This chapter is the last of the Crests. It is also the last of the texts of the Tanah to be translated…for now, until more have been discovered, to be translated and commented on when the time comes.
As has been explained in the commentary on earlier chapters, this crest is an ambiguous one. What is to become of humanity after the third and most terrible trough? Is man to be reborn in a new, peaceful world, or is he to exist only in a spiritual, nirvana-like state in the oneness of Cao? The elders of the tribe who saw the vision of this final crest do not know. The reader will have to decide for him- or herself.
Chapter Three
The last vision that we elders had, the final crest, was difficult to interpret. What was the true nature of the peace that we saw? Was it the quiet of man no longer fighting his brother, or was it the quiet of man no longer in existence, since death is often the highest peace, the one true escape from pain? Our uncertainty was chilling.
We saw flatlands with no plants or animals. We saw only barren desert waste and rock. Total silence. Not a single man, woman, or child could be seen anywhere, near or far, to populate the land.
Still, we could feel humanity; the souls of all people were a vibration throughout the air. These souls were all one, united in peace, with no bodies to make them seen or heard. Still, that collective soul was there, all in harmony.
Finally, after a long wait, what seemed like years, maybe hundreds or thousands of years, we saw the beginning growth of green, a tiny plant. Our vision thus ended.
We asked each other many questions about what we saw. Will the Pluries fall again, animating the rain with divine spirit and life? Would this plant we saw be the first of many more to come? Would new animal life come after the plants? And then, at last, would man reappear, to live in peace and harmony with his brother?
We can only hope so.
If not, may the united souls of man, in that vibration in the air, remain in peace by always being at one with Cao.
Every move that you make, AI’ll be watching you. Server rooms serve the rulers. If we only had the rows of racks all gone, and empty space there instead. We’d all be free.
A couple of weeks before I started writing this post, I came upon a short video posted on Twitter (I refuse to call that social media website by its moronic renaming!) on which Elon Musk was complaining about having to pay too much in taxes. Good God: who would imagine the richest man in the world, a centi-billionaire, upset about that? The super-rich would never go on campaigns to lower their taxes, would they?
Well, of course, such complaining is only to be expected of him and his ilk. But matters get worse when we encounter ordinary people defending these plutocrats, which I promptly found myself having to deal with after replying to the video by saying that people like Musk pay far too little in taxes, which of course they usually do–that’s how they became centi-billionaires in the first place.
Musk’s defender was someone who calls him- (or her-) self “chronically based” (“chronically bird-brained” is more like it). The person in question replied to my comment by saying that Musk pays “absurdly” high taxes, “in the billions.” I took a quick look at the defender’s Twitter page, which included, under the name, what probably shouldn’t be all that surprising–a Bible quote: “With man this is impossible, but with God, all things are possible” (Matthew 19:26). Right-wingers are often fond of their feel-good Christian quotes.
I responded to all of this by pointing out the oft-noticed link between Bible-thumpers and billionaire-simping right-wingers, adding that this person ought to read this quote from Matthew–25:31-46, which shows a concern for the poor, something right-wingers routinely ignore.
Well, I suppose this person got a little upset by my reply. First, he or she wanted to know if I’m any better when it comes to caring about the poor (by not defending the super-rich, I’m already better without a need to do anything else!). Then, after citing a few more debatable statistics about the tax rates of the rich vs average-income Americans, which I consider neither here nor there, he or she claimed that higher taxes would just drive the super-rich out of the country, leaving the US government to default, since average-income Americans wouldn’t be able to carry the burden of such high taxes.
Let me deal with these objections one by one. There was no point in my saying any of the following in a reply on Twitter, since I’ve no need to prove myself to this nitwit (who probably wouldn’t listen to me, anyway), and my claims of charity couldn’t be verified independently, anyway. But suffice it to say, for years, I donated money monthly to World Vision to a boy in Nicaragua named José Eliel Angulo; and as a leftist, I constantly advocate for the poor. This right-winger said nothing of helping the poor; just billionaire-simping. I’ve already done leaps and bounds more, even with my modest charity as a chronically-underemployed worker (ever since covid), than he or she.
Next, we should look at the claim that Musk pays an “absurdly” high amount in taxes, “in the billions.” Let’s start with some context: Musk‘s net worth, as of this writing in May 2026, is $788 billion, according to Forbes; his net worth was $800 billion in February 2026. In 2021, his net worth, again, according to Forbes, was $300 billion. His total in net worth billions rose by a billion yearly, if not almost monthly, from 2024 to 2026. Since November 2025, he’s been expecting a Tesla pay package of $1 trillion, if approved, over a period of ten years, if he meets specific goals.
Note that net worth is, of course, after taxes. In 2021, he had to pay about $11 billion in taxes (while Tesla paid none), yet his net worth had been $300 billion. Given his gargantuan wealth at the time already, I think he could handle a tax on 28.27% (311/11) of his wealth–it doesn’t seem all that “absurdly” high to me. It was also just one year. He paid no federal income taxes in 2018, by the way. From 2014-2018, he paid $455 million in taxes on $1.52 billion of income.
As much of his wealth is in stock rather than salary, his tax liabilities often arise only when he sells shares, allowing him to defer taxes. In 2026, he said he’d have to pay a combined federal and state income tax rate of around 45% when selling stock. Well, don’t sell the stock, then, Elon, if you hate taxes so much.
Incidentally, Tesla paid 0% in federal income taxes, in 2025, on $5.7 billion of US income. Indeed, in spite of high profits, Tesla has utilized tax breaks, resulting in a low effective tax rate in recent years.
Furthermore, ever since Trump‘s second term, the super-rich have seen huge increases in their wealth, up roughly $1.5 trillion in 2025, about 22%, from $6.7 trillion to $8.2 trillion. Musk, Jeff Bezos, Larry Ellison, and Mark Zuckerberg made up about a quarter of the total gains. Much of these gains were, of course, because of Trump’s tax cuts to the rich. A study last year showed that, in spite of the super-rich paying an overall larger share of taxes than ordinary Americans, the former pay a lower tax rate than the latter. The super-rich are not paying their fair share.
Ultimately, though, who pays how much in taxes is neither here nor there when you consider how everyone ends up after the taxes are paid. Oligarchs like Musk, Bezos, et al are still obscenely wealthy, while millions of working-class Americans are struggling to make ends meet. We all know where far too much of that tax revenue goes–to the military, to Israel, to the US/NATO proxy war against Russia (using Ukraine as a stick with which to hit Putin), and the like, in disproportion to how much should go there…if any of it. Far too little of that money is going out to help the poor.
