Analysis of ‘The Serpent and the Rainbow’

The Serpent and the Rainbow is a 1988 horror movie directed by Wes Craven. The screenplay was by Richard Maxwell and Adam Rodman, loosely based on the non-fiction book of the same name by Wade Davis (for a comparison of the book with the film, which added the political element, go here). The film stars Bill Pullman, with Cathy Tyson, Zakes Mokae, Paul Winfield, Brent Jennings, Michael Gough, and Paul Guilfoyle.

Roger Ebert gave TSATR three out of four stars, praising Pullman’s performance and the “stunning” visuals, while also noting the the story took the religion of voodoo more seriously than most horror movies, which merely used it as a “gimmick.”

Here is a link to quotes from the film, here’s a link to the film, and here’s a link to the script.

Davis, on whose character the anthropologist Dr. Dennis Alan (Pullman) is based, is an ethnobotanist and anthropologist whose book recounts his experiences in Haiti as he investigated what happened to Clairivius Narcisse–on whose character Christophe Durand (played by Conrad Roberts) is based–who was allegedly poisoned, buried alive, and revived with an herbal brew that made him into a “zombie.” A practitioner of voodoo allegedly did this to Narcisse, making him into a slave.

Though TSATR is marketed as a horror film, Craven saw it as more of a political drama with an exploration of the voodoo religion. The one who poisoned and enslaved Narcisse was a bokor, or Haitian Vodou priest “practicing for both good and evil” and creating “zombies.” In the film, Christophe is made into a zombie by Captain Dargent Peytraud (Mokae), commander of the Tonton Macoute–the secret police of right-wing Haitian dictator Jean-Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier–and a bokor, thus making him the villain of the film. The screenwriters’ creation of Peytraud is the one on whom the added political element of the film is centred.

Christophe is made into a zombie because, though a mere grade school teacher, he spoke out for the people, for freedom, and this of course was a threat to Duvalier and Peytraud. The terror of the bokor poisoning, live burial, and zombification of dissidents and political agitators like Christophe is how the right-wing dictatorship of Haiti keeps the people intimidated and well under control.

According to Haitian legend, the Serpent represents Earth (how like the Midgard Serpent of Norse myth, which bites its own tail while circling the Earth!), and the Rainbow is Heaven. We all live and die between the Serpent and the Rainbow. Because we have souls, though, we can be trapped in a state between life and death, the zombie-state that Christophe suffers because Peytraud has stolen his soul. Live burial is also part of that hell of being between life and death, which leads me to my next point.

TSATR exploits a deep fear many of us have, taphophobia, the irrational fear of being buried alive. The history of this fear in the West is well-documented in the book Buried Alive: The Terrifying History of Our Most Primal Fear, by Jan Bondeson, which gives examples of many who were so afraid of being accidentally pronounced dead and unintentionally buried alive that one would have strings attached to bells above ground that the buried living could ring by pulling the string going all the way down into the coffin.

Peytraud’s live burials, of course, are not accidental, but as I said above, are a cruel act of intimidation and control. They make their victims experience a kind of living death, as does Peytraud’s stealing of the victims’ souls. In our experience of not only imperialism but also its boomerang now affecting the imperial core, we too–that is, the global proletariat–experience a living death of wage slavery while elites get away with atrocities…they’ve stolen our souls.

This ‘living death’ idea brings me to a discussion of a recurring theme in this film: duality and the merging of opposites. Apart from the unity of life and death, there are also the unities of the First World and the Third World, of white people and people of colour (not just the blacks of Haiti, but also the Amazon shaman seen towards the beginning of the movie), of houngans and bokors (respectively, good and evil voodoo priests, for the purposes of this film–namely, Lucien Celine [Winfield] and Peytraud), body and soul, the Serpent and the Rainbow (earthly and heavenly existence), Catholic ‘monotheism’ and voodoo ‘paganism,’ science and religion, Erzulie and the Virgin Mary (as Mater Dolorosa in particular), tyranny and revolution, even genius and idiocy.

These opposites merge, overlap, and interact with each other in a yin-and-yang, dialectical way. White Dr. Alan, an American from Harvard University, goes to the Global South (first, to the Amazon, then to Haiti) to get local drugs and bring them to the First World for use as medicines and anesthetics. It’s said that he and the people he finds the drugs for (e.g., Dr. Andrew Cassedy [Guilfoyle], head of Boston Biocorp, a pharmaceutical company, and Dr. Earl Schoonbacher [Gough], a consultant for the pharmaceutical company) have only altruistic motives in providing these drugs for the world–saving countless numbers of patients on the operating table from death because of anesthetic shock. Let’s be frank, though: in their use of these Third World drugs, the pharmaceutical businesses of the First World hope to rake in huge profits. Alan’s explorations are for exploitation.

When Schoonbacher wonders if the Haitian “zombie drug” could give proof of the existence of the soul, Alan scoffs at the idea, asking where in the ‘car,’ if you will, of the human body the soul resides, and insisting it “begins and ends with the brain.” When in Haiti, in conversations with Dr. Marielle Duchamp (Tyson) about the voodoo faith–in which she sees no conflict between religion and science–Alan hears that the Haitian God isn’t just up in heaven, but also in their bodies, their flesh (in the Serpent as well as in the Rainbow, in other words). When found in the graveyard at night, Christophe tells Alan that the zombie drug is a powder blown on people’s faces: it runs through the skin to the soul. Body and soul are one–the latter is indeed in the physicality of the brain, as Alan atheistically intuited.

Many Christians like to contrast their faith as sharply as possible with that of pagans, though the places of comparison and similarity are obvious. This close connection is even more obvious in how, as Duchamp tells Alan, “Haiti is 85% Catholic, but 110% voodoo. For [them], Erzulie and the Virgin Mary are the same.” Erzulie is a family of loa, or spirits, in Vodou. They are feminine, and Erzulie Fréda Dahomey, a spirit of love and beauty, is often identified with the Mater Dolorosa. Note that Mary is chaste, but Erzulie is flirtatious and seductive of both sexes. Mary suffers, but Erzulie has fun. Lust and chastity are one, as are desire and suffering (as the Buddhists would also observe of the latter pair). It’s significant that, immediately after Duchamp immerses Alan in the spirituality and culture of voodoo, the two make love. Not long after their lovemaking, Alan will be terrorized by Peytraud, with that nail in the scrotum.

To pursue that topic further, Haitians are being tyrannized and terrorized by Peytraud’s government precisely because the country is on the verge of revolution, and therefore of ensuing freedom (Could this be the near future of the US?). It’s always darkest before the dawn, a resurrection after death–like Christophe’s…and Alan’s.

In a Haitian man aptly named Louis Mozart (Jennings), we see the dialectical link between genius and idiocy. He’s brilliant enough to know the exact procedure to make the zombie drug, but when he unsuccessfully tries to con Alan out of hundreds of dollars for a fake drug, Alan–not one so easily conned–calls Mozart “an idiot” to his face, thus pushing Mozart to show Alan the process of making the real drug.

Later, when Alan is forced to leave Haiti on a trumped-up murder charge, while he’s on the airplane and ready to take off, Mozart comes up to him and gives him a jar of the powder for free (and a watch), foolishly hoping Alan will make him famous by telling the world he is the maker of the zombie drug. His foolish helping of Alan will in turn lead to him being beheaded by Peytraud’s men.

Let’s return to the death and resurrection theme. Note the apt naming of Christophe, Peytraud’s ‘dying and resurrecting’ victim. Since TSATR is at least as much a political thriller as it is a horror film, it’s useful to put its Christ symbolism in its proper political context, as I did in my analysis of the Christ myth. Please look at that article for the full argument of that political context, as a complete repetition of it is beyond the scope of this article. In brief, the point is this: the Jesus of history never intended to create a new religion with himself worshipped as divine; he was a Torah-adhering Jew who, seeing himself as the Messiah in the Jewish sense, tried to rise up in revolution against Palestine’s Roman oppressors and failed.

