WHITE GOLD (PS)
Trapped in the repetitive news-cycle of optimistic infrastructure spending, the simple facts of life escape attention. One of those is that resources are free.in the natural state that is not under the bane of "smart" building.
In this sense, Poly Styrene's electro-power-pop-punk thriller seems to be aiming to fly away from straight-line news and into a rustic idyll, where water and the plants and animals of earth are the principle products.
This is not a bad link to Kanye West's free and sentimental location on his Cody cotton-plantation design/manufacturing base in Wyoming.
Rebellion of free-form types tends to take spiritual matters as a concomitant part of the physical activity - here cotton planting through to design and manufacture as an ecological unit.
Whether the Cody institution has built a temple I'm not sure, but it's worth quoting this from Mishima's The Decay of the Angel.
The perfect symmetry of the shining mandala holds at its centre the Court of the Eight-Petaled Lotus, abode of the Lord of Great Light. Twelve courts stretch out in the four directions, and the abodes of the several Buddhas are fixed with delicate and detailed symmetry.
If the dome of the art gallery, high in the moonless night, was taken for the central court, then the avenue where Honda stood, separated from it by the pond, was perhaps the abode of the Peacock Lord, to the west of the Court of Emptiness. (page 186
The psychic dimension contains powerful symmetries, simplifying factors in a world of perpetual information. Water, earth, air, fire. Religious structures where there are detailed symmetries and the metamorphosis of line is spotlighted. One enters the meditative mindset of a chapel (see prev. on Iran, Turkey, India).
This contrasts with a society where straight lines are the status quo, the setting for smart-buildings. This is even though smart compounds in nature like proteins metamorphose spontaneously into shape.
As was noted previously, the scientific attempt to predict shape via algorithms simply takes one further into the mirror of illusions - of number, complexity, information. It's a logical dead-end of smartness.
Cotton, cattle, crop-sharing, the symmetrical beliefs of American Indians (see totems, prev.) The physical signs of metamorphosis - in growth, seasons (even in shape of clouds - see Mishima) - invite the spiritual dimension, the chapels of meditation.
In The Decay of the Angel, the angel in question is Toru, a genius-level lad whose self-centered ruses lead to tragedy. In this scene, the imperious Keiko has his schemes in her sights.
Toru was for the first time afraid of Keiko. He felt not the slightest constraint of class, but there are persons endowed with a special nose for scenting worth. They are the angel-killers.. Toru had let the moment for an answer pass. He knew that he had let underestimated his adversary..
"..Your confidence and your dreams are groundless. If there is on this earth something exceptional, special beauty or special evil, nature finds it out and uproots it. We should all by now have learned the hard lesson, that there are no 'elect'". (page 201)
Toru's schemes in a sense are illusions of his intellect, an intellect divorced from physical reality. This is certainly very close to the predicament we find ourselves in, in a world with neither a physical reality, nor a brightness of spirit. The death of taste in a mirror-land of endless tidiness (P157)
False optimism.turns into the gloom.of a news-cycle constructed of numbers and charts. Pessimism in Mishima's book takes the form of " flesh that is latent death" (page 210).
But the truth of the statement frees one from endless cycles of gloomy forecasts in the game of optimism where only positive information is allowed (see prev.)
"Positive information" meaning information that feeds the egos of acolytes(of the mirror of illusions). An illusion can or should be positive. My sense of Poly Styrene is that she felt intuitively the gloom in our modern prognosis of artificial advance. Into the mirror and into perverse AI, the profane serpent of corrupt rhythm.
Lost are stories of physical heartiness in the fields, the apple trees and the gentle maidens and the player of the lyre. The Grecian idyll of the South.
False optimism is the handmaiden of the detached ego that is so like the angel of Mishima's that has to decay to be real.
THRILLER (MJ)