Hyborian Bridge 99

LE MEPRIS Hyborian Bridge 15

Cosmic spontaneity – the wilful Poseidon – and the resourceful adventurer Ulysses, versus modern neurotic man (Paul) who only thinks. These themes are a very big part of Godard’s film, starring Bardot as Camille/Penelope, Paul’s wife.

There’s a scene in this musical sequence of La Bardot framed by a golden halo of hair – truly a Mediterranean goddess sprung to life.

 

The famous pout responds to maleness in the shape of producer Prokosch on the island of Capri. Her physical honesty and Paul’s neurotic mental games culminate in desertion and death.

Savage honesty in a sense is sensuality, virility, femininity – over which the enigmatic Greek statues watch. Dishonesty is in the two-faced words which Paul – in all good faith as Prokosch’s screenwriter – spouts like a geyser gone to the dogs (as has Jean-Luc, apparently, but I won’t mention BB).

The neurotic man spouts words, while Bardot pouts and lashes out with savage scorn. The film is almost like a template for the war between words of no meaning – in a parallel reality of numbers (or the dollar) – and the world of physical reality that words may aptly describe.

Paul represents the first, while Ulysses and Camille/Penelope represent the second. Bardot represents honest sex, while Paul represents hedging and vacillation(one scene has him perusing a Roman pornographic book, as it happens).

The dishonesty of Paul’s attitude is easy to discern in the modernday corporate boardroom. There’s for example the whole area of robot sex, with CES in Las Vegas hosting sex-tech with quote, “No sleaze.. no lewd language and no anatomically correct demonstration.”

“Our branding is not that way anyway. We really try to speak about this more as a wellness and lifestyle product and just get people to integrate it into their lives, so for us that wasn’t really a problem at all,”says Braicks. (DT)

Words, words, words. All she means is they are dishonestly selling sleazy products! After all, it’s not a moral business; the reason one used to go to sleazy joints in Soho is that it’s a sleazy business. Straight sex is more moral even when it’s sleazy. The purification process at CES is yet another sign of hygiene-machines that are misnamed as moral as opposed to dirty (which they are).

All of this is really a brand of robotics which is just a brand of VR, all of which inhabits a parallel world of words without the physical reality of moral meaning (body). The people at CES like Braicks and Liz Klinger, founder of “data-driven vibrator company” Lioness, say (accurately) that pleasure is part of human behaviour. However, they are branding it like any other tech-product in a hygienic universe of rational robots.

The truth is that a primeval serpent underlies all this hi-tech shininess which is based on a false premise that everything can be clean (as opposed to dirty). The whole trend of modern technology is to replace one reality – which is sensual, virile, feminine and has ambiance and dirt – with another, which has information.

It’s irrelevant to “them” whether the information is to do with pleasure or the dollar. Everything to them is the same since they are looking through “the mirror of nothingness”; lines of light, reflections in solid-state circuitry (ones and zeros).

In ancient Greece, Euclid was a very small percentage proportion of classical reality. Actually, Euclid was circa 350 BC or about 100 years post-classical, to be accurate. Today, Euclidean space – meaning light or electro-impulses – is rapidly approaching 100%, if you assume everything human is attached to it (ie the head). The psychotic and the numerical become one with the compulsive ego, and death to grace of movement and form (body).

That world is induced and therefore lacks the cardinal virtue of sensuality, virility, femininity, the ambiance of dirt, the spontaneity of movement and proportionate balance. Dance. If we were living in a Hyborian kingdom, we would have every reason to suppose a sorcerous hand was at work. The hand that negates savage beauty and straps it instead to rational machines.

 

The technology is aimed at the head at the expense of ambient reality that has sensual leanings; I mean sleazy joints.

Hyboria has all of that in large doses. If it can be seen as something of a reaction against straight line progress, it can now be seen that straight lines inevitably lead to the killing of life as a spontaneous dance, and its replacement by information seen through “the mirror of nothingness” (induction of hygiene-machines, misuse of words).

Competing in this parallel reality delivers a strong disadvantage to spontaneous acts of any kind – including original thinking. What “they” say is almost the reverse of reality. Only by being non-progressive does one retain one’s original identity and freedom to dance to a tune of the stars.

Meanwhile, overhaul of PETA’s environmental checks at the White House:

“The US can’t compete and prosper if a bureaucratic system holds us back from building what is needed”. Trump is no original thinker and his brand of Big Competition accelerates the attachment of the head to smart surroundings, from hyperloops to higher streets.

