I just read in a science study that they found the brain has its own pipeline that gets rid of waste or toxic substances (and that goes into the immune system). There could be a joke in that! What it really tells you, though is that the human head is something very proportionate that is part of the body. Without the proportions that are attached to it, there is no limit to the bilge that can be pumped into a human brain.
We sing through our throats; the neck has a graceful sort of sweep to it. Rather than listen to turgid debates, old Appalachian families would tend to pick-up their instruments in the gloaming. The body is an instrument of pleasure, not in the reasoned sense, just in the sense of living expression, sensation.
Are we entering a pseudo-reality that is like something from Woodroffe’s Triptych (Weird 12) and is that something to do with the proportions of body and head? A pseudo-head has no way of getting rid of waste or toxic products because it is no longer proportionate to the body. Proportion is everything in nature just because things exist in a very fine balance. If you take something like the dark web it is the ultimate in pure reason applied to pleasure with no sense of proportion (ie junk).
The lusts that Man is heir to are proportionate to his psyche. Without the psyche there is no balance. This seems to be a “hidden” syndrome. The lusts that Man is heir to, which are supposedly “dark”, are suppressed letting the real darkness loose from the voice of reason; the forked-tongue of ego-lust. Everything is proportionate and a freewheeling, open society of sexual expression has a ready-made cure for corruption and ills, which is essentially love (or fortune). Prayer.
GARDEN OF MAN
The question is, are we part of universal forces of creation and destruction that empower us, or are we part of a pseudo-reality that weakens us? The delectable rhythms of nature give us hope and optimism; the enfeeblement of pseudo-modernity gives us “cures”. Fortune is something that the powers that be cannot understand because they rely on clockwork, reason and all the tools of their demonic trade. The maze of ego-lust is their home so let them sweat it out there. We, the outward-bound of physical lust and psychic purity, need simply take to the open ranges again, cleansed by the primordial elements.
We are simply retaking the iconic territory of Lil Abner and, I suppose, Superman. Smalltown is surely a microcosm of mid-west America, the hicksville sideshow to corporate megabucks. If you look at the cover to Action Comic #1, Superman is hoisting a car aloft.
You wonder if, right from the start, superheroes were almost subconsciously trying to kill the new, corporate-industrial America?! I know it’s a longshot; I’m just saying there could be something subconscious. They will fight for America but doubt springs eternal. In the 70s, Steve Englehart wrote a run of Captain America based on the premise Steve (Rogers) had almost given up on the establishment and just vaguely represented the American Dream.
Then there’s Gilbert Hernadez’s BEM from the 80s which tackled the vigilante’s lust to destroy “the enemy” as a sort of paranoiac urge. I know this is quite a controversial area but at the top of the heap of a democracy always stands the politician so they have ultimate power. If there is a demonic element it could be that of the false Apollo (CH4). They are cunning but they are not “of the earth”; they are bloodless, anaemic, smiling, calculating.
Since, in America, democracy is mainly corporate-industrial, there is an inevitable tendency to a world of precision-dominated facts, with the gimlet-eyed politician as the “factoid-in-chief”. But the end result of this is something that’s run like clockwork, made-up of reason applied to pleasure or, in other words, machine-algorithms, proxy-sex (DNA-clipping) and robot housekeeper/sex-helpers a la Zappa.
This is truly a type of hell-on-earth sanctified by democracy so the way out of it is not by the ballot box but to go back to the American Dream of graceful men and women of action harnessed to the soil almost like noble beasts. It is an idyll, and the worm in the apple will always sow dissent, as in the dark Puritanism of Nathaniel Hawthorne (The Scarlet Letter).
I think this graceful world of supermen and women can be found in classic comics like Alex Raymond’s Flash Gordon. The heroic figure who is also introspective and destined to become a statesman was of course pioneered by Howard in Weird Tales in the 30s. This almost goes back to the Athenian ideal of warrior-statesman Pericles. Athens may have invented democracy but it also valued proportionality, and the ideal human physique above all things.
Conan #7, © Marvel 71
(see CH 3,4) Howard’s story The God in the Bowl is almost a foretaste of the anaemic head that speaks to us with no inbuilt sense of proportion; a type of hellish deluge of insidious, slithering speech that seduces by coiling its ego-slime around the mind. If you assume we live in a pseudo-reality (see Woodroffe #12), the pseudo-head has no way of ejecting this build-up of junk from the “powers that be”. The point is, everything is proportionate and a flow of information – whether it’s reasoned or mad – has no sense of proportion. We need to be able to destroy, as the proportionate head destroys what it does not need.