Christophe’s speaking up for the rights of the Haitian people also ended in failure, with him being drugged with the zombie powder, pronounced dead, buried alive, then revived, a Christ-like death and resurrection of sorts. As Duchamp tells Alan, Christophe once inspired courage, but now as a ‘zombie,’ he only inspires fear.

Jesus’ followers were similarly demoralized upon knowing of his arrest and crucifixion, losing all hope until believing in his resurrection. As I argued in my article on Christ (link above), we leftists can see in the Christ myth an allegory in which His death and resurrection represent failed attempts at revolution that then are revived with new hope and ultimate success. In TSATR, we can see similarly crushed and revived hopes in Christophe’s live burial and revival, then Alan’s, and the final defeat of Peytraud and revolutionary overthrow of Duvalier, freeing all of Haiti.

Interactions in TSATR between the First and Third Worlds, and between whites and blacks, are interesting enough to warrant further discussion. Imperialist incursions into the Global South to extract resources and exploit them for the benefit of the rich countries is common enough, of course, and Alan’s forays into the Amazon and Haiti for this purpose are no exception. An interesting irony, though, is in how we see a lone white man in a country of blacks, we see him terrorized by their government, and his home country is even ‘invaded,’ as it were, through Peytraud’s possession of Cassedy’s wife (played by Dey Young) at the dinner table–during the party after Alan’s return to the US. Peytraud’s attack thus is a kind of ‘inverse imperialism.’

In Dr. Alan’s first meeting with Peytraud, in his office outside of which one can hear the groans of the tortured enemies of the regime, Alan is given a simple warning not to continue nosing around Haiti with “a radical” like Duchamp, or inquiring about Christophe. Peytraud talks about the volatile political situation in Haiti, and how setting things off could return the country to slavery, as it had been with the French. We’re thus reminded of the successful black slave revolt in Haiti that sent shockwaves throughout the Western imperial world at the time, on an island just southeast of the then-slave-owning United States.

To justify his iron-fisted rule of Haiti with Duvalier, Peytraud tells Alan that the US government would like to see anarchy in Haiti (thereby giving them a pretext to take over the country and rule it with an iron fist of their own). He reminds the American Alan that Haiti isn’t Grenada, where US imperialism in 1983 crushed the people’s revolution, established in 1979 as the only Marxist-Leninist government in the British Commonwealth.

The American government under Reagan was content to have right-wing, anticommunist Duvalier ruling Haiti, for obvious reasons. If the Haitian poor were to liberate themselves from him and the likes of Peytraud, their revolution would soon backfire and lead to even worse oppression from the white West, as Peytraud reasons–hence, the ‘necessity’ of his rule with an iron fist.

So in the references to the Haitian Revolution, the Grenada revolution and counterrevolution, and the current oppression of Haitians under Duvalier, Peytraud, et al, we can see the intermingling of white imperialism in Haiti with the black Haitian pushback against it, even to the point of Peytraud’s magic going all the way to the US, infiltrating the dinner party with Alan, Schoonbacher, and the Cassedys, a kind of ‘inverse imperialism,’ if you will.

Just as I spoke of the merging of opposites in TSATR (like that of imperialism and anti-imperialism mentioned in the previous paragraphs), so is there lots of just plain duality in the film. Its very title evokes duality (heaven and earth), as does that of Romeo and Juliet, which incidentally also involves a drug to make her seem dead, and thus also involves a live burial.

Alan seeks out two drugs: one from the Amazon shaman at the beginning, then one from Mozart in Haiti. There’s the historical Haitian Revolution Peytraud alludes to, and the final Haitian revolution at the end of the movie. There’s Christophe’s live burial and zombification, and there’s Alan’s. There’s the dual Catholic/voodoo syncretic religion. There’s the nail piercing Alan’s scrotum, and there’s the revenge nail piercing of Peytraud’s crotch. There’s the good voodoo priest, Celine, and the evil priest, Peytraud. There’s Alan’s lovemaking with Duchamp (in bed, as it were, though not literally), and there’s him in bed with Christophe’s decapitated sister. There are two women momentarily possessed by spirits: Duchamp dancing in Celine’s tourist nightclub, and Mrs. Cassedy attacking Alan with a knife at the dinner table.

The duality of the nail piercings in the crotch need closer attention now. The P, t, and r of Peytraud come across almost as a pun on one of the possible inflections of pater–that is, patri, patre, etc., or “father” in Latin. The nail piercing of Alan’s scrotum is symbolically castration, reminding us of the punitive father of Freud‘s castration complex, or the father who threatens his son with castration for wanting his mother.

I’m not saying that that’s what’s going on between Alan and Peytraud, either literally or symbolically. The point of the association I’m making here is that Peytraud’s authoritarian bullying of Alan and the Haitians is like that of a cruel, tyrannical father, a Kleinian bad father, as opposed to the good father as seen in Lucien Celine.

Another point of comparison with Peytraud as the bad father is with the primordial sky-father king gods of Greek myth: Ouranos and Cronus in particular. Ouranos had his children imprisoned in a secret place in Gaea‘s body; Cronus ate his children. These two gods, fearful of being overthrown and losing their power, oppressed their children just as paternalistic Peytraud oppresses the Haitians and Alan–anyone who is a threat to him.

But just as a father can be castrating (literally or symbolically), so can a son. As I explained in my analysis of the Ancient Greek creation myth, not only did Cronus castrate his father, Ouranos, while liberating his imprisoned Titan children, so–according to an uncensored version of the story as recalled by Freud (page 469), John Tzetzes, and Robert Graves–did Zeus castrate his father, Cronus, upon freeing the eaten Olympian gods. These violent but liberating acts can be paralleled with Alan’s vengeful driving of the nail into Peytraud’s groin and the liberation of Haiti from Duvalier.

The point I’m trying to make here is that associating Peytraud with a cruel father reinforces, in a psychological sense, how oppressive he is to Alan and the Haitians. He attacks Alan and Christophe, like God the Father (in an evil Demiurge sense) sending God the Son to die, be buried in the tomb, then resurrected. Peytraud attacks them because he is threatened by them, the way a man with the Laius complex is afraid of being supplanted by his son.

Peytraud is so threatened by Alan, a white American and therefore of the imperial core, that even with him kicked out of Haiti and back in the US, he must be terrorized all the way back there, too. I mentioned above how Peytraud fears an American intervention if the Duvalier government is overthrown and the country descends into anarchy. He feels he must coax Alan back into Haiti so he can make a zombie out of him. Hence, what happens at the dinner party with Schoonbacher and the Cassedys. Part of the irony I mentioned above, of the ‘inverted imperialism’ of Peytraud’s possession of Mrs. Cassedy, is how at the dinner party there’s a black servant, Albert, who speaks with a Caribbean accent. The whites are his master, yet Peytraud is the whites’ master there, too. The imperial boomerang goes both ways.

Yet another merging of opposites occurs in how, at the very darkest (quite literally so) moment of the film, Alan’s live burial, the revolutionary overthrow of Duvalier also happens. The Christian symbolism is powerful: Alan is experiencing a kind of harrowing of hell, not just in the terror of being in that blackness (like those hellish near-death experiences many talk about), gasping and screaming upon reviving from the zombie drug, but also in his zombification, Peytraud’s stealing of his soul. Yet this is just when the salvation of Haiti begins. It’s like Satan knowing he’s lost upon Christ’s death on the Cross.

Could we now, upon learning of the total depths of depravity of our global ruling class, be–in our boiling collective rage–on the cusp of a revolution? Could the bitten tail of the ouroboros of our current oppression soon dialectically switch over to the biting head of our liberation? Could my oft-used symbol of the dialectical unity of opposites, that auto-cannibalistic serpent, be leading us to a rainbow?

