The Tanah: Crests–Chapter One

[The following is the forty-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, here is the thirty-third, here is the thirty-fourth, here is the thirty-fifth, here is the thirty-sixth, here is the thirty-seventh, here is the thirty-eighth, here is the thirty-ninth, here is the fortieth, here is the forty-first, here is the forty-second, and here is the forty-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 Introduction

The following is the first of a trilogy of writings of visions of periods of good fortune, this first one for the Luminosian tribe specifically, and the other two for the future of humanity in general, with whom the tribe would be intermarried.

The tribe’s plan for liberation–to make bracelets marked with images of the four Crims personified, and to wear them faithfully–worked gloriously for them, not only freeing them from slavery to the Zoyans, but also ushering in a long period of peace and prosperity for the tribe. The tribe is warned never to lose faith in the Crims as they continue wearing the bracelets, though, lest their fortunes should turn ill.

Such a loss of faith would come one day, though, many generations down the line, and the tribe, by now intermarried with other ethnic groups they’re living with, would then begin a descent into another trough, the “feudal” one described in “Troughs, Chapter Two.”

Chapter One

Glory be to the mighty Crims, who in response to our faithful wearing of their bracelets, will not lose faith in us, and who will soon liberate us from the oppressive Zoyans!

The drugs we extracted from the plants and herbs of Drofurb’s earthly body have given us visions of a certain future of liberation from slavery to the Zoyans. We will be free; we will prosper!

In our visions, we saw a pestilence overwhelm our Zoyan oppressors, wiping them out quickly, one by one, until none of them are left…yet the pestilence will not affect even one of us Luminosians! We will all walk out of Zoyan land unhindered and unscathed, free to find a new land to settle in.

When we find that new land, as our visions have shown, we will have the wisdom not to take the land from those who live there, as we had the Zagans, but instead to live with them peacefully and in mutual respect. We will engage in commerce with them, and we will thrive with them, growing from our poverty as wandering former slaves into a wealthy, happy people!

For many generations since that time, we will continue to live well, because we will keep faith in the Crims as we pass the bracelets from the old to the young. We will remember those four of the air–Weleb, the earth–Drofurb, the fire–Nevil, and the water–Priff, who all saved us from servitude, and we will teach the younger generations to have the same respect.

Thus will the land we live in grow in fertility and bounty, giving us plentiful food, good weather for growing crops, and a peaceful coexistence with the other peoples we mix with. We will even marry with them, adopt many of their cultural values and beliefs, and become much more than just Luminosians.

There should be nothing wrong in any of these changes, as long as we continue to keep faith with the Crims as the bracelets are passed down; but over time, as the newer and newer generations are diluted of our Luminosian values and beliefs, they will forget, if not be utterly ignorant of, the importance of believing in the Crims as they wear the bracelets.

O, the new generations will love the beauty of the bracelets! They will not, however, understand, much less appreciate, their meaning. This ignorance will be the people’s downfall, for the good luck given from the bracelets comes only from faith in the Crims. Wearing the bracelets without that faith leads only to ill fortune.

The faithless wearers of the bracelets will see that ill fortune in the beginning of a new trough.

Analysis of ‘Paranoid’

I: Introduction

Paranoid is the second album by Black Sabbath, released in September 1970 in the UK, and in the US in January of 1971. Several of the band’s signature songs come from this album: its title track, “War Pigs,” “Iron Man,” and “Fairies Wear Boots.” “Paranoid” is Black Sabbath’s only top 20 hit, reaching #4 in the UK, and #1 on the US Billboard Hot Hard Rock Songs in July 2025, for the first time in 55 years since its original release.

Paranoid was completed quickly, recorded in only a few days, as was the band’s debut album (recorded in a single 12-hour session). It’s regarded as one of the greatest and most influential heavy metal albums of all time, defining the genre. Rolling Stone ranked it #1 on their list of the “100 Greatest Metal Albums of All Time” in 2017, and #139 on its list of the “500 Greatest Albums of All Time” in 2020.

Here‘s a link to the full album, and here is a link to all the lyrics.

II: War Pigs

The song was originally to be called “Walpurgis,” with different lyrics, about Walpurgis Night, or as bassist/lyricist Terry “Geezer” Butler put it, “the Satanic version of Christmas.” For him, the real Satanists of the world are the warmongering politicians and bankers who make the poor fight their wars for them, so the original lyric’s talk of Devil-worshippers is just a metaphor for the rich and powerful.

Still, the nervous record company executives wanted nothing to do with a song lyric about Satanism, so it had to be changed into something more directly anti-war–hence, “Walpurgis” became “War Pigs.”

The song is in E (actually, all of the songs on Side One of the album, as well as “Electric Funeral,” opening Side Two, are in E), with a frequent power chord alternation back and forth between D and E (also happening often in the other songs just mentioned). Indeed, the intro of “War Pigs” is guitarist Tony Iommi playing E and D chords back and forth while a civil defence siren is heard in the background. Sometimes, Iommi plays E suspension 4th and E major chords.

Then we come to the iconic guitar riff of D-E, with drummer Bill Ward‘s hi-hat hit closed, then one time open, then three times closed again, before the next D-E riff. This whole cycle is heard twice, then singer Ozzy Osbourne comes in.

Vestiges of the old “Walpurgis” lyric can be heard in the comparison between “Generals…in their masses” with “witches at black masses” and “Evil minds that plot destruction/Sorcerer of death’s construction.”

Since the song was written while the Vietnam War was still going on, “the bodies burning” can be heard as a clear allusion to the effects of napalm, something also referred to in “Hand of Doom.” As we hear this song today, though, “the bodies burning” can make us think of Palestinian children caught in burning buildings and tents as a result of the IDF bombing in Gaza. These latter may not have been in fields, but the flattening of their cities may make them in a metaphorical sense like fields.

The last two lines of the first verse, about “hatred” and “brainwashed minds,” gives us an idea of the “poisoning” effect of propaganda in the corporate, bourgeois mainstream media, which is always inculcating the idea of who our ‘enemies’ are: back at the time of the writing of the song, it was those ‘dirty commie Reds,’ the Viet Cong ‘gooks’; in the 2000s, it was ‘radical Islam’; in the 2010s, it was Gaddafi, Assad, and Putin; in the 2020s, it’s been all Russians, Chinese, and the Iranian ‘regime’ (as Michael Parenti once observed, we in the West have governments; elsewhere, they have ‘regimes’ that must be overthrown and replaced with ‘freedom and democracy.’

Next comes another famous Iommi riff: first, a repeat of the power chords of D-E, then power chords in G, F♯, F♮, and E. A spooky high G-to-G♯ lead, as a blue note–follows, then all those chords again, followed by a high trill of D and E.

The scary, evil sound of riffs like these–of a sort also heard in “Electric Funeral” and “Hand of Doom”–were consciously made as such, for Sabbath were trying to make the rock-and-roll equivalent of horror movie music: this is the basic formula for what would be called ‘heavy metal.’

Originally, the band had called themselves ‘The Polka Tulk Blues Band’ and ‘Earth,’ and they were playing a kind of blues/pop music. Then one day, Geezer had noticed a lineup of people waiting to see a horror movie, and he noted that people are willing to pay a lot to see scary movies. The movie in question was a re-release of 1963’s Black Sabbath, directed by Mario Bava; so the band changed their name to that, and started focusing on writing ‘scary’ songs, such as the eponymous first track of their debut album, with the main riff featuring the evil-sounding tritone interval, known as the ‘diabolus in musica.’

To get back to ‘War Pigs,’ we come to a very important and political verse that is so memorable and even more relevant today than ever. Politicians (and the capitalists they serve, of course) may have started the wars, but it’s the poor who always have to do all the fighting and dying. In the next verse, we hear that people are treated “just like pawns in chess.”

This is all true not just of the Vietnam vets who felt screwed by the American government back in the 1970s, but also those of the Iraq war, many of whom regretted their service in killing people based on government and media lies about “WMDs.” Many Americans join the military out of sheer desperation to find work in a country that threw the working class overboard as soon as there was no longer a danger to the capitalist class of socialist revolution (i.e., the dissolution of the Soviet Union by the end of 1991).

Not only have American troops been treated “just like pawns in chess,” but so also have the troops of people in other countries. Consider young Ukrainian men being forced to fight a war that, contrary to popular belief (as a result of mainstream Western media lies), was not merely Russian aggression, but has always been a proxy war from the US and NATO that had provoked Russia for eight years, from the 2014 coup d’état that removed democratically-elected Viktor Yanukovych from power and replaced his government with one that included Neo-Nazis who attacked ethnic Russians in the Donbass until Putin, realizing that attempts to bring about a diplomatic solution weren’t working, felt he had no choice but to intervene. The US/NATO proxy war is all part of a geopolitical chess game meant to weaken Russia to ensure the continuation of US/NATO global hegemony. Hence, Ukrainian boys, the pawns in that chess game, die to satisfy the anti-Russian ambitions of the US/NATO.

