What is sameness? It seems to be a condition that does without Dionysus, the gay god of rustic abandon. Dionysus is equally close to sun and moon, since the sun fertilizes the vine, and bacchanalian rites follow into dusk and nightfall. Without the frivolity, the $ symbolises reason applied to pleasure (warehouse) for the “effect” of a geometrical maze of goods. This is just the madness of logic, since ideal form – like the human physique – is a balance. Human communes, again, are completely illogical balances of opposing forces Obvious also if you read the anthropologies of Paul Radin and Claude Levi-Strauss - symmetries of lodges and the archetypal scavenger (raven) that is midway between prey and predator (harvest).
This is the basis of Greek tragedy; if differences could be resolved through logic there would be no tragedy and no European classical culture! What often happens nowadays is we get sophistication but without the sublime primitivism that things originate from. It’s like the difference between Serge Gainsbourg and Moondog; I like both but only one brings tears of recollection of a collective psyche.
In a collective, communal sense, the humble worm is psychically attuned to its rustic surroundings. In a parallel reality, the dragon (worm) of consumption is let loose to prey on the human psyche. In other words, it's completely topsy-turvy. The human physique is nowhere; the dragon is everywhere. That is what I take as justification for attacking Trump et al. They represent the $ or the worm of consumption that preys on the psyche so that psychotic ego-lust becomes a type of norm.
This is not anti-American; the dollar is just a symbol of the “effect” that preys on human psyche and physique. Can we be so sure the psyche is what it used to be? Man used to cohabit with animals; the Red Indians in Last of the Mohicans can read signs on the moss on trees.
Where there is sameness the psyche diminishes. Where there are a lot of different, contrary forces, the psyche is strong, It’s not about intelligence; it’s sublime primitivism (or a bit like Sally Bowles’ refrain in Cabaret, “divine decadence”.
Not only that, physically if you lived on an old-fashioned farm, say, there are healthy microbes in the “dirt”. So, what is dirt and what is clean? Sadly for Trump hygiene is a misnomer and dirt is strong and healthy. If you went back to ancient Athens you’d find there was no hygiene as we understand it. There was, though, vast health in terms of spring water, airy courtyards, animals and athletics.
All this is a type of balance that rustic pursuits represent, a return to Dionysian origins, with a preponderance of unfrocked physique and psychic primitivism. This is actually classical, mythical content and one can trace it in pop-cultural forms as diverse as Lil Abner (Pictorial 13) and Cabaret (Weimar German decadence). Decadence is a return to origins, or the archetypal peasant.
These themes came into the 70s heyday of Pilote (Alternates 6) in France. Rustic free-licence, fantastically healthy-looking freckle-faced maidens, farm animals and tricksters
Pilote 53 1979
Annie Mal, Jean Denis
Pilote 57 1979
The healthily erotic, rustic Gallic female type from the old communal world of illogical power; the seasons, the sexes, the bulls of the field. There’s a very nice quote in CL Moore’s Paradise Street that picks up on the exuberance of naked power in the field
One instant he was swinging free, sliding down towards the shaking ground. The next, his knees were locked hard on both sides.. Lying close along the tremendous, pumping neck. Morgan led the herd. Exultation boiled up in him like strong liquor, a wild intoxication of the mind (Omnibus, page 541)
What moderns of any description can never get their heads around – men, women, those who go to Davos – is that that power is completely illogical, a form of balance, a type of mystique. Germaine Greer, the original female eunuch, is now at odds with feminists as she made the blatantly obvious observation that women used to slap men down.
In the old days, there were movies - the Carry On comedies, for example - which always had a man leering after women. And the women always outwitted him
A slap – like sex or riding a bull – is a physical action so doesn’t come into the modern parlance where everything has to be verbalised in ever decreasing circles. Circles of logic without the basic physical and psychic balance that are grace and power. Women should have a look at the old film femme fatales from the fifties who have grace and power, arching necks and arched eyebrows.
The talking head or the human head without the neck is disproportionate and the mystique of a woman is not a product of logic but of sublime form (see Weird 15, Pictorial 1). The reason most people don’t seem to recognize this is that most people inhabit a geometrical maze where logic is the default. They inevitably proceed to a type of sameness born out of disproportion, imbalance, disharmony. They cannot appreciate that differences ARE a type of harmony, the action of opposing forces. Not war, low-level feuds or mini-duels. Barbed wit, not robotic diktats from One Size Fits All HQ
All roads lead to One Size Fits All in the geometrical maze of talking heads otherwise known as Davos – yet another Martian encampment where talk of the wormdollar breeds a type of exuberance that is the psychotic opposite of the clean-limbed bull-rider of CL Moore’s Paradise Street. Trump has become the mascot of “them” with his seeming simplicity, a true champion of the $ and an enemy of the diverse power invested in the US constitution. He can only represent corporations, and this goes back to the American Flagg! Quote (Wild Horses) where the Plex is set on Mars.
