Pictorial 101

Howard’s historical adventures are “not under the dominion of fact” (do you know the source of this quote?)

The real question is: is the information we are given by “them” actually a sorcerous illusion that has its predecessor in Francis Bacon’s The New Atlantis, which foresaw “The Idol of the Den”?
Information is not actually reality – which is line and movement – but is numerical and attractive to the ego. It seems like it might very well fit and convinces the ego with numbers, but it is a fact rather than an actual process of transformation such as predator-prey.

 

Information replaces process with numbers, and rough abandon with straight lines. We are persuaded by flow-charts when only rough abandon contains the line and movement that give strength to nature.

The worm, the carrion crow, the blade of grass stirring in the breeze. The waving and diving and wriggling could be likened to the primordial serpent that is the active force in nature. The serpent is dangerous and powerful and sexual and in myth the warrior of pure spirit conquers it. You can say “myth is not fact” but, as stated above, information contains no line and movement, no rough abandon, no regrowth.

Information persuades the ego with numbers which, in an electrical future, can lead to a straight line world where numbers become expressive via algorithms (prev.) It’s a copy of reality born of physical boredom whereby the numerical and sexual become one.

I’m calling that a sorcerous illusion because it is not the physical roughness which alone supplies strength in the abandon that leads to regrowth. The realm of the gay frolicking Dionysus and the vine.

The sorcerous illusion of electricity is null and void, or what you could call a mere hole (see Weekend). I’m reading Papa Hemingway’s short story collection The Snows of Kilimanjaro (Penguin) and it was fantastically obvious how physically acute was the writing.

In the title story, a guy is rotting from the leg up from gangrene, and the pustulence and smell pursue the reader across the open Savanah. He tosses off phrases like “urine-yellow” and writes about lumberjacks as much as about failed writers on safaris.

In The Three-day Blow,

There was a big fire in the fire place. The wind made it roar. Bill shut the door. (page 59)

In patent clipped phrases, natch. Later, Nick

..had noticed while looking into the fire that the fire was dying down..

‘Bring one of the big beech chunks,’ Bill said. He was also being consciously practical..

He came in carrying the log and Bill got up from the chair and helped him put it on the fire.

‘That’s a swell log,’ Nick said.

‘I’d been saving it for the bad weather,’ Bill said. ‘A log like that will burn all night.’

‘There’ll be coals left to start the fire in the morning,’ Nick said.

‘That’s right,’ Bill agreed. They were conducting the conversation on a high plane. (page 64)

Yeah, it is a physical plane that can affect the psychical one! That’s because we live in a physical world of the body and not a numerical one of the head.

If the old bear was off on a jaunt and a wind blew up, he might get cold and start a fire. It’s a physical situation, not a numerical one. That’s the difference between Papa’s latter day fairy tales of dark candour, and the sorcerous information that is algorithmically expressed via an emotional net. One is manly, rough. The other isn’t.

Papa is channelling the caveman who lives physically like the animals and for whom the fire is his strength, his psychic charm against the terrors of the night. Animals live physically from which the psyche emerges in the form of behaviour (instinct). Do you see where this is heading?

Information is not physical; flow-charts are not line and movement; electricity is straight lines (algorithms). The entire spectrum convinces the ego with a type of nothingness of numbers, powered by electricity via algorithmic imitations of heads (prev.)

Once the numerical can have expression – as with the previous example – “they” will write a story to facilitate the use of algorithmic faces (in ads or messengers or maybe sex-robots). It’s a good copy, but without the physical reality – that is built of line and movement – there is no psyche (soul). There is no psychological content (behaviour) or strong style.

I was watching seagulls wheeling on the beach and it’s clear they have a psyche (behaviour) directed at scavenging sand the sea and being irritable. It’s simple but real, like staring at a fire, and has strong style, cartoony form that is strong and pure.

Why do seagulls scavenge? To fulfil their lifecycle as seagulls. So, in other words, they are living things (that die). All these fairly obvious observations go straight under the heads of our masters, who think everything can be a copy and therefore nothing.

Seagulls inhabit littoral areas which are quite rough and tidepool-like, where the physical has a distinctive psychic content of freewheeling seaborne ways.

Wild Horses

I might have said awhile ago that where I am an archaic lobster mural

C6

got obliterated by a new “creative quarter” development? The naïve simplicity of the mural was more to my taste, reflecting the seaborne ways of this ancient southeast port.

Many things are “before information” (a priori). The primal serpent; the symmetry of sun and moon. Day and night; social order and rustic disorder; Apollo and Dionysus; straight line certainty and the harmonic womb.

This entire mythical dimension of line and movement is lacking in a world which is merely a convincing copy. The ones who run this world – our masters – are weak because they deal in methodical tidiness. Whether it’s Netanyahu with his West Bank numbers, or Merkel with her lumpen frau grin/grimace, they are masters of expression in a world that is null and void.

They are the acolytes of a sorcerous illusion that convinces the ego by means of straight lines and numbers, flow-charts and information theory. Yes, it convinces the tame ego, not the body that roams the wilderness by horse and hunt, that needs fire for warmth and to eat (canned beans) and where physical needs impinge on the psyche in the shape of woodsmoke and carefree campfire ways.