Hopi friend, Chief Seattle).

Levi-Strauss describes scavengers (crow, coyote) as “tricksters” or intermediaries, a common theme in myth (Prometheus, who stole fire from the gods). This entire ancient universe has nothing to do with Darwinian competition and everything to do with Man the hunter.

A competitive order is the perspective illusion we inhabit (sun); it has no basis in anthropology; it’s a pseudo-science of acolytes (Vincent of UVS says the same of CERN). How did it happen and what can be done? It’s over to Conan the Conqueror again.

Hyborian Bridge 56

Legendary figures tend to oppose the Randian universe of perspective, logic, order (the dollar – or maybe the vertiginous opening of Watchmen?) This happens to be a hidden Arabic courtyard, but you could easily imagine Conan skulking along the roof, dirk in hand; somewhere that is largely left to its own devices, the patina of age pleasantly coating its nooks and crannies. Souk, camel

CARAVANE

The source – the origins of classical culture– according to Nietzsche is Dionysus. Without that element, Apollo is mere illusion, and that is where we are. The head has become the sole point of reference and the body is nowhere, in some pornographic hell. Acolytes of sorcerers are denying Man’s status as an active land animal with marine prowess, and the strength harnessed by Gaia in the fields and seas.

They do it in the name of “smart” hygiene, which means the head attached to electromagnetism or AI. The latest example is the Gates’ sponsored “bleeding” burger, which takes DNA of soy and injects it into fermenting yeast. Thereby instead of living, breathing beef one has an AI-controlled tank of vile yeast run amock on GM.

Naturellent, this is sold as great for the health of the Earth when it is the exact opposite. What is good for the health of the planet is active life on open ranges that eat off the land and are not force-fed with artificial grain (also GM Pictorial 44)

The acolytes the like of Gates are trying to draw us off the land and into hygiene-machines run by Amazon Houses off of Google platforms. The lie is that Earth does not actively strengthen its constituent parts by the foraging, hunting, herding and farming of humanfolk.

There is not strength derived from the inert (ie machine) processing of weakness, of brains addled by their close proximity to their electromagnetic buddies

SY BORG
Pseudo-genitalia is the word (another theme Frank explored in Joe’s Garage); an obsession with running DNA round like processed meat (see Aristophanes Pictorial 46). GM is “hygienic-meat” grown in vats by acolytes of the sorcerers of hygienic order (Crick, Watson, Franklin), having no physical substance or psyche.

Don’t be fooled by fancy words; the genome is strictly for hygiene obsessives who like to breed meat for their profane use, sex by another name. There’s also A Boy and his Dog down in Topeka, the tasteful scene of Vic bound to a machine. To quote Vic, “I want to get dirty, so I can feel clean again!” To hygiene obsessives this makes no sense, stuck in their subterranean facilities. “They” have no awareness of strength; that dirt is cleansed by the self-regulating and self-generating killer of pathogens, the Earth itself.

They have no awareness that the traditional farm is an absolute of proportion (style) and psyche (narrative content); the physical substance (physiology) and modes of habit of pristine livestock (bbrray!). There is dirt and cleanliness, there is natural activity of animals and Man, the range is rough and tough, the psyche is willing, yeehaw!

Pictorial 44 – under the Lauzier/Alexis strip – says something like, “the primitive awareness of physical absolutes breeds an archetypal individual (who had) racial attitudes (like Howard and his cohorts in 30s Texas.)”

The modern world may not like to know that – but another danger looms. That of intolerance to non-conformity. Because the conformity “they” desire is that of the masters of illusion, where there are no physical absolutes – meaning, the range, the hard days of grinding toil, saddle-sore and hungry, that breed men and women of a certain type.

The illusion is the perspective illusion of the head – a parallel reality of fact without proportion or psychic narrative, a relative world of illusion. This is the world that will be run by AI. Why? Because AI inhabits a perspective reality; it is the master of illusion.

