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.

Analysis of ‘The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway’

I: Introduction

The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway is the sixth studio album by Genesis, released in 1974. It’s also the last Genesis album with original lead singer Peter Gabriel, who then quit after the tour promoting this album to pursue a solo career. So this is the last Genesis album with the classic prog quintet–Gabriel (vocals/flute), Tony Banks (keyboards), Mike Rutherford (bass/12-string guitar), Phil Collins (drums/vocals), and Steve Hackett (guitars)–which gave us Nursery Cryme, Foxtrot, their first live album, and Selling England by the Pound.

A rock opera, TLLDOB tells the story of Rael (played by Gabriel), a troubled youth from New York City who goes through a journey of self-discovery in a surreal Manhattan. The story is richly allegorical and metaphorical, drawing ideas from religion, mythology, literature, and psychology. It is by turns brilliant and yet of a frustrating “obscurantism,” to borrow a word from a critic in the Rolling Stone Album Guide (fourth edition, page 328).

Here is a link to all the song lyrics, here is a link to the entire album, illustrated and with the lyrics, and here is a link to Peter Gabriel’s liner notes from the inner gatefold of the album cover.

Since this album is so frustratingly obscurantist, there are probably as many different ways to interpret what it all means as there are people to interpret it. What follows below, therefore, is my own personal interpretation, for what that’s worth.

Gabriel’s narration in the liner notes mostly do more to make the story obscurantist, as do the black-and-white photos on the cover, than do his lyrics. Perhaps obscurantist is the whole idea, though, since as I see it, the story is about Rael going from his angry, rebellious, self-centered youth to reaching a high state of spiritual enlightenment, a mystical experience that cannot be adequately expressed in words, music, or images.

II: The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway

The song begins with Banks on the piano, playing wavelike phrases with his alternating right and left hands hitting intervals of fifths and fourths on every strong beat (the first, fifth, ninth, and thirteenth of the sixteenth notes in every bar of 4/4 time, the other groups of three sixteenth notes being intervals of thirds). We can hear in his playing the clear influence of classical music, a defining feature of prog.

Then the whole band comes in, with Gabriel singing the album and song title (Collins doing backup vocals and hitting cymbals), to a chord progression of B-flat, B suspended 4th, and resolving to E.

Now, what does “the lamb lies down on Broadway” mean? Note what Gabriel says in the liner notes: “This lamb has nothing whatsoever to do with Rael, or any other lamb–it just lies down on Broadway.”

Are we supposed to take Gabriel at his word here, or is he deliberately trying to keep us from the correct interpretation? I think it’s the latter. Why should we believe it’s just a lamb lying down on Broadway, meaning nothing else? What would be the significance of that, if that’s all there is to it?

Denial is a common defence mechanism used to keep us from confronting a painful truth. Here, at the beginning of the story, Rael hasn’t yet begun his spiritual journey. He’s full of anger, rebelliousness, and hatred of everyone around him. He has yet to understand that the hostility he sees in the world around him is just a projection of his own hate.

The lamb is another lamb: the Lamb of God as symbolic of someone going through a painful journey of self-discovery and enlightenment, who must learn to sacrifice himself for others. Therefore the lamb is Rael. Gabriel would deflect us, for the moment, from that conclusion so that we won’t figure out the meaning of the story too quickly or easily…or to make it obvious that his denials are b.s. I generally regard the liner notes narration as unreliable, so I won’t reference it again.

The lamb lies down-that is, dies, like the light that dies down towards the end of the story–like Christ on the Cross. This happens on Broadway, where theatrical and musical productions are done, for “all the world’s a stage.” Rael will make a sacrifice–saving his brother, John, from drowning–in the middle of the theatre of life.

Rael isn’t at that stage of his spiritual progress yet, of course (a progress somewhat like John Bunyan‘s Pilgrim’s Progress, one of Gabriel’s inspirations for Rael’s story, by the way). At this point, he is just angry at the world, part of his reason surely being its phoniness, like the theatre of a Broadway show.

He would have his identity and individuality known to the world, hence his can of spray paint and wish to put graffiti on the walls (“Rael, imperial aerosol kid. Exits into daylight, spray-gun hid.”). He’d have the world know he’s not one of their kind: “I’m Rael!” he shouts.

“Rael” is a pun on real. He’d have the world know he isn’t phony as they are, “all the men and women [who] are merely players,” as Jacques calls us in As You Like It. As I said above, though, everything Rael sees that’s wrong in the world is just a projection of what’s wrong in himself, and his spiritual journey will help him to understand that over time: no, Rael isn’t all that real, either. His journey will make him real.

So if the lamb is Rael, and is a symbol of crucified Christ, the Light that will die down on Broadway, then it makes sense that “the lamb seems right out of place,” for Rael is far from ready to be that salvific symbol, a selfless rescuer of his fellow man (personified in his brother, John).

Rael is trying to establish his identity and individuality, that is, his ego. The problem with doing this, though, is that–as the Buddhists and Lacan independently concluded–ego is an illusion. Our identity is interwoven with every other identity and with everything else around us. By the song, “It,” Rael will come to this understanding.

