Hyborian Bridge 107

Beliefs that incorporate sex, death, rebirth value social strength – not information. Strength of social norms is inevitably linked with fascist “supermen” of the 30s. However, as you could hear from the text being read out at the bookstore scene in One Plus One (actually Mein Kampf), the dictators value above all cervo-mechanisms of the (superior) mind, and downplay sentiment.

To them “soft” feelings are not strong – and this is where the difference lies (with fascism). Meaning that the lifecycle of sex, death, rebirth or regrowth is very much dependent on feminine values.

The feminine value is really action in the bush (pardon the phrase). The agile woman of loping grace, the huntress who is allied with the moon, the destroyer who precipitates creation and rebirth.

It is active strength of bodily grace and form. Information that accords with this strong style and psyche relates to fertility and the female body. These societies of grace then influence events with their belief in strength.

This is probably the opposite to fascist cervo-mania, which is itself almost a precursor to the modern ego-fixation on numerical “facts” that are hyper-realistic illusions (like pornography). In this situation, reality is much more akin to a pulp fantasy that has storytelling balls. Events in the story are predicated on a belief in strong style and psyche.

While our societies are predicated on competition (male ego), ancient ones are predicated on grace and style, and from that comes strength. Grace is the feminine virtue – the harmonic womb – and associated with fertility.

After all, what would Conan be without style and psychic allure?

 

  Savage Sword #212 1993

As a sequel to Red Nails, one can see Kayanan’s style is influenced by the BWS original. Languorous scenes of decorous repose were fairly frequent amidst the gruelling beast-infested slaughter.

In this case, having partaken of dragon-flesh, the fetid reek of entrails and general roughness and dirt invite the act of cleanliness. Places of power are bastions of fertility, whether a Stygian swamp or here under unknown jungles that border the black kingdoms, and the mud and slime that goes with it.

Ecology is pretty well the opposite of hygiene but, as Valeria attests to here, the ultimate satisfaction is vastly keener for the degradation endured. Fertility is the feminine domain of blood and power, and from this flows social grace. The hunt, the savage slaughter; and after the music, song, dance and raucous laughter.

The rough strength of ancient societies does not come from the masculine virtue of order (now hygiene and number), but from the feminine value of fertility. This is the hunt of Artemis under wooded eldritch blue-moon hills.

 

With the feminine vistas comes heroic romance, for the world is strong (again). Water, shrubs, nudity, fountains, springs to cleanse body and spirit. This is where the masculine virtues collapse into nothingness for lack of feminine mystique. We live in an ever-more convincing illusion of numbers since number is merely the masculine or ordered side of reality. Without the feminine there is no underlying harmonic of cosmic vibration (moon, planets.)

All atoms have an atomic number designating their place on the Periodic Table of elements, since nothing in nature is not ordered. However, nothing in nature is not disordered either, in that things are destroyed and built-up in a natural cycle of predator-prey.

The masculine virtue is like Euripides’ The Bacchae (The False Apollo etc), discounting all the gay power arising from the destructive cycle of the seasons, the springing buds, the vines of plenty and orgiastic rites.

Instead of this strength which is a virtue of harmony (the womb) we are given the weakness of numbers. Since everything is a number (including atoms), the logically most convincing illusion is for numbers to replace politics and economics.

Why do we not realize it? Because it’s so convincing, natch. In the UK, Sunak’s budget for the Conservatives has nothing right-wing, merely a game of infrastructure spending and borrowing while sticking to “fiscal rules” (same as Trump and the Fed?)

It’s all totally incomprehensible but, since it’s numbers no one notices. Same with computers, which are words (language) that are numbers (ones and zeros). Algorithms which express human faces (prev) will be given stories that replace the reality of blood and fertile beings.

This sort of reality is sex-by-numbers which makes pulp fantasies seem vastly more realistic. Unless a story is based on the power that springs from blood, land, commune there can be no beliefs associated with it.

The masculine virtue is appearance (Apollo), not reality (Dionysus). A world of hyper-realism is all appearance, while pulp fantasy has the strong style and psychic content that are influential. It’s what you see in BWS’ Red Nails  and the sequel by Kayanan. There is blood (the dragon); there is a land (jungle); there is a commune – the Ichiribu. There is water, shrubs, nudity, springs, fountains.

There is music, dance, song like the social virelai of the 14^th century (Outtakes 4)

LESCUREL

As noted in HB106, the Shemite goddess Ishtar was exportable to Koth as a Valkyrie-like Earth-Mother residing in languorous temples. The female has the decorous grace that maybe the more brutish Dionysus lacks, but both represent the destruction that precipitates revival and strength.

This entire area is a harmonic symphony as opposed to pure masculine order. The former is strong and can influence the psyche (and events); that latter is weak and only has the appearance of realism. It is an illusion of the masculine high-priests of the sorcery of number.

Carney meets Sunak

                                      “One Plus One = 25 trillion”                    “Right!”