In the process, archaic forms – from rutted streets to cowboy trails – loses its meaning and use in the realm of acts (Hyborian Bridge 89). Free competition kills use, which is like rotted fruit: the use changes and becomes a new type of strength in the field. Competition will replace the active use of rotten fruit – or compost or dung – with the misuse of words dominated by smart surroundings.

This is the electric-green future where electricity becomes the new green (Tales of Faith 2). Archaic form is linked to the activities of the body – human or animal – in town-and-country. Competition kills any vestige of this body use, and the head reaps the reward in domination by the sorcery of information – robots, VR, robot-sex (see Zappa Tales of Faith 13, Weird 3)

Competition kills the harmonic resonance of places that just exist side-by-side; the natural state-of-affairs since physical movements and trade will tend to establish a balance. The Mediterranean trading empire of Venice, say.

There is a difference between movement for the sake of trade, which takes place in the physical world of the body, and financial movements which take place in the numerical universe of the compulsive head!

The first has natural resonance relating to physical contact by sea-trade to distant shores; the second has almost no physical reality! Resonance occurs also between heavenly bodies, since it is just a natural; consequence of physical distance.

Vincent of UVS (Hyborian Bridge 48 and various) sent me this link on the Fibonacci sequence of planets, a series which is found in radial branching of leaves round stems.

SOLSTICE

Resonance also has to exist in the proportions of a body, as it grows in the womb. It stands to reason, as a resonance is a stable vibration. Does the resonance have any relation to the heavenly bodies? This can only possibly be a factor if gravity vibrates in aether, as Vincent’s website postulates. Aether is a universal substance, so all things vibrate in it.

The entire Solar System oscillates with its barycenter, and thus its motion is transferred to all Solar System objects via its encapsulated aetheric medium. This resonant could cause all its planetary objects to generate sound with the vibration. This is not a conventional way of audible sound transmission. (email)

How can these harmonics possibly be connected? Well, the womb is zero-G (relative to Earth, in a watery float) and is known to be affected by lunar tides. Water in homeopathy works the inverse of normal, by having more effect the more dilute the solution (of the molecule). Is it possible water has a cosmic connection via aether?

H-bonds consist of hydrogen, which is the smallest atom, consisting of only a proton and an electron. H-bonds oscillate sympathetically, so a reasonable question is, is water intrinsically harmonic? Cosmically, Mars, Earth/Moon, Venus have a Fibonacci harmonic. They could vibrate sympathetically with the next planet, the vast Jupiter.. and so forth.

There is a numerical connection here, related to harmonics, almost the opposite of “data”. One is the graceful body, the other is the compulsive head. There is a harmonic tendency in nature, and it clearly is the opposite of competition, which is mainly aimed at the head and not the proportionate body, or archaic form in the realm of acts. Movements of figures in a space (Weird 11)

 

Doctor Strange water elemental Hyborian Bridge 82

Pictorial 84

Euclid’s 5^th postulate states

That, if a straight line falling on two straight lines make the interior angles on the same side less than two right angles, the two straight lines, if produced indefinitely, meet on that side of which are the angles less than the two right angles.

In a diagram this is easy to visualise as it’s a roundabout way of saying the two lines incline toward’s eachother (not away or parallel).

Postulates are not axioms, which are really blindingly obvious, but they seem axiomatic. Why am I bothering with this? Only because it boosts my ego to say these things! Even though it’s nothing to do with me and happened about 350 BC. For someone working professionally with geometry – Newton, Einstein et al – the correctness of what they do just has to boost the ego. It’s human nature.

Any geometrical theory of the universe – like Einstein’s warped structure of spacetime – is therefore helpful to the ego of those who work with it.

That’s all I’m saying as spacetime is non-Euclidean and over my head. There are other things that aren’t geometrical and therefore can’t be understood in the same sense. Symmetry, balance (prev.), something a priori, but not a straight line or a circle. It could be a vibration, a musical chord (who knows?)

Proportion in animal figures has to be related to symmetry and balance.

While geometry can boost the ego (of the head), the human figure can’t do that as its ideal proportions aren’t axiomatic propositions. For an artist they just have to be learnt by rote, there’s no real brain work (eg. about 8 heads fit one body height).

I suppose Leonardo hazards a type of geometrical relationship in Vitruvian Man, but it’s frankly not terribly convincing. That’s quite a strong indication that the human figure develops spontaneously from primordial forces of dynamic balance.

All I’m saying is the spontaneity of nature is outside of human ego – as it can’t be understood mathematically, by the mind. I know you could say artists who deal in the human figure have egos, but they don’t have acolytes. Science is built like a sort of inverted pyramid where multiplicities of acolytes live off the theorems of previous ones.