The Tanah: Amores–Three More Love Spells

[The following is the thirty-seventh 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, here is the thirty-third, here is the thirty-fourth, here is the thirty-fifth, and here is the thirty-sixth–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.]

Hypnotism Spell

[Lure your lover into a dark place lit only with a small flame on the top of a stick or candle held in your hand. Look your lover in the eyes, recite the verse, and immediately on finishing the recitation, blow the flame out in the direction of his or her face. Your lover should lose consciousness and fall to the ground if you have recited the verse with proper diction and sufficient faith in the Crims.]

[Lover’s name], sleep for me.
[Lover’s name], yield to me.
Weleb, blow Nevil’s fire.
Weleb, give me my desire.

Comment: one of the especially wicked spells that were abominated by the tribal elders, this one was believed to be most effective if particular materials were used for the stick or candlestick: a wood favourable to Drofurb, Crim of the earth, such as silver birch, or tallow whose smoky, foul smell has been somehow minimized. As with so many of these spells, details on what specific materials are to be used are scant. Perhaps a separate, as yet unfound set of writings has these recorded?

Pheromone Perfume Spell

[Mix wood and citrus scents into the soap used for the ritual bath for this spell, a bath to be prepared with the same instructions as those for the anti-aging and sexual attraction spells previously given, but with this new verse.]

Weleb, spread my allure throughout the air!
Of Nevil’s fiery scent be all aware!
May Drofurb’s herbs be all-enticing smells!
May this bath make the best of lovers’ spells!

Comment: though there was of course no such thing as a “pheromone perfume” (i.e., using synthetic chemical compounds, as used today) in the ancient world, we felt that “Pheromone Perfume Spell” was a better translation of Akhnar Wayat Bilm than “Animal Sex Smell,” which though a literal translation, sounded off-puttingly crude to us. While this spell is largely a variation on the “Sexual Attraction Spell” given previously, two differences should be noted: firstly, this one emphasizes the scent, whereas the previous one only briefly refers to fragrance; secondly, where the previous spell is meant only to attract this or that particular lover, this new one doesn’t discriminate–any and all lovers are welcome…to the point of orgies, even.

Commitment Spell

[Make two small wooden figurines as effigies of oneself and the desired lover; their closer resemblance to the actual pair of lovers in real life, the more effective the spell. Use birch bark tar to make the two adhere to each other while repeatedly chanting the following verse.]

Drofurb, make our love as solid as stone!
Nevil, make my love burn in his bones!
Weleb, never blow his love away!
Priff, always have his love flow back my way!

Comment: this spell was generally a woman’s prayer to the four Crims to make her man commit to her, hence, our translated name of it, “Commitment Spell,” as opposed to the “Stick Him to Her Spell,” which is a more literal translation of Guro Shuk Er Im Bah, but also a cruder-sounding one, in our opinion.

Trump is No Aberration…He’s the Culmination

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I: Introduction

One thing we can all agree on is that the world today is at its most screwed up in a very, very long time. What we don’t necessarily agree on is who in particular is at fault, who in particular has to be removed from power, and what is the best way to remedy these problems.

At the heart of these problems is one man, whom I affectionately call Orange-face (I call him by this moniker in case any liberals in the comments mistake me for an apologist of his). The Trump phenomenon is a classic case of controlled opposition: either you worship him in a cult of personality, or you abominate him to the point of Trump Derangement Syndrome.

What you’re not supposed to do is to regard him as yet another example of the capitalist class using a demagogue to further their interests. They want us to focus on individual personalities as a distraction from the very group of people who are really behind all of the injustices of the world, people of whom Trump is just one example.

The ruling class is thrilled to have us either demonize Trump as the supposedly sole cause of our problems, or to worship him as the sole solution to these problems. The bourgeoisie would be terrified if we fingered them as the true cause of our problems, for then we might be motivated to overthrow them, not just vote in a “lesser evil” and gain satisfaction from how the new president is, at least, ‘not Trump’ (though the new policies will remain largely the same).

Apart from those in the MAGA crowd who have finally seen the light and realized that Trump isn’t doing anything to improve the lives of Americans, there are still a number of red-cap-wearing morons out there who turn a blind eye from such things as the Gaza genocide (which he’s enabling no less than the Biden administration did), the regime-change operations and other forms of imperialism (so much for the “peace-loving president”), and the Epstein scandal, not to mention the “corporatism” of his political love affair with all those tech-bros.

What the MAGA crowd and the TDS liberals have in common is their misguided belief that Trump, for good or ill, represents a huge shift in American, and therefore global, politics. The MAGA crowd continue to delude themselves that Trump is ‘draining the swamp’ and taking on the ‘deep state.’ Liberals wail, gnash their teeth, and rend their garments thinking that his second administration is an abominable deviation from how America ‘ought to be.’

To be sure, things have gotten recognizably worse since 2025, but the worsening of the world has had far less to do with his personality than it has had to do with the general worsening of things ever since the dawn of neoliberalism and the dissolution of the USSR. Let’s now go into all of the conditions that have led to Trump, and therefore learn how he is no aberration from the system, but rather, he’s its culmination.

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II: Fascism

It would be a naïve mistake to think that people like Hitler or Trump are these unique monstrosities who suddenly popped out of nowhere. They didn’t pass through a membrane from another dimension. Their rises to power were a result of particular material conditions to serve the needs of the ruling class at those particular times.

Fascism in general is used by the capitalist class as a response to crises in capitalism, when the system is breaking down, and there’s a danger of the working class rising up in revolution. There were Mussolini’s blackshirts physically assaulting Italian leftists in the 1920s. There were the Nazis putting German leftists in the first of their concentration camps. And now, there’s the designation of Antifa as a ‘domestic terrorist organization’ (when it really isn’t any kind of formal organization, but just an umbrella term to describe antifascism in general…and how exactly is that a bad thing?), and there’s the intention to use ICE to target leftists.

What is more important to understand, though, for the purposes of this argument, is that fascism and ideas associated with it are far from anything new in the US. What I’m saying here is hardly eye-opening to any leftist, of course, but those of my readers in the political centre and to the right may need a bit of a history lesson.

Far from being ‘a shining example of freedom and democracy for the world,’ the US was built on black slavery, the genocide of the Native Americans, and it’s therefore a shining example of white supremacist settler-colonialism. Racism against blacks was only the tip of the iceberg.

Hitler’s fantasies of achieving lebensraum for the ‘Aryan race’–the conquering and settling of Eastern Europe and the enslaving or killing of Slavs–was inspired by American Manifest Destiny and the Monroe Doctrine. Slavs were understood to be the Nazis’ equivalent to the Native Americans, an ‘inferior’ race meant to be subjugated. Naziism didn’t inspire people like Trump: people like Trump inspired the Nazis.

After WWII, the American government, NATO, and West Germany gave jobs to ex-Nazis to help fight the Cold War–Operation Paperclip. The Ukrainian underground (which included the Nazi-sympathizing OUN) was also given help by the West to fight communism–Operation Aerodynamic. Operation Gladio was set up in Europe in the 1970s, using fascists there to fight communism, too.

In 2014, the US and NATO aided in a coup d’état to remove Ukraine’s democratically-elected president, Viktor Yanukovych, to set up a US-friendly government that includes Nazi sympathizers. The purpose of this was to stop Yanukovych’s pro-Russia, anti-IMF stance, so the US and NATO would have more control over Ukraine, as was demonstrated in Victoria “fuck the EU” Nuland’s telephone call with Geoffrey Pyatt, then-ambassador to Ukraine. Provoking Russia into war with Ukraine, then blaming Russia for the war, was all part of the plan.

