David Altmejd and the witches of hell frozen over, David Kordansky, June, 2021, part 1 of 2.

rev., Jun 3-4, 2021.

Disclaimer: As I only see art virtually now, this is a thought piece and not a review.

David Altmejd’s show at David Kordansky, The Enlightment of the Witch, really struck home again, in my mood of “synchroetherrhoe” everything all at one flowing together, as it seems like I have survived the covid lockdown era, and so I winged it in an attempt to read it, on FB

and so, then, I take you through it.

“For every synapse, a figure points the way. David Altmejd, long time fav, at Kordansky, on a neurozeroedin soul journey: reduced to a state of miasma, an entome (a being torn to pieces) whose only life derives from the bad witch’s spell, cast into a nightmare, hell on earth

“but when that hell on earth is come back to,by way of a Cassandra figure (the realization of a witch here).

“to under the aegis of Ophthchthon*, in a zone of epigogy, wherein by having discovered your true dream path, you can flip reality upside down to enter Zudecca, or frozen hell, the world where hell HAS frozen over, your psychopomp is Splitting Smurf

sort of like Blake’s Satan

he shows that at last Zudeons are defeating Quanon trolls, their leader, Troll, possibly the demon TIND-TIRH**, gibbetted on ice

and by way of “white album” guides, even a unicorn, where in waking reality you hereafter act without fear according to your dream and truth; at last to enter the cenote’ of magic, the Enlightenment of the Witch, and a rebirth.

“This is really happening, and this is really happening”, and it is happening, NOW, TODAY.

And. then, I also provided a key

now, this notion of Zudecca came to me a day earlier, as I also posted, about Deana Lawson

but, then, as I do, on FB, where I play with theory “for entertainment purposes only,” I pushed it, and so looked up frozen hell, and the frozen hell phase we are now living in, and it turns out that in the fourth level of the ninth ring of hell Satan sits in ice, in Judica, but then since that title seems to whisper of antisemitism I took a Muslim name for the hell of ice, zambeera, so it becomes Zudecca.

This notion is built up on the power of the surge of “synchroetherrhoe” events that have taken place in my reading and movie culture in the last sixty days. Time and again, I find that no sooner do I lay out a new possibility in theory, that some art is out there greeting it, realizing it, as in the Sunrise and Sunset show in Berlin, and other places. Theoretically, this is based on the whole reappraisal in 3D of the full dimensions of the three states of nightmare in the Eldritch formation, and about the emergence of syngogy and epigogy as types of consciousness that relate to states of dreaming in the flips and turns of the activation of the Eldritch formation.

The change came when Wolfwalkers (2020) helped me work out the greater complexities in flips in the syngogic dimensions of what happens when one wakes up a second time in the eldritch. That is, to return to it: first, there is the first nightmare, you have, whoosh, it leaps you back up to the lattice, in hypnagogy.

this can be not unlike a conjure attack situation, a true, classic nightmare, in all its forms, this is where Fuseli’s nightmare takes place, and she is not woken up from it. But, then, in the eldritch, when you wake up from this nightmare, you are in fact still sleeping, this is the no sweat part, and in that state you experience a more intensive dream experience

but this dream has a more intense nature, you appear in it as not you, but as you embodied in some abstract or other form (in Wolfwalkers it is the girl represented by her smell, by the Umwelt, that is, of the wolf she has become). As a result, this dream has a transformational and Umwelt quality

and, for a human, that dream path, specific and unique to you, perhaps, is the equivalent to an animal’s umwelt, the few steps required to keep it alive in the hunt (I give the example in common terms of a path used by a person to get to a site onlline, by a well worn step by step, so I always get to my rmarts site by going to “Bava Black Sunday”, then clicking over, there, three steps, same three steps every time, it is like the sequence of a safe combination). that is,in this dream, by the Far Path to the Far Door, etc

but this second dream has a shock hid in it, which involves contact with the demon TIND-TIRH, “This is no dream, this is really happening”, and so this realization, this fusion of dream and waking reality, or some deeper reality, results in a fierce ephialtic leap, which brings up the whole substrate of the dream, so a FLIP, and this then creates a state where in syngogy freeze you cannot quite tell the difference between dream and reality.

This flip happens this way

but, now, you are in the third nightmare, and several things can happen. Most opportune is you can, from your paralysis, like the episodes I had in my 20s, experience in a freeze a dysmetropsic flip, and that then opens up ophthchthon, as such

Theoretically, this would then let you wake up enlightened, to live in the security and certainty of your Umwelt, to live in a state of white album.

But there are also other things that can happen in the epigogic state, which is my name for it. If white album insight takes hold it can open up from inside-vigilogogic, or inside-hypnagogic mind space to the cenote space I have been writing about, with a different scale of imagination at work in it, since March, and its working out that way in The Amityville Horror, so if the realization of living White Album is the key, that can open up the path to, under the Blue Sun, the cenote to deep brain, as such

so. The white album controls ophthchthony, and if you see the “truth shot” that can then cause a final leap to full realization, and leap you all the way out into fata morgana ambience, to then through either Heaven’s or Tannhauser gate (as fill in later), experience an encounter with monsters created by the emanations of hell on earth.

But, in a recent essay, working through the nature of hell in Dracula (1979) I went back to Alien for an analysis of the land of the Blue Sun. This brings to mind the balcony POV which I addressed in the Irish movie Spectre (1996) with Alexandra Paul and considered as well as Ash’s perch over the perilous outing in Alien (1977). According to this trope, as I wrote about it in Alien

they are overseen in their exploration of the ping by Ash, in his bay window, the Blue Sun itself

the graphic space is, just like Jodorowsky’s long shot, a mis en abyme, care-less of the gradations of ambient vigilogogic space. But, then, the planet will have to be considered, relative to them, an ambient space, that when they land on it, drops into a spatial equivalent of hell on earth, in sentient outer space, and then when they land, they are overseen by Ash, who is suspect and later will be revealed to be death, so it IS a thanatopsis of sorts.

I suppose the only place, hypnagogically, that such a place in “outer space” could exist in the mind is below the bottomless pit of hell on earth, and so I have to term it Tartarus, which was a special hell below hell which was reserved solely for demiurges or gods hurled there from Olympus, and imprisoned in perpetual darkness (the Greeks had to have created the idea to conform to some psychological pressure)

this is what the whole construct, everything vis a vis each other, looks like

I guess I will then have to argue, keeping a logic operable in my working out of the relations between

Alien hypersleep 2 9 21

hypnagogy and vigilogogy, a flip from Tartarus on up over the whole rest of the other construct, to make by another form of the Big Sleep, the Hypersleep, a delirious dream flipping formation, all of it feeding in

the most telling fact-in-form, that is, a form they came up with which in fact corresponds to hypnagogic psychodynamics of Ash’s bay window as oversight, and it is blue, and since he is suspect it is death, that is, he knows death is a risk, and he wants to minimize revealing concerns as to that, since the creature is more important.

this secret evil, sabotaging things, is reinforced by this shot of an evil overseer, The Blue Sun thanatopsis eyed evil one

everything around so that they cannot see anything

then, also strange, as if combining the color scheme of my rendering of hells on earth, here sunk into the deep blue of Tartarus, we learn that the atmosphere is “primal,” so Chloros reigns

it is also amusing that this is the first time we get a view of the cat as overseer, the cat represents the sanity of the living moment, I suppose, ever watchful for deceit and evil, a guardian god, watching over the watchers. This position makes of him the embodiment of the Blue Sun, that is, thanatopsis, he is, simply, by this, the realization of the saying that “death has come to our little town,” or, as Pleasance said not a year before in a movie he will be much more remembered for and kept itn “he’s come home,” and he is death, death has come.

This posits “outer space” as imagined as a hell below hell on earth, and it is in that zone that the deepest things happen, I called this place Tartarus, it would be here, in this graph, but you can get to it ONLY by way of Heaven’s (for truth) or Tannhauser (for lies, or monsters, even) Gate, with the balcony or gargoyle like Antaeus looking over it

I do not want to create another type of –gogy for this, but, let’s face it, THIS is where the monsters are in the mind, in the deep brain, down the cenote, in hell on earth activated, with the formicarian and the ommatidian gaze, this is where almost ALL of the artists I really like are mentally located, doing their work, encountering the sentient universe of monsters and the like, by way of epigogy, after your life has learned the truth.

BUT….there must be a benign aspect of this too, no? so, let’s posit that in entering into this world, you come out of it, and this is due to being in ambient epigogy

and IF you are able to overcome the demons, and the monsters, and not submit, then Tartarus freezes, and becomes Frozen Hell, or as I call it Zudecca. We are now, I argue, due to the afterschocks of BLM reckoning, the Biden Presidency, then the changes to the mediation and practice of industries due to covid lockdown and its ultimate consequences, no doubt to come, in a period of hell hath frozen over. And this is where the great positive demons are now, so while I see Blake’s Satan in ice, he is in, in fact, Tartarus

that ice then expands and the whole thing, as in an effulgence of ice, LIKE IN AMITYVILLE HORROR 3D, and the whole of the epigogic POV of the ambient and sentient becomes Judecca, hell frozen over, that is, a kind of heaven on earth.

and at the top of it, replacing Antaeus, who lifted you down in, you get, I think, Altmejd’s Splitting Smurf, who just might be the first time any artist has given sight of this particular daimon, or god of day, the god of today (yesterday, June 2)

so, that is where I am at, right now, June 2, coming out of covid lockdown, and in the nervous energy leading up to my possibly reentering the world of talking to artists (though now it has been postponed, and maybe the moment will pass), we are in Zudecca, where religious, agentic, hypnagogic, syn- and epigogic dream-based art is on the rise, and on the march.

So, now I have to go back to see if when I go through Altmejd’s latest, it actually shakes out that way (as opposed to my toying with the possibility on FB, which is my “art”).

Altmejd says that his exhibition begins in the conscious mind, where things are in pieces, and that’s what is going on entering in, we are in, that is, waking life, or life informed only by consciousness.

and so Matter is, like man at creation of a Claymation god, just a hunk of clay

but this is also a sort of screen wipe moment, to clear the eyes, for them to then see something beyond

and like in work by Jonathan Meese this past season uptown, I like that lumps of clay are affixed to as if a dummy’s head to signify parts of the brain that one knows one needs to get to to live in full, but which are not got to in thinking too much. I see suggestions of cerebellum, succulus, temporal lobes, and tinnitus censors, which need to wake up, to get to it  

but, then, the other entome or miasmatic pieces primarily made use of as trophies over doorways elsewhere, we come to the Realization of the Witch

this terrific sculpture takes us to the shore of the in-between, and she will be the one to take us across into hypnagogy. The fact that she is a witch, and she is separated from a hand, even questioning it, as if it is more ghostly than her head, indicates her in-between state of being, I guess I take her as an example of the Hanged Woman trope, the one that leads us in

and her crossing over, her wriggling in the wobble-wobble, is conveyed by a telling detail below, a sort of snake form, suggesting the force flowing through her

that said, the fact that she “lords over” a small sculpture set on the floor, an exciting little piece, indicates that she may rest deeper, or may in the looking, actually sink in deeper as you gaze on her, as this figure is the one trapped in the Suspirialike kunstkammer space that lies under the lattice in hypnagogy,

which places her in the role of the conjure demon, and then this as an object encountered “under the bed”

so, alas, she is a psychopomp, but also a jailer, the keeper of the kunstkammer, where beings subservient to her are kept as entomes, beings as if insects with wings torn off, under her spell, like Patricia’s fate in the kunstkammer in Suspiria (2018).

in my reading, Troll is also a prisoner of a partner sculpture, or scrylpture I called them in my post-y mode, wordplaying, and he could also be TIND-TIRH. It is characteristic of Altmejd in general that he skips quickly through vigilogogy and hypngogy, and does not even venture far into the tunnels and adjunct places of it, or the ambient from it, but moves quickly into the second and third dreams, as his work has always from the first existed in that part of the mind I now call the epigogic, which is the place of a more extravagant imagination unafraid of encountering bad demons and even monsters. And so we leap quickly.

if we peruse the prisoner works as separate little dreams, coming upon Troll can be seen as the intenser scare of the syngogic elements of the second wake-up where one thinks one is awake, but you are still sleeping. It is here, in its flips, that one exclaims this is no dream, this is really happening, thus the demon. Altmejd, in language typical of the 20^th century educated art world, states that it is with Troll that he feels the work crosses over from the conscious to the unconscious. My more precise phrasing is that it is here that one’s dreaming self encounters a very powerful demon, who can flip a dream to make it into a reality (the archetype being, in fact, the Satan in Rosemary’s Baby, whose mephitic green mist  causes Rosemary Woodhouse, Catholic girl from Omaha, to exclaim, etc). He is quite fearsome

he is clearly in a gibbet formation, that is, reduced to a paralyzed position. He has no arms, which appear to have been ripped out at the sockets. his face bifurcates below, then it splits out again above, so it triangulates itself, so that he has

his hands are as if separate beings, disconnected, with a life of their own (their reach, like the phantom reach of Dracula in Coppola’s telling, might signify this encounter)

he is triply bald, as if a joke on the triple crown of the pope that Durer and others demonized in the prints of the Reformation, he also has a sort of mullet, sort of pony tail

but, in fact, upon close-up, and there is a reason why the tour has so many closeups, is that he is imagined much as images are in movies during transformation scenes of werewolves and the like, and in this his physical being manifests delirium, or, in fact, a syngogy stage of dream where one does not know if one is asleep or awake

the fact that his hand has cored out, with crystals, and is turning blue, suggests he is rotting, and dead

he might also be turning into stone

in my commentary I posited that as a troll he epitomizes the era of the green slime that we fell into in the Trump years, but I do not find in careful autopsy any indication of such a critique.

I did not mention Smoking with Myself, but here too I think this is a self wandering in the syngogic stages of the second nightmare, unclear what state one is in. Perhaps this figure embodies what one becomes when meandering in the Umwelt of one’s being, charting it out as one goes, in the dream, more intensely searching for the truth.

this is indicated by the fact that he has lost his head, and now has dragonfly wings. This suggests an Umwelt state of being, pared down to creaturely essentials. Here, too, the details are critical, he has a hole in his head, or his neckhole, and we see that the whole thing rot due to the green slime gone mineral, that is, he died by trollism.

sort of leaping forward into the epigogic imagination, so, in my view, not right for this piece, Altmejd even gave figural expression to a delirious almost sequel-to-Nightmare on Elm Street level hallucination as after his neck is severed he sees in the severance of it a reflection of his face, and in the stump another, and he imagines those two as if in the mirror of the cutting, as if this was a case of twinfire, sharing a cigarette with oneself, after death.

much more cryptic are the strange symbols inscribed on its body. This is the Green Eye, which presides over the second nightmare, and then some secret codes

sequentially, The Troll and Smoking are part of this sector of the mind, and present hauntings at that level.

Smoking is the form the self takes when it ventures in this second sweatless dream to seek out the wisdom of one’s Umwelt, in the dreaming space; while the encounter with Troll is an encounter with TIND-TIRH, my demon of the moment, or god of day, and whose encounter is so shocking, one declares it, “this is no dream, this is really happening”.

a few more words about this second stage syngogic dream. This is a zone in which one must walk some, what has to be seen is far off, and you must go through. stage syngogic dream.

To be continued.

Waetzoldt’s Durer and his Times (1935; 1950) and the demon of the Blood Sun, part 2 of 2.

rev., Sep 16/18, 2021.

with mention of Glaser’s broadsheets of celestial phenomena in Nuremberg; Jung’s Flying Saucers (1957, internet archive): The Empty Man (2021)..  

Now the question is, how do I view other phenomena recorded, over time?

This requires creating a taxonomy of types of sightings, determining if any other demons are seen. Above, tracing out the phases of Glaser’s sighting, a kind of body tunnel was formed horizontally in the sky, but then the rising action in and around the sun, and then the condensation of it all to the black spearlike form, which Jung says is phallic, seemed to tilt to an emphasis on the vertical, and thus the formation of a figural, Xyston, the spear demon of Nuremberg.

following from this, it would make sense that once that impression is imprint on the local mind, other events after might well be read as more of the same (the “It’s just like 9/11” syndrome continued in the NYC mindset in response to any accident or explosion for over a decade). This immediately brings into play the Knight in the Sky that people saw

here is a later version from 1566

close up

this shows two knights fighting on the left, a slain knight lying right, and then a king on a throne, holding the same black spear. The arrangement of figures is odd, a sure sign of a logic beneath it, out of which one is piecing together a pareidola. All of it is oddly framed in split screen cloudscape, which perhaps bespeaks by way of a le fanu eye projection the externalization of the eyes and something in them. The emphasis on the frame also suggests a half-lilfe override. The rest of the marginal turmoil is rendered in simplifying cloud.

But in the earlier one, we see one knight charging, and through the deadfall of all of the sundog effects zipping this way and that causing people to not only see crosses, behind the blood, resulting in blood crosses, but soon enough every object in the list of tortures in the Arma christi, sacred relics of persecution in the Passion. We can see chalices and the crown of thorns, the scourging pillar, the whip, the lance and sponges, it would seem the whole of the passion was falling from the sky onto them.

the arma christi became a significant source of cult items and imitatio christi cults at the time.

it usually happened that they were in art either separated to exist on their own as abstraction or in the letterspace of the symbolic vigilogogic state of fellow feeling empathic imitation of christ, or they floating overhead in scenes of the life of christ, as andactsbilder aid in meditation on them one by one, as if saying a rosary.

with such a graphic appeal that they were also incorporated into family coats of arms

It could then be said that the eyes of the religious person at the time were as if cataracted over by a tendency, should anything odd show up in one’s eye, to see arma christi. This much then argues that it is culture that colored the nature of the eyesight. But then there is the extra dimension of media’s role in creating a general sense of what the sky is versus the ground, and how they relate. This one of various sun spots and halos that appeared over Vienna in the 1520s is entirely abstract, with the rain turned to cats and dogs, so to speak, and then the below part being just an emblematic representation of elements from the Noah and ark story. This simply indicates that in the construction of the milieu by media it worked out, as I have argued, that a picture with the drama of wonder in it in a broadsheet format that had to grab a viewers eye first with spectacle, and then they read all about it, the sky was the vigilogogic, and the ground with the hypnagogic. When you looked at the sky you were literally looking up through the very wobble-wobble of the in-between, or low sky luorosphere, just overhead, and since sky was associated with heaven, and earth with the here and now, and acheiropoetoi and other miracle images had a habit of dropping out of the sky, a binary crossover formula developed which prompted people to see the sky in entirely fictional, religious and figural fashion.

and then it follows that if ever there was a vertical turbulence, it did not take much to create of the arma christi in one’s mind a figure (as I did to create a Frankenstein in my novel Arma Christi), and thus sword and elements become a knight.

but there is another dimension here. This seems to be an apocalyptic scene, because the knight is charging in protection ahead of the saved, streaming apparently back down to earth. This is an important inherited visual trope. In Durer’s Apocalypse, there is a tendency to make heaven crowded, to convey the idea of a host, so here with St John (these homely wooden doors of heaven are the detail I most appreciated seen in Waetzoldt

again, in the Adoration of the lamb

but in the whore of babylon

there is, in fact, the host, appearing en masse, and compressed in a crowd, in an almost medieval style, and they seem to ‘figure forth,’ that is, as pareidola, from a vertical opening in the clouds

this means, according to my graphs, that Durer’s vision, and the vision of the sky as derived no doubt from his influence, it was, as said, the “sky” above the in-between, and the symbolic earth, as if in a nexus reflecting the things of the earth; but it was also topped off by a fata morgana, which the small figures en masse are a mere pareidola of the clouds, and thus have an inherent vertical push.

then when that downward figural impulse touched the central core of consciousness and its turbulence approaching a nexus at the borderline, it took on a vertical, singular figural form, a knight. Thus, one has developed a core sun space, all the turbulence around it resulting in abstract forms, not unlike its raining buckets or cats and dogs; and then there was a cul de sac where a more figural cloud-based fata morgana formed, to give a forward downward thrust to the sighting, maybe to make you duck.