This is why I say a sorcerous order replaces reality with logical propositions. One could trace a relatively direct sequence to the present day starting with geometry (Euclid 350 BC) to Newton’s Principles to Darwin’s competitive order (in a universe of straight lines, or the industrial order) to Tim Berners-Lee’s invention of the net.

All this progression constitutes ego-overload, otherwise known as AI. At the other end of the spectrum, I came across this enhanced photo of London from 1880

 

The copy on DT says “Dickensian” and they’re certainly archaic looking and non-progressive. Is there an innate tendency to be non-progressive in human behaviour (and why)?

First of all, it’s a safeguard of identity (origin).  Going by Biblical authority, when the Jews were captives in Babylon, King Nebuchadnezzar set up a

..giant statue and ordered each captive nation to send representatives. When his band struck up a tune, everyone was supposed to bow to the statue; those that refused would be tossed into a fiery furnace. Hananiah, Mishael, and Azariah, the Jewish delegates, consulted the prophet Ezekiel as to the proper course of action. Since the statue was not erected for idolatrous purposes, but only to honor the king, it would seem that Jewish law permitted bowing to it. However, the three Jews decided that they would demonstrate that only G‑d possesses unlimited power. Their plan was to refuse to prostrate before the statue, thereby defying Nebuchadnezzar publicly. Ezekiel, however, knowing that the punishment for such actions was death, instructed the three not to be present at the ceremony; if they went, he said, they should not expect G‑d to save them miraculously. Nevertheless, the three appeared, and when they proudly stood tall as everyone else bowed down, they were cast into the furnace. A spectacular miracle occurred, witnessed by the vast multitudes: the three walked out of the furnace without even being singed! After witnessing this great Kiddush HaShem, the nations of the world gained a new respect for G‑d and the Jewish people.

 

The motto is that identity is combatively non-progressive b ordering on reactionary. It has the quality of a triumphant song, such as the eon-spanning folk-anthem

BY THE RIVERS OF BABYLON

Folk and the people can exist alongside progressive industry, and the most obvious example is Motown (Drama3) which grew up alongside Detroit’s car industry and declined along with it. By “folk” I guess I mean the family-oriented identity of Motown that brought the street into the studio – with ambiance.

Ambiance is lost in the modern world because the self-organization of places gives way to progressive organization – which is the opposite thing. A place that is self-organizing will run down and will not rebuild – as happened in Detroit. It will self-regenerate through decay (rugged revival). Dirt and ambiance.

And life stories. By contrast, hip-hop is basically banal and born of boredom, rather than the reality of communal living. After all, Kanye West’s big hit is Runaway which says it all, really.

Living things are not progressive – which is a straight line. They are a dance of different things. A progressive system has to lead to straight line rule, essentially electro-impulses (sun or ego). Living things will rebel against this if they wish to self-rule, since this is a dance of the body.

That is the coming battle as one is to do with information (DNA, algorithms) and the other is to do with physical ambiance, spontaneous gaiety, unthinking acts (hygiene versus dirt and cleanliness; weakness versus strength; immaterial order versus physical and psychic reality).

Which will win? I don’t know the answer to that question, but it’s conceivable that the straight line progression of Newton-Darwin- Net is starting to show signs of wear. The reputation of God has suffered in the process. I remember writing a school essay about a global computer the last words of which were: As the last relay was closed, a fiery glow erupted in letters ten feet high: There Is Only One God. (I think I ripped-off Arthur Clark).

But it seems that living things are symmetrical, balanced and proportionate for a reason. Because it would be unthinkable to come into this world unless blessed by those attributes. It’s the ultimate non-progression since it has to apply to every living thing there’s ever been (even atoms, actually.)

This goes back to the idea of aether (Hyborian Bridge 48) which even Einstein was minded to support. Basically, the modern order replaces a universal aether with induction in laboratories (DNA, algorithms). Induction by “them” replaces the subtle vibrations of gravity in aether; order replaces spontaneity (the gods?) Greek myths of the wilful deities; Poseidon and Ulysses; water and H-bonds in the womb.

It’s a blessing that is supplied by the physical universe, and it can have nothing to do with fact or planning or routine as that applies to the ego. It is instead a dance in time of primordial forces (see Bruce Lee prev.)

The fact that the universe is spontaneous lends space for introspective reflection on meaning and morality.

MERCY MERCY ME

Hyborian Bridge 98

If sorcery is a sort of “bridge” between here and Hyboria, one can only thank the gods and goddesses that Thoth Amon never gained a stranglehold on the Hyborian lands. And it may give a clue as to why sorcery is so vastly more proficient in our own lands; the ego of acolytes of the sorcery of straight lines.

