Author: Mawr Gorshin

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

The Tanah–Translator’s Introduction

[The following is the first of many posts 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.]

The manuscripts translated here were discovered in archaeological digs in northeastern Europe ten years before this writing. My colleagues and I have since been at work deciphering and translating this ancient text, a laborious, painstaking task that is still far from finished. These manuscripts, fragments full of lacunae, constitute only a portion of what has been unearthed; the translation of more texts is still underway, and ongoing digs just southwest of the Baltic region are expected to yield still more texts. This current publication is meant only as a taste of what is to come.

The manuscripts were found among the ruins, relics, and skeletons of an ancient Slavonic tribe; the writings are dated at about the first century CE. We say the tribe was Slavonic, but the language is far removed from that. In fact, the written script is unlike any known anywhere on Earth; one of our translating team even joked that The Tanah, as these writings are collectively known, is the product of extraterrestrials!

Now, the language seems outlandish, but the cultural attitudes expressed in that language reveal The Tanah‘s undoubtedly terrestrial origins. As one reads through its chapters and verses, one discovers the usual ancient, pre-scientific assumptions and prejudices, which skew and limit the expression of The Tanah‘s otherwise formidable wisdom.

The writers of The Tanah assume, for instance, that women’s main use of its spells should be to augment their physical beauty, help them find a husband, and acquire power and influence through ‘feminine wiles.’ Since its spells are of a paradoxical, dialectical nature, women are advised to use them to gain power through taking on a ‘submissive role.’ Curious.

Still, a surprising thing about The Tanah is that, in spite of these ancient presumptions about the world (a flat Earth in a geocentric universe, the chauvinistic belief in the superiority and centrality of the tribe owning The Tanah), there are also ideas about the world that, interpreted metaphorically, seem uncannily to anticipate certain insights in modern physics.

Examples of such scientific anticipations include what the texts call “Cao,” the undulating, unifying oneness of the entire universe, and the “Pluries,” the same atomic unifying reality that Cao is, but expressed in the form of an endless shower of particles, coming down like rain, hail, snow–some kind of precipitation. Since The Tanah is all to be read as allegory and metaphor, rather than as literal history, Cao and the Pluries could be understood to symbolize particle/wave duality.

Now, despite all of this apparent predicting of scientific ideas millennia ahead of their time, the texts are still essentially poetry, using the most vivid and striking imagery. Our translation does the best it can here, but as with any, much is inevitably lost in translation. There are nuances and multiple meanings in so many of the words of the original language that their ‘equivalents’ in English–or in any language, for that matter–can never bring out. Indeed, to cover all of those extra meanings of each word would require commentaries several times the size of the original texts and their translations.

The word “Cao” alone means so many things at once. “Oneness,” “infinity,” “universe,” “sea,” “ocean,” “waves,” “fundamental,” “void,” “chasm,” “nothing,” “everything,” and “all,” among many others. Similarly, “Pluries” can mean “particles,” “atoms,” “rain,” “precipitation,” “tears,” “snow,” “hail,” “sand,” “dust,” “ants,” “germs,” “plurality,” etc. The language these texts is written in is a most eccentric, idiosyncratic one. In reading any image used in the poetry and narratives, one must pause a moment and consider every possible association to be made with said image, just to begin to grasp the meaning of it in its fullness and totality.

If the reader finds it jarring to know that “Cao” can mean “nothing” and “everything” at the same time, he or she should bear in mind that this mystical concept has dialectical, yin-and-yang-like qualities. The imagery of the waves of the ocean that are associated with Cao suggest a dialectical shifting up and down, back and forth, between all the pairs of opposites, including every level between those crests and troughs, thus to embrace all things in the universe. This is an everything so comprehensive that it even includes nothing.

Cao represents that everything as understood as a oneness, whereas the Pluries represent everything as a plurality. Attempts at etymologies of these two mystical words suggest that “Cao” may be cognate with a composite of Greek Chaos and the Chinese Tao, though this latter derivation seems a bit of a stretch, given how far removed geographically Chinese culture and language were from where these texts were found, as well as the fact that “Tao” is modern Mandarin, not ancient Chinese. Still, Cao has both the mystical properties of Chaos and the Tao, so while the associations are probably just coincidental, they’re also fortuitous and appropriate.

Similarly, a speculative etymology of “Pluries” implies that the word is cognate with a combination of the Latin pluere, from which we also get the French word pleuvoir (“rain”), and the Latin pluralis, plures, and pluria (“plural”). Again, though, as with our speculative derivations of “Cao,” the surety of these etymologies is rather shaky and limited, given the geographic region from which we’ve found these texts. One would expect a Slavonic tribe to use a language more directly connected with actual Slavic roots. Then again, what is so fascinating about these texts is how mysterious they are: is this language an alien one after all? The written script is unlike any found on this Earth, as mentioned above.

So anyway, Cao and the Pluries are the source of all creation in the universe, as a unity and as a plurality. Not only does the natural world come from these two sources, but the supernatural, and all of magic, derive from them, too, hence the inclusion of many spells, which invoke Cao and the Pluries, and their creative power.

Cao and the Pluries aren’t the only ‘deities’ (if that’s what they are to be called) that are invoked in the many magic spells of The Tanah. Four particularly important ‘deities,’ or rather ‘basic forces,’ which is a better translation of dvami, are what the manuscripts call the “Crims” (krimso). These are the four elements: Priff (water, the first and most natural element to emerge from the watery Cao and Pluries), Nevil (fire, the first spark of passion and desire [Hador], causing the light of day [Dis] to emerge from the darkness of night [Noct]), Weleb (air, a thinning and diluting of all matter to near nothingness), and Drofurb (earth/stone, a return to the condensing of matter, yet going beyond liquid to a freezing [Calt] and solidifying of it).

Note how the Crims can be paired into dialectical opposites, with Priff and Weleb, then Nevil and Drofurb. The first two are everything (i.e., near Cao) and nothing (or near nothing). The latter two are the heat of desire vs. the cool of calmness. These two pairs of opposites move from the one to the other, then back again, like the crests and troughs of the universal ocean that is Cao itself, dialectical shifts from one extreme to the other.

The ensuing narratives also demonstrate a cyclical, dialectical shift from one extreme to its opposite, then back again, with every intermediate point expressed, too, in a shifting back and forth between opposites of many, varying manifestations. A journey out of slavery and into freedom, a mass exodus of a people out of an oppressive nation in which the masters pursue the slaves, reminds one of the Moses story.

A discussion of how to use the spells ethically versus unethically comes next. One must exercise discipline and responsibility in using the magic, for good, knowledge, and enlightenment; warnings are given against using the spells for selfish ends.

Again, in The Preaching and Proverbs, it is advised to use restraint and to be responsible in applying the magic. There is an urgent sense that warnings must be given repeatedly in The Tanah against using the magic for evil, since the writers correctly anticipate their warnings to go unheeded most of the time.

I find it fortuitous that the name of this collection of manuscripts sounds, however unintentionally and unwittingly, like a double pun, first on the Tanakh, or Hebrew Bible, with its laws and injunctions as to its moral use, and second on the Buddhist concept, given in the Pali tongue, as taņhā (“thirst,” “desire”). There’s no reason to see an etymology of tanah coming from such divergent languages, of course; but imagining such wordplay in the two words seems apt, in spite of such an improbable intention, given The Tanah‘s dialectical shifts back and forth between ethical and unethical uses.

The Lyrics are a series of verses that are magical incantations for the purpose of achieving a vast array of fulfillments of personal desires and wishes. Many of them involve causing harm to people in various ways, such as capturing souls and imprisoning them in jars, or when releasing them, they become ravenous beasts. Others involve various ways of taking control of people’s bodies, or taking a soul out of one body and putting it into another. Since such spells can be, and typically are, used in abusive ways, it is easy to see why so much is said elsewhere in The Tanah about refraining from the temptation to use these spells.

The Amores are a series of spells meant to aid the user who is in love, or who lusts after another…or many others. These spells aid in such things as maintaining youthful beauty, shaping one’s body into a more pleasing form, ensuring pleasant body odours in all the crevices of the body, preventing pregnancy or the transmission of venereal diseases, and using mind control to manipulate a love object into loving one back.

Again, warnings are repeatedly made in The Tanah to be at least extremely careful in the use of these spells, if not to refrain from ever using them, since in the use of any of them, not only is there the risk of harming the object of the spell, there’s the risk of harming the user of the spells, too, in the form of bad karma.

One way the spells work is through achieving one goal by way of its opposite. The spells thus exploit the dialectical unity of opposites. So, for example, if a woman wishes to have absolute control over a man she loves, she can do so by, ironically, being excessively submissive to him. This tactic has been used many times throughout history according to The Tanah, usually by women, and the beauty of this use of the spells is that they won’t work karmically against the user, since he or she has already exploited that opposite that would otherwise come eventually to plague the user.

The key to understanding not just the magic spells, but the entire philosophy, mythology, and cosmology of The Tanah as a whole, is to grasp that the whole universe must maintain a sense of balance. If things shift one way, they must shift the other way sooner or later. Those who fail to understand this sense of balance are typically those who misuse the spells for selfish ends. The shifting out of, and then back into, balance by means of opposing directions is the basis of understanding the Troughs and Crests of history, dealt with in the section of The Tanah called “The Future.”

Troughs, when the waves of Cao are at their lowest, represent the bad times of history. Crests, Cao’s waves when at their highest, are history’s good times. The next two books, having these titles, deal with these prophecies of good and bad.

Since the good prophecies are grouped together, as are the bad prophecies, rather than arranging them as alternating with each other, it is difficult to know which prophecy–good or bad–represents the end of the world. And since, as has been noted above, these prophecies exist in the form of allegorical tales rather than straightforward narrative prose, it is even more difficult to tell if the tale representing the apocalypse is a happy or unhappy one.

There is also a group of apocryphal texts, ones of uncertain authority, but which have been considered wise and instructive for the responsible practitioner of magic. These are also allegorical tales.

Now, as a closing note, a discussion of the verse styles should be given, if only in passing, since only a thorough study of the ancient language, beyond the scope of this translation and commentary, can do justice to the goldmine of literary, poetic beauty of the writing, as well as the multiple and nuanced meanings that are sadly lost in translation, as noted above.

Indeed, our English translation inevitably obscures, for example, the muscular metric rhythms, which can only ever so occasionally be approximated in the English, though we’ve tried our best. As for the imagery, we’ve managed, more often than not, to be able to bring out its structured use, with regular patterns of thesis/negation/sublation, usually given in a wavelike pattern of t-s-n-s-t…and so on in the same way.

As for whether or not the user of the magic spells needs to worry about their potentially adverse effects, well, we translators haven’t seen such effects…not yet, anyway.

Garrison Mauer, PhD, Professor of Religious Studies, McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario, December 2024

Analysis of ‘Howl’

I: Introduction

“Howl” is a poem by Allen Ginsberg, written in 1954-1955 and dedicated to Carl Solomon, hence it’s also known as “Howl for Carl Solomon.” It was published in Ginsberg’s 1956 collection, Howl and Other Poems.

“Howl” is considered one of the great works of American literature. Ginsberg being one of the writers of the Beat Generation, “Howl” reflects the lifestyle and preoccupations of those writers–Jack Kerouac, William S. Burroughs, Neal Cassady (“N.C., secret hero of these poems”; also, “holy Kerouac […] holy Burroughs holy Cassady”), etc.

The preoccupations of the Beat Generation writers included such subculture practices (as of the conservative 1950s, mind you) as drug use, homosexuality, free love, interest in non-Western religions, etc. Such practices are described with brutal, uncensored frankness in “Howl,” hence the poem was the focus of an obscenity trial in 1957.

Here is a link to the entire poem, and here is an annotated version of it (without the ‘footnote’).