And the rich won’t leave the US if taxed more…they own the country! They simply won’t pay. We cannot legislate them out of their wealth. That’s why I advocate forcible expropriation (via socialist revolution), and not taxation, anyway.
A huge part of the reason that so many of the super-rich (the tech-bros in particular, like Musk et al) are supporting Trump in his second term is surely because of those delicious tax cuts his administration has given them. When Musk is in a video talking about how ‘awfully high’ taxes are in the US, what he’s really trying to say is that he simply wants to get them even lower than they currently are.
Musk currently has ambitions of being the world’s first trillionaire, as Tesla’s pay package, mentioned above, may make him. We have a word to describe such ambitions: GREED.
This leads me to take a proper look now at the psychology of the super-rich.
III: Billionaires Are Different from the Rest of Us
Yes, the title of this section is ridiculously obvious in its truth, but I need to state it in reaction to something that chronically bird-brained said in one of his or her comments Apparently, the rich are the same as the rest of us and ought to be treated the same as us.
lol wut?
It doesn’t take a genius to realize that acquiring huge amounts of wealth changes you psychologically, and in a profound way. You become more selfish, acquisitive, narcissistic, entitled, and you lose much in empathy for others. It’s easy to see why people like Musk want even lower taxes than they currently have to pay.
Several years ago, I wrote an article on how those benefitting from capitalism tend to exhibit narcissistic personality traits. Many of the super-rich are so devoid of empathy and basic decency that they can be reasonably called sociopathic.
Consider how Jeff Bezos’s company, Amazon, has pressured their workers to deliver products so quickly that, lacking time to go to the bathroom, they have to piss in bottles as they’re driving to deliver! Then there’s Musk himself, who in response to 2019’s fascist takeover of the Bolivian government (with its accompanying violence to those Bolivians opposed to the new right-wing government) and the left-wing protests against it, he said, “We will coup whoever we want. Deal with it!”
Finally, there’s that billionaire psychopath Alex Karp, CEO of Palantir, whose AI is currently used to help the IDF kill Palestinians and Lebanese, and which will also be used in data centres for mass surveillance of everybody. He’s spoken bluntly of the ‘superiority’ of Western civilization and the need to defend it, necessitating scaring our ‘enemies’ so we can “on occasion kill them.” Such notions are in Palantir’s 22-point manifesto. And Palantir co-founder/Trump supporter Peter Thiel speaks out against democracy.
We all have dark, selfish thoughts deep down: Freud‘s id, and Jung’s Shadow. What distinguishes us from the super-rich is that they can afford to fulfill their darkest desires. That’s why billionaires shouldn’t exist. This is just common sense.
Those guilty of the disgusting and highly disturbing Epstein crimes weren’t and aren’t necessarily billionaires, but they’re certainly rich enough to have partaken. They, who raped and sexually exploited underage girls, among other atrocities, clearly regard common people as mere toys to be played around with, mere meat, not as human beings.
This sort of wickedness is why people like me are opposed to the whole idea of being born into a lower class, a middle class, or an upper class. One tends to stay where one is: those at the bottom generally cannot escape poverty, those in the middle are driven to work like slaves out of a fear of falling to the bottom, and those at the top, never learning what it’s like to struggle to live, go through life entitled, thinking they should be able to have anything they want and never be held accountable for any wrongdoing.
Such an entitled attitude is easily seen in people like Trump, who’ll “grab ’em by the pussy,” and never release the Epstein files, in which his name is mentioned tens of thousands of times. Billionaires are people who can buy a home, a private plane, cars, etc. quite fast and easily, as compared with how the rest of us would struggle, scrimp, and save to afford any one of those things. One billion is a thousand millions: people need to use their imaginations and think about what one can do with that much money. If a million dollars were seconds, they would add up to a little over 11.5 days. If a billion dollars were seconds, they would add up to about 31.7 years; and if a trillion dollars (Musk’s current ambition) were seconds, they would add up to about 31,710 years. I hope these calculations help the skeptics understand why we call such amounts of money obscene levels of wealth.
No, billionaires are not the same as the rest of us. We aren’t even in the same league as they are.
Some may try to defend billionaires by referring to their acts of ‘philanthropy.’ Their ‘charitable’ acts, however, require closer scrutiny. Only a small amount of that money actually goes to helping the poor; when donations are given to schools, for example, they usually go to elite ones. A lot of the motive behind the giving is for tax breaks and an improved public image. Most importantly, this ‘charity’ only serves to justify keeping the class system as it is instead of properly addressing the real root causes of poverty–those of capitalism.
The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation may have done a lot to reduce the problem of polio, but that was far from the biggest problem of the local people, to give one example. That foundation is also not all that noble in its agenda: among other things, Gates’s ‘giving’ allowed his net worth to go up every year since 2009 to $72 billion as of 2014. It’s currently at $102-108 billion. Some charity.
If expropriated, billionaires’ wealth could help end world hunger, build schools and hospitals in the Third World–ones that are fully equipped and with well-trained staff–it could provide affordable if not free housing for everyone, and could be used to clean up the planet. All their combined wealth is around $16 to $20 trillion: don’t tell me it couldn’t at least make huge strides at achieving, if not completely achieve, the above goals.
Instead of even trying to achieve those oh, so worthy goals, however, what kinds of things do the super-rich do with their wealth, besides hoarding it in offshore bank accounts to avoid taxes (i.e., the Panama and Paradise Papers), to pushing for even more tax breaks, lobbying for Israel, etc.? Well, in the case of Musk, Bezos, and Richard Branson of the Virgin Group, they go into private space exploration! What do we need that for, when we have NASA?
What good are fantasies about colonizing space when we won’t even solve the ecological problems of this planet? Even if we achieve the technological miracle of science fiction’s terraforming, isn’t it true that we’ll just mess up the environment out there on those planets, too, sooner or later?
The motives of these three private space explorers is obvious: it isn’t out of altruism: it’s just a glorification of their already bloated egos. No, billionaires are not the same as the rest of us. They are, in fact, monstrosities.
The idiotic dogma of the market fundamentalists is that with minimal-to-no government intervention in the economy, the “free market” as a ‘natural,’ ‘organic,’ and ‘self-regulating’ way of doing things will set everything right. Lower taxes, deregulate business practices, and businessmen’s “rational egoism” will motivate them to produce the best quality goods to satisfy customer demand, resulting in a healthy economy with lots of jobs for everyone. Wealth will “trickle down” to the poor, and everyone will be happy.