There is a choice to make. Either we live in the ancient world of dirt and cleanliness and primitive action (body); or we forever face the illusion of the sun in a perspective reality where fact equals fiction (head, AI).

sleeve to Sunfighter, Slick and Kantner, 1971

I’m sitting here writing while listening to Cat Stevens’ questing album Catch Bull at Four from 1972. People were questing in those days, why no more? Could it be that we are now Traylor’s “Pets”? I reckon it’s possible, so decided to adopt Traylor’s poem to my cause – not change anything, interpreting is all.

First off, the telescope was the innovation that ushered in the new Copernican age of heliocentricity, dating from roughly Galileo in the 17^th century. Lenses and optics later ushered in microscopes, and the physical and biological studies that culminated in the discovery of DNA (from a Franklin phot.)

Obviously, lenses act exactly like eyes by refracting (bending) light. Relating that to the poem, “the probes of some super power” are the lenses of telescopes and microscopes. Microscopes reveal to us a hidden universe of microbes under bright lights on glass slides (hygienic, natch.) Meanwhile, telescopes reveal to us the hidden depths of the universe above, which is pretty big if not infinite.

Now, what do microscopes and telescopes have in common? They show us worlds which are somewhere else from our own physical substance. Scientists with their fancy talk will tell us we are full of microbes, but the fact of our physical reality is what we feel in our muscular and sensory systems.

You can make the case that everything, from blood corpuscles to endocrine (hormones), is microbial and that’s true. But our sensory and symmetrical self is the organism that we are, regardless of how complicated the minutae. Only our selves have the proportion and balance of an organic system.

Weird 11 (“The Enchantment”) makes quite a big thing of the different symmetries of figures in a landscape. There’s the forward prospect into the frame that BWS makes use of in the doppelgangers on the far side of the lake.

detail with crumpled Conan #20

There’s the left/right symmetry of the figures. There are other symmetries and asymmetries; the four elements; the up/down asymmetry. There’s the even more profound asymmetry of the bright light of life and the sombre dark of death.

The symmetries and asymmetries are fundamental to an active life on Earth, our history, our pre-history. What “they” tell us is the universe is revealed to us by microscopes and telescopes (lenses); what they don’t tell us is it takes us away from our active selves in our primitive bodies, and into our heads. Specifically our eyes which view the lenses (and the iphones, natch.)

The head is a perspective system, and is prone to perspective illusion (see Pictorial 44) These illusions are very convincing, so what you can say is the entire universes of microscopy and telescopy can be added to the illusory “facts” we are given. A fact doesn’t have proportion or balance as the human body does. It doesn’t have symmetry (or asymmetry). A body has a front and a back, it has mirror-image symmetry. All of these are much more than facts; they are our very selves.

You know the smutty jokes in Aristophanes’ The Knights? All that smut is proportionate and body-symmetrical. That’s why it rings very true, if lewd, and why the myriad facts of modernity ring very false, if sterile.

So, my interpretation of Traylor’s poem is as a perspective universe of “facts” which are also fictions, both of microscopes (bugs) and of telescopes (the light from stars that is not proportionate, ie as constellations of figures are).

proportionate reality of figures (absolute psyche of the universe Drama2)

According to Relativity, this absolute reality is a fantasy and we live in a universe which is relative to light, not the Earth’s orbit. Nevertheless, Relativity is much like a reflection, moving images travelling through the medium of electromagnetism (mirror), where the speed is relative to the speed of light (the medium of electromagnetism in the mirror-image).

Einstein was aware of the need for an absolute Aether (see Hyborian Bridge 49 ), else the difference between a reflection and relativity is very hard to discern, in terms of physical substance. In absolute terms, then, the stars are psyche (narrative content of constellations – myths) and the moon symbolises aether or physical substance (which may not be discernible relativistically, since it is an absolute).