DNA, we are led to believe, unfolds with clockwork precision, and that is the wonder of it. On the absolute contrary the opposite is true. A body is rhythm but it’s also counter-rhythm; a lung branches like a tree; a blood-vessel weaves between. The way a living thing develops is a maelstrom of unfathomable rhythms, wheels-within-wheels. Taken as a whole it’s simple and symmetrical, and that is just pure luck, fortune, something quite vague that seems to tie us to the universe, to the stars and to the moon.
On the contrary to what “they” tell us, it’s completely not clockwork, it’s waves and tides ebbing and flowing. The vaguer things are the more fantastically fortunate they are because they crystalize. The crystal is the fortunate act which becomes true. Clockwork, in the sense of an information flow, is just a buildup of junk. There must be some way to destroy the linear information, and that is the powerful rhythms that are balanced between up/down, left/right, forward/backward. So, why are they balanced?
Mythopoeikon, Woodroffe
You may as well ask why does a spiral spiral. There are powerful forces that spiral and that balance symmetrically. It’s nothing to do with precision, it’s completely imprecise, a product of tension, balance. Even more specifically, it’s a product of timing and luck. Luck is simply fortune, or being in the right place at the right time. Do you honestly believe that psyche and physical lust have anything atall to do with DNA? The content is not there. All the content is in the process of dynamic balance, like a tensile string that is tuned. You are being tuned-up in the womb to grace the stage of life.
Do you honestly believe that anything in the body that is tuned-up has anything to do with linear information flows? They are just a buildup of junk that has to be destroyed with cyclical flows. Destruction is part of the strength of creation. That is the fantastic weakness of the Dawkins argument that we are composed of linear information. We are symmetrical beings; our bodies are instruments of power; we have grace in our hearts, in our limbs, in our song, in our muscles.
We have to be prepared to destroy, with the power of our limbs and psyche, the buildup of junk that has become the ego-daemon of jargon, a pseudo-reality. The pseudo-reality has no concept of the power of destruction, of blood churning and of the soil underfoot. The powers that be are anaemic, insidious heads that coil round our minds with slithering jargon.
Blood is there to purge the body, as it is to supply nutrients. The soil is the destructive maelstrom that powers regeneration and spring (see Weird Apocalypse Pictorial) This goes back to Noto and the voluptuous romance of Spenser’s Faery Queen (Aspects 3). The destructive power of blood and soil takes you into another universe; it is nothing to do with precise information flows and everything to do with powerful tidal rhythms and counter-rhythms.
The way we measure time destroys time in that cyclical sense (see Watchmen essay “Blood from the Shoulder of Pallas”). There are two totally distinct universes; one is precise and factual; the other is fortunate, voluptuous, psychically powerful and connected to universal forces of creation and destruction.
Noto’s “Red Lace” is a blood-infested evocation of the woes of the underworld that encircle “Red Venus” in psychically voluptuous destruction. Like the knight in Faery Queen, the pure soul is able to unite with the forces of destruction. Perhaps that is the symbolism of Red Sonja’s blindness.
Red Sonja #10 ©Marvel 75
Destruction in the natural world isn’t evil, but it is an indomitable urge. Those who deny it, whose ego-lust hides the dragon in a maze of chasms and canyons of the psychotic mind, are doomed to a sterile emptiness that is death to creativity.
We who inhabit the modern world are overwhelmed by complexity and sometimes drawn to simpler fables of the comics and pulps. It should be remembered, though, that the world these heroes and heroines inhabit is fortunate, voluptuous, psychically powerful and connected to universal forces of creation and destruction. In our world DNA is the ultimate “fact” but it is a pseudo-reality. At the other extreme you get the dark web which is another pseudo-reality. Pseudo-realities evade all the great forces of destruction and creation that rhythmically enfold our universe.
We are fortunate beings and our actions enfold us in fitting raiments. I’m thinking of all the artists who are attracted to illustrating Howard’s sandaled hero. The Maroto-designed chainmail of Red Sonja as depicted by beguiling Thorne that to me is Howard-inspired. The link to superheroes is pretty obvious. The utilitarian belt and garter of Wonder Woman (And God Created) that empowers and protects. Utilitarian clothes are the sign of a bodily empowerd culture whose acts are always proportionate.
The cowboy and the Indian; the Howard hero and the superhero. They are symbols of the body and finely-honed mind creating fortune in simplicity. We shouldn’t be seduced by a complex world that’s mostly junk when the sweeping rhythms of natural forces are a type of truth that we, with our bodies and minds, can psychically adjust and attune to, singing with lusty abandon. We are not fodder for the pseudo-life of linear time, our destiny is written in the stars.
HYPERDRIVE (CATHY RICHARDSON VOCALS)