…but I digress. Back to the song.

After the end of the verse with “Wait ’til their judgement day comes” (whose significance I’ll get to in a minute), we hear a repeat of the D-E, G, F♯, F♮, E chords (interrupted, of course, with Ward banging on the drums). Then Iommi goes into a solo, starting and ending it with notes highlighting the suspension 4th and major 3rd, the middle of the solo being blues licks. Next is the going back and forth heard in the intro of E to D chords, and back to the D-E and hi-hat.

In the final verse, Ozzy sings abut the war pigs finally getting their comeuppance. The thing is, though, that it comes in the form of divine retribution, rather than, say, that of the ICC, or the Nuremberg Trials. It’s assumed that justice will be achieved through the spirit, rather than through realistic, human action, as if we people are too weak to do anything about injustice.

Using religion as the final arbiter of justice is a form of philosophical idealism, which says that thoughts, ideas, the spirit, etc., come first, and that physical reality proceeds from them. Philosophical materialism, on the other hand, reverses the order, placing physical reality first, and having thoughts, ideas, etc., proceed from the physical (i.e., our thoughts and ideas proceed from a physical, biological apparatus called the brain).

Many of us today feel that this latter philosophy is far more realistic and useful for solving the problems of our world. Lamenting the wars and injustices of the world, while waiting for “God” to repair all the wrongs will probably involve a rather long wait, to put it mildly.

The idea of God judging the sinning war pigs, throwing them all in the Lake of Fire, and with “Satan laughing, spreads his wings,” sounds more like a form of ghoulish entertainment than a wish for real justice. Such a trivializing of the ethical problem of warmongering can lead to the kind of backsliding into liberalism that Ozzy did by the 2000s (under the influence of his wife, Sharon, no doubt) when he was defending Zionism, even when the IDF war pigs began murdering the people of Gaza in a particularly shocking way in recent years (as of the publication of this article).

After a refrain of the D-E, G, F♯, F♮, E chords, we come to an instrumental outro called “Luke’s Wall,” named in honour of two men in the band’s road crew, Geoff “Luke” Lucas, and Spock Wall. Sabbath also added the title to inflate the song count for the US release of Paranoid, to get higher publishing royalties.

The outro opens with Iommi playing, still in E, high notes of E-B, E-D (minor 7th above), E-B, E-D, B-D, then power chords in E, B, and D. He repeats those high notes (otherwise described as root–fifth, root-7th [2x], fifth, 7th), then power chords of E, G, and E. He plays those high notes again in E, then brings them down, with parallel intervals, to D, then to C, and he plays chords of B, C-C, B.

Then he plays a mournful lead in E, which goes into a brief solo, and he returns to those high notes of the beginning of “Luke’s Wall.” The outro ends with a speeding up of the tape.

III: Paranoid

This song was an afterthought. In fact, the album was originally supposed to be called War Pigs (The album’s cover, with a picture of a man rushing at us with a sword and shield, is supposed to be a “war pig,” not a man with delusions of persecution; but with the change of the name of the album, they never bothered to change the picture accordingly).

It was felt that the album didn’t have enough material, so this short song was thrown together very quickly to fill in about three minutes. A cursory reading of the lyric already reveals that the song is not about a man who thinks everyone is out to get him, but rather, about (Geezer’s) depression.

The song begins with an Iommi riff in E, him quickly hammering on from D to E chords (by ‘chords,’ I mean power chords, the standard rock/heavy metal practice of playing the root and fifth simultaneously, rather than full triads–i.e., no thirds, hence, I don’t bother saying if they’re major or minor chords), then he plays single notes of A-B, D-E (2x).

Most of the rest of the song musically is made up of chords in E, D (G-D), and E. On two occasions, you’ll hear E, C, D, E (2x). Iommi’s guitar solo is a dry signal on the left channel, which is patched through a ring modulator and routed to the right channel.

There really isn’t much point in going into the lyric in much detail; it’s pretty straightforward–as I said above, it’s just about Geezer being disconsolately unhappy, to the point of feeling as if he’s going crazy. This ‘feeling of going crazy’ is the closest the lyric ever gets to him being “paranoid.”

The notion of being depressed as a form of mental illness, does, however, tie in with the album’s general themes of war, drug abuse, anger, hatred, and vengefulness. Paranoid is an album about, essentially, everything that’s wrong with the world, and a sense of paranoia is surely a big part of such problems.

IV: Planet Caravan

And now, we have a mellow, psychedelic song to contrast with all of the heavy metal coming before and after it. Now, instead of power chords in E and D, we have gentle, lyrically played chords in E minor and D major. Ward plays congas, and Iommi adds some flute, overdubbed to the reversed multitrack master which was then re-forwarded and treated with stereo delay.

Tom Allom, the engineer for the album, added some piano chords towards the end of the song. Ozzy’s voice was put through a Leslie speaker to achieve the treble and vibration effects.

The lyric is about floating through the universe with one’s lover, according to Geezer. I can’t help thinking, though, that given the psychedelic nature of the song, that it’s also about enjoying a nice, mellow high after smoking some grass. Such an interpretation would tie in well with the general themes of the album, which as I mentioned above, include drug use.

As far as Geezer’s lyrics go, this is one of his particularly beautiful, poetic achievements, rich in imagery, simile, metaphor, and personification (take, for example, the line “Stars shine like eyes, the black night sighs.”). The words flow musically and gently–they’re a true delight.

After Ozzy’s singing, we hear a fittingly lyrical, even jazzy, solo by Iommi. Though his solo has been compared to those of Django Reinhardt, I don’t really hear the comparison. It is worthy to point out, all the same, that Iommi suffered an injury to two of the fingers of his fretting hand, reminding us of how Reinhardt had damaged two fingers of his fretting hand in a fire. Both guitarists managed to get around their handicaps quite admirably: in Iommi’s case (inspired by Django’s example of not giving up on the guitar), he coped by drop-tuning his guitar and playing more power chords, partly to make playing easier, but also resulting in his signature ‘heavy’ and ‘dark’ sound, so loved of metal fans.

V: Iron Man

Ward begins the song with the thumping of his bass drum, then Iommi plays a dissonant bending of a low E note against another bent E note. Ozzy, in a distorted-sounding voice that apparently was achieved by speaking behind a metal fan, says, “I am Iron Man.” Then comes in the iconic guitar riff: power chords of B, D, D-E-E, G-F♯ (3x), D, D-E-E.

As Ozzy sings the verses, in the same melody as the riff, Iommi is playing it in single tones rather than with power chords. “Iron Man,” of course, is not the Marvel Comics superhero: his actual body was turned into metal as a result of time travel “in the great magnetic field,” for the purpose of warning humanity of an apocalyptic future.

His return to the present time in his iron form has only caused people to gawk at him and wonder how he changed into such a monstrous creature. They regard him with disgust and contempt: “Why should [they] even care?” This is humanity: judging people solely by their physical appearance.

Geezer has said that he meant “Iron Man” as an allegory for Christ, who also tried to save mankind, but was treated with similar contempt and killed. Instead of saying, “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do” (Luke 23:34), though, Iron Man wants revenge against those who rejected him, making himself the very dreaded future he meant to warn us all against.

After the first two verses, in which Ozzy has sung of the people’s contemptuous reaction to Iron Man, Iommi plays an ominous riff of single tones of B-B, D, B, B♭, A-A-A, E, A♭-A-A-B♭(3x, but without the last five notes the third time). Then we go back to the main riff with the power chords.

Ozzy sings the third verse, of how Iron Man’s body “turned to steel…when he traveled time.” After that, during the verse where Ozzy sings of nobody wanting the Iron Man, Iommi plays power chords in E, then D, then single notes of B, B, B-D-E, E-F-F♯, A-A♯-B (2x). This music is all heard twice, then back to the main riff.

The next verse is about Iron Man beginning his act of revenge. The verse after that is musically the same as, and lyrically parallel to, the one discussed in the middle and end of the previous paragraph.

Next comes an instrumental break, at double the tempo, in C♯, with Iommi playing single notes of C♯-B, G♯, G♮, G♭, E, B-B (hammered-on) C♯-C♯ (we hear this all twice). Then, Iommi plays a solo, then a repeat of the riff just described.

Then we hear a return to the single-note riff of B, B, B-D-E, E-F-F♯, A-A♯-B (4x), and a return to the main riff. In the final verse, Ozzy sings of Iron Man’s terrifying revenge, the people “running as fast as they can.”