Relativity is intrinsically confusing, and it seems that Vincent (of UVS Hyborian Bridge 48) is in agreement that the universe must be absolute (though I admit he’s gone quite of late). If we see relativistic effects it is some form of perspective engineering (like CERN) and not what the universe IS in terms of psyche and physical substance.

From that standpoint, scientists have released the first computer image of a supermassive black hole. It seems to resemble the pupil of an eye and, with that in mind, I’ll leave any comment to Frank Zappa

It's lookin' at you
Don't fool yourself girl
It's winkin' at you
Don't fool yourself girl

Katie Bouman’s algorithm BROKEN HEARTS ARE FOR ASSHOLES

You might say that’s lewd – like Aristophanes. You might also say it’s a truism (see Walter Ralegh quote Tale s of Faith 6). Anything that has physical substance has a symmetry of figure and form. Without the symmetry there is neither physical substance nor psyche.

The cold-blooded logic that needs light for its parallel reality of perspective is an order that is not figurative. It is both fact and fiction. We, as humans, have to imagine a figuration of physical substance and psyche.

Since the facts of scientists – microscopes and telescopes – are largely independent of physical substance, and of psyche – constellations of stars – they are not gonna be aware of these truisms even if they are self-evident. What one sees is in the eye of the beholder; “they” see one thing and I see another; they see facts (which are fictions); I see ambiguous symmetry (CL Moore Hyborian Bridge 17)

In a universe of physical substance and psyche, meaning is through interpretation, so we get figurative myths (which BWS champions); the universe of Plato and medievalism up to the inauguration of telescopes (and microscopes) by Galileo and then Newton.

Now, a figure of heroic fantasy is above all physical substance writ large. Their status is symmetrical, and they are balanced between head and body. That is their true claim to fame, since Conan is not averse to thinking his way out of dire straits. This happens in Conan The Conqueror (Hour of the Dragon) when the a group of nobles engineer a Nemedian coup with the aid of the archaic wizard Xaltotun of time-lost Acheron, reanimated by arcane arts.

Conan finds himself taken by Xaltotan to a deep, dark dungeon of Tarascus’ Nemedian palace, his position hopeless, when unexpected succour arrives in the shape of a woman of Tarascus’ seraglio who has

..“loved you ever since I saw you riding at the head of your knights along the streets of Belverus.. My heart tugged at its strings to leap from my bosom and fall in the dust of the street under your horse’s hoofs.”  (page 47)

These muscular fantasies are much more than erotic dreams. Her devotion demands a sense of awe precisely because she doesn’t desire more than

The one look he cast back over his shoulder showed him Zenobia leaning over the window-sill, her arms stretched after him in mute farewell and renunciation. (page 57)

Yes, she would like the embraces, but hers is a mystical devotion to this man of myth. He is a man but also representative of the power and awe of the universe, of the stars above.

Both of these have symmetrical status, and neither are purely factual. They have absolute, figurative power or psychic narrative (this is what I was saying of Diana Ross or of Johnny Cash). Absolute power is figurative, not factual. To say that we have this power while the universe doesn’t is meaningless. Rather, the “powers that be” want us to believe the universe is an inert machine (like the intensive beef lot.) Weak and sterile servants of the dollar – or the solar serpent let loose (Hyborian Bridge 30,32,36)

What I’m saying is the lewdness you find in Greek comedies is very true to the absolute, figurative reality of the universe. The sun will only give us order (appearance) while the moon symbolises physical substance (style, proportion). The stars have psyche (narrative content, myth).

Taken all together there is lewdness because it is part of life’s joy. Ancient landmarks such as Stonehenge are emblematic of such rites.

