by Neil Vodavzny

Having arrived at H+ (Transhumanism), a few observations may be in order: things in the multiverse have to be either instantaneous or very fast. There seems to be no time for pace, tempo, stillness or even serenity. Probably that’s because they don’t exist in the multiverse! Why should that be, since in most other respects everything’s hunky dory?

Einstein famously stated “Time is an illusion”, though he wasn’t playing the piano at the time.  And the general consensus seems to be that we experience time as a way of making sense of space-time, which in reality is continuous (like Dr Manhattan, or the Starchild). It’s easy for scientists to accept this since the nature of time is still unknown.  Philosophically, this is highly improbable since such statements as “ actions have consequences” would lose their meanings.

What you can equally do is turn this round to its opposite and say, time is real while the multiverse is fake. Of course, what scientists will say is, we can observe such and such an event – so that is true. Quite, but what they’re observing is the world of pure reason, a Cartesian world. However far they peer they’re not going to detect the works of Shakespeare.

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Monoculturalism meets Rockefeller (and eats him)

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George at Golden Dawn New York has issued a statement (by podcast) on the Baltakos Affair, which I will come to in a moment.  First, the background.

Baltakos was a close aide of Antonis Samaras, who appointed him to the post of government general secretary in June 2012.  He is identified with the right-wing of New Democracy, and is said to have led opposition within the party to the crackdown on Golden Dawn, at least up to the December 2013 murder of the “anti-racist rapper” Pavlos Fyssas (which the Greek government used as a pretext to attack GD).

Six months ago Baltakos initiated a series of conversations with Golden Dawn - he says now, to gain their trust and extract information from them.  But the information flow appears to have been in the opposite direction.  A video has been posted by the impressive Ilias Kasidiaris, the GD member of parliament and Athens mayoral candidate,  showing Baltakos explaining to him, Kasidiaris, how, why and by whom the decision to crackdown on GD was taken.  It is a seismic political confession.  Baltakos has been forced to resign.  He now says he expects other “damaging” releases from GD to follow.

A translation by EnetEnglish of the Baltakos confession follows:

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In the immediate aftermath of last week’s initial debate between the Deputy Prime Minister and LibDem leader Nick Clegg and UKIP’s Nigel Farage, an easy victory for the former was swiftly declared by the entire media Establishment – only for a snap poll by YouGov, conducted for The Sun, to prove them painfully wrong.  57% of the thousand-strong panel thought Farage won.  Only 36% thought Clegg had emerged victorious.

There followed a lot of very rough changing of journalistic gears, along with several admissions of Westminster village behaviour.  The underlying inference, though, remained that Farage’s views were “populist”, ie, not the sort of thing that interests the cogniscenti (they being far above the infirmity and fickle affections of the public Mind.  Naturally.)

Anthony Wells at YouGov – a left-leaning polling company if ever there was one - made the point that just finding a thousand people who would listen to the LBC Radio broadcast was a challenge in itself; and took months to achieve.  He seemed not to have great confidence in the sample at all.

Everything, then, hung on the second of the debates last night - an hour-long joust between Clegg and Farage on the benefit or otherwise of EU membership, to be broadcast live on BBC2:

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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.

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Neil Vodavzny

Having conscientiously done preliminary research for this part of The Maze on craftwork, I have to say that both Derek Whitehead and David Hamilton have a tendency to abstraction. Doubtless this goes with the territory, but it isn’t easy to sell such things except to the converted, it can be admitted. Some practical examples help to it make palatable, so I’ll attempt to weave those into the discussion.

Whitehead delves into the interrelation in Greek art of techne, praxis (production), and poiesis (world-founding). The work of art brings into being through a type of facility of production something imbued with the tension of spontaneity

Both the artist’s vision and the activity of production combine in the world-founding. It might not be recognized so much nowadays, but the aim of art is not expression. Up to the late Renaissance, it was more to do with apprenticeship, learning a trade then, after long years of strenuous graft, finally practising the craft and discipline of art-making.

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My friend Tadeusz Korzeniewski has suggested that we engage in an exchange of letters, by way of exploration of one another’s views.  I have no idea what will come out of that, if anything.  But it is too interesting a prospect to be neglected.  So here is my opener, on the subject suggested by Tadeusz.  Replies will be added to the page, not to the comment thread - that is for readers with their own thoughts on the matter at hand.

Dear Tadeusz,

Your suggestion is that we choose as our subject the appearance of a Polish diaspora in Britain.  A brave choice.  I certainly don’t have a great number of positive things to say about it.  I don’t think you will find many patriotic Englishmen who do.  But there are those among the bien pensant classes and, of course, the shrinking band of Europhiles and outright devotees of libertarianism and economism, as well as the usual haul of thoughtless little sleepers who parrot any media mantra, who will tell you that east European immigration (because, obviously, all east Europeans are Poles) is “not a problem” and even “a benefit”.

Well yes, east Europeans are, at least, white and Christian (nominally, anyway).  They seem refreshingly, unusually like us.  And some of the girls can be very appealing.  They drink and swear and dance, and then they can be laid.  To the English ethnic sensibility, this is an understandable species in a way.  They can “assimilate”, in a way. 

Obviously, as a matter of ethno-nationalist principle, it’s very different.  All our peoples must live sovereign and free, and that means alone, on their own ancestral soil.  Europe’s peoples must grant one another this most essential collective freedom, because sovereign possession of territory is, and has always been, the guarantor of life itself.  We have no business in each other’s lands.  Is not Polish history a long and painful testament to that?

