Author: Mawr Gorshin

I'm merging the variety of topics I've blogged about--which include literary and film analyses, anarchism, socialism, libertarian-leaning Marxism, narcissistic abuse, and psychoanalysis--into a coherent philosophy centred on dialectical materialism, dialectical monism, and object relations theory. Now, one dialectical opposition is that between the erotic and the ascetic, so accordingly, my writing encompasses the sexual as well as the philosophical; the former can be found in my publications on the Literotica website, as well as my self-published (erotic) horror writing on Amazon.

The Tanah: Lyrics–More Spells

[The following is the thirty-fourth of many posts–here is the first, here is the second, here is the third, here is the fourth, here is the fifth, here is the sixth, here is the seventh, here is the eighth, here is the ninth, here is the tenth, here is the eleventh, here is the twelfth, here is the thirteenth, here is the fourteenth, here is the fifteenth, here is the sixteenth, here is the seventeenth, here is the eighteenth, here is the nineteenth, here is the twentieth, here is the twenty-first, here is the twenty-second, here is the twenty-third, here is the twenty-fourth, here is the twenty-fifth, here is the twenty-sixth, here is the twenty-seventh, here is the twenty-eighth, here is the twenty-ninth, here is the thirtieth, here is the thirty-first, here is the thirty-second, and here is the thirty-third–about a fictitious discovery of ancient manuscripts of a religious text of narratives and magic spells. Its purpose for my readers and me is to provide a cosmology and mythography on which I am basing much, if not most, of my fiction–short stories and novels. If anyone is interested in reading this fiction, he or she can use these blog posts as references to explain the nature of the magic and universe in my fiction.]

Translator’s note: please remember that all of this collection of spells is incomplete. As excavations of the area continue, more will be found and published in future editions. The current set is only what has been found for the moment.

[Sing the following verse repeatedly, louder and louder, with increasing intensity. Pluck individual strings on a zither, each plucking for each line.]

May I take, ///
and escape. \\\
May I keep ///
what I steal. \\\

[Sing the following verse repeatedly, in as low a bass voice as possible, with the soft hitting of a gong.]

Take your life, \\\
take your soul. \\\
Take your breath, \\\
leave you low. \\\

[Sing the following verse repeatedly, with accompanying flute.]

Make my tales \\\
seem as real ///
as if they \\\
had been seen. ///

[Sing the following verse repeatedly, with loud drums.]

Ai, Lord of Fire, ////
god of lust ///
and desire, //
come from hell ///
to the earth, ///
give me what ///
in my heart burns. ////

Commentary: The following two spells are not particularly ‘wicked’ ones, yet they are included among the Lyrics all the same. The first is a verse of protection, often sung before one is about to eat a dish blessed by the spell. It is also sung while the singer, naked, has his or her hands on the plates on the dishes, to transfer the spell into the food, and give its power to the eaters.

[Sing the following repeatedly, with hands on the food to be blessed and to protect those who eat it. The singer must be naked.]

Keep our enemies far away. \\\\\
We eat what will keep us safe. \\\\\\\

Commentary: the second spell is of protection put on necklaces.

[Sing the following repeatedly, with the necklaces to be blessed lying nearby. The singer must be naked.]

Keep the necklace wearers safe. ///\\
May no enemy give them strife. ///\\\

Commentary: in keeping with the malevolent nature of so many of these lyrics, though, one spell has been devised here to make the wearers of the protective necklaces want to take them off, rendering them vulnerable to their enemies again, as we’ll see.

May the necklace itch, itch, itch. /\/\/\
May the wearer twitch, twitch, twitch. /\/\/\
May the wearer take it off, /\/\/\
and at his protection scoff. /\/\/
The wearer being naked now, /\/\/
I can make him kneel and cow. /\/\/\/

[Sing the following repeatedly, with flute and drum accompaniment to guarantee success.]

May boils grow all over your skin! ////\\\
May no one love you ever again! ////\\\

Analysis of ‘The Perilous Night’

The Perilous Night is a 1944 composition for prepared piano by the American avant-garde composer John Cage. It is in six untitled movements, and a performance of the whole piece should last about thirteen to fourteen minutes. He said of the piece that it is expressive of “the loneliness and terror that comes to one when love becomes unhappy.”

In 1982, Jasper Johns, a longtime friend of Cage, created a mixed-media diptych also called “Perilous Night,” which includes a silkscreen of the score of Cage’s composition.

Being a piece for prepared piano, The Perilous Night is an example of the radically experimental nature of Cage’s music. I’ll go into what a prepared piano is below, but for now, I want to go into the avant-gardism of his music more generally.