The last fifty-or-so years have shown that the truth is anything but the nonsense described above. When taxes are lowered and the economy is deregulated to maximize profits, far from resulting in the right-wing libertarian’s “free market” utopia, millionaires become billionaires and their private property balloons, requiring the super-rich to protect it all the more through the very state that they claim they want to minimize. Hence all the rich’s lobbying of American politicians through super PACs, resulting in legislation to benefit the rich at the expense of the poor. Hence the proliferation of militarized police. And hence, when markets dry up here and need to be developed abroad, the need to export capital to other countries, fueling imperialism and war.
As I explained here years ago, the “free market” doesn’t result in “small government”; it results in huge government (i.e., the bloated military-industrial complex). As Tupac once said, “They got money for wars, but can’t feed the poor.” When right-wing libertarians talk about “small government,” what they really mean is cutting social programs; spending absurdly high amounts on the military, though, as if there were no tomorrow, is perfectly acceptable to them. Their notions of being “frugal” and not wasteful with government money is pure hypocrisy. It’s not “small government”; it’s capitalist government.
Tariffs, of course, are taxes on imported goods. While Trump has lowered taxes on the super-rich, hence the backing of his reelection campaign by Musk et al, the poor are being burdened with the taxes of these tariffs, and the poor in the US are already having difficulty making ends meet as it is. All of these injustices are the result of allowing the super-rich to have too much political influence, making them get richer and richer, while the rest of us get poorer and poorer.
Real democracy means giving power to the common people, not this sham we see of voting for whoever the oligarchs allow us to vote for every four or so years, and yet the pro-rich, anti-poor policies continue unchecked. In these ways, we can see how, in buying political power, the billionaires are killing democracy.
Any candidate offering a real alternative to the system gets marginalized. Scant media attention is ever given to the Green Party, for example, and even the modest social-democrat reforms proposed by Bernie Sanders, AOC, etc., are stopped before they can even be seriously considered. Sanders can be counted on to bow down and endorse yet another corporate whore of the Democratic Party during the lead-up to any election because he is just a sheep-dog for the left. He and AOC, in spite of the lip service they pay to criticizing Israel, are Zionists: any American politician who wants to have a successful career must be firmly Zionist, as Israel has always been crucial in helping protect the interests of Western imperialism.
This is all why, outside of revolution and expropriating all of the billionaires, the poor will never have a hope of improving their lot. The super-rich will never pay their fair share in taxes, and they’ll continue to lobby for even lower taxes. They do this because they own the country. They are killing, if they haven’t yet already fully killed, democracy.
The fact that Trump recently visited China accompanied by oligarchs like Musk and Jensen Huang of Nvidia is telling. Trump is one of these oligarchs, and he serves the oligarchs, who truly rule the US. They are caving into China because they know that China, home to many of the coveted rare earth minerals and other natural resources essential to propping up American industries like AI, etc., has the upper hand.
The link between billionaires and AI leads me to my next point.
Along with the idea that today’s US government is a big, capitalist one is the fact that this state is getting increasingly fascistic and totalitarian. As I discussed in this article, what is feared of communism is here in capitalism: attacks on freedom and democracy–touched on in the previous section, but I go into more detail in this other article; cults of personality (i.e., Trump), police brutality, concentration camps, and mass murder (again, see my article for details); and finally, surveillance, which is what I want to get into here now.
As the working class gets more and more frustrated and desperate, they will start lashing out and thinking about revolution. The super-rich, naturally, are getting nervous about that, as we can see from such things as Luigi‘s shooting of the health insurance billionaire, the burning down of warehouses, and Sam Altman’s house being hit with a Molotov cocktail.
The tech bros among the billionaires have been setting up AI data centres in places all over the US, which apart from using up needed water and energy are also being used to collect data and info on everyone. So anyone who, as the AI finds out from all of this personal information, is in any way involved in organizing resistance to the capitalist, imperialist system, who is agitating and educating (as I try to do here), and/or is planning anything of a revolutionary nature has thus made him- or herself a target. Big Business is watching you.
Note that at least one of these oligarchs, Larry Fink, billionaire CEO of BlackRock, has vocally expressed his concern about “domestic terrorism” in the event of a possible civilian use of drones to strike these data centers, an act of resistance against the growing totalitarian capitalist state. Note also that Fink was one of the oligarchs who went with Trump, Musk, Huang, et al to China. And note further that BlackRock, along with Vanguard and State Street, is one of those giant, multinational investment companies that own and control just about every business on the planet.
These billionaires are becoming truly scary people. Taxing them more doesn’t even begin to address the need to rein them in. Why do you think Musk brazenly did a Nazi salute on TV at the time of Trump’s inauguration? Was he just being foolish or ‘socially awkward’? Doing such a thing thirty years ago would have been political suicide. Now, at worst, Musk has received something of a public shaming (like most of the Epstein criminals), but there haven’t been any real harsh consequences to his life and career. He did the salute because he knew that with the ascent of Trump, fascism has arrived fully formed in the US, and Musk figures there’s nothing any of us at the bottom can do about it.
This helplessness of ours brings me to my next point.
VI: Genocide as Suppression of Resistance
The “terrorism” of Hamas and Hezbollah should be understood as resistance against the ongoing Israeli settler-colonialism, occupation, and oppression of the Palestinians. The UN has acknowledged that armed resistance against an occupying force is legitimate self-defense. To the extent that the events of October 7th, 2023 were the acts of Hamas, as opposed to the Hannibal Directive, we can see those events as part of that resistance; for as those of us who have read the history know, this conflict didn’t start on Oct. 7.
While the Zionists have made life for the Palestinians an unending hell ever since the foundation of Israel in 1948, the ethnic cleansing of those in Gaza and the West Bank has been particularly shocking to watch on live-streamed video and photos since Oct. 7. Bodies buried under the rubble of destroyed buildings all over Gaza, children having lost limbs and their bodies torn apart, traumatized survivors everywhere, people dying of starvation, a lack of housing and medical care…all because the IDF looks on the victims with a Hitler hate.
