Hyborian Bridge 70

I was listening to a talk on the Indians of Allegheny valley by Chuck Erdeljac, having segued in from Buffy’s Now That the Buffalo’s Gone. Amongst all the Senecas and Delawares, he said (several times) the traders and trackers of the Allegheny “got on” till the late 18^th century. At about that time, instead of individual parleys and actions amid the creeks and rivers, there began a full-throated battle of two cultures; one of high Enlightenment idealism; the other of Dionysian savagery.

Chuck did say the term “savage” was used disparagingly, but I think for the sake of comparison it may be justified. The Enlightenment is the sense that one argues from the authority of logical thinking; Dionysian is muscular exertion, song and dance. At that time European civilization was fully on the side of the former.

In the 20^th century – as mentioned previously  - there were two significant rebellions. The first was the pulps, and particularly Weird Tales of the 30s, the second was the hippy era culminating in Woodstock in 1969. Both were essentially rebellions against a culture of words of the head (scripted routines) and in favour of a poetry of the physical substance of the body.

So far, the culture of the head has won out since it’s essentially a culture of precision, whereas the body is a culture of vague sentiments of discord. To give an example of what I mean, here’s a model of DNA

 

DNA is a perspective image which gives rise to a perspective universe of products. That is, products which are observed through lenses (microscopes) in order to maintain precision. Here’s one example of a Japanese experiment based on chromosome observation

..Scientists looked for receptor molecules that were only on the outside of X-chromosomes, and found a pair called Toll-like receptor 7 and 8.

A precise universe has got to be perspective (light) because it is “run” by lenses (see Hyborian Bridge 56) That makes it very convincing, but it is not a universe of physique which is imprecise and strong (muscular, athletic, games).

I know this can get confusing, since photographers photograph physique (of models etc). Yes, I know, but science operates in a world of lenses (light) which makes it a perspective world. Photographers operate in the real world. Same goes for (most) film.

Scientists, because they see the world through the head rather than experience it with the body, have perspective views always, as it’s the most precise. What that does is takes you away from disorder – which is the general attribute of strength in nature – and towards order.

Disorder in nature (see prev) is the strength of revival that comes from decay. Buffy, in an interview with co-conspirator Andrea Warner, made reference to dried buffalo manure as a physical use of a product with a pungency that is strong and pure (see Laurens Van der Post prev.)

What tribal people tend to realize is that there is strength in metamorphosis. The decay or rotting process is ultimately cleansing. This is an ancient ethical question which pits order against disorder; dirt against cleanliness (see Mosaic Law). If one lives in a world of order, that balance of seeming opposites is no longer possible. Therefore the very precision of science leads to a robotic universe that cannot revive through disorder (decay or dried buffalo manure).

How come more people are not seeing this already? Is it because the human is being made less physical, and more in the head? (I’ll leave that as an open question!)
If that latter point has any semblance, though, it does point to a type of sorcery that changes human nature to its own “reality” – which is actually false.

What you could call the black magic of modern sorcery gives overwhelming authority to the reasoning head over the unreasoning body. But it’s a reason which tends to overlook the physical reality that is out there in the grace and danger of natural forms.

Whereas the ideal for science/medicine is to ease the way towards death (or not even notice it!) the physical ideal is to be ready for and aware of danger. In Clair Noto’s “Skranos” plot-cycle (from Red Sonja #7 -13 and including the classic “Red Lace”) Suumaro’s mother, the sorceress Apah Alah, tests Red Sonja with a mystical serpent, having previously rescued her with a bough.

  Red Sonja #8

To me, this sorcery is natural mysticism along the lines of Van der Post and what I would call white, and not black. Apah Alah, builder of the wooden-stone temple from “Red Lace” (Weird1 Aspects3) still loves Suumaro’s father, and love plays strange tricks on human soulds. I’ll leave it there.

In the same issue, Red Sonja has a fight to the death with one of Suumaro’s generals, and lures him onto the carcass of one of Skranos’s famed behemoths. Fighting atop the beast’s rotting body, the heavyweight Jimodo starts to sink.

Hyborial Bridge 69

Castaneda had a notion of another world of perception that is hidden by the “factual” one. This hidden world could be the naïve one of physical proportion.