Trump may pay lip service to wanting to stop the Russian/Ukrainian war (probably more to win votes in the 2024 election than out of a sincere desire to have peace), but his ‘peacemaking’ stance doesn’t explain his willingness to sell Javelins to Ukraine back in 2017. He couldn’t stop that war even if he wanted to, anyway: too many billions have been invested in it from the Biden administration.

In short, the support of fascism is as American as apple pie–it didn’t start with Trump.

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III: Greenland, Venezuela, and Cuba

Trump’s recent threats to take Greenland are seen as a highly eccentric move by him, to put it mildly. But as Dennis Riches demonstrated in a blog post, the American desire to take Greenland (typically by purchase) is nothing new. Attempts to purchase Greenland go back to Seward in 1867, when Alaska was purchased. Other attempts before Trump to acquire it were in 1910, 1945-1946, and 1955. Trump’s more aggressive attempts to acquire Greenland are thus the culmination of them, not a deviation from a previous American contentment with leaving the island alone.

As is the motive for so much of US imperialism, that of obtaining Greenland is a combination of economic and geo-strategic ones: the island possesses potential reserves of hydrocarbons and rare minerals crucial for high-tech industries; economic valuations are estimated to range from $200 million to as high as $1.7 trillion; and Greenland’s location is crucial for military and ballistic missile trajectories between the US and such major powers as Russia and China (hence, Trump’s rationalizations about American ‘national security’ vis-à-vis Greenland).

As with the kidnapping of Nicolás Maduro and the threats to overthrow the Venezuelan government, the threats on Greenland reflect an arrogant American attitude that the US somehow ‘owns’ both American continents and every piece of land that’s a part of them. It’s nothing new: the US regards South America as its ‘backyard’; Manifest Destiny would have all of North America (including Greenland) to be part of the US eventually; and the Monroe Doctrine would refuse any foreign intervention in the Western Hemisphere, certainly not out of any sensitivity to the sovereignty of the countries within that area, but because–let’s face it–the US government imagines that it owns all of this land (as an extension of the Monroe Doctrine, the Roosevelt Corollary makes my interpretation more explicit).

The motive to control Venezuela is obvious, and even openly admitted by Trump: to steal their oil, of which Venezuela has the largest reserves in the world. Only an idiot thinks confronting Venezuela is about drugs. Many attempts have been made over the years to wrest power away from those protecting the Bolivarian Revolution. A coup tried to unseat Hugo Chavez during the George W Bush administration. Starvation sanctions have been imposed on Venezuela for years. Again, Trump’s attacks on the country are the culmination of years, decades, of toxic US foreign policy. It isn’t just about Trump being an asshole.

As for Cuba, Trump’s threats are only the latest in decades of attacks on the island, from the failed Bay of Pigs invasion, to the economic embargo that’s lasted over six decades, to the hundreds of attempts on Fidel Castro’s life. Trump is the culmination of it all.

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IV: Epstein

Only a fool thinks Trump is anything other than guilty as sin when it comes to the Epstein files. Was it ever a secret that he’s an old lecher? The man openly lusts after his own daughter! We’re supposed to believe that he, with his money and connections with the billionaire class, did not rape underage girls on Epstein island?

The MAGA crowd, still delusional that ‘God sent Trump to take on the deep state,’ will do mental gymnastics and believe him that the Epstein scandal is a conspiracy to bring him down. They’ll also try to deflect criticism from him by pointing out how men like Bill Clinton are also guilty of involvement in the goings-on with those girls, goings-on that sound like something out of a Marquis de Sade novel, or Salò, or that scene in the mansion in Eyes Wide Shut. I’m perfectly content to see Clinton shamed and punished, too, for I’m not partisan.

The point is that, apart from the disgusting sexual abuse these men are guilty of, the Epstein files expose something that should be obvious to everyone: people with obscene amounts of wealth feel free to commit the most obscene acts of violence, sexual or otherwise, against the poor and vulnerable, because they can simply buy their way out of being accountable for it.

We shouldn’t be the slightest bit surprised that Jeffrey Epstein was a Mossad agent (that some are claiming he was a Russian agent is the most desperate Hasbara!). It makes so much perfect sense as to be a no-brainer that there would be a link between a Mossad agent and members of the ruling class raping underage girls, on the one hand, and on the other, the enabling of the Gaza genocide. These people have nothing but contempt for human life.

Another thing to keep in mind: the Epstein people got caught. How many other people among the super-rich have committed the same kinds of crimes elsewhere, and at other times in history, and gotten completely away with it? Very few of the current gang of criminals have been punished: Ghislaine Maxwell is incarcerated, and is Epstein even dead…murdered, or the unlikely official explanation? He’d have the money and connections to make himself disappear, even if those photos that surfaced are faked, as some claim they are–a little plastic surgery, and he could live anonymously somewhere in Israel, with bodyguards to protect him.

It seems unlikely that the rest of the guilty will ever be punished, beyond a public shaming. In any case, we’re dealing with the crimes of the rich that hardly started with Trump, and–outside of a socialist revolution–will likely continue to be perpetrated long after he’s gone.

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V: Israel

It’s fitting to follow up the above Epstein section with this one on Israel since, as I mentioned above, he was an Israeli agent. It’s also fitting because the Zionist regime is also guilty of committing some of the most heinous crimes against humanity, against women and children in particular, and crimes that, in all likelihood, will never be punished outside of a revolutionary overthrow of the entire global system. These crimes have in common with those of Epstein’s criminals a contemptuous disregard for the rights of the vulnerable and the poor.

A lot of people say that Israel has used the Epstein files to blackmail Western politicians into doing the bidding of the Zionists. Such coercion hardly seems necessary, given how thoroughly willing most in the upper echelons of Western politics are to support Israel. Epstein and Maxwell, as well as Trump, Clinton, Prince Andrew, and others have already been outed: where’s the power of blackmail? Epstein and Maxwell were arrested. Nobody else to date is being punished.

The notion of Israeli blackmail is surely rooted in the antisemitic canard that Israel rules the world, which in turn is rooted in the idea that the Jews rule the world–Nazi nonsense. The correct way to understand Israel’s relationship with the world, as I’ve discussed elsewhere, is that Israel is a vital ally to the Western empire. That tiny sliver of land is in a crucial area of the world geo-strategically, where there’s so much oil and thus such a great need to control the area. The Western empire needs an ally there to kick ass among unruly neighbours who don’t want that Western control and exploitation going on.

Because capitalism, as we know through Lenin, is intimately connected with imperialism (i.e., the export of capital into other countries and stealing their resources to get rich off of them), it’s easy to see how the super-rich would have always enthusiastically supported Israel as a protector of Western interests. Just as the concentration of wealth among the 1% is nothing new or started under Trump, neither is the abuse of the vulnerable, on Epstein island or in occupied Palestine. Trump’s abuses are the mere culmination of it all.

Israel’s founding in 1948 was land theft, plain and simple. The Zionists never had, and still don’t have, any right to that land. Israel as a country should not exist; Palestine belongs to the Palestinians. It’s perfectly acceptable, on the other hand, to have Jewish communities in Palestine, even large ones, enjoying full equal civil rights there with the Muslims and Christians…but not superior civil rights. Such Jews would be Palestinian Jews, not Israeli ones–therein lies all the difference. As for the excess of Jewish settlers, however, they have the right to pack up their bags and leave, as Norman Finkelstein once said.

The Soviet Union, regrettably, in a momentary lapse of reason and rationalized as realpolitik, aided in the establishment of Israel, hoping to gain geopolitical leverage in the region and–with a ‘socialist’ Jewish state–gain a crucial ally. The Zionists’ choice to side with the US and capitalist West took away the USSR’s illusions about the new country, and the Soviets quickly repented and maintained all solidarity with the Arabs from then on.