“Somehow [the lamb is] lying there/Brings a stillness to the air.” Two aspects of the lamb sit in contrast to those of the city: the lamb’s passivity and its representation of nature, as opposed to the aggressive hustle and bustle of New York City, and “the man-made light…the neons dim to the coat of white” (i.e., the white fur of the lamb). The light of the neon is nothing compared to the light of the white lamb.

The passivity of the lamb, its “lying there” and its “stillness,” means it not only has Christian symbolism, but also that of Taoism, which favors the passive, feminine yin over the aggressive, male yang. While ultimately, Taoist philosophy is about having a balance of yin and yang, in Rael’s case, he has too much of the yang in his anger, aggression and vandalism, so he must learn to emphasize the yin as symbolized in the lamb in order to restore a sense of balance in himself. Since the lamb also represents nature as contrasted against the urban reality of New York City, this love of nature is also how the lamb is Taoist in symbolism.

“Something inside [Rael] has just begun,” that is, his spiritual journey is beginning. He doesn’t know what he has done because, contrary to his loud declaration of his identity (“I’m Rael!”), he doesn’t know himself. As he goes on his journey, though, he will come to know himself.

The song ends with an ironic quote from the old Drifters song, “On Broadway” (also covered by George Benson, whose version was used in the All That Jazz soundtrack). The irony in the quote in the Genesis song is how the bright lights and the “magic in the air” are illusory, the fake theatricality of life.

III: Fly on a Windshield

Here is the inciting incident of the story, Rael’s call to adventure. A dark cloud is descending into Times Square. No one else notices it or seems to care.

There is soft guitar strumming as Gabriel softly sings. Banks’s organ is hovering in the background, too.

The cloud is like a “wall of death.” The wind blows dust into Rael’s eyes; where he thought he saw clearly before, now he realizes he cannot see. That same dust, settling on him and making a crust on his skin, has immobilized him. He is terrified and wanting to run to safety, like the hero rejecting the call to adventure, but of course he can’t, so he feels like a fly, about to die by smashing into a windshield.

There’s an instrumental outro in E minor in which the whole band joins in, with Collins bashing away on the drums and Hackett playing leads. It goes up to F-flat, then to B, segueing into the next track.

IV: Broadway Melody of 1974

Here’s where the surrealism of the story really takes off. Gabriel’s lyric is of a stream-of-consciousness style (some might call in self-indulgent writing).

We’re hit with a barrage of images from a variety of sources in popular culture, religion, myth, and politics: Lenny Bruce, Marshall McLuhan, Groucho Marx, “mythical Madonnas,” the Sirens, the Ku Klux Klan, Howard Hughes, the song “In the Mood,” and criminal Caryl Chessman. So we have people involved in performance, as is Broadway, though many have in some sense failed (Bruce got busted for obscenity, Groucho’s “punchline failing,” and media man McLuhan has his “head buried in the sand”), since Rael sees through the fakery of the theatre of life.

There’s a sense of a mix of good and evil throughout, for “Ku Klux Klan serve hot food,” “the cheerleader waves her cyanide wand” (we may find cheerleaders charming, but cyanide is usually extremely toxic), and a robber, kidnapper, and serial rapist “leads the parade.” Chessman “knows, in a scent”…a pun on innocent, from a man who was most certainly guilty. This mix of good and evil, a blurring of opposites making everything to seem a chaotic mess, implies that Rael has entered the realm of the Real, Lacan’s notion of an undifferentiated, traumatic world that cannot be described verbally…hence, Gabriel’s obscurantist lyric.

The song ends with some soft guitar strumming and Banks on the Mellotron (strings tapes).

V: Cuckoo Cocoon

Rael finds himself in some kind of cocoon-like cave. Like Jonah, who also refused his call (from God) and thus was caught in the belly of a great fish, so is Rael caught in this dark, enclosed space wherein he’ll undergo a spiritual transformation.

He is perhaps too early to be going through this transformation, though: “Cuckoo cocoon, have I come to, too soon for you?” He’ll need to experience a lot more before he’ll be ready to shed his ego and live for humanity, his brother (literally John, and metaphorically everyone).

Gabriel sings over soft 12-string guitars from Hackett and Rutherford. Gabriel also does flute solos in the middle of and at the end of the song.

VI: In the Cage

Where at first he felt “secure” and “good” in the “cuckoo cocoon,” now Rael is “drowning in a liquid fear,” and he wants to get “out of this cave.”

He’s felt like an embryo slumbering in the womb, but now he wants out. Rael is experiencing something comparable to Jesus’ harrowing of hell, or Jonah’s terror in the belly of the great fish. Rael’s “sleep in the deep” will feel like a nightmare.

We hear Tony Banks’s organ with a heartbeat pulse in 6/4, in B-flat minor. When Gabriel sings of keeping self-control and being safe in his soul, the key changes to E-flat major; but when Rael’s “cynic soon returns, and the lifeboat burns,” the key goes down to C-sharp minor, with an A-flat major for a dominant chord.