His music teachers were, in the 1930s, Henry Cowell and Arnold Schoenberg, both radical innovators in music who would have a strong influence on Cage. (Another major influence was Edgard Varèse, who also influenced Frank Zappa.) Schoenberg, Cage’s teacher in UCLA, famously said that his student wasn’t a composer, but rather an innovator…of genius.

As Schoenberg’s pupil at the time, Cage (writing in a version of musical serialism then) said that he had no feeling for harmony, for which Schoenberg had insisted a composer must have a feeling. Without that feeling, Cage would find himself at a wall he could not pass, as his teacher insisted; so Cage said that he would dedicate his life to beating his head against that wall.

Apart from the prepared piano–which I promise I’ll go into detail about soon enough–he also composed such works for percussion as the Constructions (the first being in Metal) and the Imaginary Landscapes (the first of which was for  records of constant and variable frequency, large Chinese cymbal, and string piano), Williams Mix for magnetic tapes, and by the 1950s, he started to incorporate chance into his music, which as part of the influence of Far Eastern philosophy, used the I Ching. Part of this foray into aleatory music was a recording Cage made with David Tudor in 1959 called Indeterminacy: New Aspects of Form in Instrumental and Electronic Music.

Particularly radical ideas of Cage’s included the use of silence, as in 4’33”, for any instrument or combination of instruments, and is just four and a half minutes of silence, or whatever ambient sounds are heard during that time; then there is 0’00”, for any performer. Such ‘compositions,’ influenced by Zen Buddhism, Indian traditions, and Dadaism, are meant to challenge our most basic ideas as to what music is.

As for the prepared piano, its origins lie in the composition of Bacchanale, a dance piece for Syvilla Fort back in the late 1930s. Cage had been writing a lot of pieces for percussion ensembles then, but the place where the dance was to be performed wasn’t large enough to fit in a percussion ensemble (there was only a grand piano in the room); so Cage, influenced by Cowell’s use of extended piano techniques (e.g., playing the strings inside, instead of with the keyboard, as with The Banshee), started to experiment with the interior of the piano.

Cage used mostly weather strippings on the piano strings for Bacchanale, but as for his prepared piano compositions in general, he would also put such objects as bolts, screws, mutes, or other objects between or on the strings, effectively turning the piano into a one-man percussion instrument, changing the lyrical piano tones into metallic, percussive ones. This one-man percussion instrument, or one-man gamelan ensemble, was the solution to his problem with the small room in which Bacchanale was performed.

Here are links to recordings of The Perilous Night, the last of them including the score (with instructions on how to prepare the piano at the end). The first of these shows the pieces of weather stripping and screws put between or on the strings.

Twenty-six notes of the piano are prepared with rubber, weather stripping, screws, bolts, nuts, bamboo, wood, and cloth, and Cage provides very exacting instructions for the preparation, even specifying certain Steinway piano models to create the sound he wanted.

The piece’s title is a reference to the Perilous Bed that Gawain, of Arthurian legend, had to lie on to rid a castle of its enchantments and curses, and thus free it of its captives. For Cage, the ordeal that Gawain went through on the bed is symbolic of a painful moment in Cage’s life, when he was separating from his wife, Xenia Andreyevna Kashevaroff, to be with Merce Cunningham, who would be Cage’s partner for the rest of his life.

According to the legend, Gawain entered the chamber of the castle where he saw the enchanted bed moving about, hurtling all around the room and smashing against the walls. He jumped on it.

The bed stopped moving, then slingstones and bolts were launched at him; after that, lions or other beasts attacked him (there are several works of art showing him on the bed, with nearby lions). With his bravery and armour, he managed to survive the ordeal and rid the castle of its evil magic.

Since Cage’s relationship with Xenia and Cunningham was a sexual one, a legend about a perilous bed was an effective way to express the emotional turmoil he was going through. Changing the title from “Perilous Bed” to “Perilous Night” sounds to me like a kind of censoring of the homoerotic aspect of this relationship, especially given how the piece was composed and first performed in the mid-1940s, when attitudes toward divorce and homosexuality would have obviously been far more condemnatory than they are today.

The dark, tense nature of the prepared piano music vividly expresses the tension that must have been felt as Cage saw the heartbreak in Xenia’s eyes when she knew she was losing him to Merce. Initially, she’d actually suggested that she and Cage have an open relationship with Merce, a ménage à trois; but the two men drew together more and more, leaving her out and leading to her divorce with Cage.

So it’s easy to see how a legend about a bed that flies around a room, smashing into its walls, then launches bolts and slingstones at the man lying on it, then attacks him with wild beasts, is a perfect metaphor for what was going on in Cage’s bed at the time. Even after it was just him and Merce, Cage kept the intimate aspects of their relationship as private as possible, famously quipping that he did the cooking, while Merce did the dishes.

