by Neil Vodavzny

This is rather a hit and miss sampling of the good and bad of Eastern and Western pop-culture, apart from Bruce Lee, who I’ve recently discovered had a very neat philosophy of selfhood. I’m really sorry to have to say we should go to the East to get us out of this modernist mess we’re in, to get a sense of perspective if nothing else. Take the tripartite blandbusters of Nolan, Cameron and Ridley Scott (Interstellar, Inception, Invalid) is a blitz of prefabricated preposterousness. These sci-fi buffs always cite 2001 (hugely influencial on the East) whereas, in fact, the 1969 marathon has little dialogue and few ideas apart from primeval apes, a monolith and a star-child. Almost everything else is assumptions from our (collective) subconscious – therein lies its power. Lee’s statement “all knowledge is self-knowledge” never seemed more appropriate.

Staying with film, low-budget HK kung fu films have much more credibility than modern yawnathons, for the reason they’re much less thought-out – it’s fast and furious on-the-set. In Fist Of Fury, Lee plays a lone-wolf apprentice avenging his master’s murder by the Bushido school in Japanese-era Shanghai. There’s a startling clash between the cutesy-ornate period alleyways and Lee’s animal nature, gnawing at fresh dog-meat in a picturesque park to the tune of crickets (very 2001). Ornate patterns are pure atmosphere, rendering the Japanese habitats sparse and spacey, the geishas taking on an artificial aura. The climactic battle is fought to the tune of frogs croaking. That’s class.

Primitivism and rarefied artifice – eternal themes. Lee’s animal nature is also an artifice; he combines in one figure uncompromising absolutism with technical pragmatism. Absolutism is to be the centre of action, the still centre, calm and untroubled. One becomes in touch with one’s instinctive nature. Everything instinctive has an artificial quality because it makes us aware of the action taking place, the fight for existence, predator and prey. We become fully differentiated, man and woman, life and death. Fairy-tale fantasy-mode (I’m looking at you, Dawkins clones).

I randomly sampled YouTube and came to the conclusion we are fed a cut-price version of the “superman” who became a magnet for women. In truth, the way of a warrior is spiritual because he is the calm centre; his needs are justice, strength, discipline. The West is in this invidious position that equates physicality with sex; that’s only so when there is no spirit-road. The road of a warrior is an artificial one born of their instinctive nature; what we are sold is materialism without the source of strength. Small wonder the West is a slave to weakness. The Western mind is a product of objective conditioning, so that we have extreme trouble facing someone who practices an absolute reality. Lee’s writings spell it out, while what we are given is someone with clever acting skills. No, what you are seeing is what there is; an art born of Tao and Confucionism, being and harmony. When a teacher speaks it’s advisable to listen, even if you’re not a believer; I’m looking at you, European Right.

The West is almost deaf to such ancient practices, but it’s noticeable Ang Lee’s Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon, which he calls Jane Austen with king fu, was box-office. Everything in Austen is consummate artifice; everyone is aware of the game being played-out, predator and prey, greed and lust, intermediary or trickster. The social milieu is an absolute to the extent it accords with the instinctive natures of a differentiated society, or castes.

Something about the man behind the legend that is Bruce Lee. He first came to Western attention as Kato, the Green Hornet’s sidekick, with an acting style that was already completely minimalist: expression as pure spontaneity. The Green Hornet may be less familiar than Batman, but its style is classical not camp. Vis, no preamble to plot, exotic locales with minimalist décor and noir lighting. Black Beauty as a song to retro-fetishism (that’s the big car).

Virtually everything you see is a type of useful stereotype, from Chinatown to the Black batman and the ever-primed Miss Case. The Mad Man-esque milieu makes you aware that the less you see the more is there. There are no distractions, no needless expositions. It’s action, suggestive sfx and taut, emblematic momentum.

By contrast, the mind of modernism is caught by analysis, everything is preamble, nothing is content – 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 dream-scape of the Pre-Raphaelites, for example, which overturned methods steeped in tradition-gone-stale to restore the youthful lustre of early Renaissance/late medieval.

Lee wrote various screeds 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)

This is life as a dream – or a legend. The West, being so beclouded by an objective multiverse, can regain a sense of perspective from the transcendental clarity of the East, beyond form, pure expression and awareness. We who have everything have nothing and must start with a dream, the dream of classicism. The taut string that sounds the right note; cadence and sense, taste and discipline, our European heritage.

