by Neil Vodavzny

Comparisons may be in order here. In one hugely significant way Japanese pop-culture is way ahead of ours, with much more organic interaction between anime, music, literature, folk-culture. In a word, the islands of the rising sun are full of Japanese natives. It’s a shocking state of affairs, and one the leaders of the free world are less than amused by. While their breeding rate is dismal and they’re getting older, culturally-speaking there is a continuity we can only gasp at.

While Japan may be superficially cutesy, its pop-culture is not. It’s full of tropes such as the teen misfit, the schoolgirl popette, the emotional cyborg, hangups galore. The tribal mentality imprints itself on these gaudy trinkets of cyber-culture. That’s the attraction of Planet Japan – it’s sexy, not surrendering. Anime is a completely fetishistic artform, sex and tech in perfect harmony, Evangelion being the perfect example (prev).

The closest Europe gets to a harmonious pop-culture is (or was) Eurovision, a naïve folk-culture which is identifiable in Swedish pop-icons Abba. Though they sometimes come across like a beer-cellar oompah piano collective unconscious, make no mistake, they are sentimental optimists. It’s pop-Euro-folk as opposed to strident national sentiment.

If Eurovision was the circus of Europe, politically-motivated cynicism of the eastern states sabotaged its musical authenticity. So I have to say the only way to identify Europe is through its emblematic cohesion. Abba make a big effort to be pan-European, picking up Spanish guitar for Chiquitita. What we’re searching for is a naïve and non-cynical truth, something like pure tribalism. Without those emblems of harmony we are merely technically European, cynically so, without our hearts and anthems. “It’s about the music”, trumpeted the guy at the Turkish takeaway; they left in protest at the vote-rigging and who can honestly blame them? They are as folkloric as we are; listen to outside voices.

That is the spirit-road, and one shouldn’t deny that song and dance, effortless and free as a bird, are part of that route. I was trying to figure the “formula” of Abba; there’s one uptempo number goes “to fill the hole in your soul”. It’s a type of mock-tragedy, light as a bird with a hint of mystery.

Aspirational harmony you see and hear in Gothic cathedrals and the Mediterranean romance of Demis Rousos and Nana Miskouri, while their homeland is pillaged by the Fraulein. Maybe (you say) they should exit the Euro to restart the Drachma and clamber back onto the holiday idyll of yore? Maybe, but it doesn’t solve the problem of what is Europe save another facet of the money-go-round.

If we crave European harmony, we need a counter to the global nexus, and that counter is spirit. The spirit of place is something artists can conjure-up as convincingly as kleptocrats knock it down. Here’s a quote from a short story I read recently by Pierre Gascar

It was a black horse with a glossy coat, one of those half-breeds the peasants used to harness to their wagons. It had just been shod, and the blacksmith wsa taking his tools into the forge when the horse set off towards the middle of the square without the blacksmith’s son, who had untied it, making a move to catch it.

The baker’s wife was running across the square. She saw the horse coming towards her. It was moving slowly with the clatter of its new shoes which made its progress more nervous. The woman took shelter in the coach-house.
I understood that everything that lived in that animal, the burden of strength, the whinnies as yet unleashed, the dream of space freer than space, everything that was held in check was in this man and woman, who face to face stared at each other in silence.

It was market day, and carts blocked the square. The peasants left them there first thing in the morning, one against another, higgledy-piggledy, and led their horses away into the stables of a café.
– La Petite Place

The square is evoked in painstaking detail with bright flourishes of grace and mood. The baker’s wife and the blacksmith’s son, joined by some invisible bond, the sombre horse reflecting their travails, the ateliers, the jumbled mass of peasant carts, the two eloping on the galloping mare. That type of story only exists outside the nexus of global finance-statehood. A spirit of self-government in all its contradictions. Hence, it’s a type of fable of humankind. One can imagine that living in such situations has a more fabulous Tati-esque sensibility. In that way, the life of La Petite Place borders on myth, it has not succumbed to the total rationalism of modernism.