It’s interesting how the time signatures for all six movements of The Perilous Night are either 4/4 or 2/2, when one considers how complex the rhythms are throughout; one would expect constantly changing, asymmetric time signatures. Cage’s music in the 1940s made use of rhythmic structures called “nested proportions,” in which the total structure of each movement reflects the same proportions for the length of the smaller phrases of the movement.

I would like to imagine a narrative of six chapters, so to speak, that are expressed in the music of these six movements. It’s a narrative of the Cage/Xenia/Cunningham love triangle, with the Gawain narrative paralleling and allegorizing it.

In the first movement, Gawain is approaching the enchanted castle, just as Cage heard Xenia’s suggestion that they have a ménage à trois with Cunningham, since she found him attractive. As for the prepared piano music, it’s mostly variations on, for the left hand, bass notes a major sixth (or a tenth) apart from each other (F and D), and for the right hand, three adjacent notes in the middle of the treble clef (F-sharp, G, and A-flat). One senses in the music a tentative approach to the castle…and to the coming threesome.

In the second movement, I hear Gawain going through the door inside the castle. Cage, Xenia, and Cunningham are having their first sexual encounter together and deciding they like it. As for the music, the left hand does a lot of minor thirds of D-flat and F-flat, back and forth (or they would sound that way, if not for the altering of tones by the piano preparations). The right hand plays a repeatedly ascending and descending arpeggiated chord of E-flat, G-flat, B-flat, and upper E-flat (again, except for the tone alterations). Permutations of these patterns occur largely throughout the rest of the movement.

The energetic nature of this music suggests the passion of the three lovers enjoying their thrilling first time in bed together.

In the third movement, we can imagine Gawain walking through the halls of the castle, looking for and finding the chamber with the Perilous Bed. Cage, Xenia, and Cunningham are experiencing the life of a threesome, but the beginnings of the two men’s desire just to be a couple are being felt. A lot of different musical ideas are going on here, but a few towards the end stand out. Both hands here are at first in the treble register, the right playing mostly A-flats and B-flats, back and forth; then the left hand returns to the bass register, and there’s a back-and-forth of D and F there, with a back-and-forth of D-flat and G/E in the right hand, to end the movement. There’s a sense in this music of an itch in Cage and Cunningham just to be a couple, without her.

In the fourth movement, I imagine Gawain going into the chamber and seeing the Perilous Bed flying around the room, bumping into the walls (each knock against a wall being musically represented, though heard softly, in the left hand of the piano hitting bass Fs, Ds, and Fs two octaves lower). Xenia is having suspicions that Cage and Cunningham are excluding her. This feeling is expressed in the haunting ostinato played on the right hand, with back-and-forth notes of G-flat and E-flat.

In the fifth movement, Gawain has jumped on the bed, and the bolts and slingstones are being launched at him. Xenia has caught Cage and Cunningham in bed together. The tension of such an encounter is musically felt throughout this movement, especially at the end, with six bars of tied, dotted half notes that are accented and played fortississimo with the left hand, and F/D/G with the right hand alternating with low Ds with the left hand.

The sixth and final movement is climactic. Now, beasts and lions attack Gawain on the bed. This violence is symbolic of the hostility that must have grown between rejected Xenia on the one side, and Cage and Cunningham on the other, with fighting that led ultimately to divorce between her and Cage.

The music reflects this tension and fighting with variations on a motif of high eighth notes of mostly D and E, but also some high Bs and other notes played with the right hand, the piano preparation making them sound almost like xylophone notes. The left hand tends to play an extremely low, ascending, arpeggio-like motif of mostly eighth notes rising up to a D and F just below the staff of the bass clef. Though it’s all notated in 4/4 time, the left and right hand motifs are very irregular rhythmically, adding to the sense of an emotionally unstable situation.

Other permutations of these patterns are heard in the middle section, until we get to the end, where things slow down, and the left hand is playing its motif in descending half and whole notes. The right hand will be alternating between eighth and half notes near the end, while the left hand is playing an extremely low F in tied half and whole notes; then the right hand will switch from the alternations I just described to dotted half notes, played on the second beat of each bar, in an extremely high E.

Then, as the music gets softer, and eerier, the low F goes down to an E, and the high E goes down to a B, which soon, instead of being played on the second beat of each bar, is played on the first, with the low E of the left hand. The piece ends thus in pianissimo, expressive of the loneliness and desolation that Xenia must have felt, and for which Cage, in his regret over the relationship’s debacle, must have felt a painful empathy.

In conclusion, I can imagine this piece to be allegorical of the strain felt between the gay and straight communities, the latter’s struggle between tolerance and intolerance of the former, which as we know can be quite perilous for the former.