.. as I looked about I saw there was a wonderful well just under the high, steep wall of grass. All the ground round it was covered with bright, green, dripping moss; there was every kind of moss there, moss like beautiful green ferns, and like palms and fir trees, and it was all green as jewellery, and drops of water hung on it like diamonds. And in the middle was the great well, deep and shining and beautiful, so clear that it looked as if I could touch the red sand at the bottom, but it was far below. (The Great God Pan, page 135)

This universe is defined by irregular flow, of water or lines. What you could say is all the lichen and moss you see has scripted routine (of DNA), which is one side of reality. The other is flow, and taken together they express their identity in the world.

Without expression (as Bruce Lee says) there is no independent identity. No free, naturalistic creativity with a sense of cosmic destiny. The naïve world, you could say, is one of destiny, of figures in a landscape, of figures in the sky.

Because it is naïve it also is not the universe of perspective accuracy. That’s not to say there is no perspective. BWS’s “The Enchantment” has perspective but not to an overriding degree.

 

The sweeping curve of the turf and deep waters make quite a weird space, embroidered with blossoms and grasses, even if there is more than a hint of perspective in the flagstones and jetty.

The naïve world is actually full of weird spaces, shifting and twisting animate/inanimate shapes. If this is the expressive world of cosmic destiny (of the cowboy and Indian!) it has a flow that is not to be seen in the straightline mainstream.

The vast perspective illusion hides the real world of naïve proportion, that I think is represented in their various ways by Madame Blavatsky, Arthur Machen, Talbot Mundy, Francis Stevens, Howard and the ethos of Weird Tales .. and Castaneda?

I quoted David Silverman

Field research.. views the culture through a lens.

A lens, though, is also a type of perspective illusion that lets us see an invisible world (Hyborian Bridge 56) There’s nothing wrong with using perspective, as I’ve repeatedly said; it’s only when the world BECOMES perspective that the illusion dominates reality.

You know the quote from Machen’s The White People

..I could see that all the different shapes of the earth were arranged in patterns, something like the grey rocks, only the pattern was different. It was getting late, and the air was indistinct, but it looked from where I was standing something like two great figures of people lying on the grass. (page 138)

The sense one gets is that the strong human shapes are far from crystal clear; there is a vagueness that’s very atmospheric. Where does the vagueness come from? From the interweaving shapes, inanimate ground and animate nature

 

Machrie, Arran

The suggestion of things that might be there is a peculiarity of the flow of line that merges and emerges in the dense tangle of the long, low shadows. It’s not to say either they’re there or they’re not, but the very suggestion is magic. Machen’s images seem to recur in the Narnia chronicles of CS Lewis in the 60s.

A world where not everything is crystal clear, and there is a vagueness, sounds much like the hidden world that is part of the Castaneda mythos. After all, things are only crystal clear in a perspective vision. In terms of shape and pattern things are often suggestive.

Now, in the scientific world of lenses (microscopes and telescopes) this suggestive world doesn’t exist. Nevertheless, in a human body – or in any physique – the jumble of shapes is suggestive of hills and valleys and that type of thing.

So, perspective illusion creates very definite shapes (ie biochemical molecules) but not the subtle hollows and highs of a physique. It’s the very precision of science that is false, and of course very convincing!

What is the undulating vagueness? It’s the flow of line that can’t be precisely measured. Even if precise shapes exist, so does flow and the two together create the expression of a physique, of a place (of magic).

In other words, the very persuasive precision of science is incorrect! Without the flow, the primeval rhythm, there can be no expression, only what “they” call information. It’s the same as saying that we, as homo sapiens, are identical to robots, an artificial, cyborg lifeform.

The way “they” get away with this is by being ultra-precise. But the very precision is robotic. Not only that but incorrect. In order to have precision one must also have imprecision – the atmosphere, the state of being.

 

The Big Pretence Titian was painting the very same hollows and highs of a magical wood as was Machen describing. A description can be precise if the thing being described is imprecise, and that is poetry. An all-precise world couldn’t be described poetically; it would be a living death.

It’s like Nietzsche says, “Without music, life would be a mistake” (Pictorial 27). It’s incorrect to be living in a robotic situation, unless literally forced by circumstances (like, say, Michael Schumacher).