US support for Israel ever since, from both the GOP and the DNC, has of course been unwavering. Even “progressives” like Bernie Sanders and AOC, for all of their paid lip service to opposing Netanyahu, support Israel’s “right to exist” and insist on condemning Hamas, whose necessary armed resistance against Israel has been shown to be more than justified over the past few years of carnage in Gaza.

Biden and Harris willingly green-lit the genocide in Gaza, right from October 2023 until the end of their administration, and if Harris wins in 2028, there’s no reason to believe she’ll change her stance. All talk of her having ‘worked tirelessly’ to end the killing of Palestinians was and is just that…all talk. Trump’s moving of the American embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem on May 14th, 2018 (the 70th anniversary of the nakba), and his current wish to turn the mass graveyard of Gaza into a set of resorts for wealthy vacationers, as outrageous as these are, are merely the culmination of a decades-long project of ethnic cleansing.

No blackmail is needed to make Trump, or any of the other plutocrats, support Israel, for such support is already in their class interests. They want to maintain a global order that ensures more for themselves and less for everyone else. Support of Israeli settler-colonialism–just like that of the US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, etc., as against the rights of the indigenous peoples of all of these ‘countries’–is integral to maintaining such a world order. Socialism is anathema to such a system, and that’s why billionaire Israeli agent Epstein was the very antithesis of socialism. The only way Israel needs to blackmail the West is through its most probable nuclear weapons program and the Samson Option, that is, if any attempt is made to overthrow the Israeli regime.

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VI: ICE

ICE, having received training from the IDF (and having a similar contempt for human life), can be seen as a manifestation of the imperial boomerang. Now, I don’t mean “boomerang” in a strictly geographic sense, since fascist terrorizing of people of colour in the United States is nothing new. Hear the words of black Americans when they describe their victimization from police brutality to know what I mean. The violence has, however, boomeranged on white people, and while we shouldn’t use this violence to prioritize whitey and minimize the horror that should be felt at state violence against POC, we can use this new violence to point out the extremes to which the state is going now.

When an otherwise white supremacist culture is actually starting to inflict violence on people of their own skin colour, people they normally take it easy on, things have come to a pretty pass, to put it mildly. We’re horrified to contemplate the Nazi murder of Jews, the Roma, Slavs, etc., but not quite so much when King Leopold II of Belgium was responsible for the butchering of one to fifteen million Congolese. Similarly, the condemnation of the 1985 MOVE bombing isn’t quite as vehement as it should be.

My point is that we shouldn’t regard the ICE atrocities as either anything new or anything occasional in history. That many are shocked at what ICE is doing now is merely an indicator of how little they seem to be aware of such violence against non-whites for many decades…centuries. That ICE is attacking whites and American citizens now is an indication of the boomerang I’m talking about.

And while the ICE attacks have gotten particularly vicious under Trump, we shouldn’t regard the problem as just a ‘Trump thing.’ Anyone who has been following the history of ICE knows that the Democratic Party has done much over the past two decades to strengthen the law enforcement agency.

ICE was created in 2002, under the Bush administration, as part of the Homeland Security Act in response to the 9/11 attacks. There was already severe criticism for ICE’s aggressive, militarized attacks, including high-profile workplace raids, the separation of families, and civil rights violations.

ICE was awful under the administration of Obama, the “Deporter-in-Chief,” too. They deported a record 2.4 million undocumented immigrants, 40% of those deported in 2015 having no criminal conviction, and a majority of those convicted guilty of only minor charges. See here for an investigation of complaints of abuse and harsh treatment in the detentions and deportations during Obama’s first term, aired in 2011, and how it all continued in his second term.

The Democrats have helped in the increase of funds to ICE. The inhumane conditions of ICE detention centres continued under the Biden administration. The beefing-up of the agency during the second Trump administration should not be seen as an aberration from a ‘normal’ form of deportation, but as the culmination of targeting POC, finally rebounding and hitting whites, too.

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VIII: Iran

The current push for regime change in Iran (while there are some Iranians with legitimate grievances against their government, the bulk of the recent protesting and violence in the country has been sparked by US and Israeli influence, not least of all by the sanctions imposed there causing economic misery) is, of course, not an aberration from usual American foreign policy. The Trump administration is just carrying on a continuation of a decades-long policy.

It can be traced back to when Mohammad Mosaddegh tried to nationalize Iranian oil in the early 1950s, wishing to use the revenue to improve the lives of his people rather than allow the West to exploit it and profit off of it. Of course, such ‘socialism’ could not be tolerated, and the MI6 and CIA helped bring about a coup d’état in 1953 to get rid of Mossadegh and install the Shah, a Western puppet who’d ensure that the exploitation continued.

The Shah, Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, would no longer be tolerated by the Iranian people by the late 1970s, and he was overthrown in 1979 to establish the Islamic Republic of Iran, then led by the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. During the Iran/Iraq War in the 1980s, the US gave aid to Saddam Hussein, even with him using chemical weapons on Iranian forces, fearing that an Iranian victory would threaten regional stability and oil supplies (Of course, there was some US aid to Iran, too–i.e., the Iran Contra Affair; but it was mostly about aiding Iraq.).

Israel has always felt threatened by a strong Iran, so naturally the US will snap to attention and aid the Zionists. A reflection of that US/Israeli solidarity, among so many of them, can be seen from back when Dubya spoke of Iran, Iraq, and North Korea as an “Axis of Evil,” propagandistically exploiting quasi-Nazi language as a projection of American fascism on the three “rogue” countries just after 9/11.

The sanctions imposed on Iran, ever since 1979, have devastated the country, causing banks and firms to withdraw humanitarian trade; this has left Iranians with rare and severe diseases unable to obtain the medicine and treatments they need. The desperation felt there, combined with how the Mossad has been stirring things up, more than explains the explosion of violence in Iran. The Western hypocrites couldn’t care less about human rights issues: they just want a US/Israel-friendly regime installed there. It should come as no surprise that the former Shah’s son is to be Iran’s next head of state.

Overthrowing the Islamic Republic of Iran won’t exactly thwart the BRI, but it will certainly disrupt it, as Iran is a key component of it, and the West would like to hinder it. In any case, between attempts to overthrow the governments of Iran and Cuba, and to take Greenland, the American empire is clearly overextending itself, and history has taught that empires that do so are not long for this world.

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VIII: Democrats Helping to Pave the Way

I’ve already pointed out how the Democrats are at least partially responsible for such problems as the support of Ukrainian Nazis, links with Epstein (i.e,, the Clintons), support for Israel and the Gaza genocide, the increase of funds to ICE, and the sanctions on Iran. There’s much more, as I’ll soon go into, and have gone into in previous blog posts.

The point I’m trying to make here is that it is beyond naïve for liberals to think that a mere voting in of Democrats will solve the Trump problem. In fact, it’s outright political dishonesty. Liberals being “at brunch” if Hillary or Harris had been elected means they would have turned a blind eye to Epstein, Gaza, ICE, and Iran. They certainly would have been cheering on Ukrainians fighting to the last man against their bogeyman, Putin, meaning they’d be content to see all Ukrainians die in the process (what “To the last Ukrainian!” really means), while smugly blaming Russia for a proxy war the US and NATO provoked.

To get rid of Trumpism, one has to get rid of the conditions that gave rise to Trump, and the Democratic Party’s concessions to the rise of the right have been key to creating those conditions. Liberal claims that bipartisanship makes for “better legislation” (yes, I know a shit-lib who actually said that online, and I’d say it’s a safe assumption that there are many shit-libs out there who’d say, and have said, the same thing) is their outright confession that they are a crucial part of the problem.

If one goes into the history of it, it isn’t difficult to see how right-wing libertarianism leads to fascism. First, they cut taxes on the rich and deregulate the economy, so businesses can make higher profits. This sort of thing happened under Reagan and Thatcher. It also turned millionaires to billionaires, who could then buy both political parties via Super PACs and make them steer politics in even more pro-business directions. This is all why notions of the “free market” and “small government” were bullshit right from the beginning.