Trump speaks fluent Martian, the market has no balance, whether fair or free and is just a means whereby geometry replaces native power – men, women, the bull in the field – with a type of psychotic AI. Native power is proportionate and has a type of affinity of differences, of mystique.
#31,Ulysse, Georges Pichard art
This sort of mystical camaraderie is the opposite of power as “they” understand it, a psychic affinity of living things that walk the grasslands of Earth. The affinity is quite ancient and mythical (Mary Renault The Bull of Minos). Even before that, the reptile brain – cerebellum and spine – that twists and turns within our subconscious (Pictorial 1)
In Jirel of Joiry, CL Moore uses this ancient affinity as a type of passageway to dark vistas of living dream (Pictorial 6). We who walk on grassland walk on the ancestor of all reptiles, the humble earthworm. The worm represents cyclical power, the ouroboros, that we dwellers of grasslands like to believe is our fortune to enjoy. What is the future without fortune?
Answer, the “electric-green” future of Musk, Bezos and co (see prev) that goes full tilt into the nothingness of global AI. Fortune, if it exists, it stands to reason is something ancient and cyclical and not intended to get from A to B in a straight line (or hyperloop)
Ragnarok, serpent battling dragon
To be a part of fortune’s tune and not simply vapour in some mad future trail would seem to have a psychic strength. Cast aside the misfortune of the wormdollar’s appeal and pick up hoe and pitchfork, the aromatics of grassland farming. The fortune of physical and psychic health is counter to corporate power, a cyclical theme that was covered to some effect by BWS in LIfedeath II (with Claremont) and Adastra in Africa.
Fortune, whatever it may be, has to come from an awareness of the deep unconscious – the very power that is denied free-marketeers who cruise round their geometrical warehouses. Awareness that different things have an affinity; of the stars in the sky, of moon on water-tables, of sun’s succulent grasslands, of humus and leaf-mulch.
The psychic power of Ulysses is of living among nature’s vast differences and finding fortune through naked cunning amid sea and sun. This is the dream of eternal recurrence, eternal dawn amidst nature’s ample bounty..
.. the poet belonged to a civilization that grew in harmony, not in opposition, with nature. And the beauty of "The Odyssey" lies precisely in this belief in reality as it is. (Fritz Lang Le Mepris)
Thus is lyrical fortune told at the dawn of civilization. At civilization’s end (?) “they” are building a parallel future with straight-line time. CL Moore, in The Code, has a nice explanation of why “parallel tracks” are such an alien idea (see also GK Chesterton The Man Who was Thursday)
In a railway yard there are many tracks. Each carries a train, moving relentlessly forward in space – and parallel.. each train is a spatial universe, and the tracks are laid on the dark roadbed of time itself.. the trains – the universes – of each are roughly similar. (Omnibus page 600)
She makes the observation that the young develop quickly and think slowly, so their experience of time is very subjective. Her story hinges on temporal experience being highly subjective, which she gives a typical fantasy twist when subjective reality becomes literally alien – in physique and psyche.
But a parallel world is equivalent to her analogy of railroad tracks – just change it to a microchip, and you have a lot of parallel lines – run by an atomic clock. Where you live in a parallel reality, an alien mentality predominates, which is the basic ability to issue statements or messages like clockwork. In conventional societies children chant rhymes, tell filthy jokes, indulge in leg-pulling and scallywaggery, so events have a certain mischievous harmony.
In a parallel society, that slow build-up of development is overrode by the predominance of the strictly linear tracks, instant messaging apps. That’s what’s meant by parallelism since it actually affects normal development of psyche – which should be slow and lyrical, as in an old-style commune (see Cider With Rosie).
Harlan Ellison’s essay Xenogenesis on sf fandom has the theme of children being different to their parents. That is a very appropriate word for the geometrical maze of AI “they” have in store for us and our kids.
The psychosis centres on normal human physique and psyche, and I came across a startling example in this pre-Raphaelite painting by Waterhouse that was the subject of a stunt by Manchester art gallery ..she felt “a sense of embarrassment that we haven’t dealt with [it] sooner. Rather than the nymphs being passive, they are beguiling Hylas into their clutches, free spirits of water and earth in female form, despite their blank-eyed demeanour
Hylas and the Nymphs
Of course, you may say it’s fantastically ludicrous, but Therese Dreaming by Balthus at the New York Metropolitan Museum was subjected to a similar puritanical attack. What we’re talking about is a degree of sexual licentiousness that you find in classical myth. The origin for that is Dionysus, the instinctive god, so these attacks are on normal human nature.