Compare this photo of the Erechtheion (Athens) to BWS’s “The Enchantment”

 

What you see beyond a Greek temple is the other side of reality to monumental idealism. The filigree foliage that is like enlarged lichen. A Greek temple is proportionate order, whereas the surroundings are proportionate disorder. Disorder is the cycle of life that rises and falls, like the sweep of the turf. The theme of “The Enchantment” is the doppelganger on the other shore; the reality that all must face.

To the Greeks, their monuments were appearance, not reality. What you could call a magnificent illusion or, as Howard might have put it, the monuments of Man fade with his conquests.

But a Greek ruin is also a sign of heroic revival. An illusion can only revive in the grand sweep of conquest by nature herself! The Greeks did not live an illusion; they lived for the everlasting revival of nature that is the Dionysia, the theatrical festivities dedicated to the gay god of rustic pursuits.

This world is what you could call the ever shifting, undulating lines of leaves that fall off boughs that soar over hills and stones and moss soft and uneven. The world of disorder that is simply the other side of reality to a Greek temple. The world that existed throughout the Middle Ages and that is easy to identify in Howard’s fantasy descriptions.

Hyborian Bridge 68

The naïve universe is two-sided. On the one side there are heroic monuments of renown. On the other human-as-animal frequenting ale-houses and meandering quadrants pungent in all senses of the word.

Red Sonja #7

Mel Gibson’s Apokalypto gets the balance quite well, with the clueless peasants meandering around the jungle until they find themselves, by some cosmic jest, the sacrificial pawns of the great urban monument to Aztec power. The film ends with the arrival of a Spanish galleon bringing with it, of course, the Christianity which was to exert an equally bloody conquest/conversion. The great monuments of Mexican and Andean civilization could be described as “an enigma wrapped in a mystery,” which was actually what Time said about Carlos Castaneda (of Don Juan) in 1973.

Of himself, Castaneda said,

To ask me to verify my life by giving you my statistics.. is like using science to verify sorcery.

Such deliberate mystification could be justifiable if science is itself sorcery; in this case a sorcery of convincing illusions (sun, reflection, perspective) that relate to the head (not the body).

Castaneda’s quote reminds one of Grace Slick’s remark on the compulsions (of the factual head) for numerical verification in Hyborian Bridge 62/1 . By being more relaxed and less obsessively verifiable, the picture painted by Castaneda (of Don Juan) is more like an animal-shaman dance, and less like a strictly factual field study.

Again, as fellow anthropologist David Silverman says,

Field research.. views the culture through a lens.

The lens in this case is the human head that deals in verifiable fact. But peyote (the plant used by Don Juan for animal trips) is a psychoactive compound that changes perceptions.

In a dance, a Nagual can mimic and psychically “become” an animal form. To what extent are the psyche and physical linked? He may perceive himself to be an animal in his altered state of perception.

You could say that is a state of fantasy; another way to put it is a world of fact is another type of illusion, an illusion of perspective, one that convinces the head.

The Nagual who psychically becomes an animal physically identifies with the animal. The universe they are in is not part of the head but of the physique. This universe is the naive one of physical proportions. Moon, sun; Earth, stars (constellations, figures in the sky.)

Yes, but physical proportions are just what we see; facts are the lens that  is applied to a culture such as the Yaqui Indians (of Don Juan, who was a descendent of Toltecs, the pre-Columbian civilization.) What is missing is the dance, the primeval rhythms that are actually what we see (on Earth or in the heavens, constellations).

The primal or naïve reality is what the modern world through its facts and its Siri phones can no longer apprehend. The one where physical proportions are observed and have identity in the natural forms that used to surround Man’s habitations (Tros of Samothrace)

The dancing and winding ways of woods figure largely in folklore and fairy tales. I’ve just been reading The White People by Arthur Machen which is just full of that type of Celtic notion.

..the ring of wild hills all around was still dark, and the hanging woods looked dark and dreadful, and the strange rocks were as grey as ever; and when I looked down on them from the great mound, sitting on the stone, I saw all their amazing circles and rounds within rounds, and I had to sit quite still and watch them as they began to turn about me, and each stone danced in its place, and they seemed to go round and round in a great whirl, as if one were in the middle of all the stars and heard them rushing through the air. (The Great God Pan, Penguin, page 157)

The White People is told through the eyes of a girl writing in A Green Book of things seen in woods and of tales told by an old lady and the old lady’s great grandmother. Machen was Welsh, and it seems likely the same type of sombre and sultry folklore was told to Howard by his Irish mother.