This then left those seeking to render the appearances with two choices, cover the arma christ rain, which goes beyong the blood rain crosses

but then up in the corner in the high sky you get a glimpse into an imagined heaven and there, here, there is a battle of knights, here staged as a battle of demons, or fallen angels. This one also includes similar calendar-oriented sun and star imagery, which has biblical import too. Then, to progress with the evolutions, if you saw the sun illuminate oddly, that could be presented vertically, giving, half way between bookread figurals and weather events, a vertical presence, almost monstrous

and such vertical readings of them, impellations, if you will, can take on a religious significance to alsto construe where and now as the gateway to an out there

as long as the suspect vector, as well as the fear vector, were switched to ON, there is a tendency of the frightened mind to, upon report of any disturbance, to bounce to the worst case scenario, and then step back, fearing that it is coming in on you, targeted. Presuming, for the moment, that in 1566 Glaser had a nightmare the night before, or even just before that predawn hour, the witching hour, he would then “wake up” to a second dream which he nonetheless thinks, while walking it, he is awake, and there in searching for meaning he will detect that whatever it was that was keeping his sense of safety intact, in terms of personal and community space, and lebensraum, that theory, he would then sense that the vectors have pulled in from presence to Figment, figments were forming, he then encounters TIND-TIRH, who now spins down through the figments, then back up by way of the fata morgana to come down upon him like a demon occupying and figuring out the horror of the falling into nightmare, a demon like this

in other words, there might, somewhere in these dynamics (my formulation here is less than optimal), be the construal of megafigures, which haunted, then, the imagination of people living in Nuremberg at the time.

it is interesting then that when Jung addresses two of these pictures

he sees mother-ships, and then alchemical symbols, he argues that the Christian reading of the cross is a nonstarter because this is a natural event, and that as such the crosses represent a more primal meaning as combining opposites, all elements of the vertical and horizontal uniting to form a quaternion. This is the marriage symbol, he says, then all the UFOs are actually amassing together to celebrate the marriage flight, and that the dawn hour only intensifies the honeymoon feeling by offering up the aurora consurgens, the revelation of the light, an idea from Boehme. Interesting.

but, then, this follows from his previous interpretation of two other works of art included in the text. The Fire Sower, oddly, is a vertical figure seen as if walking over earth

he argues that because it strolls by the city, and the city seems to not be affected, this is the fire of the philosophers, descending from heaven

for that reason, the city is in one reality, the fire sower in the other, and, as such, he IS the symbolic figure representing the crossing over of two worlds that do not touch. In that capacity he is aforementiond Mercurius Katachthonios, a hermaphroditic demon that rises up from the earth in the form of fire,  

in other words, he is homo maximus, the full human being fulfilled as self living in dream, as compared with the paltry ego that scuttles about in this world.

he quotes Revelations, he is the fiery minister,

the unconscous strolling by the conscious, the same figure is quoted in Durer, the figure of the unconscious that makes your rational mind eat the book, because it is such a shortcoming, compared to the real dream of it (and this, then, again, the minister as if of the arma christi built up).

for Jung, then, he is also the in-between figure. In his mental world, a work of art had a conscious surface, and then an unconscious depth. This figure represents the unconscious depth surfacing, for a moment, this homo maximus, or Anthropos, the filius hominus, Lucifer, the holy ghost.

This echoes on a recent viewing of The Empty Man (2021), where James goes out to the camp, and then sees a group of cultists circling a fire, that is getting higher as they do

then, by their energy, it rises higher still, with a hint of figuration

then we see it shoot up, high

and, by this, James, standing across the river, has a dizzy spell, which opens up to the milky way

and when he sees it, he spins

which strangely relates, by triangulation, with the image on the front page of the NYT announcing the end of the war of Afghanistan, copying Elsheimer’s famous painting, the first painting on earth to show the Milky Way, and said by some to be an omen of bad times coming.

and, then, right at that moment, the chanting stops, the fire goes out, it is dark

and very quickly this mere Presence, on his conjure vector, remains off in the distance, but where they are going is concerning

then they get to just across the stream from him, all stop, and seem to him to look in his direction, the ultimate scare as the vector contracts to the Famulus position, you realize you are the target

then they get to just across the stream from him, all stop, and seem to him to look in his direction, the ultimate scare as the vector contracts to the Famulus position, you realize you are the target, and they chase him, back over the bridge

all the way to his car, and all the time he is thinking, what the fuck is this?

like I said

what it was was a large fire figure, not that different from the one in The Fire Sower, and when they got it to form into a high as if twister that reached up into the sky, to bring down the spirit transmitted there, it then by way of the Milky Way conjured James to it, he felt the spin, they felt that someone nearby felt the spin, that must be the new mediator, so, conjuring done, they go get him. In other words, while from Jung’s perspective the Fire Sower is ambiguous, here, not so much.

I ought to here to pause to explain where Jung’s psychogeography is located vis a vis mine. His view of the world of the mind is yet a modernist frustum. It foreshortens mental life into a battle between the conscious-rational and the unconscious-irrational, as such, in the frustrum, his mind acts upon the rings of saturn, and vacates as a no man’s land the whole in-between zone, which in his topology is ALL of the realm of the vigilogogic and hypnagogic that I spend so much time working out, all of it occult. As a result of this split his conclusions are highly polarized, and, on the positive side, prematurely reassuring with its psychic optimism that one can see such beings as the homo maximus in one’s REM (only) dreams, or in the realm of the occult, parallel to REM but vaguely placed as a counterpart to the conscious, but apart from REM, the unconscious. In recent colonizing and inhabitation of the various byways of the in-between, as I work it out in examples from movies, the unconscious comes into direct contact with the conscious mind far less often than Jung imagined. Which is why so many of his readings seem far-fetched and overly figured out. Indeed, it seems very unlikely, that this figure, the Fire Sower

would be seen by most people in an entirely positive way. Similar figures that have appeared in horror like it certainly do not emit such a positive vibe. I immediately associated this figure with the scary grasshopper demon that towers over Hobbs Lane in Quatermass and the Pit (1966), a destructive force (I will further explore this when I read the Midwich Cuckoos and compare to Jung’s also rather benign reading).

this image, most closely parallels the demon of Hobbs lane

this image underscores and informs even more the sighting of positive imagery in the third painting Jung “critiques” using alchemical symbolic theory symbols, The Fourth Dimension

in this one, he counts up the circles and squares hovering about, and decides that the fourth dimension is what is represented in the background

again, he splits the canvas between the city, in conscious life, on the right, and, then, the hauntings, in the left, the unconscious, or the fourth dimension. He sees a cross and a waterfall, in midcanvas, separating the two worlds. Then, he all but describes a kind of symbolic cymbal-clanging similar to the one Glaser saw on April 14, 1566 over Nuremberg, but he counts numbers, believing that number is the entity that allows the crossing over, and that the main figure is the embodiment of all this

he then zeroes in on the central face, and sees it as the key element, resulting from the presence of which the “ground structure” of the painting is the quincux, the quinta essentia, quinessence

this is very good, and I wish, but in my reading, my keep of the concept of the quintessence, is based on Dixon’s analysis of Bosch’s Passion, christ the face of quintessence, amidst a world of men drunk in overkill of the various humors, mad with as if humor poisoning (reinforced by Veronica, a blue boy construct)

 but I made a point of it again

In The Fourth Dimension, a work of art analyzed in Jung’s Flying Saucers (1957), Jung sees one large hovering pareidola (hidden face), then it breaks down into three, or four others, forming, he says, the alchemical quincux, which sweeps the whole scene from the third dimension over the in-between into the fourth dimension where endures unexplainables like “synchronicity.” He also mentions the “foo fighters” seen by US pilots over the Rhine in 1944, the best original eyewitness photo looking very much like the faces in The Fourth Dimension. I would have no problem if the implication is that my maternal “homeland,” from Strasbourg to Trier along the Rhine or Moselle, were in fact like a Euro Bermuda triangle in the fourth dimension.

and it strikes me that these faces are part and parcel of the haunting face in a classic OEP, original eyewitness photography, the face of the foo fighter seen by US pilots over Germany in 1944. And whilst it could be argued that they were seen as if in repentance of the horror they had to inflict to bring Germany to its knees, the notion that there is a Bermuda triangle in around Hartog and Ouijan etc, is fun. But, seen at proper scale of sleep stages as they impact the mapping out of mind, this is a nightmare demon rising almost like a Death Mask over a city, that is, a close cousin to the one I saw in Glaser’s 1566 study, this is FOO, cousin to XYSTON.

He, however, goes on to see a kind of god, a being come up from the “unitary substrate” with four faces, only one of which is human, like seen on Ezekiel’s wheel

Jung finally calls him the refrigerium, the cooling being who finally puts out the fire,

he also brings in Hildegard of Bingen, but that is outside this purview.

In any case, Jung reinforces the seeing of mostly a figurative element in the events in the sky over Nuremberg. But, to continue in the taxonomy. It appears that when the vector switched to OFF, and culture was becoming more ‘rational,” in an interregunum before it went back again during the Thirty Years war, astronomical realism begins to replace, say, astrological supernaturalism. There follows, this from a meteoros site, simply pictures of what the rationalizers latch onto as proof of the science of it, various forms of halos.

as part of the corpus there is also the emergence of another subgenre, the three suns. I have not seen these before, but they bespeak at least the notion, still extant in internet culture, that astronomical events figure significantly on earth. The truly strange thing here is that in my formulation of the roving form of the second dream in the Eldritch formation in a state of syngogy, and when searching one finds a “thrin” of objects, or three of them, which I call Orion’s belt, the impellation par excellence, consisting of the sweet spot of the dreaming mind. It may then be that these, when further explored, are, in the text, given a more visionary prophetic meaning, to be continued.

and then the more science that was fed in, the more graphics from the scientific literature, where the answer as to what these are lies, overcast the sightings, and these feel like gates to me, portals, of possible escapist significance.

Then, these, they say, are the aurora borealis, seen, apparently, over Nuremberg, in the years leading up to the Thirty Years War, at present, in my view, inconclusive.

though it may be that when the fear or suspect vectors switched back to ON, tensions building, these sightings began again to have a more ominous quality

and it may be, in this one, that things circled back to seeing a battle anew in the aurora borealis, if that is what this is.

Finally, to address some of the pecularities of Durer, which suggests his buy-in to this popular broadsheet visual tradition or corpus. There is no question that Durer’s Apocalypse is part of this popular tradition,

here, the sun and moon, and the rain of…..in this case, fire, shooting stars,

which crossover from heavenly logic, into life, to persecute, hit people

and in the culturing of trying to figure out what they mean I saw in Waetzoldt, likely because of the inosculatory effect of holding up over my chest a flaking crumbling book with a dried out binding, diving in, I saw that in one of the Apocalypse series, the gate of heaven is nothing more than a wooden shutter opening on the life below

as such

this further reinforces the notion that, as mapped out in my graphs, fata morgana lies above, in ambient space, the deadfall, Raven’s Gate, place of sacrifice, peripteral phantom wall, and the overall periaequductal reduction of materiality in ambient haunted worlds, altogether, when on the sideline of hypnagogy, the half-life TALUS structures

that even Durer knew of such half-life places in the imagination of mankind, all mental spaces that Jung seems (in Flying Saucers–in a 1903 paper on the psychology of the occult he did adress hypnagogic states) to be blind to, inside the modernist formalist frustum.

The End.

Waetzoldt’s Durer and his Times (1935; 1950) and the demon of the Blood Sun, part 1 of 2.

rev., Sep 16/18, 2021.

with mention of John Currin’s memorials; Glaser’s broadsheets of celestial phenomena in Nuremberg; Jung’s Flying Saucers (1957, internet archive).  

Waetzoldt is turning out to be giving me a new moment in my ongoing interest in the origin of prints in broadsheets and the like in Renaissance Germany, it started with a mailing, an inosculation.

then Waetzoldt compared Durer’s dance of death with Rethels in the 19^th century, which I did not know about

this then intersects with Baker, and interest in gibberish symbols and letters in apotropaic charms

but, then, today, this morning, John Currin is weirdly synchroetherrhoe, introduces me to a new painter, and his works relate to my ongoing interests in the origin of prints

Gedechnus nach Engebrechtzs* seems about right as John Currin captures the zeitgeist of our neopremodern moment of mob irrationality and decadence where the empty rituals of the seasons are more important than the public good and collecting trophy heroines in whose reflection one might bask is more important than relieving poverty and preventing covid death; and does so by channelling an equally deathsick era when the emperor spends his time writing a chivalrian romance to his dead queen, the archbishop of Brandenberg is so death-struck he collects hundreds of relics guaranteeing himself ONE HUNDRED THOUSAND YEARS off his time in purgatory, so by comparison to today why wouldn’t ultimately the perfect relic of one’s fungiblob mediastoned decrepitude and fullbody black out of S&M midlife crisis be memorializing yourself in an NFT sex tape cum high hundredsofthousandsofdollars art? And yet all the moral tsskers will still raise your face from your dinner photo and say Currin is sexist (um, it is satire! just like I said when I reviewed him back in ’89). At Gagosian.

*memorials after Engebrechtzs, mentioned in press release! a fab painter I missed!

Currin avec bikini, very little I can show here, Gagosian; all censored except corners; crazy decadent ladies (likely saints!) of Cornelius Engebrechtzs; Giant Knights seen fighting in the sky over Germany, 1540s; KK black out at Met, 2021AD; typical memento mori, walking over one’s grave; more horror in the sky over Nuremberg, sundogs,1566; Max describes Mary, his wife; she, him; victory of the empty sign, media vorticing. All my zining. Signs and wonders.

these are from the Triumph Procession of Max I

and in a wild meander last night, from a comment that W made about the White King and the Therenetc, Max I wrote three chivalric epics, poetry, and all have illustrations, fo another whole body of images from the time of the prototype space of prints.

But the pay off, and I mentioned it as to maps, was W’s one paragraph on the Blood Rain plague as a sign of the times, then

and when I looked into it, I found that two different bloggers had at last looked into the Kreuzwunder page in German over in the German internet, which up until recently was the only place online to find images of the movement or moment. And, then, too, meteoros.com adjudicated the science of not just the Blood Rain, but when it separated out, for rationaists to find the more extravagant forms to be sun dog related. and this lead to an opening up by finding Hans Glaser, and all the broadsheets he did at the time, which is a refinement of the press, so

More discoveries. When the blood rain crosses appeared in the sky with lots of other forms, in wild formations, things got weird, scientific explanation is that they saw sun dogs, and “misread” them. Except the fighting knights in the sky, the weapons, all that, they sound like hallucinations, my guess is they lived under a “low sky”* in a “village of dreams” where the wobble-wobble or in-between** was directly over them, but the fear vector switched to ON, so strobing started, entoptic CEV phenomena flipped to be seen in the external world (LeFanu eye***), they saw horror, and the harder they looked the more externalized psychodynamics they saw****, it’s how Durer saw the Apocalypse over the rooftop, and it became, as long as fear was up*****, “real.” See, now, if I did a movie on the 30 years war all the war would be porcupinal under very, very trippy skies.

*a trope, suffered by the paranoid. **between waking and sleeping.***my name for flip see LeFanu’s Green Tea.****oh yes I’m going to try to graph.*****all it takes is to flip the fear switch to OFF, which in Deutschland then did not happen til 1648. Needs to happen NOW.

Many more of these have been mined from broadsheets published by one Hans Glaser, a new discovery, he is best known for third image, now explained, apparently Jung writes about it in a 1959 book on ufos, must read, the three suns visions is another variant, as is, apparently, the aurora borealis was visible in Germany then, fourth image, others not here, all images from broadsheets 1500-1570, thanks to meteoros site for all this.

so, W sparked a super-meander to update my keeping track on the Blood Rain phenomena.

but, again, as stated, I think to look back from a purely rational-scientific perspective and just say well they were mistaking what they were seeing, and correct them, that is ridiculous. It is truer in terms of capturing their habitus and even umwelt if it became a thing,

So, my method is, take the most famous example by Glasner, his attempt to figure out what this was, and figure it out

Glasner says, in the text, that at daybreak, there appeared on the sun, two red slashes, downward. My argument is that, either by media, and its settlement at how mediation will look, people then in paranoia lived under a “low sky”. That was, simply, the wobble-wobble itself, the in-between, which they thought was just above their rooftops, and that was where dramas of a religious nature were played out (I concede this construct might well have been developed in prints, and then spilt back out by reverse agency into reality). Living in the village of dreams, in fact, life at the time cast most people into a slow way of living and sensing that might well be compared to light dreaming. Were, in fact, people living in hypnagogy in times past? A model might be: They are looking up from the entoptic/hypnagogic, with as stated the fear vector turned to ON, and le fanu eye switched to external mode, they gazed up, and saw vigilogogic CEVs, that is, closed eye visualizations, often of the worst case scenario sort. Thus, Glasner describes seeing two curved red slashes on the rising sun, something like this

that is, in fear, in the core symbolic posture, the suspect vector has switched to on, and this sort of slashing gesture, doubled, would be called a Refluxive closing-in event, not unlike when Savalas stepping out of the tv into Tiger’s living room in Pretty Maids in a Row, and so those red slashes are an alert of a trouble getting close.

Then he says that blood color was above and below the sun, and then that a round ball of partly dull black ferrous color appeared, so, this to me seems like a further contraction back in, in response to an attack, to the sleep demon attack stage

this means that he has as it were cringed before the spectacle, and in backing off drawn it further in toward him. At present, I can only construe the black ball is a premonition of the Black Sun behind the Sun, and with an eclipsing relevance.

Then, next, he says three was a torus, and with blood suns all around it; and then in one case three blood suns aligned, and in another four in a square, something like this.

this would be a vision of a sleep demon or suspect monster coming in on one, lowering, spinning down.

Then, next, it is at this point that the form begins to spread out toward ambient space and this generated more globes, but between them crosses, with blood-red strips between, and then two big rods formed on the right and the left.

then he says at this point the globes began to fight amongst themselves, every which way; and that some of the globes outside the sun flew into the sun, and others flew out, and this went on, this fighting amongst themselves, for OVER AN HOUR. This sounds, in its structure, like a Toad Road light dream, in which one can get caught in a stichomythia, comparing two things back and forth, for hours, all of it here projected turbulently into the in-between just above (because in the sky).

then they became fatigued, so they all fell to the earth, and crashed with a great deal of smoke,

then it is only at this point, after an hour, that the smoke settles in or smoulders and out of it, as if coming round from below, where it was dissipating, that it then rose back up into the original position of the red slashes, to appear now as a black spear pointing west, and Glasner says heaven knows what this sign meant.

he then says a prayer, chastising his weak followers for making light of these high signs, and that’s that, amen.

So, here is how I work it out.

compared to the original

how it reads to me is, he saw at dawn the sun become a demon, with red horns; that agitation then caused the sun to as if explode into lots of red globes, made of blood. This could be an entoptic sight through his fearfully half=closed eyes, or perhaps an example of a dysmetropsia in which he sweat blood like jesus and saw it in what he looked at, by a flip of Le Fanu eye, that happening because of fear and panic. This all happens as the suspect vector comes in close, to the level of the Refleucive, so it is all now media taking hiim in. And, then, he feels it all come close in on him, at the sleep demon phase, that is the war of forms. This leaves him transfixed for over an hour. It feels like a spell, not unlike the ones Laura Mars (1978) or even Madison in Malignant (2021) suffered, for a full hour (when I get a crenellation attack, a silent migraine, only twice a year, they usually hang around for about forty five minutes). So, at this point, this is the whole battle swinging round under the bed, or the equivalent, to then separate off into good or bad. The fact that at this point the blood globes crash and smoke, as pictured singularly (I picture it as a perfusion of the whole horizon), means that the battle is on, but he loses out to become a crepusculate, so terrified is he. This then causes him to see the defeat in the form of a black spear rising, to be taken in hand by the demon of the red sun, at dawn, and pointing West, maybe it was pointing to where next the plague would go, or telling my ancestors, if in town, time to go west, all the way to America, in any case, this all feels like a fairly exact description of a psychodynamic soul battle which works out in the negative.

I have seen these forms, that is, a centralized presence move down through, looming; then, spin in. I have not previously linked this figuratively to the battle going on as the vector closes in, but it makes sense. The closing in for Madison in Malignant meant that the demon twin crawled over her, blackly; the closing in for Laura Mars meant that the killer revealed himself to her before her. If as per the psychodynamic of the conjure vector, the split here is to the crepusculate, and then the dropping away of the perikionos, which is torched. And I have in the past, if not recently, acknowledged that a whole horizon of a level can be activated in such sightings. So, it sort of works.

