(Note to Sheila - see prev.)
Strong blood. The primitive link with action in the
wild is the perennial hunt. Where there is hunting there is the skillful
dismemberment of game – see description in The Green Knight HB188.
The ripe exposure to nature’s entrails necessitates a
bath, and bathing rituals are perennial products of active and
psychically-healthy cultures (Roman, Japanese.)
When Max Friedman falls into the Danube in Hungarian
Rhapsody, it’s only natural that he washes-off the mud and detritus.
Dirt isn’t selective, so far as the body is concerned.
The modern trend seems to be to puritanically clean the ‘dirty bits’ while
leaving the rest! That simply implies the body is not actually encountering
dirt which is a normal by-product of active life in the field, necessitating
regular water and mineral bodily exposure in tubs, or at least basins.
A basic problem with modernity is people think they
don’t have to encounter different things; that everything is the same. But dirt
is simply another word for a strong, fertile environment that is self-sufficient,
as opposed to being inert and hygienic.
Scientists in their labs have this continual
assumption of sameness as they fiddle with RNA/DNA routines - genes are
interchangeable for many species. The culture in Wuhan seems to have been
approaching bat-human proxies, where both species were spliced into mice genes.
Moderns think in terms of sameness instead of
differences all the time. Boris Johnson on his recent trip to the US made this
comment.
"We are awesome." Every day green startups are producing new ideas, he said, highlighting initiatives to feed seaweed to cows to restrain their traditional signs of digestive approval and to use AI and robotics to enhance food production.
"It is these technological breakthroughs that will cut the cost for consumers, so that we have nothing to fear and everything to gain from this green industrial revolution," he said.
The technological-over-reliance makes false problems
out of the assumption of sameness. Traditionally pastoral cows that are fed hay
and allowed to free-graze are not methane-polluters. Spokespeople like Boris
tend to assume that efficiency dictates monoculture on gigantic scale where
there is only sameness and the problems arise from monotonous living regimes.
Diversity and difference – mixed farms – are
ecologically attractive solutions that have the active life of plants, animals
and humans at their core. Where there is active diversity, stable environments are
created where the viruses and germs that are present remain within the core
populations (see Minnesota Institute of Environment, prev.)
These areas have a high self-sufficiency, and the need
for modern technique is correspondingly less. Modern techniques are simply the
result of more and more sameness, which is being artificially propelled by
random gene-splicing.
We are led by news to accentuate this techno-premise
of modernity, basically since it is attractive to the ego. We are living the
ego-dream – or nightmare – of genetically-propelled sameness that creates false
problems that ‘naturally’ rely on ever-more technical solutions.
The problems are authoritarian – unnatural – but even
more they diminish the psyche. As Carl Jung said,
Who looks outside, dreams. Who looks inside, awakes.
As we dream our lives away, the natural strength of
life on the range is lost to use. With strength comes the clarity of dream,
instead of the misdirection of a dreamlike stream of news. Blood, dirt,
strength, health in self-sufficient communes. The coordinated actions of
bodies-in-motion, animal and human.
This is what is being lost to the genetic cult of
sameness, that does without primordial action in areas of diversity and health.
A logical universe of ‘fact’ is without the coordinated actions that alone can
generate a vigor of community that instils also an atmosphere of collective
psychic calm (Carl Jung, natch.)
The inner life of communities is represented by atmospheric emissions (candlelit mosques) that reassure with ethical messages or good dreams. Dreams like The Arabian Nights that are above all tales of physical action.
The antagonistic muscles of the body (physique) that represent action in the moral dimension are exactly what is not present in the modern universe of bad dreams.
The human head will always dream, but it can either have an ethical basis (in physical reality), or s basis in random logic.
The Green Knight, Clair Noto ("Red Lace") or The Arabian Nights represent good dreams that are fully clothed in animal flesh - antagonistic movements, grace (woman, the hunt, blood.)
The modern bad dream cannot have antagonism because it speaks in the language of logic (non-biological.)
In a quote that would be widely repeated in the following decades, she (Ruth Bader Ginsburg) said: "The decision whether or not to bear a child is central to a woman's life.."
In the version that the ACLU shared on Twitter, it removed any reference to women. (DT)
While biological organisms operate antagonistically in their functions and movements, they have to be the product of balance between and among the different elements.
Balance is primordially what we are in the ancient Greek sense of ideal proportions. We can either make an ethical decision to follow balance in ecosystems and culture, or follow the logical path of random techniques such as gene-editing.
Genes are not a controlling element because they have not the primordial reality of balance that comes from opposing features. Those who follow genes are merely following a random red-herring of cosmic proportions!
Creative redundancy (prev) is the clue that organic bodies above all require coordination of their antagonistic, opposing features. Because this is a product of opposites, it cannot be logically derived. It's basically pre-Newton, pre-inductive reason and takes place in the active universe of people, plants, animals.
The end-poduct of inductive reason is of course a machine universe, where ethical issues are bound by random processes. This basic dichotomy is one interpretation of Moebius's The Airtight Garage. Giraud (like BWS) has intuitive senses that seem to bypass whole chunks of information-speak.
On one reading it seems to be composed of incompatible elements, in that the garage is 'hermetically sealed', but also 'Hermetic' in the ethical sense (historically, both these words refer to Alchemy, not to machines as in the story.)
The story is an investigation of who is running the garage of worlds-within-worlds. Jerry Cornelius, Major Grubert, or Sper Gossi?
The concept of levels of reality is reminiscent of spiritual Hermeticism. Cornelius calls on the aid of the Nagual, or animal spirit. However, the top level is the universe of machines, implying the garage is simply a device that is programmable.
This incompatibility endures in the ending, where Major Grubert goes through door 9 into a modern subway. How can an artificial asteroid in space lead to a subway on Earth?
In short, has Moebius written (drawn) a 'Shaggy Doge' story of pure nonsense? It's possible, and it's a fun idea. While The Green Knight and other tales have nonsense elements, the ethical purity is always contained in physical reality.
In our age, the physical reality itself - the coordinated, antagonistic features of opposing elements of the body in action - is not there, not in control. The Airtight Garage could be read as an allegory of a nonsense land of authoritarian rules. A topsy-turvy land where, in the words and song of Moondog..