The secret ways of Earth that connect Man to animals.

..I could see that all the different shapes of the earth were arranged in patterns, something like the grey rocks, only the pattern was different. It was getting late, and the air was indistinct, but it looked from where I was standing something like two great figures of people lying on the grass. (page 138)

This sort of physical identification is very like “figures in a landscape” (Weird 11 “The Enchantment”). The physique of Man and animals that invest a landscape with meaning. The worms that twist and turn in the ground. All of this is outside of our factual reality, but it is part of the great strength of the winding ways of the physical, proportionate reality.

All this makes one think we are no longer in the physical world, and that the more “material” it gets the more immaterial in actual fact! This again makes one think that science is a sorcery, an illusion of perspective, of the head, that does without the bodily sense of physical reality, as well as psychic perception.

One is also reminded of Madame Blavatsky’s Theosophy, where the psyche emanates from the naïve physical universe of planets. Because science is imprisoned by precision and perspective vision, it neither has the physical nor the psychic sense of things.

Howard wrote of Conan (Hyborian Bridge 58)

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)

Why is it that we, in our vastly more dominated future, are so credulous of the sorcery in our midst? It hurts my head to think of it, so here’s another Bolivian performer.

NARANJITAY

Pictorial 53

FLORILEGIUM

The Bolivian baroque choir took me back to my nigh-mythical kid-hood in Franco’s Spain. There’s something about Bolivia (Heads of Cerberus 1) that is quaintly old fashioned, as if they never got past the 50sor 60s. I guess it was founded by a rebel.

The baroque was rediscovered by some old European pastor and was largely Indian written, taught be the Spanish Mission. The guys performing it are probably villagers from around the country. Gee, I simply can’t get enough of those muchachos and senoritas, so here’s a traditional folksong

NARANJITAY

This is all inculcated in my mind, strangely enough, with Kukulkan from X-Men #s 25, 26 (which I read in “Power” reprints). Anyway, what is it the Bolivians have? Whereas mainstream reality is complex and weak, Bolivia comes across as simple and strong.

There’s also a connection with Moondog (prev.) who had some classical training, as well as Red Indian drums and jazz. Canons and rounds figure in his beats, which are relatively fugue-ish.

Baroque – as I see it – has a sense of stasis, of things revolving and developing gently and quaintly – tres naturelle. Without stasis – as previously noted  - there can neither be any change since it’s just a general mash-up (like contemporary pop).

The Bolivians – as I’m tending to say of other poverty-stricken Latin Americans (not that they’re poor, but rural and jungle-bound rather than electrically city-bound) – have spontaneous communal expression. I think it’s easy to detect in the videos.

The strength of commune gives rise to a facile simplicity that is a joy to see. This old strength – that is also in Moondog, the “hobo of the streets” – is the human-as-animal that is steadily being killed off by our Martian masters.

Hyborian Bridge 20 was saying that the ancient city-state has two sides: the established monuments (order) and the alleys that wind their ways, markets crowded with hoi-polloi and hawkers (freedom). The two sided state of affairs is quite easy to detect in Roy Krenkel’s illustrations for

 

It is really seen in the flow of line that meanders with a living vibration. The city is expressing itself in broken line (Bruce Lee, “broken rhythm”). I happen to have a copy of Metal Hurlant #14; this illo by Jean-Claude Gal has some resemblance

 

Again, the broken, pock-marked meandering unevenness has a living presence. Another example is BWS’s Pah-Dishah from Conan #19 splash

 

Broken rhythm and broken line are what you could call romantic decadence; the sense that ordered straightness doesn’t exist. That things weather, get beaten up, establish a chaotic order that is intoxicating to Man – see Detroit Drama3 From ruins will come strength (predator-prey rebirth) and that means leaving things well alone. The very fabric of reality is cyclical rebirth, and that strength is undone by all the routines of a competitive order. See Rome Hyborian Bridge 2

Here’s another Krenkel, with a lot of figures

 

A figure is physique, and so to do with proportion, especially if semi-naked. In the ancient universe everything is proportionate, one to the other. Sun to moon, and Earth to stars. This is the naïve, geocentric world that is strong and simple. If you have as look at Krenkel’s illo, there is some perspective there but it isn’t laborious. It’s when everything becomes ordered perspective that we are outside the geocentric model – where everything is proportionate – and inside the universe of precision.