From Ballots to Bullets

George Clinton, alas, was wrong.
For a browning of an urban area,
the ballot will never be sufficient.
The other George, of course, knew better than to trust the vote.

Putting a ballot in a box
is like buying a ticket to
watch a theatrical show
in which a president struts and frets his hour upon the stage.

ICE, to the IDF
close in character,
shoot at people.

We the people
thus have the right
to shoot back.

The Tanah: Lyrics–The First Four Spells

[The following is the thirty-third of many posts–here is the first, here is the second, here is the third, here is the fourth, here is the fifth, here is the sixth, here is the seventh, here is the eighth, here is the ninth, here is the tenth, here is the eleventh, here is the twelfth, here is the thirteenth, here is the fourteenth, here is the fifteenth, here is the sixteenth, here is the seventeenth, here is the eighteenth, here is the nineteenth, here is the twentieth, here is the twenty-first, here is the twenty-second, here is the twenty-third, here is the twenty-fourth, here is the twenty-fifth, here is the twenty-sixth, here is the twenty-seventh, here is the twenty-eighth, here is the twenty-ninth, here is the thirtieth, here is the thirty-first, and here is the thirty-second–about a fictitious discovery of ancient manuscripts of a religious text of narratives and magic spells. Its purpose for my readers and me is to provide a cosmology and mythography on which I am basing much, if not most, of my fiction–short stories and novels. If anyone is interested in reading this fiction, he or she can use these blog posts as references to explain the nature of the magic and universe in my fiction.]

Translator’s Introduction

And at long last, we come to the wicked spells of the Tanah.

When one considers just how heinous the intentions are of many, if not most, or all, of these spells, and how much the ancient elders abominated them and fought to keep people from using them, it is amazing that so many of the texts have survived, rather than all of them destroyed.

But here they are, as incomplete as they may be.

These Lyrics are verses set to music, for it is the nature of the music–the melodic contours of the singing (as expressed in an upward or downward slash for each word, beside each line of verse), the instrumental accompaniment–that makes an important contribution to the efficacy of the spells (the poetic power of whose words is rendered rather dull, unfortunately, in English translation). Little of the musical arrangements has survived, though, in terms of how the music is precisely to be performed: there’s no notation even of the sung melodies of the verses, except for the above-mentioned slashes, as mentioned above, which only suggest a tune; and there are only vague indications of what instrumental backing is recommended…if that.

These are spells for selfish ends. They fulfill individual desires, or those of the tribe, and they often have outright malevolent purposes. Examples include the summoning of such demons as Ai, the demon of lust as introduced in Part Two of The Preaching, or the capturing of souls in jars, for the purpose of gaining greater magical power from them.

Elsewhere, there are songs meant to help in the conquering and subjugation of foreign peoples, cruelty to enemies, controlling people, gaining wealth, stealing, and more.

For sexual exploitation, wait for the book of spells known as Amores.

[Sing the following verse repeatedly, louder and louder, with accompanying flute and drum.]

Your land is our land. \\\\
Your home is our home. \\\\
Your wealth is our wealth. \\\\
Your food is our food. \\\\
Your men are our slaves. \\\\

[Sing the following verse repeatedly, louder and louder, with increasing intensity, until the singing sounds like screaming, with the dissonant plucking of adjacent strings on a zither, and harder and harder pounding on drums.]

May you hurt, ///
may you groan, ///
may you cry, ///
may you bleed, ///
may you die! ///

[Sing the following verse repeatedly, louder and louder, in a breathy voice, with no instrumental backing.]

I take you, //\
I have you, //\
I use you, //\
I own you. //\

[Sing the following verse repeatedly, louder and louder, with increasing intensity, and with the tapping of more and more cymbals.]

My gold and silver grow. /////
My gold and silver double. /////
My gold and silver triple. /////
My gold and silver, endless. /////

Comment: Each upward slash represents a rise in pitch, and each downward slash represents a lowering in pitch, each slash being for each word to the left.

Analysis of ‘Friday the 13th’

I’m going to focus on the first two films of the franchise, since I’m primarily concerned with the relationship between Pamela Voorhees (Betsy Palmer) and her son, Jason, as well as the implications I see in it. Also, by the third film, the format for all of them has been established, and has thus become too redundant to go over the storyline of every movie.

We all know the format: either Jason or his mother (or copycat killer Roy Burns), violently kills off a number of young adults at or near Camp Crystal Lake, or at Chris Higgins‘s local homestead, or in a halfway house where Tommy Jarvis is, or in Manhattan, or in a spacecraft in the future, or in the Springwood, Ohio setting of the Nightmare on Elm Street franchise. Where the killings happen doesn’t really matter, as it’s all just an indulgent blood-fest, typically with the final girl trope.

