by Neil Vodavzny

Because race is quintessentially tied to the sensual world – rural, resource-based – creative outsiders are also tied to that world. The aforementioned Harlan Ellison, R. Crumb, KT Tunstall, Tanita Tikaram (sci-fi fantasist, cartoonist, folk-rockers) in their disparate ways fantastically creative, originating works tangled-up in the fecundity of a natural cornucopia – erotic, psychedelic, mythopoeic. These types are for sure not enemies. For the reason they’re outside the mainstream they’re more likely to appeal temperamentally, not through any political affiliation, but from their antithesis to either/or, modernity/the Cartesian multiverse. That is folk, or pop-folk.

Their work exists in a folkloric world which we already know as quintessentially racial. To take Ellison’s case, ancient Egyptian or Babylonian gods. Crumb would be the blues lineage of classic Black shellacs. KT Tunstall interestingly is Irish/Chinese, Scottish operating in a Scottish folk idiom (Golden Frames, a typically enigmatic ditty, has something to do with fame and alien abduction). Tikaram is Fijian operating in an indie-folk milieu.

Environment and temperament are equally vital to race, for the reason that races don’t develop out of thin air. We are cavemen – I mean, Alan Moore  still is. Can you imagine him driving a car? Not quite 18th or 19th century enough. Those who instinctively recognize images of racial, temporal, folkloric origin, are friends in the sense their work supports the sensual world, which is the life-support of all God’s chillen – I mean, races.

This is true of much which is quintessentially English – Lewis Carroll’s Oxford, Ben Jonson’s Bartholomew Fair (17th c London), Chaucer… Now comes the tricky bit: how to connect old-time English artefacts – Ben Jonson’s savage satire of perverted science The Alchemist, Milton’s Christian epic Paradise Lost – with old-school Moore?

A slight digression: Moore is a revivalist with a penchant for alchemical symbols: “solve” for analysis, “coagule” for synthesis. The difference with alchemy is his is a mindscape with no pretensions to science – which occupies the material sphere (only). But, is he not guilty of a wilful withdrawal from modernity to discredited pre-Enlightenment theories?

Watchmen, in its fetishistic, sociopathological parallelism, struggles to decipher the enigma of modernity. The black joke is that Ozymandias conspires to end all wars by dint of hi-tech mass-murder – the implication being that a conspiracy lies at the heart of the enigma. Why is it that modern society is so fantastically enigmatic, virtually non-existent by comparison with previous eras? One of Moore’s other stories, From Hell, deliberately utilizes ultra-specific architectural signs and settings from the Ripper’s world, to atmospherically analyse his mindset.

This is what I call an old-school trait; in similar fashion, Dean Motter in Radiant City uses art deco motifs to decipher the enigma of modernist architecture. The specificity is something Victorian and pre-Victorian, that modernity submerges with the unstoppable force of egalitarian capital.

Putting these together, the enigma at the heart of modernity is the arbitrary value of capital. As exemplified by J-L Godard in Le Weekend, the value of products is 100% arbitrary and, indeed, valueless, since they are consumed. In terms of Freudian-capital, there is only sexual equivalence, no Eros, no sensual value in and of itself. The modern world, being so infernally complex, replaces all images of iconic simplicity with “text”; pedantry, cyber-code - actually a sensory world, not a sensual one, see below.

Moore, being archaic, deals in “idea-space” which to him sustains the material world. This to me has a permanence equivalent to that of image. This is an archaic universe because “idea-space” isn’t a literal space, figurative only, so obviously exists temporally like the moral cosmos of Paradise Lost. Such works are founded on simplicity, psyche, instinct.

So, the temporal world of moral ideas or image has a certain permanence. Two other 60s Godard films, Alphaville and Le Mepris , in their different ways exemplify the permanence of myth. In the one, Lemmy Caution destroys Alpha-60 by reminding it what it is (a memory), in the other Ulysses, “un homme simple, audacieuse et fidel”, is the ancient code which to screenwriter Paul is opaque.