This is what Vincent’s email was referring to (posted on swordsofreh.proboards) I think. Where everything is precision, you are outside the universe of relative proportion – as seen from Earth (geocentric).

This universe is simple and naïve and strong; it can’t be measured ultra-precisely because then it wouldn’t have the naivety that goes with strength. Things decay, and that is a source of strength. In the measured universe there is no decay, and so no revival. It is a death force that convinces (sun, reflection).

Earth is proportionate (to the cosmos), whereas the relative universe of light is not. The thing that is missing is the moon; the absence of light, its lunar reflection and

MOONSHADOW

The absence of light is just the proportionate symmetry of the universe. Why should that be? Why do we have four limbs? It just is.

To be naïve is not to be precise (robotic). To be precise is to be trapped in a world that is not proportionate, because of its very convincingness! It’s better to be naïve, animal-like; you can’t be fooled by the robots or Martians in our midst.

 

 

The Heads of Cerberus (part 4)

Tim Smith-Laing (labyrinth Hyborian Bridge 16), in a review of This Is Not Propaganda, says, “It is almost as head-swimmingly hyperactive as the process it uncovers.” The book is an expose by a noted Russian dissident of Putin’s fact=fiction world. As Smith-Laing notes, the real problem is we literally don’t need one more book; we need less books, less words.

For all its qualities, it feels akin to a nuanced essay on icebergs written from the tilting deck of the Titanic. It is worth reading, but you had better read it fast.

The real point is no one knows anymore what they’re writing about because the reference points have faded in the mist. The first thing is to find your reference point, there on the chart before the iceberg hits. If one were looking at an old chart, the reference points would be the stars, the nearest port, the waves on the sides of the ship, seagulls plus the maritime wreck reading the chart.

It all sounds like a mix-up between Jacques Brel (C13) and Tintin; old, right-wing Europe with maybe a dash of Bardot. Yeah, that is where I’m coming from, why deny it?
Let’s make it simple; there are shapes which are classically human, and Bardot is one. So is Coco Gauff, the black American tennis prodigy. So is The Boxer at Rest from circa 300 BC

 

What do those all have in common, apart from the classic physique? They’re all fighters. The naked boxer is stoic resistance personified. Gauff is quoted as saying, “I never stop fighting” and the same goes for BB.

Greeks were the prototype Europeans, forever feuding and reneging and beating back the Persian fleets. The physical world is feudal, the shape of the human body which is athletically muscular. This lost world of grandeur and glory was recaptured in the pulps, and especially heroic fantasy, whether Almuric or A Princess of Mars.

And – yes – Francis Stevens (ne Bennett) - this scene of Trenmore atop a balcony of fear speaks for itself.

Throwing off his coat he removed a large handkerchief from the pocket, wadding it in his right hand and grasped the blade high up. Seizing the pommel in his left hand, slowly but with gathering force, he twisted the sword. It did not move. His white shirt stood out in bulging lumps over his labouring shoulders. His face went dark red. The purple veins rose and throbbed on a forehead beaded with great drops of perspiration. He did not jerk or heave at the thing. He merely twisted – and the leverage was terrific. (page 161)

Further along the line, whirling the blade in “a crimson haze of fury” against the Red Bell (“Threat of Penn”) his blows take effect, and he is filled with “a savage delight”.

Pulps were essentially a rebellion against a world of words and empty rituals, and in favour of physical action. You tend to notice nowadays even the shooters post wordy manifestoes – very thoughtful of them!

Why is it that people - supposedly of action – think words so meaningful? When Trenmore’s blows have the effect of eclipsing this dire future and they are precipitated 200 years previously into the vast grey square of 1918, one of the first things they see

There was still an emblem above the southern arch. That morning it has been the ominous, sword-crossed Red Bell. Now it was a shield with the city colors, pale yellow and blue; above it glowed a huge “Welcome” and the letters “A.A.M.W.”; beneath it the one word “TRUTH”.

“Associated Advertising Men of the World,” he muttered half aloud, “and their convention was here – I mean is here. Yes, we’re back in our own century again.” (page 176)

I’ll leave you with a question. Is the modern world an advertising invention? An invention that is built of words that are designed to persuade us that we are living in a perspective illusion, and not in our fighting bodies; bodies which are built of balance, grace and primeval rhythm.