It is always the goal of a classical artist. Copying any idiosyncratic style is almost impossible so, in that sense a master’s style is beyond style. Same for comics – plenty of Kirby imitators (Roy Lichtenstein I’ve never thought of as any sort of a stylist). Compare classic Disney to modern 3D animation – we’re in an age where perfect copies are replacing drawing, virtual acting replacing actors, etc.

CC Beck of Captain Marvel fame has, as I quoted before, this to say:

One of the early aviators took a plane over to China, and the Emperor saw the plane as it flew around and was not impressed at all. “Look, Emperor, it’s flying!” “Well, that’s what it’s supposed to do, isn’t it?” Now, a comic strip is supposed to illustrate.. what some writer has thought up. And I feel like the emperor of China saying “that’s what it’s supposed to do”. I’m not amazed how they can show people … being garrotted and getting their eyeballs shot out like they did in Godfather”
The Comics Journal 95, 1985

The cadence of classical simplicity is something that is lost even in fable.  Everything is preamble, nothing is amble (Into The Woods). We have to go to an East/West crossover art-form like anime to get a strong sense of tonal purity. French maestro Moebius is hugely influential in Japan, naming his daughter Nausicaa after the anime by Miyazaki, and here we get an idea of the stark, storytelling simplicity of a master:

So, why is it classical purity belongs to comic book and anime masters like CC Beck or Miyazaki, and not to fine arts? For the same reason there are exemplary interpreters of Beethoven concertos; the West can do subtlety till the cows come home, but not sublime simplicity. In the final analysis, black is black and white is white; the strength of the world is contained in its emblematic simplicity. Without that, we are caught in preamble.

Emblems can be seen as traditions within nature. Actually, this is one of the reasons fairy tales seem to exert a legendary force; their images are traditional to people and to the places they frequent. Woods, water and so forth. I might just invoke the name of Richard Dawkins here, since he has broadcast his disdain for such stories. Dawkins is the arch prophet of managerial efficiency; his faith in neo-Darwinism has no content that is traditional to nature – meaning spontaneous, with no pre-planning or fore-thought.

It’s the type of simplicity you get in folklore or even see in paintings. Since it’s spontaneous, it also has hidden subtleties, spirit. The actual content of nature is in its emblems – hawk, dove. Dawkins is so purblind to reality he literally cannot see that, so to him fairy stories have no content or moral worth. This point needs some elaboration, just to be as clear as concrete. On one side you have DNA, on the other side you have content (this is applied science, not theory). Content comes to a quite large degree from fractals; fractals have the property of continually branching, creating energy as they branch. Fractals form spontaneously; proteins fold repeatedly, DNA is wound into a tight bundle of fibres. Spontaneity is the actual cause of content. That’s quite an Eastern idea, you might agree.

Of course, there is a science for this, chaos theory, which describes certain forms, but doesn’t come even close to describing the emblematic or legendary. Another thing about spontaneity is it’s an actual process, there’s energy associated with it. The energy is just innate to the universe. Once you have that you have action, so implicit to emblems is the idea of action. The action of Tao or a type of playful energy; in Bruce Lee’s phraseology irregular, non-rhythmic. Lee explores the martial art aspect of this truth.

With action you have history, family-trees which contain ancestral DNA. History is all about action: clans, feuds, city-states, conquest and reconquest, alliances. History is a rich resource of emblems and pictographic representations, going right back to the origins of written language in Sumer. The fertile crescent was the seat of ancient civilization that was by all accounts polyglottish, the original settlers who domesticated animals, used the plough and trenched irrigation being a proto-Euphratic non-semitic people. This ancient terrain is a meeting place of civilizations, and was conquered and reconquered by Akkadians, Babylonians and their descendants. Aramaic, actually, was the non-Arabic, Syrian semitic language spoken in the New Testament.

This is totemic history bound up with ancestral lands. It has something of the living vitality of fairy tales as a response to the world in its pristine state. Yes, there is a technical advance, but there is an innate primitivism that exists as a genuine, sacramental response to nature, a tribal fetishism.