The very title of the poem, one that gives vivid description to so much suffering, must be–on at least an unconscious level–an allusion to the final scene in King Lear, when the grieving king enters, carrying his freshly executed daughter, Cordelia. He calls out “Howl, howl, howl, howl! O, you are men of stones!” As in “Howl,” King Lear demonstrates, as I argued in my analysis of the play, that in the midst of so much suffering and loss, one can also gain something: Lear loses everything, but he also gains self-knowledge. Similarly, “the best minds of [Ginsberg’s] generation” suffered much and engaged in much self-destruction, but they also searched for forms of spiritual enlightenment, as I’ll demonstrate below. By the ‘footnote‘ section of the poem, we’ll find Ginsberg gaining that “Holy!” enlightenment.

II: Part I of the Poem

Now, “the best minds of [Ginsberg’s] generation” were those Beat Generation writers and their socially non-conforming ilk, engaging in all the wild behaviour we associate with them–doing drugs, having promiscuous sex, etc. As a result, they have been “destroyed by madness,” and have been “starving hysterical naked.”

“Naked” could be a reference to illicit sex, but it more likely refers to a lack of possessions in general, as the word is used in Hamlet, Act IV, Scene vii (in which Hamlet writes, in a letter to Claudius, “I am set naked on your kingdom.”). After all, these “best minds” are “starving hysterical naked.” Their wildness comes in large part because of their poverty, the cause of which, in turn, is an issue I’ll delve into in more detail later.

These drug addicts are going “through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix”, yet in spite of their Dionysian sinfulness, they’re also “angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection”. They seem to be offering their own idiosyncratic interpretation of Luther’s injunction to “sin boldly.”

Indeed, there is a duality permeating these pages, cataloguing on the one hand sin, obscenity, and excess, and on the other, a search for spirituality and salvation. They are in “poverty and tatters […] high […] smoking” and “contemplating jazz,” for this music was an important soundtrack to the lives of the Beats, as one can note many times reading Kerouac’s On the Road. Yet they also “bared their brains to Heaven under the El and saw Mohammedan angels…”

The El is the elevated train in New York, but it’s also a Hebrew name for God. Note also that the words “Mohammedan” and “negro” were being used here before they were considered unacceptable. Ginsberg’s reference to the Muslim faith is one of many examples of the Beats taking spiritual inspiration from non-Western sources. Some Beats having hung out in Tangiers (in the International Zone in particular) can, in part, be seen as an example of this influence.

The use of “who” beginning many of the long lines of this first part of “Howl” is paralleled with the refrains of “Moloch” in Part Two, “I’m with you in Rockland” in Part Three, and “Holy” in the ‘footnote.’ “Who” reminds us that the subject of Part One, an almost interminable sentence, is Ginsberg’s beatnik friends. The refrains of the other three parts also, of course, remind us of their respective subjects, an explanation of which will come when I get to those parts below.

Special attention should be given to Ginsberg’s use of long lines, something he derived from Walt Whitman, whose non-conforming behaviour (including homosexuality) could make him a kind of Beat Generation poet of the 19th century. One could compare these long lines to the sometimes lengthy verses of the Bible, giving Whitman’s and Ginsberg’s poetry a near-sacred feel, in spite of (or perhaps because of) its sensuality (recall in this connection the sensuality of the Song of Solomon… could the dedication to Carl Solomon be linked to this Biblical association?).

Long lines are oceanic, inclusive, requiring deep breaths to take in everything before expressing everything. They are universal because the poetry of Whitman and Ginsberg is universal: these two men are bards of Brahman, seeing holiness in everything (read Ginsberg’s “footnote” to see what I mean). The two poets embrace all religious traditions, like Pi, but they also reject the limitations of any one religious tradition or dogma. These long lines, in including everything but eschewing the rigidity of traditional short and exact metres, exemplify the same paradox in poetry.

In “Blake-like tragedy”, we find another example of a spiritual non-conformist in whom Ginsberg found inspiration. I discussed William Blake‘s unconventional approach to Christianity in the “Jerusalem” section of this analysis of an ELP album.

Ginsberg was once “expelled from the academies for crazy […] obscene odes…”, that is, he was kicked out of Columbia University for writing obscenities on his dorm room window. His friends “got busted in their pubic beards returning through Laredo with a belt of marijuana for New York,” that is, they were caught in Laredo with weed stashed in their underwear.

They “ate fire” and “drank turpentine in Paradise Alley…”, referring to the ingesting of toxic substances (drugs and alcohol) in a slum in New York City, full of run-down hotels, brothels, and dope dealers. Nonetheless, in a poem, Paradise Alley also has heavenly associations, and thus in this line we have another juxtaposition of the sinful with the spiritual.

Those readers who may have difficulty reconciling my close associating of sin with mysticism should take into account the idea of the dialectical unity of opposites, an idea I’ve symbolized with the image of the ouroboros in a number of blog articles. Two extreme opposites meet, or phase into each other, where the serpent’s head bites its tail, and all intermediate points are found in their respective places along the middle of the ouroboros’ body, coiled into a circular continuum.

Applied to “Howl,” this means that the harshest Hell phases into the highest Heaven and vice versa. One cannot understand this idea while adhering to traditional Christian dogma and its literal reading of an eternity in either Heaven or Hell. My interpretation of the ‘afterlife’ is metaphorical. In our moments of darkest despair, we often see the light and come out the other side (“It’s always darkest before the dawn.”); this is what Christ‘s Passion, harrowing of Hell, and Resurrection symbolize. Note also that those who rise to the highest points of pride tend to fall, as Satan and the rebel angels did. Finally, keep in mind the Beatitudes—Matthew 5:4 and 5:11-12 in particular.

This Heaven/Hell dialectic can be seen in the four parts of “Howl.” This first part is the Hell thesis, with the second, “Moloch” part representing the Satanic cause of that Hell; the “Rockland” third part is the Purgatory sublation (though therapy in an insane asylum must be judged to be a remarkably ill-conceived purging of sin), and the “footnote” is the antithesis Heaven that stands in opposition to this present first part.

In this way, we can see “Howl” as Ginsberg’s modern Beat rendition of Dante‘s Divine Comedy. And just as Dante’s Inferno is the most famous first part of his epic poem, so is the infernal first part of “Howl” the most famous part, with its emphasis on human suffering. Similarly, Pasolini‘s Salò, with its sections divided up into Circles of Manias, Shit, and Blood–like Dante’s nine circles of Hell–is also focused on suffering, sin, and sexual perversity.

To come back to the last line discussed before my dialectical digression, and to link both discussions, this inferno part makes fitting reference, in this line, to the paradiso of Paradise Alley and the purgatorio of the “purgatoried […] torsos”. These torsos may be purged of sin through the ingesting of alcohol and drugs, or through sex (“pubic beards”, “torsos”, and “cock and endless balls”).

Just as there’s a dialectical unity of Heaven and Hell (i.e., one must go through Hell to reach Heaven, as Jesus did, the passing through the ouroboros’ bitten tail to get to its biting head), so is there also a dialectical unity of sin and sainthood (i.e., one uses drugs or sexual ecstasy to have mystical visions or spiritual ecstasy). The fires of Hell are those of desire, in samsāra; blowing out the flame leads to nirvana. The Mahayana Buddhist tradition, however, sees a unity between samsara and nirvana–the fire is the absence of fire…Heaven is Hell. The Beats, in their excesses, understand these paradoxes.

Part of those Dionysian excesses are, as mentioned above, the alcohol and drug abuse (“peyote” and “wine drunkenness over the rooftops”). Similarly, the Beats were “chained […] to subways for the endless ride from Battery to holy Bronx on benzedrine“, that is, they were so high on the benzedrine that they were frozen from doing anything while on their endless joyride on the subway, “chained” to it, all the way from Battery to the Bronx. Note how the Bronx is “holy”: in their sinful indulgence on drugs, the beatniks attain sainthood in the Bronx.

At Fugazzi’s…Bar and Grill, at 305, 6th Ave. in New York City?…they are “listening to the crack of doom on the hydrogen jukebox”. In Macbeth, “the crack of doom” is the end of the world, and a “hydrogen jukebox” suggests the hydrogen bombs that had been created, recently as of the writing of “Howl,” a bomb whose destructive power, greater than the original atomic bomb, can bring us even closer to “the crack of doom.”

Ginsberg and company, however, are getting wasted listening to music–jazz, presumably, on the jukebox. They are creating their own armageddon of drunken self-destruction. That end of the world, though, is followed by the Kingdom of God: the beatniks, in their rejection of the conservative values of the nuclear family, are getting nuclear bombed drunk; and the hellish fires of “the crack of doom,” the ouroboros’ bitten tail, will be passed through to attain the heavenly Kingdom of God, the serpent’s biting head.

The dialectic is manifested once again in how this “lost battalion of platonic conversationalists” are “jumping down the stoops off fire escapes off windowsills off Empire State…” Since sorrows “come not single spies but in battalions,” it’s easy to see them leading to despair and suicide. Yet the beatniks would express platonic ideals in philosophical discussion, an Apollonian trait; of course, in true Dionysian fashion, they would also jump off of buildings to their deaths to escape the egoistic experience for that of the oneness of Brahman.

Thus, the juxtaposition of jumping suicides with platonic conversation is a case of “whole intellects disgorged […] for seven days and nights”…the seven days and nights of Biblical creation, ending in a day and night of rest–that Heaven of intellectual bliss? It’s fitting to include the Sabbath–“meat for the Synagogue”, since Ginsberg was Jewish.

Indeed, the Beats return from debauchery to spirituality in not only the Synagogue, but also “Zen New Jersey”, “suffering Eastern sweats and Tangerian bone-grindings and migraines of China under drunk withdrawal”. We’re reminded of the Opium Wars, the victimizing of China under Western imperialism, and maybe the jumping “off Empire State” is Ginsberg’s rejection of that very imperialism.

These hipsters “studied Plotinus Poe St. John of the Cross telepathy and bop kabbalah because the cosmos instinctively vibrated at their feet in Kansas”. Plotinus was a neoplatonist who believed that all of reality is based on “the One,” a basic, ineffable state beyond being and non-being, the creative source of the universe and the teleological end of all things. St. John of the Cross was a Spanish mystic and poet who wrote The Dark Night of the Soul, both a poem and a commentary on it that describe a phase of passive purification in the mystical development of one’s spirit.

What’s interesting here is how Ginsberg sandwiches, between these two writers of spiritual, philosophical matters, Edgar Allan Poe, also a great writer, but one whose death at the relatively young age forty was the self-destructive result of alcoholism, drug abuse, and/or suicide, his last moments having been in a delirious, agitated state with hallucinations.

Though St. John of the Cross hadn’t intended this meaning, “the dark night of the soul” has the modern meaning of ‘a crisis in faith,’ or ‘an extremely difficult or painful period in one’s life.’ The combining of these three writers in the above-quoted line in “Howl” suggests a dialectical thesis, negation, and sublation of them respectively: the wisdom of philosophy (Plotinus), the destructiveness of the Dionysian way (Poe), and a combination of passive mystical purification with a spiritual crisis and a painful time in life (St. John of the Cross).

Such an interpretation dovetails well with the Heaven and Hell, saintly sinner theme I’ve been discussing as running all the way through Ginsberg’s poem. The juxtaposition “bop kabbalah” continues that theme, with “bop” representing the contemporary jazz that he and his beatnik pals were grooving to while drunk or stoned, and “kabbalah” representing Jewish mysticism, a fitting form of it for Ginsberg.

This “bop kabbalah” dialectic is further developed in how “the cosmos instinctively vibrated at their feet in Kansas,” since Kansas was the Mecca of jazz and bebop for hipsters at the time; and a ‘vibrating cosmos’ suggests the oceanic waves of Brahman, or Plotinus’ One. The hipsters were also going “through the streets of Idaho seeking visionary Indian angels…”, even more of a juxtaposition of the common and the cosmic.

