Societies that engender a physical harshness and a roughness of spirit tend to be modelled on the ideals of nature, Sparta being the classic example. Athens, though somewhat more mild-mannered, was up for the conflict and neither side came off without bloody hands.
The roughness of the ancient world was part of an ideal of the free spirit of the body, whereby spirit and roughness of the flesh can’t be disentangled.
Rough living and germs impact health and the immune system (HB140); health and a healthy psyche are difficult to disentangle. This dualism of strength is now under threat from the cult of fact, whereby a “fact” is neither good nor bad, something either normal or abnormal – who knows.
Just to give one example, scientists have found “micro-evolution” is speeding up. Even though they call it evolution, the developments are clearly abnormal and related to our soft and easy living.
Wisdom teeth are normal in societies where children need to chew; the presence of an infantile artery is abnormal in an adult. What “they” call evolution just adds to the pot-pourri of “facts” that are also fictions. Reason being, there is no underlying strength born of rhythm and rough living, running, hunting and bloody pursuits.
Any change can be called evolution, when it’s entirely the opposite effect. Why are our societies so soft? The main reason is that they are completely planned and nothing is left to chance, since chance is the fortune of the brave, the free-spirit who lives by wits in an uncertain world. The history of Man.
Whereas an active society lives in a messy state –in that there is very little rubbish-removal and quite a lot of metamorphosis of waste-products on-the-hoof – a planned society doesn’t.
The softer the society seems to be, the more rubbish-removal is necessary. Roughness is the strength of cyclical living, whereas softness is the weakness of efficiency in all that is straight-line. Amazon and the rest are very attractive to the ego of acolytes of numbers, natch.
Our societies become rubbish-removal centres because that enables soft living that can be planned via straight lines (or numbers, algorithms.) This is very convincing to our dear leaders!
It struck me that the people who are often rebellious are oftentimes somewhat naïve; I don’t think they really follow these numerical matters. I mean guys like Ari Up, Paul Kantner, Harlan Ellison, BWS, Jack Kirby.. They have no truck with money, and are single-mindedly creative.
Yet these are the types who in past ages were founders of societies, honourable free-spirits of the commune. If there are two types of societies, these rebels are of the old-school type whereby most things were down to chance with very little bureaucracy and forethought.
Towns appeared on trade-routes, the greatest examples being Troy on the plain of Ilium that occupied maritime and land trade-routes between Europe and Asia; and Venice, which extended to Byzantium.
Where trade is purely a matter of logistics, these au naturel developments can never again occur. The au naturel even more applies to Hyborian kingdoms, where ports and trading centres occupy purely geographical positions of power and privilege, from Khemi in Stygia to Messantia in Argos.
Roughness is something that chance allows to occur, that is totally unplanned. Hyborian cities – such as Makkalet HB20 – are monumental establishments of church and state, and also mazy and stench-laden representing the low-life districts of living barter.
The two aspects – the monumental and degraded, the established and the happenstance – can’t be disentangled in that type of city that is free from the yoke of pure order.
A society of pure order is factual (number, algorithm), so fact becomes the way it is run (news). But facts without the underlying strength of rhythm and proportion are weak. It’s sometimes difficult to put things into words, which is why visual artists often appear rebellious! Fantasy artists tend to obey their instincts and just go with what they see as negative in society.
Caza’s 70s material for Pilote (as opposed to his psychedelic scenes for MH) revels in blood and gore, his muscular alter ego laying into soft human flesh left, right and centre. It’s even possible he wasn’t 100% sure what it was he was so livid about; can a left-wing radical also be a sabre-swinging pirate?
But this is fairly typical with creative-types who have a certain naivety. It’s their instincts they are obeying, not rational thought, and instincts are signs of strength underlying reality.
What I’m saying is that - beyond left and right – there is a strength to reality that is in the nooks and crannies of disorder. This is something Bilal observed in his dilapidated, pock-mark strewn buildings of nouveau Paris in The Nikopol Trilogy (prev).
Anything that is dilapidated and left to its own devices develops a patina of dirt and decrepitude that has aesthetic and moral worth. From this decadence springs rebirth. Ancient cities wear down, decline and are abandoned. They may then be reclaimed or overrun with vines; this is the Hyborian way that is a mixture of order and disorder.
Pure order only exists when the ego is drawn into the vale of numbers that make living easy; an illusion of facts that are fictions of acolyte-rule.