That is essentially the code of Homer, a song-cycle of legendary Bronze-Age heroes. The eternal verisimilitude of Homer has been shown by Parry – quoted here to have an underlying simplicity in what he terms “remembered metrical phrase”. Metrical phrases, like musical mnemonics, are scattered through the epics, inducing a cyclical sense of movement …  Through time rather than through space. Ulysses is merely diverted on his return trip to Ithaca by wondrous and weird natural phenomena.

As Oswald notes, he travels between dawns, that’s the poetry of it all. By contrast, modern Man doesn’t travel in time, so has no psychic, mythical knowledge of the points on the compass he may visit (not counting outsider-types and voyagers of the unknown) – same goes for the vast majority of European migrants, naturellement. Nomadic peoples, it might also be said, travel temporally toward habitual settlements, oases of refinement.

In the film, Penelope/Bardot is the destroyer of Paul, who is unable to decipher the underlying simplicity of the myth. Travel is a sort of stasis because the one thing that doesn’t change is implacable time – memory and being. Whereas modern Man is helter-skelter voyaging in space, trying to find his way home (in the usual lyrical trope), settled Man is voyaging through time and so has permanence, a mythical being.

The relatively unchanging permanence of an Iron Age village is reflected in temperament: the village sage, the poet, the stern-faced warrior – more or less caste distinctions/occupations. These temperaments themselves echo the hidden forces of war, of Eros, of aesthetics.

The Danish settlement of Hodde, wherefrom sprang foes of Augustus and victors over Arminius.

These antagonistic entanglements of a sensual world are the antithesis of a sensory one. Sensory in this capacity means techne, but also sexing a limited sense. If Moore and Gebbie’s Lost Girls is an attempt to reclaim the “lost” Eros, it is so in an anti-Freudian, anti-capital sense of sensual value in and of itself; the idea or image of Eros as an aesthetic force of nature. There’s an unfortunate but unmistakable link between techne and sex, in the sensory aspect of technology. A bit like online porn, the facility is a green light to sleaze, so this is going to be an aspect of an H+ future whatever they tell us to the contrary.

Surprise, surprise, if you check the next link here, to Cisco’s “the net of everything”, you will see that the reliance on sensors is total; gadgets of every description are to be linked by sensors. According to Cisco, the apparent aim of a textual world is the internet of everything. What exactly is the purpose of a “trillion pounds worth of efficiencies, time savings and greater productivity..” (I mean, not being an ant)? Answer, it’s not an economy at all, a resource-driven, self-reliant, racially-biased, hamlet-oriented, river-bound, landscape-lying, image-conscious culture. It’s only an economy if you abandon cultural artefacts traditionally tied to race: Arabian souk, ships of the desert, horse-&-plough. And, through race, to resources.

Moore, Woodroffe, Dylan Thomas and others cited are temperamentally artists, and would assiduously deny they are race –oriented artists; nevertheless they are quintessentially English, Welsh etc. It’s what they are by image & instinct, even intonation. What’s meant by race in this context is therefore rural folk. So, you could replace it by folk or folk-culture. The fact this folk-culture is quintessentially racial isn’t necessarily a political point, but obviously can be used in a Right-wing context.

To repeat, race has an ethos which non-race doesn’t. The one is dependent on race; the other on text. The image of a Zulu warrior we have is as prince Mangosuthu Buthelezi, speaking of his role in the film of that name, says here:

“Lord Chelmsford (the commander of the British troops) came there and saw them with their cowhides and spears and thought there would be a picnic,”

Without the racial aspect, there is no pride in a resource-based culture; meaning hides, spears, war-songs, Soweto harmonies. They are even in racial epithets of the “fuzzy-wuzzies” variety, which are in the 60s film if not modern life.

I came across a weird example of this modern trend to write-out race from history in the Spectator. Wade attempts to sidestep the racial issue by positing social evolution, along the lines of ants. By using the genome as an untranslated text, he makes evolutionary assumptions based on the hypothetical existence of this text. To add insult to obfuscation, he seems to assume tribes and agrarians are a less evolved state (when ancient agrarian Greece had tribal rivalries galore).

In fact, agrarian, tribal existence is something which we can visually confirm is supremely adapted to active life, aesthetic, athletic and quite appealing. Someone seated at a computer terminal might conversely resemble a dormant parasite. In order to determine how image-based societies operate, we need to get into the history of such things as caste.