In order for sorcery to succeed, it almost has to convince people that it’s right, that the benighted realms of men-serpents and serpent-men fulfill some psychological or physical function. Stygians live with reptiles because they believe in their unholy power. The Hyborian lands on the whole realize the downsides are too much to put up with for mastery of the serpentine race. The sacrificial aspects, slippery footfalls, temples of abomination, nighted vaults and ghastly screams – you name it.

Conan comes across his fair share of that, and Milius’s 1982 film – despite being not really Howard – has scenes that really are Howard’s primeval vision. If a film were only scenes it would be good but, of course, Conan is a whole mythos.

You might well ask, “Where are the serpents in our midst if sorcery is triumphant?” As I say, many people are persuaded – psychologically – that serpentine aspects of behaviour are right, because it’s just the other side of the coin to the Newtonian modern era of light and movement.

As a fan of Paul Kantner and Jefferson Starship, I’m always surprised by their worship of the sun, and the reason seems to be they consider this the.

DARK AGES

So how is it that Newton’s god-like equations of motion that set the planets in orbit round the sun can be considered anything other than light and one of the great achievements?

Yes, it’s a thorny issue. On the one hand, Saturn boosters and Musk’s Mars racket are really something and stir the soul. It would be folly to deny it. It would be folly to say the Earth is flat and it’s all stage-managed.

On the other hand, there is another type of movement that is not travel; it’s dance. Kubrick’s “2001 A Space Odyssey is one of my favorite films and it is astonishing how the Blue Danube waltz so perfectly fits the perambulations of the shuttle to the “ring” station in mid Earth-moon orbit.

BLUE DANUBE

The film is almost the best advertisement there has ever been for the romance of space travel, but reality is not like that. I’m as disappointed as anyone, but it seems like it’s 99% a drag. Newton’s laws just aren’t really that romantic. I almost feels that 2001  is the most realistic lie of all cinema!

If you get down to brass tacks, then a dance and spaceflight are not really similar atall. A voyage goes somewhere; a dance goes nowhere. A good way to put it is to look at one of Joan Armatrading’s performances as she pirouettes round the stage

ME MYSELF I (1980)

Now, she goes forward, backward, twirls left and right, hunches down onto the mike, also rolls her eyes skyward. All that is really symmetrical movement, as opposed to straight-line progression (see Weird 11 "The Enchantment")

A dance is really to do with symmetries and balances. As it says in Hyborian Bridge 97, movement in the natural world is spontaneous – and this will lead to symmetries and balances (a cheetah chasing a gazelle; what Darwin says is that the gazelles that are caught are less fit, however all gazelles have the same symmetries of proportion).

Before animals compete, they are symmetrical and balanced. Animals compete in the physical world, which is again symmetrical and balanced. On a cosmic scale, the moon is perfectly in balance with the sun.

Movement in the natural world is not really Newtonian since that’s just two billiard balls colliding. It’s symmetrically balanced and proportionate. So, really, our reality – the sorcerous one – is replacing another. Newton is all about straight lines (where the ego of acolytes resides); even a circle is just a straight line that’s bent into a circle.

Nature is all about roughness, irregularity, broken rhythms (Bruce Lee, prev.) In space it’s true that things are straight – or bent into circles – however, what seems also to be true is that spontaneity produces symmetries – the sun and moon.

If the universe were planned, it would resemble the sun as a unit of order. Instead, it seems to be more to do with a lot of disorder and some balance. It may simple be that spontaneity is the same as symmetry – they’re a priori.

Whereas the modern order seems to verge towards planning and order (sun) it’s noticeable how different things seem when one looks back at old serials such as Nyoka from the 40s (Drama1.) Nyoka and the Tigermen has vast amounts of galloping horses riding in splendid groups. What often happens is Vultura’s riders intersect with Nyoka’s and engage in a shootout. At the end, the Bedouin ride in to add to the melee.

The movement is physical and graceful. Or, in other words, in rugged, craggy territory with boulders and trees but no straight lines. Straight lines –a as noted previously – represent the sun and order, and are associated with the immaterial world (electro-impulses).

The movements you see in Nyoka are also well-plotted; they have a manifestation of psyche in the characters’ interactions and intentions. So you have movements which are psychic and very physical, as opposed to our modern era of order and planning.

Animal movements have in general to have psychic manifestations to show their behaviour (instinct). So, none of that, nor the physical balance, are Newtonian, which is to do with the sun and order (and planning). Newton – and by extension Darwin – are orders, and therefore not to do with freedom and spontaneity (of expression, instinct).

However, if spontaneous line is a priori (see Hyborian Bridge 91 Leonardo cartoon) that would seem to be quite a big omission. In fact, it would include the entire natural “order” as well as the cosmic one!