THE BOY WITH A MOON AND STAR ON HIS HEAD

Hyborian Bridge 57

It’s a vital theme for science fiction, because the singularity point of a black hole is a ready-made point for suspension of disbelief. The laws of physics can’t tell us what is or isn’t there, so it’s a space for the crazy and the sublime. (Juliet Samuel, DT)

Samuel’s commentary on the algorithmic image (prev.) seems to make the case that a fact becomes a fiction, an object that is very far away with no physical substance on Earth. The object is a very long range perspective view (via parallax of Earth’s position, natch); however, physical substance and psyche are independent of distance and you can see this in artists’ styles.

Hyborian Bridge 21 took as an example the final page of Conan #15, the sorcerer from Zukala’s Daughter holding his tragic heroine as Conan bids adieu

(c) Marvel 1970

Physical substance is proportionate reality (style) – the horse, the figures and surroundings. Psyche is what meaning one gets from the gestures, symbols, composition and, as I said, the abundance of detail is largely independent of perspective.

Proportionate reality is just what things are as you observe them – birds that fly, stars or planets in the night sky. One is not encumbered by “facts”, such as “they are competing”. All one sees is they are hunting or scavenging for prey of carrion.

Similarly, when one is not encumbered by facts, such as “this is a supermassive black hole”, what one sees is something lewd. In a way, this is a human imagination, unless the universe has a symmetrical status analogous to a living thing (which is not seen in the perspective illusion).

Again, your guess is as good as mine, but that’s because we are no longer dealing in “facts” (of a perspective reality); we are dealing in physical substance (proportion) and psyche (narrative content).

One has to make a choice in a situation where there are myriad facts but no myths. Man makes myths and they give him strength. Which takes us back to Conan the Conqueror.

She shook her head. “I am but an oracle, through whose lips the gods speak. My lips are sealed by them lest I speak too much. You must find the heart of your kingdom. I can say no more. My lips are opened and sealed by the gods.” (page 71)

So speaks Zelata, witch-woman of high crannies, the grey timber wolf ever by her side, who tells the vagabond king her visions are strictly limited by the “powers that be”, in this case the spirits of magic and the runes.

This makes me think that destiny is a mysterious thing, and one cannot pre-empt it or do any more than give sidereal hints on the chosen route. This is pretty much the opposite of science, which has an a-priori order (the sun) that casts aside from the outset such things as destiny and the ambiguous symmetry of events.

Whereas the reality Zelata can pierce, through the veil, is figurative and dreamlike, the reality scientists pierce is crystal clear but without the figurative dream (fact equals fiction).

Put another way; while Zelata sleeps to gain understanding of her dreams, Katie Bouman (prev) sleeps with her algorithms! It’s a type of psychotic hygiene which is trapped in a logical order (of the sun, perspective vision). They are not able to see figures of the universe that have physical substance – moon versus sun – or psychic narrative (constellations, myth).

These are the exact things which Zelata is bound to perceive in her dreamquest. Howard’s fantasies very clearly inhabit an absolute universe of moon, stars and golden dawns (Earth’s rotation). This is the figurative world of Man the hunter who lusts, who tallies with womanhood.

It is the world of symmetrical status where the body is lewd as well as loud. It is the world of Greek tragedy and comedy, of psyche and physical substance. This seems like I’m aiming high for Howard, who disdained the classics, but it is more like placing algorithmic complexity at a much lower order (than Howard or the classics!)

Because, without lewdness and without psyche, there are only facts which are the equivalent of fictions. Without figuration the universe is essentially meaningless. The a-priori order of science abhors figuration and any meaning other than the purely factual.

Yes, but that’s another way of saying science doesn’t deal in physical substance and psyche – it increasingly deals in algorithms. It therefore can’t perceive a symmetry of figuration that is actually blatantly obvious (Artemis and Apollo – see BWS). It can’t perceive anything that is lewd – in other words, that has symmetrical status like living things.

It can only perceive the universe as an inert machine, not a meaningful creation that is our home.

