Wednesday 17 March 2021

Pictorial 156

 All things approach sameness - or the vanishing point of technique (perspective, prev) - when the illusion of straight lines convinces the ego. 

That is to say that the ego is susceptible to being convinced by "facts" and numbers. What that essentially means is that the ego that is susceptible becomes very dominant in the modern order.

The order that is led by science, usually in the guise of a white male. So, when people are approaching sameness, what that means is that they are approaching the rationalistic outlook of a white male scientist.

It's fairly easy to see that in social-media, where each news-channel has a specific factual outlook (for example, Watching the Throne on Kanye West). I'm not saying it's necessarily wrong, but it gets samey. The modern world is infinitely factual.

West happens to be fairly immune to this type of analysis, having established his own spiritual and physical socioeconomic setup in Wyoming (see prev.) but that is vanishingly rare.

A socioeconomy that is atall realist - as opposed to being based on an illusion of.number and "facts" - has a strong sense of untidiness in "the animated universe".

Untidiness, meaning letting things be. Letting people develop differently; differences jar and moral force is established with the settling of differences (using insults, chivalry P155).

Differences are settled in this way whereas in the modern order nothing is settled and there are eternal protests! In an ecosystem animals eat each other; human culture is less aggressive, but the principle of balance can't be denied.

Basically, instead of things being similar, in nature there is a sameness of difference, rather than sameness per se. The metamorphosis of line connects different things in nature, as has been mentioned.

Mishima's The Decay of the Angel, the 4th and last of The Sea of Fertility series, has this description of sunrise.

It finally made its appearance at five past five. From an opening in the dark gray clouds at the horizon, just above the second pylon, came the first glimpse of the sun, carmine, melancholy, as if it were not rising but setting. The top and the bottom were cut off by a screen of clouds, like shining lips. An ironic smile of thin lips rouged in carmine floated briefly among the clouds. Thinner and thinner, fainter and fainter, they left a sardonic smile that was there and not there. The higher stretches of the sky carried a warmer, brighter light. (page 31)

Metamorphosis and decay are somewhat similar things, in that the lines weave shapes that dissolve into thin air and dissolution is part of the process. The entire process is completely untidy and incapable of being ordered in a rationalistic sense.

With decay there are foul-smelling waters and dissolution, which is part of the overall process of metamorphosis. Page 51 of The Decay of the Angel has a description of the various signs in Japanese mythology.

"There are thirty-three angels and one archangel, and the signs of death in them are fivefold. Their flowered crowns wither, their robes are soiled, the hollows under their arms are fetid, they lose their awareness of themselves, they are abandoned by the jeweled maidens."

These Japanese angels appear quite like European fairies to me (see the dying tree-dryad quote from Jirel Meets Magic, prev.) Fetid aromas and soiled robes are signs of the cycle of organic materials.

The modern order doesn't really like the physical scene, and takes refuge in arcane theories, such as Stuart Hameroff's "quantum consciousness". As I said to Hameroff awhile ago, though, worms wriggle and their physical reality has to inform their psyche. If a worm has emotion, it is through the act of wriggling, not some ineffable consciousness.

The illusion we are entering (daily) is one of smart-towns where everything approaches AI. There is no decay (no worms) and therefore no strong revival. The grotesquery of revival in the spiritual realm was brought out in Mishima's previous book, The Temple of Dawn, with the descriptions of Benares' Hindu rituals (prev.)

The symbolism of Pelleas and Melisande is strong (prev.) One honors the dead in terms of physical and psychic realities, rather than ambiguous pseudo-facts of flakehead ego-scientists.

RIP Susan Ellison, woodworking artisan and furniture restorer par excellence.