STAMPING GROUND  (sublime primitivism) Pictorial 13

The Heads of Cerberus (part 3 of 4)

I suppose you wonder why I keep coming up with Linear A (prev) as a sign of basic boredom? Well, because it’s a script which self-references. It contains lists and stocktaking for the storehouses at Crete but, even though many signs are identical to Linear B (Mycenian Greek), their use in the different language (Minoan) is opaque because of the meagre subject-matter.

What I really mean is a script is only interesting if it’s deciphered. Linear B was eventually deciphered by various people but the credit usually goes to amateur Michael Ventris, who went on the hunch that differences in the clay tablets would be found in localised place-names (eg Knossos) – which proved correct.

So, the decipherment of a language is down to relating it to the wider world. Developing that idea, a physically desirable world would inspire colourful language. Now, if this physically desirable world is inarticulate, it relates to non-verbal things like beauty, grace, color, gaiety.

These things are child’s play to write about as it’s simply a matter of observation. So what is an inarticulate world? One where there is spontaneous communal expression of Man in his animal guise, a four-limbed acrobat leaping onto saddles, sidling down streets or seasonal barn-dancing.

It’s not a case of there being no routine; the routine relates to Man the four-limbed animal, not Man the dissociated head (robot). What the modern world doesn’t seem to appreciate is that a world of the head is a world of script (words) that are self-referential – that do not relate to physical reality.

This harks back to Ayn Rand; in Pictorial 46 Randianism was opposed by a legend of rustic wildness.

 

 

Whereas the image of Rand amongst towering monuments is as illusory as a maze of mirrors, the rustic image has an irregularity that is disordered and free. Free, that is, to be rundown and to have a rundown spirit that precedes flourishing revival. Meaning, the place that merges with nature in a rustic way has a natural strength that will endure.

The illusion of modernity, by contrast, is a living death that cannot allow decay from crumbling walls, lichen and moss; revival as the way of nature. By leaving something be, it becomes part of the moon-dark reality that is the Earth spinning through space. The serpent that twirls twixt sun and moon. The sea (“Claimed”).

This reality is non-verbal, brim with poetry, whereas the ordered illusion of Randian sorcery is brim with words. Now, this is where we get back to Linear A: something that is indecipherable owing to meagre content.

The real problem with modernity is that the content of reality is not words; it’s the inarticulate beauty, grace, color, gaiety of the sky at night through which we travel. From this comes then power of poetry, from Homer to Howard.

In a universe of words the content is always illusory. This is the universe we are entering since, after all, that is what algorithms are (language). The trend is blatantly obvious in transhumanists, who speak a fantastical gobbledegook (Jeffrey Epstein of the sex shenanigans is one of their sympathisers, apparently). The Russians, actually, with their Bolshoi acrobats and tennis stars are a pretty good antidote.

Which brings us back to The Heads of Cerberus. In the run-up to the Civic championships at City Hall, Bennett’s Noto-like descriptions continue. The décor is

Entirely in green, a thick velvet carpet of that color covering the floor like moss, and the walls being decorated in a simulation of foliage. (page 123)

There is quite a decadent feel to the entire scenery; the Numbers (citizens) are enjoined to silence and only give off the sound of “dry leaves rustling”. By contrast, the Servants (“of Penn”) are not unlike the dandies from The Nikopol Trilogy (C8 etc)

All wore the green or yellow buttons of Superlativism, and all were dressed with a  gaiety that verged – in many cases more than verged – on distinct vulgarity. (page 123)

Theatrical grotesquerie is certainly a similarity to Noto’s “Red Lace” Aspects 3 etc and, when the Justice Supreme finally makes his appearance for the championships, he is an ancient wreck, “decrepit and loathsome”.

Bennett somewhere does say something like “the Quaker stronghold of Philadelphia”, and one almost gets the impression of a savage Quaker tribe (see “Indian Summer” Alternates 7)

This decadent streak becomes more apparent as the contest winds on, and the Numbers’ candidate for Musician, a gilded youth, loses and is set to be thrown into the pit. The Numbers rebel, surge forward, and the City Hall turns into a red slaughterhouse.

  (page 138)

This really does come straight out of Noto’s bag of tricks! Like Narca, the Justice Supreme

His face! It was lined and scarred by every vice of which Clever’s younger countenance had hinted.