The Greek for home is Oikos (in a communal setting natch)

From which we get “ecology”. You may recall Drama3 was talking about Detroit? Here’s a quote from Conan the Conqueror, as Conan enters Tarantia incognito

Not a long distance from it, lost in a tangle of partly deserted tenements and warehouses, stood an ancient watchtower, so old and forgotten that it did not appear on the maps of the city for a hundred years back. (page 82)

This sense that when places and cities and buildings are left to their own devices they develop an almost primeval “thingness” I think connects with the quote from The House of Elrig (Pictorial 43) where he is entering a fetid grassland near the school grounds. Oikos is a livable place,and the meaning in Greek is fairly vague, in fact much more like our word ecology (from oikos natch). If you think that in Greek times the universe was figurative – and animalistic – then it’s almost true to say that the entire ecosphere was oikos as it connected to the Greek citizen.

In any event, a wood is a good place to live, and we know Greek temples were originally wooden (as was Stonehenge Woodhenge once). A wood is a place for bacchanalian rites in groves and grottoes of faerie. An area where decay is underfoot and which strengthens the living system. Falling leaves are actually plentiful habitats for bugs (leaves contain lignin, or similar polypeptides to wood, that sculpture the decaying forms)

A gleam among the dead leaves that carpeted the ground caught Conan’s eye. It was his broadsword, lying where he had dropped it when his horse fell, reflecting the rays of the moon. (page 116)

rundown neighbourhood dwelling

Because we (or “they”) live in a hygienic order (perspective, sun) that has no physical substance or psyche, we (or “they”) fail to see that a living system must decay in order to be healthy. This relates to various things, like Gates’ hygienic-toilet (Hyborian Bridge 31) or intensive beef lots (Pictorial 44).

In a general way, though, it relates to Oikos, to buildings that are old or semi-derelict in the bosom of mother Earth. I am thinking of more examples from pulplore; there’s the timber frame of BWS’s splash to Conan #24 (Hyborian Bridge 38.) In Nyoka, the Tauregs live in cliffside burrowings that almost have the look of termite colonies. There’s Zelata’s cliffside stone dwelling high on a gorge; in Countryman (film) the witch doctor’s highland dwelling is somewhat similar.

In Nyoka  again, the African tribal village  has the stereotypical patina of grass/reed roofs, snakeskin hangings etc. The wider picture, though, is that buildings or places that are left to their own devices develop “thingness”, an irregularity, a patina, a shady grove that has the strength of decadence (see Hyborian Bridge 16). Notre Dame, for that matter.

Pictorial 46

Logical metaphysician professor Andy Clark is under the impression human and AI will learn to love eachother

In this hybrid future, AI-augmented humans will create a world defined by layers of human-AI partnership.. structured around goals.. that reflect.. our needs and priorities. (DT)

Going by his title, this guy must have read Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason (1781), a byzantine argument that transcendence places limits on reason (and science). Ayn Rand makes a cogent attack on some core arguments, such as that “any knowledge acquired by a process of consciousness is necessarily subjective and cannot correspond to the facts of reality, since it is ‘processed knowledge’”. She says,

Consciousness..is not a passive state, but an active process. And more: the satisfaction of every need of a living organism requires an act of processing by that organism, be it need of air, of food or of knowledge. (Ayn Rand Lexicon)

Kant’s undercutting of reason in order to raise mysticism was unprecedented, and Rand sensibly raises the sceptre of Plato.

His system represents a massive effort to raise the principles of Platonism, in a somewhat altered manner, once again to a position of commanding authority over Western culture.. Plato was more than a Platonist; despite his mysticism, he was also a pagan Greek. As such he exhibited a certain respect for reason, a respect which was implicit in Greek philosophy no matter how explicitly irrational it became. (Ayn Rand Lexicon)

I think this is very true, since Kant used reason to essentially kill reason metaphysically, while Rand uses reason to kill mysticism metaphysically. Both their philosophies strike one as Apollonian (reason). It’s exhaustive, and Nietzsche is a much easier read, who stood by the Greek maxim that Apollo is appearance, not reality.

