The Heads of Cerberus (part 3 of 4)

I suppose you wonder why I keep coming up with Linear A (prev) as a sign of basic boredom? Well, because it’s a script which self-references. It contains lists and stocktaking for the storehouses at Crete but, even though many signs are identical to Linear B (Mycenian Greek), their use in the different language (Minoan) is opaque because of the meagre subject-matter.

What I really mean is a script is only interesting if it’s deciphered. Linear B was eventually deciphered by various people but the credit usually goes to amateur Michael Ventris, who went on the hunch that differences in the clay tablets would be found in localised place-names (eg Knossos) – which proved correct.

So, the decipherment of a language is down to relating it to the wider world. Developing that idea, a physically desirable world would inspire colourful language. Now, if this physically desirable world is inarticulate, it relates to non-verbal things like beauty, grace, color, gaiety.

These things are child’s play to write about as it’s simply a matter of observation. So what is an inarticulate world? One where there is spontaneous communal expression of Man in his animal guise, a four-limbed acrobat leaping onto saddles, sidling down streets or seasonal barn-dancing.

It’s not a case of there being no routine; the routine relates to Man the four-limbed animal, not Man the dissociated head (robot). What the modern world doesn’t seem to appreciate is that a world of the head is a world of script (words) that are self-referential – that do not relate to physical reality.

This harks back to Ayn Rand; in Pictorial 46 Randianism was opposed by a legend of rustic wildness.

 

 

Whereas the image of Rand amongst towering monuments is as illusory as a maze of mirrors, the rustic image has an irregularity that is disordered and free. Free, that is, to be rundown and to have a rundown spirit that precedes flourishing revival. Meaning, the place that merges with nature in a rustic way has a natural strength that will endure.

The illusion of modernity, by contrast, is a living death that cannot allow decay from crumbling walls, lichen and moss; revival as the way of nature. By leaving something be, it becomes part of the moon-dark reality that is the Earth spinning through space. The serpent that twirls twixt sun and moon. The sea (“Claimed”).

This reality is non-verbal, brim with poetry, whereas the ordered illusion of Randian sorcery is brim with words. Now, this is where we get back to Linear A: something that is indecipherable owing to meagre content.

The real problem with modernity is that the content of reality is not words; it’s the inarticulate beauty, grace, color, gaiety of the sky at night through which we travel. From this comes then power of poetry, from Homer to Howard.

In a universe of words the content is always illusory. This is the universe we are entering since, after all, that is what algorithms are (language). The trend is blatantly obvious in transhumanists, who speak a fantastical gobbledegook (Jeffrey Epstein of the sex shenanigans is one of their sympathisers, apparently). The Russians, actually, with their Bolshoi acrobats and tennis stars are a pretty good antidote.

Which brings us back to The Heads of Cerberus. In the run-up to the Civic championships at City Hall, Bennett’s Noto-like descriptions continue. The décor is

Entirely in green, a thick velvet carpet of that color covering the floor like moss, and the walls being decorated in a simulation of foliage. (page 123)

There is quite a decadent feel to the entire scenery; the Numbers (citizens) are enjoined to silence and only give off the sound of “dry leaves rustling”. By contrast, the Servants (“of Penn”) are not unlike the dandies from The Nikopol Trilogy (C8 etc)

All wore the green or yellow buttons of Superlativism, and all were dressed with a  gaiety that verged – in many cases more than verged – on distinct vulgarity. (page 123)

Theatrical grotesquerie is certainly a similarity to Noto’s “Red Lace” Aspects 3 etc and, when the Justice Supreme finally makes his appearance for the championships, he is an ancient wreck, “decrepit and loathsome”.

Bennett somewhere does say something like “the Quaker stronghold of Philadelphia”, and one almost gets the impression of a savage Quaker tribe (see “Indian Summer” Alternates 7)

This decadent streak becomes more apparent as the contest winds on, and the Numbers’ candidate for Musician, a gilded youth, loses and is set to be thrown into the pit. The Numbers rebel, surge forward, and the City Hall turns into a red slaughterhouse.

  (page 138)

This really does come straight out of Noto’s bag of tricks! Like Narca, the Justice Supreme

His face! It was lined and scarred by every vice of which Clever’s younger countenance had hinted.

(page 126)

Red Sonja #11

How is it that these scenes of pure evil can be swept aside, or even have desirable consequences such as Sonja’s sight being restored? Both Noto and Bennett write allegorically, and with the spilling of blood comes a sense of natural justice. The roc’s blood that cures Sonja’s blindness; here, there will be revenge.

This is a Quaker city where presumably good and evil exist. In nature there is blood, and there is a natural justice in the flowing of blood between predator and prey. Blood in human societies may be evil, but Nietzsche wrote Beyond Good and Evil. This provides a link between human societies and savage nature.