Capitalism uses the government no less than any other political ideology to further its interests. The capitalist class needs the state’s monopoly on force to protect private property. That’s why we Marxists call “liberal democracy” the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, and consider the dictatorship of the proletariat (i.e., a working-class state, for the people) to be true democracy. When there’s any threat to the ruling class (i.e., when the common people have had enough of our oppression, as has been keenly felt in recent years), the rich use fascism to beat back the working class: that’s what we’re seeing now under Trump. The mask has come off: keeping up the illusion of freedom is no longer profitable or sustainable.

The Democratic Party has been every bit as much a part of this rightward movement as has been the GOP. Clinton gutted welfare, helped re-elect Yeltsin, signed the Telecommunications Act of 1996, and bombed Yugoslavia. Obama expanded the Patriot Act, increased surveillance, and punished whistleblowers. Biden didn’t lift a finger to stop Israel’s killing of Palestinians. It’s easy to see how all of this led to Trump, if you have eyes to see.

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IX: Conclusion

Liberals are living in a fool’s paradise if they think voting in a Democrat in 2028 will fix the Trump problem. We’ve seen the DNC/GOP one-two punch too many times over the years to believe that any meaningful reversal of the current fascism will happen. The Republicans in power push things disturbingly rightward, the Democrats hypocritically wring their hands about it, and when they are in power, they leave matters largely the same.

On the issue of releasing the unredacted Epstein Files in their entirety, Pam Bondi said the whole system would collapse if they were thus released (Snopes denies she ever said it, but I think one ought to pull a Snopes on Snopes, since so many of us suspect Snopes works for the powers-that-be). Anyway, if true, then in Bondi’s response we can see a hint in why the Democrats won’t reverse the move to the right, but only pay lip service to doing so. Democrats are part of that system, not a cure to it. So many people would go down with Trump et al, not just the Clintons, that the whole legal system would be overwhelmed. I would not be at all surprised if many other high-ranking Democrats would be exposed in the Epstein files, too.

But if that’s the case, so be it, I say. Tear the whole system apart. Burn it to the ground, and replace it with federations of socialist communities that will take care of the needs of the people and restore the land to the aboriginals. The damnation of the empire will be the salvation of the poor and disenfranchised. I won’t state explicitly how the tearing-apart of the system should be done, but I’ll just say this: I’m having visions of tricoteuses.

The Tanah: Amores–Translator’s Introduction and First Four Spells

[The following is the thirty-sixth 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, here is the thirty-third, here is the thirty-fourth, and here is the thirty-fifth–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

Here we come to perhaps the most controversial of the spells, for on the one hand, the elders of the tribe abominated them for their wickedness, while others coveted them for their perceived ability to fulfill so many sexual desires. As with the Lyrics, these Amores‘ efficacy seems to depend on their users’ unshaking faith in the power of the Crims–Nevil, the Crim of fire (and therefore, of sexual passion) in particular. These spells are chanted, not sung, as are the Lyrics.

Apart from the supposed magical power of the original language–whose rhythms, alliteration, assonance, etc., cannot adequately be rendered in English–some other items are to be used to aid in the effectiveness of the spells, being either indispensable or at least helpful in achieving the best results. These include early forms of soap that combined animal fat with fire ashes; though the spells involved bathing while wiping the soap all over one’s body, the purpose wasn’t cleaning oneself–it was about spreading the benefits of the magic’s power all over oneself.

Anti-aging, youth-preserving spell

[Burn wood to ashes while invoking Nevil. Drip animal fat on the ashes, still invoking Nevil. Get naked and bathe with the soap made from the ashes and animal fat while repeatedly chanting the following lines.]

Nevil, keep all wrinkles off of me!
Nevil, keep my skin smooth as can be!
Nevil, keep me beautiful and desired!
Keep me young with your so holy fire!

Sexual attraction spell

[The following lines are to be repeatedly chanted with the same instructions as those of the anti-aging spell above. Be careful, upon completion of the ritual bath and incantation, to have present only the desired one to be attracted by the spell.]

Nevil, make him want me.
Nevil, draw him to me.
Make my fragrance pull him near.
May I have his eyes and ears.

Comment: this spell was generally used by women to attract men, hence the warning to ensure that only the desired men be at hand once the bath and spell were completed. Spells for men to attract–really, to seduce–women, were of a different sort, an example of which will be found soon below.

Potency spell

[Burn a fire surrounded in a mound of dirt. Wave a rock, ideally, one of a phallic shape, over the flame while repeatedly chanting the following lines.]

Nevil, have me ready for her.
Nevil, do sustain me for her.

Seduction spell

[Burn a small flame in a private room into which you would have the desired woman enter and meet you. Repeatedly chant the following lines while, on one side of the flame and her on the other, you keep eye contact with her.]

[Her name], receive me.
[Her name], yield to me.

Analysis of ‘Indent’

Indent is a live album by avant-garde jazz pianist Cecil Taylor, recorded in March of 1973. It was the first solo piano performance he ever released, recorded at Antioch College, in Yellow Springs, Ohio. He taught at Antioch from 1971-1973.

I’d first heard of Cecil Taylor’s music through an enigmatic quote from Frank Zappa: “If you want to learn how to play guitar, listen to Wes Montgomery. You also should go out and see if you can get a record by Cecil Taylor if you want to learn how to play the piano.” You will find this quote to be all the more enigmatic once you hear Taylor’s music, wondering how one is actually supposed to learn how to play the piano from emulating Taylor’s relentless, indefatigable virtuosity, especially as it is applied to such an unconventional musical style.

Indeed, to say that Taylor’s music is not easy listening would be the understatement of the year. It is undoubtedly an acquired taste, so be forewarned before hearing any of it. If you stick with it, though, and keep an open mind, you’ll find it rewarding.

I recommend starting with an album like Indent, or Air Above Mountains (Buildings Within) from 1976, for these are solo piano albums, and you can clearly hear what Taylor is doing without what will (at least at first ) seem like the chaos of saxophone wailing and endless drum rolls by players like Jimmy Lyons and Andrew Cyrille respectively, two regular members of Taylor’s “Unit.” This is why I’m analyzing Indent, apart from the fact that there is also poetry, on the back cover of the LP, which I wish to analyze.

Taylor’s music is characterized as being rushes of seemingly endless energy, eschewing conventional melody, harmony, tonality, rhythm, or structure. He was part of the free jazz movement that developed in the early 1960s with players like saxophonist Ornette Coleman, so the music is generally atonal and dissonant. Strongly influenced by 20th century classical composers like Igor Stravinsky and Anton Webern, Taylor started off as a classically trained pianist before going into jazz.

While many jazz musicians of the 1960s were getting inspiration from 20th century classical music, Taylor went beyond the more usual influences of these to create a musical style totally unique to him, with–for example–cascades of tone clusters as being a regular feature of his improvising. He once said that he liked to imitate the leaps of a dancer in his playing, and one can hear that in the way the tone clusters fly along the range of the piano keys.

His piano is a percussion instrument, in effect: “eighty-eight tuned drums,” as Val Wilmer once described Taylor’s playing. This music is demanding on the listener, who must give full attention to it. Lacking conventional rhythm, the music cannot be tapped to or bopped to; I once read somewhere that listeners tend to sway to the music instead, for it is constant, frenetic energy, like fast triplets going on almost forever. At the end of any performance, Taylor had to be exhausted.

Cecil Taylor wasn’t just a piano player: he was also an accomplished poet. As I mentioned above, he had some of his poetry printed on the back cover of Indent; these are called “Scroll No. 1” and “Scroll No. 2.” I will be going into an analysis of these, as well as of the album’s music, below. It will be clear upon reading them of how he was preoccupied with politics in the US.