In a simple psychodynamic graph, in the abstract, on the model of the suspect vector, the spin on the vector in on one stirs up rotation which gradually closes in in the ambient attack posture and in this case, if he is cast down more than usual, it rises up a demon, who in the end wins, thus brandishing the black spear. I will call this the Demon of the Spear (with connection the spear of destiny, kept in Nuremberg), Thus, in broadsheet form, the demon Xyston (spear)

and my demon scirpograph

the Vision of April 14, 1561, the demon Xystor 9 16 21

Thus, Glaser, as a figure, he was traumatized by this dark vision, which ended up with him haunted by a crepusculate, and himself reduced to a perikionos statuelike being; and so after that it kept recurring, he kept looking for it, and thus the rash of interest as the years went by in the halos or all kinds, the three suns, which is Cerberus, and etc, to work out. The other idea today, to perhaps shore up by paucity of line, make use of sigil lines to delineate the forms of demons, this then Xyston

As part of this “culture” I did have a look at C Jungs Flying Saucers (1957), a copy of the original on the internet archive, where I am doing so much of my reading lately (and currently stalled on Carlyle’s Frederick the Great and Simplissimissus). I mentioned this in a post,

As part of this “culture” I did have a look at C Jungs Flying Saucers (1957), a copy of the original on the internet archive, where I am doing so much of my reading lately (and currently stalled on Carlyle’s Frederick the Great and Simplissimissus). I mentioned this in a post,

Jung’s concept is formalist par excellence, arguing that UFOs represent the rotundum, a four-sided form which makes people for a moment feel whole

the rotundum represents the whole self, versus the ego, and makes use of whole numbers like four, the tetrakyts

this four is important, and has psychological power because of Jung’s concept of psychophysical parallelism, which sounds like a kind of twinfire, between body and mind, this provides the bridge

he says that on this side, numbers, for example, are just numbers, but on the other side of the borderline, between body and mind, they are entities with great power. In this, and in the crossing over, are invested strange psychic abilities like synchronicity, which he wrote about so much

so the rotundum leads to the quincux, the quintessence

he then finds entities which pass over, such as Hermes katachthonias, so Jung believed in “demons” too (but mostly daimons, positive demons, but with dangerous sides) , This is his reading of the Fire Sower in the painting above, and pretty closely a parallel of my reading of the 1566 incident over Nuremberg.

but when Mercury passes over and becomes invested with the power, he becomes something much more powerful, the figure of the essence, Exhydragyrosis, this capacity he is Mercurius, the bringer of healing

it seems clear that Jung was deeply influenced by WW2, and even dates the most recent rash of UFO sightings to the foo fighters seen in WW2 Germany

ironically, and playing, I applied the notion of the rotundum to false cult worship of heroes in liberal culture

But this image in fact occurred to me some time ago

but, now the question is, how do I view other phenomena recorded, over time?

End of part 1.

Sandra Mujinga and “Witch Hunt”: dreaming as personal witchcraft.

rev., Nov 14, 2020.  

I made a comment yesterday in protesting some aspects of an exhibit, Witch hunt, in Copenhagen,

the idea is, in rational culture uniform methods for dealing with things develop, resulting in norms settling in. Witchcraft would be, then, an alternative way. But, more than that, witchcraft would be an unique personal impossible way likely based on the pathway by which one dreams. That is, witchcraft is the psychodynamics of your brain, as opposed to any other, and since most people adhere to norms provided them from other sources, to develop one’s own way is witchcraft.

It looks like this work is of that nature, entirely her own

the mistake often made with this sort of thing in the west is, it is creative and metaphorical. That is, it is art, therefore not real. But, here again, what distinguishes this from being art about witchcraft and actual witchcraft is that the person doing it completely believes in the reality of it, and getting to where one wants to go, and so it is not fictive in the medium, but frontal in the prototype space, part of a cult of self in the world.

This off the cuff remark made me think. Since I went out the other day to take pictures of a tree being brought down in the alley, I have been enchanted by the fact that the space from 1) my front door; 2) past the rock I live under; 3) past the door of death; 4) the path between; 5) the ladder; 6) the platform; 7) the camp; 8) the looking in the window to see 9) the closets that bunker me–this is, somehow, equivalent to a dream pathway. But it is mostly the ladder that has stuck in my mind as I saw it made use of as part of the “under the bed” climax of Gretel & Hansel, then in Sinister (2013), I developed a wider model of the under the bed drama that occurred when the conjure vector closes in on its final stages, the conjure demon and the Sleep demon, and have populated that final drama, all of it, in my model, taking place “under the bed,” including Telemon, Telesphorus, Corposants, Crepusculates, and others. It occurs to me then that the formation around my personal space is not reflective of an entire dream sequence, but simply of the climactic part of it, the under the bed sequence.

then, to superimpose over my micro-geography, here

so, the conjure demon appears at the door; then you step outside and perceive a frisson, or spell-ing, the door next door, the door of death; you avert from that by blocking it out with the rock (the red rock painter comes into it too, marking the way at this point); then you encounter the ladder, by which you climb up to the crisis

that is engaged between the presider over the camp

the dwarf telesphorus, red, then he splits danger with his machine the telemon, who is death who has his year roamed iclose

from the blue angel who looks into the window of the empty room of the neighbor

where he died, to promise rising above that–a corposant outcome rather than a crepusculate, embodied by the row of closets that barricade me neighbors (an o me explains why I heard nothing).

Thus, while the Strange Picture Room, as I worked out in Screaming Skull (1958), is the nexus between waking and dreaming, the under the bed space is, more specifically, the crisis space, which starts up the engagement with conjure forces. This posits a second form of incubative therapeutics, one remaining fixed on defining one’s soul by the overall dream structure one follows to dreams; but, then, the other focused more particularly on the under the bed space crisis, the final events of confrontation which bring about, for example, a sighting of the god, etc.

I worked this out with Sinister (2013), in the Spring, this the drama.

that is, the conjure figure forms, in this case it is the children ghosts, come into the under the bed space. In that space, he is haunted, it makes him go splat, so he cannot see the haunting conjure figures, who in that process are evolving into Bughuul. He walks the house, classic Black Toad Road stuff, a trail of torture, and posturing, he is the pater familias, like in the Roman feast of the Manes, throwing black beans behind his left shoulder, to chase the ghosts he knows are there off. Then, the sun rises not only on him, but on the art, but it also brings up the first presence or shadow of Bughuul, left on the curtain. It is very well done, in quite accurate detail. Then, spaced out through the daughter, he sees the Blue Angel emerge into reality. THEN, he is further splatted, dressed down by the wife. And this then sets him up for the last fall, which is climbing up the ladder, to the lattice platform transformed, now controlled by the Corposant dream demon, Bughuul. Bughuul appears, whether on film or in person is not clear

which causes a very rare occurrence of a waking nightmare splat, a tumble in shock down the ladder, to splat again, thus finally eliminated in the passing over of the power, subject to and now defeated by the dream demon

so he splats

In this sequence, however, at least I have further characterized the progressively worse nature of the approach looks which a demon gives one as he comes in one you. There is the presence, then the Figment, which is simply when you know that it is there, for real, because, like the next day, it is still there, so that confirms it for you; then, next step, a most scary step, is the Famulus, which is when an inanimate Figment form suddenly turns animate, and turns to look at you, the point, the action, that makes it malevolent, game on. Then, as the conjure demon is manifest, he comes at you. But, then, it seems like the Under the Bed space it must pass through, underneath you, splits it into not two, but three: here the children become the helpers, the Blue Angels, Hawke is knocked down to become the Sacrifical Lamb, walking the toad road He then must submit to torture, then to climbing the ladder, to be shocked off of it, and in this with the Blue Angels elevated to having a poppet place in the work of the Corposant in possessive inspiration of you. It is the demon in full, a supernatural being, Bughuul, who rules. But it also happens that after this victory, “you” are knocked back down and out, and both exorcise and apompically get out of there, in response, in an enantiodromion.

In Gretel and Hansel (2020), I did not entirely understand the working out of the torture room at the end. But, in that two part finale Gretel, somewhat confusingly, has been made the Corposant, she finds the victim, Hansel

then a Blue Angel rises against her, out of the muck (more like a Black Angel, but)

but she is all tatted up

in this phase of being in the under the bed, it is revealed that the feast upon which they have been feasting, is really made of the guts of massacred children, by way of a witch spell. But, then, in this context, the menorah represents the Black Toad Road, its various gates, at least four posts of a bed, it is a grill, not unlike the one Cushing encountered in his dream in House that dripped Blood. She must now grapple her way up, it is also related to light, or the process of becoming a Corposant, so it serves as if the instrument of the passage on the Narrow Path  (I would say, in general, it is arranged by Telesphorus)

as such

she, the young witch, is, without question, the equivalent of the Blue Angel, that is, the haunting entity of the demon dividing off its weak part, for the powerful to take over. The black fingers means they have been blackened by laboring on the Black Toad Road

Gretel is sat at the table, to watch it all go down in the way the witch wants, so in that scenario it is the Blue Angel is the young witch, the old witch gives way, Hansel is the Sacrificial Lamb, and then I guess Gretel defeated by the new witch, transcending Blue Angeldom, is the future new power, a corposant. In this shot, then, the menorah is simply a sorting device telling us that personae are here, by the order of black magic, being mixed and exchanged in odd ways, as per the lore. It is a Nemesis sorting mechanism, who decides who should live and who should die.

but, now, as she watches, Hansel is sent up a ladder to sit in a metal cage to be burned (so very much like the Baphomet bronze bull in Antrum) Then, by the parsing, the menorah is in front representing the process of separation of powers in the last swing, under the bed, on the Black Toad Road, which it signifies (and which, now, I see, the earlier artifact also foreshadowed). Then, the young witch or the Blue Angel is burned on the other side, by the sudden power of Gretel to cause an object, a Famulus fork, to pin her to the wall, and things having separated out, tell me this

does this not look like this?

it’s rather startling, it is Hansel not Hawke going up the ladder, the fact that we are in a torture is signified by not the Black Toad Road but by a menorah; then there IS an enantiodromion, that is, a quick reversal of fortune by way of quick flying action, then there is the exorcising fire, this time it burns blue to only promise destruction of the Blue Angel, and she in this posture is as if taking Hansel’s place, he starts to come down, she to burn up

she is even reduced to a spindly skeleton, clunk

splat

then as per the Conjure Vector, out of this battle, splitting figures, parsing out the power, it is Gretel who emerges as the Corposant, who takes over. But, wow, in one movie, they make use of ghost children haunting, a child’s drawing, a fight with the wife, a pater familias vigil, then two forms of exorcism, fire and flight; this other movie, six years later, makes use of a revelation of finding a lost child, the feast of entrails, the rising of the Blue Angel, the surrender of the old witch, the sacrifice of Hansel, then the victory of Gretel, all to lead to pretty much the same thing, that is, transformation of self at the end of a frightening sequence of conjure scaring. It is quite something.

Finally, in that treatment, another personage in the under the bed space, the Green dragon (which has not gained currency, but I suppose the Green dragon is the archetypal crepusculate, as I later called them).

There is an odd detail, as in the original (see above), when Hawke looks into the tea cup to see a reflection of green, which he cannot identify, so thinks nothing of it, he drinks it, it turns out to be poison. We now get an even more “sacrilegious” version of the same thing, and it seems that it has been put into the chalice, which holds the wine, to turn the eucharist into poison.

this is a very strange evocation of green, but it rings today, because I continue to brood upon how it is that so many people have fallen for the hydroxychloroquine ruse in the current fight against covid, and with chloride, I noted that it was pale green, and the Greek word for that, is Chloros, the first name of Athena. I worked it out, a propos a shower scene in my own life, ew, on FB

as soon as I thought of this, I thought of who is the dream guide, guard, presider over the under the bed state, and if all of THIS is happening as I posit now, in a very much more lively state of the under the bed state as all of this is

then he is watching, he is Telesphorus

maybe he is the one who processes the splitting,

whatever this is, because it IS a thing, he stands by the bed leg, guiding, maybe here, lower right

but then, it is interesting, in this case, in the transference, the torture film that translates immediately into the next torture murder. Here it is a priest who thinks he is drinking the wine, but the bad twin, or someone, previously, the previous bad kid in the line, poisoned him, so they are all caught. Perhaps THIS is where the chloros is, where Chloros, goddess who presides over the split when it goes bad, that is, when the Blue Angel turns into what I will call the Green dragon, his evilly possessed other half, under the aegis of a very primitive form or warfare, even in the killing of brothers.

in this primitive form, Athena would simply be Erichthonios, the serpent child, whom the three girls let out of the basket (I will leave this here). And this happens precisely when the split occurs, but then it goes bad, that is, the Blue Angel turns into the Green dragon, and so the god is a demon and kills the dreamer

all of this complicated working out of more details of the under the bed space care of the movie Sinister.

I know it might seem entirely crazy that I have posited that in the brain there is a monitor on the body when it lies in bed in the lattice position that nonetheless keeps watch over the under the bed space, which makes us humans with the bodies we have uncomfortable in the very nature of our creaturliness. But, then that when what I construe as the Conjure demon arrives close to us, he then gets in on us, that is, attacks, by splitting us. If this is positive, then the self is reduced to a Blue Angel in the hands of a Corposant, if however, this goes bad, then the Green dragon is split off from a demon in full, a Malispirit. But I am seeing this split all over the place, since January one, and, now, horribly, I see that twins are often used as the very sifting device to dramatize the inner battle to allow the good side to survive over the betrayal of the bad side. Then, in a redemptive way, since they replace each other, so that one does not feel the let down of a loss of one of them, to recover (this somehow comes very close to Girard’s notion of why twins messed up the sacrificial solution to problems, they provided an easy, have your cake and eat it too “out”). So, the Evil Twin, the sequitur, is here as if the quintessential Malispiritus!

but, now, the funny thing is, the Evil Twin trope is made use in Sinister 2. It is necessary to remind viewers that this is a trope, or mechanism, in horror, and not a drizzling of human interest over the horror which, for nonhorror writers, who precisely view horror movies outside-in inside-out, that is, backwards, it becomes a “drama” with a strong reality in it, that rises up past the clichés of horror. In fact, in New York mag, this writer did precisely this, and he actually said that the emotional turmoil of the twins’ fight was the essence of the movie, when in fact this valorizing of the cliché is benign singleton biased fascination with the evil twin stereotype, its pretty funny, and entirely wrong (the notion that an evil twin emerges because there is no saving alibi by which he can rationalize a disappointment, because he is the same as the one who gets things, is the classic stereotype, and utterly untrue, twinship is not a lab for your singleton envies; I mean, he THINKS he is being nice, but he is simply retelling the oldest of stereotypes!).

Thus, with this excursus I now place two new characters to figure out the psychodynamics of a place in the brain My guess is that the under the bed place is wherever in the brain is the element that makes our body still as we sleep is, that is, not just the Blue Angel, but the Green dragon; not just Telesphorus but Chloros, the nightmare poisoner, not just a Corposant, but a Malispiritus, it figures itself out. I am still a bit unsure over the nature of the splitting of self that goes on in horror, but it is now emerging as something that seems to be everywhere.

This brings me to Sandra Mujinga. She has a large piece, Ghosting, in Witch Hunt. It is shown, in fact, almost as if the climax, from afar, as a mere presence; then upclose, the Famulus that moves on your eye; then it closes in, if you come in under it.

I have seen her work previously, posting from this in January, I think. What is current in her environment is that it is scenographic. Also, it is part of the more occult discourse of invisibility, as opposed to the representation 101 which “grounds” so much of current political diversity discourse in our politics. As such, it parallels my own exploration of a talisman protecting that, that I worked out in January. Here, too, she arranges things sequentlally according to a “screen logic.” Now, in grounding her work in computer gaming and in the technicalities of computing, she retreats from my reception of it behind the techwall of know how or digital nativity that I will never become part of. In the world of screen logic, she is the native, I am the immigrant who simply does not have the means to integrate. Vis a vis her I live in a subordinate, entome state. That said, a screen logic would count as a special way of doing it, which would make of her work what I call witchcraft. It also makes use of forms which are familiar in horror. The green shift is suspicion and worry, you enter in

then as you come in, you begin to sense that there are beings in the room with you

this immediately puts you in the company of the guardians of the under the bed space, that is, the space in the gallery is arranged as if enacting the crisis. One of these is Telesphorus, another is a crepusculate, another is a Blue Angel. But you can only get out in a positive way, by delving. Thus far, I have placed he Truth Shot, a key prototype picture which alone, found at the bottom of a drawer or some place in nightmare, somewhere in the eldritch formation, and discovered only at the bottom of the whoosh or splat, so here.

But how it fits in with a conjure vector, or IF the truth shot is, in fact, discovered under the bed, is the question. But, in this, Mujinga takes you in to see a truth shot, strange framed photos mounted in the dark (they might also be paintings, then possibly to be placed in the strange picture room.

There are also other breadcrumbs along the way, they look like computer notebooks wrapped or bagged in plastic, to be viewed, but at one’s feet, as if forensically examined. These too might be littered on the pathway when one is under the bed in the crisis (reminding me of Phillip Simon’s xmas piece). Then, at last, the Blue Angel, to take you up out, appears, here it is a hologram. My sense of how this is described is that you enter into the space, your eyes adjust, you sense the figures, then follow the breadcrumbs, then there is a darkening of the light, and the hologram, the climax, appears, it’s pretty thrilling

https://contemporaryartdaily.com/2020/01/sandra-mujinga-at-bergen-kunsthall/?fbclid=IwAR3saow_qYOwy8Zkh_n48OgSCmiu3y0p0_xvgAvnyWDwU-GWXRjOkvtJiaw

It is rare when I like dance when attached to contemporary art as usually dance projects the ego of the culture at large into the space to cause the dance to be rendered in the space as nothing more than an emcee, a person introducing things, a ta-da figure, showing off. But, here, she seems to keep the movements inside the envelope of the spin they are in. Also, her movements strike me as crunchy.

they are called stretched delays

that is, the human figure moves, then the echo figure, after a delay, moves. The fact that in this graphic Mujinga makes use of a typical green screen, to abstract it all from space; that there is a film of a real body, but then it is outlined over by both white and black lines, and bleached out a bit, makes of it a creature with screen logic, as if from a phone squiggle.

some of the movements also seemed crunchy, though not jerky enough to be entirely so.

crunchy body movement is the province of demons, but of a class reemerging in mist and miasma after a submergence or breakdown, which I call styros. If they crinkle up from tinfoil, they are foils. If they are the result of some genetic mutation they are xxy’s. The delay here might render them, then, as demons. That said, they are remind me in their simple graphics of the graphics I liked in matinee movies I watched in the early 60s which made use of animation of a solar sort, to make banshees. I had an uncanny encounter with banshees last week, from looking under the rock of both Wes Lang’s paintings (Almine Rech), and then memories of the Scarecrow of Romney Marsh, and then too the banshees in darby o’gill. So, I encountered banshees.

Since Banshees come in from afar, as here, from above

but then try to get at a dying person to take them away to death, they are emissaries of thanatopsis, come down into the place of the Figment, then to come into the space of the under the bed. They might be the beings in mind which inhabit the bedsheets, or dustsheets, of the bed, animated by fear if it comes to that. Something like this, overseeing, witnessing, conducting from the periphery, the drama.

the larger issue is that both the scarecrow and the banshee reemerged in my consciousness after a sixty year sleep because they were buried under the rock of two notable forms which I experienced in popular culture, The Beatles, then James Bond, meaning that mainstream material-rational culture serves to create a simulated, impostor culture of imposed likes on one, to block out the more disturbing implications of those buried images. Under the rockiness would be, generally, all dreaming under the Rock of consciousness.

Mujinga’s show had a very good press release (my bold)

“Sandra Mujinga’s exhibition SONW – Shadow of New Worlds presents a hologram, video installations, sculptural works and photographs by the artist in her largest solo presentation to date.The exhibition draws on Afro-futurist strategies to propose invisibility as a survival strategy, both as a speculative gaze to the future and in relation to the political reality of our time.

In Bergen Kunsthall’s largest gallery, a figure with vaguely human features hovers in mid-air in a darkened space without clear boundaries. The protagonist of Sandra Mujinga’s new hologram video Flo (2019) appears like a video game avatar or a science fiction superhero, and is inspired by Ann-Marie Crooks, a Jamaican-American former bodybuilder and wrestler; better known in the 1990s by the stage name Midnight. The work is projected through a large-scale hologram screen, a simple but highly effective technique that creates a three-dimensional illusion. The soundtrack is composed with digitally processed strings that are used to create an emotionally charged atmosphere. The figure, that may at first glance appear as a digital animation, is in fact one of Mujinga’s regular collaborators, the actor and DJ Adrian Blount (GodXXX Noirphiles), dressed in one of the artist’s wearable sculptures. The outfit is both artwork and costume, affecting the actor’s mobility with its inflated muscles and superhuman proportions. The hologram technology is frequently used in spectacular stage settings to resurrect dead performers or celebrities, such as Tupac Shakur, seemingly alive on stage. Throughout history, new media technologies have often been used in attempts to connect with the afterworld or to revive the past. In this work, named after the artist’s mother, technology acts as a bridge between our own world and an imagined world beyond ourselves, linked to both science fiction and technological performance.

