The brass intro
is a primitive stomp that sets the blood racing. Lest you think this is all
aimed at black musicians, this strumpetty rendering by Fairport is a rhythmic
revival to stop the blood cold.
The folk revival
was a mix of the primitive and the clever. The best pop also has a
folk-primitivism. The best of both combine both
STEPPIN’ OUT (42 mins
in)
Why is the
primitive clever? For the reason that life is a song that cannot be
rationalised. The more scientists attempt to rationalise reality, the more
hopelessly complex. Life is a combination of the simple and primitive with the
clever and subtle. If we live in the age of politicians, the reason may lie in
that rationalising process, in that politicians are the spokespeople for
acolytes of the modern maze of logic.
Politicians therefore
inhabit a world which is ordered –Pictorial 24– either left or right
(see Latin America). Nowhere does it occur to them that a society needs both
order and freedom. The NRA champion machines of destruction as individual
freedom when it is actually a type of militaristic order. Our societies
champion cleanliness (hygiene) and the individual but – see Pictorial 21 – that is not the same as empirical
traditions of sanitation which rely on dirt (cowboys on the range; the nomadic
Indian).
Without dirt there can be no cleanliness, since dirt is the strength of the earth and the lifecycle born of decay (revival). There can only be hygiene, which is a figment born of the head attached to its electronic masters (AI). Empirical traditions of sanitation rely on dirt because they are attracted to primitive places of power
In The
African Queen, Bogart and Katherine Hepburn first start to get closer when
he realizes they both need a wash. They take to opposite sides of the boat, she
swims around in her knickers then (of course) can’t get back aboard. He hauls
her up; “Don’t look!” she intones. Small hope. In a primitive locale with crocs
“waiting for their supper”, gay bankside flowers and the ternsion of the
rapids, Hepburn’s physical excitement mounts, and the ending is forgone.
In a primitive
situation, with a man and a woman, there is always every going to be one
ending. The situation is very similar to Conan and the Devi in The People of
the Black Circle. What does primitive mean but something strong and fertile
that advances life in its myriad forms? Romance. In both film and story,
enemies circle the duo. In the film it’s the organized Germans; in the story
the Masters of Yimsha.
Organization is
not self-organization which is a primitive act of unthinking development. The
film – set in 1914, about a hundred years gone – sets the two against eachother
in an adventurous river chase. Modern politicians are simply the heirs of the
hapless Germans, forever attempting with organized thought to quell primitive
romance.
Organized thought
(of politicians) is itself the enemy since – see HB42 – human
passion depends on the creative-unconscious of the unthinking cosmos. When
politicians say they are “passionate”, they mean about words and ideas, not
about the reality that is outside of these. Egotistical, forever gazing at
their own reflections, where a “reflection” is a fact, the head attached to its
electronic master Narcissistically.
The primitive
reality of blood and slaughter that allows gaiety into the world of revival is
outside there conscious reach. I made the same point about the history of
Western ranching and East coast slaughterhouses.
The primitive
cycle breeds unthinking gaiety, found in the heavens and in the emergence of a
single flower. The same feeling is found in The African Queen and it is
the same primitive exhilaration of using one’s wits that is found in Howard.
Organization is not self-organization. One applies to thought (head); the other
applies to development (body). We live in a society of the head that in Howard’s
Hyboria is epitomised by the followers of Set.
They want an
ordered world in order to run it with man-serpents and serpent-men, vassals to
the great AI. Politicians’ egos become inculcated with “facts”, reflections
that flicker on a screen.
Primitive
strength is far from their minds, because it is a product of body. The body
that self-organizes and is self-governing. Without this primitivism, all that
is left are detached Martian tentacular heads in human guise; reading from the
same hymn-book of profit-motive that weakens the ambiance of unthinking realism
in the skies and silent biers and flowers of the Big Country.