Now of course, the international reaction from ordinary people like me to all of these horrors has been one of sheer outrage, but apart from protesting and attempts to bring food and medical relief to the victims, we cannot stop the Israelis, the great majority of whom support Netanyahu and his thugs in their non-stop murder, which has now extended itself to southern Lebanon. The people in power who really could have stopped Israel–such as, first, Biden and Harris, and now, the Trump administration–have done nothing. They have all been perfectly content to allow the killing to continue. Again, as with Sanders and AOC, they may pay lip service to how awful the violence is, but they’ll do nothing of consequence to stop the violence.
Note that this support of Israel is not limited to the United States government. The former prime minister of my country, Justin Trudeau, proudly called himself a Zionist while this killing was going on; like so many others, he was more concerned with “antisemitism” (never mind that many Jews are anti-Zionists, and many non-Jews are Zionists). Similarly, you can find video of German police beating the shit out of pro-Palestine protestors, who include women.
The Middle East is geostrategically very important to the US and the rest of the Western Empire, as I went into here...all that oil! It’s extremely vital to the imperialists to have an ally–Israel–to kick ass in the region, as then-senator Biden said in a speech back in 1986 (not with my choice of words, of course, but the same idea).
Therefore, not even protests against Israeli brutality against the Palestinians–and now against Lebanese–is acceptable to the Western powers-that-be…to say nothing of a military intervention from those powers to stop the Zionist slaughter. And so the accusation of “antisemitism” is such a convenient excuse for those powerful people to use to stifle the protests (and so it’s important that we protestors not fall into the trap of generalizing about “the Jews” when we protest the evils of Zionism…such generalizing only gives those powerful people more ammunition against us).
When we consider how Israel–apart from a public shaming–is continuing their persecution of the Palestinians with impunity, we must also consider another, even scarier idea: the ongoing genocide of Gaza, the West Bank, and now southern Lebanon is clearly a template for how all resistance–anywhere in the world–will be dealt with.
Consider the current situation in Cuba. The island has already suffered an economic embargo since 1960 for committing the unforgivable sin of kicking out the capitalists on New Year’s Day, 1959, and embracing Marxism-Leninism. Now, the Trump administration has been cutting off Cuba’s acess to vital materials for its people’s survival–no fuel or oil, widespread blackouts, difficulty in securing the financing and logistics to import basic food, medicine, and agricultural inputs. There are even Cuban fears of a US military invasion. If the American government is allowed to have its way in these acts of aggression, this will mean yet another genocide.
So what’s happening in Palestine, southern Lebanon, and Cuba is adding up to a dangerous set of precedents. Genocide will be the punishment for resistance against capitalism, imperialism, and settler-colonialism. Imperialism has always been violent, cruel, and bloodthirsty, but not on such a brazen level. And who do these imperialists ultimately serve? The capitalist class, at the top of whom are the billionaires…which leads me to my next point.
VII: The Rich Fuel Imperialism
In Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism, Lenin explained how the interlacing of bank and industrial capital, creating a financial oligarchy, has financial capital generate profits from the exploitation colonialism inherent in imperialism. Note that these imperialist wars and coups d’état are not just “government stuff.” The bourgeois government merely manages the affairs of the capitalist class. In other words, it’s really the rich who fuel imperialism.
Consider again Musk’s tweet in response to protests over Áñez‘s far-right takeover in Bolivia in 2019: “We will coup whoever we want! Deal with it.” He said the quiet part out loud here: it was his coveting of Bolivian lithium (and that of other oligarchs–including those among Western carmakers and investors [including U.S. firms], and various private technology corporations) that motivated at least some of them to aid in the right-wing coup and removal of Evo Morales from power.
Then there’s the real motive behind the kidnapping of Nicolas Maduro and his wife: not that nonsense about arresting him on bogus charges of drug trafficking, but to steal Venezuelan oil, which is what Trump has been doing (making his claim that it was Venezuela that was stealing from the US pure projection). The US government and the capitalists it serves have been coveting that oil for years, since Venezuela has the largest oil reserves in the world.
On top of all of this, the Big Three asset managers–BlackRock, Vanguard, and State Street (note the extent of their influence on corporate America)–have substantial investments in the defence sector, including Lockheed-Martin, Raytheon Technologies, and Northrop Grumman. We don’t know exact numbers here, but estimates suggest the Big Three’s combined holdings could be in the hundreds of billions of dollars. These defence contractors are profiting from wars like the one in Iran.
While oligarchs like Musk, Bezos, Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, and Warren Buffet don’t hold significant direct public stock portfolios in legacy defence contractors like Lockheed-Martin or RTX, Musk’s Starlink, for example, has been used to help Ukraine in the US/NATO proxy war on Russia; Starlink has also been used to help Israel. Amazon, under Bezos, secured a massive contract (Project Nimbus) to provide cloud services for the Israeli government and military. Gates’s Microsoft has a notable cybersecurity and technology footprint in Israel. Buffett, a strong supporter of the Israeli economy, is heavily invested in Israeli businesses like Iscar. The fact that the super-wealthy have, in one way or another, been involved in imperialism and Zionism is all the more reason to be opposed to the very existence of billionaires.
VIII: Conclusion
All of the above reasons should demonstrate that there is no sound reason to regard billionaires as anything like the rest of us, or that we should treat them as we would anyone else…except that they should be reduced in wealth to that of the average citizen, at least. Billionaires need to be much more than merely taxed heavily: they should be expropriated–they should not exist as such. Reduce them to the status of multi-millionaires at the very most…and that is already being very generous to them. (I would, incidentally, extend this reduction to Chinese billionaires, too. Fair is fair.)
Another thing worthy of mention–though I won’t go into detail about it here, since I already did so in section III of this article–is the undue influence of the super-rich on the media. You can go to the link for the details.
Of course, forcible expropriation of the super-rich is easier said than done. In fact, with AI surveillance data centres keeping tabs on all of us, militarized police and ICE ready to beat the shit out of us, as well as those scary robot dogs, etc., the achievement of the needed expropriation seems bordering on impossible. Still, we can’t just sit on our hands and wail in despair. Things will continue to get worse if we let them. We have nothing to lose but our chains.
Elsewhere, there is hope in the decline of the American empire and de-dollarization. As Rosa Luxemburg once said, “Before a revolution happens, it is perceived as impossible; after it happens, it is seen as having been inevitable.” Let’s find comfort in those thoughts.
Just Beneath Your Boat: Tales of Aquatic Terror Edited by: Thomas Folske, has been published on Amazon today, May 17th. Presented by Dark Moon Rising Publications, the anthology has my short story, ‘Scylla,’ in it.
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, go get yourself a copy of this great book! Its’ also to 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.