They’d be “seeking jazz or sex or soup”, and they would “converse about America and Eternity”. These hipsters led bohemian lives, but also wanted to know the rest of the world, so by “America” it is not meant to be only the US but also Latin America–the Mayan ruins of Mexico. To escape the evil of American capitalism, Ginsberg “took ship to Africa”. These are examples of the Beats immersing themselves in the wisdom of other cultures. The protesting of capitalism is part of the basis of the Beats’ destructive Dionysian non-conformity; hence, they “burned cigarette holes in their arms”.

Note how the Beats’ protesting of “the narcotic tobacco haze of capitalism”, having “distributed Supercommunist pamphlets” would have been done in 1950s America, at a time of welfare capitalism, higher taxes for the rich, and strong unions. Imagine the passion the Beats would have had distributing “Supercommunist pamphlets” in today’s neoliberal nightmare of a world!

They “bit detectives in the neck”, those protectors of private property and the capitalist system. Recall how Marx compared capitalists to vampires, as Malcolm X called them bloodsuckers; Ginsberg’s vampire-like Beats biting cops’ necks is indulging in amusing irony here. After all, he insists that the Beats’ non-conforming sexuality and intoxication are “committing no crime”. They “howled on their knees in the subway […] waving genitals…”

More obscenity and saintliness are merged when Ginsberg says they “let themselves be fucked in the ass by saintly motorcyclists and screamed with joy.” This line in particular got him in trouble with the law, though in the end, “Howl” was ruled to have “redeeming social importance.” Similarly, the Beats “blew and were blown by those human seraphim”, and “balled in the morning in the evening […] scattering their semen freely…”

When a “blond and naked angel came to pierce them with a sword”, we see an allusion to The Ecstasy of St. Teresa, a fusion of sexual ecstasy with spiritual ecstasy.

Now, “the three old shrews of fate” who have taken away the Beats’ boy lovers are the Moirai. These can be seen to personify the kind of conformist, nuclear family that the Beats are rebelling against. Each shrew is one-eyed, for in her conformity, she cannot see fully. One is “of the heterosexual dollar”, a slave to the capitalist, patriarchal family, and in her complaining of her lot in life, she seems shrewish. One shrew “winks out of the womb”, since by limiting her life to that of a career mother, she also sees little. The last shrew “does nothing but sit on her ass and snip the […] threads of the craftsman’s loom”; she is Atropos, who in cutting the thread ends people’s lives, yet in limiting herself to doing traditional women’s work, she’s ending her own life, too.

The Beats “copulated ecstatic and insatiate […] and ended […] with a vision of ultimate cunt and come eluding the last gyzym of consciousness”. Here again, we see Ginsberg uniting the sexual with the “ecstatic” spiritual: in “ultimate cunt”, we have a fusion of the final with the beginning of life; similarly, “come” and “gyzym” would begin life, yet here we have “the last” of it. The end is dialectically the beginning–the Alpha and the Omega, the eternal, cyclical ouroboros.

Such heterosexual Beats as “N.C.”, or Neal Cassady, “sweetened the snatches of a million girls”. He “went out whoring through Colorado in myriad stolen night-cars”. Indeed, a reading of On the Road will reveal how Cassady (i.e., Dean Moriarty) did exactly this.

When it says that the Beats “ate the lamb stew of the imagination”, since there’s so much juxtaposition of sensuality with spirituality in “Howl,” I suspect that “lamb” here refers at least in part to the Lamb of God. Ginsberg may have been Jewish, but as a Beat poet, he would have been interested in religious and spiritual traditions outside of his own. The ‘eating of the lamb stew of the imagination’ would thus be yet another example of “Howl” fusing the sensual and the spiritual.

The Beats were “under the tubercular sky surrounded by orange crates of theology,” yet another example of such fusions, as is “rocking and rolling over lofty incantations”. They “threw their watches off the roof to cast their ballot for Eternity outside of Time,” indicating a preference of the transcendent over the mundane; yet they’ve also engaged in suicidal acts, indicating the despair that bars one from entry to Heaven. Such suicidal acts include “cut[ting] their wrists three times successfully unsuccessfully,” as well as having “jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge this actually happened”.

Some Beats were “burned alive in their innocent flannel suits”, an apparent allusion to The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, by Sloan Wilson, another Beat book. One Beat, Bill Cannastra, was with those “who sang out of their windows in despair, fell out of the subway window”: Cannastra died drunkenly trying to exit a moving subway car.

Some “danced on broken wineglasses barefoot”. Some went “journeying to each other’s hotrod Golgotha jail-solitude watch or Birmingham jazz incantation”. Again, we see a merging of the sensual (“wineglasses,” “jazz,” “hotrod”) and the spiritual (i.e., the Christian imagery of “Golgotha”), as well as a fusion of salvation (Christ’s crucifixion at Golgotha, the place of the skull) and condemnation (“jail”).

The Beats hoped, in their travels, “to find out if I had a vision or you had a vision or he had a vision to find out Eternity”. They were often in Denver, as Kerouac and Cassady were (represented by Sal Paradise and Dean Moriarty, respectively) in On the Road. All of the drinking and partying therein is Dionysian mysticism, if properly understood.

For in spite of how antithetical this drunken partying may seem to the spiritual life, the Beats also “fell on their knees in hopeless cathedrals praying for each other’s salvation”. The cathedrals were “hopeless” because there’s no salvation in conventional, orthodox religion.

So instead, they “retired to Mexico to cultivate a habit, or Rocky Mount to tender Buddha or Tangiers to boys […] or Harvard to Narcissus…” Alternative forms of spirituality may have been Buddhism (consider Kerouac and The Dharma Bums), or the dialectical opposite of spirituality, indulgence in drugs or pederasty, or a generally narcissistic attitude. In any case, the “hopeless cathedrals” would never have sufficed for the Beats.

Just as there’s a fine line between Heaven and Hell as described in “Howl,” so is there a fine line between genius and madness here. Ginsberg has celebrated the inspired creative genius of Kerouac, Cassady, Burroughs…himself in this very poem…and others. Ginsberg has demonstrated many of the acts of madness of the Beats. Now we must examine the attempts ‘to cure’ madness.

Now, what must be emphasized here is that it’s not so much about curing mental illness as it is about taking non-conforming individuals and making them conform. Recall that at this time, the mid-20th century, homosexuality was considered a form of mental illness. The proposed cures for these ‘pathologies’ were such things as lobotomy, “Metrazol electricity hydrotherapy psychotherapy occupational therapy pingpong…”

Recall that “Howl” is dedicated to Carl Solomon, who voluntarily institutionalized himself, “presented [himself] on the granite steps of the madhouse…” Solomon, mental institutions (what Ginsberg calls “Rockland”), and pingpong will return in Part Three of this poem.

The psychotherapy in these mental institutions will include such fashionably Freudian ideas as the Oedipus complex, as we can see in Ginsberg’s line about “mother finally ******”. The ultimate narcissistic fantasy, about sexual union with the mother, Lacan‘s objet petit a, has to have a four-letter word censored, for a change in this poem, since it’s a gratification too great for even Ginsberg to discuss directly: “ah, Carl, while you are not safe I am not safe…”

Still, while mired not only in madness but, worse, also in the prisons of psychiatry–those cuckoo nests–these incarcerated Beats can still experience the divine. They have “dreamt and made incarnate gaps in Time and Space […] trapped the archangel of the soul […] jumping with sensation of Pater Omnipotens Aeterna Deus…”

This connection with the divine is achieved through the use of language, a kind of talking cure, entry into the cultural/linguistic world of Lacan‘s Symbolic, as expressed in Ginsberg’s poetry and the prose of Beats like Kerouac and Burroughs. They’ll use “elemental verbs and set the noun and dash of consciousness […] to recreate the syntax and measure of poor human prose…”

The Beats are thus a combination of “the madman bum and angel beat in Time,” a marriage of Heaven and Hell (recall the “Blake-like tragedy” above), the best and the worst, “speechless and intelligent and shaking with shame,…” They “blew the suffering of America’s naked mind for love into an eli eli lamma lamma sabachthani saxophone cry…” In this, we see how the Beats combine jazz sax partying with suffering, despair, Lamb-of-God salvation and love.

“Howl” describes the individual experiences of men like Cannastra, Cassady, Kerouac, Solomon, and Ginsberg as if all the Beats had experienced them collectively, since in their solidarity of non-conformity, they felt the Dionysian unity, Plotinus’ One, Brahman’s nirvana. Ginsberg will feel that solidarity with Solomon in Part Three, but first,…

III: Part II of the Poem

Note how Moloch is described as a “sphinx of cement and aluminum” who “bashed open [the Beats’] skulls and ate up their brains and imagination”. Moloch, an ancient Canaanite god depicted in the Bible and understood to have been one requiring child sacrifice, is a Satanic figure in “Howl,” the Devil responsible for the Inferno of Ginsberg’s Divine Comedy here. But what does this Satanic figure in turn represent?

The “sphinx of cement and aluminum” that is also “Filth! Ugliness! Ashcans and unobtainable dollars” is modern-day industrial capitalism. Children are sacrificed to this Moloch, this Mammon of money, by having their skulls bashed open and their brains and imagination eaten. In our education systems, children’s energy, individuality, and creativity are all stifled and replaced with obedience and conformity, that energy redirected towards making money for the Man, never for the people, for whom it’s “unobtainable.”

The “Solitude” of Moloch is alienation, the lack of togetherness among people, which has been replaced by cold-blooded competition. This had led to “Children screaming under the stairways!”

In this second part–instead of the preceding part’s long lines ending in commas, which suggested an ongoing problem seemingly without end, the hopelessness of eternal infernal punishment–we have lines ending in exclamation points, to express the rage Ginsberg feels against an economic system to which we all feel we’ve had to sell our souls. Small wonder the non-conforming Beat writers were going mad in a drunken, Dionysian frenzy.

Moloch is an “incomprehensible prison!” It’s a “soulless jailhouse and Congress of sorrows! Moloch whose buildings are judgment! Moloch the vast stone of war! Moloch the stunned governments!” Ginsberg recognizes, as so many right-wing libertarians fail to do (or are dishonest about not recognizing), that capitalism very much requires a state and a Congress to make laws that protect private property. Government only does socialist stuff when it’s a workers’ state, not the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, as the US has always been.

These “buildings [of] judgment” that are “the vast stone of war” are symbols of the modern, industrial world. The capitalist government has far too little funding for the poor, for education, for healthcare or for affordable housing, but it has plenty of money for the military. The Moloch government is “stunned” because it’s confused over who should have access to this tax revenue.

The evil industry of capitalism “is pure machinery!” It’s “blood is running money!” Since capitalism in our modern world spills into imperialism, as Lenin pointed out, then it’s easy to see how money can be linked with blood, death, and human suffering in war. Moloch’s “fingers are ten armies!” These are the armies of the Americans who, already in the 1950s, were occupying South Korea, making their women into prostitutes for the enjoyment of the GIs, and making their men fight their brothers and sisters in the north. Moloch’s “ear is a smoking bomb”, like those dropped all over North Korea.

The specifically modern, industrial nature of the capitalism that Ginsberg is excoriating here is found in such lines as this: “Moloch whose skyscrapers stand in the longs streets like endless Jehovahs! Moloch whose factories dream and croak in the fog! Moloch whose smoke-stacks and antennae crown the cities!”

These skyscrapers will be office buildings, places of business, the nerve centres of capitalism. Just as Moloch and Mammon are false gods, so are the “endless Jehovahs” a heathenizing of the Biblical God by pluralizing Him. The irony mustn’t have been lost on Jewish Ginsberg to know that Elohim can be the one God of the Bible as well as the many gods of paganism. Indeed, Judeo-Christianity has often been used to justify capitalism, imperialism, and settler-colonialism.