More widespread are the neutralisation of gender, as in phrases like "in all thy sons command” from the song O Canada that has been changed to “In all of us command”. Alongside this trend goes robot-sex, and they are already lining-up sex-bot playmates for old folks. Zappa got there first with “Stick it Out”(Joe’s Garage). This is an attack on physique and psyche, meaning (epistemology) and power (ontology) or the entire history of myth. Neutralisation is a bias which makes us more Apollonian, but it is the false Apollo, the talking head, the seductive man-headed serpent (CH 3,4 Conan #7).
These heads that try to neutralise the human physique and psyche are from a parallel reality, one where there is no balance and proportion. If you look at Hylas and the Nymphs, you see water-nymphs, lilies and reeds and they have flowers in their hair. What the censor doesn’t see in their prudery is the nymphs are strongly attracted to buds of nature and the wildness outside civilization. The domain of Dionysus.
This is even more obvious if you look at old films such as the aforementioned many time The Beautiful Blonde from Bashful Bend with Betty Grable or, say, Dance, Girl, Dance with Lucille Ball and Maureen O’Hara. The girls use their curves to good effect but they also can fight and shoot. Ball and O’Hara have a rough-and-tumble of blood-curdling savagery, being stage rivals.
In Beautiful Blonde Gable plays a similar sassy stage girl who is also handy with a gun
What seems to have escaped modernday “feminists” is that women can fight and lay out wry lines, By thinking gender-free they are escaping from the physique and psyche of women, meaning and power. Women who are part of nature and part of its divine balance and proportion; if women are beguiling that is why. There is a divine balance of the human form, a florescence of nature. One can be beguiled by a rose, the scents and shades and delicate fronds. Scientists talk hormones (endocrines) and circadian (bio)ryhthms but there is a tangible succulence that is a pure accident of nature, the land of the faeries and strange symmetries.
It's like a tear in the hands of a western man
Tell you about salt, carbon and water
But a tear to a chinese man
He'll tell you about sadness and sorrow or the love of a man and a woman -“Ride the Tiger”, Starship
This is the aspect that escapes modernday puritanicals, whether you’re talking about Alice or some mistaken notion of passive nymphs.
It’s the gay god Dionysus who is no shrinking violet, as lustrous and red as roses. This seems to be the difference with old-time icons like Greer, Bardot or Grace Slick. They are – and deal in – real women and not neutralised, gender-free “feminists”. Even if you look at their aging features, there is a realness to them.
Their psychic reality is not the parallel reality and is not speaking through them. Parallelism is a tendency to sameness in a geometrical world where there is no divine form, there are no wildchilds of nature with meaning and power (Indian Summer) in communal gatherings. There is only reason ($) applied to pleasure (goods) in a warehouse of the mind and an inevitable degrading of sexual relations, the neutralising of differences. The latest case of this in the UK where marriage is being made a civil partnership so it is much less distinct from a gay marriage, thus further blending the sexes.
The basic point is that a geometrical world is inevitably heading to AI, since a microchip is a parallel reality. Curators of museums may not know it, but their thoughts already have alien incursions. The parallel world has no knowledge of Dionysus, of wild fertility rites or of a harvest of plenty that strengthens a commune.
The puritanical relation to sex is more robot than human, and round the corner is this idea of psychotic robo-sex (Zappa’s Joe’s Garage). The puritanicals see sex as an isolated act between individuals – or person and robot – and not as the presence of fertility in the fronds of nature. Their minds are already neutralised in a gender-free geometrical universe. They are already thinking like the alien in our midst. The psychosis of this is that the Dionysian significance of sex that used to be a feature of Puritan settlements (see Alternates 7) is completely absent. Old fashioned Puritans knew the power of sex and had strict rituals (The Scarlet Letter).
The new puritanism is from somewhere else entirely. Not a universe of ornate chapels, matriarchs in bustles, wide forests and fringe Indians but one of pure geometry run by AI, of sensory apps, your bosom buddies on the hyperloops. Incidentally, CL Moore’s Heir Apparent has a pretty good foreshadowing of a sensory, enhanced future such as Apple and Co envisage. The ending is typical of pulps and very much so of Moore in the terrible and beautiful fate of a human-machine symbiot.