In the adjoining spaces, sculptural works and video images form part of an integrated installation in which visitors navigate among oversized, hollow human figures made from textiles. Seven hooded figures loom high above average human size, in ambiguous constellations of guarding, gathering or confronting. With a starting point in the science fiction genre’s idea of “world-building”, Mujinga outlines alternative worlds where the interplay between visibility and invisibility, the transparent and the opaque, reflection and camouflage, renders new modes of existence and identity. Mujinga’s work is inspired by writers of speculative fiction (for example Nnedi Okorafor, N. K. Jemisin and Octavia Butler), as well as posthumanist thinkers such as Donna Haraway and Anna Tsing. In a world that was not made equal for all bodies, and which is threatened with destruction, survival strategies for the future cannot build on the maintenance of an existing order but must reach out towards something else. Science fiction functions here as a template for exploring imaginary worlds where humans are not necessarily at the centre. Some of the sculptures evoke elephants or octopuses, with elements resembling trunks and tentacles. Mujinga is interested in how animals develop survival strategies and adapt to hostile surroundings, for example when elephants stop growing tusks or change from diurnal into nocturnal animals to avoid human poachers“.

My comment: the sinister place which requires invisibility is, of course, in my system, the under the bed space. That is, in terms of the conjure vector, the figures have already come into the crisis. The black figures are the danger lurking, the monsters under the bed. One comes in, though, searching for Telesphorus, to give you an answer, in the Truth Shot. Then, in a Chloros or green dragon atmosphere, not her neutral green screen, but in the context of this sort of presentation in the culture at large, the color shift of suspicion, deviant behavior, evil conspiracy, this then justifies the invisible strategy. And from that the Corposant that emerges from the encounter is the hologram, which then, either combining  with or taking from the Blue Angel, one rises up, surviving this time. The dances provide a picture of some of the pivots required in working your way through. That some of their movements suggested the demonic to me, that again refers to the possibility of defeat or poison which will result in the implosion of the Telemon into a miasmus in the base of the under the bed zone, for a demon styro to rise up.

Interesting enough, Robert Bloch, a long time ago, seemed to know this. In his story for Three dangerous Women (1977), Ronnie Blakeley says put off goodbye to a childhood bedroom that was kept as if in wax by her mother, all her old dolls and stuffed animals there. She is chagrined, promising never to return.

it is also weirdly suggested that the mother developed such as cult of wanting it back that one of the stranger dolls ended up seeing her off at here tomb

this cult-ivation of her, then, making of her a future telemon of the cult, causes Blakely to have not only echolating head aches and dizzy spells, but extreme pain in her back, left side.

she is gradually turning into a hunchback

finally she is lured back to the house, and in a cult ceremony turns out that her mother making of her a cult figure involved taking one of those stuffed animals made over into a demon, for it to live inside her, to now come out, a green dragon

then its second job in terms of securing her presence at the cult, is getting rid of interfering Keir dullea, so he gets him in the car, the demon is a big-eyed reptile form of a stuffed animal, a strange compound form, stuffed animal and green dragon of styro implosion.

and the truly uncanny coincidence is that, having explored the “demon” Anarchy in Turner’s painting, now called The death of Anarchy, it has a psallictive quality, but this brought me back to the tate’s Gothic Imagination show of 2006, again, one of the most influential shows for me in the century, and in one early comic print a ghost or demon at a tomb is being made fun of, and itt is just like this stuffed-animal-green dragon compound, a bogey in the under the bed space.

George Montard Woodward
Gravedigger and Monster circa 1795

A bizarre-looking supernatural creature alarms a gravedigger, who drops his spade in surprise. Woodward’s watercolour makes the most of this opportunity for physical comedy. The spectre is a crazy, halfanimal, half-human creature, most resembling a giant puppy with diminutive wings. The gravedigger is a stocky rural type

back to Mujinga (my bold)

“The exhibition spaces are thus installed in accordance with what could be called a “screen logic”, where the spatial presence of an artwork is considered on a par with the same work’s appearance in digital images. Many of us view more artworks on screen, via websites and social media, than we do in a physical space, and both the art object and the medium of the exhibition today always act on several “platforms” simultaneously; in a physical and spatial encounter with a bodily present viewer, and also “intangibly”, on larger and smaller screens, often within the viewer’s own private environment. Mujinga is actively using this double presence among other things, by playing out doubles within the exhibition itself. Two of the rooms in Bergen Kunsthall are fitted out almost as a doubling of themselves, where a similar situation or “tableau” is repeated in two different versions, as echoes of each other. The exhibition space is used as an adaptable and changeable space, comparable to how a digital image can be subjected to endless edits and changes, without losing its essence. On the web one can find Mujinga’s sculptures acting in radically different situations, from illuminated white gallery spaces to darkened stages. Or as here: bathed in a green light, as a filter added to the appearance of the artworks. The ambient lighting colours and connects the rooms in the exhibition, with a green shade reminiscent of the green screen known from video production, where a green background is superimposed with other images, making the relationship between figure and background fundamentally unstable and interchangeable. At the end of the fourth exhibition space, the green light blends with the sculptural material of Coiling, made out of a similarly coloured textile.

“The black darkness and the green light are opposites, but also two sides of the same coin in Mujinga’s work. In an interview with Olamiju Fajemisin, made for the upcoming publication for the exhibition, Mujinga explains how she has worked actively with green screens for a long time, both as a conceptual and material starting point: “… and it’s ‘black’ for me. (…) In my videos, when you see a black background, it’s green screen. It allows me to host ideas and alternative spaces. Green is ultimately Black.” The question of what it means to exist in the dark is a recurring topic within the exhibition. The darkness here refers both to invisibility based on hierarchies and exclusion in society, and at the same time to visibility and invisibility in the face of an increasing (often commercially motivated) surveillance. On the one hand, it is about the productive aspects for rebellion or peace of mind that invisibility brings – on the other hand, about invisible stories, collective amnesia and about who writes the history versus who gets written out and overlooked.”.

The release plugs Mujinga into a number of discourses, and in its interest in ambiguity and invisibility it may relate to my particular treatment of the representation debate. It most certainly counters the positivist exploitation of the representational 101 discourse which underscores in a bowdlerized form the politics of diversity in the US&A today. There are a number of aspects of this simple, seeing yourself reflected in a representation gives you a role model to imitate, or as AOC said it, “see me, be me”. But what if, as in my case, deep down, my representation involved in itself being taken as part of a set, and it most definitely caused me issues as in being represented I was a twin to my brother and my representation reminded me of that every day (again, I only address this issue hypothetically). The release is also too binary, but if one can discern the wriggle or wiggle by which Mujinga navigates the under the bed crisis stage, then, yes, that would be her witchcraft.

An added point here, which I have of late felt the need to clarify again, is the difference between art and religion. Burkert argues that religion has certain insistences upon the reality of its belief system that art does not have, though I don’t know if I think this. He starts with Geertz’ definition of religion as

1) a system of symbols

2) which act to establish powerful, persuasive and long-lasting moods and motivations in men by

3) formulating concepts of a general order of existence.

4) and clothing these conceptions with such an aura of factuality that

5) the moods and motivations seem uniquely realistic.  5

Burkert then clarifies that it is the process of working with these symbols and interacting based don them which makes them into a their own reality, that is, reverse agency, which makes religion religion. He has three principles.

1) religion deals with the nonobvious, the unseen, the adoletes, unclearness or nonevidence; its actions and functions do not result in immediate practical functions (and the unclearness is emphatically denied by insiders);

2) special forms of experience, meditation, vision and ecstasy are created to get beyond the unclearness so the paranormal is called upon to contact the supernatural; this involves nonobvious entities or partners, communication with which interferes with normal life by its indirect special means.r3) a claim for priority and seriousness, its ultimate concern (Tillich) THIS is what primarily separates religion from art as art makes use of an as if play that can be dismissed “In religion there is a postulate of priority and necessity of certainty that given thoughts and actions are essential and unavoidable”. All other priorities are downgraded, the ego even has to stand back, with submission and veneration, there is also limits of use, the taboo and the sacred, it therefore also sanctions violence. “This absolute seriousness, derived from dealing with unseen superiors, is the prerogative of the sacred that characterizes religion” 8 (Burkert, Creation of the Sacred, 1983).

By this reading, Burkert places religion in the prototype space, but also, by my reading, in a fixation space, that is, an exploitation space. I am not sure I can get by this problem at present, religion too often coopts rationality and reality to exploit other areas of life. Anyways, one’s personal witchcraft is usually yet a form of play, or art, so does not have the seriousness of religion; certainly, my particular form of “religion” does not have such a claim, but at times it does feel like there is a push to make real again by ostension and reverse agency counterrealities created in play for witchcraft or art.

The Blood on Satan’s Claw (1971) and a miasmic hell on earth bedeviling, with mention of Witchfinder General (1968), part 2 of 2.

rev, Jul 31, 2021.

The rape and, I think, murder of Cathy is certainly the worst thing they do, horrifying.

the key plot development here is that she is marked to be taken in, or sacrificed in some way, because she has contracted the devil’s skin.

it is grey, fishy, a black bile, almost black mold type corruption of skin. The question is, what is it, and how did she get it? It is chilling to watch this, when the D variant is causing covid to return, when we thought we had beat it, because there have been reports, primarily from India, about a black fungus that comes with covid, called

very eerily, I have only been able to find one picture of mucormycosis, it looks familiar

this is a bit more uncanny as in the early covid panic days (March-April, 2020), there was panic over covid toes, which at one point I actually thought I had

in a more traditional vein, it is now almost at the level of art history 101 legendry that many of the images of monsters painted by Bosch and Grunewald, as well as Schongauer, were directed at patients with ergotism from rotten rye bread, resulting in St Anthonys Fire, the burning of limbs, solved by amputation, in the renaissance, particularly in northern France and the Rhine valley homelands

the scene is activated by an almost unbearable intensity in terms of the conjure attack, when everyone closes in on you and surrounds you, and, then, when she thought she might just get away with a little sexual teasing,

they then go after her copious skirts, to bring in a stud to rape her, so this goes down to serious crime

a really nauseating detail, but to show that they were into the earthiness of life on earth is that after her petticoats are stripped off Cathy Angel takes them up and gives them a good whiff, as if to glory in her female smell, mixed with the cold sweat of terror, awful

at which point they get her entirely naked, against her will

then, I think, also, killed, in any case, Angel now smelling blood on her shears

a special quality is given to all this, as if to bury it deep in nature, in a gap between, in a blind spot in ambience, is that throughout the screaming, Ralph is running around through the forest trying to find them, to save Cathy, and he can’t, it is all just too complicated, this is almost like a reverse fairy circle in the sense that he loses all sense of direction, and it maybe even running around in circles

then he finds Cathy’s body in the woods

An Interlude.

In review I mentioned that Blood’s terror was amplified by the way that it made use of space, making the broad fields of 17 century England seem like the Wild West, wastelands of great distance that isolated each village in its own little madness. This is certainly a theme, but at this point I would discriminate between its amplified use of the fairy circle idea, in not being able to feel one’s way through space. (this may be a detail lifted from the espoused source of the script in Manson lore, as it was repeatedly stated by earwitnesses of the Tate murders that in the canyon no one could tell where the screams were coming from, this disorientation then created a gap in acoustics that let the murderers get free). The movie makes use of space as a place to get lost in, that is, ambiently, a wide open wild west of helpless space

which, of course, gives license to mischief

and particularly against Cathy

people are shown traipsing through deep woods, heavy with undergrowth

the congestion shot, getting lost in the weeds, deeper than entoptic reverie, but actually stuckness, is often present, that is, this is the woods as deadfall, detouring you out of normal life, into an occult place and occurrence, dangerous

this then presents Ralph with a problem, when he hears Cathy scream, he has lived in the area his whole life, but he cannot tell where the screams are coming from

the presence of the old people at the rite is another indication of space, as they are just stragglers or homeless travelers living out in that space who get picked up along the way

Ralph gets completely consumed by the space

when the procession comes in, we get a screenwipe, as if to erase the trail

it is all happening back of the trees, we are just peeking in on it

then the second time it screenwipes, it does not quite come out again, it swings around through a dark, smoky place, a place of sacrifice

they literally come out of the smoke, obscured

when Angel comes forwards, the beast is in the back, that is his realm, so we are in ambient epigogic space

but Ralph is looking, he asks a man who lives out there, outside in the commons, in the open space in between (about which I wrote my notorious linguistics paper in 1976 about the development of the English language in these places)

he hadn’t seen her, but he’s seen them

and still he searches

literally trying to figure out where she is based entirely on where the sounds are coming from, in this one, he runs left, pauses, waits, listens, then runs uphill towards us off left.

but by this point, all he finds is Cathy, left behind, down in the gulch in which they held the ceremony

and we only are given a far shot through the trees

then the magistrate’s son rides to fetch him back, and, again, long distance, an effort

this is all nicely done, as this expansion into ambient space makes for ambient hauntings in general, and also works as a plausibility-enhancing device, as the evil things are done in the “wild space” of a community or village. This also means that, indeed, when the monster is introduced, the movie lurches out into the epigogic space of thanatopsis, looking through the deadfall at a place of sacrifice, over a pit where the monster dwells.

But, I say the same thing about Witchfinder General (1968), as Michael Reeves makes use of space in an even more expansive way, it is, that is, all but sentient, if ambient then mostly concerned with the phthchth, the desert of meaninglessness. I like the anecdote about Reeves and Price’s disagreements on set, Price did not understand why Reeves was tamping down his acting, to make him so grim and stone-faced, but, today, that is the most immediately striking thing about the movie. But, then, there is also the space. Most of the movie is spent managing that vast space. It is mostly energized by horses racing off from this or that, from town to town. Right from the first we see that the witch is marched far out of town to the place of the gibbet, a warning place, to keep out of this town

early on, we follow troops, having to deal with ambushes in the woods

everywhere wide open, the reverie in the canopy, opening things up

the danger of the hammeresque fern underbrush, a place of ambush

this gives a logical basis to the fears of the time that things were so wide open that if a man like Price came to town, the town was helpless against him, because of its isolation. This notion of isolation is conveyed when Ogilvy hears of trouble in his fiance’s town so goes AWOL to help, only to find that, indeed, Hopkins has had the run of the place, and been able to do whatever he wanted because there was no protection

then his drive for vengeance is conveyed by his riding

riding and riding, looking for Hopkins

this then occasions the breaks in this scenario, which is, coming upon an inn, where, in picaresque tradition, adventure is found, or evil (as per Le Fanu)

then not happy there, he rides on

and on

and then Hopkins can continue his work with impunity, staying one step ahead

here too there is a sequence where directions are asked, but what he gets is a different sort of information. One of things that I loved about DeFoe’s tour of the isles, touring what he saw as the phenomenal build-up of Britain in the late 17^th century, is that he sometimes paused at intersections and roads and then reported that down that road, and then he would detail it, without going down the road. Same thing here, almost with a Sebaldian allure, he gets to the White Cliffs, then asks a local if he has heard, or even if he knows where a certain t own is, and he does, they be burning witches over there, is what he’s heard

and it is precisely in this context, a town as a blind spot, or gap in law and order, that Hopkins exploits, taking over the town, becoming the final law for the day, or week, it is so sinister, this is when then Reeves inserts this particular type of witch burning, which, now knowing that he also did the Blood Beast where in Transylvania a witch possesses Barbara Steele because she was dunked by a large contraption like this into a lake, a very effective sequence, a good movie too, and now this

and, indeed, this then occasions, just like in Tom Jones, or other novels of the picaresque, when one party is going one way, and another another, the daughter, who slept with Price to back him off her father, then, when Price’s second found that out that she used sex to put off Hopkins, so thought she was a slut, so raped her, she has fled far, to another town, and, then, surprise, with a tingle of the uncanny, and dread, indicated by the as if shaking nature of this shot, they end up again in the same town (RIP, Hillary dwyer, 2020, from covid 19)

causing her and Ogilvy, who has ended up there, to have to huddle in their hotel room (this aesthetic also worked out in Canterbury Tale), which has about it a good eccentric quality, like the hotel room in House that Dripped Blood, a refuge of last resort

it is so well done, even if it unravels some of the devices of hypnagogic or ambient horror, as sentient horror, the horror of the big wide world, of the directional of the universe always expanding away from us, the world getting ever more and more complex, it is rare, and, in fact, somewhat Kubrickian, a tone not often set in British horror (and it is certainly commendable that when Price saw what Reeves had done, he understood, and wrote him an apology). So, space, it is scary, depending on how you make use of its gaps and blindspots.

Return.

When Ralph saves another girl from getting the dunking treatment, which was de rigeur in witch movies of the time, they see the skin infection on her too

it is old lore, apparently

another curious point of convergence on Demons of the Mind, and moving into the more earth-bound demonic phase, out of the gothic into the pagan phase of British horror, is that it involves Gillian Hills getting cut by a scarificator in the context of medical bleeding

which scratches her, or rather cuts her, gently

and one thinks of Hills in her sleep scratching her stepbrother in Owl, and in general the emphasis on scratching, her being as it were the scratcher, scratching off a hide of old, to bring on a new phase. Then, the cup is heated

then affixed to where the scarfications have been made

and since his is on her hip near both her behind and vulva, it has a kinky quality to it, but, then, too, does something occult or traditional in medicine to be taken as “medical” it did, in fact, have to have a sort of witchcraft quality, that is, unreadable from the surface, and supported by some deep physical natural fact in its core, it had to have a secret code, and in cupping the secret is that, and somebody discovered this, if you heat a cup and place it over a cut wound the heat and the pressure from the cup as it clouds up will extract blood from the cut and thus gently bleed the patient.

and when I first looked that up, I googled, device which cuts skin and came up with the word DERMATOME, used in skin grafting, and, in the treatment of this, they decide the thing to do is to remove it from the body so the doctor gingerly cuts off the whole layer of what looks like fish skin, a primitive dermatome,

this not only implicates medicine with the tortures of the witchhuning times, when prickers examine every body mark to see if it is cold and unfeeling, which would prove a woman a witch

but reinforces the notion that in the transition into the 70s a harsher kind of body horror related to scratching and tearing is taking over. The movies now try to make the audience squirm with sympathetic pain, to imagine such cutting happening to them. This, of course, feeds off of lore from the witchcraft era. In a movie made back in 1968, The Witchfinder General, which I do not, in fact, apart from horrific things happening in it, consider a horror movie, much is made of pricking

and, as here, dunking, or swimming the witch, to cant-win trial of water to see if they are witches, in WG, they float, so they pull them up, only to burn them

of course, what really gets people into trouble is sex. The daughter of the vicar who is attacked for being a papist, therefore a witch, has sex with her captain no problem, without consideration of how this would look to pious puritans

and, later, she has sex with Price, just to push him off; and he is pretty much in the business of exploiting local women for sex, to get them to confess or to beg off

in his biggest show, Hopkins burns the witches, this the scene that was even, at the time, censored

here by leaning her into it

this contraption, I am sure, was not historically accurate, indeed, some argue that witches were not even, commonly, burned. But, by way of Reeves, it comes from She Beast, there, a witch is lowered into a dead lake by a contraption that is part dunking, and part burning, that is, a kind of bonfire, but really a dunking machine, to drown her.

as a result, she dies in the lake, and the lake becomes cursed, because it is believed her spirit is still in it.

then, Ogilvy and Steele lose control of their car and crash into it, and during the time it takes to rescue Steele the soul of the witch comes into her

and then manifests physically on a table, and it is a misshapen thing, possibly also the prototype to the demon Behemoth in Blood

but the thing is, von Helsing says the town, in mob mode, mishandled the whole thing, so that the witch was able to curse the town, thus, for Reeves, his goal is the describe lawless places, and what can go wrong when towns, as in Witchfinder, become lawless, a tyrant takes over, and then anything can happen like witchburnings, That lake then represents that sort of place

finally, when Ralph calls back the magistrate, because the whole town has lost its mind, that is, we are deep in the sacrificial crisis, as Girard outlined, all order by way of discrimination between social roles levelled out, and chaos loosed upon the society, he has read the book given him earlier and is now a full on witchfinder or exorciser, and comes back now armed with a very large sword to kill the beast. They approach another ritual at dusk. and Angel steps into the cleft to with thigh gap light through her legs indicate the source of her earthly power

they’ve got Ralph too now, and there is nude dancing in front of him, to entice him

and Angel brings in with her, the demon himself, present, fully present

but mysteriously so, what is it?

then the movie surprises us. In the world of the arhouse-horror overlap, some misguided critics think that a slow burn that never reaches a boil is the way to go, and that showing the monster at the end is a mistake. Not true. The classic case study of this is Night of the Demon, when it is the general consensus of the arthouse overlappers that the addition of the monster at the end of the movie ruined the movie, the director certainly thought so, but in retrospect, no, I think it MADE the movie, you have to in fact show the demon, and here, a great movie proves the point again, as they do in fact show the demon,

and since that is not such a good view, we see Wymark in fact gore it in the gut and lift it up, and this time, a clear view

and he is pretty much an unseemly, uncertain deeply strange monster, horns, almost like bat ears above

and a deeply unreal face as if just now pulled out of the clay and existing as nothing more than a few pulls of flesh, on the way still to becoming a real face, deeply unreal, scary

and he is gored and lifted up

and then tossed into the fire

which breaks the spell

The exciting aspect of this demon, whom I call Amand, is that he does not in fact completely materialize but is only a being in making when he is killed, he is caught between a nightmare and the cult, and as such is a kind of succubi in the world, a bear moth amalgam indeed. That is, another way of looking at the possession is that the entire town was taken down into the nightmare where he had this power and used it against all in the end. The movie to the end remains unapologetically hell on earthly, and fundamentally demonic in nature.