Moloch’s “love is endless oil and stone!” Note the endless coveting of oil in the Middle East. This would have been evident to Ginsberg as early as 1953, when the coup d’état in Iran happened to protect British oil interests in the region. The indictment against capitalism continues in these words: “Moloch whose soul is electricity and banks!”

Note also that Moloch’s “poverty is the specter of genius!” By “genius,” we can easily read Communism, since European poverty in the mid-19th century inspired the spectre that was haunting the continent.

“Moloch in whom I sit lonely! Moloch in whom I dream Angels! Crazy in Moloch! Cocksucker in Moloch! Lacklove and manless in Moloch!” Again, Ginsberg addresses the problem of alienation caused by capitalism. He also explains in this long line how one resolves the contradiction between sinning and the pursuit of salvation. One “dream[s of] Angels” in a desperate attempt to escape Moloch’s inferno. Still, that very desperation, in finding the escape so impossible, causes one to go “Crazy in Moloch!”

Conservative society’s moralistic condemnation of homosexuality, something gay Ginsberg would have been more than usually sensitive to, reduced his form of sexual expression to mere pornographic language, hence “Cocksucker in Moloch!” Recall Senator Joseph McCarthy‘s vulgar homophobia when he said, back at a time when such language would have been far more shocking, “If you want to be against McCarthy, boys, you’ve got to be either a Communist or a cocksucker.” Of course, the taboo against homosexuality was so aggravated at the time that it would have been so much more difficult for LGBT people like Ginsberg to find love, hence “Lacklove and manless in Moloch!”

“Moloch…entered [his] soul early!” It brainwashed him as a child into thinking he needed to conform to the ways of a capitalist, heterosexual society. He’d later have to work to unlearn all of that poisonous conditioning. “Moloch…frightened [him] out of [his] natural ecstasy!” He had to “abandon” Moloch.

Moloch is an industrial capitalist world of “Robot apartments!” (Imagine how much more robotic they’re becoming now, in our world of smart cities, with AI surveillance.) The “blind capitals! demonic industries!…invincible madhouses!” [to be dealt with in the next part] “granite cocks! monstrous bombs!” are those of a capitalist state, far more totalitarian than a socialist one could ever be.

“They broke their backs lifting Moloch to heaven!” Those phallic skyscrapers are “granite cocks!” Moloch is “lifting the city to Heaven”, with these skyscrapers as Towers of Babel: this tireless, slavelike construction has confused our language, making us incapable of communicating with or understanding each other, more capitalist alienation.

The pain and Hell of Moloch’s Inferno, though, is also in close proximity, as I described above, with the Heaven, the Paradiso, to which the Beats were trying to escape. Hence, “Visions! omens! hallucinations! miracles! ecstasies!” One has mystical experiences of bliss and psychotic breaks from reality at the same time. One thus also has “Dreams! adorations! illuminations! religions! the whole boatload of sensitive bullshit!” One has “Breakthroughs!…flips and crucifixions!…Highs! Epiphanies! Despairs!…suicides!…Mad generation!”

Though this is the Hell of Moloch, there is also “Real holy laughter…!…the holy yells!” The “Howl! Howl! Howl!” of Hell leads to holiness, that passing from the bitten tail of the ouroboros to its biting head. To reach the very best, one must pass through the absolute worst.

Still, some tried to purge the Beats through the dubious mental institutions, and this is where we must go next…

IV: Part III of the Poem

This part of “Howl” is most directly addressed to Carl Solomon, to whom, recall, the entire poem is dedicated–this ‘Song of Solomon,’ if you will. Ginsberg met Solomon in a mental hospital in 1949; he calls it “Rockland” in the poem, though it was actually Columbia Presbyterian Psychological Institute. In fact, among Solomon’s many complaints about Ginsberg and “Howl” was his vehement insistence that he was “never in Rockland” and that this third part of the poem “garbles history completely.”

As much of a fabrication as “Rockland” is, though, we can indulge Ginsberg in a little poetic license. After all, “Rockland” has a much better literary ring to it than “Columbia Presbyterian Psychological Institute,” or “New York State Psychiatric Institute,” or even “Pilgrim Psychiatric Center,” this latter being another psychiatric hospital to which Solomon was admitted.

In any case, maybe the point isn’t so much about Ginsberg being literally, physically with Solomon in the correctly-named mental institution, but rather that the poet was with Solomon in spirit, in solidarity with him, in a metaphorically therapeutic state of being, a true purging of Solomon’s sin and pain, which Ginsberg called “Rockland.” As such, this ‘mental hospital,’ as it were, is the Purgatorio that the actual hospital could never have been. The actual hospital would have just pushed conformity onto Solomon. The solidarity of Ginsberg and the other Beats, being with Solomon “in Rockland,” is the real cure.

So as I see it, the refrain “I’m with you in Rockland” means that Ginsberg was in solidarity with Solomon in his process of mental convalescence, a far better healer than the best shrinks in his actual loony bin. Ginsberg’s love and friendship, as that of all the other Beats, is a therapy to make that of his doctors and nurses seem like wretched Ratcheds in comparison. This part of “Howl” is the Purgatorio because of the Beats, not because of the therapists.

Solomon is “madder than” Ginsberg is, in both senses: more insane, and so voluntarily in a mental institution that the poet is only visiting; and angrier, because of the conformist society he was so at odds with that he chose to be put in the institution.

Solomon “imitate[s] the shade of [Ginsberg’s] mother”, who also had mental health issues, and so Ginsberg’s love for her inspired his empathy for Solomon. Similar empathy can be seen between Ginsberg, Solomon, and all the other Beats, since they were all “great writers on the same dreadful typewriter”–the Beats tended to type, rather than write, their literary works. Recall the caustic words of Truman Capote about the Beats: It “isn’t writing at all–it’s typing.”

Recall how the first part of “Howl” had its lines ending in commas, making it one interminable sentence with only breaths to break it up. The second part had its thoughts ending in a plethora of exclamation marks…endless screaming about the agonies that Satanic Moloch was inflicting on all the Beats. In this third part, however, there are neither commas nor exclamation marks. No periods, parentheses, or dashes, either. There’s no punctuation at all, unless you count the apostrophe in “I’m”. This lack of an indication of pauses suggests a kind of rapid-fire speaking, a frantic dumping-out of words, a therapeutic release of feelings that have been pent up for far too long. Such expression is a true purging of pain.

Now, in direct contrast to this verbal purging, this Symbolic expression of the undifferentiated, ineffable Real, Solomon suffered from the staff of the mental hospitals and their bogus therapy. The “nurses [are] the harpies of the Bronx”. He would “scream in a straitjacket that [he was] losing the game of the actual pingpong of the abyss.” I assume that a pingpong table was provided in Solomon’s hospital, in an abortive attempt to allow the patients to enjoy themselves.

He would “bang on the catatonic piano”, trying and failing to express himself artistically on instruments presumably also provided by the hospital. The immobility of catatonia, a perfect metaphor for the lifelessness of the patients, results in discords ‘banged on the piano’ instead of flowing, expressive music.

One’s innocent soul “should never die ungodly in an armed madhouse […] where fifty more shocks will never return your soul to its body”. This, of course, is a reference to the particularly egregious practice of electroshock treatments for the mentally ill. Ginsberg felt that shock therapy robbed Solomon of his soul. This practice is critiqued in Ken Kesey‘s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.

Solomon would “accuse [his] doctors of insanity”, given such truly psychopathic practices as described in the previous paragraph. Indeed, this Purgatorio of Ginsberg’s poem, set in a mental institution, is ironic in how the opposite of purgatory occurs here, where a restoration to mental health is expected, while the friendship and solidarity Ginsberg has with Solomon is the real cure.

Ginsberg and Solomon, both Jews, would “plot the Hebrew socialist revolution against the fascist national Golgotha”, the American political establishment of the 1950s that was right-wing and, ironically, Christian. American imperialism crushes revolutionaries just as Roman imperialism crucified Christ. The Rockland “comrades [will be] all together singing the final stanzas of the Internationale.”

The American government, whose FBI and CIA were monitoring men like Ginsberg in the 1950s for their subversive activities, “coughs all night and won’t let [them] sleep”.

Their “souls’ airplanes” will “drop angelic bombs”, and the “imaginary walls” of the hospital will “collapse”. The “skinny legions” thus can “run outside […] O victory forget your underwear we’re free”. As I said above, the true healing from mental illness will come outside of the mental institutions, not inside them. Without underwear, the freed inmates will be naked, allowed to be their true selves, with no need to cover up who they really are.

Solomon thus will go “on the highway across America in tears to the door of [Ginsberg’s] cottage”. This cottage will be the locale of restoration to mental health that the loony bins could never be. His cottage will be the real purgatory, cleansing all the Beats of their sins and readying them for Heaven, for Ginsberg’s Paradiso, which is…

V: Footnote to Howl

Allegedly, Ginsberg stated in the Dedication that he took the title for the poem from Kerouac. I still believe, however, that the title for “Howl” was inspired, whether in the conscious or unconscious of Ginsberg or Kerouac, by Lear’s repeated cry of “Howl!” over Cordelia’s death.

I insist on this allusion in part because of how the “footnote” begins, with its uttering of “Holy!” fifteen times. On the one hand, “Holy!” can be heard as a pun on “Howl!” On the other hand, “Holy!” is the dialectical opposite of “Howl!” It is yet another instance of the Heaven/Hell dialectic that permeates the entire poem.

This repetition of “Holy!” implies the repetition of the title, just as Lear repeated the word four times.

Like the second part, the ‘footnote’ ends each statement with an exclamation point. The second part, with its Satanic Moloch, is like the Centre of Hell in its Ninth Circle, as depicted by Dante in his Inferno. This area is the worst part of Hell, where Satan is trapped waist-deep in ice, his three faces’ mouths feasting on Brutus, Cassius, and Judas Iscariot.

My point is that the same punctuation is used in the very worst and best places in “Howl.” Here is where the bitten tail of the ouroboros, where Satan’s mouths are feasting, leads immediately to the serpent’s biting head of Heaven, Ginsberg’s Paradiso. The exclamation points represent screams of horror in the “Moloch” part, and screams of joy in this “Holy!” footnote.

“Everything is holy!” to Ginsberg. “The world is holy! The soul is holy!” As a convert to Buddhism, following such Mahayana forms as Tibetan Buddhism, Ginsberg would have understood the unity of samsara and nirvana. So while all life is suffering, or the duhkha of samsara, it’s all manifestations of Buddha-consciousness, too, or “Holy!” Once again, Heaven and Hell are unified.

Even the ‘sinful’ or dirty parts of the body are holy: “The tongue and cock and hand and asshole holy!” Furthermore, “everybody’s holy! everywhere is holy!”

“The bum’s as holy as the seraphim! the madman is holy as you my soul are holy!” People from the lowest ranks of society to the highest orders of angels are of equal worth, the greatest worth…holy!

The typewriter may have been “dreadful” back in the third part of “Howl,” but here it’s holy, as “the poem is holy”. Of course, the Beats are holy, including Ginsberg himself, Solomon, Kerouac, Burroughs, and Cassady, “the unknown buggered and suffering beggars holy the hideous human angels!”

Ginsberg must also acknowledge the sanctity of his “mother in the insane asylum!” He similarly praises the sanctity of “the groaning saxophone!…the bop apocalypse! Holy the jazzbands marijuana hipsters peace peyote pipes and drums!”

While he condemned the skyscrapers of Moloch in the second part, here he sees them as holy, as well as the solitude of alienation he called evil earlier. The “mysterious rivers of tears under the streets!” are also holy. What is painful is also divine. Heaven and Hell are one. So the “lone juggernaut,” a Hindu god whose worship was once believed in the West to involve religious fanatics throwing themselves before its idol’s chariot, to be crushed under its wheels, is actually holy and good.