If Iron Man is allegorical of Christ, then “Iron Man lives again” could be heard as a fusion of the Resurrection and the Second Coming, bringing on the Day of Judgement. Then we hear a return to B-B, D, B, B♭, A-A-A,…etc. Another way to see Iron Man’s revenge as relevant to today’s world is to think of how many times leftists have warned people about the consequences of embracing unbridled capitalism, or the “free market,” which has resulted not in economic prosperity, as the market fundamentalists fantasize it would, but rather the very neoliberal, totalitarian society that those right-wingers fear of communism. Ordinary people now are taking their revenge in the forms of burning down warehouses, throwing Molotov cocktails at Sam Altman‘s home, shooting insurance company billioaires, etc.

Next comes the coda: fast E notes on Geezer’s bass while Ward is thumping with him on the bass drum and playing the hi-hat, then hitting the tom-toms. Iommi repeats that dissonant bending of the low E note, then he plays a doom-laden single-note theme of E-D-E, (hammered-on) D-E-D (pulled-off), E-D-E, F♯ G F♯ G F♯ (grace note>>>) G-F♯ D (2x). He does overdubbed solos briefly, then returns to the theme (which always has Geezer backing him up with bass notes of mostly Es, Ds, C♯s, and Cs. The song ends with an emphatic E-D-E.

VI: Electric Funeral

This song is yet again in E minor, as were the previous three (“War Pigs” was an ambiguous, blue-note E major/minor). Iommi is playing the opening riff with a wah-wah pedal: E, E, B-C-B, E, F♯-G-F♯. The tempo is plodding and mournful.

When Ozzy comes in singing, he sings the same menacing melody as the backing guitar and bass riff: E, E, B…B♭…A-G… The song is about a nuclear holocaust. The first verse, with ominous imagery of the dangers coming from the sky (the dropping of an atomic bomb, of course), is comparable to the narrative I created around Krzysztof Penderecki‘s music when I wrote my analysis of his terrifying avant-garde composition, Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima.

The first two lines of the second verse, about how people who blindly follow orders like robots, who obey without thinking, will lead us all to our deaths in a nuclear war. These lines are particularly relevant today, when people mindlessly believe Western media propaganda that insists, “Russia bad! China bad!”, yet never consider that the purpose of such agitprop is to manufacture consent for war with those two nuclear-armed countries, as against the one nuclear-armed country that has actually used nukes to kill people.

This isn’t about believing that the Russian and Chinese governments are flawless or utterly blameless. To be sure, there’s plenty of room for criticism of both where applicable and appropriate. The point is that we should not be demonizing them to the point of antagonizing them and playing dangerous games of nuclear brinksmanship. Such dangers are what “Electric Funeral” is all about. We don’t want to be “victims of man’s frustration” over the reality that the US isn’t going to be the strongest country in the world anymore, and that the BRICS nations are on the rise. In fact, if handled well, this emerging multipolarity, with its new balance of power, could lead to world peace.

After the second verse, we come to an instrumental break. With an open low E-string, Iommi plays descending pairings of notes in E-G♯, E♭-G♮, D-G♭(5x). Next, he plays a riff, at double speed, of power chords of E-D-E, then a high chord of E minor up on the twelfth fret. Geezer backs him up on the bass with E-D-E, G, G-G, G.

Ozzy sings, doubling a melody of leads Iommi plays, of the violent effects of an atomic bomb destroying a city. The horrors turn surreal with imagery like “rivers turn to wood; ice melts into blood.” When I first heard this line as a teen, I thought it absurdly sensationalistic, but a possible interpretation of the first half of it is an allusion to Revelation 8:10-11, in which a star, named Wormwood, falls on a third of the rivers, turning them bitter and killing many people. Similarly, in Revelation 8:8, “the third part of the sea became blood.”

This fast section of the song ends with Ozzy chanting “Electric funeral” in E, while Iommi bends a high D-note up to E for Ozzy’s every syllable. Then Iommi plays a lower lead of Ds and E, leading back to the original, plodding riff with the wah-wah pedal.

The final verse is, as with the ending of “War Pigs” a reference to the Final Judgement. God is “the electric eye/Supernatural king.” The evils ones of the world will go to hell, as will the war pigs.

After a repeat of the original wah-wah riff, the song ends with more of that menacing theme on the guitar and bass: E, E, B…B♭…A-G. The song fades out ominously with that, ending not with a bang, but a whimper.

VII: Hand of Doom

The song begins with an eerie bass line in D: C-C-D-D-D, D, D-D-G, G♯, A. Then Ward and Iommi join Geezer, and Ozzy begins singing.

The song is about drug addiction, specifically intravenous drug abuse, such as IV heroin, as used by traumatized veterans of the Vietnam War, in a vain attempt to escape their pain.

Once the addictive habit has been established, “time’s caught up with you,” and “you know there’s no return.” What up to now has been a soft, ominous guitar doubling of that bass line described above is now loud and terrifying. “You join the other fools [who have become addicts]”, “Now [the addiction is] killing you.”

With the second verse is a return to the soft, ominous playing of the guitar/bass theme. Ozzy sings of the traumatic source of the need for the escape through drugs: “the bomb,” and “Vietnam napalm.” It’s all so “disillusioning” that “you [need to] push the needle in.”

A return to the loud and terrifying version of the riff comes with Ozzy singing of how, with the addict, “from life, you escape/Reality’s black drape.” After this verse, Geezer plays the eerie riff alone a few times, then all is spookily silent for a second.

Then we come to a whole new riff, in C, from Iommi. He plays roots, fifths, and octaves in triplets of C-G-C (4x), then chords of B♭, B♭-suspension 4th, and B♭-major.

Ozzy sings of what a fool the addict is to be overindulging in such a dangerous habit. In the second of these two new verses, he sings of the addict “drop[ping] the acid pill.” He won’t “stop to think now.”

It seems odd (if not outright hypocritical) for Ozzy to have sung, and Geezer to have written, a lyric that judges drug users, when we all know these four guys were far from innocent of the habit. As early as “Fairies Wear Boots,” Ozzy is freely admitting to “smoking and tripping.” Then there’s “Sweet Leaf” glorifying the smoking of marijuana, with Iommi opening the song by coughing after inhaling a joint. Then there’s Ozzy chanting “cocaine!” in “Snowblind,” and saying “Smokers…get high!” in “Killing Yourself to Live.” Finally, there’s Ozzy’s claim that he and Ward did acid every day (or almost every day, or sometimes once or twice a week) for two years back in the early 1970s, leading to Ozzy having a chat with a horse.

After the first of these verses is a return to the triplets of C-G-C, etc. During the verses, Iommi is playing power chords of C, E♭, D-B♭, F, C, B♭, C. After the second of these verses, Iommi plays power chords of C, E♭, F, G (3x).

Then, for the next verse, Iommi is playing a heavy riff with power chords of Cs and C♯-C♮, over and over again. Ozzy sings more of the addict’s delight in self-destruction.

After this verse and a repeat of that riff with the triplets, etc., Iommi does a solo in the Dorian mode. Then he plays a riff of three descending power chords of C, B♭, and G (2x), then there’s a return to the original, eerie bass riff in D.

In the next verse, Ozzy sings of the addict’s “skin…turning green,” symbolic of the physical and mental sickness growing in him, as the rest of the verse is just about the addict ignoring the damage he’s doing to himself and the painful reality around him he’s trying in vain to escape.

In the final verse, we sense how the extensive damage to the addict’s health is finally taking its toll on him. He falls, his body heaves, and he’s surely going to die.

After this, we just hear the bass playing the eerie theme all alone, just as alone as the dying addict is. The bass fades out quickly, as does the addict’s life.

VIII: Rat Salad

This track is an instrumental in G. One can hear it as Black Sabbath’s equivalent to Led Zeppelin’s “Moby Dick”: an instrumental, the second last track on Side Two of the band’s second album, and most importantly, it has a drum solo. The riffs are essentially made up of blues licks, as “Moby Dick” is essentially a blues instrumental, though here Iommi plays a solo in the Dorian mode again.

The main riff is, as I said above, made up of blues licks: G, A♯, C, C♯, C-C♯ grace note)-C, A♯, G (2x), etc.

IX: Fairies Wear Boots

This song, with a lyric by Ozzy, for a change, was inspired by an altercation the band had with a group of skinheads: not the white supremacist kind, but ones nasty enough to call the band “fairies” because of their “girlish” long hair.