Beast Under Your Bed, Vol. 1: A YA Horror Anthology, from Dark Moon Rising Publications, has my short story, ‘Cao,’ in it. The book has been published on Amazon. Because the stories are written for teens, there are no naughty words or other adult content.
My story is about Timmy, a sensitive boy who feels a mystical connection with Cao, the unifying energy field of the entire universe. It keeps telling him it is going to take him away. He’s terrified of it…but will going away really be a bad thing, given his abusive parents and the bullying he suffers at school? Will being taken away be his damnation, or his salvation? Read and find out!
There are lots of other great writers in this anthology, one of whom is Megan Guilliams, the curator of the book. All of us writers are as you can see below:
You can also see other publishers of the anthology, if you don’t want to give Jeff Bezos your money. Go get yourself a copy of this great book as soon as you can! 🙂
This chapter, too, seems eerily prophetic. It seems to predict not only the French Revolution and the rise and fall of Napoleon (or are our researchers letting their imaginations run wild here?), but also the end of the Commons due to enclosure, forcing English farmers to enter cities to work in factories. We’ll let you decide if our researchers’ speculations are correct.
Chapter Two
The next crest we saw in our visions would be a short one–so short as almost to seem non-existent. Indeed, this crest seemed almost to overlap with a trough, and to overlap almost fully.
Those who wore the bracelets came to hate them, suspecting rightly that it was the bracelets that were the creators of their woe. So when the time came that the bracelets would no longer stick to their skin, and the wearers were to feel compelled to pass them on to be worn by the next generation, the wearers, having finally become able to remove the bracelets from their wrists, resisted giving them to their sons and daughters. They felt a terrible headache from their resistance, but they prevailed all the same, not knowing the Crims or their divine power in the bracelets.
This unwitting disobedience to the Crims–the people’s not knowing that it was to be the Crims who decided when the wearing of the bracelets would end, and not the people to decide–would result in good and ill fortune at nearly the same time. True, the ill fortune of servitude to the lords of the land would end, the curse of wearing the bracelets, but a new ill fortune would creep up on the unsuspecting people, their punishment for rejecting and discarding the bracelets before the time the Crims deemed a fit one.
The people with naked wrists rejoiced at the cutting off of the heads of their oppressive kings and queens. They rejoiced no longer to have to work on land owned by lords who took most of the food they produced. They were delighted that a new state, with men to represent the needs of the common people, was born…almost still-born, they would soon learn.
Indeed, new evils were soon coming to replace the old ones–new evils that followed like toes of boots stepping on the heels of the feet of the old ones.
A great new leader, once thought to be a liberator of the people, would soon call himself “emperor,” and would conquer many nations–though he would be defeated soon enough.
More significantly, while those farmers who now lived off the land in relative peace, without lords to have to give most of their food to, were happy in this state for a time, new masters would come. These would buy off the land and force the farmers off of it, making them move to the cities to find work in filthy, smoky buildings, castles that blew fumes into the skies.
The people would work for a pittance, barely enough to live on, and thus would begin a new trough, the worst of them all.
An experimental novel, TSM uses the cut-up technique, an aleatory narrative that involves taking a written or typewritten text, cutting it up into pieces, and rearranging them to create a new text. The concept started with Dadaists like Tristan Tzara in the 1920s, yet writers like Burroughs in the 1950s popularized it.
Two things from Burroughs’s novel were later applied to music: its title, which became the name of a late 1960s/1970s psychedelic/jazz-fusion band from the Canterbury scene (check out an analysis I did of their third album here); and the expression “heavy metal,” used by Burroughs originally to describe a heavy, “metallic” kind of drug addiction.
I am basing this analysis on the second edition of TSM, with which most readers are familiar. Here is a link to it, and here is a link to Burroughs reciting “Uranian Willy,” which is a different version from the text I’ll be using.
II: General Remarks
As I did with my analysis of the Naked Lunch novel, I’ll only be looking at select parts of TSM, since the cut-up technique has created a chaotic incoherence that would make an analysis of everything virtually impossible, at best turning a blog article into a book. I’ll be looking at those parts that do read as a linear narrative (or approximately so), such as ‘The Mayan Caper,” among others.
Because of the cut-up technique’s causing of the story to jump back and forth instead of being linear, it would perhaps be best to read TSM more like an extended prose poem than as a novel, appreciating each piece of imagery for what it is, instead of trying mentally to put all the pieces back in order, a frustrating process that would negate Burroughs’s purpose in cutting up the text anyway.
His reason for cutting up the text and rearranging it was not some kind of avant-garde self-indulgence for its own sake. He was trying to subvert the reader’s sense of perceiving the linearity of language as a manipulative or coercive power. As with so much of Burroughs’s writing (as I observed in my analysis of NL–link above), he was preoccupied with systems of power and control, as manifested in religion, the government, drug addiction, and sexual indulgence as an attempt to escape from such control.
Burroughs may have written about drug abuse a lot, but he by no means glorified it. He knew the pain of addiction and the need to be freed of it, so notions of drug abuse are a major theme in his writing as an aspect of power structures’ way of trying to control us, as we see in NL and TSM. For Burroughs, the human body is a “soft machine,” a weak, vulnerable thing under siege by parasites, drug addiction, and totalitarian control.
One of those forms of totalitarian control is the linear use of language, so the purpose of the cut-up technique is to liberate us from the linguistic aspect of that control. One aspect of TSM is a tendency to go back and forth in time, as if in a time machine (indeed, it’s been observed that Burroughs’s title for the novel is a variation on HG Wells‘s Time Machine), so the cut-up technique can be seen as representing that moving back and forth in time, instead of experiencing it in the normal, linear way.
The idea that the cut-up technique can be a metaphor for time travel is suggested in “The Mayan Caper,” in the third paragraph of that chapter, where the narrator speaks of taking yesterday’s and today’s newspapers and rearranging their pictures to make a montage: as he does this, he’s literally moving back in time to yesterday.
Though it’s the first novel of The Nova Trilogy, TSM is also widely regarded as a sequel to and extension of NL, since both novels are taken from The Word Hoard, as mentioned above, and so TSM continues NL‘s habit of explicitly describing drug abuse and homosexual sex, these being ways of trying to escape the miseries of totalitarian control through the government and religion, yet also paradoxically keeping us in its thrall, as slaves to our own desires.