Stalactites and stalagmites shut Rael in and lock him tight. On the one hand, they could be seen as teeth about to bite and chew him up; on the other, they are like the bars of a cage. Now he wants to get “out of the cage.” He’s “dressed up in a white uniform,” like a straitjacket, since he’s obviously troubled and difficult for society to control: has he been put in an insane asylum, and the cave/cage is just a hallucination from his unstable mind?

He sees others trapped in cages like his, with the stalactite/stalagmite ‘bars’: “cages joined to form a star, each person can’t go very far.” This sight has the potential to give him the understanding that we’re all in the same predicament, caught in a trap of some kind. Rael also sees his brother, John, for the first time in the story. He calls out to John, hoping for help, but John leaves him there.

Gabriel then makes references to two old songs: “Runaway,” by Del Shannon, and “Raindrops Keep Fallin’ on my Head,” sung by BJ Thomas, written by Burt Bacharach and Hal David, and heard in the soundtrack for Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. John is Rael’s “little runaway,” leaving him in the lurch as the raindrops keep falling on his head, the raindrops of pain he wants to get out of. If he could be a liquid like those raindrops, he “could fill the cracks up in the rocks” and escape, but he is solid, his own bad luck.

Interestingly, though, when John disappears outside, Rael’s cage dissolves. This moment is a hint as to what he must do to be spiritually edified and enlightened. John is the key to Rael’s salvation. If he cares about John, he’ll be free of the cage of his own egoism. In this sense, his sojourn in the cave, or cocoon, like Jonah in the belly of the great fish (a moment in Joseph Campbell‘s Hero’s Journey, as are the call to adventure and the refusal of the call, as mentioned above), has been spiritually transformative for him.

VII: The Grand Parade of Lifeless Packaging

The song begins in A major, with Banks at a keyboard and Gabriel singing. The verses generally are in A major, with some shifts to C major in later verses; the refrain, in which Gabriel sings the title of the song, is in E major, and the song is more dissonant at the end. Collins’s drumming is rather like a marching beat, suggesting the regimented life of the scene Rael is about to see.

Rael is now in a factory, being given a tour by a women there. He sees people being processed like packages of dolls. Here we can see the source of Rael’s suffering, as well as that of everyone else in those cages: capitalism. People are being commodified, hence, “the grand parade of lifeless packaging.” This is the society that has produced Rael’s rage.

He recognizes some of the people in the production line, members of his New York City gang, it seems, with the same rage as he because of everybody’s commodification, “in labour bondage.” Indeed, the imagery of capitalism runs throughout the lyric: “Everyone’s a sales representative/wearing slogans…”, “I guess I’ll have to pay.”

Unlike the “free market” delusions of the market fundamentalists, a true understanding of capitalism recognizes that there’s “no sign of free will.” We live, work, buy, and sell under capitalism because we have no other options…and this lack of choice is among us leftists, too. Such is the hegemony of neoliberalism, which had only gotten worse after the 1974 release of TLLDOB.

We get a sense of worker alienation and the commodification of humanity in lines like “The hall runs like clockwork/Their hands mark out the time/Empty in their fullness/Like a frozen pantomime.” People feel like machines, operating with mechanical precision, yet they’re empty, frozen, and lifeless, bereft of humanity, even in the “fullness” of everything they’ve shopped for and bought.

It seems that the commodified people have all been fittingly given each a number, since John, among them, “is number nine.” Is this a reference to Lennon, with “Revolution 9”? This also seems fitting. If I’m right in that interpretation, and so much of the source of the suffering of Rael and everyone else–including John–is capitalism, then revolution is the solution. Lennon spoke of “Revolution 9” as an attempt to paint a picture of a revolution using sound. If John is the key to fixing what’s broken in Rael, then he’s his brother’s inspiration, like the nine Muses, to a revolutionary overthrow of capitalism.

We just need to understand how such an overthrow is to be done successfully. First, we’ll examine how not to do it.

VIII: Back in NYC

The song begins in D major, and it’s mostly in seven. Banks’s synthesizer playing is prominent throughout the song.

Gabriel sings of Rael’s rough life as a kid in New York City, being in gangs, getting into fights, and being incarcerated in Pontiac Correctional Facility as a juvenile delinquent when he was 17 years old, and released then, too. He also sings of Rael’s use of Molotov cocktails, damaging property with them.

These are examples of young punks using violence to rebel against establishment systems like capitalism and the bourgeois state. They can be seen as forms of adventurism (a typical tactic of anarchists), which while being romantic and exciting, are ultimately bad for the working class because they provoke stronger waves of violence by the bourgeois state against the rebellious punk agitators (e.g., Rael being put in Pontiac). Such actions, thus, are how not to do revolution, as opposed to building a disciplined working-class movement and party, rooted in Marxist-Leninist theory, and engaging in revolution only when the time is ripe for it.