Ozzy decided to get back at them with this song lyric by using the homophobic slur on them instead. The song opens with an instrumental intro called “Jack the Stripper,” named after the Hammersmith nude murders of 1964 and 1965. Iommi plays an opening riff in G minor with an echo effect, then it goes up to A minor.

After that, it goes up again to B minor, with Iommi playing octaves. Then he plays power chords of E, D, (and Ward bangs solo drum licks), B, and A (more solo drumming). This trading of power chords and solo drumming is repeated, then they go up to C♯, and Iommi does a solo with blues licks. Then there’s a repeat, twice again, of the E, D, B, and A power chords trading with the solo drum licks.

Finally, we come to the song’s main riff in a bluesy G minor. First, the riff is loud and aggressive, then it softens to leave space for Ozzy’s vocals. He begins his story about the skinheads, though the setting and circumstances seem quite different from the original source of the story. Instead of what was, depending on how the story’s told, an encounter with skinheads at either a Sabbath gig or a soccer game, Ozzy presents it as if it were a drug-induced hallucination. He’s walking home late at night and sees the “fairies” in boots dancing through a window inside a house. The boots are the strong ones a skinhead would wear.

Between the repeated chorus, in which Ozzy seems hysterical that no one would believe his bizarre vision, there’s a riff by Iommi with single notes of (more or less) F-G (hammered-on, 2x), C-D (hammered-on), F, D, and F bent up to G and back down (these an octave lower). Then he solos briefly, does the riff again, and plays the “Jack the Stripper” theme again before returning to the main riff of the song.

After Ozzy’s repeat of the chorus, he sings of going to the doctor for help, only to be told that his problem is doing too many drugs. Oddly, instead of producing a fourth line to rhyme with “far,” he just sings a long “Yeah!” (Easy rhymes for “far” could have been “are,” “bar,” “car,” “jar,” “star,” etc. Off the top of my head, I could rhyme it with a fourth line of “A crazy dope fiend is all you are.”)

Iommi repeats the riff described two paragraphs above, then ends the song with a repeated, higher-pitched riff of A, A♯, G, A♮, F, G…fading out.

X: Conclusion

Paranoid is an album fusing the themes of war, mental illness, escape through drugs, alienation, revenge, nuclear war, and self-destruction through drug abuse. The song “Paranoid” may be more about depression than actual paranoia, but the title for the album seems nonetheless apt, since all the aforementioned themes have a way of fuelling paranoia in people, in one way or another.

My Short Story, ‘Soil,’ is Published in the Anthology, ‘Life, Death, and Transmutation’

I have a short story, ‘Soil,’ that has been published today, fittingly, on Earth Day, in the anthology Life. Death, and Transmutation: A Charity Anthology of Dark Nature Poetry and Fiction, edited by Alison Armstrong and presented by Dark Moon Rising Publications. It’s a  charity anthology of dark fiction and poetry exploring the life, death, and regenerative forces of Nature, with all proceeds donated to Defenders of Wildlife.

My story is about a businessman who has just died, and while he’s in his grave, his soul must reckon with the divinity of the earth for his sinful pollution of the land to maximize profit. He’ll undergo a painful ego death, which will ultimately be a kind of purgatory for him, leading to his ultimate redemption and blissful existence, being interconnected with everything else in the universe.

Other great writers in the anthology are Alison Armstrong, Pixie Bruner, J. Rocky Colavito, Christina Guldi, Elad Haber, Kyle Heger, Kristi Hendricks, Juleigh Howard-Hobson, J.L. Lane, Basile Lebret, LindaAnn LoSchiavo, Shane David Morin, Irena Barbara Nagler, Margo Pecha, Sacha Rosel, Stacy Schonhardt, Tamara Kaye Sellman, Shawn Scott Smith, David L Tamarin, and Tracy Thompson.

So go get yourself a copy of this great book. You can find it here on Amazon.

The Tanah: Troughs–Chapter Three

[The following is the forty-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, here is the thirty-second, here is the thirty-third, here is the thirty-fourth, here is the thirty-fifth, here is the thirty-sixth, here is the thirty-seventh, here is the thirty-eighth, here is the thirty-ninth, here is the fortieth, here is the forty-first, and here is the forty-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

The last of the “Trough” chapters describes a world without any knowledge of the Crims, let alone how to worship them or use the magic of the Tanah. In the eyes of the ancient tribe that wrote these texts and prophesied this future in their visions, it’s a future world that has totally lost its way, with nothing to give its people any kind of moral guidance.

Accordingly, the trough depicted here is a particularly bleak one. Though a corresponding crest is supposed to follow it, as was mentioned in the translator’s introduction to Troughs, Chapter One, there’s an ambiguity as to whether humanity’s salvation will result in physical survival in a better world, or if it will be only a kind of spiritual survival, a nirvana without physicality.

In any case, this trough also shows a disturbing, uncanny prescience of our modern, capitalist world, or so do some of the researchers in our group believe. Most people will face appalling poverty, state repression, and social alienation, while a small elite own most of the land, money, and property. There’s a description of money-making that reads like a formula from Marx’s Capital–M-C-M’, meaning money-commodity-valorized money (i.e., money with added profit).

Finally, there is a prophesied man who will usher in the end of the world: Christ, or anti-Christ? The text is unclear. Some will think he’s the former; many will think he’s the latter. We researchers think he sounds like a certain contemporary US president.

Chapter Three

O, woe to those in the future who will forget the Crims! We have seen that the people of the world will lose their way, and the punishment of their sins will be too great for most to bear.

These people will know a new kind of slavery, in which the slaves are given wages (though very little), are allowed to change from one master to another of their own accord (if they can find one to give them money and thus save them from total destitution), yet are slaves nonetheless. Exceedingly few have the most, and almost all have almost nothing. The people seem to know or care little about each other, or about themselves. People are not close to each other.

An oppressive state watches the slaves closely, puts them in prisons to work like even more abject slaves, and kills people in other nations through constant war. Wealth is created by transforming money into a product to be sold, which is then made into money again, yet a greater amount of money than before, most of it to be kept by the masters. If too little of this wealth is made in one’s own nation, one goes out to other nations, steals what is in those other nations, and makes the greater amounts of money in those other nations, all to be taken back to the first nation.

Attempts will be made to overthrow these greedy rich men, to establish just and fair societies, but through the clever machinations of those men, who always trick their people into believing that the makers of those just societies are making unjust ones, these attempts will be thwarted, plunging the world into worse oppression and greater despair.

At one point in our vision, when matters seemed to be at their worst, we saw a man emerge and rise to the highest seat of power. Our vision became cloudy and unclear: we could not decide if he was a righteous man avenging the unjust by destroying the world, or an evil man completing the destruction of it.

Some of the people thought him a saviour; many others thought him a demon. Still others thought him a mere fool raised far too high. He saw himself as a saviour; there were pictures depicting him as such. His face was orange. Whatever his intentions were, he assuredly brought on the destruction of many, leading to the end of the trough.

Arson

A fire is nothing, in an empty building,
compared to that violence of having so
little pay that you cannot afford to live.
David Byrne and his band in the white
suits had the right idea in their old song
and 1980s video. We’re ordinary guys, and nasty weather is coming.

It’s just adventurism, but it’s something.
The fire-starters will just be arrested, so
it won’t in itself be revolution, but it has
started something that has been far too overdue. Build a movement.

We must not just burn buildings; we must
burn the entire system to the very ground.
No longer must the parasites be allowed to steal off workers’ sweat.

With a virgin earth, we can start to build something new, and better.

Analysis of ‘Naked Lunch’

I: Introduction

Naked Lunch is a 1959 novel by William S Burroughs, adapted into a film by David Cronenberg in 1991, which starred Peter Weller, Judy Davis, Ian Holm, and Roy Scheider. The film is hardly an adaptation at all, since it uses mostly odds and ends from the book, while also adding elements from other writing by Burroughs, as well as biographical elements of his. Indeed, the film is more to the spirit than to the letter of the book, since a faithful adaptation would have been impossible: it would have been far too expensive, its lack of a coherent, linear plot would have baffled audiences, and it would have been banned in many, if not most or all, countries for obscenity.

Indeed, as a seminal work of the Beat Generation, NL (originally The Naked Lunch) was notorious for its use of four-letter words, blatant expression of (particularly gay) sexuality, and candid descriptions of drug abuse. A Boston obscenity trial initially resulted in the banning of the book, though awareness of its obvious literary merits as having redeeming social value would soon overturn the banning. As a result, NL has become immeasurably influential.

I’ll first be looking at the film adaptation, since that will be easier, all the while making comparisons and contrasts with the novel. Then I’ll delve into the book, hitting on highlights of it and giving my interpretations of them, since a point-for-point analysis of every detail will be as impossible as making a film of it all.