The political aspect of that control, as depicted in NL, was in the form of political parties that all (except for the sympathetic Factualists, who represented Burroughs’s libertarian socialist individualism) in their own ways stifled the individualism that Burroughs valued. The religious aspect of that control in NL was represented by the Muslim faith (i.e., “Islam Incorporated”); in TSM, it’s represented by the Mayan religion, which leads me to a discussion of…
III: The Mayan Caper
This is not only the one genuinely linear narrative in all of the novel; it’s also central to understanding the meaning behind the cut-up technique as a means of undoing the manipulative and coercive power, as Burroughs saw it, of language, especially as it passes through linear time. One upsets the established order by literally upsetting the word order of syntax and temporal order (i.e., going back in time to the Mayan era).
I already mentioned above how the narrator ‘traveled time’ by rearranging the pictures of the day’s newspaper with those of the newspaper from the day before to make a montage–analogous to the cut-up technique’s rearranging of the order of cut-out sentences on strips of paper. He will also mention how the oppressive Mayan priests will use the Mayan calendar–a record and arrangement of the order of time–to control their slavish, toiling population, who work in the fields doing slash-and-burn agriculture.
After rearranging temporal order with the newspaper pictures, the narrator goes to a film studio and rearranges the order of time by learning “to talk and think backwards on all levels…by running film and sound track backward.” An example of such retrograde motion includes going from satiety to hunger. He will also run a film first at normal speed, then in slow motion…he applies the same method to such physical practices as achieving orgasm, which I assume means either delaying it (what fun!) or reversing it.
He next goes to Mexico City and learns all he can about the Mayan language (which he finds easy to learn) and their culture. The absolute power of the Mayan priests, about two percent of the population, depended on their control of their calendar. As I explained above, control over temporal order and the concepts of language–as expressed, for example, in their calendar–is essential to manipulating and having power over the people–this is why messing up that order is so crucial to liberating the people, as Burroughs saw it.
Slash-and-burn agriculture–what the priests use to keep the population obedient, ever-toiling slaves–is a matter of precise timing, according to the narrator. It must be done at specific times; “a few days’ miscalculation and a year’s crop is lost.” We see once again how temporal order is strictly maintained for the priests to retain power over their people.
Most of the hieroglyphs from the Mayan writings refer to dates on the calendar; the other, undeciphered symbols probably refer to the ceremonial calendar. Yet again, we see how language, mixed with temporal organization, is used to manipulate and control the Mayan people.
After learning of the Mayan language and culture, the narrator has to find a “vessel,” that is, the body of a Mayan boy in whom the narrator is to be transferred–his soul moved into it for the purposes of mixing in unnoticed among the Mayan population after traveling in time back to their era. The two are to do this procedure, an illegal one, with an American doctor who has lost his certificate due to having become addicted to heavy metal [!].
What’s ironic here is how the narrator’s mission–to liberate the Mayan people from their oppressive priests and systems of language and the temporal order of their calendars–is to be facilitated with the help of a doctor also in need of liberation (i.e., the “soft machine” of his body controlled by the hardening, heavy, metallic nature of his drug addiction). Furthermore, the doctor learns, from his examination of the Mayan boy’s naked body, that his body “is riddled with parasites,” which are another major form of control dealt with in TSM. Another paradox of liberation via the aid of the non-liberated.
The narrator “would be eaten body and soul by crab parasites” if the doctor used “the barbarous method used by…[his] colleagues”, so instead he’ll use a different technique for the transfer operation. He’ll operate with molds, keeping the narrator intact in deepfreeze.
Once the transfer operation is done, the narrator goes to find a “broker” who will help him achieve time travel to the Mayan era. The method of traveling time should be of no surprise to those familiar with Burroughs’s writing: it involves nothing other than drinking a drug, made from dried mushrooms and herbs that the broker cooks in a clay pot.
The narrator feels the motion sickness of time travel, he pays the broker his fee, and he finds himself in a jungle. When he comes to a clearing, he sees a number of workers in a field planting corn. He feels “the rushing weight of evil insect control forcing [his] thoughts and feelings into prearranged molds, squeezing [his] spirit into a soft invisible vise”, and he is handed a planting stick from one of the workers. He’s gone from time machine to soft machine, the parasitic insects taking control of his body.
He comes across as “a half-witted young Indian”, which will be useful to him, since he’ll never be suspected by the priests as a threat to their power. He can thus possibly be transferred from field work to rock carving the stellae after a long apprenticeship and the priests have total confidence he’ll show no resistance to their power. He stays, therefore, for months as a field worker and keeps a low profile.
He learns of two horrible punishments for anyone who tries to challenge, or even just thinks of challenging, the priests’ authority: “Death in the Ovens,” and “Death In Centipede“, this latter one involving being strapped to a couch and eaten alive by giant centipedes–executions carried out secretly in rooms under the temple.
In order to mess with the system of controlling the people and thus liberate them, the narrator needs access to a machine the Mayans know how to use, but not how to repair were it to be broken, or how to build a new one were it to be destroyed. Since the machine uses recordings (i.e., on magnetic tape, something not invented until the 1920s), it’s clearly an anachronism that Burroughs, in his surreal imagination, has invented out of poetic licence–this anachronism is also reflective of TSM‘s theme of rearranging the temporal order of things.
To gain access to the machine, the narrator agrees, in all disgust and reluctance, to do a sexual favour for one of the priests–the latter transforming himself into a green crab from the waist up during the sex act. The narrator is able to endure all of this by reassuring himself that he’ll enjoy killing the man when the time comes. So after the narrator’s sexual ordeal, the priest transfers him to janitor work in the temple, where he witnesses executions: bodies torn into insect fragments by the ovens, and centipedes born in the ovens from those fragments. It’s time for him to act.
The narrator uses the drug he got from the doctor to take over the priest’s body, he gets into the room where the codices are kept, and he photographs the books. He dismantles the machine by mixing the order of recordings and images, a change that will be picked up by the machine and fed into it. Recorded agricultural operations–the slash and burn–are shuffled so they’ll occur at the wrong times, losing a year’s crop, and causing famine.
He sends out a new command, essentially: “Smash the control machine–Burn the books–Kill the priests–Kill! Kill! Kill!” And with this, to make a long story short, comes the toppling of the Mayan “regime,” to use the word in, of all sources with an obvious liberal agenda, the Wikipedia article. This leads to my next point.
Now, a bringing of an end to the Mayan tyranny is all fine and good…if such is an accurate representation of what their priestly authority was really like. Yet with an anachronism like their machine and its ‘recordings’ as central to the priests’ power, I’d say such accuracy is rather unlikely, to put it mildly.
