by Niel Vodavzny

Poesy is not much in the offing in the present climes as a tool of opinion, wit or idle fancy. Instead, we are plagued with words, ie language with no formal embellishments. If you take Byron, he wrote in various idioms, and often inserted a mocking characterization or political sideswipe. What is it, in short, about cadence and meter that render them so full of content to our eyes and ears?

Why is it, also, that Nietzsche’s poetic fancies are so inspiring as philosophy? This harks back to pre-Enlightenment days when scribes labored over illuminated manuscripts. Craft was a thing of beauty to behold: Ruskin even wrote a book on The Stones of Venice. Why are ornate folios so much more appropriate than kindles?

Is it something to do with how we perceive reality? Aurally, visually, through the senses, then through the phenomena of the mind. What is it the King James Bible has that modern transcripts don’t? Here’s a page from French comics magazine Pilote from 1979, text by Klotz and pictures by Regis Franc:

This style of whimsical editorial review has gone by the wayside, with all the French magazines of note – Spirou, Metal Hurlant, A Suivre, Charlie Mensuel (not Hebdo) – ditched in favour of merely selling stories in large-format albums in Hachette. In the process, something has gone missing. The comic magazines, like 60s Marvel comics, inhabited a milieu where editorial line and cartoonist’s line were the avant-garde of a sub-cultural phenomenon. They weren’t just selling books/products, they were selling an alternate view of reality. Quite skewed, somewhat mytho-sexual, fairly satirical mockery of mainstream.

A potted history may be in order here. Goscinny, with artist Uderzo, launched Pilote with Asterix and rapidly gained a wealth of diverse native talents of the type alluded to, changing format mid-70s to “adult”, avec un juvenilite toujours meme. The relation of Goscinny to his “tribe” was fragile and born of trust. To most of them – Gotlib, Mandryka, Dionnet – he was the guiding force and “papa”. But the very success of Pilote produced a profligacy that found other outlets. These were journals established to further some temperamental affinity or style. Dionnet, who set-up Metal Hurlant with Giraud and Mandryka, makes the point (Pilote #68, 1980) that their “empire” is for adults but with an adolescent point of view. Thus, Fluid Glacial, bizarre, outlandish, L’echo, experimental (with Claire Bretecher), A Suivre aping Pilote’s youthful currency.

To Uderzo, Pilote is the pillar, a topical, sarcastic or sardonic outlet which supports all the diverse offshoots. This proved unerringly accurate :

Ca veut dire quoi leurs petits journal? Les gens de la profession n’ont pas compris qu’en foutant en l’air un support comme Pilote, ils se foutaient en l’air eux-memes.
- Pilote #68, 1980

Goscinny concurs:

When I decided, with the agreement of Dargaud, to change the format of Pilote, we had a very great success which upset some of our rivals who had waited their time to try to beat us. Their time had undoubtedly arrived in the current political and philosophical atmosphere. We have had to suffer from outside violent attacks that have undoubtedly done damage.

Charlie Hebdo, for its part, has put pressure on our artists/writers to get them excusively, and lots of our other artists have tried to jump onto the bandwagon, and to take advantage of the current atmosphere to achieve easy successes. To add to this, the real prestige of Pilote has equally excited the envy of the most conservative press which, by outbidding, took several of our artists from us.
However, I think that Pilote must keep these philosophical aims fermenting, which are essentially to treat life with good humour, without grinding the teeth and without malice, even if that is the current fashion.
- Pilote #68 trans

Clever humour as opposed to stupid vindictiveness, a sort of poetic commentary on society, which is often disturbingly accurate at predicting the decadence of modernity. Caza’s forays such as New Arc City spring to mind. The amount of work that goes into such pieces speaks of craft, and in fact CC Beck says comics are more craft than art. In picking up a copy of Pilote, one is picking up an article of craftwork honed to a fine tradition. Because it has editorial content and viewpoint, it presents a view of society, one viewed through the prism of poetic fancy. The work of a poet-craftsman is their expression of their being. You are seeing an expression and not a serious appraisal of the social order. This is what I mean by temperament. It’s the Dr Johnson type thing where the character is as great as the work.