“Holy the vast lamb of the middleclass!” The petite bourgeoisie of 1950s American would still have been predominantly Christian, of the Lamb of God, and thus disapproving of Ginsberg’s homosexuality, but he deems them holy nonetheless, as he does “the crazy shepherds of rebellion!” And since Jesus was “the good Shepherd,” we can see in these “shepherds of rebellion” another paradox of conformist Christian with rebellious Beats.

He praises as holy many cities of the world, including New York, San Francisco, Paris, Tangiers, Moscow, and Istanbul, reinforcing the sense of a pantheistic universe.

Ginsberg, as a gay activist and socialist, was somewhat disenchanted with, for example, the social conservatism he saw in Cuba and its persecution of homosexuals in the mid-1960s, as well as with China, who turned against him as a “troublemaker,” and with Czechoslovakia’s arresting him for drug use. Because of these kinds of disappointments (these above examples having happened long after the writing and publication of “Howl,” of course, but still illustrative of the general kind of disillusion he must have already felt toward the, for him, insufficiently progressive Third International), he spoke of a “fifth International” as holy.

Note also “holy the Angel in Moloch!” Once again, we see the dialectic of Heaven and Hell, of angels and devils, and of nirvana and samsara. Similarly, the sea and the desert are holy, visions and hallucinations are holy, miracles and the abyss are holy, and “forgiveness! mercy! charity! faith!…suffering! magnanimity!” are holy.

Finally, the “intelligent kindness of the soul!” is holy.

VI: Conclusion

What makes “Howl” a great work of literature, like any great literature, is its embrace of the All. The dialectical unity of opposites is a kind of shorthand for expressing the universal in its infinite complexity. Such merisms as “the heavens and the earth” or “good and evil” are unions of opposites as a quick way of including everything between them, like the eternity of the cyclical ouroboros. The unified Heaven and Hell of “Howl” thus include everything between them, too.

Howling is holy, and vice versa.

‘The Devil’s Playground’ is Published!

The Devil’s Playground: A Horror Charity Anthology for Drug Addiction, by Dark Moon Rising Publications, is finally published on Amazon, in paperback and ebook forms! It will be published on Godless on December 8th.

My short story, ‘Serene,’ is one of the stories in the anthology. All proceeds donated will be for To Write Love On Her Arms, an organization to help people struggling with depression, addiction, self-injury, and suicide. The theme of all of these stories is drug addiction and its self-destructive effects. 

If one were to read this story as well as my story, ‘NIB,’ in the horror anthology Symptom of the Universe: a Horror Tribute Anthology to Black Sabbath, also from Dark Moon Rising Publications, one might find a number of similarities between the stories. There are crucial differences between them, though. In ‘NIB,’ the female drug dealer is in love with the narrating protagonist, who has a fear of sexual contact due to childhood trauma caused by sexual abuse, and he uses drugs to forget his pain. In ‘Serene,’ however, the female drug dealer is luring men into enjoying her drug, taking advantage of them while stoned, and deliberately killing them if they reject her love. Both stories, ultimately, are allegories on the seductive yet destructive nature of drug abuse.

Many other great authors have stories included in this anthology (check the pic at the top to see all of their names), so please, check it out! I’m sure you’ll love the stories, and you’ll be helping out an important cause! 🙂

‘The Ancestors,’ a Horror Story, Chapter Thirteen (Final Chapter)

“Al, no! Please, tell me what’s happening?”

But when Hannah looked in Al’s face, she no longer saw him in there.

She saw Mei instead.

Mei’s cruel, malicious eyes were what was looking back at her.

In total control over Al’s body again, the evil spirit made him raise the knife and point it at Hannah. Mei made him grab her by the throat and shove her against the dining room wall.

Shaking, she gasped, “Al…Al…” through what little voice Mei allowed her to let out.

Mei had Al bare hateful teeth, like a wolf’s fangs, as the knife came slowly closer to Hannah’s chest. Though Al was trying desperately to keep the blade from getting any closer to the woman he loved, she saw only Mei in his eyes–her malevolence, her single-minded wish to stab Hannah to death.

“It’s your…turn…to die, Hannah,” Mei’s feminine voice said through Al’s mouth.

“This…isn’t you, Al,” Hannah gasped, her one hand on the wrist of Al’s knife-gripping hand, her other trying to loosen Mei’s grip on her neck. “Fight it.”

The hand holding the knife was shaking, but for the moment not getting any closer.

“Of course…this isn’t…Al,” Mei said. “It’s Mei.”

“You’re a…split…personality?”

“No. I’m…one of…Al’s…ancestors.”

“That’s…nonsense. Al, you’re ill. You need…help.”

“Al needs…to die. As soon…as I’m finished…with you.”

The shaking knife was getting closer to her chest.

Hannah kept searching for Al in his eyes.

She still saw only Mei in them.

Al was feeling a splitting headache in his efforts to regain control over his body.

No, Mei, he thought. I won’t let you kill Hannah.

The tip of the blade was now a millimetre or two away from Hannah’s skin, just above the top button of her dress. The knife shook a bit, and the blade cut off the button, exposing more of her skin to the sharp tip.

“Al…please!”

A slight scrape of the tip let out a little red.

She looked in his eyes…and she saw Al again.

He was pulling the shaking knife away from her, with all of his strength, his headache killing him, and the soreness in his arms–from Mei’s attempt to keep control–adding to his agony.

Finally, with the knife-gripping arm safely away from Hannah, he started regaining control of his other hand, which loosened its grip on her neck. She pulled free and got away from the wall.

He turned to face her, having most of his control back. He was bent over, panting.

“Al? Are you OK? Are you back?”

“Yeah, I’m back, for the moment. Mei just left me, completely.”

“As soon as we call the police and explain what happened, we’ll find a therapist for you, and you can tell them all about this ‘Mei.'”

“No, Hannah. This can’t go on. I have to die.”

He was looking at that knife in his hand.

“What do you mean, you ‘have to die’? You won’t go to jail, Al. You’ll be found not guilty by reason of…no offence…insanity. We’ll get you the psychiatric help you need. I won’t abandon you.”

“You don’t understand, Hannah. My problem isn’t mental illness, though I’m sure it must look that way to you. The spirit of Mei, one of the family ancestors, is still inside my body. She relinquished control…I don’t know why, but she’ll come back and take control of me again. Then she’ll try to kill you again. I can’t fight her off forever. She will succeed, sooner or later. I can’t let that happen. To save you, I must kill myself.” Sobbing, he pointed the sharp end of the blade at his chest.

“Al, no! What are you talking about? There’s no evil spirit inside you. Mental illness is nothing to be ashamed of. We’ll get help for you. I still love you. I’m sorry I said we were through. I still want us to be together.” Now she was sobbing.

“Hannah, I’m not insane.” His arms were shaking as he brought the tip of the blade to his chest. “I know full well what I’m doing. I know now that we cannot be together. I’m doing this, though, because I love you. Either Mei makes me kill you, or I kill myself. There is no other way out of this.”

“Al! Please, no! It’s just a delusion you’re having. Don’t stab yourself! I love you!”

She reached forward to take the knife from him.

“I love you, Hannah. Never forget that.”

He held the knife with the tip of the blade firmly against his chest, ready to push it in.

“God, no! Al, don’t!“

“Oh, no, NO!“

She saw no more Al in his eyes. She saw Mei’s cruel grin.

“Al, no!“

He shook a bit, then raised the knife, as if to stab her.

“NOOOO!!!” he yelled.

Then the blade swung down in an arc…

…and it went deep in his gut.

“NOOOO!!!” she screamed.

He buckled and fell to the floor, his blood gushing out and staining his shirt.

She put her arms around him and kept screaming. She welcomed his blood on her dress, wanting the stains to stay there so she’d still have at least some of him with her.

I came to this house having everyone, she thought as she kept bawling. Now I have no one.

As she wept and wailed, holding his bloody body tightly against herself and practically bathing in the red, she’d had her eyes squeezed shut, as tight as her hold on his body. Then she opened them.

With her tears obstructing her vision, what she saw was blurry and distorted. In that blurry haze, she saw what at first seemed a hallucination.

She wiped away her tears for a clearer look.

No, it was still there.

And it made no sense.

A glowing vision of three old Chinese in traditional clothes–two women and a man.

In my grief, Hannah thought, I’m truly going crazy.

Thank you, Hannah, for helping us achieve our aim, Po said. You are free to go.

“I’m seeing things,” Hannah gasped. “This isn’t real.”

Oh, we are very real, Hannah, Meng said.

“Wait a minute: your voices sound familiar.”

That’s right, Mei said. You heard me from Al.

And me from Emily, Meng said.

And me from Freddie, Po said.

“I’m imagining this,” Hannah said. “There’s no such thing as ghosts. I’m going crazy.”

If you were going crazy, you wouldn’t think you were going crazy, Meng said. We’re real, we assure you.

Al wasn’t going crazy, either, Mei said. We really were possessing him and his family, and now that our work is done here, we can thank you and say goodbye.

“And what was ‘your work’ that had to be done?”

The destruction of the entire Dan family, Po said.

“Why did they, and the man I loved, have to be killed?”

For failing to pray to us, their ancestors, Mei said.

“I thought Al continued praying to you. He told me so. Why wasn’t that good enough for you?”

Because the snubbing of us by the rest of his family…our family…was already bad enough. We felt too dishonoured to forgive them, Meng said.

And when we aren’t sufficiently prayed to, we spirits turn into demons, Po said. The Dan family is almost an anomaly when it comes to Chinese culture. Most Chinese families are close and loving; this is because they pray to their ancestors. An impious attitude took hold of your boyfriend’s parents, in their adopting of Western secularism.

In rejecting belief in spiritual matters, like most of you in the West, their family unity broke down, and they came apart, Mei said. So many social and family problems that you see in Western society come from rejecting spirituality. This is why Chinese families, on average, hold together far better than your Western families.

“I call bullshit on all of that! My family wasn’t religious in any way, and we were always loving and happy. You destroyed Al’s whole family, and you murdered mine!” She was sobbing again.

She looked through her teary eyes and saw wicked grins on Po, Meng, and Mei.

“Why did you kill my family? Why did you make Al kill himself? What did they do to you?”

Oh, we did that for the sheer fun of it, Meng said. We even put the idea in your mind to have your family meet the Dans for dinner…we prodded you to insist on it, never taking ‘no’ for an answer.

The three spirits were still grinning malevolently at her. Her jaw dropped.

“You’re evil, pure evil, far worse than Al’s family!”

What do you expect? Po asked. We’re devils. Thank you for your help, and goodbye.

The three grinning spirits faded away before her eyes.

Hannah let out a loud, ear-splitting scream.

Her screaming and bawling continued over a period of several minutes. A patrol car was going by the house, and the two police in it heard her. They stopped, got out of their car, and ran up to the house.

They looked in a window that revealed the dining room and saw Hannah, still on her knees and holding Al’s bloody body, always sobbing and shaking. They also saw Freddie’s and Emily’s bodies.

“Holy shit!” the male cop said.

“What the hell happened here?” the female cop said.

They went in the house and ran over to Hannah.

“Officer Wong calling,” the male cop said on his cellphone to the local precinct. “We have…what looks like..a triple homicide in the house at…just a minute, I need to take a look…137 Washington Street. We need an ambulance and stretchers.”

The female cop took Hannah in her arms.

“It’s OK, it’s OK,” she said, trying to soothe Hannah.

“No! It’s not OK!” Hannah screamed.

“What happened here? Who killed these people?”

Hannah’s words came out like a frantic firing of machine gun bullets, much too fast for the cops to process. “The ancestors did it! Three demons, two old women and an old man! They killed all of my family, too, up in the attic! They lured us all into a trap! They…”

“What is she raving about?” Officer Wong asked, sneering. “Three demons? Ancestors? This Chinese family may have believed in ancestors and evil spirits, but why would a white woman believe in that nonsense? My family never believed in that old tradition, and I’m glad they didn’t.”