Rael, therefore, must learn to tame the wild man inside him. This is what shaving the hair off of his heart symbolizes. The hairy heart, in turn, is represented by a porcupine that Rael cuddles. He has no time for romantic escape (i.e., adventurism) when his fluffy heart is ready for rape (i.e., wishing to commit crimes in the name of revolution, when as Che Guevara observed, the heart of a revolutionary should be filled with love–that is, selflessness). The hairs, like a porcupine’s sharp spines, cut when you touch them; they hurt, like a raping phallus.

So Rael must learn to do revolution out of love for others, to help others, not just do violence for the sake of violence. He will eventually learn this virtue when he has to sacrifice his return to NYC by saving his brother from drowning. If he just goes back to New York City, as in the title of this song, he’ll just go back to his old violent, rebellious ways, and he’ll have learned nothing.

During the verses about cuddling the porcupine and “No time for romantic escape,” the key is D minor, and we hear groupings of four bars in 7/8, each followed by one bar in 6/8. During the “Off we go” part, there’s a grouping of two bars in 7/8, then a bar in 3/8, another two bars in 7/8, then a bar in 4/8, and the whole pattern repeats one time. This section is in A major.

The hair on the heart to be shaven off, like the spines on the porcupine, are phallic symbols, so shaving the heart, a taming of the wild man in Rael, is thematically connected with his and John’s emasculation later. It’s all about extinguishing desire–being “ready for rape”–to end Rael’s egoism.

IX: Hairless Heart

This is an instrumental, in D minor. There’s some soft guitar strumming with Banks’s organ arpeggios in the background. Hackett plays a lead using a volume pedal. Collins comes in later, playing the drums gently. The sedateness of this music suggests the beginning of the taming of Rael that the shaving of the heart represents.

This music segues into the next track.

X: Counting Out Time

This song, the one following it (“The Carpet Crawlers”), and the title track were the ones we heard on the radio, released as singles.

In this song, Rael has “found a girl [he] wanted to date,” and he wants to “get it straight” when he gets it on with her, so he has a book to teach him how exactly to stimulate her erogenous zones. This is all perfectly well-intended, of course, but ultimately wrong-headed, for to get his girl off properly, he has to listen to her, to know exactly how this girl in particular likes it.

Now, this is the surface meaning of the song. There’s also a deeper meaning that makes the surface, sexual meaning most ironic. Note how as Gabriel sings early on, he asks the Lord for guidance, noting how “the Day of Judgement’s come.”

The book he bought, which has all the advice that “the experts” give him, should be seen as symbolic of the Bible, “the experts” being the prophets. The girl he wants to date is actually God, whom Rael wants to please, the sexual ecstasy being symbolic of spiritual ecstasy.

Such an interpretation fits in the wider context of Rael’s ‘pilgrim’s progress,’ his spiritual journey. The body here is symbolic of the soul; his ‘knowing‘ her (in the Biblical sense [!]) representative of growing in spiritual knowledge and enlightenment, of knowing God deeply.

Consider The Song of Songs, a book of sensuous love poetry in which the groom professes his love of the bride. The book is traditionally allegorized by Jews as an expression of God’s love for the Israelites, and by Christians as an expression of God’s love for His Church. We can thus allegorize Rael’s sexual encounter with the girl as Rael’s attempt to love God; here, with the roles of bride (man) and groom (God), the sexes are reversed, with a female God.

So how does Rael try to reach God with his Bible, the Good Book of Great Sex? He’s “found the hotspots, figures one to nine,” which sound like nine of the Ten Commandments, or of the Mosaic Laws in general (he later mentions a “number eleven”). In other words, Rael has the superficial idea of reaching a state of spiritual enlightenment by merely following religious laws. Accordingly, he is doomed to fail, “for the letter killeth, but the spirit giveth life.” (2 Corinthians 3:6)

The song is in A major, the verses following a descending major scale progression of tonic (A), leading tone (G-sharp), submediant (F-sharp), dominant (E), subdominant (D), mediant (C-sharp), supertonic (B), and dominant again. The tune has a light, almost trivial quality, to the point of being comical, since Rael is being clumsy and overconfident in bed (allegorically, too trustful of the efficacy of following religious laws). Hackett’s guitar solo is fittingly spastic.

In the refrain where Gabriel sings of how Rael loves erogenous zones, we hear a progression of G major (subtonic), D major (subdominant), and tonic A major; then, when Rael wonders what a poor boy would do without the book’s guidance, we hear chords in C major (a natural mediant in the context of the key of A major), B, and a bar in 5/8 (subdominant resolving to tonic). Bars in 5/8 (representative of the Pentateuch) will alternate with bars in 4/4 in the verses.

The last time we hear the chorus about erogenous zones, there is significantly no use of the bars in 5/8, for at this point, Rael has grown disillusioned with the book, since its erotic tips have been of no use in helping him satisfy the girl sexually. As far as my allegory is concerned, this means that adherence to religious laws (i.e., the Pentateuch) isn’t working for Rael, so he has abandoned them–hence, no bars in 5/8 time.