IN THE YEAR 2525

Hyborian Bridge 106

What does it mean by saying that words ARE propaganda (prev)? Well, for the world of straight lines and light – electromagnetism, talking and expressive algorithmic heads. After all, computers ARE words – they read language (ones and zeros).

In a way, that entire area is a fantasy, an illusion (appearance). In HB92 it notes there that in medieval times the beliefs – of the psyche – influenced events profoundly. The psyche was held to be real, and belief in the far Eastern knight Prester John – whose kingdom was practically totemic – influenced the Crusades.

Taking it further, Christianity is “good news” – meaning for the psyche – and so medieval faith becomes the events. This is almost the complete opposite to the idea that there are events which are “real” and that reporters report on, completely independent of the psyche.

Jean-Luc Godard’s films such as One Plus One seemingly do take this on. The reporter interviewing Eve Democracy, for example, is supplying all the information, more or less including the answers. At the end of the Bookstore scene, the intoner does make the concession that faith is the vital factor in social power, which is pretty interesting for a fascist bookseller!

In his interview, Godard comments that morality is informed by events (paraphrasing) and that it is not important compared to politics. He almost implied it is a fantasy of the church. Yes, but modern events are so complex that something as simple as good or evil can appear fantasy. Equally, though, what appears as reality can just be appearance (Apollo, light).

Words propagandize this apparent reality by means of information. What about psyche and faith? To me, faith would imply temples; atmospheric monuments that seclude one from incessant words and impart instead poetic and allegorical truths that feed the psyche. All ancient societies venerate temples, and that goes equally for Hyboria, natch.

Eve Democracy could almost represent a fertile woman wandering the trees, which are a type of natural temple. But instead of Dionysian rites she is asked political questions. Again, there appears to be two direct opposites (One Plus One =).

In a democracy “the point” is always the numbers, rather than the land, community or temple. Yet in ancient Greece it would be taken as read that these things are inalienable rights. Only landowners of the commune could vote, and they gave offerings to the temple deities.

What seems to happen in modern democracies is that everything relates to the head – which is impressed by numbers – and not to the body which works the land of a commune, prays to the temple.

The commune has a psyche and a faith. The psyche of the commune will tend to influence events with its beliefs in harvest and fertility. The rural aspect of the society is therefore also a belief (see BWS Adastra in Africa Tales of Faith 2)

They will tend to value information that accords with their beliefs. The beliefs are to do with fertility and particularly the female body. This accords with the gods and goddesses of Hyboria, and especially to the Elder gods of Shem and Koth bordering on nighted Stygia.

As Robert Yaple notes in Savage Sword #8 (page 17) the Shemitic mother goddess would have a subordinate mate who dies and is reborn annually with the cycle of vegetation. Although nomads known as the Sons of Shem later initiated sky gods such as Pteor, only Ishtar went any way towards replacing Mitraic cults in neighbouring Koth.

Ishtar is typically portrayed as a Valkyrie-like Earth Mother in sumptuous temples. According to Yaple,

Her ivory idols combined southern sumptuousness with northern restraint. (Conan is restrained?)

City-states may have been political institutions but spent wisely on “lofty zikkurats” to adorn their temples. As I’ve been saying for awhile, while we live in a world of “facts”, reality in nature is to do with action, predator-prey, blood, death and renewal. That world is strong and fertile, Dionysian.

We live in a world of Apollo (light, appearance) but this is only half of reality. Mitra is the skygod of Hyborian lands. Erlik the dark deity of death. Ishtar the Earth-goddess who harbingers renewal, regrowth.

In this world, information and beliefs are tied together because we are no longer in the numerical land of the ego; the land of physical boredom where talk is about talk and not about the psyche that is strong and resurgent.

A lot of the Elder gods of whom Yaple writes were grossly obscene, animalistic. They represent what in nature is not talk or words but active events of sex, death, rebirth. Each god or goddess has a story associated with them.

Hanuman (SS #8)

Pteor

Going back to One Plus One

, in the bookstore scene the looseness of the sex counteracts the fascist text; the pulp magazines shown are also storytelling - gross, obscene or animalistic as it may be!

 

Pornographic pulp-storytelling is practically quaint collectors’ items compared to today’s “market”. Because life is a story; we are our bodies, not just our brains which get the juice of information. Beliefs incorporate sex, death, rebirth and from these is born a society that values strength, and not simply information.

Pictorial 103

ONE PLUS ONE

Eve saying yes or no is s sort of sequel to the scene in Weekend where Roland and Corrine meet Emily Bronte and Tom Thumb in a forest. The odious protagonists are baffled by the two fantasy characters, and end up setting Emily on fire as she recites a poem.

They are entirely caught-up in their own materialist fantasies and this type of nature romance escapes them utterly.

Somewhat similarly, the “interviewer” of Eve is utterly indifferent to the indifference of nature through which Eve wanders as he presents her with posers on the capitalist way of life.

In both films, it seems like two incompatible worlds appear alongside eachother. The indifference and romance of nature is set alongside capitalist mores, or against political certainties that are just as fanciful, in reality.