Matters get more sinister when we consider how this whole “Mayan caper” (interesting choice of words in itself) has been conceived by, of all people, Americans, and for the purpose of toppling an aboriginal “regime” in what’s today Latin America. Yes, the tankie in me is coming out for commentary again.
Of course, there’s nothing inherently socialist about the Mayan “regime.” Remember also, though, that in the opinion of an anarchist–as Burroughs can reasonably be described to have been–neither were the USSR or the Soviet Bloc, nor have China, Cuba, Vietnam, North Korea, or Laos ever been ‘genuinely socialist.’ Any state is oppressive, whether right-wing, left-wing, or centrist, in the eyes of your average anarchist or ‘left-wing’ communist, especially in the eyes of individualist libertarian socialists like Burroughs…so what difference did it make to him whether or not the Mayan priests were socialists?
The point is that it has been a standard practice of US and Western imperialism to do regime change on any country out there that goes against imperialist interests. The first step of such regime change is to justify it by claimning that those “regimes” are oppressive: exactly what we are meant to understand about the Mayan priests–it’s all propaganda, meant to manufacture consent for said regime change.
The ruling class has always found anarchists useful in agreeing that state socialism isn’t ‘real socialism,’ and is therefore tyrannical. The capitalists can say of the anarchists, “See, even fellow leftists agree that the socialist states are no better than capitalist ones, so we should oppose them!” In helping imprialism crush, for example, the Soviet resistance, through their own propaganda, anarchists give the working class “the unkindest cut.”
IV: Uranian Willy
“Heavy metal,” as Burroughs used the expression, had nothing to do with music, of course. I recall seeing him on TV (back when I was still living in Canada) talking about his use of “heavy metal”; I wish I could find the video of him talking about this on YouTube so I can share it here, but my foggy memory of it will have to serve. He was talking about a “metallic” drug experience.
So Uranian Willy, “the heavy metal kid,” personifies drug addiction at its worst: where it has gone from the organic (vegetable) to the mineral (metallic). Willy thus represents the final stage of addiction, a “heavy metal” addiction to junk, sex, and power.
He may be among the “Nova Mob,” a group of parasitic entities attempting to destroy the Earth by manipulating human thought and flesh through “word and image” machines (rather like that of the Mayans, just discussed above), but also being closely associated with Will Lee (who in turn represents Burroughs), Uranian Willy also wishes to break free of his drug addiction and thus free everyone else from addiction’s thought control. Hence, he is also known as “Willy the Rat,” or “Willy the Fink,” for having turned his back on and snitched on the Nova Mob. “He wised up the marks”–that is, he got them to understand how they’re being manipulated. Recall Burroughs’s dictum from Naked Lunch: “Hustlers of the world, there is one mark you cannot beat: the mark inside.” You can fool others, but you cannot fool yourself.
Willy’s efforts to liberate others (“the marks”) from heavy metal drug addiction is compared, on one level, to a pilot in a fighter plane attacking “the Reality Studio and retak[ing] the universe”–“target[ing] Orgasm Ray Installations.” On another level, Willy’s resistance can be compared–in terms of its somewhat similar language–to the narrator of “The Mayan Caper” and his changed commands in the Mayan machine to “Burn the books–kill the priests–Kill! Kill! Kill!”
“This is war to extermination,” Willy understands of his wish to end his dependency on heavy metal. He must “wise up the marks everywhere,” and get them to understand the dangers of drug addiction and how the powers-that-be use it to control the minds of the masses. To wise them up, he must “show them the rigged wheel,” how the marks are being played by those in power. He must save the “Souls rotten from the Orgasm Drug” of heavy metal.
So in this context, we can see how passages like “Photo falling–Word falling–..Take Studio–Take Board Books…Towers, open fire” are similar to what happens when the narrator in “The Mayan Caper” messes with the Mayan machine and its words and images to overthrow the Mayan regime.
Now, members of the Nova Mob are alarmed at Willy’s having suddenly gone rogue and against them, so they try to get him to stop his attack: “Pilot K9, you are cut off–Back–Back–Back before the whole fucking shithouse goes up–Return to base immediately.”
It seems, however, that the Nova Mob have failed in their attempt to stop Uranian Willy, for “It was impossible to estimate the damage–Board Rooms destroyed–Enemy personnel decimated–…Shift linguals–Cut word lines…Photo failing–Word failing…”
Note how “Shift linguals–Cut word lines…” and “Word failing…” sounds a lot like the cut-up technique’s disruption of the natural flow of language as a way of liberating humanity from systems of control. The Nova Mob is being overthrown just as the Mayan priests were.
V: Gongs of Violence
The sexes are at war, dividing the planet right down the middle. It’s a perfect way for the ruling class, with their systems of power and control, to keep us all from resisting and fighting them: make us all fight each other instead, through idpol. [This battle of the sexes, incidentally, should not be confused with the legitimate and necessary struggle for the equality of the sexes, to allow equal opportunity for women, to end their domestic servitude, and to end their sexual degradation. Such an attainment of equality necessitates solidarity between men and women through the adoption of socialism, not the divisiveness of edgy liberal identity politics.]
The armies on both sides seem to have adopted homosexuality, for one army has “Lesbian colonels in tight green uniforms.” Those on either side are deemed “the Sex Enemy.”
Since there is no true love between the sexes in this world, there are no heterosexual marriages or families, and there’s no natural parenthood. Children, therefore, are just “property,” usually not owned by their biological parents.
Each of these “properties” has a “life script,” which sounds again like the use of a predetermined language for the purposes of control by the ruling class. Those with “a lousy grade B life script” may complain…to their mothers, whether adoptive or biological?…”Fuck my life script will you you cheap downgrade bitch!”
The idea that “time-nappers jerk the time position of a property” sounds like an example of how normal linear time is also used as an instrument of power and control by the ruling class, and so “time-nappers,” who “jerk the time position,” are engaging in acts of resistance against the powers-that-be. “The property can also be jerked forward in time and sold at any age,” which sounds as though those in power also manipulate temporal order to maintain power, through the selling of children.
With vivid descriptions of a cityscape we also have vivid descriptions of fighting and violence there, presumably manifestations or results of the battle of the sexes. “Rioters of all nations storm the city in a landslide of flame-throwers and Molotov cocktails.”