The present-day story itself is lacking in Polish tragedy, but it has its victims.  The million-fold young Poles and eastern Europeans generally who, since 1st May 2004, have come to Britain, and travelled in even greater numbers to Germany, have deserted their own needy economies and treated ours like some low-rent, mud-free Klondyke.  They have created enormous resentment in East Anglian towns such as Peterborough and Boston.  They frequently live in gang-houses provided for them by migrant-worker agencies.  Rumours abound that they sleep several to a room, and know nothing of the always rising costs of owning an English house and raising an English family.  English workers simply cannot compete on the subsistence earnings the incomers are so willing to accept.

It is said that local employers recruit directly in Poland, the jobs never being advertised to prospective English workers; and that whole workforces are recruited and actually paid in Poland, the employers exploiting loopholes in EU law to avoid employment taxes in Britain.  The whole deal is topped off with constant praise for how “polite”, “hard-working” and “skilled” the incomers are, while the English men and women they have replaced are routinely dismissed as “lazy” and “uneducated”, and are left to rot on state benefits.

The underlying narrative is that life in the old Soviet bloc countries of eastern Europe has remained economically harsh, and workers still understand what it means to do an honest day’s work for what, by Western European standards, is a pittance.  They are only too grateful, we are told, to take up “the jobs British workers will not do”.  British society, on the other hand, is written off as having become decadent and uncompetitive in the global economy.  Our people have come to expect the good things in life without having to work for them.  Europhile politicians and financial journalists, whose own jobs are not at risk in the new neoliberal universe, regularly reinforce this message.  Some have the gall to lecture the English unemployed to the effect that if they don’t like it, they are always free to go and find work for slave-labour wages elsewhere in Europe, as if to be decanted from home and family into the life of a characterless economic cypher is an acceptable station for any human being.

It is true, of course, that the eastern European workers are an economically productive cohort.  Migration is a filter for IQ, and the quality of first-generation migrants is higher in all sorts of ways than the average for their country of origin.  Higher, in this case, than the average for the natives too.  But by the same measure the eastern Europeans have come with rather more than the average loading of competent criminal gangs.  The least of it involves metal theft: stealing manhole covers, stripping lead from church roofs and power-cabling from railway lines.  Multiple accident insurance fraud is another little game.  Armed robberies of soft targets like petrol stations and jewellers are also a favoured pick and, naturally, the drug trade has benefited substantially from “skilled eastern European labour”.  The very worst of it has been the smuggling and prostitution - sexual enslavement, actually - of innocent and brutally used eastern European girls hidden away in inner-city whore-houses.  Undoubtedly the most novel and multicultural felony has been the provision of rather more willing eastern European “brides” for the purpose of a passport scam, usually involving Asian fixers and African “husbands” willing to part with a few hundred quid for a quick I do.  Not the hardest work a hard-working eastern European girl could find to do in opportunity-laden Britain.

The whole “hard-working” narrative took a bit of a knock from about the middle of the recession - well, perhaps not the “hard” part.  We began to hear about penniless, unemployed eastern Europeans living rough in parks and public spaces, “skipping” supermarket bins and hunting the edible wild-life to extinction.  The sight of regal swans gracing the urban river landscape has become a thing of the past on some East Anglian rivers.  In contrast, alcoholism, at which eastern Europe has always excelled, has become a rather more commonplace feature of town-centres.

Now we are told the recession is over.  But nine out of every ten new jobs is being taken by immigrants of one hue or another.  Our kids struggle to enter the workforce at all.  Only half of graduates find non-menial work.  Of the others many are serving internships - generally without pay, just to have a chance of a permanent job at some point in the future.  It is, of course, an utter betrayal of the young, to add to the long, long list of betrayals we have suffered in the grand cause of maximum corporate freedom.  The politicians, together with the businessmen who have wallowed in its profits and the liberal Establishment which has found it so convenient and personally inexpensive, can never make amends for what they have done.  Tumbrils and old maids with knitting needles will not make amends.  Only mass repatriation, ruthless and complete, will make amends.

As for the eastern Europeans, they do not escape without a cost to their humanity.  Like all new migrants, they have brought upon themselves and their children a ceasura they do not yet understand.  The subtle rewards of peoplehood, of life among kind, of natural belonging and warmth and understanding have been replaced in them by becoming a stranger in another man’s land, and by the coldness and disinterest he feels for them.  This is the true wage that the neoliberal system pays its migrant workers.  Its materialism has become theirs, and its power to commodify human lives has commodified them.  Until they go home they are merely labour, another commodity to place alongside goods, services, and damned capital.

Yours,

GW

by Neil Vodavzny

I don’t know for sure, but BWS may have intended his print of Icarus:

Icarus, Barry Windsor-Smith, 1981 (Goblimey Galleries)

… in a literal sense. Unlike Psyche – see previous post – and other pre-Raphaelite influenced prints, it employs late-Renaissance techniques. The figure half-disappears into a stream, giving the opportunity for optical effects – reflection, refraction (light bending under water). Lilies float suspended over reflections of tree-trunks giving an odd illusory, photographic quality. In classic or proto-Greek figure-art, there’s no illusion, and a simplicity redolent of art-deco ornament. The pre-Raphaelites strove for the presence of a figure in a landscape to be almost frieze-like. They wanted the power of symbolism, not the illusion of reality.

BWS is known to carry this into his work, being fond of sundials – in The Ram And The Peacock:

The Ram and the Peacock, Barry Windsor-Smith, 1974 (Windsor-Smith Studio)

… where it is used as a symbol of civilized refinement. If you contrast Icarus, there is actually a type of illusion in the fact that it’s more “real”. This is a perennial problem of which the pre-Raphaelites were acutely aware. They wanted the “psycho-culture” of medieval Europe, not the pin-hole captured realism of later Renaissance figures, Caravaggio being the outstanding exponent.

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