by Neil Vodavzny

Re-animating nature is another way of thinking of Whitehead’s conception of more or less “letting it be”. The ancient Greeks may well have thought of nature in a more animated sense than we do. Materials such as limestone and wood have an organic origin, and the sense of inherent dynamism may have come naturally (Greek temples evolved from wooden ones, retaining the organic sense). The Bible alludes to Man being moulded from clay, clay being the raw material for the potter’s wheel.

If nature wasn’t animate, even the greatest artist would be unable to let it be, so that’s probably a traditionalist view of art, ie, studying nature, life-drawing, landscape etc. Since the Renaissance, what seems to have happened is that nature has been corralled by science, so it is no longer the preserve of artists. Modern art is correspondingly thanatopsic, with no understanding of materials or craft, deathlike in its nihilism. Almost all traditionalist contemporary art is popular and commercial, where studying the essentials is a prerequisite. Art as a wordling or narrative form of myth-making is alive and well - in pop-culture.

A near-perfect instance of someone presenting a personal mythology through a mastery of various techniques and intricate craftwork, allied to subconscious or intuitive powers, is Patrick Woodroffe’s Mythopoeikon.  Just how far you can go with an etching is shown in Mickey’s New Home, a self-produced children’s book); depth and stop-out (to bleed the sky), then aquatint applied in graduated tone (creeping bite) mythopoeikon2. You know what they say about etchings, and this plate shows why. As you see from the illo, he’s essentially self-taught. What that means is he learnt a trade, the practical skills and techniques needed to become an artist who uses the subconscious, instinct and feeling. In fact, this applies to others in the field who work “in the school” of .. (comic artist/creator Rob Liefeld is routinely scorned for his naïve style but at least he possesses adequate skills, and the work has a sort of rough honesty).

Known primarily for sci-fi book jackets, here’s a typical multi-media effort, Neq The Sword (Piers Anthony, Transworld) mythopoeikon3.

mythopoeikon3 by Patrick Woodroffe

The extraordinarily vivid textures are obtained by gouache, crayon, ink and marbling. This really is using technique to maximum visceral effect, combined with a degree of craft that brings the skull to malevolent life (not quite Damien Hirst’s cup of tea, I fancy). Woodroffe refined his style through a Bosch-like fascination with natural grotesqueries, or just oddities, so nature is his basic resource – also dolls and other obsessions.

His work to me exemplifies poiesis. Through such dedicated and refined craftwork. He is able to manipulate the depth-field, the colour-scape, texture and modelling to something close to a mind’s eye perception. No contemporary gallery art can come close to such facility, mainly because they don’t try.

Selling books is like selling a world, I guess, so this is “bringing forth” on a fairly epic scale. Such visions are likely to give some indication of a retro-future which is resource-based – ie having nature as the chief resource – and with some fairly decisive mythos or guiding spirit.

Warlord of the Air (Moorcock, Quartet) is a neat example of some type of steam-punk future mythopoiekon4. I would say poiesis is present because of the intensity of technique (gouache, crayon, ink), mythopoeic forms and elaborately fanciful antiquated technology.

So, in order to have such a future, it would seem apparent we must be fully eco-conscious, in the sense of living with nature and not just off it, evolving a type of techno-mythos that is not exploitative, but at ease with and capable of co-existing with landscape and human scale environment. The Right could thereby appropriate terms like eco-Darwinism. The one implies environment, the other ethnicity as a dynamo of evolution. Any future society must have a resource-base, so the term ethno-resource seems appropriate. If we are allied ethnically with resources there is a type of world-building going on.

Let’s take a concrete example: Cameron intends building a “garden city” in Kent. This is an inappropriate invasion with no ethnic or resource foundation. An alternate Rightwing approach is to limit homes to English-style dwellings – possibly pastiches along the lines of Quentin Terry – thereby relating to ethno-cultural roots. Dwellings should be human-scale and in-harmony with local buildings and resources. Better yet, plant woods or place homes round woodland, building worlds not destroying them, taking back the land.