(page 126)

Red Sonja #11

How is it that these scenes of pure evil can be swept aside, or even have desirable consequences such as Sonja’s sight being restored? Both Noto and Bennett write allegorically, and with the spilling of blood comes a sense of natural justice. The roc’s blood that cures Sonja’s blindness; here, there will be revenge.

This is a Quaker city where presumably good and evil exist. In nature there is blood, and there is a natural justice in the flowing of blood between predator and prey. Blood in human societies may be evil, but Nietzsche wrote Beyond Good and Evil. This provides a link between human societies and savage nature.

The Heads of Cerberus (part 2)

The way I’d put it is both Bennett and Howard’s fantasies take place in a physically desirable universe of blood and honour, in which there is often wild fighting. I haven’t read Lovecraft in centuries (literally) but doubt if his universe is physically desirable. For all that Howard is dark, he is intoxicated by nature’s gaiety, and Friend Island is that type of place.

"But sudden the ground begun to shake under my feet, and the air was

full of a queer, grinding, groaning sound, like the very earth was in

pain.

"I turned around sharp. There sat Nelson, holding his bleeding toe in

both fists and giving vent to such awful words as no decent sea-going

lady would ever speak nor hear to!

"'Stop it, stop it!' I shrieked at him, but 'twas too late.

"Island or no island, Anita was a lady, too! She had a gentle heart,

but she knowed how to behave when she was insulted.

The physically desirable – whether nature or woman – needs defending with blood and honour from those sorceries that would threaten it. Heroic fantasy, the fighting spirit of man and woman. Sorcery, in medieval parlance, is another term for evil – outwith the church. Blood and honour are at the service of conscience (religion) and the physically desirable in woman or nature (chivalry.)

That physical reality is very hard for moderns to follow since, in effect, we are living in a sorcerous world of “spells”. Meaning various lists, scripts, routines (of the head) that take the place of reality.

I read a review of a history of Charlemagne that related round various secondary sources, court “annals”, monastery documents, chartered estates. What I tend to think is, in those far-off days, “script” was vastly less vital than fighting deeds in defence of conscience, as this picture suggests.

  Casper Johanne Nepomuk Scheuren, 1848

Primary source, Charlemagne to Abbot Fulrad..

Let it be known to you that we have determined to hold our general assembly¹ this year in the eastern part of Saxony, on the River Bode, at the place which is known as Strassfurt.² Therefore, we enjoin that you come to this meeting-place, with all your men well armed and equipped, on the fifteenth day before the Kalends of July, that is, seven days before the festival of St. John the Baptist.¹ Come, therefore, so prepared with your men to the aforesaid place that you may be able to go thence well equipped in any direction in which our command shall direct; that is, with arms and accoutrements also, and other provisions for war in the way of food and clothing. Each horseman will be expected to have a shield, a lance, a sword, a dagger, a bow, and quivers with arrows; and in your carts shall be implements of various kinds, that is, axes, planes, augers, boards, spades, iron shovels, and other utensils which are necessary in an army. In the wagons also should be supplies of food for three months, dating from the time of the assembly, together with arms and clothing for six months. And furthermore we command that you see to it that you proceed peacefully to the aforesaid place, through whatever part of our realm your journey shall be made; that is, that you presume to take nothing except fodder, wood, and water. And let the followers of each one of your vassals march along with the carts and horsemen, and let the leader always be with them until they reach the aforesaid place, so that the absence of a lord may not give to his men an opportunity to do evil.

Secondary sources remind one a bit of Linear A at Knossos (Pictorial 8), closed to color and gaiety. The rough hues of a Hyborian map are far preferable

  C12

A world of “spells” is closed to color and gaiety, which is simple the reality that Man has four limbs and can be a natty dresser, like Charlemagne! This is the classical world of drama that is the source material of European civilization– physique and psyche.

IPHIGENIA IN TAURIDE

Sorcery works against that, because it is really the warrior ethos, blood and honour – how many Greek tragedies have revenge and blood? Sorcery replaces blood and death with the living death of a non-physical reality that cannot revive from decay.

If things are left alone, they have a strength of laissez-faire revival, the cycle of lifedeath, predator-prey. The dilapidated building is more “alive” that the picket-fence perfection (Drama 3). Moderns cannot really follow that idea, because they are not in physical reality.