In the Hyborian world all this would be quite impossible, since sorcerers can only set themselves up as advisers to rulers of Hyborian states that are feudal, rugged, fairly filthy etc. They cannot establish an empire, except in the relatively quiescent and decadent Stygia.

A sorcerous order only seems to be light, since the fact that it is order means there is no freedom (spontaneity). This is where the reptile comes in, since it is a type of mental drowsiness that is attracted to the sun. While we are surrounded by light, our heads are almost asleep from the multitude of facts and figures.

The head cannot deny its own physique, and there is a type of physical boredom associated with compulsive behaviour – numerical, monetary (see Outtake 6 O Lucky Man, Hyborian Bridge 62/1). This is our sorcerous reality, which has the appearance of the sun (Apollo = appearance) but is rooted in reptilian sleep, the sleep of talk and thought so attractive to acolytes..

THULSA DOOM 

Hyborian Bridge 97

Putting together HB96 and 96/2 goes something like this..

The shared experience of people in a place represents a physical reality (that the modern order is losing). Priests, aristocrats, artisans, peasants, warrior. The priest invokes deities that are Earth-powers as it spins twixt sun and moon. The deities manifest in the physical universe –seen from Earth (constellations). The psyche emanates from the physical.

The crescent represents progress and the five pointed star, light and knowledge. The moon is the appointed sign of times, seasons, fast and feast, and governs the Islamic calendar. The five points of the star can represent the five pillars of Islam, the essential elements of the Muslim faith.

Shared experiences are not “factual” – of the material order – because what “They” call material is actually immaterial (electro-impulses). Shared experiences have the irony of life and death in a physical world of the body.

The physical world is strong and not hygienic. Dirt is strong; cleanliness is strong. The hygienic order is built for machines, and for those who “sleep with the machines”. The ego cannot deny its own physique, and the result is physical boredom and reptile urges – it is two-faced; reptilian urges underly the innocuous screens (of numerical data). “They” sleep with the machines and psychosis intervenes.

Talk that is a type of sleep; the sleep of matter which is actually immaterial (electro-impulses on a screen), and the facts that convince the ego. Underlying this order are the strong rhythms of the primeval serpent that animates life, the serpent that a hygienic order cannot deny, and that a heroic (muscular) order conquers.

The serpent is the antithesis of facts: pure line and movement. The throat is a serpent and has the power of life and death in its movements (Pictorial 1). An inductive order replaces movement with fact, but animals are movements before they are able to compete.

Movement is a priori and our shared experience in the physical world. Again, an inductive order replaces spontaneous line and movement with political (factual, material) rule.

“Fact” replaces reality, which is the physical texture, colour, gaiety and discordant dirt of a place. This reality is invisible to a hygienic order that sees through a mirror of nothingness, and it is the one which connects the physical to the psyche through shared experience.

Spontaneous movement is grace – not fact – and without grace there can be no physical manifestation, whether in a place or in the cosmos of manifest deities in the sky.

The induced hygienic reality (of the head) uses facts to deny the manifest reality of psyche in a place, and in the cosmos. Through the mirror of nothingness and the “sleep of thought” (reptilian sleep-thought) they replace physical grace with a hygienic order of immaterial fact (screen electro-impulses). A compulsive numerical order (of the head), and reptilian urges underlying it, replace spontaneous movement (of the body).

Spontaneous movement has a story. There is also stillness or death, and another type of movement. Induction – the compulsive behaviour of the ego in a world of straight lines – replaces all that with a numerical order underlain by reptilian urges.

The ego cannot deny its own physique: this is really the weakness. There is physical boredom – the sleep of thought (sleep-talk) bordering on psychotic rambling. Words, facts – never simply melodies and unthinking acts.

I’m reminded of the Spain of my youth; also the gritty sounds of music before the anodyne era of machine-pop. Modern pop simply doesn’t have the right sounds!

SLIPPED TRIPPED

“Sleep thought” kills all that stone dead since the important things aren’t thought; they’re spontaneous expression. The body is an autonomic system that works by line and movement (HB91 Leonardo cartoon). Thinking is the antithesis of that (see Bruce Lee). Only by accepting the unthinking world can one be sure of being able to think atall! Peebles contemporary soulster, Gloria Jones, I just read studied advanced classical piano, as that must have been the line she was travelling towards.