“I have no answers for your questions, Officer Wong,” his partner said, rocking Hannah back and forth gently. “But I guess we’d better check the attic, too.”

“Alright,” he said. “You stay here with her, and I’ll go up there.” He went searching for the stairs.

The three spirits were waiting in the attic.

I don’t like Officer Wong’s lack of faith in us spirits, Po said to Meng and Mei. Maybe we can go after his family, too…just for fun.

All three spirits were grinning.

THE END

Dunes

Men erect
edifices, imagining
we’ll look on them and despair.
But these are houses built on the sand–
one day, they’ll crumble, like sand castles, and be dunes.

One tears
up the trees, imagining
the plant life of the Earth is limitless.
But when grass no longer grows, and green turns brown,
those castles made of sand will turn into barren dunes eventually.

One wages war
and heightens heat, imagining
that gold and paper green will last forever.
But these are worthless colours without the green of the ground.
Dunes will one day make us look on these works of the wicked, and despair.

Analysis of ‘Predator’

Predator is a 1987 sci-fi action horror film directed by John McTiernan and written by brothers Jim and John Thomas. It stars Arnold Schwarzenegger, with Carl Weathers, Bill Duke, Jesse Ventura, Sonny Landham, Elpida Carrillo, Richard Chaves, and Shane Black. Kevin Peter Hall, 7 foot 4 inches tall, played the towering Yautja, with Peter Cullen doing its voice.

Predator was written in 1984 with the working title as Hunter. It grossed $98 million worldwide. It initially got a mixed critical reception, but it has since been regarded as a classic sci-fi/action/horror film, and one of the best 1980s films. It was nominated for an Oscar for Best Visual Effects.

The Predator franchise includes films (including three sequels, a prequel, and a crossover with the Alien franchise, including Alien vs. Predator and Aliens vs. Predator: Requiem), novels, comic books, video games, and toys.

Here is a link to quotes from the film.

The Thomas brothers’ original concept for Hunter centred around the idea of “what it is to be hunted,” with a band of alien hunters of various species going after various kinds of prey. This concept was eventually streamlined into one of a singular alien predator hunting man, the most dangerous species, and in particular, the “most dangerous man,” a soldier.

Things really started to get interesting when the setting chosen for the film became the Central/South American area, where so many Operation Condor activities were going on when the story takes place.

The central theme of Predator is, well, predation, of course; but we’re not limited to the predation of the Yautja. Significantly, the film begins with the Yautja’s spaceship flying to Earth, and this is juxtaposed immediately after with a shot of a US Army helicopter flying into a Central/South American country…Guatemala? Colombia? Val Verde? The predator of the film’s title is preying on other predators, those of US imperialism.

While imperialist propaganda would have us believe that these American troops are ‘the good guys,’ fighting off those ‘filthy, rotten, godless commies’ and protecting ‘freedom and democracy,’ anyone who knows what it’s like to be victimized by troops like these can see the lie of such a narrative. The American government arrogantly believes that Latin America is essentially their backyard, of which they think they have the right to determine its collective political destiny.

And since the American ruling class won’t abide a political system other than ‘free market’ capitalism, then any Central or South American country that has a leftist government come into power must have an intervention, typically in the form of coups d’état or other forms of political repression, to ensure the ascendancy of a right-wing, authoritarian strongman to beat the working class into submission. The American troops go in to facilitate just such an intervention. They’re the predators of the Global South poor.

Major Alan “Dutch” Schaefer (Schwarzenegger) flies in with his team of troops to meet with his old Vietnam War ally Dillon (Weathers)–who’s now a CIA agent (this alone should tell us he can’t be trusted)–and General Phillips (played by R.G. Armstrong) to be briefed on their mission: to rescue a local cabinet minister whose helicopter was shot down in a Central American jungle. He’s being held by local guerrillas.

What is not taken into consideration, as far as the pacing of the plot is concerned, is that the guerrillas wouldn’t have engaged in any of this aggression had it not been for the imperialist encroachments on their land, as discussed above. Furthermore, Dutch learns that Dillon’s story about the kidnapping of the cabinet minister is a lie: during his team’s attack on the guerrilla camp, it turns out that the hostages are actually CIA agents like Dillon.

Among the men that Dutch’s team are fighting are the guerrilla’s Russian military allies. The real mission has been to prevent a Soviet-sponsored invasion of the area. Translation: the USSR is here doing what it had done many times during the Cold War–giving aid to national liberation movements. The ‘commies’ aren’t the predators here; they’re helping to fight the American imperialist predators, who in thinking of this fight as a ‘Soviet-sponsored invasion’ are really just engaging in projection.

It’s interesting to note how multicultural the team of American fighters is. Along with the three whites, Dutch, Blain (Ventura), and Hawkins (Black), this third one providing a few bad “pussy” jokes, there are two blacks, Dillon and Mac (Duke), an Hispanic, Poncho (Chaves), and a part-Native American, Billy (Landham). My point in bringing this up is how, in including mostly people of colour in the team, those whose ancestors were victimized by imperialism, colonialism, and racism, we can see in Predator a blurring of the line between military predators and prey.

This blurring can also be seen in the Yautja, who seems to have dreadlocks, and whenever we know it’s around, in the soundtrack we often hear an eerie, undulating, echoing set of fast drum triplets, suggestive of African music. When Dutch has to face the Yautja at the climax, he’s covered in mud, associating his appearance with the darker skin of indigenous people, and he has to fight the alien with primitive weapons, like the Ewoks against the stormtroopers.

Of course, one cannot have imperialist troops without them being über-manly, and Blain gives us the ultimate macho line when wounded. But the blurring between predator (the Yautja bleeding a glowing yellow-green when wounded) and prey is established not only when all the men except Dutch get killed one by one, but also when he confronts it at the climax, when its superior size and strength make him look small and slight. This is an interesting contrast to the virtually invincible men Schwarzenegger had played (Conan, Matrix) up to this point.

Another blurring between predator and prey is, in a symbolic sense, how Anna (Carrillo) claims that the jungle has come alive and attacked people. We would normally notice how the predatory imperialist soldiers (especially those of today–the US military being the world’s biggest polluter) have damaged the natural environment. Her observation, however, reverses the soldiers and the environment as prey and predator, even though its actually the Yautja using its cloaking device to hide in the jungle, like a kind of high-tech camouflage.

There’s also the blurring between predator and prey in the form of animals in the jungle. Blain hears something in the bushes, thinking it’s their predator, and only just after he realizes it’s just a little mammal crawling about, the real Predator shoots and kills him. Mac finds a scorpion crawling on Dillon’s shoulder and stabs it with his knife. The Yautja later finds the killed scorpion.

After the trauma of having seen his good friend, Blain, killed, Mac flips out that night and uses his knife to stab to death something moving around in the dark, what he thinks is the Predator. It turns out that a large pig is what has scared him.

Now, how should we interpret the meaning, the political implications, of this blurring of the boundary between predator and prey? I see three possible interpretations here: a right-wing conservative one, a mainstream liberal one, and a Marxist-Leninist, anti-imperialist one.

The right-wing interpretation, probably felt by the average moviegoer who is just entertained by the film without giving any thought to its political implications, is just a straightforward sense that the Yautja is the bad guy, and the soldiers–for all their faults–are the sympathetic victims. Their faults are negligible; their imperialist acts are not even an issue. Their predation is projected onto the Yautja, one hundred percent.

The centrist liberal view acknowledges the troops’ guilt, which is an extension of liberal guilt in general. Nevertheless, the troops are seen as sympathetic. The operation, purportedly to go into the Central American jungle to rescue the cabinet minister, is seen as legitimate (even though the alleged minister would just have been part of the puppet government the US had installed anyway, and so kidnapping him would have been part of the guerrillas’ plan to liberate themselves from US imperialist exploitation). Dillon’s deceit, to get Dutch to agree to rescue the former’s CIA colleagues and to stop the Soviets, is considered going too far. Therefore, the American soldier and the Yautja are predators. ‘There is bad on both sides.’

As for the leftist, Marxist view, it’s the US troops who are the relevant predators, while the predation of the Yautja should be understood as a matter of getting those troops to understand how it feels to be the prey. We hope this insight will inspire actual US troops out there watching the film to reflect and show true penitence.

It’s significant that Billy, being at least part Native American (as Landham was), notices early on the terrible danger that the Yautja poses to all the troops. The collective unconscious of the aboriginal of the Americas, having the memory of the predatory white man’s incursions on his land and genocide, would give Billy an instinctive sense of the movements and intent of the alien Predator.

Elsewhere, there’s the curious friendships between white and black soldiers in Predator. I say ‘curious’ because, while there’s the historic racist animosity caused by the former group against the latter one, there’s also the neoliberal accommodating of the latter group into the capitalist/imperialist structure. Consider how, since this film was made, we’ve seen blacks rise in the ranks of that structure (Colin Powell, Condoleezza Rice, Barack Obama, Karine Jean-Pierre, etc.) instead of attaining parity with whites in a meaningful, socialist context, in which those at the bottom would rise, instead of just a few of them rising and joining an elite who all tower over the rest of us and bestride the narrow world like a Colossus.

Apart from the black/white friendship we see between Mac and Blain, the former mourning the latter’s death in a particularly traumatic and revenge-seeking way, there’s also the shaking of hands between Dutch and Dillon at the film’s beginning, an iconic moment parodied in many satiric memes since, and a handshake that quickly turns into an arm-wrestling…with Dillon losing, of course.

This superficially liberal white/black friendship is a pretense of racial equality that masks the white supremacy inherent in Western imperialism. Dutch wins the arm-wrestling because Schwarzenegger gets top billing, not Weathers. Most of the heads of the CIA have been white men, but CIA-man Dillon gets the blame for the deceitful mission, not his superiors. His death includes the dismembering of his arm, a symbolic castration, and he’s killed before he can get the use of his other arm to fire a phallic gun at the Yautja.

Billy, instinctively knowing the invincibility of the Yautja as mentioned above, has no illusions about the ability of the surviving members of the team to kill it. Allowing the alien to kill him isn’t just a sacrifice to help Dutch, Anna, and wounded Poncho to get farther away from it; despairing over what he feels is the impossibility of defeating the Predator, Billy is essentially committing suicide. Since the Yautja is an interplanetary imperialist/colonialist, Billy finds it to be far more impossible to kill than even the white man who settled in what’s now the Americas.

One would think Anna would know that her only hope of protection from an alien that flays its victims is this group of American soldiers, but she has no illusions about her ‘safety’ among them. As a member of the guerrillas, pretty much the only survivor of the Americans’ raid of their camp, Anna attempts to escape her captors, for she knows, as scary as the alien is, the American troops are the real predators. Besides, as Dutch observes, the Yautja won’t kill her because she’s unarmed–there’s no sport in hunting her.

She calls the Predator “the demon who makes trophies of man,” since it not only flays its victims, but it also collects their skulls, like a headhunter. We associate this kind of heinous, barbaric behaviour with ‘primitive’ peoples, but since there’s been a blurring between its predatory behaviour and that of the US troops, we can see its prey as not being all that civilized, either.

Finally, of course, Dutch has to face the Yautja alone. There are such levels of irony here. A predator has become the prey. A tough guy is made to be vulnerable. He is left to fight with primitive weapons (i.e., booby-traps) against a technologically advanced alien, just like an aboriginal against the white man. He’s covered in mud to hide himself, and the mud–his ‘war paint,’ if you will–makes him look like a ‘filthy, dark-skinned native’ who shouts out a war cry to attract the Yautja.

On the other side of the coin, the Yautja’s dreadlocks make us think of such groups as the Rastafarians, inspired by, among others, the Mau Mau freedom fighters who resisted the colonialist British authorities in the 1950s. Its face, with the arthropod-like mandibles–which provoke Dutch to call it “one ugly motherfucker”–suggests a predatory crustacean…or an animal that we may eat. We always call ‘ugly’ those who resist imperialism, while also projecting our imperialism onto them.