Actually, the French took a bit of a lead from the American Underground which R Crumb famously started with Zap. But, here’s a thing. Matt Groening started out as a sort of alternate cartoonist with a strip called Life In Hell. The foibles and tics of this pastiche of plastic LA culture mutated into The Simpsons. So, basically The Simpsons is an alternate cartoonist’s view of plastic society. Or would be, since the animated series has nine full-time writers plus Groening

We try to do plot twists that are so convoluted that nobody on earth will be able to figure out where the show is going ... It turned out I was a little too picky about what the shows could sustain.. Over this several month period if something doesn’t work, ultimately it won’t go in.
- TCJ #141, 1991

The difference between the French scene and The Simpsons is the difference between a fascinatingly dysfunctional family and a well-oiled machine. Add to that the fact Groening is a liberal lefty and you have a veritable machine of subliminality. So, there’s a huge disparity between the French scene, which for whatever reasons lost steam, and the US mainstream scene. I’ve, like, totally never watched The Simpsons, but the entire premise of preset, preordained, group or hive-minded subliminality as opposed to the single and extempore creative mind I find offputting. In The Simpsons everything is understood to be a predetermined liberal milieiu, and phrased in like manner however idiosyncratic it may appear on the surface. Likewise, modernism is preset, and cannot emerge as a true process of self-actualization.

The corporate mind, incidentally, is a pet topic of a couple of the best comics creators. The entire drift of Chaykin’s American Flagg! (winner of a Hugo) is bitter tears of woe for the “spirit of solidarity” that corporate Man corrupted. Grant Morrison takes the same thing into sci-fi territory with a sentient infectious corporation.

Poet-craftsmen are speaking to society with a type of ease and grace of line and sound; they are not analysing social mores in excruciating detail. This especially applies to pulps “free from the domination of observed fact”, as was said of REH, and harks back to the medieval and Renaissance relationship between art and society. Noble families often employed craftsmen-artists to act as their cultural advisors and more or less run their affairs. The best known of these was Rubens, who was also a diplomat.

So, there is a very strong poet-craftsman hand in the formulation of pre-Enlightenment societies. Again, pulp creators have their fingers on the pulse of futurescapes that correspond to such values. Harlan Ellison’s A Boy And His Dog pits a post-apocalyptic punk and his mutated talking mutt, both craving sustenance, warmth, shelter, sex and habitat, against the lovelorn inhabitants of a toytown bearing a passing resemblance to “The Village”. Utterly banal on the surface, misshapen and abysmal underneath. The theme of the story is more or less survival; as with other Ellison stories it is gruesomeness laid bare, and in such brutally honest environments human values prevail – filial loyalty by virtue of necessity. The drive for survival is won by guile and wisdom, the virtues of warrior king and priest, boy and dog. Blood may be a hunter, but he’s an intermediary or the story wouldn’t be so raw and true.

Copyright 1969 Harlan Ellison & 1987 Rich Corben

The primitivism of human needs and desires never changes; we are as one with microphages and microbes in our need for light and warmth. This is natural energy, at once primal and bountiful. Zeus was nurtured on goat’s milk in a cave in Crete. Myth has it the goat’s horn was accidentally broken-off by Zeus’s great strength. The god in recompense re-bestowed the horn as a cornucopia of super-abundance. The moral is even gods need nurturing. The legend of the cornucopia has been linked to that of the unicorn and the Holy Grail. Incidentally, Nigel Farage appears not to have learnt that mother’s milk is the natural-toxin, symbolic of the family-unit. Obviously not an old hippy!

If pulps are primal rage critiques, it makes not one blind bit of difference to the organized elites of planet-finance. We are trapped in a Minotaur’s labyrinth – paraphrasing Greece’s “rock-god” finance minister Varoufakis. Let me quote from Bruce Lee, who wrote on going “beyond system” in his personal approach to martial art (Jeet Kune Do):

There is no standard in total combat, and expression must be free. That liberating truth is a reality only insofar as it is experienced and lived in its suchness by the individual himself, and this truth is far beyond any styles or disciplines.
Artist Of Life, Copyright 1999 Tuttle Publishing, HK (page 152)

Going “beyond style” takes a certain grace and awareness of Man’s primal roots. A sophisticated awareness of the cadence of simplicity that you find in medieval music; the languid, dreamlike non-rational formality is what you respond to in the most direct and intuitive way that feeds your innermost soul.

By contrast, the mind of modernism is caught by analysis, everything is preamble – most apparent in blockbusters. I mean, except comics franchises where the content is already there, in the song the 60s sang. Content in a sense goes beyond style, expression as pure spontaneity, the goal to which classical art aspires. The dreamscape of the Pre-Raphaelites, for example, which overturned methods steeped in tradition-gone-stale to restore the youthful lustre of early Renaissance/late medieval.