During our hearing of “Back in NYC,” Hairless Heart,” and “Counting Out Time,” Rael experienced a flashback from which he has now come back, getting us ready for the next song. In other words, aspects of his spiritual journey had begun before this story even began…and perhaps he hadn’t even realized he was already on that journey.

XI: The Carpet Crawlers

This song is also about an attempt to attain spiritual enlightenment and salvation that ultimately fails, that in fact leaves one trapped in hell. Here, instead of there being false hope in following religious laws, as I saw as an allegory in “Counting Out Time,” there is false hope in following spiritual leaders (“callers”). One might think of people watching televangelists on their TVs, foolishly giving them money.

Rael feels lambswool under his feet, which is “soft and warm, giv[ing] off some kind of heat.” Since the lamb represents Christ, this lambswool carpet that feels so good is actually representative of that false Christian path that promises, but fails, to deliver salvation.

Rael sees examples of carpet crawlers going to their deaths, such as a salamander going “into flame to be destroyed,” “imaginary creatures…trapped in birth on celluloid,” and “the fleas cling to the Golden Fleece hoping they’ll find peace.” Note how the lambswool is, apart from representing the Lamb of God, also the Golden Fleece, religious fraudsters’ promise of heaven while enriching themselves with others’ money.

Later, Rael sees his “second sight of people,” the first having been those in “the grand parade of lifeless packaging,” while these new ones have “more lifeblood than before.” Nevertheless, they’re being no less exploited than the previous bunch, for they’re crawling like the insects “to a heavy wooden door/Where the needle eye is winking, closing on the poor.”

It’s the rich who aren’t supposed to be able to pass through the eye of a needle, not the poor. But in this Golden Fleece version of the Lamb of God, religion–the opium of the people–is being used to serve the rich.

Still, the masses mindlessly follow the voices of their corrupt religious leaders, crawling on the carpet like the self-destructing salamander and the fleas, all the little ones…the poor. The carpet crawlers are yet another grand parade of lifeless packaging; religion is used to serve the interests of capitalists.

While it is true that one can only get out of one’s problems by going through them, not avoiding them (“We’ve gotta get in to get out.”), in this case, the “callers” are drawing the carpet crawlers into a trap by chanting a mantra that, though true in itself, is being misused and applied in a way to lead the crawlers astray. The callers thus are false prophets, who twist true ideas out of context to deceive their followers by taking them in what only seems to be the right direction.

They’re being taken “to the ceiling where the chamber’s said to be.” Upwards to heaven, up into the light, which the trees crave. “Believing they are free,” the carpet crawlers mindlessly follow the voices of “their callers.”

Even the strongest of these people are lured to their destruction, for the meek here will not inherit the Earth (“Mild-mannered Supermen are held in Kryptonite.”). Gabriel’s lyric doesn’t seem to make a distinction between “the wise and foolish virgins,” the former of whom, according to the parable (Matthew 25:1-13), had enough light for their lamps when waiting to meet the bridegroom (God), while the latter didn’t prepare enough oil, and so they were excluded from the wedding banquet. Here, all carpet crawlers, strong and weak, wise and foolish, are led to ruin by their callers, not to heaven.

The chord progression of the chorus is, essentially, F-sharp minor, A major and G major twice, then D major, and C major leading out to the next verse.

XII: The Chamber of 32 Doors

Rael has gotten past the carpet crawlers, gone up a spiral staircase, and reached a chamber with 32 doors, There are people everywhere around him, “running around to all the doors.” They all want people to acknowledge them.

After all the religious chicanery of the callers tricking the carpet crawlers, as well as Rael’s failures with gang violence bringing about social change and with the book’s advice not pleasing the girl, Rael “need[s] someone to believe in, someone to trust.”

People in the country are more trustworthy than those in the city, for the former people’s eyes and smiles are more sincere. Someone who works with his hands, the proletariat, is more trustworthy. But Rael is down here, alone with his fear, alienated from everybody; every door he’s gone through brings him back to the beginning. He’s making no spiritual progress trying to follow the ways of others, so he must find his own way.

Everyone’s pointing where to go, even Rael’s mom and dad, “but nowhere feels quite right.” He still needs someone to believe in, someone to trust.

A man who doesn’t shout what he’s found is trustworthy. Such a man doesn’t need to sell his path to salvation, “he won’t take [Rael] for a ride.” The “chamber of so many doors” is thus just like the cage: Rael wants to get out–“take [him] away.”

XIII: Lilywhite Lilith

Just as he wants to get out of the chamber and away from all the people, so does a blind woman, “Lilywhite Lilith,” want help to get out. He guides her out of the crowd of people, and now that she can “feel the way the breezes blow,” she can show him where to go.

Rael is gaining an early insight as to how to find spiritual enlightenment and salvation. He will get the help he needs if he helps others and gives up his egoism.

She takes him “into a big, round cave,” and tells him not to be afraid. Just as she is blind, so is he in the darkness of the cave, sitting on a jade seat. Being in the darkness, in his fear, is like confronting his Jungian Shadow, in order to attain enlightenment.