Here‘s a link to the novel, and here‘s a link to the complete film.

II: The Film

The music we hear during the opening credits and throughout, composed by Howard Shore, is brooding strings, with fittingly free-jazz style saxophone soloing by Ornette Coleman. It gives off a film noir aura as well as a sense of the kind of music Beat Generation writers like Burroughs, Jack Kerouac, and Allen Ginsberg would have dug; the atonal, avant-garde nature of the sax playing also fits in with the surrealism of so much of what is seen in the film.

The notion of William Lee (Weller) as a pest exterminator is nowhere to be found in the book. Actually, Cronenberg got the idea from Burroughs’s short story, “Exterminator!” Furthermore, very little of that actual story is even used in the film, apart from Lee’s boss complaining, in a thick Yiddish accent, that maybe Lee would like him to spit in his face. The rest of this pest exterminator aspect of the first act of the film is more built around this short story than directly coming from it.

Lee, based on Burroughs, is in trouble at work because he ran out of bug powder when doing a job. It turns out that his wife, Joan (Davis), has been using the bug powder as a heroin-like drug to get high on.

Why does she like it? It gives her “a very literary high…It’s a Kafka high. You feel like a bug.” This of course is an allusion to The Metamorphosis, by Franz Kafka, in which the protagonist, Gregor Samsa, wakes up one morning transformed into a giant insect (commonly depicted as a cockroach, like most of the bugs Lee is to kill with his bug powder). Unable to go to work anymore, and causing his family nothing but revulsion, Samsa is eventually left to starve to death while others in the family have to provide for them financially. It’s a classic tale of modern alienation.

In this way, we can see how Samsa’s predicament fits in with that of the drug addicts in the film adaptation and the novel. They feel like bugs: useless, revolting pests that need to be got rid of. The bug powder itself is a toxin, of course, representative of how destructive narcotics are.

One “routine” (as Burroughs called the stories in his novel) called “The Exterminator Does a Good Job,” has a line or two suggesting this idea of using a yellow bug powder, “yellow pyretheum powder,” for the secondary purpose of a heroin-like drug: “He dipped into a square tin of yellow pyretheum powder and pulled out a flat package covered in red and gold Chinese paper.” Then: “At one brief point of intersection I did exercise that function and witnessed the belly dance of roaches suffocating in yellow pyretheum powder (‘Hard to get now, lady … war on. Let you have a little.… Two dollars.’)”

Unlike the Lee of the novel, who starts off being chased by a cop for his drug abuse, leaving the US for Mexico and thence to Interzone, the Lee of the film comes off as a straight (in all senses), conservative man who likes his job, fears losing it and just wants to play by the rules. It’s his wife’s new bug powder habit that pulls him (back) into the marginalized life of the junkie, which in turn leads him to a life of generalized vice, including a sexual relationship with a gay teen boy named Kiki (played by Joseph Scorsiani) in Interzone. Lee has been transformed into a bug: unable to work, despised by society.

Apart from the bad influence of his slovenly wife, though, Lee’s reasons for his descent into the sordid world of drug addiction and pederasty are centred around his sense of alienation as a worker, and alienation from society in general. When his boss crabs at him about having run out of bug powder in the middle of a job, not yet knowing the lack of powder is his junkie housewife’s fault, Lee assumes that a Chinese coworker (whom everyone calls a “Chink”) gave him too little bug powder. In his and the other workers’ racism against the Chinese coworker, we can see one of many examples of worker alienation.

In another scene, Lee unsuccessfully tries to steal a container of bug powder from a coworker (whose voice will later be heard from the anus on the back of a large cockroach/typewriter) for his and Joan’s use. More antagonism and competition between workers for resources.

Lee earlier was tipped off about his wife’s new, peculiar habit by his two friends, Hank (played by Nicholas Campbell) and Martin (played by Michael Zelniker). Just as Lee represents Burroughs (and just as Joan Lee represents Joan Vollmer, Burroughs’s common-law wife, who was accidentally shot and killed by him in a drunken game of “William Tell” in Mexico City), so do Hank and Martin respectively represent Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg.

Hank and Martin are introduced debating whether writing should flow spontaneously and without editing (Hank’s position), or if it should be thoroughly rewritten many times to consider every possible angle for it (Martin’s position). When Lee joins them and hears their reasoning, his choice of words is significant: “Exterminate all rational thought.” He also says he gave up on writing when he was ten.

These two points he makes give us insight into his mind. The strait-laced conservative we see in Lee is a façade hiding his repressed urge to be like Hank and Martin. (We never see this kind of conservative façade in the Lee of the novel.) He’s so preoccupied with his ‘good job’ that he uses the language of that job. He gave up his dreams of developing his literary creativity at an early age.

Of course, the greatest repression of all for Lee is his homosexuality. Marrying Joan is part of keeping himself in the closet, just as the extermination job is a conservative cover for the bohemian, radical things he’d like to do with Hank and Martin. As we learn from his having been apprehended by cops Hauser (played by John Frisen) and O’Brien (played by Sean McCann), Lee had a problem with drug abuse in the past, his current conservative façade being an attempt to put all of that behind him.

Now, Hauser and O’Brien do appear in the novel, towards the very end; but instead of finding a ‘reformed’ Lee, the cops find him in the act of shooting up in his home. He escapes their custody as he does in the film, but in the novel, he does so by shooting them, running off to find more dope with a friend; while in the film, Lee uses his shoe to crush a talking anus/cockroach in the police station.

His urge to put a (phallic) needle in his vein can be seen as a substitute for his unconscious gay wish to be anally penetrated by a man. Similarly, Joan’s shooting up of her husband’s bug powder represents her wish to be sexually penetrated by him, when he obviously isn’t doing it for her. No wonder we see Hank banging her when Lee comes home, Lee not caring at all. While this is happening, Martin is reciting something that sounds like it could be a passage from Ginsberg’s “Howl” (actually, it’s a passage right from NL).

The giant cockroach with the talking anus on its back, which later will also incorporate a typewriter keyboard on its face, is a fascinating image to psychoanalyze. Let’s start with all of the elements it incorporates and merges: a bug to be killed with Lee’s bug powder; a body part, typically sexualized by male homosexuals, elevated as a part-object to a kind of talking consciousness (connect this with the famous story of “The Man Who Taught His Asshole to Talk”), and speaking with the voice of one of Lee’s coworkers, Edward, the one he tried to steal the container of bug powder from (the voice being that of Peter Boretski); and the keyboard of what Lee would use to be an author.

In this creature we see a fusion of a number of Lee’s contradictory desires, a masterpiece of hallucinatory wish-fulfillment. There’s its existence as a reason for him to have ‘the best job he’s ever had’–accordingly, he crushes it with his shoe in the police station, and the typewriter version he has in Interzone is also taken from him and ‘tortured,’ rendered essentially unusable…though he’s more conflicted about the damage done to it, since as a writer and resident in Interzone, he is now dissociating from his pest exterminator job and more fully coming to accept his identity as a homosexual/junkie/writer.

Since the male anus is typically sexualized by gay men, it becomes fetishized as a part-object, the way the mother’s breast is for a baby (in the Kleinian sense), treated as a full object in its own right, as if a complete person–hence the talking anus that takes over the man’s body, as in the story (to be discussed in full below). Giving it Edward’s voice manages to merge the sexual wish fulfillment with the wish to remain employed by the extermination company.

The third part of the wish fulfillment, to be realized in Lee’s drug-hallucinations while in Interzone, is the incorporation of a typewriter keyboard on the giant cockroach’s face. Though Lee ‘gave up writing when he was ten,’ this was just a repression of something he deep-down needed to do. If he was truly not at all interested in writing literature, then why would Lee hang out with aspiring writers, Hank and Martin? Lee’s association with those two is the return of the repressed, in a form unrecognizable to his conscious mind, of his undying wish to be a writer.

Sprinkling the bug powder on the bug’s “lips”…later, on Joan’s lips…thus giving both of them the sensuous pleasure and the high of the drug, is again a fusion of wish fulfillments to give pleasure, sexual stimulation, and a high to both sexual objects (and satisfying Joan in a way Lee cannot do genitally), as well as killing them, since the bug powder is of course a toxin–he’s doing his ‘great job’ as pest exterminator, and he’s knocking off his wife (who feels like a Samsa-bug while high) so he can be free to be gay.

Killing Joan leads to the next important plot development. This ‘accidental’ shooting her in the head instead of the bullet hitting the glass on her head is a classic parapraxis, done shortly after Lee’s having seen Hank on top of her on the couch at home. The fact that the giant cockroach told him she is an enemy agent of Interzone, Inc., who must be killed, is another example of hallucinatory wish-fulfillment on Lee’s part. The cockroach suggesting that Joan isn’t even human is more wish fulfillment, making it easier for him to kill her.