Then, the bookstore scene in One Plus One (prev) sets fascist ideology against pulp smut. This echoes the smutty opening to Weekend which sets up almost a monstrous pornographic road movie, seemingly centred on the anal fixation on capitalist-goods. In one scene, a guy called Balsamo hijacks the pair and reveals himself as the result of God sodomising Alexander Dumas. Even he, though, is repelled by their bourgeois fantasies, and turns their car into a flock of sheep.

Having seen One Plus One – plus the Godard interview included – I can see that Godard is very much the crude satirist almost in the mode of Rabelais (scatology and extended risqué jokes). Scenes like Eve are his way of putting straight-laced rationality against melodic form. “An orgasm is the only moment life cannot be cheated?” “Yes”.

In a way, One Plus One is a sequel to Weekend with virtually the same pornographic fixation. The black rebel amongst the hulks of cars with the three captured white women rhapsodises over the fascination of their white flesh to his ancestral black race.

Again, in the bookstore scene, the very straight-line racism of the intoned fascist text is counterpointed by the camera panning over ridiculous pulp titles of women whipping men and adventures in lingerie, with the odd Green Lantern. The ridiculousness of the body-fixations seems in direct opposition to the racial certainties being read out.

“When sex is problematical, in walks the totalitarian?” Eve is asked. “Yes” she says. “And the one thing you have learnt.. is not to make love when you don’t really feel like it?” “Yes”. There is the pulp voiceover of a seemingly sci-fi romance, which references a sordid fondling of fur. It could also be noted that the two girlish black interviewers of the car-hulk rebel are very appealing in a streetwise black fashion, loose and guileless.

It seems, then, that Godard is counterpointing the serious political content of his 60s films with louche body-oriented material which is really pretty appealing, whether black, white or pulp sci-fi.

As was said previously in P96 your body-responses are always real. At the beginning ofWeekend, where the girl is describing an orgy, the sordid fixation on anal erotica at least produces real responses in the participants. It seems that sex in Godard’s 60s films, whether sordid or simply pretty, takes on something real and that counteracts a fixation on words.

What you could say is that the reality if sex underlies capitalism, and that the more technologically vacuous the more the sex itself becomes vacuous, as in the scene at the start of Weekend.

Sex is a good metaphor as it can either be good or bad, bodywise. The body can therefore act as a metaphor for the brain and, in the case of physical boredom, the sexual aspect becomes totally technological. IE a robot (prev.)

Don’t forget these films are about 50 years old, as where we are today is much more advanced towards a state of physical boredom – a numerical world of algorithmic heads. Even looking at the Rolling Stones’ studio one soaks up the atmosphere of basically people just sitting around and casually coming-up with a groove. It can be pretty hard work with take after take, but there is also the fact that from out of nothing comes something.

I was reading-up on the Stones, and they started out as Blues and African-based, later, with Brian Jones departure becoming a Chuck Berry style band. You can see this in the studio, where Jones concertedly plays the bongos.

Music, like sex, is a very direct hit and is often accentuated by atmosphere. Atmosphere often means just the space to be able to feel something without conscious thought or the presence of words. Eve is in the garden is atmosphere, and indifferent to human words.

50 years on from the films one can see the advanced technology induces physical boredom and hence the numerical/sexual fixations that are more or less vacuous. In other words, the counterpart to a society of the head (word) is the vacuity of sex.

In traditional rural societies, again as previously noted, the supple strength, particularly of the female spine, is accentuated by bunched clothing (see Eve). Women is the fields are a source of strength to the well-bred human race (see also the rhythmic sexpression of Fulling Hyborian Bridge 60)

Millet (Ruth HB92)

The body in its natural state of activity is sexually expressive by its nature. The sexual aspect of rural societies is not detached from the work aspect, the economy.

What this really means is that the body is physically very expressive, supple and strong, and so very appealing. It’s almost the guileless appeal on associated with African tribes before the expansion of Western civilization.

Dahomey Amazons of South Sahara

Guilelessness is an aspect of the body-in-action, the natural state of human affairs. Ancient Greek culture was tied-up with the naked athletic pursuit; Minoan bull-dancing was another ancient European pastime.

Wild Horses

In One Plus One, there’s an intermittent voiceover that plays when the Stones are rehearsing in the studio and one hears bits of carnal pulp sci-fi. Meanwhile in the studio are seen the acts of the musicians, some of which are highly sensual.

Wyman plays bongos and writhes his torso; Jagger tweaks his leg repetitively and forcefully; the sleek grace of Richard’s limbs. In other words, the work the Stones are doing much more resembles old-time field-labour that inevitably has a sexually expressive aspect.

The atmosphere of the studio is appealing and joyful if stressful. By contrast, body movements nowadays are often bored and listless. The pulp proximity in Godard’s film adds spice and a type of gay abandon that counteract the sexless intonations of propaganda.

If you watch the bookstore scene, the intoning guy hands out a blank sheet to each punter as they give a fascist salute. This is very reminiscent of Carpenter’s They Live! Which I’ve also remarked on previously. Words in the modern scene ARE propaganda simply because they ARE words.

THEY LIVE!

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

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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.