HEARTBEAT

Shared experience (in a place) is not thought, it’s grace. Churches, mosques and monuments and art-deco skyscrapers (Glasgow School of Art). From the physical reality flow deities and destiny. All that is killed by inductive fact, which exists in the ego of the acolytes of the sorcerer of compulsive hygiene (prev.) Newton’s induction (sun) replaces the Earth-power of sun and moon combined (Artemis and Apollo). The immaterial, hygienic order of straight-line electro-impulses; reptile tongue sleep-talk.

THEY LIVE!

Dirt in the world is just the strength of spontaneous movement, the antithesis of thought. Dirt represents lifecycle or a type of story that makes places interesting and not anodyne. If I can relate that to Hyboria; only Thoth Amon has made the attempt to impose his thought on the disordered reality (a type of death-by-order Weird 8). The Newtonian order has done it by going outside the physical bounds into the immaterial world of inductive technology (screens), ego, reptilian urges.

By calling this “materialism”, the acolytes replace physical reality with the inductive sorcery, a type of sleep guided by thought, the thoughts of a reptilian order that sleeps with the machines.

The crescent represents progress and the five pointed star, light and knowledge. The moon is the appointed sign of times, seasons, fast and feast, and governs the Islamic calendar. The five points of the star can represent the five pillars of Islam, the essential elements of the Muslim faith.

Shared experiences are not “factual” – of the material order – because what “They” call material is actually immaterial (electro-impulses). Shared experiences have the irony of life and death in a physical world of the body.

The physical world is strong and not hygienic. Dirt is strong; cleanliness is strong. The hygienic order is built for machines, and for those who “sleep with the machines”. The ego cannot deny its own physique, and the result is physical boredom and reptile urges – it is two-faced; reptilian urges underly the innocuous screens (of numerical data). “They” sleep with the machines and psychosis intervenes.

Talk that is a type of sleep; the sleep of matter which is actually immaterial (electro-impulses on a screen), and the facts that convince the ego. Underlying this order are the strong rhythms of the primeval serpent that animates life, the serpent that a hygienic order cannot deny, and that a heroic (muscular) order conquers.

The serpent is the antithesis of facts: pure line and movement. The throat is a serpent and has the power of life and death in its movements (Pictorial 1). An inductive order replaces movement with fact, but animals are movements before they are able to compete.

Movement is a priori and our shared experience in the physical world. Again, an inductive order replaces spontaneous line and movement with political (factual, material) rule.

“Fact” replaces reality, which is the physical texture, colour, gaiety and discordant dirt of a place. This reality is invisible to a hygienic order that sees through a mirror of nothingness, and it is the one which connects the physical to the psyche through shared experience.

Spontaneous movement is grace – not fact – and without grace there can be no physical manifestation, whether in a place or in the cosmos of manifest deities in the sky.

The induced hygienic reality (of the head) uses facts to deny the manifest reality of psyche in a place, and in the cosmos. Through the mirror of nothingness and the “sleep of thought” (reptilian sleep-thought) they replace physical grace with a hygienic order of immaterial fact (screen electro-impulses). A compulsive numerical order (of the head), and reptilian urges underlying it, replace spontaneous movement (of the body).

Spontaneous movement has a story. There is also stillness or death, and another type of movement. Induction – the compulsive behaviour of the ego in a world of straight lines – replaces all that with a numerical order underlain by reptilian urges.

The ego cannot deny its own physique: this is really the weakness. There is physical boredom – the sleep of thought (sleep-talk) bordering on psychotic rambling. Words, facts – never simply melodies and unthinking acts.

I’m reminded of the Spain of my youth; also the gritty sounds of music before the anodyne era of machine-pop. Modern pop simply doesn’t have the right sounds!

SLIPPED TRIPPED

“Sleep thought” kills all that stone dead since the important things aren’t thought; they’re spontaneous expression. The body is an autonomic system that works by line and movement (HB91 Leonardo cartoon). Thinking is the antithesis of that (see Bruce Lee). Only by accepting the unthinking world can one be sure of being able to think atall! Peebles contemporary soulster, Gloria Jones, I just read studied advanced classical piano, as that must have been the line she was travelling towards.

HEARTBEAT

Shared experience (in a place) is not thought, it’s grace. Churches, mosques and monuments and art-deco skyscrapers (Glasgow School of Art). From the physical reality flow deities and destiny. All that is killed by inductive fact, which exists in the ego of the acolytes of the sorcerer of compulsive hygiene (prev.) Newton’s induction (sun) replaces the Earth-power of sun and moon combined (Artemis and Apollo). The immaterial, hygienic order of straight-line electro-impulses; reptile tongue sleep-talk.

THEY LIVE!