Because of Lee’s newly-acquired habit of using bug powder as a narcotic, he has been given–by Edward–the name card of Dr. Benway (Scheider) to help him be rid of his addiction. Benway is seen only twice in the film: first, in his office and appearing as if a perfectly decent, normal man giving Lee something to end his addiction; then, towards the end of the film, in his Fadela disguise and more like the unscrupulous psychopath of the novel. Apart from these two appearances, Benway is only referred to a number of times in the film. In the novel, he appears on a number of occasions in person, demonstrating his sadism, among other things.

Just as Burroughs had to flee Mexico for having killed Joan Vollmer, so does Lee have to leave the US for killing Joan Lee. He’ll hop on a plane and go to Interzone, in North Africa.

In Interzone, where Lee will be free to indulge in drug use and gay sex, as well as to write what will eventually become the novel Naked Lunch (all in the guise of ‘reports,’ with him imagining himself to be an ‘agent’), he will finally be able to be his true self, no longer the false self of being an exterminator and a straight, married man. In this change of his character, we can see the meaning of Burroughs’s famous dictum from the section of NL that begins with “I can feel the heat closing in,” namely, this–“Hustlers of the world, there is one Mark you cannot beat: The Mark Inside.” (This is also quoted at the beginning of the film.)

The hustler, being a con man or addict, can make a mark–the victim of a con game–of anyone, that is, a hustler can manipulate or take advantage of anyone else. The hustler cannot, however, succeed in fooling the mark inside himself. Lee tried to pretend to be a straight, conformist American with a normal job and a wife. He was like a hustler trying to deceive the mark inside himself with his false self, and as a result of that deception, he lacked spontaneity and felt dead and empty behind his façade, as DW Winnicott had observed of such people. This is why Weller’s acting in the film shows a Lee largely bereft of emotion in the first act of the film. Only later on, as he returns to a sense of his true self in Interzone, does he start showing true emotions.

“Interzone” is based on the Tangier International Zone, where Burroughs lived in the 1950s and wrote NL. He went there in 1954, just after the publication of Junkie, his first novel. The appeal of the place for him lay in the fact that it had a reputation for allowing drug use and homosexuality, so his intention there was to “steep [him]self in vice.” Accordingly, he became severely addicted to Eukodal there, eventually using the drug every two hours, and he had a sexual relationship with a teen boy named Kiki, this relationship being one of the biographical elements of the film.

Another biographical element of the film is Lee’s friendship with Hank and Martin, all three of them representing Burroughs, Kerouac, and Ginsberg respectively, as I mentioned above. So when we see the scene in the film of Hank and Martin visiting Lee in Interzone and encouraging him to finish writing NL, this represents Burroughs having mailed early drafts of his novel to his friends Kerouac and Ginsberg. Similarly, Hanks says that the book he’s working on is as “American as football,” so he has to go back to the US and finish it there; presumably, the book he’s talking about is Kerouac’s 1957 novel, On the Road.

While in Tangier, Burroughs noted the political tensions between the Moroccan nationalists and the French authorities. He tried to be politically neutral about the situation, but he was a vocal critic of the brutality of European imperialism on the one hand, while also worrying about how Islamic rule might limit individual freedom on the other. The film’s references to ‘enemy agents,’ and the novel’s discussions of “Islam, Inc.”, as well as Interzone’s four rival political parties–Liquefactionists, Senders, Divisionists, and Factualists–all seem to be NL‘s way of representing the political conflicts in the Tangier International Zone. (I’ll be discussing the four rival parties in the third section of this post, The Novel, below.)

Though I am probably oversimplifying here, Burroughs’s political views can be described as libertarian socialist and individualist anarchist. He hated capitalism, yet he also hated the state in all of its forms, whether right or left-wing. Overall, he hated all forms of power and control over people, so drug abuse as it appears in the novel and film, as well as the machinations of such villains as Dr. Benway, all are reflective and/or metaphorical of such systems of social control.

To get back to the film, we note the switch from bug powder to that of the Brazilian giant aquatic black centipede…the Black Meat. It symbolizes the ultimate, most destructive nature of addiction (the powder is given to Lee in the film by none other than Benway as a ‘cure’ for the bug powder addiction), but in its length and size, the centipede is also phallic and therefore linked symbolically with Lee’s homosexuality.

When Benway mixes the black centipede powder in with the yellow bug powder so that the black is unseen within the yellow, he tells Lee that the new, mixed powder is like an agent who has come to believe his own cover story, hiding there, in a larval state, waiting for the right time “to hatch out.” Of course, Benway is in part speaking of himself, since the character will appear in Interzone as Fadela (played by Monique Mercure), whose name sounds like an ironic pun on Fidelio, for Benway is anything but trustworthy.

In Interzone, apart from Kiki, Lee will meet Tom Frost (Holm), a character based on writer Paul Bowles, and his wife, Joan Frost (Davis again…could this Joan also be based on Jane Bowles?), who is a dead [!] ringer for Joan Lee. The thing about ‘typing reports’ as an ‘agent,’ which in Lee’s hallucinatory drug state is a cover for the fact that he’s really writing NL, is that writing is a kind of therapy, something Lee needs to do to heal from the guilt and trauma over having killed his wife. Seeing her ‘clone,’ as it were, in Frost’s wife just reinforces the trauma, hence his helping her type something in the Frost apartment, then making love with her there.

Frost seems to find writing and typing to be therapeutic, too, for when without a typewriter, he feels “desperately insecure,” and so when he’s been without his Martinelli typewriter for too long after having lent it to Lee, Frost goes to Lee’s apartment and demands to have it back at gunpoint. (In many ways, Frost is a double of Lee: both have a version of Joan as a wife, whom they unconsciously want to kill [recall the scene with Frost’s confessions to Lee about this unconscious wish while his moving lips are saying something else], and both use writing as psychological therapy. Frost even has a male Arab companion, as Lee has with Kiki.) Lee will eventually give Frost a special, new typewriter in the form of a Mugwump head…which leads me to a discussion of our next topic.

The Mugwumps of the novel and those of the film are quite different–in appearance, manner, and symbolism. Those of the film have big blue eyes, bluish skin, and are more humanoid than those of the novel, while still slick and alien-looking. Those of the novel have beaks, white oily skin, no liver, and are monstrous and non-human.

Both kinds of Mugwump secrete an addictive drug, “Mugwump jism.” In the novel, the ‘jism’ comes from a Mugwump’s penis, naturally. This of course would have been too much to show onscreen without the film being banned, so instead, the jism spews out of phallic tubes in the Mugwumps’ heads.

In the novel, Mugwumps represent pure degradation, exploitation, and the body horror of addiction. In the film, they seem more benevolent and likable, in spite of how addictive their jism still is, because here they’re more linked to sexual ambivalence (as Kiki points out to Lee) and creativity (recall the Mugwump head/ typewriter above) than mere addiction. Significantly, the film’s Benway/Fadela is promoting Mugwump jism like a mafia drug lord.

Let’s skip ahead in the movie to the scene when Lee is in a car at night with Yves Cloquet (played by Julian Sands) and Kiki, and Lee is telling them the famous story of “the man who taught his asshole to talk.” (In the novel, it’s Dr. Benway, in the section called “Ordinary Men and Women,” who tells the story.) Frank Zappa, not normally a great reader of literature (he was far too obsessed with his music to make time for it), found Burroughs’s story so amusing that he even asked for and got permission to read it aloud publicly.

What’s particularly interesting about the talking anus story, apart from how obviously amusing it is, is how it attempts to place one of the lowest, dirtiest, and most animalistic parts of the human body up among the highest parts, the mouth, associated with speech, the expression of ideas, and therefore linked with the intellect. It sounds absurd to hear that the asshole wants “equal rights” with the mouth, and to be loved, but we should consider the implications of that from a symbolic standpoint.

The mouth represents the bourgeoisie and the anus represents the proletariat–dirty, despised, and down below. At first, the talking asshole acts as a kind of ventriloquist’s dummy in an amusing act to be performed before a laughing audience. The asshole starts to take over the body, causing the mouth at first to try to make the asshole shut up, but ultimately failing.

This conflict between the mouth and the anus is representative thus of class conflict. When the asshole tells the mouth that it’s the latter “who will shut up in the end,” this would represent a proletarian revolution.

Now, as I’ve said above, Burroughs did have socialist sympathies, but of course he was no tankie, so he wouldn’t have liked the state Soviet system of the USSR or the Eastern Bloc anymore than the CIA did. So when the asshole fully takes over the body, creating, in effect, the equivalent of the dictatorship of the proletariat, the story starts to take an Orwellian, Animal Farm-like quality, with the mouth “sealed over.”