What you could say, then, is that Kant has gone back to that ancient Greek position except that, as Rand says, there is an active element in the Greek reality. That element is the body and, of course, neither of these logical philosophers feel it worthy of mention! Both the pessimism of Kant and the Objectivism of Rand are products of reason which, in the modern lexicon, is simply the illusory reality we find ourselves in (sun, reflection).

This fits a Greek maxim of “nothing to excess” where balance and proportion are ideals of behaviour. Neither too much in the head, nor a wild beast or satyr of the wooded grove. These guys like Andy Clark are essentially specialists telling us what the future will bring. No surprise, then, that it’s bringing us specialization. As I tend to say, though, the mind is electrochemical impulses (Hyborian Bridge 37) and the ideals of balance and proportion save us from getting too far into a universe of the mind.

These days, that universe is going to lead inevitably to AI (electromagnetism) which is just another word for the sun. These acolytes are heading, like the fabled Sentinels from X-Men #59 “into the heart of the raging sun itself”.

Where Rand says, “The active process of an organism (search for food or knowledge)”, actually thought is not an active process (of movement). As I say in Hyborian Bridge 37, acolytes (of sorcerers) “are not expressing processes; they are expressing thought processes.”

Rand, the chief sorceress of our age, assumes that thought processes are active. That’s like saying AI (electromagnetism) is active; right, you switch it on, but it’s not active in the sense that an animal has grace and proportionate symmetry in its search for food (the swaying strike of a cobra.)

The thought processes Rand means are order and reason; the sun and not the moon (the grace of

Diana of the bow)

We humans have to learn the lessons of humility and one of these is that exhaustive specialization leads to the pure order of electromagnetism (sun) and away from the free-and-easy grace of the body – Diana and her hounds, Artemis, huntress of the moon, blood and destiny.

One of the consequences of this (see passim) is that facts become fictions, devoid of the poetic grace and artistry of proportionate bodies in motion. Monuments of Man need the easy grace of human behaviour to offset them. This is the city-state of old (see Detroit Drama3)

I think this applies to almost all specialist subjects. Acolytes of Darwin preach competition when, if you observe animals, you see grace and movement. Competition is a type of order; free grace and movement are a type of communal freedom. Animals and plants are free to be what they are; I suppose they get into competitive contact, but the dogma is destruction of the natural freedom to be what they are.

Everywhere one encounters the same exhaustive specialization that leads to order – acolytes of a specialization of words within a perspective reality (order) - and away from graceful freedom. Be it the genome or AI or any of the voice-activated utensils generated by the Amazon House and other monstrosities of the corporate mind, it’s all the process of thought (or AI) that is ordered reason and not freedom (of limbs, of body).

If you have a look at the images of Detroit (Drama3) ruins, decay and revitalisation are all part of the same thing. Why should that be? Because pure order is death (Weird 8). Moderns, and particularly the dollar-obsessed acolytes of Rand, simply cannot fathom this.

A Greek ruin is a symbol of resurgence; the power of decay that reclaims things to earth. A ruin is not ordered but it’s also not that disordered, it’s fairly balanced in its state of genteel decline. Moderns deny this force of nature for revitalisation and so lose strength, psychic and physical. The idea that ruin and decay can be forces for good is anathema to acolytes who live in a convincing order of the sun (electromagnetism), attaching their heads to the perspective illusion and regaling us with disproportionate facts (fictions).

All it takes is a little humility. Also, learn to live with your neighbours as they have things to teach you.

CHICA CHICA BOOM CHIC

Up to the 50s – and perhaps Cuba is to blame – America and Latin America were cultural symbionts. I was reading an obit of Bibi Ferreira, the Brazilian singer and actress, and she clearly had much in common with Judy Garland. She performed in Portuguese translations of plays and got a part in Powell/Pressburger’s The End of the River. She played in My Fair Lady, Hello Dolly as well as singing Piaf.