Let’s be frank: the films are good mindless fun and entertainment (emphasis on mindless), but the critics are right to deride them. They’re schlocky slasher films, intended only to capitalize on the success of far superior slasher films like Halloween, Black Christmas, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, or Psycho, the sequels even more so meant to capitalize on the success of the first Friday the 13th.

Still, however, there must be a way to explain how popular these films are with the masses so that one doesn’t insult the intelligence of Friday‘s fans. I’d like to attempt such an explanation, with an understanding that the basic elements are there, if so unconsciously, to make a good premise…if only the execution, as well as the development of the themes I’m about to discuss, was done better, without such an emphasis on just kill, kill, kill…ma, ma, ma.

I’m a strong believer in the power of the unconscious mind, and while I’m sure the screenwriters of these movies only consciously meant to create simple stories of a killer on a bloody rampage, with the intent of gaining maximum box office success, I believe there are archetypal elements deep inside the collective psyche that got put into these films (especially the first few, before things got too self-indulgent) regardless of conscious intent.

To uncover what these elements are, we first need to examine the motives behind Pamela’s and Jason’s bloodlust. In dialectical contrast to their murderous hatred of anyone they meet, they have the deepest, most intense mother/son love you could imagine…and mother/son love has already been traditionally idealized as the greatest love of all.

The evil comes in, however, when we consider how the love of this mother/son dyad is a narcissistic one, based on a feeling that each of them is just an extension and mirror-reflection of the other. The two are trapped in Lacan‘s Imaginary, incapable of and unwilling to go out into the healthier social and cultural world of the Symbolic. Hence, anybody else out there, the Other rather than the other, is just to be killed.

Other rationalizations for the killings include a moral abomination of the ‘sinfulness’ of the camp counsellors–enjoying premarital sex, smoking weed, the public indecency of playing strip Monopoly or wandering around outside in one’s panties. Tied to this sinfulness is a belief that the children at summer camp won’t be adequately watched–hence, Jason’s drowning.

Thus, Camp Crystal Lake must never be reopened, and any attempt to do so by these sinful camp counsellors will necessitate their deaths. OK, apart from the Lacanian stuff I mentioned above, we all know this–I’m just reviewing the basics here…but what does it all mean?

Here’s where my interpretation comes in. Now, since art, properly understood, is a dialogue between the artist and the audience–not just an artist saying his or her ‘only meaning’ for the creation, but a meaning evolved and developed between the artist and audience through a back-and-forth of creation and interpretation–I feel free to interpret the meaning of these movies in my way. (I also hope my interpretation can elevate the movies a bit…if at all possible.) Here goes…

Ever notice how Jason could be heard as a pun on Jesu (as in “Joy of Man’s Desiring”)? You should see where I’m going with this, Dear Reader.

Note how the superstition behind Friday the 13th is associated with the Last Supper, in which Judas Iscariot is often considered the 13th guest, and the day after was Good Friday, when Christ was killed. Judas betrayed Jesus, as the camp counsellors betrayed Jason (in his mother’s opinion, at least).

Camp Crystal Lake (the name being a pun on Christ) can be associated with the Garden of Eden, where sin lost us paradise. Naked Adam and Eve eating the forbidden fruit has been seen as symbolic of sex, just like the camp counsellors taking off their clothes and going about publicly in their underwear (think of Genesis 2:25), or having sex. If Adam and Eve eat of that fruit, on that day they shall surely die (Genesis 2:17); they die metaphorically on that day, losing their innocence; the counsellors die literally on that day for publicly undressing, having sex, and smoking pot. Steven Christy (Peter Brouwer), who would suffer the little children to come unto him (Mark 10:14), that is, to come to his summer camp, has a surname that is another pun on Christ.

The point I’m trying to make here, which should be obvious to you by now, Dear Reader, is that Mrs. Voorhees and her son are a perverse Madonna and Child. That deep love between a mother and her son is epitomized in all of that old Christian iconography.

By seeing Jason as an evil Jesus, I’m not calling him the Antichrist of the Book of Revelation (Go to this horror movie for that.). I mean instead that Jason and his mother, in murdering sinners rather than preaching repentance and forgiving them, represent the oppressive, authoritarian aspects of the Church. Jesus saves, but Jason slays. Some call Mary the Co-redeemer, but Pamela Voorhees is, if you will, the Co-reddener.

If Camp Crystal Lake is the Garden of Eden, then she and her son also represent the cherubim, their knives, axes, and machetes representing the flaming sword to keep the sinners out of paradise (Genesis 3:24). The purity and innocence of the place must be protected from fornicators and pot-heads, for the sake of children like Jason.