The darkness is gone when two bright, golden globes float into the cave and hover above the ground.

XIV: The Waiting Room

This track is an instrumental. Tony Banks called it “the best jam [they] had in the rehearsal room,” and it was originally called “The Evil Jam.” The band apparently played in the dark, just making noises on their instruments, and this track resulted from their experimentation. It was quite frightening.

You really get a sense–from all of the spooky, eerie sounds the band is making that Rael is waiting in a dark, scary place, in the belly of the whale again, so to speak, confronting the Shadow.

XV: Anyway

The song begins with a sad piano motif in G minor. Banks develops the wave-like, arpeggiated motif by replacing its perfect fifth with ascending and descending minor sixths, major sixths, and minor sevenths. Gabriel comes in singing of Rael’s experience of impending death, trapped under a cave-in of rocks.

Gabriel’s lyric uses a number of metaphors to refer indirectly to death. It’s “time to meet the chef,” who I assume is supposed to be God. “It’s back to ash,” as in ‘ashes to ashes, dust to dust.’ Rael has had his “flash,” the brief light of life. He’s heard that Death “comes on a pale horse” (Revelation 6:8), yet he’s sure he hears a train, which can be associated with death in dreams and poetry. He feels “the pull on the rope,” which is a hangman’s noose. He’ll “stretch for God’s elastic Acre,” which comes from the German Gottesacker, an ancient designation for a burial ground.

Rael imagines he’ll keep his deadline [!] with his Maker, that is, meet God in heaven. Anyway, he’s not really dying; he’s just going through that maddening confrontation with his Shadow, and so it feels like dying. Accordingly, the musical tension is heightened, with Banks playing those mournful piano arpeggios much faster, backed up by the band. Hackett adds some harmonized, overdubbed guitar leads.

XVI: Here Comes the Supernatural Anaesthetist

We hear some 12-string guitar strumming in A major, then Gabriel comes in (with Collins’s backing vocals) singing about personified Death as “the Supernatural Anaesthetist.” He just puffs a toxic powder into your face, you breathe it in, and die. As “a fine dancer,” he’d be doing the danse macabre, I assume.

What comes after this one, four-line verse is an instrumental passage, also in A major, that is rather upbeat for something that’s supposed to be about Rael’s death. Indeed, Hackett plays a sweet lead of C-sharp, D, C-sharp, B, and C-sharp. the fact is that Rael is not really dying; the whole thing was just a hallucination, like a really bad drug trip.

XVII: The Lamia

Since there’s a dialectical relationship between Eros and Thanatos, or the life (sex) and death drives, then it seems fitting to juxtapose Rael’s near-death experience with a sexual encounter.

Out of the cave, Rael finds himself in a pool with three Lamia, the tops of whom are beautiful women, but instead of having legs, each has a snake’s tail. Rael makes love with them, after which they would consume him, but it is the three who die after drinking some of his blood. He eats their corpses and leaves.

The point behind his sexual encounter with and mutual eating of the Lamia is that these acts represent Rael’s giving into the animal side of himself, his bestial, sexual nature. This is the symbolism behind Gabriel’s choice of Lamia, half-woman, half-snake, for his story. Rael must learn from the mistake of giving in to sensual pleasure…and he will learn this the hard way.

XVIII: Silent Sorrow in Empty Boats

This track is another instrumental. Mostly keyboards, Hackett’s leads are put through a volume pedal, and Collins plays a little percussion. Very dreamy, melancholy music. The party of sensual pleasure is over for Rael, so like a drug addict who is coming down from the peak of his high, Rael is feeling the depression that inevitably comes when he realizes the pleasure he’s so attached to is impermanent.

XIX: The Colony of Slippermen

The instrumental intro of this track sounds like an imitation of Chinese or Japanese music–plucked guitar strings sound like those of a koto or zheng. Collins hits wood blocks, which again give an Asian effect. It’s a unique moment in the history of the musical style of Genesis. Why the band chose to play the intro like this I don’t know: are we meant to think that Rael has wandered into the Chinatown section of New York City?

After this intro, the music suddenly changes to a light, upbeat sound, with Banks playing the organ over a shuffle rhythm. I find it intriguing that Genesis chose such a happy theme given what we’re soon to learn what’s happened to Rael as a result of his sexual union with the Lamia. The upbeat theme seems to represent his blissful ignorance of something that will soon shock him.

Gabriel begins singing with a quote of the first line of the famous William Wordsworth poem about daffodils. Again, the association with the poem reinforces this odd sense of everything being positive…when all that Rael has to do to know he has nothing to be happy about is look in a mirror.

Indeed, instead of “all at once, [seeing] a crowd/A host of golden daffodils,” as in Wordsworth’s poem, Rael had “never seen a stranger crowd” of Slippermen, with skin “all covered in slimy lumps,” and “twisted limbs like rubber stumps.” Rael is told that they all made love with the Lamia, too, who made them look as grotesque as they do, and therefore, he now looks the same as they do.

Naturally, Rael is horrified to realize this, and the music changes, with some synthesizer playing, to reflect this shocking realization.