The languid Latin rhythms have much to teach the US dollar, but nowadays Brazil is run by Trump soundalike Bolsonaro who is threatening to monetise the rainforests. These people are all under the illusion that order exists because the illusion is very convincing (perspective AI).

The athletic grace and majesty of the 50s are echoes of the city-state of yore, when the monuments of Man existed alongside the free-expression of Man. Anatomy and primordial rhythms.

Quoting Rand again, the “zombies”

who accept any part of Kant’s philosophy – metaphysical, epistemological or moral – deserve it. (Ayn Rand Lexicon)

It’s no wonder Rand is the symbol of US exceptionalism with effortless put-downs like that – they deserve her. Where you have such a formidable “Fountainhead” one idea is to put up an equally strong counters-symbol.

You have to admit Rand is often convincing but, as I’ve been saying for awhile now, an allusion often IS convincing – and particularly an illusion of the sun (reflection Pictorial 29). So, I give you on the one side the order of a reasoned Randian; on the other the wildness of unreasoned resurgence.

Founder of Objectivism

legendary French vagabond Alternates 6

Note the surroundings, as a lot of this goes against the idea that planning per se, as seen in The Fountainhead, is needed for human habitation.
As I tend to say, a city-state has on the one side the temples and monuments and rituals of governance, on the other the free-expression of citizens in their gay districts of unschooled ambiance (see Detroit, prev.)

As you can see in the picture on the left, one’s eye tends to follow the vanishing point of the modernist architecture. If you say The Fountainhead was written in the 30s, we’re now in the era of the Amazon House and AI. In that universe, you are always approaching the vanishing point (of technique) because you are always in a perspective reality (electromagnetism, the sun).

Outside of this artificiality, we have the labyrinth of a nighted wood, where one follows the trail of a roe deer, waiting and listening for rustles. Whereas Rand’s universe makes a virtue of order, this universe makes a virtue of action; the bow, the lethal throw.

So, in this universe there is slaughter, game, carrion and crows and the freedom of action. I know Rand says that acolytes of Kant are “zombies”, but a Randian world only has monuments. It doesn’t have death and decay and therefore the beliefs that go with that. The very persuasiveness of Rand strikes one as the persuasiveness of AI-perspective; something that is a good illusion that has no reality.

Those in thrall are attaching their heads to the vanishing point of technique (see “speed”). It’s a world of monuments that vanish into the mists, not of the free-flowing physique of a hunter. In that guise, it’s the America that a Trump might want to see, devoid of cattle and cowboys, ranches and homesteads.

To be fair, Rand has taste whereas Trump has none, but taste isn’t enough without the patina of freeborn form (her taste in art actually verges towards that of the comicbook fan!) Randians are forever renovating and never leave well alone. This is the very shape of the world we’re in (ever wonder why gothic and art-deco buildings keep burning down? Glasgow School of Art, Notre Dame).

Pictorial 47

In Electra (Drama2) the gayness of the bacchanalian rite to the vine is the setting for Orestes’ murder of Aegisthus (Clytemnestra’s paramour). Comedy turns to tragedy in one flash of the blade. The Dionysian origins of tragedy – the animal side of Man’s nature – are contained in Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy.

The later comedies of Aristophanes often make quite a nice point of animal allegories; there’s The Frogs and The Birds, both very contemporary satires of Athenian exploits. The Birds is a pretty frivolous piece imagining a city of birds in the sky that might be intended as an ideal polis. In one scene, the birds speak to the audience, advising them to award the play the top prize or get crapped on!

The Frogs is a more serious comedy. The god Dionysus – representing the city Dionysia, where the annual theatre festival was held – goes down to the underworld to try to get the recently dead Euripides to “save the city (Athens) from itself.” There is a frog chorus (they’d all croaked) and, amidst various escapades, Euripides gets into a “flyting” (poetic) contest with Aeschylus.

