Monday 5 April 2021

Hyborian Bridge 167

 If the modern order is sterile geometry, the Northern Renaissance master Durer was fertile metamorphosis of line. This dichotomy was previously brought-out in P145.

Distilling this down from the really abstract is the intention! Starting from abstraction, the ambition of the modern order us to live in resolved space (straight-lines represented by light - see HB115).

Within this space, problems are resolved (by AI), but it is an.illusion of geometry (perspective, or the vanishing point of technique).

What is lacking is the fecundity of nature which is a product of the metamorphosis of line (Zeus and the bull, see The Rape of Europa, prev.)

'Resolved space is always very persuasive - see CL Moore P8 - but it is psychically lacking and, in CL Moore's Judgement Night, full of reptilian psychosis. The style is monochrome, flashy and tawdry (Trumplike).' - from HB115

IT is the monotone of the two-tone universe of constant reflections (ones and zeros) that expand into nothingness (see Jirel Meets Magic, prev.)

A monochrome universe can appear multiplex simply owing to the multifaceted repeats! Nature itself is thoroughly illusory; the sea, a flat surface or endless deeps (see Francis Stevens' Claimed, prev); the floaty air and flickering flames.

Each element may contain illusions, taken together the elemental symmetries are real. In other words, symmetry is a fundamental component of reality.

So, taking this abstraction into concrete areas, it's basically saying that contradictions in society are often correct in that they can't be resolved into sterile information (of the illusory mirror).

A traditional society has priests and it has knights, both of whom would tend to contradict each other. I've previously cited the religious states of Turkey, Iran and India for their old styles of living with the symmetries of beliefs.

The strength of belief or psyche is there, and therefore there are bound to be contradictions within the society. Obviously a belief is not real in terms of artificial information, but it is still very real.

The basic point is that living artificially can seem real, but it's still a sterile illusion of the ego of acolytes (head). The product of a system of straight-lines (sun or electromagnetism).

In a fertile system, the metamorphosis of line much more apparent. This relates to style, taste and art and architecture (see any Hyborian kingdom). It's a condition of the body (as Bruce Lee has said, of moving in the moment, of pure action, the state of being within time.)

It's because a resolved state is convincing to the head of acolytes (of sorcerers) that that is the state we are approaching. It's an illusory state of the mirror of illusions that sees the geometry of things only; that is one side of reality, the side that has no spontaneous movement of line).

Iran is s study in contradictions. The Shah westernized it and even built The Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art to house western modern artists. It was a pet project of Farah Pahlavi, his architecturaly-inclined wife.

TMoCA

As you can see from.the illo it's brutalist in the best tradition! The fact the Mullahs didn't pull it down does say a fair bit.

Iran is a country that is monumentally graceful and mountainous (not unlike its ancestor Turan), and more western-oriented than you might think. However, it's the contradictions that make it Iranian. The fact the fundamentalists haven't managed to iron-out these contradictions says something of the Iranian spirit of millennia.

Similar observations go for Lebanon. Fundamentalism has wreaked havoc but hasn't conquered the spirit. Gad Saad is a Jewish Lebanese exile who evokes this ancient tradition of contradictions in his podcast The Saad Truth.

You need to be able to withstand the stress of satire, of rejection, of critique. If you're unable to do so, then your ideology doesn't belong in a free society. If you want kids to be resilient against auto-immune disease, they need to be exposed to pollutants and allergens. It's because you're immune system.needs to be triggered. I think the same is true of critical thinking- this thing called your brain expects to be exposed to opposing ideas for it to develop its critical thinking properly.

It's not up to governments to resolve these things; insults and objections are good. Saad happens to be a Darwinian, but I'll forgive his ludicrous lapse for his sound humanistic, liberal sense.

A fertile society can be dirty and squalid, but it does not develop a fixation on numbers and rubbish-removal as ours do (see Grace Slick quote on compulsion HB62/1).

The straight-line order necessitates a fixation on sterility, which at the same time is a fixation on rubbish-removal. The fertile society lives with disorder and untidiness and the cycle of material because it is the natural thing to do - see HB115 link to Pompeii..

'To the Romans the Earth is the body and recycles things as the body does. There us no cerebral cleverness because it's not fitting that a house should be clever; it's just mud, wattle, mortar - nothing more.'

Resolved space contains the profane serpent of corrupt rhythms, which is simply a distortion of what is already there in the symmetries of the body (see "clean meat" and the apotheosis of DNA as opposed to clean living and sound milieux).

As Radin has said, societies contain 'types' and the modernist type is the political mind that welcomes problem-solving, never appreciating the illusory space they are inhabiting. The ego triumphant on a desert if its own devising.