I guess there are those who would take issue with the idea that human beings can change so radically, those of a plus ca change persuasion. It does seem odd, though such things are known in sci-fi, EC Weird Science, Carpenter’s pulp homage They Live! or Godard’s Aphaville. Partly it’s an intuitive sense that things are missing (see Dan Dare Tale of Faith 5) The modern scene is the rapid culmination of several hundred years of empirical research. If there’s something wrong with empiricism (ie. it enters a logical maze of the ego) then that is rapidly becoming apparent in the pure ego of the mainstream. It has its attractive qualities for sure, but it’s like an ephemeral spring day. There is a lot missing. Just go back to the ancient days, say 1967 Janice Joplin at Monterey

COMBINATION OF THE TWO

Happy-go-lucky, feel more in-the-moment, lust for life in the Summer of Love, ephemeral but eternal. What lasts is feeling, which can encompass intuition. Without feeling what artist is going to bother to put paint to canvas? The ego, attracted as it is to a maze of self-reflecting facts – gazing in effect at its own head – loses the human power of intuitive reason.

Yes, it is possible for a wizard to have a modicum of humility, the primitive shaman who merges his or her psyche with the physical/psychedelic content of nature. Where there is content – psychic and physical – the ego cannot dominate with its inward-turning gaze (of factoid death) and the outward-bound lusts for life and joy have a fair wind.

In the Conan comic, Zukala’s Daughter was one of the early BWS/Thomas yarns featuring a wizard’s daughter who fell in love with our yak-browed Cimmerian (as then drawn). When Conan’s sword slashed through the eye of the mage’s mask, Zukala lost his powers and gained the more humble demeanour we later see in the two Elric yarns (#s 14,15).

While unbridled ego fuels morbid desires for material of a logical maze that will vanish with the dawn, humility breeds the intuitive reason that we live in a regenerating world of green and gold and blood red.


Conan #14 © Conan Properties1971

The ordered garden of Zukala calls to mind the 1974 print The Ram and the Peacock. Zukala loses his daughter, but hasn’t lost something almost as vital, his perspective on the eternal mysteries of nature which are bounded by freedom and order.


© Conan Properties 1971

In the Moorcock-plotted story, various forces of Chaos battle eachother, while the Lords of Order mete out high-handed “justice”. It’s not what you’d call a Conanesque tale, and BWS took this even further in The Ram and the Peacock where, according to him, the wizard is a “fallen hero”.

© BWS

The barbarian is “the invader” among the refinements of a cultured garden, wind-chimes, peacock and symbols of time and space, sundial and prism. These suggest the wizard as a student of nature and not aloof from it, a priest rather than a necromancer. The study of physics, by the way, used to be called “natural philosophy”, which is like a bad joke.

The burden of proof now rests with the ego in a maze of neverending mirror-images (see prev.) The egotistical assumption is that if something is logical it is true, whereas it is only true for a logical system.

The ego is attracted to logic – to verifiable proofs – so it is a type of lure, a trap that leads to infinite mirror images. Perhaps the best example is Einstein’s quote on Faraday’s law of induction, from “On the Electrodynamism of Moving Bodies”, which led to Special Relativity (of light)

It is known that Maxwell's electrodynamics—as usually understood at the present time—when applied to moving bodies, leads to asymmetries which do not appear to be inherent in the phenomena. Take, for example, the reciprocal electrodynamic action of a magnet and a conductor.

The observable phenomenon here depends only on the relative motion of the conductor and the magnet, whereas the customary view draws a sharp distinction between the two cases in which either the one or the other of these bodies is in motion. For if the magnet is in motion and the conductor at rest, there arises in the neighbourhood of the magnet an electric field with a certain definite energy, producing a current at the places where parts of the conductor are situated.

But if the magnet is stationary and the conductor in motion, no electric field arises in the neighbourhood of the magnet. In the conductor, however, we find an electromotive force, to which in itself there is no corresponding energy, but which gives rise—assuming equality of relative motion in the two cases discussed—to electric currents of the same path and intensity as those produced by the electric forces in the former case.

Examples of this sort, together with unsuccessful attempts to discover any motion of the earth relative to the "light medium," suggest that the phenomena of electrodynamics as well as of mechanics possess no properties corresponding to the idea of absolute rest..

.. in a geometrical framework” (my coda) - because Faraday’s invention of the electric coil or solenoid is the question under discussion (later by Maxwell, Lenz, Lorenz, Ambrose Fleming..) Electrodynamism applies to Faraday’s law relating to an electric coil or some other device of pure geometry. Without the geometry there is no induced current or EMF (force). Faraday’s laws don’t exist without the geometry.

So, how is it that Einstein and his followers are so convinced and convincing? Because the mind is attracted to pure logic – it’s an ego-trap. Yes, they’re aware of the geometry, but to them the verifiable proofs are the reality. That is, proofs of a geometrical system. Therefore they build ever-more geometrical systems, obtaining ever-more verifiable proofs (CERN). This is the infinite mirror-image culture of

BIG SCIENCE

I’m well aware that there is a signal lack of proof for the idea that verifiable proofs are just a type of advanced junk. Mainly, it’s circumstantial evidence that we do indeed live in a culture of infinite reflecting mirrors. A trap for the ego where there is no symmetry and proportion and where fact becomes fiction.

How do you tell if something is fact or fiction? By having verifiable evidence. Yes, but that is evidence of a geometric system, for which verifiable proof exists. This is attractive to the ego, so you get in an infinite loop of “facts”

LET X=X TANGO

There’s also the case of mainstream pop – do you know what I’m saying? If you go back to Quicksilver or Big Brother and Joplin (prev.) Janice is stomping and hoofing it up like crazy, whereas a lot of modern bands are forlorn echoes of Coldplay, or robo-DJs. Pop music is a physical act, the body is presenting what the mind is thinking. The Who at Monterey played Cochran with rock’n’roll flamboyance, you can’t doubt their cred.

Hoofing and rolling around is what the human body does expressively; pop is the physical allure of a psychic feel, the stately dance-rhythm of

FALALALA

representative of human physique, the dainty, the burlesque allure of pure physicality. The head – the psyche – is proportionate to the rhythms of the body (Pictorial 1). In a logical system, there is no proportionate head to body, no sense of the allure of physique in song, in social convention of song and dance. The head is grotesquely over-extended, speaking its factoid fictions with ever-more intensity, justified by verifiable proofs which apply to this grotesquely over-extended logical order.