Dirt in the world is just the strength of spontaneous movement, the antithesis of thought. Dirt represents lifecycle or a type of story that makes places interesting and not anodyne. If I can relate that to Hyboria; only Thoth Amon has made the attempt to impose his thought on the disordered reality (a type of death-by-order Weird 8). The Newtonian order has done it by going outside the physical bounds into the immaterial world of inductive technology (screens), ego, reptilian urges.

By calling this “materialism”, the acolytes replace physical reality with the inductive sorcery, a type of sleep guided by thought, the thoughts of a reptilian order that sleeps with the machines.

Conan #7

Hyborian Bridge 96/2

It seems there's a mistake here as Hyborian deities like Mitra don't have lifecycles (top para). They have cosmic life cycles of the physical Earth (sun and moon). That relates to physical decay, ie the lifecycle of the votary or believer..
In our world, sorcery tales place in an immaterial universe of facts – inductive technology (Newton, sun). The people who inhabit this world often seem like they’re on a serious snooze, almost sleepwalking into the future.

Maria Menshikova happens to be a young Russian agonizing about life after Putin (DT) but could equally be a German agonizing, or Scandinavian Greta Thunberg

What they all have in common is that they occupy their head with “facts” (on a screen) that convinces them everything is serious and very verbal. It’s almost the snake-tongue; reptilian closeness to the cold-light of technology.

Hyborian sorcery doesn’t inhabit the immaterial universe – which it might like to. It has to occupy the material universe to deliver physical blows against its opponents. The physical universe (of the body) contains perils, as was shown in Conan #10 when the priest of the temple invokes the bull of Anu, and Conan turns the tables.

In the Hyborian universe, the psyche emanates from the physical, and the bull is drawn into the heavens.

Figures in the sky (constellations) are the physical universe as seen from Earth as it spins. The deities emanate from a physical universe, and so the psyche is connected to the physical reality.                      By invoking a deity, such as Mitra, one invokes the spiritual essence of the sun – since Mitra is a sungod. Gods and goddesses are Earth-powers that can be manifest in the sky as cosmic figures.

The Earth is the physical body, and Hyborian sorcery cannot detach from the Earth if they wish to do physical battle on a muscular plane. That’s their weakness.

 

Conan spies the physical manifestation of Kharram Akkad’s sorcery.

Our modernday sorcery is immaterial and factual – it isn’t required to be physical – it persuades the head with facts. It can appear like a type of sleeping as the head nods serpent-like to numerical data (zzz.)

It can also be a type of psychosis – which is similar to sleep – as the ego cannot deny its own physique, and so occupies a two-faced reality  of innocuous machines (in a hygienic order of electro-impulses), and the reptilian urge underlying it.

Sleep, the swaying of the serpent head, the psychotic reptilian urges – all seem a part of this induced technology of straight lines that convinces the ego numerically (monetarily, logically).

Hyborian Bridge 96

Believe it or not, the preceding could still relate to Howard’s Hyborian Age! A lifecycle which is ritualised then becomes sanctified as a faith, with priests and disciples. Welcome to a typical Hyborian city-state! (see next post)

In the Corinthian city where Conan first encounters the priest of Anu (#10), the rascally nobleman Murilo fears for his life when the Red Priest Nabonidus finds he has been selling state secrets (#11 Rogues in the House). Much like the later yarn of the siege of Makkalet (#s 19-25), the priest-sorcerer is the real ruler of the city’s nobility. Both are laws unto themselves, as this panel from #19 shows.

HB19

Back in #11, Murilo and Conan find themselves in league with the Red Priest when, in the house to hunt and slay him, the Red Priest’s man-ape Thack runs amock

 

As you see, the technology of mirrors figures here, as it does for the sorcerer in #20 HB20

The obvious reason is that mirrors are an optical illusion and hence the most fundamental of all technologies (P83). In this story, Nabonidus is clearly a cultivated man, and his house and garden give BWS ample scope for employing art-deco flourishes.

 

It’s not that there’s anything innately nefarious about technology. BWS’s print The Ram and the Peacock features a prism that is there to represent the fallen wizard’s broad and cultivated idealism.

(BWS says somewhere that the wizard is a fallen hero)

It’s not that mirrors or prisms are nefarious, it’s that in a world of mirrors (or prisms) the sorcerer is then the law, as opposed to the city guardians and aristocracy. The sorcerer’s law puts the devious head in a dominant position.

In Howard’s world, the barbarian is on his own ground and there is no real dominion (outside of Stygia). In both these tales, the king and the faith of the city – or cities in the case of the Tarim – hold dynastic and legitimate sway. The sorcerers may be laws unto themselves, but they also keep themselves to themselves.

Reason being, their powers are not global and omnipotent, they’re quite localised and they can be cut by naked steel. So Howard’s stories tell of a world where sorcery and barbarism and civilization are all very evenly balanced.