Those enduring the liberal age are fed the lie that tribalism is extinct and there is no alternative. But there is. Primitivism exists if we but see it, recognize it for what it represents. It is there in the blood and gore of the Brothers Grimm. It is also there in the heavens; a comet is an indicator of primal forces, and that is exactly what Rosetta found. The organic molecules in the cloud surrounding the comet. According to Dr Matt Taylor,“smells like a stag”: urine and alcohol and a sulphurous eggy smell. This is the stuff of life.

In order to be true to our heritage, we should also be aware of primitive roots which are ever-present. That is a Jungian view of things much more than one indebted to the obsessions of Freud.

Talking of primitive tribes, one of the creative minds behind 70s Red Sonja was Clair Noto, also known for “the best screenplay never filmed””. Her fantastically fertile imagination is close to fairy tale – flowers that bleed, scallops that feed, vats of blood, images of Red Venus from the collective unconscious.

One cannot have a decent fairy tale without gore, and pulps can just be fairy tales for adults. Something of the same argument applies to pulps; the characters are iconic, lofty, sturdily disdaining modern advances. One of the best comics series to explicitly tackle the ramifications of this is Warren Ellis’s Planetary (the summary in that link is well worth reading). Planetary is an “alternate reality” of the 20th century, a pulplike re-imagining of the causes of our so-called “advance” into the metropolitan cavern of modernity.

Ellis’s pulpish archetypes are spirits of the heroic age, stubbornly persisting in the age of the machine. They are not luddites, but they are solo adventurers, in the spirit of those magnificent men in their flying machines. Ellis is something of a post-Victorian fetishist, sort of re-imagining the glories of Britain’s 19th century techno-achievements in a futuristic setting.

The heroes he invokes have a tribal primitivism of macho, fetishistic techno-accomplishment and daring-do, with the odd female thrown in (see summary). Is, in fact, techno-accomplishment inherently fetishistic and tribal? One thinks of the glory days of WWII’s battle of Britain and Spitfires over southern England bashing the Huns. Deprive technology of its tribal heroics, and one is increasingly enslaved to the fetish worship. In other words, the romance these pulps evoke, is inherently tribal because technology is a type of fetish. Incidentally, Frank Zappa’s Joe’s Garage is a fantastically scurrilous rock-opera on a similar topic:

Freud, as we know, has a view of capital as an expression of (male) libido. Because he was a late Victorian, it could also be the case that industrial society functions as a primitive religion, one that worships new-fangled products. By that criterion, late Victorian society was male-oriented techno-fetishism. After all, capital is a word for goods, it’s really the techno-aspect that is tied to the male machismo, despite whatever.

Planetary, as a sort of Jungian view of that, takes due account of the tribal element in techno-advance; without that heroic ingredient, humanity is doomed to perpetual enslavement, now taking the form of new-media etc (“servers” and “followers”).

The heroes of Planetary exist to keep the weirdness and wildness of the world – its hidden reality. Weirdness and wonder are the watchwords of history. It is Man’s response to the world of action, what the East calls Tao. Robert E Howard’s heroic vistas and historical yarns of the crusader era have more vitality and truth than any number of BBC snoozeries.

Howard’s prose poem Proem starts:

Let no man read here who lives only in the world about him. To these leaves, let no man stoop to whom Yesterday is as a closed book with iron hasps, to whom Tomorrow is the unborn twin of Today. Here let no man seek the trend of reality, nor any plan or plot running like a silver cord through the fire-limned portraits here envisioned

Howard’s fantasy worlds are “free from the domination of observed fact”. Heroic tribal vistas of unbridled wholeness and primitivism. Man should pay obeisance to ancestral lands and totems because they are a sacrament of our relation to nature. Without the religious instinct, we are indeed tied to the dominion of observed fact.

The primitive power and potency of landscape is the stage on which history is written. What DNA-worshippers fail to see is that the power of primitivism, the fractal properties of matter, its essential tactility and spontaneity, are the content of nature. This is what we sacrament in ritual of water and wine; we are primitive and ancient beings.

This is slightly left-field, but I read that an order of German Templars established their sect in Bethlehem of the Galilee, a relatively unknown settlement in northern Israel. Archeologists have now uncovered evidence that this may be the Biblical one (not the other one in the West Bank). I have to admit to finding all that semi-historical, legendary myth-making fairly fascinating. Why be inhibited by objective preformulations of manifest stupidity when you can be liberated by dreams of dim provenance?