The Nomadic Alternative – Page 58

Solar symbolism saturates the centres of temporal power -

Versailles, Moscow or Pekin. Even 'revolution', the emotive word of our age, was first used as a technical term for the movement of celestial bodies. The Centre of Revolution changes periodically, and, though proceeding in an easterly direction, is perhaps still resident in Pekin. "The East is Red", chanted the radio inside China's first orbiting satellite. The Sun irradiates every public appearance of Mao Tse-tung. "Its splendour reddens the great earth. Our leader, Beloved Chairman Mao, may you be with us for ever."

"At 1.10 p.m. on October , the most, most happy and the most, most unforgettable moment of my life, I saw Chairman Mao, the never-setting red sun ... Loud shouts of joy burst from the square."

Red, colour of blood, immo[r]ality, the anemones of Adonis and the shroud of a dead Pope. Neanderthalers covered their dead comrades with a dusting of red ochre to give an illusion of the incorruptible. Mao Tse-tung, heir to the Son of Heaven, once held a view that all true revolutionaries had an insatiable appetite for red pepper.

Moon-rocketry is a vertical aspiration with celestial, almost mystical overtones, the significance of which has not escaped attention. "It must have occurred to many who saw pictures of it", wrote Sir Peter Medawar, "that the great steel rampart or nave from which Apollo rockets are launched had the size and shape and grandeur of a cathedral. Like a cathedral it is economically pointless, a shocking waste of public money; but like a cathedral it is also a symbol of aspiration towards higher things."

Displays of such material splendour are the vehicles of rulers to demonstrate to their subjects that they alone hold the key to vertical progress. And before the coming of human flight to the Other World, the sovereigns of civilized states never spared money or their consciences to turn their capitals into worldly approximations of the New Jerusalem, the visionary city "of pure gold, like unto clear glass". Their scintillating metropolises they planned on the celestial model. The Bernini Colonnade revolves