This is a living society, so what I propose is a type of revivalism. A living society has an awareness of natural spirit, of religion. I think we need to be aware that classical and Christian are entwined, and both are imbued with natural spirit, a primitive poesy of earth and sky, waters and heavens. In such societies, the awareness of self is inextricably linked to an awareness of natural spirit.

I would go so far as to say modernism is divorced from reality; it implies the citizen not being able to express their temperament through traditional culture and art. Rule by elites of the Cartesian multiverse. We need to re-imagine a fresh mental state in which society is not simply an organization of energy (finance) but has a natural extemporized process.

R Crumb is himself a bit of a medievalist in his peasantish fiefdom, and is on record as saying the folk idiom speaks to him more than Mozart.

Be that as it may, there is a folk strain running through medieval madrigals, as in this Macedonian medieval folk song:

It’s not style I’m talking about, it’s a folk naivete, the lost world of Homer. In Mozart’s day the Turkish idiom was popular, and his music was often played according to a gay rhapsodic fashion, a type of extemporization that characterizes a social culture. One finds it also in baroque, the ability to extemporize from formal arrangements.
Art and society in such times were almost equivalent. The social order was also an order of artistic patronage. So, this somewhat hierarchical society has an underlying creativity. Now, creative, extemporizing energy is natural, not organization in the modern sense. It’s the absence of rational organization. Rational materialism may have gotten us some ways, but now we are trapped in the Minotaur maze. We cannot get out because, like The Prisoner, we choose to think this is a society, when actually it’s a system of organized energy.

When Germany lays down the rules for Greece to follow, they are trumpeting the merits of organized energy and finance. But if you look at modern Germany, its culture is quite hidebound; they have traditional festivals and classical music and little else. Because they are so good at it, their culture is literally an anti-culture ... BMW as anti-matter. Luckily, Germans have spectacular scenery to compensate, but the point is Veroufakis rightly complains of a Minotaur in the midst of Europe. Anti-matter, because value is only financial. Material which has “real” innate value is craft-oriented; the wood of a Stradivarius, the stones of a Byzantine mosaic, the cart of a haywain:

In order to get to grips with what’s going on, one has to recognize that modernists live in a world of anti-matter, and the sooner European Man comes to recognize that, the better for recognizing who and why our friends and enemies are. Lee sometimes used a clay analogy to explain his philosophy: “Chisel away the surface until the truth is revealed without obstruction”. Meaning, instead of adding, a sculptor decreases. Here’s something to ponder ...

An imago is the final or perfect stage of an insect’s life-cycle, the papillon that flutters in silent moonlight. From whence does such perfection originate? It’s a fragile and subtle state of being that perhaps one might aspire to. Its refined delicacy is maybe akin to a work of craft and temperament. It’s essentially nothing to do with information (DNA) per se since, as Lee’s quote implies, the subject is revealed or emerges from within the larva, choosing a material that is true to the “craft” of the flitting will-o-the-wisp. DNA is like a potential; without the training-ground of culture (cocoon) one has limited access to the revealed truth of cadence, craft, disciplined awareness of origins. The artist is an “actualizer”, creating things which have actual presence.

Presence, or revealed truth, opens a door to the primal needs and lusts of Man: predator and prey, harvester (intermediary or wise man), shelter, sex, origins. Actuality is what you see, not a potential. This is essentially culture – I mean, in the sense yoghurt has a culture – which in Man is civil society.

What passes for society nowadays is not civil; civil meaning a creative trade, craft, disciplined refinement of civilization. That is the only way those who reach these shores from other civilizations are able to harmonise – they have autonomy. Entering a Pakistani deli nearby, aromatic herbs and spices waft, some gay Istanbul iconography attracts the eye, the scents and sounds of civil society.

As I was saying earlier, to be a “DNA-European” is not enough; that’s just potential not actual presence. What counts is self-actualization (again, another quote from Lee). Presence is not information (DNA), and not energy (modernism). It’s a creative product of a civil order, actualization of a potential.

Classicism contains or is European actualization. Actually, Titian’s The Rape of Europa is a supreme example of this, invoking the fecundity of nature in a scene complete with cherubic chorus:

This page of rough ribaldry from BWS’s Young Gods bears some comparison:

Young Gods copyright 2003 Barry Windsor-Smith