Hyborian Bridge 56

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

CARAVANE

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

sleeve to Sunfighter, Slick and Kantner, 1971

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

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

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

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

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

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

detail with crumpled Conan #20

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Katie Bouman’s algorithm BROKEN HEARTS ARE FOR ASSHOLES

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

THE BOY WITH A MOON AND STAR ON HIS HEAD