The man would have lost his head completely, except that the asshole still needs the eyes. However, “nerve connections were blocked and infiltrated and atrophied so the brain couldn’t give orders any more.” The brain is trapped in the skull, sealed off. Then the brain seems to have died, and the eyes go out. So our story has an unhappy ending, with the asshole being an Orwellian version of Stalin, or Napoleon from Orwell’s novella.

Burroughs mentioned that the story is meant to be an allegory of the insidious effects of the ever-expanding bureaucracy. One should note, though, that no one in politics likes the meddlesome bureaucracy; not even Lenin or Stalin were happy with it–the problem is that it’s so difficult to get rid of it.

Being in Cloquet’s place now, he also being gay, he wants to get his hands on Kiki. While he’s having the boy, Lee drinks up from a little jar of Mugwump jism, having already gotten information from Cloquet that he’ll find Benway through Fadela. Lee will find Cloquet aggressively sodomizing Kiki in his bird-filled bedroom, but Lee’s drug-based hallucination will make Cloquet look like a giant centipede (with his head) behind the boy.

Lee is horrified to see the sight, and he runs out of the room. What he’s seen, though, is just a reflection of what he himself has done with the boy, his own pederastic desires. Only members of NAMBLA would find this using of Kiki to be at all defensible.

Upon finding Benway ripped out of his Fadela getup, Lee asks him to let him take Joan, who has been with “Fadela” since shortly after her lovemaking with Lee. Benway asks what Lee wants with “that purulent little cunt” (purulent is used several times in Burroughs’s novel…so is cunt, for that matter). Lee says he can’t write without her, so Benway allows him to take her, sending them to Annexia so the Mugwump jism business can be expanded out there.

Though Burroughs had been writing before he killed Vollmer, it was this accidental shooting that, he insisted, pushed him to become a writer (as a form of therapy, as I mentioned above). This is the meaning we can glean from the ending of the film, when Lee drives with Joan Frost to the border of Annexia.

The two guards, played by the same actors as those who played Hauser and O’Brien, but now wearing Soviet-style uniforms (a reflection not only of Burroughs’s anti-state socialist leanings, but also of the usual Hollywood liberal denigrating of the USSR as ‘totalitarian’), want proof beyond Lee’s mere ownership of a pen that he really is a writer. He reluctantly does a repeat of the William Tell routine with Joan (a case of the compulsion to repeat), and shoots her in the head. Full of grief, he is nonetheless allowed by the guards to enter Annexia, because it’s understood that shooting her signals his transformation into a writer.

III: The Novel

Since I’ve already mentioned a number of events from the novel in my comparison of it with the film, and since there’s far too much material to go over from the novel, such that this analysis would be transformed from a blog post into a book, I will be limiting myself instead to a discussion of what I consider to be some of its most noteworthy highlights…excepting the talking anus story, which of course has already been dealt with.

I don’t mean to bad-mouth Burroughs or his classic work, but the–to be perfectly frank–chaotic mess of its organization and the almost unreadable nature of so much of it force me to be selective of what to analyze, too.

I’ll start with some general comments. The wild disorganization of the novel suggests than Burroughs, in his throwing at us of one ‘routine’ after another, was less interested in crafting any kind of coherent story than just engaging in writing as a kind of psychotherapy, to deal with his pain and guilt over having killed Vollmer, among other things I’ll go into soon enough. In all of the use of four-letter words (something that would have been far more shocking back in the late 1950s than today), sexually explicit scenes, drug use, and violence, he seems to be trying to get a lot of painful emotional baggage out of his system, just throwing it all down on paper.

On the other hand, there is a bit of structure to the novel in the A-B-A form of first, Lee being chased by the cops, then a kind of descent into the underworld, so to speak, of drugs, sex, and all-around decadence, and finally a return to being pursued by the cops (i.e., starting with Hauser and O’Brien), leading to the chase from the beginning of the novel, giving it an overall cyclical form.

Burroughs, in the 1950s especially, was a man on the margins of society as both gay and a drug abuser. He would have felt the contempt of all of those of ‘straight America’ every day without any relenting. It’s only natural that he would have wanted to lash out at those who’d rejected him, and so he did it through the rough language, frank homosexuality, and in-your-face depictions of drug use. People were shocked at it back then, but we shouldn’t at all be surprised at a book chock-full of images of castration, sodomy, pederasty, and sadomasochism, as well as horror at the excesses of abuse of authority.

Such abuse of authority is singularly personified in Dr. Benway. There’s a scene in the “Hospital” section of the novel in which he’s operating on a patient, though it reads far more like him indulging in torture. He clearly demonstrates his sociopathic tendencies in ways not at all touched on in the film. Tellingly, he and his medical team are operating in, of all places, a lavatory.

Benway means to massage the patient’s heart with the rubber vacuum cup end of a toilet plunger; he washes it in toilet bowl water instead of properly sterilizing it. After his assistant has made an incision, Benway works the cup up and down on it, making blood spurt in all directions. When the patient has clearly died, all Benway has to say is, “Well, it’s all in the day’s work.”

Now, that’s what I call a talking asshole.

Benway as personifying the medical profession’s abuse of authority, as seen in his Rehabilitation Center, is a parody of the kind of doctors Burroughs would have seen while treated for his opioid addiction in the Lexington Medical Center.

Another routine I find worthy of mention comes a little further down in the “Hospital” section, in which a man sings “The Star Spangled Banner” with a slight lisp. As the tenor begins singing, his voice breaks into a high falsetto. Hating how obviously, stereotypically homosexual he sounds, the Technician has him fired and replaced with a “sex-changed Liz athlete,” who is “a fulltime tenor at least.” The Lesbian belts out the national anthem with “a tremendous bellow.” Having stereotypical gays and lesbians sing the anthem is clearly meant as a ‘screw you’ to a country so hostile to them.

Another amusing routine, in the section titled, “A.J.’s Annual Party,” involves the watching of a porno film. A young woman named Mary tells her young lover, Johnny, to get naked. She wants to give him a rim job, so first she washes his ass clean.

After the rimming, she straps on a dildo called the “Steely Dan III from Yokohama.” (There were two Steely Dan dildos, briefly mentioned to have been previously used by her; of course, the American rock band from the 1970s was named after the dildo.) Mary fucks Johnny in the ass with the Steely Dan III.

After she’s done with him, a boy named Mark arrives, gets naked, and fucks Johnny in the ass on a bed. After their sex, the two boys and Mary go to a gallows, where Mark puts a noose around Johnny’s neck. As he’s hanged and dangling, he has a full erection, which she puts inside herself. She screams at Mark to cut the rope to let Johnny down, which Mark does. Then Mary starts biting off pieces of Johnny’s face: she sucks out his eyes, bites off his lips, nose, “great hunks of cheek,” and his prick.

After Mark aggressively fucks Mary, she wants to hang him, but he hangs her instead, having transformed into Johnny. Then they immolate themselves…etc, etc, etc.

Anyway, I find the fucking of Johnny with the Steely Dan by Mary, as well as her biting off of his face, to be allegorical of a feminist reversal of sex roles, a turning of the tables, rather like the “Happy International Women’s Day” scene in Deadpool. The hangings are rather like autoerotic asphyxia, only without the auto-. The immolation seems symbolic not only of the fiery passion of lust, but also of the destructive effects of pornography in general.

The reversal of sex roles is analogous to the reversal of roles of the anus and mouth in the talking anus story, as allegorical of the dictatorship of the proletariat over the bourgeoisie, as I described above. Indeed, shortly after Benway’s telling of that story, there’s mention of an Arab boy in Timbuktu “who could play a flute with his ass.”

Next, we can deal with a section called “Islam Incorporated and the Parties of Interzone.” The notion of an “Islam, Incorporated,” for which Lee works in Interzone, is an interestingly paradoxical one. A corporation named after the Muslim faith? Corporations are what capitalism leads to if the businesses are successful…and they’re successful if they can do a lot of maximizing of profit…at the expense of their toiling workers.

Islam, on the other hand, is a religion ideally devoted to helping the poor and doing other good works, quite antithetical to capitalism. Also, capitalism, in the form of imperialism, has done more to cause misery, suffering, and oppression to Muslim-majority countries over the past hundred years or so (i.e., Zionism) than anything else.

Burroughs’s use of “Islam, Incorporated” seems meant as a critique of the authoritarianism of both religion and capitalism, as going against the individual rights that he so cared about protecting. The point is that he saw such restriction on individual liberties in the bourgeois government, religion in general, and bureaucracy.