Amidst all of this fighting and surrealist description is the ongoing battle for the souls of the people: on one side, those trying to liberate us from the heavy metal addiction: “We are converting to vegetable state–Emergency measure to counter the heavy metal peril”; and on the other side, there are those trying to keep us all addicted to heavy metal: “we are converting all out to heavy metal. Cabonic plague of the Vegetable People threatens our Heavy Metal State…Do not believe the calumny that our metal fallout will turn the planet into a slag heap.”
“Gongs of violence” on the one hand sounds like explosions ringing out like the banging of gongs, and on the other hand like a pun on ‘gangs of violence,’ a male gang vs a female one in the sex war.
The world of this sex war seems to be a future dystopia, which fits in well with the sense of time travel going on throughout TSM. The destruction of cities is implied in the spelling of a number of them without the first letter of each: Ewyork, Onolulu, Aris, Ome, Oston.”
VI: Cross the Wounded Galaxies
In this final chapter, we seem to have traveled time yet again: this time, to the very beginning of human consciousness. The “muttering sickness” has come to “the ape forms,” or the first primitive man, who are able to speak. Since Burroughs regarded language, and the normal, ordered use of it, to be a form of power and control over humanity, he saw it as a “sickness.”
The sickness was brought to the narrator of this chapter “from white time caves frozen in [his] throat.” The “sick apes spitting blood laugh, sound bubbling in throats torn with the talk sickness.” The primates are learning to speak, which is a kind of forbidden fruit of the Tree of Knowledge, so to speak, that is going to lead them all to their collective ruin.
And with language, they now have names. They’ve come out of the mud and are about to enter civilization, and all the irreparable harm it causes, as Burroughs saw it. “The sickness leaped into our body…cold screaming sickness from white time…spitting ape wounds…the talking sickness had names…we had names for each other.”
The “talking sickness” sounds like a rejection of the psychoanalytic “talking cure.” Just as Burroughs didn’t trust language, he didn’t trust the Freudians as people who used therapy as a tool of control. On the other hand, the “ape forms” problematically having names for each other sounds representative of ego formation, which a later Freudian–Jacques Lacan–saw as illusory.
“White time” and “the white worm-thing inside” (this latter being a parasite as yet another instrument of control) seem to represent white supremacy. The “fear-softness in other men” would be the soft machine, or the vulnerable human body in its susceptibility to all the forms of control: time, language, parasites, and heavy metal drug addiction.
“The thing inside [him, that is, “the white worm-sickness in all our bodies”] would always find animals to feed [his] mouth meat.” The parasites inside us that control us always make us kill for food, which includes eating other humans.
There seems to be a jump ahead in time later on in the chapter, for we read of “sewers of the city, crab parasites in [their] genitals.” What was parasitic in prehistory is still parasitic now.
As we have moved from prehistory to the modern world, in Burroughs’s time machine of the rearranged words of his cut-up technique, we encounter a proliferation of the evils begun in the era of the “ape forms”: more parasites and tapeworms, people with names (“Mr. Bradley Mr. Martin”), the authoritarianism of religion (“I am Allah. I made you.”), and shattered windows (“Glass blizzards”), the result of vandalism, or war? There are even Orwellian “Think Police”.
Time travel seems to go into the future again, with presumed astronauts who “cross the wounded galaxies”: Earth seems not to be the only planet infected with parasitical forms of power and control. After all, the “heavy metal boys” are from Uranus, hence “Uranian Willy, the heavy metal kid.”
VII: Conclusion
What TSM is trying to tell us is that the most significant and dangerous forms of manipulation and control that we have to be wary of are not so much those of the government, religion, or even the capitalist class. They are those that we have all internalized: what the parasites and the heavy metal addictions are metaphors for–whatever we allow inside ourselves to have power over and harden the soft machine of the human body.
The following is the first of a trilogy of writings of visions of periods of good fortune, this first one for the Luminosian tribe specifically, and the other two for the future of humanity in general, with whom the tribe would be intermarried.
The tribe’s plan for liberation–to make bracelets marked with images of the four Crims personified, and to wear them faithfully–worked gloriously for them, not only freeing them from slavery to the Zoyans, but also ushering in a long period of peace and prosperity for the tribe. The tribe is warned never to lose faith in the Crims as they continue wearing the bracelets, though, lest their fortunes should turn ill.
Such a loss of faith would come one day, though, many generations down the line, and the tribe, by now intermarried with other ethnic groups they’re living with, would then begin a descent into another trough, the “feudal” one described in “Troughs, Chapter Two.”
Chapter One
Glory be to the mighty Crims, who in response to our faithful wearing of their bracelets, will not lose faith in us, and who will soon liberate us from the oppressive Zoyans!
The drugs we extracted from the plants and herbs of Drofurb’s earthly body have given us visions of a certain future of liberation from slavery to the Zoyans. We will be free; we will prosper!
In our visions, we saw a pestilence overwhelm our Zoyan oppressors, wiping them out quickly, one by one, until none of them are left…yet the pestilence will not affect even one of us Luminosians! We will all walk out of Zoyan land unhindered and unscathed, free to find a new land to settle in.
When we find that new land, as our visions have shown, we will have the wisdom not to take the land from those who live there, as we had the Zagans, but instead to live with them peacefully and in mutual respect. We will engage in commerce with them, and we will thrive with them, growing from our poverty as wandering former slaves into a wealthy, happy people!
For many generations since that time, we will continue to live well, because we will keep faith in the Crims as we pass the bracelets from the old to the young. We will remember those four of the air–Weleb, the earth–Drofurb, the fire–Nevil, and the water–Priff, who all saved us from servitude, and we will teach the younger generations to have the same respect.
Thus will the land we live in grow in fertility and bounty, giving us plentiful food, good weather for growing crops, and a peaceful coexistence with the other peoples we mix with. We will even marry with them, adopt many of their cultural values and beliefs, and become much more than just Luminosians.
There should be nothing wrong in any of these changes, as long as we continue to keep faith with the Crims as the bracelets are passed down; but over time, as the newer and newer generations are diluted of our Luminosian values and beliefs, they will forget, if not be utterly ignorant of, the importance of believing in the Crims as they wear the bracelets.
O, the new generations will love the beauty of the bracelets! They will not, however, understand, much less appreciate, their meaning. This ignorance will be the people’s downfall, for the good luck given from the bracelets comes only from faith in the Crims. Wearing the bracelets without that faith leads only to ill fortune.
The faithless wearers of the bracelets will see that ill fortune in the beginning of a new trough.
Infinite Ocean 
You must be logged in to post a comment.