All of this section of the song has been Part I: the Arrival. Rael must join his brother John with Doktor Dyper in Part II: A Visit to the Doktor. What has happened to Rael and the Slippermen is essentially the catching of a sexually transmitted disease, for which the only cure, apparently, is…emasculation.

So, Doktor Dyper emasculates both Rael and John, and Rael looks normal again…except that both he and John have their penises in tubes that they wear as pendants around their necks. The point is that Rael’s desire and indulgence in pleasure (his union with the Lamia) have made him ugly (like the Slippermen). Emasculation represents a renunciation of physical pleasure so Rael can progress spiritually.

Part III: The Raven He still feels some attachment, naturally, if not physically, to his penis. This is when a raven appears and snatches his tube. Rael asks John for help, and not getting it, runs after the raven as it flies away, but he’s never able to retrieve the tube, for the raven–far off ahead–drops the tube in some water at the bottom of a ravine, and all Rael can do is helplessly watch the tube float away.

John’s indifference to Rael’s need for help is just like his indifference when Rael was in the cage. This cool reaction hurts Rael, but what he must learn is that it’s not about people caring about him: he has to learn how to care about others.

He also has to learn how to let go of his attachments and desires, as represented by what’s in the tube.

XX: Ravine

This track is another instrumental. It’s essentially Banks playing melancholy music on a synthesizer. One imagines Rael standing at the top of a ravine, looking down where his lost penis was dropped in the water. He’s staring down at the abyss. One may ask if he’ll ever be a man again, and one hears the raven’s answer: “Nevermore.”

XXI: The Light Dies Down on Broadway

Fittingly, much of the music for this track is thematically similar to that of the title track, for at this point in the story, Rael has come full circle. He sees a window in the rock of part of the ravine wall, and in this window he can see New York City: his home!

Once again, this is a temptation of his selfish instincts, for he’ll be left with a difficult choice: escape this hellish world and be free, or sacrifice the fleeting opportunity and help his brother in need. In this dilemma of his, we can see a link in meaning between “the lamb lies down” and “the light dies down”: Jesus as the Lamb of God and as the Light of the world gave His life for His friends (John 15:13). Rael as a Christ-figure must do the same for his brother, John, representative of all our brothers and sisters, all of humanity.

The lamb lies down, dead, and the light dies down, dead.

The surreal world Rael feels trapped in seems fake because of its fantastical qualities, yet it is the real world of his New York City home that is fake, the Broadway world of theatricality and phony performance, the stage that is the world.

XXII: Riding the Scree

Not only does Rael have to give up his chance to go through the window and back to New York City, but he also has to risk his life slipping down the loose rocks of the scree along the side of the ravine if he wants to get to drowning John in the water below.

Still, he chooses to be brave and go down to save his brother’s life. He imagines himself much braver than even Evel Knievel.

The music is largely in 9/8 time, the subdivisions of the beats being tricky and ambivalent in how they could be heard as 4+5 or 3+3+3. Banks does some flamboyant synthesizer soloing.

XXIII: In the Rapids

This is where Rael has to confront a turbulent, chaotic, unpredictable world, a kind of hell that is the only way that leads to heaven. For to save oneself, one must be willing to save others.

The turbulent hell of the rapids, where he must swim to rescue drowning John, is symbolic of the undifferentiated, non-verbalizable Chaos of what Lacan called The Real–a fitting place for a man named Rael to enter, since he will soon become one with this Void.

This climactic moment, of course, is also what is depicted in the photos on the front cover of the album: specifically, the left photo showing John being pulled by Rael out of the rapids. For the great climactic moment of the story, though, it’s odd that the music would begin with soft, gentle 12-string guitar playing.

The emotion and the volume build, of course, towards the end, where Rael has succeeded in pulling his brother out and back onto land. We realize at the end of all of this, though, that the real climax of the story is not Rael’s brave self-sacrifice and his defying of the danger in the water: it’s his realization, upon seeing John’s face on the land, that he’s seeing himself. It’s like looking in a mirror. In saving John, Rael has saved himself.

XXIV: It

Now with the polarized sides of himself fused, Rael–as a complete human being, complete with John as the complementary good half of him–can feel his Atman, “It,” linked with everybody and everything around him. Hence, the victorious, triumphant, rejoicing music.

“It” is described as being a host of diverse things: cold, warm, all around Rael, and most importantly, “It is here. It is now.” It is Brahman, the pantheistic oneness underlying everything. Rael has attained the nirvana of Brahman, absolute bliss and blessedness.

Other things that are part of “It,” include any food “cooking in your hometown,” “chicken,” “eggs,” and what’s “in between your legs,” that is, sexuality–even that can be a part of It.

“It” is inside spirit, too…literally, so it is in both the physical and spiritual realms, and as spirit, the essence that can be known to be manifested in so many different kinds of things, “It” is the divine spark of everything–Brahman.

That It is here and now also emphasizes the immanence of the divinity, to be understood as a pantheistic concept, not a monotheistic idea, a divinity separate from humanity. “It never stays in one place, but it’s not a passing phase.” It’s eternal, but always moving. As Heraclitus said, “Everything flows.”