Written during the war with Sparta, it has been described as a “creative criticism” of war, fusing comedy to literary criticism. All in all, comedy can get pretty serious, and tragedy has its share of riotous revelry and the animal, instinctive side of human nature.

What seems apparent is that both are products of an active society of freeborne psyche (narrative content, as I was saying of Detroit in Drama 3). The other thing is, why is it the ancient Greeks seemed to have such an affinity for animals? Obviously partly because they were rustic and had donkeys (and hunts), but also animals for them had freeborne psyches; they had poetic, playful manners as opposed to a competitive order a la Atten-bore.

The connection of comedy to tragedy is the very opposite of a modern sterile order. When the hygiene lie is exposed, the tragedy of animal psyche and physical substance (physiology) is let loose on the plains again. This is the American lifecycle of action, of animal and human physique as against the weakness of pure order, of the inhuman dollar.

The tragedy will expose, not just intensive beef lots, but the illusion of order in the universe of scientific facts (DNA, CERN, AI). The illusion is highly convincing because it is factual, but ambiguous or non-existent with regard to primordial rhythm, the action of physique.

DNA, like CERN, represents order and hygiene as distinct from the body, or physical substance (which is dirt and cleanliness). Order and hygiene are almost the same thing when it comes to the illusion of fact (sun, electromagnetism, relativity).

In a world of order and hygiene, the sexual symbolism of the body is reduced to pornography. This is the theme of Alan Moore and Melinda Gebbie’s Lost Girls, and that whole thing is somewhat reminiscent of Greek comedy. In those days, politicians had already gotten the reputation for being piss artists: Aristophanes’ scabrous The Knights (awarded first prize at Lenea, 424 BC) is fairly typical

Panaetius To Paphlagon 322

Admit it! You have the gift of bullshit! Bullshit, the single protector of orators and politicians! .. Ah, but now I feel much better. Indicating the sausage seller. Now I know there’s someone who’s a better crook than you. Better in chicanery, more bold, a better rip off merchant!..

..Sausage Seller

I’d go over to the butcher’s and I’d make them look up into the sky, saying, “look, guys, spring’s here..” and the moment they raised their heads up I’d nip around and steal their sausage!.. And I’d never get caught ‘cause the moment someone saw me.. I’d shove the meat between my legs and swear black and blue that I’d done nothing.. One day a politician saw me and said, “No doubt about it. This boy will rule the city one day!”

Demosthenes

That politician was a prophet. Still, he saw what you did, you told lies and took meat up your bum!

Whereas Aristophanes was up against warrior-statesman Cleon of Athens, we are up against an entire parallel universe of “facts” that clinically represent the earth become sterile and inert – fantasies of the parallel system. Our universe of lies is convincing, complicated and competitive, but has no physical substance (proportion, style) or psyche (narrative content). The simplest of ditties has more meaning in the symbolic power of sunrise over a rustic setting.

CAUSE I LOVE YOU

The absolute world of the small plot of land where the fertile strength of the earth is far from clinical and nothing is sterile or inert. Cash’s ditty has the integrity of absolute power (see Motown Hyborian Bridge 47). It’s nothing to do with competition or complexity or being convinced by the powers that be. There is a sense of style (physical substance) and narrative content (psyche). This is actually what we are as human beings.

The modern illusion is to deny that simplicity for the sake of a complex charade of “facts” that are hygienic fictions. Whether it’s the perspective illusion of CERN (the vanishing point of technique, see “speed” Pictorial 43), or the order of DNA that ignores physical substance (proportion), or the “smart” hygiene-machines of AI.

Absolute power is another dawn rising over a humble dwelling on the hillside overlooking a valley, the horse nosing around in the paddock; no competition, no complexity, no need of being convinced that what you see is factual since it has meaning and symbolic power (see Happy Trails)

The Coach House, a local landmark - just add a hoss

Pets