He was black, with some Native American ancestry. He was also gay, though he didn’t want to be labelled as such, feeling there was so much more to him (of course) than his sexuality. Staying in the closet all the way to the 1980s (when he was outed by Stanley Crouch), because of the homophobia of the jazz world (as well as that of conservative blacks), was necessary for his survival.

These three aspects of his humanity–being black, aboriginal, and gay–left him on the margins of society, and they therefore surely affected his music and poetry, making both highly experimental and expressive of the alienation he must have felt. Being part Cherokee on his mother’s side, and part Kiowa on his father’s, he would have been close to nature, having been taught by his father to appreciate the trees in Manhattan; we can see some of his love of nature in “Scroll No. 1,” as we’ll take a look at soon enough.

The choice of a title for the album seems to represent an aspect of the ‘scrolls” presentation on the back cover. Apart from the left margins, each beginning with “Whistle into night” and “Nation’s lost diplomacy,” there are middle indentations, each starting with “blue’s history” and “crophandler,” then there are far-right indentations, each beginning with “White crucifix” and “asleep.” That the whole album is named Indent rather than the poems seems to indicate that the music on it is supposed to be linked with the poetry.

Certainly, Lynette Westendorf, in her analysis of Cecil Taylor: Indent–“Second Layer” (which by the way gives a much more detailed analysis of the musical structure of that part of the performance than I am capable of doing of any or all of it), sees a link between the ‘scrolls’ and the ‘three layers,’ as the album’s music is divided into. As she understands it, the left margin lines correspond to the First Layer, the middle indented lies correspond to the Second Layer, and the far-right indented lines correspond to the Third Layer (pages 314-319 of her analysis).

Now, apart from dividing both the music and the poems into threes, I can’t hear any other parallels to be made between their structures, as Taylor’s musical style remains quite consistent throughout (unless one were to do as meticulous and scholarly an analysis as Westendorf does). Indeed, with no intention of bad-mouthing Taylor, his pianistic style sounds quite the same more or less throughout his mature period, so it’s hard for me to differentiate.

So, what do the indentations represent? It’s interesting how the…far right…indentation begins with imagery associated with white supremacy: “White crucifix” and “White God” to represent the religion that the Ku Klux Klan, with their “White flame” and “White hood,” use to justify their racism. By way of analogy, could the middle indentations and left margins respectively correspond, in any way, if only ironically so, with the political centre and left in the US?

Not exactly, but I’d say the far-right indentations embody a hate hidden by polite society, the Third Layer. The left margins embody illusions of goodness and justice not so well disguised, and the middle indentations embody various desires, sexual and otherwise, and how those desires are frustrated.

Here is a link to the poetry, and here is a link to the live recording.

In the left margins, we “whistle into night,” and perhaps the tune we whistle is what’s heard on the piano at the beginning of the First Layer: octaves of B, B-flat, C, A-flat, B-flat, G-flat, A-flat, these then played an octave lower, all to a jerky rhythm. We seem to be in a good mood as we whistle this tune, but the feeling is illusory, given how later on down the left margin, “indignation laments.” The political world that Taylor grew up in, a superficially liberal one, was also one he was left out of as a black gay man.

In the America that marginalized him, “difference” was an “excuse” to mistreat him. These liberals, so superficially progressive, weren’t particularly kind to the environment, either. Their “city technique” resulted in a “tar flesh” that “trampled seeds.”

Almost as a kind of call and response, the next piano tune, again in octaves, and one that you could “whistle into night,” is G-flat, B, D-flat, G-flat, A, E, G-flat, then lower with B, D-flat, G-flat, A, E, G-flat again. Then, back to variations on the first tune, with a brief return to the second. With the jerky, irregular rhythms are also contrasts in dynamics that from time to time remind me of those in the second of Olivier Messiaen‘s Quatre études de rythme, louds and softs often divorced from conventional expressivity…that is, except for the anger of Taylor’s percussive pounding on the keys.

Just as the left margins of the poem go from illusory pleasantness to hard underlying reality, so does the music move from relatively consonant (by Taylor’s standards, at least) tunes in octaves to the more dissonant use of minor and major seconds (about a minute into the recording). And as anyone familiar with Taylor’s music knows, it will get much more dissonant very soon.

“Spring cotton answer” may seem like an answer to a problem, but the picking of cotton sounds like the opposite of an answer to black people, whose “indignation laments” their history as slaves.

A confrontation with the “duplicity” and “demagogic democracy” of Scroll No. 2 shows that matters are getting worse. One tries to be so “damned dutiful” in a country of “lost diplomacy,” with so much “white white.” A few black politicians (in recent years, think of Obama or Kamala Harris) do not do much to compensate for continued racism against blacks–hence, the sarcasm of “‘yeah bo’/I’ma Senatah!”

I can imagine the first of Taylor’s trademark cascades of tone clusters up and down the piano in this First Layer as corresponding to the line “You just sing dance unseen,” like so many invisible, marginalized American blacks and gays trying to be heard in a mainstream society that is so deaf and blind to them. Recall his words in this connection: “I try to imitate on the piano the leaps in space a dancer makes.”

Later on down the left margin of Scroll No. 2, Taylor continues his sarcastic ‘Uncle Tom’ voice by saying “‘Ah is so happy/Youse mah master” to the moderate white liberal who pretends to care about blacks, but in their…whitewashing…of people like MLK, whose socialism they conveniently gloss over, they are little better than the old white slaveowners–hence, “Youse mah master”…”Kick me agin.” These untrustworthy faux progressives have “ground life out.”

Because of the white moderate, “justice [is] invisibly/impenetrable.” Why can’t the white moderate, or any liberal in general, be trusted? Because capitalism corrupts everything, or as Taylor put it, “Dry cell of money/ has locked the minds/and cauterized hearts.” The love of money is a prison cell we’re all locked in.

Next, we come to the Second Layer, which on the LP is divided into two parts so the whole performance would fit on the record’s two sides almost equally, but which is really just one long, continuous performance, and which combined together would be of exactly equal length to the First Layer (13:40). Since, according to Westendorf’s interpretation (see link above), the Second Layer corresponds to the middle indentations of the two ‘scrolls,’ I’ll be examining these with this particular part of the music. As I said above, I find as a recurring theme in the middle indentations one of desire and the anatomical part-objects of such desire, sexual or otherwise.

As I also said above, Westendorf’s analysis (link above) of the Second Layer is far more thorough and capable than what I can give, so I recommend reading it. Still, I’ll do my best here.

The music starts with a ‘melody’ of succeeding B octaves in the bass register of the piano. Then, we have, in octaves played at the same time, B and F-sharps, Bs and Gs, Bs and Es, and Bs and F-naturals. So, as with the opening ‘whistled’ tune of the First Layer, here there’s no substantial dissonance…yet. There’s desire, but its frustration is soon to come.

As for the poem, “blue’s history” can be the sad history of African-Americans, or a history told through singing he blues. In all of this, there is a desire to rid themselves of the pain, to ‘exorcise’ it. This desire is the “awakened needs” of black people.

There is a desire for “recognition” (as Lacan also observed), to be acknowledged and desired by the object of one’s desire, including such part-objects as the “titty,” “ass’n” “prick.” The “bent whore’s” desire may also be desired, with her “recognition” of us.

The middle indentations have all the naughty words in them (including the aforementioned ones, and “shit”; “Damned,” from the left margins, is mild enough of an oath not to count–in fact, it could simply mean that corrupt politicians are “damned” in the religious sense for being “dutiful” to the ruling class). The desire to have fun saying dirty words is an example of how “puerility romps” and delights in breaking the rules.

Desire’s “tongue tastes,” and it moans “ooh ooh ooh” as the “prick” sprays its “sperm” where the “bent whore’s lost” and “puerility romps/unchided…in night cesspools” (brothels?). Desire isn’t just of a sexual sort, though. There’s also the sweetness that comes from “honeysucklevine” and “molasses” that one’s “tongue tastes.” (Or is the former quote a pun on Honeysuckle Divine, with her “dimples” and “sweat titty”?) There’s the desire of “scampering” children at play, with “pigtails stompin’.”

