Reviving through disorder is a common theme of this blog (check Buffy HB70), and the possibility that science enters a parallel universe of precision (DNA, GPS) that is seduced by the tantalising falsity of order (see Korvac W8).
Maggie, in Jaime Hernandez' stories, goes from being a mechanic in the jungle to the shabby chic of Ghost of Hoppers (P143-145). Always there is the whiff of decadent behaviour and bodily secretions, of foul-smelling waters or dying dogs.
A pungency that is strong and pure and original from the morbid fertility of the jungle. The mechanics of plants and animals is pretty precise, but so is their fertility.
This area of reality is Dionysus, Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring, sacrificial and pungent and barbaric. Archaic strength reeks of blood and bare maidens. Historically, Dionysus came from the east, possibly Persia, a cross-dressing glam-rocker riding a donkey or bull.
Where there is this level of anarchic disorder, there has to be a counter-force that achieves some visionary substance. Am ideal that appears to have substance. In Greece this is Apollo. Zoroastranism is even more menachean in its continual strife of seeming opposites.
As was said in HB70 (under Buffy), entering a parallel world of order and precision the balance of these seeming opposites is no longer possible. The strength of metamorphosis - the rotting process that leads to dried buffalo manure - is more or less denied in the interests of clinical tidiness. Without dirt there can be no cleansing process.
The useful product in the process of metamorphosis; without the process there can only be weakness. Metamorphosis tells you that from disorder comes order. The two are seeming opposites rather than existing entirely apart.
It's clearly not possible get anything from order per se, since one needs a dynamic of the physical mechanism, the skeleton (see Korvac.) The mechanism of movement is a case-in-point - the antagonistic pairing of contrary muscles that generate pull and tension.
Rugged strength (the guts of vultures, PM4) is a reality of the balance of seeming opposites. The scavenging vulture that cleanses the rotting carcass of pathogens through the power of its intestines.
Strength is a product of the metamorphosis of dirt into cleanliness. DNA is essentially illusory; it contains information that can be accessed by mechanical forces, but these forces are antagonistic. Without the strength, all is weakness and illusion (the compulsive ego, number - see Grace Slick quote )
Without metamorphosis, the compulsive ego is inside a clinical universe of sterile logic. Without the fertile ingredient or the dirt of the land, it's zeroville.
Going back to No More Heroes (PM4), I noticed that the lyric seems to contain two things. One is the Soviet feud between Trotsky and Lenin (Dear old Lenny); the other is the "tricky, illusory, duplicity" in human culture.
That quote is taken from Orson Welles' documentary on Elmyr de Hory (The Great Elmyra), the Hungarian art-swindler. As a scholar of the artists, the forger reckoned he supplied a need.
Sancho Panza was of course Don Quixote's faithful retainer; Don Quixote was another fantastic illusory character. But another way to put it is that they are original creations of a fertile imagination. They are contrary; they are against prevailing trends.
Another way to put that is that they are feudalists (They watch their Rome burn.) As I've said somewhere before, Rome was a festering pot of quarrels and feuds.
Caesar achieved power by military duplicity that was sanctioned by the Senate. Feuding, or low-level fights, is a traditional way of resolving conflicts, between men and women, within self-reliant neighbourhoods (see Detroit, Drama3.)
Now we live in a society of sameness and social-media, feuding has gone away. A neighbourhood that resolves conflicts by way of feuding is not necessarily tidy, it could be run-down and decrepit looking, practically a jungle (as happened in Detroit.)
But the degradation has a psychic strength that enables rebuilding in time. Without the psyche all you have is weakness, confusion. Detroit is a case-in-point that went outside civil legislation to achieve independence. Poverty is no impediment. The dollar and federal legislation do the opposite.
What I'm really getting at is tribal foundations of stable societies. Things happen without planning and the country (Dionysus) isn't dominated by the city (polis). Generational rhythms. Only over-urbanised societies seem to have disastrous age-imbalances. The psyche is weakened and there is no equilibrium.
Harlan Ellison in What Killed the Dinosaurs argued it was lack of imagination. That is, weakness of psyche. The modern parallel order is heading away from invariable time (of neighbourhood rhythms) within the stars and the zodiac, and into variable time of machines and social-media. Words lose meaning without the physical rhythms that enable revival from degradation, the melancholy of meaning.
The human is being made less physical and more of the head. But it's a false order, an illusion of clinical perfection that lacks the original force of Dionysus.
Leila Borari, Amazon jungle (Mirror, article on blood gold.)