The rationalization for the Voorhees terror, therefore, is to protect children from danger and death, yet this ‘protection’ hypocritically involves danger and death. The Voorhees’s ‘Church’ is really just a front for the most reactionary of conservative thinking. The camp counsellors aren’t even moderate leftists: they’re just liberals who want to be able to relax and have a good time every now and then. Pamela, like any far right-winger, expects the staff of Camp Crystal Lake to be working non-stop to ensure the safety of the kids. If the staff slacks off at all, then like Amon Göth, she’ll pick them off one by one, but with a knife or axe instead of a rifle.

When I speak of a ‘perverse Madonna and Child,” I don’t mean it as a comment on religion and spirituality per se, but as representative of reactionary, conservative authoritarian thinking, how religion is used (if only symbolically in these movies) to justify power and control over others. The year the first film came out, in 1980, as well that of as its first sequel, 1981, is fitting given these were the first of the reactionary Reagan/Thatcher years.

Going into the mid-1980s, there was a debate on CNN’s Crossfire about whether or not PMRC censorship of popular music’s racier lyrics was valid; opposed to it, Frank Zappa also warned of the US moving in the direction of what he called a “fascist theocracy.” The two conservatives he was debating scoffed at him, but he didn’t say the US was already a fascist theocracy at the time: he said that “the Reagan administration…[was] steering us right down that pipe.” (Reagan, incidentally, had fundamentalist Christian beliefs and supported the religious right.)

Well, look at the US today, under Trump, with Roe vs Wade overturned (to protect the unborn child, ostensibly, but actually to curb ‘fornication’ and to control women’s reproductive systems), and with masked ICE men violently removing people from the ‘Camp Crystal Lake,’ if you will, of the US, and shooting in the face anyone who resists. How like Jason’s violence, with his goalie mask and murder weapons.

The notion of the deep love and connection between Mary and the Christ child is not, of course, limited to Christianity. Pagan notions of a mother-goddess and her son/consort abounded in the ancient world, in such forms as Isis and Horus. The relationship is archetypal…and narcissistic. Robert Graves dealt with the idea in The White Goddess when he said, “Woman worships the male infant, not the grown man: it is evidence of her deity, of man’s dependence on her for life.” Pamela’s undying love for Jason, which involved an unending quest to find new victims in whom to avenge his death, is an extension of her own narcissism.

Similarly, Jason in the sequels saw in his mother a metaphorical mirror of himself. He endlessly avenges her death, with new victims, as she did his. She and he are spiritually inseparable, just as the authoritarian leader and his mindless, jackbooted soldiers are, as ICE are for the US government. Properly understood, the son is virtually indistinguishable from the mother (at least in terms of will and motivation, if not in terms of other things, which I’ll go into soon enough), just as the mindless ICE agents do only the will of their fascist government, with no individual will of their own, obeying orders uncritically.

So indistinguishable is Mrs. Voorhees from Jason that at the beginning of Scream, Casey Becker (Drew Barrymore) confuses mother with son, incorrectly naming Jason as the killer in the first Friday movie and forgetting that he didn’t show up until the sequels. The same “ki, ki, ki, ma, ma, ma” echoed, reverberated whispering is heard in most of the films, regardless of whether mother or son is the killer.

That whispering–so often misheard as “chi, chi, chi, ha, ha, ha” because of the heavy echo, reverb, and distortion resulting from the whispering of “ki, ki, ki, ma, ma, ma” by film composer Harry Manfredini into a microphone, then running it through an Echoplex machine–is short for “Kill her, Mommy.” Pamela hears Jason saying this over and over in her head, her imitating the child’s high-pitched voice as she chases Alice Hardy (Adrienne King) during the climax of the first film. There are variations on the whispering in the sequels: in Part Two, for example, one usually hears only “ki, ki, ki,” and only occasionally “ma, ma, ma.”

The sameness or variation in the whispering doesn’t ultimately matter: the continuity underlines how Jason and his mother are spiritually, if not materially, one and the same person. The same is true of the ruling class and their thuggish soldiers (as I see them represented by the murderous mother and son), who often use religion and its priggish morality to justify their authoritarian grip on power.

So, when Mrs. Voorhees dies, Jason is to take over the killing duties. Accordingly, two months after her decapitation by Alice, Jason kills her in her kitchen with an ice pick in her temple after she sees the severed head of his mother in her fridge. Just as his mother avenged his death, he avenges hers.

Here’s the problem, though: if Jason never drowned, but she only thought he did (as the story was ret-conned), wouldn’t she have learned he never died soon enough? She had over twenty years to learn. If she knew the whole time, or much of or most of the time, wouldn’t that have deflated her rage enough not to kill (so many)? Also, how was adult Jason able to find where Alice was living?

I propose a different explanation, one that takes into account the Mary/Jesus symbolism discussed above, and which allows for the unavoidable supernatural element in these movies. He was resurrected, given an adult body, and had the clairvoyance to find where Alice was.