Naivety and lack of order go hand in hand, signs of instinctive strength, of the harmonious body over the detached head. The same I’m sure applies to BWS’s instinctive loyalty to 60s Kirby and the 70s New Gods (Young God & Friends 2003). Instincts that relate to the body also relate to development of the psyche. The psychical and physical power of Kirby can affect young people at a deep level of instinct.
The style is suffused with psychic content.. I read somewhere in TCJ to the effect that in the best cartooning the most is achieved with the least superfluous effort. That could be something to do with intensity, and I think applies to various people - Ditko, Adams, Gulacy, Byrne, Crumb, Jaime Hernandez. The Hernandez Bros for sure were influenced by the seemingly simplistic Archie style (one could also think of Manga). Jaime has got to have one of the most fluently concentrated styles of figure art ever - think Greek pottery!
Kirby’s futuristic societies – such as the Colonisers of Rigel – are physical in terms of bodily action, and psychically independent. Their individuals are freely-active forces under self-volition. Coloniser Nile really resembles a rebel! While she is the leader of a Rigelian Colonial unit on Earth, her actions are fully independent.
She comes-up against Rigelian authority only when Thor exerts sufficient opposition, and her mandate is then revoked.
In other words, Kirby’s futuristic societies resemble old-school ones – like Rome where regional governers are fully independent and free operators. They are all potential Caesars, and the only thing stopping them is brute force.
The seeming primitivism of Kirby is actually true to ancient societies – but not our own. Really, the main reason for this is that ancient societies were strong – physically and psychically – and ours are weak.
Ancient societies were run by rebels who happened to hold the reins of power. They were thoroughly independent thinkers and men-and-women of action, whether it’s Boadicea or Julius Caesar.
Societies become topsy-turvy when thought-processes are no longer independent, so that leaders are in name only. This has to be dated from the sorcerous invention of inductive reason (Newton, Opticks etc.) where experiments take place outside the conventional physical universe, and inside a parallel reality of pure order (light or electromagnetism.)
As I’ve been pointing-out for awhile, most modern experiments are experiments of pure order. DNA is detected because it happens to produce X-ray diffraction patterns (a type of lens or perspective view HB56).
Cells themselves are composed of gel colloid and water, both of which are highly disordered, flowing, viscous. Water may have intrinsic harmonics HB82. A harmonic is multi-faceted. All this is treated by science as ultra-fringe when one could easily make the reverse point! Pure order doesn’t exist except in the heads of acolytes like Dawkins and the Big Tech Dragons.
Pure order is weak and subsumes the independent thinkers of yore. It is physically barren and a type of numerical rubbish-removal. To be told by “them” that strength is not required in societies, only “facts”, is to abandon the deep layers of instinctive behaviour that are the history of Man.
Facts are illusory in that they are not physically strong. They convince the ego and take the place of instinctive stories. Pulps and comic books fill the gap.
The worrying thing is that, if “facts” can be normal/abnormal, good/bad then the very idea of work is compromised. A lot of what “they” call work has no quality.
Where I am is a lot of building – of all the renovation and flats the only thing that struck me as justified is a centre for urban-sports.
All the rest are logic that is junk. Rubbish-removal in the illusory numerical system of building smoothness and efficiency that has no dirt; no decadent strength of psychic and physical revival; quantity not quality (see Pirsig, metaphysics of quality HB36) Fertility, patina, ambiance.
Most facts have this underlying weakness that they can be abnormal or soft. A society that relies on facts is really a society of the detached head, as opposed to the harmonious body (on skateboards).
Harmony and the proportions of the body are products of primal rhythm. The world of logic inhabits a parallel reality that cannot recognize the primal. The rebellious spirit can be naïve, but that is their great strength. While politicians debate the running of society built on order, the strength of disorder entirely escapes their notice.
It is this dilapidated condition of abandon that beckons to the creative instinct of popular artists. From this condition springs the revival that is joyful and bold. To such as Amazon this condition is invisible, occupying as they do the weakness of number and algorithm. This society of the future cannot acknowledge the hippy mentality that is loose and rough; the two are incompatible.
The same probably goes for Kanye West (HB138 and prev.) West is an unpredictable operator in the conventional areas of business. You could say he’s a free-thinker in the mold of the 60s hippies though with money. His ideas seem to be physically-oriented, in that he is aware of the physical world of “free” resources like water. He wants to create a mini-ecosystem of cotton growth and textile design/production in Cody, Wyoming.
He would tend to fit the mold of an old-school rebel as opposed to a conventional numerical operator. His spiritual leanings also point to self-sufficiency. If the project in Wyoming turns into something fairly ramshackle that would be perfect; that’s for the future.