Since we naturally sympathize with Dutch, though, the irony–of a predator fighting for survival against a predator whose appearance in a number of ways can be associated with those fighting off predators–is lost on most moviegoers. Conservative members of the audience can be smug about the American ‘good guys’ fighting off an evil alien invader…rather like all those…foreigners…who are ‘invading’ our country as refugees.

Liberals, on the other hand, can have their cake and eat it, too: while acknowledging the irony of predators fighting off a predator to survive, they know the average moviegoer will miss this irony and cheer for the first set of predators with a clean conscience.

It is the leftist viewers of the film who will recognize the Yautja as the ultimate imperialist and settler-colonialist, personifying all that is evil, ugly, and horrifying about those US troops who, let’s face it, deserve to be hunted.

‘The Ancestors,’ a Horror Story, Chapter Twelve

After several minutes of the most painful of efforts, Al was just beginning to feel a regaining of control over his body. Just a bit, at first: he could stir slightly, he could fidget and budge, all while suffering a terrible headache to deter him.

Freddie looked over at him and saw his face wincing in pain, the slight movements that suggested someone other than Mei was trying to control Al’s body. Freddie smirked at the amusing sight.

“What’s the matter, loser?” he asked Al. “You trying to hold in a fart? That was directed at Al, not at you, Mei. It looks like he’s trying to regain control.”

“He’s trying to,” Mei’s feminine voice said through Al’s mouth. “He won’t succeed…not for the moment, anyway.”

“Not ever, I’d say,” Emily said. “He’s never succeeded at anything in his life, except annoying people. I’m surprised he can make his body move at all, with you there, Mei.”

“I must say, Mei, that we were wrong to have stopped praying to you,” Freddie said.

“We’re both very sorry about that,” Emily said.

“Just aid us in what we wish to accomplish here, and all will be forgiven,” Mei said.

“He obviously sucked at praying to you all,” Freddie said, “since even his prayers weren’t enough to placate you. As Emily said, Al can’t do anything right.”

“That he actually killed our father, as Meng has told me in my thoughts…”

“And Po told me in mine,” Freddie added.

“…and he didn’t stop his bitch girlfriend sitting over there from killing our mother–that’s all the more reason for Freddie and me to hate Al. Feel free to kill him, too, Mei–we won’t mind.”

“Not at all,” Freddie said. “Kill that loser.”

“Oh, we’ll have him killed,” Mei said. “And we won’t stop with him.”

All three of them looked over at Hannah, bound and gagged in her chair at the other side of the table in the dining room. She was still unconscious.

They stared at her and grinned.

“She’ll make such a tasty dinner,” Freddie said, looking over at possessed Al, and knowing that he could see and hear everything said and done at their dining table…but he could do nothing about it. “Mmm!”

All three of them repeated “Mmm!” even louder while looking at Hannah. She stirred a bit.

Al gained a bit more control of his body, and he made it shake so the legs of his chair rattled against the tiles of the dining room floor.

This was enough to wake Hannah up.

Finding herself bound and gagged, with all three remaining Dan family members staring maliciously at her, she whined through her gag as loudly as she could to produce a scream, while shaking her chair and rattling its legs on the floor as much as Al was.

Assuming her crazy ex-boyfriend wanted her dead as much as his crazy brother and sister did, Hannah couldn’t understand why he was fidgeting in his chair as she was. Was this some pathetic, fake attempt to convince her he still loved her, to make her believe he was indeed possessed by the spirit of one of his ancestors? Did he really think she was stupid enough to believe that?

“You’re gonna taste so good when we’ve cooked your flesh, like a giant turkey,” Freddie said with a laugh, his taunting eyes going back and forth to look into Hannah’s and Al’s. “Yes, Hannah. We’re gonna make Al kill you, cut your body up into pieces, cook them, then eat them…that is, our ancestors will, and Al will. He’ll do it, ’cause he’s so weak! Isn’t that right, loser?”

Al was shaking the chair even more.

“What are you so upset about, loser? You’ve eaten her before, haven’t you?” Freddie laughed.

“Don’t be crude, Freddie,” Emily said.

Al’s shaking and rattling of the chair was getting more and more violent. He almost fell off of it, but he clasped his hand on the table, his fingers inches away from a large, Japanese deba bocho meat cleaver.

“Mei, you aren’t losing control of him, are you?” Meng’s deep, masculine voice said through Emily’s mouth.

“He’s…getting stronger, but I’m…managing,” Mei’s feminine voice said through Al’s mouth.

“If we beat him into submission, will you feel the hurt, or can you leave his body temporarily?” Po asked in that distinctly gravelly, grandmother’s voice, through Freddie’s mouth.

What? Hannah thought with eyes agape. How is Al’s sister talking with a man’s voice, and he and his brother are talking with women’s voices? Can crazy people really imitate voices so precisely, as unnatural as it would be for their biological voices to do? Or am I going crazy?

“Is that you speaking, Po, or is it Freddie?” Meng asked, as if she were as surprised as Hannah. “It sounds like something he’d like to do to Al.”

“It’s most likely a combination of Freddie and me,” Po said, putting a smirk on Freddie’s mouth. “You should be aware that, as we spirits continue possessing these bodies, our wills become more and more merged with those of the bodies.”

“Isn’t that true, Al?” Meng asked him, putting a smirk on Emily’s mouth now, to taunt Al as he continued to shake his body and take it back from Mei.

Meng and Po turned Emily’s and Freddie’s heads back to looking at Hannah as she continued to struggle, in as much futility as Al, to free herself. The two possessed bodies were licking their lips.

“She’s gonna taste so good, isn’t she, Al?” Freddie said in his own voice. “The ancestors are opening my mind to cannibalism; I never imagined I’d develop a taste for it.”

“Same here,” Emily said in her own voice. “Funny what a little demonic possession can do to your head.”

The two noticed that Al’s struggling was abating. He was sitting much more still now.

“Mei, if you have regained control over his body, why don’t you pick up that knife and start cutting her up?” Freddie said.

Al had completely stopped shaking now. Mei looked at Freddie calmly.

“Yes,” Mei said with a smile. “I have fully regained control of the body.”

“Good,” Freddie said in Po’s voice, then got up. “Let’s do this.”

Mei and Meng brought Al and Emily to their feet, Mei gripping that Japanese knife in Al’s hand.

The three of them walked toward Hannah.

She was whining in a shrill, raspy voice behind that gag, fidgeting frantically in her chair. Her tearful eyes looked up into Al’s, desperately looking for his expression rather than Mei’s. All she could see was the cold expression of a killer.

That’s not Al that I see, she thought as the three had almost reached her. It’s not Al at all. Not even a crazy version of him. Could it be a demon inside him?

They were at her chair now. Her ankles were tied to the front legs of her chair, so she couldn’t even kick at her tormentors. She could only squeal and shake.

Emily and Freddie held the chair still from the back, while Al stood before Hannah, Mei having him raise the knife high over his head, ready to come down on her with a stab in the chest.

Mei and Hannah looked in each other’s eyes, the latter’s full of pleading, and the former’s utterly empty of pity. Hannah kept looking for Al, somewhere deep inside those eyes. He had to be there. She searched and searched back there, but she still couldn’t find him.

Now, instead of squeals and whining from her gagged mouth, sobs of despair were coming from it.

I shouldn’t have told him I wanted to dump him, she thought. I want my Al back, crazy or not.

And then, she could finally see Al in those eyes.

And no, it wasn’t hallucinatory wish-fulfillment.

The knife came down in a slashing arc…

…and it dug deep in the middle of Emily’s chest.

“Emily!” Freddie screamed. “Al, you piece of shit!”

Her body fell to the floor, soaking it with blood.

“Mei, I thought you had him under your control!”

“She stepped aside for the moment, it seems,” Al said in his own voice with a grin, then he pointed the knife at Freddie. “And you’re next…loser!”

“Oh!” Freddie said with a chuckle. “You think you’re gonna take me on? C’mon, loser, try it!”

They stepped away from Hannah. They faced each other behind her. She kept whining and struggling.

“C’mon, loser, cut me! Let’s see what you got.”

Al slashed from right to left, aiming for Freddie’s chest; but Freddie grabbed Al’s arm by the wrist, squeezed it hard, and made him drop the knife. Then Freddie punched him hard in the gut.

“Ooh!” he grunted, then fell to the floor.

Freddie picked up the knife and smiled.

“I’ve always hated you, Al. You know that. But your killing Dad, letting your big-nosed, white whore kill our Mom, and killing Emily here give me all the justification I need to dice your guts into a million bloody pieces!”

As Al was getting back up, Freddie ran at him with the knife and threw him hard on the floor. Al banged his right shoulder on it; it hurt like hell.

Freddie started by slashing Al’s face several times.

“There,” he panted. “Now you’re even uglier. Think your bitch girlfriend’s gonna like that? If you do, you’re even stupider than I thought, loser.”

He slashed Al’s face again.

“It won’t matter if she doesn’t like it, though, ’cause I’m gonna kill you now.”

He sat up and raised the knife high over his head, ready to come stabbing down.

Hannah was going crazy not being able to see or help Al. Her only comfort was not watching him die.

Freddie brought the knife down, but Al’s left hand caught him by the wrist just in time. The tip of the blade was a few millimetres away from Al’s chest. Both arms shook as they debated over where the knife would go.

Freddie looked in Al’s eyes with much more than his usual non-fraternal malice. Al was at first looking back into his brother’s eyes with the same hate; then he turned his eyes away to look at Freddie’s hand.

“Yeah, that’s right,” Freddie panted, spit dripping from his mouth onto Al’s bloody face. “You’re weak. You always were weak.”

Hannah could only whine and shake in her chair in blind helplessness.

Al brought his mouth over to Freddie’s hand. He bit two of the fingers holding the knife. He sank his teeth in deep, bloodying Freddie’s hand and his own chest.

“Aaah, you fucker!” Freddie screamed, then he dropped the knife to suck on the cut.

Al pushed him off with a strength he never knew he had, then kicked him hard in the balls. As Freddie buckled, Al grabbed the knife and ran at him, knocking him to the floor.

Al held the knife with the handle down. He wanted to bash Freddie’s face in before stabbing him. The wooden handle smashed down on Freddie’s forehead once, on his nose twice, breaking it, on his left cheek three times, his right cheek once, his chin twice, and his mouth four times, knocking out two upper and two lower teeth and soaking his face in blood. His bruises would look like a black-and-blue mask.

“You’re still…a loser, Al,” Freddie gasped in toothless lisps.

Al flipped the knife around to point the blade down. “Yeah, Freddie,” he said. “You’re about to be stabbed to death…by a loser. Be proud of that.”

He plunged the blade deep into Freddie’s throat, shutting him up once and for all.

Al let out a big sigh, then got off of Freddie’s body. He went over to Hannah and cut her feet and hands loose.

She got up from the chair and got the gag off in an impatient hurry.

“Oh, thank God,” she sighed. “And thank you, Al, for stopping them.”

He just stood there–silent, unmoving, frowning, and looking down at the floor, his face dripping blood all over it and his shirt.

“Look, I realize now that…your family…had some serious…well, mental health issues,” she said, searching for the kindest way she could put it. “And it’s…obviously harmed you…emotionally, too. I think we can work this out. We’ll find…a professional…to help you through this.”

Still gripping the knife, he started shaking and twitching.

“Oh, no, NO!!! Hannah, get away…from me!”

Leftist Fundamentals

Photo by AXP Photography on Pexels.com

I: Introduction

We leftists tend to be our own worst enemies, far more so in many ways than the ruling class are. Instead of banding together in solidarity and planning how to overthrow the ruling class, we far too often would much rather bicker and argue over relatively minor issues of doctrine or political analysis.

