Pictorial 92

THE LIGHT

The only answer that I have found
Above the sky or below the ground
Is that there are no answers
There never were any answers
There will never be any answers
And as Gertrude Stein said, “That's the answer.”

Kantner’s lyric would seem not very optimistic, but it depends how much you reckon the modern world is an illusion. Kantner is not speaking as a scientist but as someone who can feel, smell, hear, see.

While “they” spout words, we can perceive the folly for ourselves. Compare with John Clifton’s anti-scientific Bite Now Suckers! From TCJ 90 (1984)

The function of art is not to challenge our knowledge, that meagre corpus of answers we have managed to intuit from the experience of a few millennia of mortal history, Rather the aim of art is to challenge the questions, to quell the analytical faculty of mind from swallowing everything up in indecision and rationalism, by presenting ultimate versions of those intuited truths, some lasting witness of a final rest for things, some lasting witness to debunk the Garand Inquisitor.(page 108)

Clifton was writing in defence of “the final version” of artists like Neal Adams; of art as superior to analytical science; of formula as superior to culture-science experiment.

There’s a lot to be said for that view, in that comic books affect young minds on a basic level of appreciation. Colour, shape, tonality, sequence, action. Comics are there to be seen and felt; if the artist can make you feel and see then they’re good.

It’s almost the opposite of the scientific mode of explaining laboriously and intellectually. I’ve been questioning the answers (and therefore the questions) of science from the basic level of feeling, hearing, smelling what is in the world.

There is also Alan Moore’s essay “Blood From the Shoulder of Pallas” from Watchmen on a similar theme (). It seems that it is possible to deceive the ego with a convincing illusion through “the mirror of nothingness” (electromagnetism). The result is physical boredom, whereby the numerical and sexual become one;  tools of the dragon of data.

I know all this sounds pretty fancy, but it’s actually a matter of simplicity. A good way to put it is to take a classic comic book, say the silver age Flash by Gardner Fox and Carmen Infantino. I was reading a review by Gene Phillips in TCJ

#58 (1980) the other day (as you do) and he had this comparison.

 

He brought to comics a storytelling style not too far derived from early “sense of wonder2 SF, whose formulaic approach stressed the wonder inherent in exotic worlds and bizarre devices (a la Jack Williamson) (page 47)

The formulaic approach with stereotypical characters engenders a classical formal style. The relation between pictures and words is also a question of style. To inspire a good story, it’s often true to say that the pictures 9sight) work independently of the words (“sounds”). They both supply something different which together makes up the action.

RC Harvey in the same issue gives as an example the Daredevil

of Miller and Roger McKenzie

 

Action is sight, sound and also feel, smell, atmosphere. In later years, TCJ seemed to forget the old formulas of storytelling. Now, if you have a world where there is no sight, sound, action (etc) then that entire world is wrong. It’s also psychotic and sexualised. The reason is that everything that lives expresses action (the fronds of plants waving in desert breezes).

Action is the way something expresses itself. In terms of the human, the body is the vehicle of expression. In the modern ear the body is no longer a vehicle of expression. By “expression” I mean, say, a farmer shouldering a spade, a hunter shouldering a carcass, a cowboy vaulting onto a saddle.. and so forth.

If you go back to Hyborian Bridge 60 there is the example of Fulling where women would strip-off and engage in rhythmical actions. There are also the old grape-treading rituals of Dionysus. I went to Newtown Boarding School (class of ’69), an Irish Quaker-run establishment, and remember rumpty-tumpty classroom rumbles and sex-games like wild animals on-heat (is that normal?)

Essentially, the entire province of Dionysian physical expression is missing in an electromagnetic universe (of the ego). Dionysian activity enables people to engage in communal frolicks related to work that are by their nature sexual. Man is a sexual animal and physique can’t be denied.

Therefore, the lack of Dionysian activity is bound to sexualise people who are no longer engaging the body in the physical, communal acts which come naturally. There is a looseness and a grace of free-form movement. Did you see the clip of Monterey? This is free human expression of young, old and infant with a communal setting.

Instead of this naturalistic freedom, we now have a state of boredom which is numerical (machine). This physical state is like a straightjacket that immobilises the body. We also get constant heat-pumps designed for serpent-men (sun-seekers, slow-thinkers). The body is sexualised disproportionately – as in social-media.

A universe of physical boredom – the product of the ego – does not impress someone who is able to feel, smell, hear, see with a mythical sense of freedom. The connection is with art and comic books and the taste and values of our own “age of myth” (prev.)

Our personal “age of myth” is a safeguard to our perceptions, and another reason to discount the answers “they” give. Their answers only convince the ego through “the mirror of nothingness” that invites physical boredom, the numerical compulsion that is the sexual tool of the dragon of data.

The reason comes down to the cosmic reality we’ve lost through living in this numerical illusion through “the mirror of nothingness” (cosmic silence). Instead of living through a blood-cycle of decay and rebirth, modern civilization lives in the head.

This blood-cycle is nothing less than meaning and power; the strength of red earth, of roots and vines, places of power. This is the scene from Red Sonja #9 where Apah Alah draws Sonja down into her underground forest kingdom. 

 

This is feminine power, physical substance, the moon rising over wooded hills, Diana bounding, hounds baying in loping pursuit of deer bouncing away or slain bloodily. Red Shiva, Red Venus, the bull-like Dionysus.. the destructive myths prev.)

Without destruction there can be no creation; that is to say, a sequence of events that takes place in the cosmos. This sequence is nothing less than the harmonic cosmos that is red-blood female, muscular and manly, at one time dainty and virile.

So, when I say “everything is wrong” (in modernity), it’s that the feminine moon that animates our physical blood-lust is no longer harmonizing with her brother. Artemis and Apollo are close almost to incestuous levels in mythology. That link is broken to Man’s eternal sorrow, for it is simply the physical reality of action – animal, plant, stone, wind, celestial sounds and sights.