He was once asked in an interview if he supported libertarianism and the Libertarian Party, which of course advocates the “free market.” Burroughs said he didn’t even know what ‘libertarianism’ is. The interviewer described the ideology merely in terms of having as few laws as possible, which Burroughs whole-heartedly agreed with. Had the interviewer mentioned the pro-capitalist aspect of the party, I rather doubt that Burroughs would have agreed with the ideology all that much; as with Rush in their early, naïve, pro-Ayn Rand years, advocating “small government” was about individualism, not giving a free pass to unaccountable corporate tyranny.

With that out of the way, let’s now look at the four political parties of Interzone: the Liquefactionists, the Senders, the Divisionists, and the Factualists, this last one being the one Burroughs favored, for “The Factualists are anti-Liquidationist, anti-Divisionist, and above all anti-Sender.”

The Liquefactionists want to merge everyone into one protoplasmic entity. The Divisionists subdivide and replicate themselves, and the Senders want to control everyone through telepathy. In other words, all three of these parties act, in their own specific ways, to undermine, negate, and stifle individual freedom.

Scholars of NL have debated whether the references to drug abuse are meant to be taken literally, at face value, or meant to be taken as a metaphor for broader forms of social control. I’d say it’s both: certainly the metaphorical interpretation is implied when it says, towards the end of this section about Interzone’s political parties, that “sending can never be a means to anything but more sending, like junk.” (Burroughs’s emphasis) Sending, as in what the Senders do, and junk, as in what junkies abuse.

Furthermore, Burroughs calls the Senders “The Human Virus,” and that “Poverty, hatred, war, police-criminals, bureaucracy, insanity, [are] all symptoms of The Human Virus.” Note how all of these are also symptoms of capitalist government.

IV: Conclusion

The excesses of drug abuse and sex in NL should not be viewed as mere self-indulgence on Burroughs’s part, nor as mere shock-value for its own sake. They are a comment on a sick society in which people try to cope by escaping into a world of superficial, physical pleasure that is ultimately unsatisfying.

Consider how many people today try to escape their unhappy lives through drugs, pornography, OnlyFans, doomscrolling on social media, etc., among other addictions, instead of doing the difficult work of organizing and rising up against our oppressive, genocidal governments.

After all, people might fear that all that hard work could just lead to such dangers as are allegorized in the talking anus story or the violent goings-on in that porno film with Mary, Johnny, and Mark. All the same, we have our own versions of political parties that are, at best, mere variations on the same ideology: keep everyone under control, assimilated, and conforming, without an ounce of real individuality.

We need to build our own ‘Factualist’ party, if you will. If not, we’ll just keep on doping and letting the bourgeois government shove a Steely Dan III up our asses.

My Short Story, ‘Scylla,’ in the Upcoming Anthology, ‘Just Beneath Your Boat’

I will have a horror short story called ‘Scylla’ in an upcoming anthology, Just Beneath Your Boat, to be released on May 17th from Dark Moon Rising publications. It’s edited by Thomas Folske, with a foreword by Michael Cole.

My story is about a family going out in a yacht, but the father works in a big company that is polluting the ocean to cut costs and maximize profits. Certain supernatural forces in the ocean, however, want to take their revenge not only on him but also on his whole family, using the plastic dumped in the ocean to construct a huge…abomination…to kill them.

Other great writers in the anthology include the following:

Stephen A. Roddewig
Jeff Parsons 
Lillian Csernica
Rob Tannahill
Claire Davon
LJ Jacobs
Milan Simić
Justin Carlos Alcala
Denise Landry 
Blake Hoss
David McDonald 
CJ Hooper
Pip Pinkerton 
Dino Parenti
Don Anelli
Matthew Chabin
Kasey Hill 
DJ Tyrer 
Miguel Fliguer
Thomas Folske
Michael Mortimer
Margaret Eve

Also, there is artwork from:

Alhiya Hoffman
Amelia Folske
Ben Merk
Blake Hoss
Kelsey Grimmell
Michelle Hanson 
Milan Simić
Olivia Davis
Sidney Shiv 
Todor Gotchkov
Warren Muzak

So when May 17th rolls around, go get yourselves a copy of this great book. When it drops, I’ll post another promo with a link to where you can order a copy on Amazon; but for now, you can per-order it here. It will also be published on Kobo and OverDrive libraries, possibly also even on hoopla. I mention these alternatives for those who’d like to buy the book, but who don’t want to give Jeff Bezos their money. 😉

The Tanah: Troughs–Chapter Two

[The following is the forty-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, 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, here is the thirty-sixth, here is the thirty-seventh, here is the thirty-eighth, here is the thirty-ninth, here is the fortieth, and here is the forty-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 and the next chapter deal with “visions” of the future brought on by the use of drugs made from plants, local ones of the tribe’s area, presumably. Which plants in particular were used, we can’t be sure of, since they are never explicitly named in the text.

This chapter includes visions of a future many hundreds of years past the time of writing. The uncanny thing about this chapter is how, at least in the opinion of a few of the researchers in our team, it seems to be describing a feudal society, long before any of the tribe could have known what such a society would be like! It uses the language of someone trying to depict such a society, while of course not being able to describe it properly and accurately, all the while describing it in a way that the people of his or her own world could understand.

The chapter begins with a vision of how the tribe got liberated from the previous trough of slavery to the Zoyans as dealt with in Chapter One. Apparently, the tribe made a set of bracelets, one for each member, each decorated with personifications of the four Crims of the elements. So, Weleb has the face of a man blowing to represent air, Nevil has a face of fire, Drofurb a face of earth and rock, and Priff a watery face. These are mere suppositions of ours: we cannot describe how such bracelets looked for sure, having not yet found even one among the texts and relics.

In any case, it is the magic power of such bracelets that it is believed helped liberate the tribe, with the understanding that they would wear them with bedrock faith in the Crims. A lack of such faith in the future would result in a reversal of fortune. The liberated tribe passed on the bracelets to the next generation, warning the wearers to keep their faith in the Crims strong. The admonition worked, it seems, for many generations. At some point, though, the new wearers of the bracelets must have thought of them as little more than pretty jewelry, for the people soon enough found themselves in a new kind of servitude.

Chapter Two

Glory be to Drofurb, Crim of the earth, from whose plants we may extract drugs that give us signs of the future! From these visions, we Luminosians now know how we can liberate ourselves from the oppressive rule of the Zoyans!

We must make a bracelet for each member of the tribe; of what material each is to be made, we do not know, but we will try many kinds until we know which is correct. The bracelets are to be decorated each with an image of the four Crims, presented as if men. Weleb’s face will huff and puff and blow air; Nevil will have a fiery face; Drofurb, a face of earth and rock, with plants for hair; and Priff will have a wavy, watery face.

The most important thing of all, upon making and wearing the bracelets, is that every member of the tribe have an unshakable faith in the Crims and their ability to sustain a happy life for us all. If ever the wearer’s faith should falter, ill fortune will come back to us.

Our visions have shown that when we finish making the bracelets with the correct material, all of the tribe, fully motivated in their hatred of slavery to the Zoyans, will wear the bracelets with perfect faith. The visions show that we will be liberated; furthermore, many generations in the future will wear the bracelets faithfully, and so will continue to live well in a long, great crest. Bur our visions also show that one day, when the tribe is self-satisfied, they will grow proud, lose their faith, and treat the bracelets as if mere adornments. Then will come the next terrible trough.

Our vision of the trough to be endured was as follows. We saw wide, flat, grassy fields with men and women living off the land. Their crops yielded much food, yet the people were often hungry, for they had to give most of this food to the men who owned the land, those far richer than they.

These poor, wretched workers descended from us Luminosians, who after our liberation from the Zoyans would marry and mix with other peoples. None of these people could read or write; they were all filthy and often suffering or dying of disease at young ages. Many had few teeth, with little to eat or to grin about.

We saw no hope for any of them to rise out of their poverty and squalor. They could only raise crops and give most of the yield to their wealthy lords, who gave hollow promises of protection in exchange for food so desperately needed to fill their bellies with.

No kindness did the lords show their drudges: only an insistence that they know their place, and never try to rise from it, for pain of violence from the lords’ standing armies. We also saw the bracelets on the people’s wrists, never to be removed until passed onto the next generation, for until such a time, the bracelets were stuck to their skin; attempts to tear them off would be intolerably painful, until the Crims forced them to give them to their sons and daughters.

In time, though, one generation would rise up, conquer the evil lords, kings, and queens through bloody violence, which included the severing of heads with devices that had dropping blades. The people would then be free…if only for a short time, for the next trough would be soon to come.