The Blood on Satan’s Claw (1971) and a miasmic hell on earth bedeviling, part 1 of 2.

rev, Jul 31, 2021.

In this deep summer various influences, mainly in contemporary horror, have prompted me to take another look at the original folk horror furor in the early 70s in the UK. In this “culturing” I have read Ritual (1968), the novel that was bought in to eventually become The Wicker Man (1973); given myself the ok to venture into notable television contributing to the movement, so watched Robin Redbreast (1968), The Owl Service (1967), and now Beasts, and others, to fill in the blanks, if this movement primarily occurred on tv (I did not like Beasts, however, unreviewable, or Penda’s Fen, likewise). And since in cards fed by feed on google folk horror keeps coming at me, and every list of ten best mentions Blood on Satan’s Claw (1972) I thought another look at it in the current context might help clarify its nature, in terms of folk horror.  

There is some dispute over what constitutes folk horror. A simple definition would be that any story that is about the reversion of a rural Christian communitY to their pagan faith, and, contradicting the Christian context, worship of the devil (who was seen in the 70s, under the influence of Margaret Murray, as a survival of a pagan earth goddess religion going back to the caves, a finding now disputed) that is folk horror. More simply put, any horror movie that takes some element from the anthropological descriptions of Frazier’s The Golden Bough, which was the popular culture bible of the moment, and works that out as a form of reversion to agricultural paganism in modern times, that is folk horror. Thus, having written about Demons of the Mind (1973), it has a segment about carrying death out of the village, which is vintage folk horror. But, then, too, Demons itself is more traditionally castle-bound gothic, except that the mad science which fuels it, as I indicated, seems to shift by externalization from psychology to humoral or miasmic science in a much more fluid way that edges upon my broader definition of folk horror.

Folk horror goes, in my charts, beyond the mere hypnagogic, and things happening inside a head, inside a house, in a haunting, that is, beyond hypnagogy. It entails the progression to altered states spun out of the second and third nightmares of an Eldritch sequence. That is, it involves “syngogy” (not knowing if you are asleep or awake) and “epigogy” (encountering monsters), and the expansion of the dream elements in each to partake of the ambient, but in a primal way. And, then, by the creation of the latter the space of monsters, with the cenote’, and a sight, then, below of hell on earth, THAT is folk horror for me. As such, the gothic=vigilogogic-hypnagogic psychodynamics including nightmare, conjure vector, averruncate vector, sleepers, and fata morgana etc, all inside the mind, so to speak

But then there is the second nightmare and syngogy, and as this seems to have to involve the ambient, and the earth, I place the search for the Umwelt, the meeting with TIND-TIRH, the feeling that dream is now reality, or not being able to tell one from another, this leads out to the broader type of ambient horror, edging toward folk horror. I guess I will say this is transitional

but, then, when, at last, things break out into the full ambient, with the involvement of not only sentience (which can nonetheless be approached from all levels), this involves the Gates, the deadfall, Raven’s Gate, the place of sacrifice, the cenote’, the drop to hell on earth, hell on earth, all the emanations, and even Tartarus below, this feels like the domain of folk horror.

and, in the general sense, as folk horror concerns the land, and is rooted in the ritual life of rural or agricultural people on the land, it is suffused with, and has to do with an invocation of hell on earth, and below, with miasmic emanations being the primary carriers of the horror, and DEMONS, derived from that process, not ghosts or other creatures, involved.

and it is precisely this dimension that, coming to Blood on Satan’s Claw for maybe the tenth time, allows me to read the movie much more fully, with fuller appreciation of where exactly, and how exactly the horror is come upon a rural town in the vast open spaces of Revolutionary England in the 17^th century. But, then, to look at the movie itself, it is clear that its style, which has had such an influence on contemporary folk horror, a slow burn style, a miasmic demonic haunting, and the working of emanations, rather than plot mechanics embodied in a human mind, its earthiness, its demonicness, all this is in the movie.

The movie starts, of course, in the furrows of a broad field, and a farmer tilling the soil.

he would be careful of his fields, and tends them well. Farming was no doubt extremely perilous at the time, dependent on the weather, and also on any other element of nature that they then did not understand. So, when a group of birds gather in one spot on his field, that is a reason for concern. He goes to investigate

and there he finds a skull, a very strange skull

the skull looks strange to him because it is malformed. An earthworm comes out of its mouth, which is intact in an odd way, almost as if petrified flesh. And then, horrors, somehow, while everything else decayed to bone, an eye remained.

The finding of strange heads or skeletons in the earth is an age-old trope and hardly needs to be addressed. It is even a constant source of feeder news today, findings of the sort from all over the world, to give you a brief rise, new find rewrites human history, strange coins make farmer a millionaire, etc. The basic idea is that the earth is the prototype space, and anything found in it is primal. Either he has uncovered a demon that was once buried, in a previous encounter with it, and thus has reopened that can of worms (so another age old plot device, see Lair of the White Worm (1988)), or it was previously some sort of other skull, and by emanations from the miasmus of hell on earth below, now coming to the surface, the emanations distorted it and turned it into a horror. This even to by way of emanations from Chloros, rise up a demon, with an evil eye, thus, this idea.

that is, an opening has been made, from hell on earth, the miasmic layers below earth and ground, and by emanations an evil eye has been brought up into life again, waking up the horror after a long interval of rest. That is, the devil is looking at him, on the devil’s road, from down in hell, looking up

he then reports it to a visiting magistrate, because that is what he does, news in his world is any change that comes to his livestock or his fields, that compromises and puts a hex or ill luck on his agriculture, upon which the town depends. This is big news, though the big city magistrate minimizes it

but, the other problem is, if it is as I argue it is, a miasmic emanation, according to the old theory, by which disease and plague and famine and the sort were understood in the protoscience premodern days of the world (which, of course, have returned to us bigtime in the 21^st century), he is contagious too. So the first citizen of the town who feels a bad humor and comes down with it, taking to her bed, is the magistrate’s wife

There are two plotlines that converge in the mis en scene of the movie. The other one is that the teenagers in town are restless, and during time off from work they play in the fields, where else? But this means, for this movie, that they are playing in the devil’s road, and in fact taking the miasma of hell on earth into them, for them all to become infected with demonic impulse as well.

this is especially true of Angel, who seems to note something odd in the field. Played by Linda Hayden, who, at the same time, played a vengeful masturbating, hand-turbulence-creating witch in House on Straw Hill (1976), which is a sort of modern borderline folk horror movie of the day too, which I looked at this summer too she is imposing. Something about Hayden’s looks, which were much more developed and womanly than Gillian Hills’, and seemed therefore oversexed and dangerous, made her tend towards roles of the sort, the sexually dangerous precociously developed girl (I knew one well, and she done witchcraft on me too).

and then, in an incredibly important shot, they, in fact, run off on the very devil’s road created by the furrow. It is the same one that Ralph discovered the demon’s head in

and it is even more important, as a symbol of puberty, or of the agricultural mindset when it comes to sex, that we hold the shot to see the girls run over the skull site with their dresses flowing up. This is not precisely an upskirt universe shot, but a notice that if they have indeed been infected by the contagion of the evil exhalations and emanations of the demon-possessed field, then it is happening by way of their sexual organs, through the “opening,” in common lore, below, in the female of the species

and then Cathy too, who will come to evil, as a result of this possession, in the story

Then we break to consider again a further invasion of the magistrate’s home. His son comes home and brings with him a low-class bride. The family is not happy, less so that they intend, it seems, to cohabit under their roof. So for the night they exile her to the attic, where she goes mad, infected by the miasmus that is creeping through the house. He then has to face up to a horror in the attic

his bride going mad

and that madness is conveyed here as in so many other places as a hollowing out of self, of one’s personality, of one’s sense of self, or one’s command of self. One becomes an empty shell made use of by the devil’s eye to gaze through it to you. This is nicely staged (the fate of Herne the Hunter, the loss of rational mind, to a mind taken over by the voids of nature). (the writer, though these details are of little interest to me, says that he was partly inspired by the look of the Manson girls in that famous case, which I am looking at again)

but that is not the worst of it. The worst of it comes in one of the movie’s classic setpiece shots, and the first real chiller, that causes the viewer to think, whoa, where ARE we here? this is happening on a whole other level, because while she was up there exiled alone to the attic somehow some invasive force caused her to begin a transformation into the very demon, and she has a demon’s claw! This is likely the Satan’s claw of the title, a truly uncannily chilling shot

but, how can this happen? how explain it.  Again, I have some insight in the “isnad” processes of depiction of nature in traditional culture this summer by my experience of teeth extraction, resulting in having to then nurse the wound through its stages, with grannulation especially, the formation of new cells, then new bone growth to follow, providing a model of pure natural growth. Indeed, at the time, it struck me as likely the model of the reincarnation of Dracula in The Curse of Dracula (1966) who emerges from blood touching ash through a build up of grannulation into a body, to then show a hand.

all that a traditional mind requires, to “make sense” of a process like this, that is, how she grew overnight a claw, is a similar isnadic (or impellative) model of phases of development, whatever the elements, and that is enough. Thus I posit that the miasmus brought into the house from the furrow by Ralph the farmer infected the wife and the household. This miasmus only attacks openings of immorality in persons, so when the bride came in with a groom with the intention of cohabiting the night, that was the gap that let it into her.

In my model, below ambience lies hell on earth, the vision of life on earth as hell in the human imagination. The first step was that for her sinful thought, or simply carelessness, she was exiled to the attic, which is both the deadfall of the house, a place of exile and storage, scary; and, also, that attic is surrounded by plenum space, in between the floors, and the miasmus can creep into those spaces by its very nature of being an emanation. Then, once the miasmus of Chloros, that is, an ambient impulse coming in on her while she sleeps, she becomes as it were less substantial, easily malleable, a “fogure”, if I might use the pun, a being of figure that has by contagion been rendered porous, sick. That then opens the gates to the more substance-building miasma from hell on earth such as the architectural emanations from Mulciberium to actually act upon a body part to give it hair and claw cartilage or whatever claw is made of, to effect an actual werewolflike bodily transformation. And that then at last makes her a demon incipient, as it were, who shows her demonic nature first by her vacant look, her mind erased by Chloric emanations, and then by this physical deformity created in one awful night in the attic.

Fear also plays a part, and I have noted several times this past season the use of quasi-organic, elemental aspects of haunting miasmic gunk, in The Vigil (2021), said by the wife to be precipitate of raw fear

and then even in Things Heard and Seen (2021), a demon of sorts pulled out of the kitchen sink. It is popular this year, a haunting something that you do not even know if it is animal or vegetable or human or organic or that or miasmic or where it comes from. And, of course, in my view, the exploration of this prototype space began in 2018 with Suspiria and committing Patricia, after being beat to a pulp by a magic dance against her, into an entome state, mere tissue kept alive by the spell of the witches upon her

And, so, Claw is the origin of that whole development, and expressive of a more ambient horror with grounding in hell on earth imaginings.

Nonetheless, the son thinks, maybe by reverse magic I can turn this evil away from my intended. So next night he breaks into the attic, which by this point has well and truly been rendered a deadfall, no admittance, boards blocking it off

And he decides to go looking for the demon, to flush him out. He reaches down into the plenum, the empty space between the floors, even then existing as a haunted place in house architecture (and in the civil war priest holes and all their lore of hidden things taking form, to hide catholic priests from the revolutionaries),

This is the second unbearable moment in the movie, how? how could this happen? Again, in the miasmic imagination (which thrived in Europe prior to 1825, when it began to be supplanted by modern medicine and contagion theory for real, not as  a metaphor of illicit contact with evil others), all you needed was a temporary logical sequence that made sense to the mind considering it for the moment of the investigation. In terms of making something like incarnating a miasma into a body, all you needed to do was imagine elements of it that were humanlike, and then they are infused by emanations, and smoke and boil into form and, like Dracula, become bodied again. So, this is a bit more complicated, as a dream structure, something like this

that is, the architectural miasmus, as a gas, or emanation, reacts upon any waste or debris in the crawlspace under the bed of the sleeper. And the below-floor space is under the bed in this situation, identical with the plenum, the space between. Any number of raw materials could serve to form a “body tunnel” of a demon feeding off of the forms of the sleeping body above it. Thus the Mulciberius emanations work upon the debris then exhales to her sleeping body to steal form or energy from it to suck it back down to the debris and gradually in that plenum space incubate into a connected body, a demon, with a claw, if, for example, something of that sort was by conjuration by someone, placed under the bed in the floor, and voila, a demon is grown between the floors, to grab the groom

now, somehow, he is pushed back onto the bed, for him to be “raped” by the demon too. And lying in the posture age old of someone in bed feeling that something awful is going on elsewhere in the bed, and it might be demonic, he freezes, looking askant, not wanting to look (this same effect in The dark and the wicked (2021) this year of couple of grown children visiting their aging mother),

and he feels now the demon has come close enough, grabbing onto him, that he can then attack him. This is his plan, to kill the demon who took over his bride, perhaps to get her back. This intrigues me, because, of course, this is a type of “Masquerade”, that is, masks of hauntings happening in and around the nine orificed being which is man or woman sleeping in a bed, attacks coming from either side, from the foot or head, or from above or below, all over. Here, he is experiencing a variant on the empty pillow nightmare, he is thinking, I should have come to share the bed with her, and she’d be safe. The pillow, now empty, causes him to think worse case scenario, and that is that the demon is now in bed with him, wanting to rape him too. I switch to my bed graphs, more illustrational

here, he has an Empty Pillow dream, meaning he thinks worst case scenario about the absent person from the coupling bed. Then, too, he assumes a position of Raven’s Gate, to gaze into the darkness, to see what is in that void. In this case, he puts his hand over into that space, a common trope, and it then experiences effects of whatever in the fissuring of entoptic sight he sees. In my experience, and last night, the most common demon that one sees in that blue space is Ursus, a kind of hunched over blue dot that bristles a bit on the eye like a bear, and so you ‘see’ him. This is clearly what he saw, and took it for the demon. So, then to defeat it, he chops at its claw, it makes sense, a claw for a claw, if he can wrest a claw from the demon, he might be able to trade him, for him to give his bride’s hand back to him.

But, then, when the magistrate hears all the noise, he comes in, and sees with horror, the fourth great shock of the movie, that there is no demon there, it is all in his mind, he is in fact chopping off his own hand (with possible religious implications, re if thy hand offend thee, and it may be that in this world of bioturbulant forces coming up from the earthworm realm of hell on earth he was in fact engaging in sort of 17^th century type of magic masturbation, and thus lost his hand), it is horrifying

(In passing, today is an obit of a sleep scientist who died, whose work I generally agree with (though I steer clear to reserve for my own findings some confirmational quality, not simply verifying his work). And then the obit was linked to a great article on REM Sleep disorder, which, no doubt, this is. That said, in traditional culture, REM sleep disorder would, indeed, be taken as a form of possession, and maybe madness.

which even mentions the traditional readings of things, in the first paragraph

That said, the fact that the haunting of the town by this demon starts, pretty much, in a bed, with two incidents of REM sleep disorder, strongly suggests the presence of a Sleeper, or patient zero, who carries it to all the town.

This also implies that satan’s process of regeneration has now spread out to the whole community, and he is collecting enough body parts to lay them out, perhaps in the rites the teens partake in, to manifest as a body in the world again. So, once again, a miasmic explanation, dreamwise, with bed demons, and plenum demons, works.

But, now, we return to the students, the vicar finds them suddenly insolent, unwilling to learn. Angel seems to be the ringleader of this rebellion. There is a conjure bag being passed around, and it has a claw in it, exactly like the one we saw on the bride. What this is, dreamwise, is a bit of a question. Talismans are intensive multiply invested power objects usually with four or five layers of meaning each within the other to give it an entirely password-like personal power. As an ultimate form of dream symbolism, they exist in the telesmatic space of the symbolic level of hypnagogy I call the glass onion. Bur, they communicate, as if by a secret wormhole, with far sentient mind space, the dark universe. So they have a great dark power. Thus, one finds them, in dreams, at the Blue Well, which is in the bottom of the symbolic stage as in Utrillo zone it bottoms out into something like a lattice, but in adjunct space, then by the well breaking through to sentience. See my treatment of this Well in Simon King of the Witches (1971), and I also think that the contemporary artist Pope L. in his Machine (2020) touched upon it. Here there is another claw, maybe the very claw from the bride, taken into the coven

By the power of Angel’s witchcraft the insolent and contrary nature of the youth in town has now been subjected to one of Girard’s horrors, a wave of indiscriminateness, in which all order and rank is cast aside, and things run riot, everyone literally equal, for a time, causing social chaos (in traditional lore). It is this indiscriminateness that requires the jolt of a sacrifice to stem the tide and shock people back into a sense of belonging in this or that(see Girard). This is the sacrificial crisis in its purest form, and for it this movie is high on my list in showing social chaos suddenly engulfing a community (other examples are Tarkovsky’s Andrei Rublev (1966), and then Herzog’s Nosferatu (1979)) in madness.

At this point, the magistrate is shown some books, which put a finger on who is behind all this. No question, in folk horror, in an ethos that evil comes from emanations and miasmas welt up from the earth suddenly cursed with famine and infertility, it must be a demon.

this seems to show a generic picture of a demon, maybe satan himself

there is another wonderful page, showing various malicious acts against crops by witches, and even a demon getting into the bed of a sleeping figure. As usual, the nature of these woodcut stiff figures involves them in sigilate and letterspace, to make them expressions of a haunted reality like a dream that overcomes a town when the demon enters in

but it is by this picture that the magistrate gets a positive ID as it were, this is the demon that Ralph found in the field

it is called the Vision of St Amand, but it is a twinfire match to the ugly face that Ralph found, exact match

St Amand is a real saint who Christianized Ghent and founded the monastery of St Bavo in the 7^th century. He had, it is said, a vision of a serpent, as shown on his wiki page. This situates this demon in pagan rural France, and, so, somehow, it came to this county in Britain 1000 years later. His use here is convenient, he puts a name on the specific demon which has been dug up and activated to spread contagion in this locale.

The interesting thing for me is, in current viewing, I looked again at Mike Craven’s Disciple of Death (1972) and though it is a far less successful horror movie it does have, which I acknowledged in review, the vibe of ’72 in that it resorts for the final battle with witchcraft to a demon that the count has called up and that demon is a dwarf jester

and he is a demon with power over natural forces in the landscape of Cornwall,

causing rockslides

and fire walls

and flash floods, all to stop the men from reaching the count

this is elemental, nature-based, natural disaster magic, and thus based on hell on earth imagination, and controlled by specific “styros”, or demons of miasma, called up to serve a witch or vampire. And the shocking thing to me is, though this is an unappealing presence, this opening up of the movie to the epigogic realm of the cenote’, the land of monsters, but it is natural disaster monsters, is commanded by a demon that in its sly evil dwarf nature looks like the vision of St. Amand demons, or Amandus, Amand’s demon!

and with that old fashioned plume on top, he even fits the overall profile of the serpent which Amand encountered in his vision

almost as if he is a human transposition of a serpent, that is, a creature of the miasmus.

it fits

but now the magistrate goes away, and things get worse for a time. It is at this point, I felt, in review, that the movie also opened up to the broad spaces of rural England at the time. It is hard to re-imagine oneself back to a time before roads but I suspect even in England rural space seemed vast then and the movie excels in creating this effect, to create an overall atmosphere of nature run amok, of a wild nature where anything can happen.

it is when the magistrate leaves, that Angel takes over the town. The moment which launches us in to the crisis of the movie is when having stolen from the reverend’s class most of his students, for them to play at evil things all day, she comes back to him at night and strips in front of him to tempt him, but also to set him up for a trumped up charge of sexual molestation, which card she plays. And, really, though Hayden is plenty sexy in her other movies, this is her finest hour on screen as her stripping is so out of context and unexpected that it shocks him and us, and moreso that, damn, she is as he said almost perfect, according the lore of the most beautiful girl in the village, who might, like the second twin, turn evil from all that flattery.

and it is full frontal nudity, which in 1972 was the sudden thing, escalating, with Hammer even picking up on it.

