The Nikopol
Trilogy starts with the
hibernetic return from deep space of Nikopol and his encounter with the
renegade Horus, and their pursuit by the inhabitants of a floating pyramid..
which continues into The Woman Trap. The woman being Jill Bioskop,
reporter in a London that reminds one rather heavily of Alphaville.. as
does Berlin which she heads for after the apparent murder of her Alpharatzian
friend.
All three cities
– including the Paris of part one – are like hermetic encapsulations of something
from the 30s. In Berlin, the scene outside the cabaret; the acrobatic elegance
of high board divers in sophisticated foyers (again, there is a similar scene
in Alphaville – somewhat bloody – and blood flows through The Woman
Trap, enwrapping the luxurious body of Bioskop.
Jill’s in Berlin
ostensibly to cover the return of the deep space Europa 1 but, of course, “rockets
are boring”. Part 2 ends with the three of them heading south on a madcap
adventure, still pursued by the pyramid.
All this, I have
to say, reminds me of the idea of decrepit travel in package steamers from Neptune.
One travels, not to arrive, but in the Homeric sense of experiencing sun, sea,
waves, spray, the decline of the day (with a margarita).
“I can see the stars tonight
would you like to go up on A deck and look at them with me
I can see the stars tonight
would you like to go out for a stroll and keep me company” (Have You Seen the Stars Tonight?)
would you like to go up on A deck and look at them with me
I can see the stars tonight
would you like to go out for a stroll and keep me company” (Have You Seen the Stars Tonight?)
Sings Kantner on Blows, in the same light-hearted way.
The adventure is an alternate passage away from scripted space travel of the
rational mind, and towards the wanton thrill of the chase.
For Nikopol this starts with Jill, but he drops her at the start of Cold
Equator and heads for the deep interior, where Niko chases him. What’s with
the wild animals that seem so at home on the south-bound train? Niko (son of
Nikopol) even has a drink with them and gets ratted.
Again, it could be travel not just in the physical sense, but in the
sense of putting distance between the rational, scripted mind of civilization.
The animals are game for a laugh, and could almost be viewed as Claude
Levi-Strauss’s intermediaries – neither prey nor predator (prev.) On the way
down, Bilal has a running gag about fake scales (7.3 on the Steiner scale) and
counts (450,000 citizens killed).
The “scientifically pure indices” are “their” standard way of keeping
us in line, by giving everything a number and rational score. “Chessboxing”
seems like another typical gag since the scales for the mind and body have
utterly no connection!
A lot of modern life is like that. I just read of a fungus hybridised
with killer funnel-web spider DNA that kills
mosquitoes
Things that have no connection in nature usually it is a bad idea to
splice. If you go to a wild bit of growth that’s been left awhile, what you
might get is brambles, sputum, a lot of insects, birds that feed off them,
sedge and stones and snails and worms. What connects the species is the predator-prey
cycle, the build-up of humus (decayed matter), the strength and fertility of
the wild patch.
Nothing can replace that strength; it builds-up over time and is
intricate with nooks and crannies. The intricacy of strength provides homes for
innumerable bugs and beasties; it’s a mixture of dirt and cleanliness.
Modern hygienic science tries to do without that cycle, and so loses
the strength. Their hybridised forms are signs of weakness. They cover up their
weakness with “scientifically pure indices”; scales and grades and numbers.
Grades of weakness, because strength is simply earth, air, water, plant,
animal undivided and free. It’s the Africa that Laurens Van der Post speaks of
(). So, the decrepit train ride with smells and beasts is a sort of metaphor
for travel and adventure; where the physicality hits you and where the psyche
is free.
It’s the other
side of blood and the chase, where animals dose on the bough and idly eye eachother;
where the Ark-like differences are raw and untamed. The utterly irrational
crowded together is the spirit of freedom – physique and psyche. A journey
through a dream. The dream of the universe. The psyche emanates from the unruly
physique, and this harks back to Madame Blavatsky’s Theosophy.
Where things are unruly, the archaic bloodlust peaks beneath the
surface and establishes a rapport with beasts. I happened to read an article on
the
unruly Bloomsbury sisters – Margery, Brynhild, Daphne and Noel Olivier.
“Usually rather serious and always noble
in looks and manners and in attitude of mind, they could be as unthinkingly
cruel as savages. Sometimes they were savages.”.. “ Shocking flirts, and
their manners were disgraceful.”(DT)
Their beastliness was described by Noel
she and her
sisters “can bear with all kinds of folk at first, extracting from them what is
good until they are, as it were, boiled dry; whereupon we at last look at them
critically and […] conceive for them a bitter contempt and ennui.”
This is the
medievalist world of psychic differences where we are ruled by planets and not
by the scales and grades and numbers of “scientific indices”. The order of the
sun, a mirage in the desert (of the wormdollar).
The pulp
universe of Madame Blavatsky’s planets was taken-up by Talbot Mundy, and in
1975 BWS came out with The Book of Samothrace (Pictorial 50/1) I
hazarded that the book was the flaming sun, but another way of viewing it is as
a prophecy of solar expansion, one that produces mirror-images (reflections) in
a perspective universe.
In the world of
reflections there is no freedom, only order. Who are the free spirits of the
modern world? There are some tramps in my neighbourhood who had a local feature
written on their plight; they are the closest I can think of!
Diagnosed with schizoaffective
disorder, she had been on an anti-psychotic medication for 15 years. When she
was unable to get this from a GP after moving back to Folkestone around seven
years ago, she said her symptoms increasingly affected her state of mind. She
said: “All five of my senses, I get hallucinations, I hear voices, I get visual
hallucinations, tactile hallucinations.”
For him, reading provides a
temporary escape. “I want to go back to college,” he said. “I would love to do
graphic design. “Michaela is brilliant at drawing but she has learning
difficulties, so you get people looking down on her.”