A useful connection to be made with “It” that can make the meaning clearer is to compare the idea with a concept in a famous passage in the Chandogya Upanishad. “Tat Tvam Asi,” or “That thou art,” is a famous expression a Hindu spiritual teacher, Uddalaka, says of a number of things to his son, Śvetaketu, to get him to understand how “that” is in everything…even in his son. So we can say that “it” here is “that.”

This is significant when we hear Gabriel sing, “It is real. It is Rael.” “It” is real, in that it is the truth. It can also be compared to the Lacanian concept of the undifferentiated, ineffable Void mentioned above. It is also Rael, because his Atman is now at one with Brahman. Yes, Rael, that art thou!

As often happens throughout TLLDOB, Gabriel makes a reference to a popular song: in this case, “It’s Only Rock ‘n’ Roll (But I Like It),” by the Rolling Stones; but Gabriel sings, “It’s only knock and know-all, but I like it.” “Knock” seems to refer to the pain of life, the school of hard knocks; “know-all” seems to mean Rael’s attainment of enlightenment, from having been absorbed into the oneness. It’s painful, but he likes it.

XXV: Conclusion

TLLDOB is a difficult album to understand conceptually, but an ultimately explicable one. As I said above, Gabriel’s obscurantism is valid because the story is about understanding the deeper mysteries of life.

Rael’s character arc is a voyage of self-discovery and enlightenment. He must learn that being angry and violent is no solution to his problems. Learning to see beyond himself and to help others is the solution.

The surrealism of the story is an expression of the non-rational, symbolic world of the unconscious mind. That Rael would become one with Brahman suggests a shift to the collective unconscious.

All of these things tell us that TLLDOB is a universal story with themes we can all relate to…despite Gabriel’s idiosyncratic way of telling it.

The Tanah: Troughs–Chapter One

[The following is the forty-first 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, and here is the fortieth–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 ancient tribe that wrote the books of the Tanah conceived of history as a series of crests and troughs, the former being periods of good fortune, and the latter being periods of bad fortune. The writers chose to collect the major troughs of their sacred history and narrate the happenings of each in the chapters of this book, and to collect the major crests of that history and tell of them in the chapters of the next book.

The beginnings of these books of crests and troughs deal with those current to the writers at the time of writing; that is, the first chapters of each deal with the enslavement of the Luminosians by the Zoyans (Troughs), and their prophesied liberation (Crests).

Subsequent chapters in each book deal with scenarios believed to happen hundreds of years after the writing: a trough of servitude to wealthy owners of land, what reads like a prophecy of feudalism; then, a crest will come, liberating the people from this servitude. A final trough concerns a world with increasing and extreme wealth inequality, with authoritarian states that use violence to keep the masses in check, and various methods of lulling the masses into docility and complacency, again, to keep them in check–that is, breads and circuses. It prophesies a world disturbingly close to our own, so accurate is its prescience.

As for the corresponding crest meant to lift the world out of that distant, dystopian future, there is an ambiguity to it as to whether the future world will be saved by the leadership of some messiah-like figure, or if the Earth’s only salvation will be a kind of Armageddon, killing and wiping out all of human, animal, and plant life, leading to a far-off, gradual regeneration of life in a completely new form. Again, the prophecy seems chillingly prescient.

Chapter One

Woe to us Luminosians! Our punishment is just!

We have been under the yoke of the Zoyans for ten years now, and no end to our misery is in sight! We only know that a crest will one day come to liberate us, yet it seems so far away from us.

We toil, we dig, we build, we break up rock, we serve meals to and clean for our betters, the Zoyans. We do all of these tasks as just punishment for our wicked and selfish use of magic, turning the once-benevolent Crims against us! We deserve our suffering!

The Zoyans degrade us because we degraded others. They conquered us because we conquered others. They make us slaves because we made slaves of others. They use our women for their sexual sport because we used the women of others for our sexual sport. The Echo Effect taught us of these dangers, but we would not listen.

These hard times that we must endure are a trough. A trough is part of a wave, and therefore a crest will come. Ill fortune is no more permanent than good fortune is. A trough will move up into a crest just as surely as a crest will move down into another trough.

We cannot know how long this trough will last. We only know that, one day, the wave will begin to rise again. Will that day come tomorrow? Will it come next week? Next month? Next year? In how many years will it come? In how many decades will it come?

We do not know any of this. We only know that the wave will rise again into a crest. We must therefore be patient, have faith, and endure.

So for now, we must continue to do our work, as hateful as it is. We must continue to toil, to dig, to build, to break up rock, to serve meals and clean for our betters, the Zoyans. We must do all of these tasks as penance for having made others do these tasks for us one time in the past, what had been a crest for us.

We must remember: if the beginning of a new crest has not come yet, it is because our penance for our own sins is not yet complete. It will be complete one day: we must have faith, and be patient. The Crims know when that day will be, and we know that they are faithful to us.