SAINTS AND LIARS (Gary Numan)
'Intruder' is Numan's recent concept album representing Earth as an infected planet by an intelligent virus known as Man (from a poem by one of his daughters).
The rugged stickability from Are Friends Electric (prev) is highly principled and, while it's a cut above his peers, it's not quite What's Going On. The latter is less angry and more hymnlike. Numan chooses to come down on religious hypocrisy and "a fictitious God".
Could this be a case of Numan unbeknownst to himself being infected by the same scourge that is rampaging through Earth, namely the illusion that the more you see things the more real they are? (see Max Romeo 'Tan and See').
Quetzalcoatl is the Aztec god of rain and the morning star (Venus). The god represents these aspects of reality in divine essence. Both rain and the morning star exist, so why not the god?
The oddity of modernity is that the more convincing things seem, the more illusory they are. It's a world of ones and zeros; the dual-note repetition of 'Jirel Meets Magic' (prev), reflections of reflections.
In this world of sameness, recognizing otherness is hard. Numan may be bizarre, but it takes a bazaar man from.the 19th century to invoke otherness, and at the same time a psychic affinity (akin to Howard's historical adventures of Outremer and elsewhere.)
This was adventurer and scholar Richard Burton, who translated 'The Thousand Nights and a Night' in about 1883. Though well after Byron's Arabic romances, the djinns and bejeweled princesses of far away lands and seas caught the Victorian imagination.
Otherness can evoke recognition in.that differences have similarities in the physical sense of metamorphosis; the curvilinear naturalness of the clothes and the settings of antique Arabia, Persia, India.
Religious essence may not be strictly visible, but it could still be the essence that one finds in lands that have an essence of naturalness and self-belief.
When the looseness and ease vanishes, one could say religion vanishes with them. Psychic looseness may be one of the entries to faith. Burton writes,
All Faith is false, all Faith is true.
Truth is the shattered mirror strown
In myriad bits; while each believes his little bit the whole to own.
In 1948 Jorge Luis Borges wrote a short story called The Aleph. In it, a manuscript by Burton is discovered. The manuscript describes a magic mirror which reflects the entire universe. (DT)
Mirrors are useful things but one has to be sure that what they reflect is not simply another mirror, equally 'truthful'.
The mirror of illusions (of light and logic) seems to be able to detect differences - such as genes on DNA via x-ray diffraction (prev) - but the differences essentially approach zero because the mirror cannot detect the primordial sameness of the universe.
That is to say, curvilinear naturalness (HB 172). If that is a godlike artifice, then it is lost to the mirror.
With naturalness comes psychic strength, and with that affinity of otherness.
Differencrs (such as DNA) are essentially weak unless they are associated to primordial strength. We live in a world of differences that are so minute they may as well be nothing or zero.
The curvilinear universe is a product of belief as a sort of cosmic scales. The power and grace of the body (warrior, woman) versus the vision of the mind.
Visions again are things that are not necessarily visible. See Paul Radin's description of primitive 'types'; the shaman (visionary) versus the man-of-action (herder, warrior).
The notion that the more visible things are the realer they are puts one in thrall to the ego of acolytes of the mirror of illusions; the false Apollo of ones and zeros. Reflections of reflections that are weak and cannot recognize otherness that is strong and psychically pure.