Usually, seeing the pubic hair of a woman in a movie pre-1980 means that she will die. Here, however, it seems to double up on the face of the demon, and show in her body the possession by a demon, with her evil eye being embodied by her nipples, and the worm in the mouth being indicated by her pubic hair. This results in a nightmare bounce out, if this be the third nightmare, to a state of epigogy, her body is the Antaeus figure which lifts us through Tannhauser Gate or Hell’s Gate behind the eye, to the final evil takeover of the town (again, it is almost impossible to reconstruct all of the cultural baggage that was packed into the hairy pubes of nudes in the 1970s, everything from earth motherists to those horrified according to Freud, all of it gone now)

the fact that she gets dangerously close to him, within the reach of a hand, and her breast all but pokes at him, and she is sweating, and nude, this is torment to him (making it harder for him to counter the charge of molestation because while he was able to resist and see her as evil, it is also doubtless that he had illicit thoughts and struggled to avoid fucking her)

It is at the funeral of one of the others than Angel begins her campaign of public manipulation and mayhem. She gives those at the funeral the evil eye, and Hayden had quite the evil eye indeed. This close-up consists of sclera, iris and pupil, but the punctum as it were was the pinpoint of light reflected in it. This is, reversed, the power of her mind’s eye, in the white out eye trope played softly here, to zap others with her evil.

and she closes in, and it is at the funeral she levels her charge against the reverend

this kind of close-up, as see, for example, Demons of the Mind (1972), means that we  are going into what is in the mind, behind the eye, and then projecting that forward, in a kind of public hypnosis. This suggests that Angel is now spreading her possession over all. She is going into the darkness, to bring others in too. Notice, for example, a detail often overlooked, but next time we see her presiding over a torture, her eyebrows have been darkened, to solid black, almost a unibrow

this says that she is now imitating “the lost spirit of the dark”

and that is Amand, the demon

subtitles not quite hearing things properly makes it even more chilling, a “bear moth of the dark”

she has now arrived at Charlie Manson status, a psychological hold I continue to look at, and as documented in Ed Sander’s The Family (1971), which I read this July. So others now submit to her entirely, we get the Squeaky Fromme blank stare, there is also, in this picture, the amputated hand, perhaps sight of the original groom (except that it is the wrong hand that is cut off, so maybe she is taking body part sacrifices)

there has been a previous suggestion, in an event of the cult before she tries to tempt the reverend, of a sense of going into the darkness, taking up in an abandoned church, unconsecrated ground

there to torture a newcomer into submission, sold as games

and now we see, with even more horror, very quickly, that some sort of demon in animal form has, in actual fact, materialized

it is a horrible thing, hard to say what

in fact, it looks like Amand the demon

which suggests that the skull, with the living eye, was dug up from the field (it was gone when Ralph took the magistrate back to see it), and then from there confabulated by spells into a body, using the body parts of others. As such, it is a monster brought up from nightmare into physical life, a kind of TIND-TIRH (“this is no dream, this is really happening”) figure, who makes it real, before launching them into monstrousness.

end of part 1 of 2.

Placing Bacon’s Three Studies for Figures at the Base of the Crucifixion (1945) psychodynamically in the mind.

rev., Apr 5, 2021.

Reading the Mark Stevens/Annalynn Swan biography of Bacon, I come finally to make an attempt to place his Three Studies for Figures at the base of the Crucifixion (1945) in the mind of the artist, and of human beings. Though the biography is entirely enjoyable, it has not quelled my concerns and questions about traditional artist biographies in that they make use of scene painting to set the stage for the artist, which includes passages of things done by other people which have little to do with the artist; and then where the artist is at in terms of his or her art is seen as a response to the same in their emotional or love life. Though such things can certainly frame where an artist gets to at any given time, it does not map out where in fact they do get to in their mind in their art. In my model of mental interiority, there is, below workaday consciousness, vigilogogy, or altered states; hypnagogy, or light sleep stages, the visual language of which was made use of by modern film makers to record their emotional reality; and then REM. But there is also, laterally, at, say, the latitude of the second, the hypnagogic, which sees inside the head; the ambient, brain parts that pick up vibes circling about; and then, even the sentient, a kind of interior tinnitus which can work all but as a radar to pick up signals from the dark universe. Then, even more involved, there are specific dream formations by which the mind lights up pathways that reach from the surface to the depths to places such as what I call the Hippocampus Hall, or Amphitrite’s Cave, and of these I have found the Eldritch formation, the Night Mirror, the, well, I don’t want to itemize them all.

But recently, in writing of the Amityville movies, and their strange hypnagogy, I reviewed a model of the Eldritch zone and found it to be a 13 step model that I have simplified over the years. Especially important is that it argued that after the wake up into the second dream, one is in another state, syngogy, where, frozen, as if in sleep paralysis, one tries to put things together, even as they struggle to do so; and, then, beyond that, there is the opisoentoptogogic, that is, something more intense that happens behind the eyes, involving constructs recently hypothesized, With the pisoentoptic, the Heaven Gate, the Tannhauser Gate, the Antaeus point, and then the cenote, this is the front of my recent interest.

It will therefore seem forced but in general I would place the three figures.

certainly not in consciousness, or vigilogogy, but in hypnagogy, perhaps lattice figure whoosh splat, under the bed. That also means that they are, as they are, “demons,” my terms for any “body tunnel” that takes form in the activation of vectors of the mind, in this case, the averruncate vector targeted on a figure on the splat spot, such as this

this would posit that each represented some sort of stage of the “averruncate” aversive response to pursuit, either in the form of a Palinurus figure, a Proesthete figure, an Apsyrton figure, or a Castor Figure, the first figure would seem to me to represent the rage of a Palinurus figure, named after the sailor the Odyssey threw overboard as a sacrifice to the sea, to calm the sea and save the rest of them, a pars pro toto sacrifice, as per Burkert.

added to that, I see a certain horse character to the muscularity of the demon, and for that it all but becomes a hippalektryon, that is, a monstrous god of day, representing in abstract figured form the insanity of the moment, in this case part horse, part….well rooster, but in Bacon he blocks that out with an iconic use of the chatterbox as a sign of getting power in the world (the hippalektryon was the first god of day monster I saw emerge in 2020 in America’s insane response to the pandemic, barging out in May like a braying horse, in fact a chicken with its head cut off). This is uncanny and occult. The fact that this figure stands on grass or a piece of sod speaks as well to the horse reading of it.

Then, on the averruncate vector the middle piece would represent the chryskokkopterophasian, the truculent bird of a personality with impenetrable edges never to be bested, the monster of last July for me. But here, the central form is clearly chickenlike, and then the neck is hung down, with the open mouth still chattering but with less conviction, the blindfold in my view representing the fact that he is about to be executed. That makes of him a proesthete, that is, as the pursuer was pursuing, the pursued to avert it would throw anything out in the way, to fend him off. that’s what seems to be happening here, it is an execution sacrifice, to save the rest

The fact that it is also spindly, and thin-legged, and stands precariously on a wobbly spindly pedestal or table also signifies that this body tunnel form embodies the irrational rush out to life that follows a slow trudge through a tunnel or even the devil’s road nightmare, in this case, Stevens was correct in associating the bandage to being a war veteran, however it spoke, it spoke to the weird feeling of it being over, and having somehow survived, when so many did not.

Finally, the third figure, in many ways the most figuratively conventional as it can be read as a grieving woman, is whatever becomes of Medea after she undertakes the apsyrtic sacrifice of her brother, to save herself, pars pro toto.

there is a productive way to read these images this way. In a previous note on travels in ambient space past tunnels of hypnagogic dreams, based on the movie Come True (2021) with input from Guiseppe Penone, currently at Goodman, it can work out, as such

the mouth of the tunnel gets smaller, as it lets out into a graveyard, with a gravestone beyond. already, there are two candles burning on the side of the grave, imitating the eyes. 

there is the grave, but with space in it like a mausoleum, this is, no doubt about it, the Black House, at the end of the desert of meaninglessness, the phthchth

it looks like the ruin of a church inside, though

but in this one, he is only a guide, he holds a frame within a frame, this is the second interim messengere or guide figure we have seen, it seems to be part of the DNA of this movie’s description of dreams, here it is at the Black House

which the camera then goes right through

this can only, in this telling, symbolize departure into the Sentient space beyond, which is true hellscape, Dante-Doresque

all karst, bodies, rocks, unclear

and there HE is, whomever he is

glaring at her

which wakes her up this is this dream, it is, as in keeping with sleeping in his apartment, more ambient, at present, I again name either the guide or the goal, Acouphane, but hesitate to say she has found Psallictus himself. 

an added special issue in my tracking of dreams in the movie is that halfway through three sequences, there is an interim guide, in this one it is the figure inside the mausoleum, who holds the black box, in which he will find the Black Figure. In a previous note it is the melting upside down figure in the hallway, which I compared to Christina Quarles work. This posits a rather distinctive feature at every point one enters from one lateral zone to another. He is the figure who, for now, prognosticates where things are going, vis a vis meeting the main figure at the end. He is a sort of traffic cop. I am tempted to locate, in times prototypical to the creation of the Black House, a sacrificial rock under the house, where, in earlier times, a figure exiled because of uncleanness went to sacrifice, to cleanse himself, and in the offscouring of blood, the aponimma, blood became black blood, and, then, leaking it onto the ground, that is where black blood was made use of to call up Tiresias, to learn of things to come. This was pictured in Harrison.

the black blood washed from his sword into the earth, the aponimma

And it seeps into the earth, and that is what calls up the blood-thirsty ghost of Tiresias, sticking his head up out of the ground, to lick his boot

Something like this.

this is tentative. But, if not, if, that is, this IS a trope, with a bit more signal importance than the norm of having guides at every juncture of the system of the mind, then it counts as a discovery. And the really creepy thing for me is that Penone HAD both this figure, and then, also, distinguished from it, and placed further back at the point of destination, Artemis. And as one ambles out into the ambient forest, beyond the Village of Dreams, there he is, Indistinct Boundaries (2013)

and it is a somehat figurative, possibly pareidolic tree stump, even a palladium sort of thing,

and it bleeds Black Blood!

and I cannot here ignore that the third interim figure that appears in the dream sequences in Come True is

indeed, a witch which rises out of a black pool of miasmus

very much like the witch in Gretel & Hansel (2020)

both, then, as if having black blood in their veins.

Indeed, this reading is supported by the fact that, once again, I see a row of buildings as an image, in Bacon’s Landscape with a Façade.

and this parallels the same sort of thing seen in Graham Sutherland’s war paintings.

both somehow painted shallowly to indicate a Potemkin village view of reality, Indeed, so interested in this form am I I had a dream of a work of art being talked about the other night, and it was simply this. (this recorded dream, Apr 2, 2021; status, hypnagogic, symbolic stage, simply looking at it, a knuckle comes in, knocks on the copper inset, “not sure what this is for,” he says)

Thus, from this reading, ambient of hypnagogy, the figures are either Tiresias figures, or the demon Acoupane, the onset of sentient whirring. It is also true, on top of that, the figures are apsyrtic figures of aversion, one maybe a Palinursus figure, specific figures.

But though this reading itself is sufficiently precise to work as a going theory, there are some problems. One, it is unclear where the space is, or why they are on the tables. Also, they seem too robustly real to entirely fit into the dreamy nature of depiction of demons or angels in vectors affecting hypnagogic sleeping. Indeed, Bacon’s early crucifix, which established his life-long interest in interiority, is more in line with straight up hypagogic imagery.

this is, in fact, on the conjure vector, and represents the ghost of the crucifixion, appearing to one at the foot of the bed, to then beseech and then haunt you with a prophecy of some sort. it is a masquerade had by a dreaming person, partly come to life.

The fact that the three figures are not quite a perfect fit then suggests that they may be ambient, or exist in the Black House out past the phthchth, on the fringe of fluxsin of the sentient, as such,

This ambient positioning, and the Black House being the place where messages are passed, leading further out, would explain the spin in the paintings. And this is indicated, again, by the odd mounts, but, more importantly, by the fact that the images are in fact composites of partial pareidola, or para-pareidola, what I called tertiary as opposed to merely secondary image in a favorable review of late work by De Kooning in the 80s, which no one else much liked, but I saw tertiary images in it, all over the place.

what I simply meant, if I could find the review, was that, in secondary images, ie pareidol, you see a cloud, and you see, whole to the form, the cloud as a bunny rabbit, or the face of the devil, or some such. It is wholly composed, a singular thing. In tertiary imagery, or para-pareidol, you see only glimpses of parts of various forms, the leg of a rabbit, the chest of a bear, the horn of an elk, the haunch of a goat, you see none of them, and all of them, and the lines wobble-wobble gently from one to the other in wrinkles or ripples.

In this one, vaguely perusing it, each recognition and dissolution on the eye a kind of threat, or start, I see inklings of the human, the pure awful abstract, the bull dog, the horse, the bird, the bear, the snake or serpent, the human again, and then the demonic. And I hesitate to attach numbers to my sighting because as soon as you settle on one thing, it shifts again, and you start all over. It is this inability of the figure to sit down on the canvas and stay put, a creature with homeostasis, like us a homeostat, which reassures us, no, this figure just keeps on rippling through itself, never coming to a stop. That is, it spins on the eye, uncomfortably so.

this spin is an ambient quality that is not usually seen in hypnagogy, and promises placing it in the Black House. In that way, the rooms of the Black House, in horror, are often stripped down to serve another purpose sometimes black magic, sometimes bad science. They become like the room where they kept Evey in The Quiet Ones

and Bacon even designed rooms like that, and lived in a space like that, and so the orange represents that sort of space.

But, still, there seems to need to be more, how can one describe the tendency of the eye to always outrun these impulses to come back over and over again to the shock or it, the triggering imprint image of it, as a horror, and that mouth as a horror, as the worst horror.

moreover, the presence of a chatterbox form in this, as in his earlier work, is a motif that must be explored. In fact, it has come up of late, as I explore how it is entities entirely mediated, like computers, like Proteus, in Demon Seed (1977), come by reverse agency to exert some physical power in the world, in that movie he created a fortune teller-like four-pronged pincer form arm to reach out and do things for him, including clip off the head of a scientist attacking him; but the chatterbox might also speak to my scorn for the extent of film criticism in horror being to apply Freudian theory about castration and vagina fears onto horror, the chatterbox discourse; then too, in Haim Steinbach’s wall, he had an uncanny moment, far from the madding crowd, seeing a chatterbox on the windowsill of his rented house, which seemed to haunt it, it IS a motif, if not entirely a trope, it might even be related to the Jolly Chimp toy trope, it is curious that Bacon adopted it almost as his personal palladial symbol, to represent his desire to transcend or katabate, or go deeper, than the chattering of the periodical world. In this regard it would not be entirely out of line to research the impact this image had on any Londoners at the time, if it got into their head, and tortured them, caused their social standing to falter (my chatterbox problem is that, isolated for almost all my time, if and when I get out, which has not been ANYWHERE in fourteen months, I tend to become a chatterbox not knowing what I am saying).

And images like that, they always keep coming back, refluxing, rrhexising, rrhaging, rrhoeing over, it pumps like a trompo, it is almost as if (and, alas, I cannot say if this is true, having never, I think, seen these in person with my nerves), the mouth surges forward to you as a separate conjure vector attack, and then slips back, then takes over the whole, then comes that way, and on and on.

this sort of thing can only appear with this volatility, coming AT you, in opisogogy. That means, to get there you have to enter into behind the eyes, like in a movie I watched this week, Rabid (2019)

we go through the eye, first there is the lens, still reflecting its green, but, now, in back of the eye, this I think where cataracts develop

then we delve back into the bed that holds the lens, back of the eye, so we leave pisoentoptic space to enter opisogogic space

and this takes us through the Tannhauser Gate, where, floating, there is a web of genes

these ones looking very much like the form the gene took inside Proteus in Demon Seed (1977)

then, once there, as in Landscape with Façade, you encounter either of two gates, Heaven or Tannhauser, there is the glacis, which is hard to climb down, it almost plays out in his Landscape with a Façade, taken from a picture of Nuremberg (the land here could read as a Black Bog too)

and btw Bacon could certainly have had a perfectly alright career making paintings like this landscape with a figure, mysterious, spooky, like Courbet dipped in horror

but he went on. There, to get down (as I have phrased it in my body myth as visualized in the mind, like Blake’s Antaeus, who lifted Dante down),

there you need a giant to help you down through. This could involve a pure entoptic reading of the pisogogic flux in front of the eyes as one switches to a reverse pillow position. In such a position the other night, not being able to sleep on my left arm due to covid vaccine pain, I saw a valley form in yellow, then from it a large bear appear, and then he stretched up farther than I could “see” and that was the giant who let me in to sleep that night.

and then I looked “up”

and, in fact, in sequence in Stevens’/Swan’s book, and maybe in his work, Bacon had such a picture, Standing Man, based on a photo of Hitler watching from a balcony a demonstration in Prague

some unsubtle or insufficiently problematized statements are made about Bacon’s interest in fascist political imagery, reaching through it to its pagan power, based on his reading of Nietzsche, but I think it more accurate to say that artists make use of images or figures to nail down dream guides in their minds, so that they may find their way in and out of the places of the mind they discover, and it may be that this is Bacon’s rendition of his attribution of entry into hell by way of the boost given him from an Antaeus figure. Indeed, I see a pareidol in his pose, another face looking out back at us, it looks to me like the face of Karl Marx, perhaps a comment on the futility of radical politics per se,

It is odd too then that at present I read Bacon for an hour, then Hitler (Urlich) for an hour, and while Bacon gets deeper and deeper as a thinker, Hitler as the war progressed turned into a spiteful psychotic without any military genius at all, a pure bully egomaniacal fool. I cannot find the specific image, but propping themselves up with balcony appearances was a thing (it is also true that Hitler and Mussolini deeply distrusted each other, and by and large the alliance was a sham).

this movement behind the eye would then mean that Bacon’s mind moved under the light of the Blue Sun, and saw thanatoptically, that is, through life to death always, then through a deadfall to a cenote’ space where images repeatedly refluxed and contracted, over and over

and, again, as all such spaces, this space in the mind is peripteral, that is, phantom, it is there, then it is not there, another character of the ambient

and, in such places, I suspect the use of the sharp orange is a picking up of an emanation from hell on earth below (being a modernist Bacon no doubt suffered from Eyes Wide Shut when faced with the darkness of the mind, it was straight from consciousness, black out to REM, nothing mapped out in between, so I seriously doubt he worked any of this out), especially the third level, Mulciberium, where things were built or orange.

Bakon (sic) at the Tannhauser gate  4 5 21

Bakon’s (sic) Three Studies for Figures in the Cenote’ of the Blue Sun 4 5 21

which leaves me in the position of arguing that, this place,

is located in the mind in a poisoned elevator stuck in the cenote’ below the Tannhauser Gate in the opisogogic space of the back of the eye. Which makes sense, right? But, my overall point is, it’s not just, well it’s not rational-material consciousness, so it must be surreal, it is more specific than that. It is ambient hauntings, in a brain attuned to such, with intimations of awful sentience beyond. But given full form by means of reverse agency through the Tannhauser Gate in pisoentoptic space, then trailing down into core brain by way of the cenote’, it lies, that is, DEEP in Bacon’s brain, and in everyone’s brain, but, somehow, Bacon found a way to get there, to culture it, to control it, and the story behind it is how he got himself to that level, to interiority at such depth, very rare then, more common now, but still, the artist is in the mind.

Alien (1979) and its dream and nightmare structures, part 3 of 3.

rev., Feb 5-6. 2021.

This monster, the alien, technically, in dream structures, as I work them out, is a figure of the peripteral wall past the Black House, verging on sentience; it is a vision of the terror of the space beyond, truly beyond comprehension, in the mind of man, taken an animalistic, but really animal-mechanical cyber form, this is Gigerism

what I am saying is, it often happens, to intensify the scare of the central core of consciousness, in its whoosh, that the imagery bounces out by way of the devil’s road to an ambient destination, a place of nexus, which I call the Black House. There, encounters with monsters are made (see my treatment of Chthulhu Mansion (1990), but in this case, the Black Out of the Black Out was superimposed on by a compound oasis in which a “peripteral wall” formed, to create an Ignis Fatuus space, and it is THAT form, that peripteral wall enclosing the backyard, if you will, of the Black House, far in the ambient chambers of the brain, that HG Giger’s cyber art dwells, Black Out-devil’s road-Black House horror. It is by this incredibly respectful and amazing ta-da introduction that Scott clarifies who and what Alien is, he is, in human terms, that is, by reason, in consciousness, impossible to get a fix on (not true, alas, in Aliens, when he is reduced to a vermin metaphor model, entirely graspable as a thing).

