Combination of the Two (7)

There is a Franco-American alternative stream that encompasses the symbolist poets and reactionary medievalism. Bilal, in Gods in Chaos, quotes Baudelaire, the poet of the weeping city. Bilal is a master at drawing the minutae of really decrepit cities, especially fantastically stained walls.

I realized just recently that French city walls are exercises in painterly decay, grimy and pure poetry in sandstone.

(Lyon)

They say Bilal is influenced by fairy tale illustrator Gustav Dore - or is it more like realism a la Francais?-  the symbolist strain gotten from Edgar Allan Poe through to Arthur Rimbaud. In order to appreciate the bloody minded irrationality, one has to go back to Joseph de Maistre, the Savoyan medievalist.

Though de Maistre had a mystical almost Platonic idea of “divine rule” by monarchy (and church), he also admired the decisive man-of-action. In his eyes, there was no decision in rationality, only the irrational believer can know their own minds.

Baudelaire followed this critique with, “The priest, the knight, the poet; to know, to kill, to create.” They are counter-the-Enlightenment philosophy of Francis Bacon (Pictorial 22), and Baudelaire thought that rational government was simply a recipe for chaos.

These French dreamers, right the way through to Bilal – who’s French but of Yugoslav extraction – were temperamental rebels against solar Enlightenment (see The Magic Flute Hyborian Bridge 27)

The solar Enlightenment informs you of what’s true, rather than one knowing in one’s own mind. They are completely contrary views. One believes in an earthly figure, like Christ, and will kill in their name and make poems to the sacrifice. The other only believes in rational argument.

But this is where de Maistre’s critique of Bacon comes in. If (Hyborian Bridge 61/1) we are in The Idol of the Den, then we are in the head and not the body. The facts we are given are induced by the head of acolytes from observation of experiment.

The world we are in is an induction and not proportionate of body, sun, moon (and maybe Holy Ghost). That is why we seem to resemble the “Pets” of Traylor’s poem (Hyborian Bridge 56)

 Like pets, we are told everything EXCEPT everything we see for ourselves; such as body, sun, moon (and maybe Holy Ghost). The physical and the psychic worlds are out of our reach; that is what “they” tell us.

Nevertheless, that is what we see in the sky at night, the lusty moon shining through the

“forest wind’s going to blow all my cares away

My mind’s wandering like the wild geese in the west” (I know You Rider)

This is where French dirt comes in, or just laissez-faire grime. Bilal depicts the city as poetry, which is not clean; it’s a mixture of dirt and cleanliness (the washtub.) These French poets are rebelling against a Puritanical parallel reality that has its origins in Bacon, then Newton, and which became the Anglo-world we know (or think we do).. of sorcerers’ acolytes.

Pilote in the 70s contains more than its share of like-minded treatises – Caza, F’Murr etc Pictorial 14. It does seem likely that Howard’s characters contain more than a hint of this Frenchness, even if they are often thought of as very American or Celtic.

Norman knights figure predominantly in his medieval adventures round Outremer and all points east (Norman Irish too). Of course, Agnes is a French swordswoman. Incidentally, CL Moore couldn’t have read this when she wrote Jirel of Joiry, though I’ve heard it said Jirel is her take on Howard’s sword and sorcery.

From what I’ve said previously, one way to look at sword and sorcery is as a knightly rebellion against rule by the disproportionate head – the solar serpent; the man-serpents of Thoth Amon. In a likewise way, French poets were rebelling against the Puritanical Enlightenment, or rule by head (acolytes of observational experiment).

A recent example of head versus body is this piece on the APR’s plan to reintroduce bison to Montana, where ranchers still herd cattle by horseback.

What we see is a great opportunity for us to co-exist.. we want to restore the native species on the landscape and cattle were not a native species, so we just have two different views of the best use of this primary habitat. (Beth Saboe of APR)

The APR wants to reintroduce bison as a natural native species that grazes the plains, and understandably cowboys feel themselves threatened. Unless they introduce natural predators of bison, like wolves, the ecology is seriously unbalanced.

The APR obviously wants to employ managed culls that produce the desirable ecology, which the cowboys fear will be without their ranches. What no one seems to have pointed out is, where you have cowboys, herds, bison and horses there once would have been Indians to control the native species!

That is a hunting ecology, which doesn’t fit with the APR’s rationalist bias that it’s better to manage things than to have them manage themselves. Anything that runs itself is active; physically active communities running over the landscape, hunting in packs. To “them” that is irrational, and that’s totally true.

Hunting, and blood, the kill, the dismembering of the carcass, the carrion crows, everything of that type of landscape and traditional hunting way of life is irrational. It’s also strong and lives off the decay and regeneration of the prairie. Modern management does not see that as fitting for humans because they want hygienic ventures for us, if not for animals (Drama3)


This goes back to the two contrary pictures, between on the one hand Rand and on the other French wildness (Pictorial 46) represented by

 

Alternates 6

Rand is the figurehead for the world of convincing perspective, which is another word for absence of decadence, the strength gained by rundown water-mills, the irregularity of wood and stone, overgrown prairie grass, scythe and butterflies, the cycle of decay and revival.

This is the setting for the picture of Perrine in her gumboots. Utilitarian clothes for utilitarian activities of the body expressing its physicality in run-down situations. The sort of setting that in French bande desinnee  often becomes imbued with decadence, in the sense of risqué behaviour. The two type of physical action are not necessarily separated, at least they overlap.

Jean-Claude Servais art Malmaison (A Suivre 1983)

Another example from France is Moebius’s The Airtight Garage, which ends when Major Grubert leaves the fantastical garage via a door into our own reality. Our own reality, hence, is only “parallel”, consisting of only straight lines and parallel tracks (this is Moebius’s ending, not Moorcock’s who wrote the original fantasy!)

Tales of Faith 12

What “they” always presume is that the convincing parallel world of straight lines is reality, the one we apparently live in. Rand represents the appeal of this in soaring monuments to the dollar, all as insubstantial as a forest of mirrors. The fantastical delusion of acolytes who can all trace their ancestry to the original sorcerer of knives that scatter light and let in a parallel universe. It’s convincing, and gets more so by the year.

As Fontella Bass says,

HOW STRANGE