Rugged sequences of events; pain and pleasure; farce; tragedy. I'm talking about O Lucky Man, the 1974 film by Lindsay Anderson (A6) featuring the picaresque adventures of Malcolm McDowell as Alex (from the previous film If.)
After encountering a bizarre pig-man at a secret research establishment, the gaunt and shell-shocked Alex stumbles into an idyllic church at harvest festival time. He is not allowed to partake of the fruits, but the pleasant maiden opens her bosom and his thirst is quenched.
The film is a grueling ride round 70s Britain, and seemed to offend the establishment at the time. It is partly about understanding - and indeed confusion. In the commentary, McDowell notes that the line "There are 3.3 million prisoners worldwide" was put in simply as a deliberately meaningless number.
The milk from a teat is meaningful and enriching while numbers are not. Just the other day, PM Boris Johnson announced an agricultural drive that proposed that "Schools, prisons and hospitals be required to offer a vegan meal option."
Bulls and cows are out of fashion, which is exactly what a cyclical, mixed farm of rotating crops, fallow and livestock requires for fertility. In the modern language of hygiene, efficient monetary monoculture rules, with accompanying build-up of toxic outfall (see Ohio pigs, English rivers prev.)
While we continually approach a neat and ordered world that is boring, the trend to physical perfection is at the expense of psyche. This trend can probably be dated from Raphael (D4), and now we have the physical perfection of science (in this country seen in Love Island.)
Physical perfection without psyche has as its other facet experiment gone mad (the pig-man), The DNA fallacy, 'clean meat'. While physical perfection cab be calculated and boosted a la Love Island, proportions contain within themselves imperfections, which are simply those of decadence and decay.
A town, like a body, contains areas of grime, grunge, slime and detritus, nooks and crannies and niches. With balance comes the cyclical order that modernity tries to replace with vegan diets.
With cyclical decadence (and sucking at the teat) comes the calmness of psyche that is needed for understanding. The modern game of numbers is most prevalent in the basic business of buying and selling.
In Nectar of Heaven(#24), Tubb paints a psychotic picture of fraudulent capital. These scenes, and especially the mirrors, are reminiscent of Jirel Meets Magic (prev.) The dual-note that confounds (with one's and zeros), that hypnotizes - until the glass shatters.
The signals were too complex for him to follow; data received and relayed by the computer, the bank which alone made such fast trading possible. The flickers alone were enough to tire the eyes, to induce a near-hypnotic statecin which judgement could be distorted and action delayed..
Again he began to pace the room, seeing his reflected image grow and diminish, waver and distort as reflection was caught by reflection, the whole painted with shifting hues. (page 140, 141, 145).
Numbers and calculation as opposed to proportionate balance; the dark areas and cesspits that maintain fertility, that germs frequent, that strengthen immune-responses.
In the country at large, proportionate balance(the spin of the planets, invariable time, dance) is needed for the ecology, the free-growing herbs, nettles, butterfly larvae (in India, Modi's anti-free market stance was forced by the actions of the small farmers, prev.)
While calculation and number approach a hygienic area of toxic outfalls, proportion always contains the niches that are unsightly, sordid, rancid and generally grimy.
Dumarest is always having to wash (ritual bathing, see Valeria prev.) Sweaty and covered with the stench of dried blood and physical pursuits from rotten neighbourhoods. Why wash except to clean off dirt? In Incident on Ath, the society is as neat and orderly as a child's toy, and again a psychotic element emerges.
The rugged, grimy and sweaty imperfections of proportion are the ones where rebellion and free-thought prosper. One can't buy and sell sweat, and that might be the understanding (epistemology) that Alex receives in the end sequence.
