So, here’s the British cabinet, otherwise known as serpent-heads from Mars. I’m not being headist, it’s just they would look quite nice on pikes, I guess. I’ve nothing against intelligence per se, it’s the disproportionate use of detached serpentine heads that exist in some parallel space where symmetry and proportion (of the figure) don’t exist and fact becomes fiction. They are direct from the set of They Live!
These guys are very confident and very wrong because they are living in their hermetic maze; the recipe for a hubristic tragedy. The more they enter the hermetic maze of sure fact the more wrong they are. Hence, the more sure they are that they are absolutely right. No doubt – nemesis. Nemesis is whatever isn’t in the planned future they have in store. Anything like the unplanned neighbourhoods of yore (see CH5 New York Harlems, say) that have “the logic of the illogical“.
The organic rule of thumb is that differences are tiered, or layered, with a castle and its surroundings as the historical emblem. This is not atall what politicians want; they want level sameness that is run by federal programs. Now, some of this is the relic of civil rights and I’ve made my position fairly clear (Tales of Faith 7) - government is killing us; white or black – same difference. Government – like social media types – is predominantly run by a certain type of head. These serpents have a future in store for us, one run by themselves and AI, which will be missing certain vital elements.
Female-oriented fantasies are often full of these elements, which you might characterize as good old boys and good old girls running their affairs with good old-time cheer. In Melissa Scott’s Point of Hopes, government is under suspicion of malpractice from a very close-knit, habitable world of fortune-tellers and soldiers of fortune under the wary gaze of marshalls or “pointsmen“.
Eslingen leaned out the window to check the sundial that stood in the garden below. Past four, he guessed, from the length of shadows, but couldn’t see the dial itself..a tower clock sounded from the direction of the Street of Knives.. (Tor, page 50)
The fortune lay crooked across the page.. „Chance meetings are just chance and chancy, bring chances, take chances. Chance would be a fine thing! Eslingen allowed himself a smile at that, wondering if his encounter with the pointsman, Rathe, was covered in that prediction, then headed for the garden stairs and his own room. (page 75)
That is the world of possibilities, but not of sure facts or certainties. It’s a world of differences piled on top of eachother where people get by using their wits. What‘s gradually happened – since the 50s – is that the world of sure facts and certainties displaces the world of possibilities, resulting in a sense of loss. What’s missing, what’s gone wrong? You often detect these questioning tones in old-time bands, Tin Star for one
AMERICAN SUMMER
Of course, some counter-culture types like R Crumb are more distraught – he lives in South France –it all seems to come down to a sense of old-time loss. You get the same sense in
GHOST WORLD
What is the loss? It’s that a certain type of head lives off certainty and prediction. It’s their ego-lust. The more sure the future becomes the more it instils their self-cofidence and preening self-regard. All this self-importance is a sham, an illusory facade. The hermetic maze of a detached head; the parallel reality of level sameness. The absurd thing is the more they are in their parallel world of level sameness the more certain they become.
You see it all the time in financial journalism, they are so sure of their facts. Yes, but the universe isn’t factual; it’s proportionate and symmetrical. Naivety often has unconscious rightness (see CH5 Yggdrasil). The ancient world was decided by the meaning of the human figure (history books, stories) and the power of prophecy and seers (the Bible). It has an empirical tradition based on those truths (sanitation, domesticity).
Our world split from that, starting from Bacon’s The New Atlantis (Tales of Faith 10) This is like a template for people with a certain type of head to remake the world in their image. Some people say science is a tautology. Whether it is or not, the sense of hubristic certainty ties it to the serpent-head, the ego-slime or DNA dragon of pure logic.
Nemesis will come in the shape of the graceful human figure taking up the mantle of communal living again, stratified or tiered like a castle, an anthill, where people get by on their wits and rediscover the good old
EARTH MOTHER (Kantner/Slick)
Just listen to those arrogant, rich, condescending and self-righteous eco-hippy radicals of a failed past.. Yes, that’s what I suspect journalists would be saying, hypnotised as they are by the great modern success story.. cy (the cy-Siren herself, Swift, projecting her obsessions with ruthless efficiency).
Our dear leaders have the most detached heads of all, because anything that is detached has to become attached to something else (and it’s for sure not being introspective!) It’s the enhanced-head syndrome; Trump is merely the forerunner of government by tweet. The idea of attachment and sham heads was foreshadowed by an EC story
“The People’s Choice” Weird Science 15, art Joe Orlando
It’s also foreshadowed in CL Moore’s Heir Apparent (Tales of Faith). An intelligence of a certain type boosted via alogorithmic complexity. The basic point is this is a certain type of intelligence that is detached from the body and loves machines. In CL Moore’s story the two become indistinguishable and the human spirit dies a hideous death – death by geometry.
The projection of tweets is very difficult to handle. If you assume Trump is given help, either alogorithmically or human aid, it boosts the projection of his thoughts. If Kim also took up tweets you could easily imagine a giant success (particularly as Koreans are techno-savvie). Whether you call a world of the future or of the fool’s paradise (Pictorial 21) it’s not a world of the human figure; not one of traditional empirical truth; not one of rituals that purge idiot-thoughts; not one of proportionate heads (Weird 15) and not one of landscape, meaning and symmetry (Weird 11 Tales of Faith 13)
It’s one where the attached head literally straddles the globe. These heads are Thoth Amon, the Stygian sorcerer whose rams‘ horns represent world-straddling ego-ambition (CH4)
(Pictorial 1)
Like modernday sorcerers, they are always full of certainty and confidence, the certainty of death. Certainty is always the enemy of the realm of possibilites. The enhanced head becomes more and more certain the more wrong they are. They exist in the realm of certainties. Have you ever noticed how conspiracy-theorists are so sure of themselves? This Flat Earth guy is going on about the space shuttle and says something like, “It should go straight up, not horizontally“.
FLAT EARTH
How is he so sure? Is it because he lives in a world of straight lines, the one “they“ are building? He’s trying to reinvent physical geometry, which is God’s creation. The space shuttle obeys the laws of physics which quite often are curved (as in Newton’s differential calculus). We live in a curved universe.
So, why is it then we live in a world of straight lines? If there is a conspiracy that’s it, as you can see from space everything’s curved. I don’t think it’s that, though. It’s that a certain type of head is running the show; essentially the same type as the conspiracy guy; the type that knows it’s right even where it’s obviously wrong or delusional!
The ego-slime that becomes attached to external enhancements, the rams‘ horns of Thoth Amon. It’s because the head is trapped in a logical maze that it cannot see the empirical truths that are a part of nature, that build the world that is logical and become attached to it.
A rocket is escaping from that world, going back to the world of natural physics. That’s why the sight and sound are awe-inspiring, almost terrible. Paul Kantner was a sci-fi aficionado and the primitive appeal of planet-escaping motion probably appealed to his sense of romance.
Love and Rockets
Mekaniks(c)Jaime Hernandez 1985
Romance is physical truth. Modern Man has become obsessed by logical truth, which is essentially a maze of facts that become fiction, full of heads attached to logical boosters. That is the political world; it’s not rocket science, which is primal and physical. I think that’s why the conspiracy-theorist was so convinced he was right; the primal sound and fury offended his tame civilized veneer and he was scared witless.
Romance is Weird Tales; CL Moore’s science fiction and the soul of dark eternal savage lands. Romance is the idea of America. The political world is killing that dream. Know your enemy. Know Thoth Amon.