That’s what I said: the totality of rationalism. That is to say, totalitarianism. And is not that a no-no? Greece may have invented democracy, but they were masters at disorganization, hence their sublime creativity. Modern analytics cannot countenance such independence of spirit. Greeks are the temperamental godfathers of Europe, and they are being leached in its name.

Let me put this in some artistic perspective. We may not accurately appreciate how thoroughly a Cartesian multiverse has efficiently managed to eliminate spirit. We live in a laboured, predictable reality. Literally everything comes under the same inane jurisdiction; Kim Sears, to pick a name at random, for expletives directed at a “flash Czech”. Meanwhile, ease of expression and grace go by the wayside. How has it happened to such devastating degree? Unless we can sort out what is amiss, how can we change in any significant manner the milieu, political or otherwise? 

Everything is equivalent in some mysterious way; the Tati-esque choreography of an old French square; the baker’s wife running, the horse flexing its flanks, the psycho-sexual vibes. St Tropez, the 60s haunt of Bardot, had it; now it’s flattened by intercontinental brands and the buy-sell brigade. We are continually misinformed; management and global finance are the destructive forces.

The choreography of action cannot be pre-thought; you see it in 40s Marx Bros movies, creative outsiders. Guys like R Crumb, Ellison and the like are still there to stir the pot. We cannot close our minds to outsiders who’s voices strike with riveting clarity. My feeling or hunch is that a classical culture is a type of carefree theatricality, emotional extemporizing in the moment. Theatre and performance should strive to mirror that reality.

The best theatre is alternate, to wit The Vault’s production http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/theatre/theatre-reviews/11375430/cressida-bonas-theres-a-monster-in-the-lake-review.html “>There’s A Monster In The Lake – a sort of cod-philosophy of babes in the woods, spare and free. It’s artless art. You hear it in courtly chansons of the Renaissance, plainchant. You see it in 60s Marvel Comics, the unique origins of all the increasingly tedious elaborations. The clarity of free expression, unclouded by preformed mentalities.

Here’s a thing.  I was listening to The Early Music Show with Lucy Skeating, some medieval filigree, then got this stuff on YouTube – slightly corny, but corn is a good resource:

Now, this is not academic at all, it’s some self-taught musician, electro-pop, yet the medieval ambiance cannot be denied. He’s conjuring-up a mindscape, a landscape to great effect. Sense and sensibility; it doesn’t have to be accurate so long as the expression and feel are present, beloved of games-people and fantasy-merchants. Just add a travelling minstrel to La Petite Place to spin the yarn into a song.

There’s something dreamlike here, but something with a life-force, a life-force with a self-motivated direction. Predator and prey, craving sustenance, warmth, sex, habitat, gathering harvest. I mean, even an amoeba has that or it wouldn’t live! The BBC, however great an institution, doesn’t have it; it has research, think-tanks, academia.

CC Beck puts it like this

Citizen Kane was one of the first movies where the camera moved all over the place … In movies if nothing is happening on stage, move the camera..And nothing was happening in Citizen Kane..

If two people are fighting it’s best to show them facing each other, not the audience … but of course in the movies everything followed the Orson Wells approach.
– The Comics Journal #95

I saw a fantastic Japanese action epic called 13 Assassins, set in the Shogunate era of the twilight of the samurai culture. They trek through a fabulous wilderness in their quest for the life of the Shogun’s renegade half-brother – shades of Rashomon. Reluctant Ronin grumbles “I gambled my life on this senseless war for power-politics”, and they are swept along by the just cause, for the renegade is a true villain, sadistic and sex-crazed, depicted as a sort of Japanese albino, his death-scene replete with rolling head.

In typical Japanese style, the blood is felt, not seen, a choreography of sound-effects and elegant sword-strokes. Contrast this true story with the unspeakable dullness of Wolf Hall; where is the carefree ambiance of the Tudor era? What I’m talking about essentially is temperament and type: those that seek justice, the scurvy knave. In Wolf Hall we only get weasel words and half-truths, not the naked savagery of a king’s yes-man.