The much wider question, which PART 3 is mostly devoted to, is why is a techno-society exploitative? As I suggested in PART 1, technology becomes allied with egalitarian and liberal monetary economics. The metro-sexual-racial image is the opposite of ethnicity and resources. In other words, it’s a techno-sphere and not a universe or microcosm comprising the usual suspects – sun, moon, summer, winter, shepherds, flocks and so forth.

The “multiverse”, as I like to call it (for want of a better description), has no common mythical roots. It’s presumably built on the efficiency of any particular technique, such as social-media, satnav, the usual suspects. Where technique is disconnected from nature, it intrudes a type of multiverse or hermetic technical space like the social-net.

What I want to suggest is that the multiverse is Cartesian in origin. I could be wrong, but am just putting it out there. That means the product of human reason or, basically, science. If you take Einstein as a sort of figurehead, there was an item the other day on “proof of the big bang”, consisting of echoes from the original 10-35 seconds event. In other words, a space of time that almost doesn’t exist. These were gravity waves of such unimaginable energy, matter was created and destroyed.

This sort of thing goes down well in comic book circles. Such colossal forces tend to support a “multiverse” hypothesis. One of the arch proponents, Swede Prof Max Tegmark, who reckons our universe is just a tiny fraction of a grand mass of parallel worlds, states:

(We) have shown that inflation predicts a space … teeming with duplicate copies of our civilization, living out countless variations of our lives far, far away

What I would suggest is that Einstein, as the figurehead for Cartesian science, rationalises the very concept of a multiverse. That is, a techno-verse, not the universe.

If you check what Tegmark says, he implies a technical event – the big bang – can create duplicate copies. But that implies psyche and everything associated with it – art, poetry, love, romance – are technical events! I know he’s Swedish, but even so. I honestly don’t think that’s the case; he’s stretching a point way beyond breaking. If the big bang occurred, it was a technical event of unimaginable energy and, as such, applies to technical phenomena. The multiverse is, if you like, a technical invention; because it’s Big Science.
It justifies a certain world view. Techno-egalitarian, not psyche or instinct. This invented world is completely invisible, of course, like the angels on pins of medieval alchemy.

This is the Kantian world of pure reason which, as we know, Hegel contradicted. Here, the Greek notion of tension is paramount. Without this overriding principle, the world is essentially pure technique.

Since this view of a multiverse (or maze) tends to justify a techno-verse, the Right could challenge this world view, or techno-destruction of the principle of tension. The real world. The Right could thereby appropriate an ethno-eco-Darwinian reality to forge a non-egalitarian future.

A couple more examples. Social-media entrepeneurs are busy investing in future-tech. Elan Musk plans an “insanely fast” hyperloop or magnetic-induction tube for intercity travel. This is the future that has no relation to environment, that instead creates multiverses of technique. This segues more and more into a political question of survival. Kids are showing symptoms of attention deficit from as young as three. Children are the next gen, our human reserve. If their brains are dimmed they’re not going to be future artists or rebels or outsiders against a cyborg-order. 

Children should be href=“https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aBeNgwMTRj8” title=“feeding their heads”>feeding their heads with Mickey’s New Home, feeding subconscious dreams, fantasies and mythical variety.  The multiverse is the equivalent of an egalitarian order where the subconscious and the psyche are rendered fairly obsolete. This in turn segues into transhumanism (H+).  I would assume this is a Cartesian egalitarian multiverse taken to its logical end (and run by Russian Jews - according to all sources).

This therefore becomes quite a political act so, as I say, the Right could well appropriate an ethno-resource based future of eco-Darwinism. “Ethno-culture” might be a word for that. What I would suggest is a fairly careful appraisal of “the politics of culture” – literary, artistic, psyche, sexual, racial, instinct, myth. By allying race to such things as resources - mental, physical, environmental, artistic, musical - and retro-futurism, we can forge a genuine alternative.