Why not resurrected? He was certainly resurrected in a number of the other sequels, and his ability to keep on living after other injuries, ones that should have been fatal, strongly implies supernatural abilities. I’d say Mom raised Jason from the dead, just as God raised Jesus from the dead (Romans 10:9). Similarly, just as the resurrected Christ had a spiritual body (1 Corinthians 15:42-44), one “imperishable” and “raised in power,” not weakness, so does Jason have an imperishable, powerful body, one whose growth to adulthood seems even to have been accelerated.

To get back to “ki, ki, ki, ma, ma, ma…”, who is saying it, really? Does Jason’s ghost say it to his mother in the first film, her imitating his voice as I described it above? In the sequels, does her ghost chant it in Jason’s mind, implying not only a psychic link between the two killers, but also that her chanting “ki, ki, ki, ma, ma, ma” in his mind’s ear means she’s calling him “Mommy,” thus further cementing my idea that the identity of the two is of only one spiritual presence?

In any case, as we know, Jason doesn’t talk at all: his voice is in his murder weapons (recall that amusing guest appearance he made on the Arsenio Hall Show to promote Jason Takes Manhattan).

His muteness, from a psychoanalytic viewpoint, is linked to his social isolation. Recall what I said above about his dyadic relationship with his mother, as a reflection of his being stuck in the narcissism of the Imaginary Order. To enter the social and cultural world of the Symbolic, one must use language. The Symbolic is the healthy world of human relationships.

That a deformed, mentally disabled child would have extreme difficulties being a part of the Symbolic and joining normal society would be an understatement. His drowning in the lake complicates matters further: it’s representative of not only never leaving the Imaginary, but also of being trapped in the traumatic, undifferentiated, inexpressible Chaos of Lacan’s Real Order.

The non-differentiated, formlessness of the lake is symbolic of the cosmic ocean, where all begins and ends (i.e., the Great Flood; consider also the rain storm in the first film as associated with the Deluge, after which the ‘sons of God’ lay with the ‘daughters of men’…that is, fornicated). Jason died in the lake, and Alice’s Carrie-like nightmare of him coming up at her in the boat and pulling her down in the water is also to be associated with the cosmic ocean as bringing us all back to death at the end of the world.

Just as Jason has supernatural abilities as I described above, and just as his mother is intolerant of sexual indulgence, so were Carrie and her religious fanatic mother respectively, hence how fitting it was to add Alice’s Carrie-like nightmare to the end of the first movie. As for Part III‘s ending, it’s fitting for Chris Higgins (Dana Kimmell) to have a similar nightmare of Mrs. Voorhees coming up from the water and dragging her from her boat into it, even though Chris doesn’t seem to know (oddly, considering how close she is to Camp Crystal Lake) who Jason or his mother are. The point is that it further reinforces how Jason and his mother are one, especially in the undifferentiated, traumatizing Chaos-Real of the water.

At the climax of Part II, Ginny Field (Amy Steel) discovers Jason’s shrine of his mother (how like one of these, if you will!), with her severed head. Knowing the ‘legend’ of him seeing Alice decapitate his mother and him seeking revenge (as she had for him), Ginny stands before Pamela’s head to block its view from Jason, her wearing Pamela’s old sweater. Using her wits and knowledge of child psychology, Ginny takes a gamble impersonating Mrs. Voorhees, appealing to his sense of filial duty and obedience to his mother (“Jason, Mother is talking to you!”). The only human relationship he can understand is one of power and authority. The only reason he’ll listen to her, and not kill her, is that she, as his mother (and also as a reflection/extension of himself), has absolute power over him.

Mindless killers like him (police, the military, ICE, etc.) similarly see human relationships only in this hierarchical sense. If you’re ‘beneath’ me, I can beat and kill you; if you’re ‘above’ me, you can beat and kill me. There is no sense of reciprocity, no mutuality, no connection, no communication.

Within my framework of Jason and his mother as a perverse version of Jesus and Mary, it’s ironic that ‘the Word made flesh’ speaks no words in these movies. (“Ki, ki, ki, ma, ma, ma” would just be the voice of a ghost ringing in his head, not him talking.) Instead, Jason, in his Oedipal relationship with Mrs. Voorhees, speaks only in the primitive, pre-verbal form of communication–as Wilfred Bion conceptualized it–of projective identification and negative containment (as symbolized by all the stabbings and slashing).

Normally, a mother contains her baby’s agitations and distress through a soothing process Bion called maternal reverie. The container, ♀︎, is yonic in symbolism; the contained, ♂︎, is phallic. This is a calming, positive containment. In pathological parent/child relationships, though, as in the case with Pamela and Jason, the containment of the child’s agitations and distress is the opposite of soothing and calming. Traumas aren’t processed–they’re aggravated, intensified, leading to what Bion called a nameless dread…negative containment.