But, then, at precisely the same point, as the ambient spin of  things is accelerating, Ripley is back in Mother, who  represents the  central core of consciousness, and has learned an even greater horror, ping for those who read horror movies as metaphors of social issues, the corporation is even a worse monster than alien, in a way (or at least in ping-pong rational thought), its mission was to capture the alien, even if it meant the crew is killed in the effort

Now, like what happens at this point in the first dream of Gretel in Gretel & Hansel (2020) is that after an encounter with a truth in the mirror, she is lead to turn back in to the hypnagogic core, and sees the Beautiful Child in the corner. When she goes over to her, her head falls off, I called this PARTICULARLY PLACED figure in dreams the Cassandran figure. This movie has a fierce Cassandran figure. Ripley learns that Ash is a robot, he begins to throw her around

in this terrific shot, the Hand of Glory reversed, the Hand of Death, he lifts up almost as a hidden puppet in his hand, a clump of her hair

then he starts to throw her around. He can do this, shockingly, because, as a robot, he has superhuman, machine strength, she is but a rag doll in his hands

he has knocked her out, this all takes place in his redoubt, which if you measure it against the previous, looks back from ambience into trouble in the hypnagogic console, and so we step back in, but with spinnier power and artifice, to the place of the Cassandran figure

at this point, exposed, he begins to behave like a robot, not a fake human, he is, it is implied, less sensitive to human feelings, he thinks, rather, that humans are crazy, sentimental, so he does something very odd, he wants to suffocate Ripley, but it does it with a magazine, almost in the manner of an oral rape, really, intense

added to this scene, in its shocking nature, is that in his enclave, there are all sorts of pinups of nude women, from nudie magazines, of the kind most definitely NOT available in 2037 (when you’ll likely to be able to be married to a perfectly compliant hub/wife robot). This is an old, old 60s-70s trope, it means he is a perv

it means that he is sex fiend, but also, for that, since masturbation is the road to psychosis, in movies then, a psycho, note too the fried egg visual joke above, so in addition to being annoyingly turned on by human women, he is also disparaging of their anatomy, their breasts and nipples looking like, was the common joke for a type of flat lying breast, fried eggs

and if you need five nudes in poses on the wall where you work to keep you sane, you are true perv, a killer

so his attempt to kill her, without touching her, it has a sadomasochistic vibe to it, truly disturbing

Then Parker comes in and beats him off, in the fight, we find out that he bleeds white blood, the sign of a robot, an android

and then his head comes off

and upside down

and he ends up sputtering, mechanically, in a mass of wires and tubes, out

and here it is, a sculpture, basically, a sculpture animated or animatronic, placed on board, passing as a human, all of them shocked, and, sure enough, as in a dream sequence we encounter these as after a shock in the Black House, we gaze back at the consequences in hypnagogy, just crossing back in over the line of in-the-head haunting

but, now, EVEN BETTER, Scott seems to know this, because he has Ripley understand that there is something she still needs to hear from it, so now she is in control of Ash and fiddles with his wires to get him to come back up, he was not, another agency shift here, a scientist on the mission for the pure science, he was placed by the company as a mole to protect the alien! he was a golem

but, then, another thrilling moment, because of its strange visual wisdom, his head is propped up on the table, and wired to talk

in a shot where obviously Ian Holm now got white blood poured on him and he stuck his head up through a table, he comes back alive, truly nightmarish

and it is HERE, not only a great theme in 70s-80s horror, but of storying in full, he, as a robot intended to be faithful and serve humans, turned, likely because of how stupid humans are, and has begun to admire as if in a cult the perfection of the alien, a perfect creature

and like all psychos (and this is the same reason why a psycho usually can overpower a human in a fight, he has no compunction or hesitancy, he goes right at it, not thinking of consequences), he is, thus, morally pure

he is unclouded, is the word always used, of our clouded minds

and the delusion of morality, always the horror movie theme, the psycho clarion call

then in disgust Ripley really pulled the plug, impulsively announcing her solution to this horrific betrayal, burn it all down, the eternal AngloSaxon solution

and she starts with burning him up, great, great shots (I am sure Holm, who really didn’t start getting the good parts until he was on in years, who died last June, considered this one of his great cinematic moments, and it is, more so as it links Alien with the grand tradition of modern British cinema, of which it was the dying breed) (I will look into echoes in his performance later, RIP).

the theme in horror, in modern horror, twas ever thus, copies, robots, androids, the like, all are suspect because as machines they are not humans, with all of our failings, but our wonderful failings faltering so easily into feelings, but like machines, who can too easily become mechanical, and thus cold and calculating and robotic, as the word is used in the sense of unthinking, just following orders, like Good Germans, it is the ethos. The problem is also that, though this does not go this way here, androids can also model bad behavior in humans, who then mirror them in becoming unfeeling and dissociative in their feelings. Of course, it has been part and parcel of horror movie tropes that evil twins are another type of this compromised humanism, being afflicted no doubt, singletons believe, by an unconquerable envy, which, when being overlooked that much, not getting the “representation” that singletons go on and on about, as if what THEY need is more representation, when all that we do all day long every day is talk about their representations, and thus seek out refuge in an android philosophy of life, which then goes sour into crime. By the logic of it, I should be rooting for Ash, Ash should be a hero, in any case, this variant of the trope is perfectly situated at that juncture after the encounter at the Black House with the nightmare, one recoils to hypnagogy, and back there finds a sculpture which perfectly evokes the task of the Cassandran Figure. The fact that as soon as Ash goes, Ripley also determines to blow up the ship, means that he also, in a way, functioned as the ship’s Palladium, he alone with his science casting a certain authority of science over what is after all merely a commercial effort. So, lovely dream imagery.

It is no surprise that the escape vehicle is tucked into a redoubt just under the underthebottom of the whole carriage structure, it is another kind of tomb,

these shots have gravity and morbidity, all of it gazing upon death

unsurprisingly, for such a careful visual director, Ash’s aegis of the blue bay window, overseeing the beclouded discovery of Alien, now transfers to them, also living now in terror, in thanatopsis.

and again, in near death experience, the light at the end of…., the vacancy, where is it ?

complicating things, in a way I can only calculate as irrational, from the point of view of consciousness, but, she may be reinforcing her humanity in doing this, and in dismissing Ash she may now realize that the palladium of this ship is Jonesy, so she has to go get him, to take him back, to by him take herself and her humanity back, unsullied by Ash

then Parker and Lambert get it, Lambert mainly because she was no kind of fightback girl, she froze in fear before the Death Mask of alien.

It is implied that alien somehow slipped in because of mannikin spacesuits being mistaken as figures or not

so he gets in as if by human shields, back on his new vector, in this case, their fate being “telemon”, as he separates them from the mission

in this Death Mask (again, the idea is, in bed, you wake up and look across to the other pillow, if it is Empty Pillow, there is a chance you might, if still, in fact, asleep, see yourself, but in a Death Mask, this is that, though in a different context). The alien is all teeth because he is an exaggerated blepophobic warning of the devils’ road, all broken teeth

he is all in your face, in attack, to signify the terror eating you, so there is an element of Eryisichthon, by your fear you have eaten yourself

but then the weird thing is, this alien is like nothing seen on earth, animalwise, I mean his structure is like a wine bottle opener, a handle-like, hammer-head with a spike body below, he is more or less, somehow (I will look into Giger) a figuring out of a weapon of some sort

the way he is shown here, just in profile lunging, then the closeup, refuses us and our mind a chance to make sense of what he is, as a result, he remains a completely occult bogey, a scirpographic figure, as I have worked out demons of late, simply a figuring out of some psychodynamic forces.

I have argued that Baphomet, for example, is such, and all demons are scirpographic, here from Necromancy (1973)

(except from essay: and that their sigils more or less communicate the path of their attacks submitting this to the scirpographic, the fire is the fire of life, the central axis; the A is the subject, represented by the pentagram, completely controlled by him, in his gaze; the horns equal the embrasure of his control; with the wings past that, in this case, representing the idea proposed in that essay that by doubling up or twinfire, represented dynamically, by a crawling around the edges, to then, redoubled, come back in, that this represents the key twinfire dynamic; then, that doubling up is symbolized by the double sexed nature, beard for one level of doubling, breasts for another level. Then he has two bounces in him, a right hand ephialtic leap to life, if life demonic, while the left hand goes down, the hand of death.

this demon, called Alien, from the above would appear to be something like a squid or octopus on earth, with a head that contains in it console that can manage any spin with ease, without concern of direction up or down (he is the figure of my third degree dizzy attacks!), and in constant spin. Then his body is simply the figture of constant lunging out and catching, and he must move spindly because he rests for a long time in tunnel forms, wriggling, then unwriggles in a fury of rushed hippalektryonic activity, crazily, to kill, he is, in short, completely unpredictable by human standards, and thus able to defeat humans easily

his otherworldly head spin capacity, which has fossilized, comes from sentient space, so he is beyond directionals; his pivoting agility, again, beyond any human capacity, comes from ambient space, in the vector situation, hyperpivoting under a supercarriage of spinning. And then since he comes from Tartarus, a hell below hell, as perceived in the mind, and was cast there by a “hurling” in the universe. Thus his further demonic styro crunchy crusty angular apsyrtonic form, he is spindly in the extreme (hyperspindly?) because he curls up into tunnel places to hide, then when he comes out its like a boomerang of pent up spindly energy so his movement is hyperspiderwalky too. He is, in short, the armaturizing of the extreme psychodynamics of a spin-pivot-spindly dizzy attack on the vector, a combination of animal movements, like Ammut.

Oh, and he presents in a threatening way as a blepophobe to humans as all teeth, and teeth upon teeth, because teeth is what paves the devil’s road and are the body part humans most fear loss of, when seeing Eyes Wide Shut, “a perfect psychodynamic animal,” above all human weakness

it is certainly fascinating, then, that in her final attempt to save things, Ripley is torn between spinning back and forth to the detonation mechanism, turning it on and off to gain time; then, when Parker and Lambert get it, there is a great deal of pivoting. It is equally fascinating that Scott seems to have understood the Eyes Wide Shut concept, which you can see in its purest form of terror in Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974) as when, I forget exactly how, but I will get back to it someday, Ripley is backed into trouble, she is all headspin and pivot, with a gun console not unlike the alien head, mano a mano

and she strikes, for a director who knows what’s what, the Eyes Wide Shut look of horror, even now

and even an extreme, almost surreal form of it, looking askant below lateral in from that posture

which strange pose may exist somewhere between a poster for 2001

and The Shining (1980), with this very strange poster, I do not know its source yet

then her posture in shot is matched by the appearance of alien in the next shot, in the exact same place in the shot, showing her the same, what she shows him–clearly a Death Mask mirroring logic underscores these two amazing shots

then she gets the full in your face

but she again returns the gaze, you bitch, blasting her out (have no idea why she decided alien was female, a mother, I guess)

then, into the lander, out under the death construction of the underthebottom, death counting down

she’s off, and that’s that

I have a special word, daimonium, for a syndrome of really good movies that in their final act climb the climb to a last terror. It is something I’ve seen in Ari Aster’s movies, in The Cremator (1969), in The Wicker Man (1973), others, this one has a very good one. In the lander, now, Ripley thinks it is over, so she strips, she is going right away to hypersleep. But the fun is she uses an age old trope, Women Undressing, to figure out to us that she is still in the lock of a twinfire relation with the monster. She as if de-forms herself into it, taking off her clothes. She “strips bare”, no more illusions, just a cog in the machine

then, in revealing much, very sexily, she takes on its form

she becomes as if a clothes-horse or mannequin version of the alien, though with navel showing, and lots and lots of body space from that down to her panties (Weaver has an elongated midsection below the ribs, a rare body characteristic)

but with relief as she is “crowned” victor at the end of it

this of course also demands exposure of her pivotness, embodied by the underarm

she does a full on sexy-powerful 80s feminist pose, victory. But, I have seen this before, her victory is formally compromised by a tangle of tubes behind, they have a bit too much figure in them to be comfortable

after her pause she goes to work to punch in hypersleep, and in doing so bends over and exposes rather more of her buttocks than I imagine Weaver wanted; but this only shows, in the movie, that she knows or thinks she knows she is alone, it is over, no problem, she might as well walk around naked, it’s the cusp of the 80s

but then comes the abreactive feint. I don’t know how alien got into this one, if there is a second one, but she sees above her in the console tucked into the crawlspace–the crawlspace, that is, like a delirious nightmare not going away–it is there, so she quietly rushes back, back in it, damn!

she is, herself, in recoil from what she thought was relief, in a Cassandra situation, and strikes a pose, it might be a moon, but to me her exposure, plus a close-up of the space between, and then continued by the light between her panties and her body, this signifies full alert awareness that she is back in monster hypnosis twinfire

she hides, defeated? in a real pickle, no. She has a plan, she comes up with it quick, a good leader

there it is in its all “creature of the black lagoon” strafing forms, wanting to strafe her

and what does Scott have Ripley do? only strike the by far sexiest pose in the movie, in a moment of high terror, this too is an “I’m not afraid” trope going way, way back, also it sometimes has apotropaic punch, exposure of the female anatomy, in this way

curiously, it is here, when they are alone, almost as if in mating, that alien makes her most advanced showed of teeth

and then a second release of teeth, I don’t know the term for it, below, so she is all teeth, but no face above, a very, very alien creature, who wants to “mate” with her

Alien remains completely in place, camoflagued, odd

then she attacks, singing a song, which is also odd, fairytaleish, this likely, then, her Sniffle, as I call it, the reengagement after the original magic defeat

and out

the last side eye also a trope, relief, goodbye for good

then the loneliness, realizing where she is, alone

so it’s time to return to hypersleep, closing a movie which was in its entirely conceived of and imagined as a nightmare, making use, likely in an intuitive unconscious way not entirely in line with my being able to chart it all out hypnagogically, to create one of the most beautifully rendered nightmares ever on film, a movie with true visual wisdom, even when after it is over, all you want to do is go back to sleep

the end.

Alien (1979) and its dream and nightmare structures, part 2 of 3.

rev., Feb 5-6. 2021.

In Alien (1979), the most telling fact-in-form, that is, a form they came up with which in fact corresponds to hypnagogic psychodynamics is Ash’s bay window as oversight, and it is blue, and since he is suspect it is death, that is, he knows death is a risk, and he wants to minimize revealing concerns as to that, since the creature is more important.

this secret evil, sabotaging things, is reinforced by this shot of an evil overseer, The Blue Sun thanatopsis eyed evil one

 everything around foggy so that they cannot see anything,

then, also strange, as if combining the color scheme of my rendering of hells on earth, here sunk into the deep blue of Tartarus, we learn that the atmosphere is “primal,” so Chloros reigns

it is also amusing that this is the first time we get a view of the cat as overseer, the cat represents the sanity of the living moment, I suppose, ever watchful for deceit and evil, a guardian god, watching over the watchers

at this point, the movie decides to “stun” us, that is, to so appall us with something so new and strange that we are as if cast into a state of shock for the rest of it. They come upon a crashed space ship of a scale far beyond their imagining. The landscape has elements of earthliness, that is, wind, storm, miasmus, but it is as if picked up and thrown down by the blue force of Tartarus and in a second spin it is almost as if the entire structure is a semblance of the dream space of the spaceship and the quarters and all of it crashed and doubled by an order of scale to a truly gargantuan size, appalling subliminity

Gotterdammerung, Alien 2 9 21

this is Gotterdammerung space, it is sensed deep through the brain stem in the body as a freezing horror beyond horror created by a crash of sense of mood in comprehending norm space, so that in a swoon or depression everything solid melts down in a whoosh into hopelessness and nightmare form. The active acid force that one feels during certain types of depression, when nothing you do looks good, when nothing you watch helps, when your mind cannot read, when things and interests just slip away off and down and melt into meaninglessness, leaving you suspended in a dizzy space, that is the form that the Gotterdammerung takes in the brain; and it is with this construct that I guess I must argue that science fiction in this franchise demands depression to see in it in its full horror. Even now, so many years later, this sighting still knocks out all previous movies

It is enhanced in its gargantuan gotterdammerung by being seen blurry through bad tv transmission and wind storm sand

after we get there, too, we see the scale, men are diminished to next to nothing. But, here again, I argue that in hell on earth all agency is lost, this forces upon  the mind of mankind a need to create magic ritualized replacements for lost agency, reagencies but of a magic sort. Here again in their world man is already unable to control his technology, so life in a vigilogogic world is only slightly better than in hell on earth, one is left to makeshift responses to problems caused by one’s core inadequacy. So, no problem, once again, impulsive ego, they go right on in, without any testing, or whatever

once they get in, Hurt especially just goes right on forward, no testing, no nothing, no problem. This is where Giger takes over. The walls of the spacecraft are fugue-y with an overlay of complexifying technology that might also be inadequate and as such like a machine device shown in Australian horror represents the notion of a depleted universe where everything is reduced to being a machine. Thus in Night of Fear (1973) the strange cabin that the woman discovers not only is strange because it looks like no one has lived there in years, and whoever it was was a perv, it is worse than that, it has been vacated by him, to be turned by his attachment of devices upon it into a trap, to feed rats in so he can watch them eat her. Same problem here, the muscular excess of rationality, the–and this is STILL a deep problem in technology today–the EXCESS OF FUNCTIONALITY that is built so far in that only those who built it will be able to operate it or use it or even know of the hidden functionality, leaving average people driving to the pharmacy, as I once put it, in a B52 bomber, this gap expressed by the spacecraft translates into his impulsive un-careful exploration. If, then, the space craft is yet vigilogogic, the logic of the insides of this spacecraft must be of a different order, that is, sinking from hypnagogy to even hell.

Giger’s trademark was combinations of biology and technology that grounded the conception of the cyber in the 80s. Such a fusion, as I mentioned in favorable parts of Jodorosky’s Dune, can only take place in REM dream space. These forms look organic, they have a function, but because men are rational they cannot see it or feel it, except that it operates by a logic they do not know, which is terrifying. So, this is doubly disorienting, deep in Tartarus.

Then Hurt goes further, down another level, into a hole, no problem, and there he finds a truly amazing site, a control room, with as if a gamer in a console chair in the center, truly gargantuan

and, best of all, it has a setpiece of all setpieces, capping off the 70s in film, quite a decade, a monstrous astronaut skeleton in the cockpit of a gaming console control throne, who has been there dead for a very very long time

it also has a gun on the scale of an observatory telescope, another interesting idea

then it is a palatial rotunda, as it were, with forming all about, and it sits atop of an armature suggestive of the roof of a glass atrium in a mall or railroad station

the architectural forms are “natural” but from some other nature, they move in a way that suggests to us nature, but their function is entirely nonobvious, obscure

when they go up to look at the astronaut, they see that he died by an explosion from inside out, that is, something went wrong in the console or in the structure below, so it exploded upward and cracked out his bones

the great thing about these shots is that the thing is pretty much staring at us throughout, even as we discover more about it, his hollowed out skull eyes, here in back of what looks like a Pinocchio length probiscus in front of him

then another form, “what do you make of this?”

Thus, far, then, on the mission, there are two frames, the outside view of the spacecraft, then this inside control room, both vast and sublime, likely, along with Blade Runner, contributing to a feel for dystopian cityscapes in the 80s, even in art. But, now, it is revealed that this is just, dreamwise, the lattice, where the beast sleeps. It seems that he presides over, sits atop, a whole complex greenhouse, if you will, down a hole of which Hurt busily charges ahead. Below, Giger has another surprise, yes, the technology on their ship is awesome, but this is exponentially elaborated way past calculable function, and just stops you in your tracks, what is it all for? What this does, then, dreamwise, is send us spinning down the whoosh to nightmare, but at the same time, simultaneously, space expands out to the dark sentient outer reaches

there is also a touch of hell on earth, second level being gassy, presided over by Chloros, as there is a thin layer of mist incubating eggs. Hurt just blindly barges on, even as, scary, his feet are taken out from under him, at least visually, preparing him

then, also deep in the miasmus, he finds some awful foreign informe’ unnatural-nature, just icky on every level, eggs

and sees movement below, inside, instead of getting the hell out of there, he continues to prod, big mistake (this would be in the splat position, having fallen into his nightmare, but not aware of it, ie it was a soft landing because of his blind curiosity, for science)

then when things go bad, the camera scurries all the way back up through three levels I think to the ship, where, again, stupidly, they bring the thing on board, over Ripley’s objections, because Kane is a buddy and he cant die, so they bring him on, with this on his face

Again, what makes this dreamlike, and this would be an example of a Pillow Suffocation masquerade on a bed, in this case a surgery table, is the gap between the thing and the response, this sort of pure alien would seem to demand absolute security and protective gear, but, like in a dream, they are prodding it with pencils, curious, amateur, thinking that by magic they can make it go away. Then too in dreams there is the “let’s try this” logic of impromptu treatment, so he clips at a crab leg

and it turns out to have acid for blood which eats through the entire hull of the ship, lethal beyond anything they know, and yet they still waffle (this feels very much like the US response to covid this past year, a complete gap between what is needed and what is responded)

the closeups of the thing over Kane’s face is also dreamlike, being the final close-up suffocation ambient shots of an approach of a monster in a vector, the sleep demon attack, without escape, we should know, usually it causes us to pop up bolt upright in bed, but Ephialties seems to have been usurped here by the thing

Still, the focus on sleep. Just as they were all in hypersleep, and Ripley will return to it, so too all are just up from hypersleep, sleepwalking in a way, and so one solution is just to let Kane gestate with it, without any hospital vitals recorded, in a quarantine room (this does  feel in its distancing device not unlike the Green Slime, of twenty years before)

this creature also has to register somewhere on the averruncate vector which has, unbeknownst to them, come on board, for Ripley is right in her warning. In that vector is a pursuer, this thing, now, and an averter, them. This is now activated. The bad early news is that while some of the strategies of averting the pursuer involve, according to Burkert, cutting off fingers, or legs, or other parts, to cause the pursuer to pause, and take that pars pro toto, if they were hoping this alien was that sort of sacrifice, an apsyrtonic being, they are mistaken, it has a hard shell

and it only sheds its cells

to make itself stronger and harder, that is, on its end of the averruncate vector, it is arming itself, preparing, his pure science seems to have allowed it to.