This is the universe of the head we live in. The result is physical boredom since the physique can’t be denied and the compulsions of the (male) mind – monetary, numerical, algorithmic – put them in thrall to their own physique. We of the ever-present “spell” (of words, script) are ever more in thrall to our physique and ever less exposed to free-flowing imagination, the dream of the universe.

Expression –as Bruce Lee says –is neither routine nor flow, but both together. If routine is articulate and flow is inarticulate, both are needed. The modern world makes the assumption one can speak ABOUT words; actually that’s a contradiction in terms. One can speak about non-verbal things: beauty, grace, color, gaiety. The non-verbal is expression (body). Poetry is the way to put that into words.

Howard’s world is thus much closer to the primary source of Charlemagne, standing poised and mighty in Casper’s portrait, than any number of scholarly texts. In The Heads of Cerberus, Viola’s beast-like desirability is made very obvious in this fiery, fairly filmic description.

Despite his desperate preoccupation, Drayton’s first sight of Viola Trenmore brought him the same momentary flash of joy that comes with the sight of a bluebird in springtime. She was like a bluebird, fluttering in from the sunshine.  (page 41)

From bluebird to flowers, as the lichenous ruins the vapours of Cerberus sent them to become animated.

After all, why should not a castle grow up like a flower – like a flower with a magic scent? Down here on the plain the grass was filled with flowers and the air with their fragrance. There was something peculiarly soothing and reassuring in the very odor of them. (page 58)

This sequence reminded me of the sorcerous temple of animated wood and sullen stone from Noto’s “Red Lace” (Aspects 3 etc). In both, the revival is accompanied by images of death.  Noto has vats of dying roc’s blood (one that restores Sonja’s sight), while Bennett has

They stood no more than eight or nine yards from the road and could see very well what Drayton had perceived. The horses were large, heavy brutes, of the type bred centuries ago for battle.. But the men on their backs – why, those were not men, not even the ghosts of men! They were mere empty suits of gleaming armor. (page 59)

Noto’s yarns can have a tendency to remind one of freak shows

 Red Sonja #4

When the three intrepid wanderers of The Heads of Cerberus arrive in the Philadelphia of 2118, lo and behold carnivalesque grotesquerie is their lot. For at the intersection of Broad Street and Market, in the very bowels of City Hall, they find not grey vastness, but

Above, rounding to a level with the top of the fourth story, curved the golden hollow of a shallow but glorious dome..From the center of the dome, swung at the end of a twenty foot chain, depended a huge bell.. The color of it was a brilliant scarlet, so that it hung like an enourmous exotic blossom. (page 76)

This is all too reminiscent of Noto’s “Master of the Bells” from Red Sonja #5

 

They are brought there as common prisoners, having no knowledge of the “numerical buttons” that all citizens must wear and find themselves in a very “courtly” court vying for attention in the championships. The bull-like Irishman, Trenmore, is put in for Strongest at the behest of Loveliest, and will seemingly rule as her consort if he wins, in place of her present mate, Cleverest.

What transpires is that only the Superlatives have titles, everyone else being a number. That is almost the opposite of our own system, where anything numerical is cleverest! Bennett’s system of government, it should be noted, seems to place equal value on head (Cleverest) and body (Strongest), as well as both together (Loveliest).

Even though, as Cleverest says,

Now these competitions – the Civic Service Examinations, as they are properly named – are conducted on a perfectly fair basis. It is a system as democratic as it is natural and logical. (page 102)

It’s clearly not atall democratic. In fact, Bennett emphasises the “barbaric splendour” of the City Hall décor, and the savagery of the law as well as the custom of contests is made apparent.

This does rather seem to make the point that democracy is purely a system of the head, and not of the body, the physique, of the courtiers of old, preening and parading their wares for ostentatious show.

A system of the head has to be both physically and sexually lopsided, and makes the assumption that “Cleverest” is good in itself. How about Strongest and Loveliest? Our politicians may be clever, but tend to be either ugly or weak.

If our system is a false logic (of perspective illusion, prev.) Bennet’s is a much more natural logic of acrobatic human proportions that made Man the hunter, the wanderer, master of the seas and builder of renown. Man the animal as opposed to the immaterial electromagnetic impulse of the head or robot.