The cosmic
serpent (Pictorial 1)is the dangerous a priori
knowledge that the hero steals; the knowledge of our undulating link to the
past. The truth that the shape and power of our bodies is knowledge unto
itself, that shape is destiny and a power unto itself. The sword that melds to
the hand like a living thing, strong, but flexible.
The servants of
Set have usurped this strength that now feeds their cold-blooded lust for
information that saps the body of its self-organizing potential that is
age-old.
This information
feeds a cold-blooded, electronic appetite that is the modern face of Set, the
corporate-capitalist serpent. Set steals our power, in a reversal of the myth.
The cold-blooded machine takes us out of the eternal cycle of destruction and
creation that happens in a particular place, and that gives us power. The
distinctive ambiance of feeling and texture of place.
All the power is
taken-up by the information-machine that twists around our lives hideously. The
power is ours to regain by freeing our heads from a world of data, and applying
them to the naivety of the story of what happens in a place.
Confusing? Yeah,
that is what a world of data is intended to be, by persuading us our bodies and
the undulating power therein are insufficient. The weakness of hygiene that
takes us out of the world of strength, dirt and cyclical activities, the hunt,
the scavengers, the white moon of Diana - or the blessed Mary of repose (Pictorial
71 The Plumed Serptent)
“They” tell us
that a culture is created by information, whereas true strength is athletic
grace (compare the slapstick touch-and-kiss joie-de-vivre of The African
Queen with Phoebe Waller-Bridge HB92)
In a culture of
power, the body has knowledge of place and is honed by the mind to a state of
fitness to prevail over nature’s rough wildness. Patrick Woodroffe’s (Metamorphosis 2)
panorama to Piers Anthony’s trilogy captures the post apocalypse culture that
is based on the fight-circle.
In a mixture of
Robin Hood and Indian braves, the green swards resound to the sound of ritual
duel. Sos craves Sola, squaw of the reigning Sol. Sos is learned, and
establishes the tribe on badland overrun by mutant shrews. Sol is grateful, yet
Sos desires Sola and the triangle can only end in one place: the circle.
Defeated, Sos
must go to the mountain, from which none return. Leigh Brackett probably wrote
the template for this type of thing in The Long Tomorrow (). Here,
however, Sos is rescued by the “underworld”, and is taken to the rec room where
an elfin girl takes his bracelet.
To cut the scene
short, the woman is a trained gymnast and martial artist who is able to floor
the mighty Sos with a straight-arm blow to the neck!
In Myhopoeikon
() Woodroffe comments that
The best
superheroes, though strong and ruthless, usually have a subsidiary gentleness
built in. (p110), and
the book does read much like a comicbook future history, where fineness and
grossness of form create a distinctive world.
“Worlds”
actually, since the mountain underworld and the pagan exterior are separate
enclaves. It can’t last, and is foreshadowed when the elfin one keeps Sos’s
bracelet to become his wife, Sosa.
Sos is sent out
into the world again – after undergoing Wolverine-style upgrades - Sosa training him in weaponising his body.
While Sosa ism something of an exception, the demarcation between men and women
is something like Imperial Japan.
In this heroic society,
sex between unknowns is not often withheld, and is more of a transaction
(denoted by bracelet). Somewhat reminiscent of a wild west code of wooing
strange women with chivalry.
At the end of book
one, Sos has quelled Sol’s empire by brute force, so clearly the underworld has
not made the mistake of Brackett’s canyon-culture, by relying on
super-computers and human intellect. The mountain they call Helicon – which Sos
recalls is the home of the Muses.
So we’re in
classical territory, where the lithe and frolicsome grace of form – masculine
and feminine – are still king and queen. While it’s true the books do make some
apologies to Darwin – and the trail up the mountain is called a survival of the
fittest – the beauty of the human form – in its muscular masculinity and elfin
femaleness – is an aesthetic counter to the fantastical chase for profit at all
costs that is so tied to Darwin and our own aberrant culture of the detached
head (that plugs-in to the nearest appliance).
The empire in
the trilogy is much more akin to Rome, and the quarrel between Sos and Sol akin
to Mark Anthony and Caesar.
Pierse is
wrestling with the monstrosity civilization has become, and I read his American
upbringing was an Elysian one of rustic bliss, and that’s clearly what he’s
writing about in the trilogy.
Civilization
tends to deny the cycle of life and death that Woodroffe’s panorama explicitly
explores. Or, to put it more honestly, Rome doesn’t deny it but seeks to impose
the image of the Caesars as eternal conquerors.
One can abhor
Rome, but it is honestly brutal! Their enemies die and they honour them in
coinage (Vercingetorix). One can hate tyranny while admiring the glamour –
somewhat like Talbot Mundy’s depiction of the Greek socialite/athlete Helene in
Tros of Samothrace ()
There is glory
and grandeur there along with the scum of rottenness. What is so aberrant in
modern times is that male/female, Man/machine are becoming closer by the day.
Only different things can have the affinity of psyche that makes for
interesting frisson (HB94).
That’s what
chivalry is; the attraction of differences. Honour in combat too. Towards the
end of book one, Sos has to fight the great clubber Bog, an affable simpleton.
A misplaced kick has the effect of breaking his neck, and
Compare this
iron rationality with the current credo for keeping paralytics alive
indefinitely (Michael Schumacher). Let me suggest that “their” scruples are not
so much aimed at the human but actually at the machine!
They are already
hybrid-humans and have no care for the sublime grace of primitive form in
action, only what they take to be the mental process that a machine can
prolong. The end result is to be one with the machine with no independent
action, no moral identity.
All this centers
reality on the ego, at the expense of the primitive spine and the supple
expressions of the body in rustic pursuits and harvesting the earth. This is
the primitive reality that connects Man to the great cycles of destruction and
creation round the undulating earth.