The point of all of this discussion of desire, centred in the middle, between the illusion of the ‘progressiveness’ of the politics of the liberal white moderate on the one side (the left margins) and the unreserved hate of the white supremacists on the other side (fittingly, the far-right indentations), is that the African-American in his “awakened needs” (a result of the raised consciousness of the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s) is caught in the middle, controlled by the whites on either side of him. Thus, his desires and needs are never met in an America where he has no power.

The frustration of that desire is clearly expressed in Taylor’s piano playing, which of course gets very tense and dissonant in short order. Variations on that motif introduced with the low Bs, that chromatic ascension of E, F-natural, F-sharp, and G are heard (see Westendorf’s analysis above for details). The variations are often played in fast arpeggiated forms with added fifths. Soon, the upward arpeggios get much more dissonant.

I’d like to skip ahead to the beginning of “Second Layer, Part Two” beginning Side Two of the LP, because it stands out in my memory. This would be “Paragraph J–Section J-1” of Westendorf’s analysis (page 306, 9:53 minutes into the Second Layer part of the recording). To use her words, here we have “A light pattern of repeating grace-note clusters featuring C♯-B…in the high register”. It is subdued and reflective, to use her words again. For those finding his usual percussive, dissonant playing grating on the ears, this passage will feel refreshing in its softness.

It won’t take too long for the harshness to come back, though, and the Second Layer will end, with more cascading clusters, within less than four minutes of that soft passage I mentioned in the previous paragraph. More desire has been frustrated for the African-American.

The Third Layer, corresponding with the far-right indentations of the ‘scrolls,’ is about four minutes longer than the other two ‘layers.’ It begins in the bass, with a quick ascending line of E-flat, E-flat an octave lower, and B-flat, repeated several times, then with variations using other notes in ascending arpeggios. It’s softer than the beginnings of the other two ‘layers,’ but dissonances are added sooner.

This added tension is fitting as it corresponds with the poem, which is where the fascism resides, hidden under the liberal First Layer (left margins) and hiding under the frustrated desires of the Second Layer (middle indentations). This is made perfectly clear right from the beginning of the far-right indentations, with the opening allusion to the Ku Klux Klan: “White crucifix/White flame/White God/White hood.” The liberal mask is off (or rather, the hood is off), and we can see who is behind it.

The “White white” that follows is repeated in Scroll No. 2 with the opening left margin, though also pushed out to the right of “blue serge,” as if indented, too. Here again we can see the relationship between the white liberal moderate (as represented by the left margins) and the far right of the far-right indentations. “White white” represents not just white skin, but also the White Terror of conservative, reactionary forces against leftists. Recall, in the connection between the liberal moderate and the far-right, Stalin’s words about social democracy and fascism.

Blacks feel the “pains” and “shame” that come from the fascist repressions of types like the Ku Klux Klan. “Whitness” is a pun on “whiteness” and “witness,” from blacks being a witness to whiteness, to which they matter not a whit.

A “surreptitious/Seraph” of “sin sinning/Singing” a “song/Set 4 centuries long” is a white angel that has pretended to be holy while surreptitiously harming the black man over about four centuries of the European slave trade. The whites, in our posturing as racially superior, have pretended the whole time to be angels, while denigrating blacks as the descendants of Ham to justify enslaving them.

Continuing with the far-right indentations in Scroll No. 2, we have only the words “asleep” and “stranger.” The world has been “asleep” to the oppression of blacks only until recently, as of the publication of these “scrolls” (first in 1965, then republished as liner notes to Indent in 1973). The black man has been a “stranger” to the rest of the world because racism has estranged him from us.

As for the dissonance of the piano playing in the Third Layer, and how it can be said to represent the pain felt by blacks because of this estranging racism and how asleep the rest of the world has been to it, one noteworthy section of the music, towards the end of the performance of this layer, should be focused on. Taylor does a particularly thundering moment of tone clusters around the middle-to-lower register of the piano, at about 43:35 on the CD.

We can hear some applause from the audience immediately after that moment. It would seem that, through Taylor’s performance, the pain of the black man has finally received its deserved “Recognition” (line 8 of Scroll No. 2). His piano has sung and danced unseen (line 10 of Scroll No. 2) until only recently; indeed, it took forty years for Taylor to be recognized by the academy, him being named a Jazz Master by the NEA in 1990, and in the following year receiving a MacArthur Fellowship.

In the middle indentation, Taylor refers to giving “recognition” to George Washington “Carver‘s oil” (lines 8-9 of Scroll No. 1). Since Carver promoted alternative crops to cotton and promoted methods to prevent soil depletion, as well as promoted environmentalism, then his “oil” is an ironic metaphor Taylor is using to illustrate Carver’s valuable discoveries for the good of the earth, a major issue of Scroll No. 1.

Still, Carver’s recognition “estranged/outer earth’s garments” (i.e., the tar and concrete covering the ground), for the big money-making interests–typically white Americans–have little to no concern for environmentalism. Their “scorched exclusivity” alienates the earth as well as blacks, gays, and aboriginals. “Tar flesh trampled seeds.”

It’s good to give recognition to Taylor and Carver…but recognition isn’t enough, for the “dry cell of money/has locked the minds/and cauterized hearts.”

The Tanah: Lyrics–The Last of the Song-Spells Discovered So Far

[The following is the thirty-fifth 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, here is the thirty-third, and here is the thirty-fourth–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 commentary

The next of these song-spells is supposed to enable shape-shifting: how the ancients believed that the mere singing of this lyric in its original, mystical language would result in any kind of physical transformation, let alone the desired one, is a total mystery to us translators. Apparently, total faith in the aid of the four Crims–Weleb, Nevil, Drofurb, and Priff–is crucial to achieving such transformations. More fool us of little faith, it seems.

Certain words in the spell were deemed to be unutterable by the elders, as such words were also crucial to cause the transformations so abominated by the elders. Again, in English translation, the lyric sounds dull and ineffective, where the magical power is in the alliterative, assonant, and rhythmic words of the original language, all lost in translation. A firm belief in the Crims, as mentioned above, is also crucial. Here’s the song.

[To be sung repeatedly, louder and louder, inserting the words of what is wished to be changed into at the end.]

O, Four Powers, rearrange my parts! /// \\\
Change my shape, colour, and likeness \\\ \\\
into a ____________! ///

Commentary: Naturally, there’s also a verse to have one transformed back to normal. This is it.

[To be sung repeatedly, louder and louder.]

O, Four Powers, reset my parts! /// \\\
Return my shape, colour, and likeness \\\ \\\
back as I was! ////

Commentary: Next is a song-spell for capturing souls in jars, to gain greater magical power from them. The elders abominated this spell most of all.

[To be sung repeatedly, louder and louder.]

Air Lord, move this soul \\ ///
from its case to that one! /// \\\

Commentary: The “Air Lord” is Weleb, Crim of the air, and as we said above about making shape-shifting possible through the mere singing of a verse, it seems that unwavering faith in Weleb and the other three Crims was enough to make the ancient tribe believe that singing the above verse would actually transfer a human soul from its body into a jar.

As of the publication of the current edition of the Tanah, these are the only spells known as “Lyrics” that have been excavated. Apart from these are fragments too slight to be translated and published as coherent spells to be read and understood, but enough to convince us that there are many more to be found, complete copies of those fragments to make the incoherent coherent.

As we’ve promised above, once more Lyrics have been found, as well as more texts of the Beginnings, Migration, Laws, Preaching, Proverbs, and Amores (these last to be examined in the following pages), they will all be translated and published in future editions of the Tanah.