3 versions of Nyoka TM & C 2015 AC Comics

What do they have in common? Simple; the ronin are ruthlessly effective mercenaries, the arabs are bloodthirsty worshippers, the English guy is a stiff-upper lip Jonny, the natives are superstitious skin-thumpers, the yanks are buddy-buddy toughies, Nyoka is even whiter by way of contrast in the jungle (etc.) Ethnic stereotypes abound, in other words; people without the prefigured, pre-thought reality of liberal determination. Sample dialogue: “seize the white infidel”, “at once, your illustriousness”. Also cliffhangers, woman in peril, being chased etc. Isn’t that what they’re for? As a footnote, the ethnic handiwork with thatched reed-roofs and the rough and ready village habitat could double for a luxury hideout for celebs.

This is where the school of pulp-fantasy that the comic books inhabit comes into its own. Temperament and type predominate. This is the test of true creativity. Everything can be pre-programmed in a pre-set reality, where knowledge is bandied round. Or everything can be a test of temperament; the tooth and claw of Harlan Ellison, the fanboy to fantasy innovator BWS. The latter, incidentally, landed in NYC on a wish and a prayer – the mark of an outsider.

Copyright 2003 Barry Windsor-Smith

All very classical, and there is a tradition of relating cherubs to the pagan in art. Christian or classical? How about both? The point is that there is a type of artless art that has a natural energy. It is not prefigured; it is a product of awareness – self-awareness as Bruce Lee would have it. Self-awareness is the bedrock of art, and it is a natural phenomenon.

You notice: rehearsed routines lack the flexibility to adapt
Bruce Lee’s languid appraisal of his 3rd tier opponent in Game Of Death (recovered footage)

Lee’s quote could be taken to imply that awareness is evolutionary, so you might relate it to the playful energy found in natural icons, or Tao (spirit). In any case, to be aware of natural spirit is to be moral, to have religion. All ancient civilizations pay obeisance to natural spirit. The Romans had water sprites and ritual baths – see Sulis-Minerva.

Our societies literally run counter to the flexible energy of selfhood that one might identify with Tao. Energy is deliberately utilized to provide smooth-running, hygienic, disinfected environments; if you take the energy equation from factory-farming to supermarkets, it’s entirely negative. Call it organized energy. The organized energy of prefabricated, preset routines has no use for natural energy.

So, what is natural energy? Here’s an interesting link; it takes the form of a tactile, small and energetic intelligence. If you take a look at this film of a microphage (white blood corpuscle) chasing a bacteria:

... you can see immediately that its actions are intelligent. That is, the energy is tactile, sensing its environment, directive.

Our organized energies destroy natural traditions which are small and tactile. This in turn destroys our natural defences against pathogens to which our bodies are designed to be exposed. I mean, in dirt, in less-than-hygienic environments – symbiotic microbes. That is the environment in which Man evolved and developed defences against (the sort of outdoorsy, horse and hunting world of some aristos, basically).

Not only the health-derived properties, but an awareness of symbolism, in water, earth. The last two paras from Animal Faith link reason to praxis, or the world of natural tradition (cosmic symbolism and associated ritual):

Ancient civilizations clearly did value the life-giving properties of springs, Roman baths, earth and mud. There is quite a lot going on here, and only some of it is symbolic. I’ve previously mentioned the fact that dirt strengthens the immune system because of the presence of micro-organisms. What you have is essentially earth-symbolism allied to fact (it may not have escaped your attention that the biggest threat to global health is an antibiotic pandemic?)
So, I think we underestimate the extent to which spirit affects us. An American pioneer settlement has an aesthetic appeal not by accident, but because it values the transcendence of craft, tradition, artisanwork over materialism. The presence of puritan chapels and unorthodox sects is a transcendent link to naturalism, animal and vegetative spirits.

All this is under present peril from prefigured, preset, predetermined liberal modernism, which has no concept of natural energy. Organization, the goal of all directed modernist groups, is the enemy of free expression. Therefore, we ought to divest ourselves of such modernist tendencies. Actually, this group seems wary of being de trop, so my words may not fall on deaf ears.