The cultivated sorcerer has a bond with humanity that is well illustrated by Zukala’s Daughter

Conan #15 HB21 

The bond, as I would say, is the bodily sense of line and movement that gives activity to the world. A dance of life and death. The disorder of the hunt; the strength of revival from decay. Once this bond is broken, the sorcerer enters the looking-glass world of the immaterial (sun, reflection). This is Newton’s world of the induction of technology (head). Because the head can’t deny the physique (Pictorial83), the result is physical boredom and a type of compulsion to a numerical order of a hygienic reality (of the ego), and its compulsive behaviour in a world of straight lines - sun, reflection.


Induction is the world of straight lines (speed), of compulsive behaviour by the ego - numerical or psychotic - that cannot deny its own physique. A two-faced reality of anodyne machines in a  hygienic order, and the reptilian urges underlying it (see next post)

The order is induced; it becomes a reality, replacing what was there. In Howard’s stories, the shared experience of aristocrats and priests and citizens in cities that are fairly filthy (representing decay and lifecycle) are never replaced by the sorcerous reality.

Quite similar things are seen in CL Moore’s Northwest of Earth sci-fi yarns, where the borderland cities of the Martian drylands have decrepit, derelict districts.

Northwest Smith bought his shawl in the Lakkmanda Market of Mars. It was one of his chiefest joys to wander through the stalls and stands of that greatest of marketplaces .. So many songs have been sung and so many tales written of that fascinating chaos..

He shouldered his way through the colorful cosmopolitan throng, the speech of a thousand races beating in his ears, the mingled odors of perfume and sweat and spice and food and the thousand nameless smells of the place assailing his nostrils. Vendors cried their wares in the tongues of a score of worlds. (CL Moore, Scarlet Dream, Gollancz Omnibus, page 208 Pictorial 23)

Spacetravel is only hinted at, as Northwest never sets a foot in one! It’s also true that both CL Moore – in Judgement Night  - and Leigh Brackett in her later works, raise all sorts of qualms about the clash between civilizations at different levels of technology.

In Judgement Night, the prospect of a parallel world planetoid of “resolved space” is quite close to the physical boredom that breeds psychotic behaviour.

Juille's reason told her that she had stumbled into one of the darker levels of Cyrille.. This undulating reptilian horror must be one of the hopeless addicts, wealthy enough to indulge his madness even when civilization was crumbling outside the walls.. (page 484 Pictorial 8)

Yes, because inductive worlds breed compulsive behaviour of the head. It could be a numerical compulsion; it could also be psychotic sexual behaviour as a consequence of physical boredom. There’s a scene in Frank Thorn’s Ghita of Alizarr where the sorcerer performs a bizarre sexual ritual with a reptile. We may not sleep with our iphones, but there’s a cold-blooded reptilian urge underneath the innocuous exterior.

MOUNTAIN SONG

Sorcery has an innate tendency to keep itself to itself and so breed a type of diabolical boredom. This can take the form of bizarre sex – and there are hints of it in Northwest of Earth. Northwest’s savage core of masculinity saves him from being easy prey to such beings.

So, inductive technology is sort of two-faced, a sit inhabits a hygienic order (of the compulsive head) that cannot deny its own physique and so becomes physically bored, with possible psychotic behaviour.

Inductive technology makes the assumption that no bond is required with the shared experience of people (and animals, natch) in places of power – wilderness, cities of decrepit dereliction. The bond that is the disorderly sense of line and movement that spontaneously transfigures places to a naïve ambiance.

It’s our world, and that means it’s not a type of global nervous system, as Blake’s print of Newton seems to infer (prev.) What “they” always assume is that technology can replicate reality, when really induction is nothing more than an advanced mirror (reflection) in immaterial (resolved) space.

Irresolvable space is decrepit and sultry with goblets of gloom and vaulty doom. It is space where the cycles of life and death cannot be resolved into anything less than that; the aura of decay and finality. It’s no surprise that the resolved space of a Pixar animation becomes popular but, actually, the irresolvable space of Pinocchio has an eternal vigour. The vigour born of decadence, naivety of texture in places of humble origin and dismal colour.

PINOCCHIO

Where Pixar is all sorcery, classic Disney is finely balanced between the technology, the disordered expression of the barbarous lines, and the civilized restraint of the cultivated act. The fine sense of balance cannot be resolved down anything else.

The same really goes for the shared experience of people in places of power and texture and colour. It’s a type of cosmic balance that a cold-light, reptile technology of endless reflections can never have or, as Sheryl Crow sings

ALL I WANNA DO