Jason, thus, unable to develop a normal ability to think, to process external stimuli, and to grow in K (knowledge), he cannot speak and express himself verbally. He can only communicate in that primitive, non-verbal way, which involves projecting onto other people. And since all he can communicate is projections of pain, he does so through negative containment, in which the phallic contained is a knife, machete, axe, or pitchfork, and the yonic container is a stab or slash wound.

This kind of mindless, violent communication is also typical of the hired thugs of a fascist state. The bloody, brutal way in which we see the victims killed in these movies (as demonstrated by the special makeup effects of people like Tom Savini) also leads, disturbingly, to a desensitization to violence. As I said above, it’s an interesting coincidence how this franchise began in the 1980s, with the rise of Reagan/Thatcher neoliberalism and Zappa’s fears of a movement in the direction of a fascist theocracy, and yet here we are, with at best minimal outrage from politicians at the ongoing Gaza genocide, the murder of Renee Good, the state of perpetual war around the world ever since 9/11, and the kidnapping (on baseless charges) of the president of Venezuela and his wife. Atrocities in the real world have been reduced to mere entertainment.

As the sequels of the franchise go on, we notice that the setting shifts farther and farther away from the Eden of Camp Crystal Lake: first, to places nearby (in the novelization of Part II, Alice has returned to the town of Crystal Lake, where Jason kills her–page 6), then to Tommy Jarvis’s halfway home, then to Manhattan, to a spaceship in the future, to Freddy Krueger’s Springwood…and like Jesus, Jason even harrows hell! By analogy, the American settler-colonial state massacred the Native Americans, then engaged in imperialist war and plunder…often, and to a significant extent at least, killing in the name of Christ.

And just as Jason’s mindless, pointless killings seem to go on and on forever, in all their perpetual brutality, so do those of the US empire, to this day, both locally and internationally.

As I said at the beginning of this analysis, I’m not saying that the writers of the films of this franchise intended the allegory that I’m formulating here; that’s all my invention. They were just dragging out a gore-fest to make a maximum amount of money, which by the way is what capitalism and imperialism by extension are all about. The associations I’m making reflect unconscious ideas we all have floating around in our minds, for such is the heritage of our collective unconscious: religious iconography representing our lofty moral ideals, lashing out violently when those ideals aren’t lived up to, violence as a form of control, self-righteous narcissism, parental authoritarianism expanding into state authoritarianism.

As a result, every day feels like an unlucky day.

The Tanah: Proverbs

[The following is the thirty-second of many posts–here is the first, here is the second, here is the third, here is the fourth, here is the fifth, here is the sixth, here is the seventh, here is the eighth, here is the ninth, here is the tenth, here is the eleventh, here is the twelfth, here is the thirteenth, here is the fourteenth, here is the fifteenth, here is the sixteenth, here is the seventeenth, here is the eighteenth, here is the nineteenth, here is the twentieth, here is the twenty-first, here is the twenty-second, here is the twenty-third, here is the twenty-fourth, here is the twenty-fifth, here is the twenty-sixth, here is the twenty-seventh, here is the twenty-eighth, here is the twenty-ninth, here is the thirtieth, and here is the thirty-first–about a fictitious discovery of ancient manuscripts of a religious text of narratives and magic spells. Its purpose for my readers and me is to provide a cosmology and mythography on which I am basing much, if not most, of my fiction–short stories and novels. If anyone is interested in reading this fiction, he or she can use these blog posts as references to explain the nature of the magic and universe in my fiction.]

Translator’s Introduction

This set of pithy maxims was not thought to be requiring a magical ritual, involving the use of the four elements personified by the Crims. The words were thought to be magically effective in themselves: the original language uses such musical elements as metre, alliteration, assonance, consonance, and rhyme felt sufficient to influence the feelings of those in the tribe and to deter them from using magic in aid of sinning, by curbing unhealthy emotions.

They are to be chanted repeatedly, louder and louder, and with more and more emotional intensity.

  1. Pride is the father of shame.
    Humility is the mother of honour.
  2. Anger is a moment of madness.
    Calm keeps sanity everlasting.
  3. Envy is admiration and hate embracing.
    Its lack looks on without malevolence.
  4. Greed never grasps enough.
    Giving never gets empty-handed.
  5. One getting fat while many starve
    reverses how food should be shared.
  6. Lust loves the flesh and hates the heart.
    Lovemaking gives life, never taking.
  7. Despair hates all the outside world,
    because it hates all that’s inside.

Commentary

It’s fascinating how this ancient tribe, through these proverbs, seems to have anticipated the deadly sins of the Church.