A wonderful dimension of this movie, the telling of this fairy tale, is the repeated focus on the underbelly or bottom of the vessel complex. This psychologically places the whole drama for survival “under the bed” of the vector, that is, IN the crisis attack phase. Even in a pause, like when Dallas sits and listens to classical music, tension builds, under the bed, the bogey is waiting to come

and, sure enough, now, the next move made in this game of cat and mouse is that the thing on Kane’s face disappears, so they go in, AGAIN without protection, to investigate. They assume that it has simply sloughed off, a victory for them. They even find it, and probe it, for science

then when Hurt wakes up and seems fine, they are always in a hurry, like people sleepwalking, to get back to normal, so, once again, they are at the table chatting away, happy that the crisis is over, and then it strikes, coming OUT of Hurt, where it was incubating, killing him

and in the movie’s grossest, most skincrawling effort, out pops this truly vicious little uncontrollable stinger or sturgeon, made of acid, then it scurries off

and they are left with like, oh my god, what just happened? go USA

so, what has been happening here is, the movie as a nightmare discovered a zone below even “hell on earth, a Tartarus, of deep space, a pure hell, and then it had by its scale and strangeness a chilling capacity to flip everything over it so now that flip is sinking down onto them in the hypnagogy of the ship and as they focus on Kane’s sleeping body, an averruncate vector opens up wherein the monster IN the sleeper breaks out and when that happens the movie shifts again into a Devil’s Road, that is, a life and death situation, and in this appearance, unlike in the prologue, in this case, with a thing hiding, the setup of the hyperfunctional technologized corridors now looks like a nightmare

Alien, the devil’s road 2 9 21

each corridor, each as depicted on film, becomes the devil’s road, life and death, it is a sinister transformation, affected by Scott’s keen cinematography

in the middle of this, as if to put an accent mark on it, remember now that Hurt has died, so he must be buried, and since this is not at sea, he will be buried as if at sea in space, he is mummified, we see him kept at a distance, like a contaminated thing, in the video camera screens (just like in The Green Slime)

then they open the hatch to dispose of it, it is a very small little opening in a vast undercarriage of the complex, awesomely making us feel their helplessness

then he is just spit out, or sucked out by space (so offering us a foreshadow of things to come), and in this funeral he passes in procession through a rhizome of zigzags of hyperfunctional pointless technology, like in the land of the already dead

as images these remind me, in their grimness, and in their wobble-wobble, suggesting to them all that death is very near, and the same thing that killed Kane will kill them

of carvings of the strigulus wobble-wobble on Roman sarcophagi, space is being used, as his tumble in space is being used, as the wobble-wobble, communicating to them their passage on the devil’s road

the busywork on the surfaces also strike me as similar to the framing devices of ornate decoration suggestive of sepulcher architecture, the palace of death, beyond

indeed, is not Kane the Mercury of the movie, moving so fast without caution to explore the science of a discovery, bringing death upon them (the alien in its immature form then a cereberus figure)?

and as the movie beautifully follows death out, we get the whole shot of the place, its helpless remoteness, without rescue, the desert island trope shot

then back to a ship which has now, no question, the sleep demon having attacked, become the devil’s road, life and death, with the door of truth at the end, far off (this also corresponds to near death experience).

what this emphasizes, and why it would be included, and this is a bit of art, of visual art, is that as mentioned previously Ash’s bay window overlooking the mission, perhaps he prompted Kane to search, was the Blue Sun, and the blue sun presides over thanatopsis, seeing death; and this occurs through the filter of a deadfall, so now by the funeral, a body sent to hell, the blue sun shines bleak, and the deadfall is the underbelly of the ship, really the lattice expanded greatly to ambient space, which reinforces the capture of the life of the ship by this totally foreign thing on the planet Gigerien

Kane’s funeral, Alien 2 9 21

now the camera goes a-searching, finding near death experience-like visual events

another element of the search is that we discover adjunct places that are centralized on themselves, in certain moments of operation, but left idle off to the side when in normal or other operations. Brett has the strangest search, as he is distracted by Jonesy the cat, he enters into another whole room, with another look

this is a typical Black House, a peripheral built-up space where a nexus forms, in which encounters with the thing beyond are made

and the gap between technology and consciousness is never higher, he is distracted, looking for the cat, the audience getting really tense because he is not paying attention, he is being way too casual about all this

every time you get another view of this space, which we have not seen at all yet, you groan, it is hopelessly complicated

then, in addition to not paying attention, he misses clues, because he does not know the science, but he cannot put two and two together, what’s this? this is the skin of the thing, that he has already shedded, what does that mean? think! it means he is shedding, and growing (this shedding IS an apsyrtonic effect on the averter-tipping-to-pursuer, it leaves skin behind, but only to get stronger, Ash literally just explained this, he ignores it)

then, in his Black House, there are more doors, big ones, monumental, part of a whole construction to blast off rockets in, it reads here as an Egyptian tomb.  

we realize that we are in a rocket launching mechanism, hello, a whole peripteral wall suddenly casts up over the Black House an ignis fatuus of another mission or time and place, all of the awe of it as if distracting us, even as it is would make sense the alien would seek out familiar buildups to live in

the “peripteral wall”, seen in dreams, creating an illusion, a mirage of some occult power

and, on time, in awe, we pause to go wow, that’s also what a peripteral wall in ambience is meant to do

so we, like him, all but forget what we are doing here?

as if to declare that this is some illusory far off ambient place, that he has lost his focus in, a nexus, it is leaking water, from above, unsure why, just raw, overscaled technology

he can’t resist, he loses himself in the simple pleasures of physical felt life

but, then, he “finds” the cat, only we realize that, just like the signal from space, the cat is not giving him an SOS to save me, the cat is hissing at a presence, he is giving him a WARNING

and then out of the rain and the scale of it comes, ta da, the alien, greatly, impossibly enlarged, in just a few hours, terrible moment of whatisit? deregulation of the senses

the Cat’s Eye sees him, so cat’s eyes again, omniscient, awake to terror, always watching,

but also to compare, to foil off the introduction of the monster, he is at bottom, perhaps, feline, or at least animalistic, but it is as if he has been distorted into a figure of the buildup of the absurd technology, it is an “it”, a figuring out, an atalantean of the technological buildup of its civilization, a hypertech ghost in the machine, a Interstit demon, also, on the devil’s road, all teeth (in which  case for a bit the cat’s eye are also Eyes Wide Shut, simply not registering what they are seeing)

and then he is too late

it attacks, and that’s that, dead. This, however, is a strange shot, the lunge shot, with the Hand of Glory reversed, the Hand of Terror, coming in, a horror movie shot, which, somehow, makes it seem less frightening than it did when it was unclear what it was in the previous shot

end part 2.

Alien (1979) and its dream and nightmare structures, part 1 of 3.

rev., Feb 5-6. 2021.

Following up on Jodorowsky’s Dune (2013), where Jodorowsky claims that he assembled a team of writers and special effects artists which then went on, after he failed to make his project work, to all work on Alien (1979), and so they won awards for that, not this. This scenario makes it seem like Alien is a variant on Dune, in some sense, or that Jodorowsky thinks some ideas he had entertained in his unmade movie Dune were then lifted and used in a copycat way in Alien and its later movies (which I am in the process of viewing in sequence). This is not the case. What surprises me most of all about Alien, seeing it this time, it is almost unconsciously guided by dream structures as well as other movies. Indeed, the movie begins in a sleep.

We are out past the rings of Saturn, as the film opens. These rings are mythical in 70s horror for a conjunction of a special sort (and we are living under a similar Saturnan-Jupiter conjunction this past solstice, forty days ago), and so this is not only far out, but occulty far out

at one point, then, strange little forms begin to form on the screen, this is the title, coming slowly in

in the space, or in back of it; then as others form, it is possibly a reflection of light from a chamber which sits vis-a-vis the view, where we are

gradually letters come in, but they seem to be figured out from computer screen lettering of the time, signifying mystery or uncertainty, or secret orders (which show up in this movie), and they could themselves be alien

Then we get the title, spinning on the rings of Saturn, with some play referring back to the 2001 monolith event.

the rings of Saturn are a bad luck formation in outer space, in movies of outer space (in The Melting Man (1977) it seems he had a melting problem because he had looked at the sun back through the rings of Saturn, as if they acted as a magnifying glass to make the sun’s rays lethal to his inner anatomy there).

Then we come into the space vehicle. It is of immediate pertinence in terms of its dream structure that we mostly see the bottom of it,

then we enter in, it is all corridors, with strange mechanisms lining the corridors

it goes on and on without any sense of purpose or order

we get glimpses of places that seem more centralized, as if a place

this is some sort of main room, with mechanical noises whirring

we get abstract figures, in  the form of helmets, meaning that human beings are somewhere around here

and there’s the computer screens, circa 1979 projected into 2037 (bad miss), ominous and scary

by flashing the screen back at the shield on the face of the helmet he represents as if the herm of the place, indicating a kind of robotic intelligence that has left man out of the loop

then we keep going into what looks like a more hospitable part of the maze

this opens onto a womblike enclosure, dark and round

the lights come up on a very strange enclosure, a Great Bed, with several people sleeping in pods

then the pods open up, and we see that there is a whole crew sleeping, in hypersleep

then we have one of those dissolve-flutters, a technique used even in Midsommar to indicate descent into vigilogogy, but here it means that after he wakes up he is still in a state of vigilogogy or sleep drunkenness not quite awake and maybe to stay in that state. In dissolves his greater dream self now has to reintegrate with his smaller bodily self. 

his profile of who he is to others in the world has to collate with his own sense that here I am, I am back in me, after this long perhaps deeply dissociative hypersleep

then, too, he, sleeping, has been a Sleeper to the others, and all have been Sleepers to each other, dreaming each others’ dreams, in a Great Bed, deeply, deeply linked, then, in a way

and then he gets up and out, ready to go, as if he expected it, and this was routine, because now he has finally figured out where he is, and that, oh yeah, I am awake again

it is important that a movie like this opens in hypersleep, as it ends. At the end, Ripley alone survives, she is the Only Girl, to use that big discovery of trope, the only trope known by many, and when she realizes her plan is to head to some spot six weeks away and see if she can make contact, space feels awful lonely

so she puts herself into hypersleep at the end

and almost like the star baby at the end of 2001, she is now the Sleeper whose dream or nightmare we have momentarily experienced, and that’s that

just as John Hurt sits up in bed, the nightmare posture, with little clothing on, it is, of course, in preparing to assume this position, before interrupted by the surprise last stand by the Alien, Weaver has her famous strip-tease sequence, perhaps the most 80s moment of the movie, but it does relate to the underlying dream logic of the story.

After she has successfully jettisoned the rescue vessel from the exploding main ship, with less than five seconds to go (so that was pretty stagey) she immediately begins to strip to get into hypersleep,

women undressing, of course, is a trope, more so then, and in this head-stuck pull-over she rather comically if subconsciously imitates the form of the Alien, no?

and by an extension of her head, and by this gesture as if saying she is purging herself of all her worries, and going to be able to relax, she exposes most of her lower middle body, she has only panties on, and she reveals that she has a good figure, so to speak

it really is a stripping bare, but of a positive sort, sort of, as underarm exposure exposes her fully for the camera and the male viewer, and she is rendered entirely vulnerable in the sense that while others were on board there was a lot of class and gender politics contaminating communication, in a very 80s way, as will be seen, here she is entirely stripped bare to be come just a functionary in the world of pure machinery without any of her personal defenses, and that’s that, she is officially reduced by her heroism to a cog; and she is also alone, completely alone, so she does not care that her panties are low riding, and do not quite cover all her behind

it is as if she is already tucking herself into bed, on her side of the bed, stretching, exhaling relief, she survived.

but then, of course, and to me somewhat unbelievably, it turns out that the console is the Empty Pillow trope, except that now we get a Papa Bear incursion, a who’s sleeping in my bed?, as hidden up in the console tubing, the alien lies in wait, so she jolts back in another nightmare

this now causes her to lurch back into the protective closet where the space suits are, she is exposed in close-up as if now body to body contend against the Alien, almost in a rape scene, with, now, the mere incidental tail of backside exposure in the previous alone shot, not playing a face-making role, looking back at the alien (one really does wonder here if Scott had to tell staff to pull her panties down just a bit further so that we can get the shot of not only her butt crack but the light from above shining ghostly through her panties off the surface unable to cover her below, this then to make as if an acknowledgement from one side of the bed that there is an intruding ghost in the other side of the bed.

after hiding, face to face, shocked to see that she has to go back at, and terrified, truly, that this time she might’ve bought it, there might be no escape from this, she sweats heavily

face to face with the alien

her breasts thrust out, as if holding her breath

then, as she, thinking very quickly, and smartly, having formulated a plan in like two seconds, so she proves herself a perfect cog in the machine against the perfect organism, by getting into a space suit again, very quietly

the alien reveals himself to be there, in fact, what he is doing, who knows? but he then expresses his mouth and it looks to me like a normal mouth, formally, to an oversized head, formally, if of entirely different material than even dinosaurs

but then it’s like there is a probiscus with the mouth with teeth dropping out of another one, so there is a double mouth, somehow

and so she gets rid of him

swinging back to the beginning, the ending argues, scenically, that at bottom the entire movie psychologically does not happen in space but in a Great Bed, that is, an extension of one’s place in a bed, and then as one is in a “masquerade” from a Death Mask reflective of one’s evil or other self, one is attacked, to then have to, in a nightmare, contend against that attack.

But, there is another point. In Halloween (1978) I argue that though Jamie Lee Curtis is not by a long shot a fightback girl, as per trope, which was only developing at the time, she did have a moment I call the Sniffle. The Sniffle occurs when after you have somehow magically by unlikely or impossible luck in the application of force survived, so after she has apparently killed Michael Myers by stabbing him in the eye with a wire hanger, he then laid out on the bedroom floor, she thinks it is over, but, then, he sits up, she Sniffles, and it’s on again, only this time she steps aside for Loomis to arrive and use proper force. In the context of the Sniffle, that is, the return of the attack after you think you have defeated him by magic means, lies the hypnagogic weakness of people in 70s movies. This in The Hills Have Eyes (1977) and even Mad Max (1979), people are at war, or contending against aggression, but they make use of their power in ineffective ways, their humanity causes them to misuse the power, they have less power than they need, they improvise with some crazy, sometimes entertaining ideas, and they just barely pull it off, or escape, but not after a heavy price in human stupidity is paid, in this case all of the crew except for Ripley. It is also by the Sniffle that a female, in particular, having thought her magic bullshit worked, finds out it did not, and, in that instant, she grows up and, in the logic of horror movies, becomes a cog in the machine, stripped bare of all personal culture or defense (horror movies are very communist in that regard, the protections of private life are meaningless, and “stripping bare” is simply about stripping away all those defenses from one).

For Ripley, her inklings of power started early, as she played tough guy but in a moral uphold-the-rules way, when Ash let Hurt back in with that thing on his face, she was against it, it broke quarantine, and did, she was right, put them all in danger. But, other than that, the exercise of power or control by the man on board is typical 70s inadequacy. Dallas is just there to do the job, and rules accordingly; the guys in the boiler room are always complaining about their pay. Ash is suspect, and he turns out to be a robot. They face up to the thing on Hurt’s face without any protective gear; they examine it in a room without any protective enclosures, to keep it from running off; they then face up to the fact that it is off Hurt without any test, he then turns out to simply host an embryo, which breaks out of him while they are eating; their searches are haphazard and unprotected, it really is quite amazing. It is as if the crew is in some other movie, and not in a movie which takes place in an environment that seems to require maximum security. All of these failings of power are typical of dreams, resulting in magic solutions and failures.

The inadequacy of their training comes into play almost immediately, as they find out that they are not on their way home but were woken up half way back to earth, way out by Saturn, and they are confused and disoriented

nothing seems right

Dallas gets his marching orders, no questions asked, from Mother, an overruling computer system that controls the craft.

this situation of disorientation is, in fact, a dream formation, or rather, an after-dream formation, when you wake up into vigilogogy but either were immersed in a dream with no relation to where you are, or one that leaves you with a hangover in a zombie day, a state of sleepdrunkenness.

It is not entirely clear which of the set was designed by Giger, and which by others. The main part of the craft seems to be a Gigeresque, without getting Gigery. Yet, physically, in its look, it appears to be a zigzag of adjunct space, the maze that trails out from the core of consciousness, and if one ends up only going through it and around in circles in it it is a fugue. As I position it, the movie takes place in the “dream” of a Sleeper, which would simply be a form representing the condition all of them are working in, that is, unimaginable to contemporary viewers, the fog I call the eschatia, the place of last things, and I think it applies here. But then, near the central core of consciousness, in waking, even if beclouded by a dark dream, there is form and a zig zag of corridors in adjunct space. If the movie spins in the zigzag, it is a fugue, of this, it does sometimes. If it, however, paces off, it is an eschatian adventure.

if, however, a vector forms, that is, if there is a danger on board, as will happen, then the central core pulls in, drops to a lattice position in hypnagogy, and one experiences the vector, then the battle, involving, eventually, a nightmare.

in a scirpograph

a sequence that oddly corresponds to the long shot that Jodorowsky outlined for Dune, happens here. There is a signal sent out, it is shown as being sent out of the craft, to locate it, and we always go out under the craft

then there is a flight path, in a series of receding boxes, around a central planet, which lies in ambient space; this could be, I am not sure, the Blue Sun, in this case, Saturn

this is conveyed scenically outside, in a view impossible for humans to get o in reality, showing the off-centered, irrationally concatenated structure of the craft, just a build-up of schemata, as it circles the planet

it follows that path

and we see the vector accordion out, around

then the lander separates off, from below, again

and it is riding the  vector around, and in

this is what it looks like in reality (Jodorowsky also says that this way of presenting predator POV, with the calculations in the frame of the window, are also derived from his unmade Dune)

and they come further in

in a scirpograph

it is fun that the craft landing on this planet has nice bootstrapping landing lights

the graphics change to more isometric

a hellish rendering of the same

they land, with a jolt

a nightmare formation

they are overseen in their exploration of the ping by Ash, in his bay window, the Blue Sun itself, one of the key shots of the movie

the graphic space is, just like Jodorowsky’s long shot, a mis en abyme, care-less of the gradations of ambient vigilogogic space. But, then, the planet will have to be considered, relative to them, an ambient space, that when they land on it, drops into a spatial equivalent of hell on earth, in sentient outer space; and then when they land, they are overseen by Ash, in the Blue Sun, who is suspect and later will be revealed to be death, so it IS a thanatopsis of sorts.

I suppose the only place, hypnagogically, that such a place in outer space could exist is below the bottomless pit of hell on earth, and so I have to term it Tartarus, which was a special hell below hell which was reserved solely for demiurges or gods hurled there from Olympus, and imprisoned in perpetual darkness (the Greeks had to have created the idea to conform to some psychological pressure)

this is what the whole construct, everything vis-a-vis each other, looks like

I will then have to argue, keeping a logic operable in my working out of the relations between hypnagogy and vigilogogy, a flip from Tartarus on up over the whole rest of the other construct, to make by another form of the Big Sleep, the Hypersleep, a delirious dream flipping formation, all of it feeding in

Alien hypersleep 2 9 21

to be continued, part 2.