We tend to forget, it seems, that the ruling class are far more united in the implementation of their agenda than we are. Sure, liberals currently are all in a dither over the recent reelection of Trump, wringing their hands and acting as though the world is about to come to an end, just as they did in November of 2016. I’d say, however, that all of this rending of garments is more of a media melodrama, meant to distract us all from how it’s more the political system is just continuing down the same neoliberal trajectory it’s been going along for the past forty years than it is some kind of imminent Night of the Long Knives.

We know the media is manipulating us, yet we don’t know. Each new outrage that gets thrust into our faces, be it the latest Israeli atrocity, updates on the Ukraine war, or Project 2025, is presented to us in a way meant to rile our anger, though not to unite us–rather, to get us to fight with each other over the ‘correct’ way to interpret what’s happening. The ruling classes laugh at us as we fight each other instead of fighting them, because the attempt to get ego gratification over ‘winning’ an argument with another leftist is far easier than setting aside our petty differences and fighting the real enemy.

None of this is to say, however, that there are no legitimate differences of opinion among leftists that can be safely disregarded. Unity on these fundamental points, the subject of this article, must be respected if we’re to move ahead and organize to overthrow the capitalist class. As for the petty issues so often bickered about, those can be dealt with once the revolution has been successfully achieved, and a socialist society is being built.

Photo by Ehsan Haque on Pexels.com

II: The Fundamentals

The following are the basic points we leftists should all agree on. There may be variation on how to interpret what these points exactly mean, or how they should be put into practice, but here they are, and they are not negotiable:

The complete replacement of capitalism with a state-planned, socialist economy. No social-democratic compromises with the market, please. We’ve tried that before, with the welfare capitalism of the post-war period, 1945-1973; when attempts like this are made, so that capitalism is ‘more comfortable’ for the working class, it’s only a matter of time before the ruling class gets sick and tired of paying higher taxes and negotiating with unions. Then they start seducing the public with the allure of ‘small government’ and the ‘free market,’ which will lead us right back down the Reaganite/Thatcherite path to the neoliberal nightmare we’re in now.

The only scenario in which a socialist state can tolerate a market economy is when a developing country needs to pull itself out of poverty by building up its productive forces, as countries like China and Vietnam have done. Once these productive forces have been fully built up, though, the left-wing factions of their communist parties should regain their preeminent influence, and guide the nation beyond the primary stage of socialism.

Now, I know any anarchists reading this will wince at my advocating a socialist state. As a former anarchist myself, I can understand how they feel. My suggestion to them is to use dialectical reasoning to resolve the contradiction between having and not having a state. A sublating of this contradiction would be to have the kind of state that withers away. I also recommend reading this.

Stalin was committed to the idea of advancing socialism to the point of a centralized state eventually dying out…when it would be possible to do so (not when there was the threat of a Nazi invasion, and not when the Americans had the atomic bomb). The obstacle to such an end goal was not his ‘tyrannical lust for power,’ contrary to imperialist propaganda (Stalin asked to resign from his position as General Secretary of the Soviet Union no less than four times, but was refused, contrary to the myth that he was a dictator with absolute power; for further reading of a defence of state socialism, anarchists can go here); that obstacle was imperialism’s relentless attempts at sabotaging socialism. This leads me to my next point.

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Commitment to opposing imperialism in all of its forms. The wish to free ourselves from capitalist exploitation must not be limited to the Anglo/American/NATO-allied countries of the First World. The entire globe must be liberated. No one is free until all of us are free.

The modern stage of capitalism, coming to reach a zenith from around the mid-to-late-19th century in such forms as the Scramble for Africa, has been imperialism. This consists of, as Lenin observed, the concentration of production and monopolies, the new role of the banks, finance capital, the export of capital to other countries, the division of the world among the capitalist powers, and competition between the great powers over which will dominate and be the greatest exploiter of the world.

A crucial element of imperialism is colonialism. One starts with the idea that one supposedly has the right to move into the land where someone else–the indigenous community–has lived for many, many generations, if not centuries, then supposedly has the right to take over and kick the indigenous population out. If they don’t like that, one can simply kill them. This is the basis of the imperial problem: that one can steal the land from those who lived there first.

This is the settler-colonialist foundation of the US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Israel, and many other countries. From this dubious foundation, the settler-colonialist imagines he has the right to go into other sovereign states and steal their natural resources to enrich himself from them. So from settler-colonialism, one proceeds to imperialism.

Just as the boss imagines he has the right to exploit his workers and steal the fruits of their labour to enrich himself, so does the imperialist, a natural outgrowth from the settler-colonialist, imagine he has the right to exploit the indigenous peoples and steal their natural resources. He can achieve this exploitation and theft militarily or through neocolonialism–an indirect control of the dependent country by such methods as financial obligation through international borrowing (think of the IMF and the World Bank).

Other forms of imperialist control include interfering with the political process of the dependent countries by fomenting coups d’état to remove democratically-elected heads of state to replace them with leaders who will be puppets of the empire. There are many examples of this slimy tactic: Iran, 1953; Guatemala, 1954; Chile, 1973; and Ukraine, 2014 are just a few examples.

Yet another form of imperial control is the manufacturing of consent for war to further the interests of empire; this manufacturing of consent is achieved through the deceitful media that works for empire, which leads to the next point.

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One must recognize imperialist propaganda for what it is, never trust it, and always oppose it.

The managers of empire are relentless in their efforts to teach us who they want us to love, who they want us to hate, who to despise, and what we’re supposed to dismiss as ideas thrown into the dustbin of history. Hence, TINA and the “end of history.”

Imperial propagandists are fond of telling us of those heads of state regarded as ‘evil dictators’ who must be removed from power for the sake of preserving ‘freedom and democracy.’ Examples of such undesirables from the recent and more remote past include Stalin, Mao, Milosevic, Saddam, Gaddafi, Assad, Yanukovych, the Kims, Putin, Xi Jinping, etc.

This is not to say that all of the names above are completely beyond reproach. It is just that we should not feel antipathy towards them merely because the Anglo/American/NATO-allied empire says they are all bad men. For whatever wrongdoing these men are…or are not!…guilty of, the Western empire is guilty of much more wrongdoing.

A detailed discussion of the sins of capitalism is beyond the scope of this article, but if you want to delve deeper into that, Dear Reader, you can look at this and this, the latter being something I wrote back in my then-naïve anarchist phase, but scroll down to the fourth section, marked “Capitalist Crimes.”

The point to be made here is that the Western imperialists always need to have an enemy, a political scapegoat on whom they can project all of their vices. Starting around seventy-five years ago (as of the publication of this article, of course), that enemy was communism, which the imperialists were desperate to discredit out of a fear of leftist revolution.

The last great taboo to be broken in leftist thinking is the defence of Stalin, who–thanks to decades of having our heads pounded in with anti-communist propaganda–is portrayed as a kind of left-wing version of Hitler. The idea is as absurd as it is offensive, given that Stalin’s leadership of the Red Army–who did most of the work fighting off the Wehrmacht, with a sacrifice of about 27 million Soviets–was crucial in defeating the Nazis. One is normally called a hero for doing that.

Apart from the fact that the deaths under Stalin are wildly exaggerated and taken out of context (and imperialist propaganda is so pervasive that only Marxist-Leninist sources will offer a different perspective), one should consider how even in recent years, large percentages of Russians, who haven’t lived under a socialist government in decades, still have a high regard for Stalin and look back on the Soviet years with nostalgia. If people are worried about the admiration of dictators, they should worry about all the people out there who still admire Hitler.

But more importantly, what is the real reason Stalin is so vilified? The fact is, his leadership demonstrated that one really can stand up to the imperialists, successfully fight off a vicious fascist invasion, and build socialism in one’s country (i.e., provide free education, healthcare, housing, full employment, etc.). He took a backward society made up mostly of illiterate peasant farmers and transformed it into a modern, industrialized, nuclear-armed superpower by the time of his death. This all was achieved within the space of about twenty-five years. That is nothing short of impressive. The capitalist West felt nothing short of threatened.

The Western media couldn’t let such achievements be spread around freely, inspiring Western leftists to want to bring about socialism in their respective countries. So a propaganda Blitzkrieg had to be unleashed all over the capitalist West, terrifying people with a narrative that communism not only ‘doesn’t work,’ but also leads to brutal totalitarian dictatorships, even though the CIA secretly knew that the Gulag was nowhere near as bad as the media were claiming it was.

Of course, the western propagandists had a lot of help from ‘dissident leftists,’ like George Orwell, Milovan Djilas, Noam Chomsky, Leon Trotsky, Mikhail Gorbachev, and Nikita Khrushchev, the last of whom denounced Stalin and his ‘cult of personality’ in a secret speech in 1956. Such traitors as these have given us leftists the “unkindest cut of all.”

After the counterrevolution was complete by the early 1990s, and the imperialists as the only superpower could do anything they wanted to any other country with impunity, it was time to look for a new enemy to draw attention away from the discontents felt in the imperial core, and in the 2000s, that enemy became Islamic terrorism. Though there was considerable opposition to the Bush administration’s decision to invade Iraq in 2003 to steal from the country, the notion of regime change to remove ‘brutal dictators’ and further the cause of ‘freedom and democracy’ has been the accepted rationale–thanks to the corporate media–for all the banging of the war drums since.

Of course, having Democrats in the White House has made it a lot easier to manufacture consent among liberals, hence the Obama administration’s destabilizing (with France’s help) of Libya–with virtually no protest from those who’d protested Bush’s invasion of Iraq–to remove Gaddafi, all because–apart from Sarkozy’s financial entanglements–the Libyan leader wanted to establish an African currency, based on gold, that would free Africa from being chained to the IMF and World Bank, something the Western imperialists would never abide.

Then the imperialists went after Assad, their real reason being, again, to steal their oil, while using the media to lie to us about Assad ‘gassing his people’ and other such nonsense. They‘re still stealing Syrian oil (and wheat), by the way.

Yanukovych wanted to partner with Russia to help Ukraine deal with its financial problems without having to be dependent on the IMF, but such a decision was unacceptable to the West, hence his ouster, to be replaced with a government and military including Russophobic Neo-Nazis. This anti-Russian attitude leads us to the next enemy of the empire.

Russia is reviled not because ‘Putin helped Trump win’ in 2016, a baseless accusation that just fueled the fire and helped manufacture consent for the needlessly bellicose attitude that has led to this awful war in Ukraine, taking away billions of dollars that could be used to help the American poor and fix their country’s crumbling infrastructure. The recent Russophobia and Sinophobia are really because Russia and China, as objects of American hate, are getting stronger (i.e., the BRICS alliance) while the Western empire is deservedly dying.

Still, the Western media, mostly owned by the top oligarchs and, as capitalists, have interests fully entwined with those of imperialism, have convinced a huge swathe of the Western population into believing that Russia and China are our latest enemies, as well as Iran, North Korea, Venezuela, etc. For us to believe such nonsense is, of course, far more convenient than to believe the far more uncomfortable truth, that it’s our leaders, both conservative and liberal, who are the problem.

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We must stop hating only one half of the ruling class. It’s the entire system–DNC and GOP, Tory and Labour, Tory and Liberal, etc.–that must be opposed. We must give up on such things as Trump Derangement Syndrome. It’s so ridiculous–and hypocritical–that liberals are up in arms whenever Trump does something admittedly awful, such as rounding up ‘illegals,’ putting them in cages via ICE, and kicking them out of the country, but when Obama or Biden did more or less the same thing, liberals largely ignore or rationalize the problem.

On the other side of the coin, Biden and Harris are rightly despised for their support of Israel and its ‘right to self-defence’ (translation: its apartheid, genocidal policies), but little thought is given to the fact that Trump will be every bit as supportive of those policies when he comes back into office in 2025.

Enough of the black-and-white thinking! In the larger scheme of politics, the ideological differences between conservative and liberal are petty. Both sides are capitalist and imperialist: that’s what matters, not the minutiae that they disagree about. That their squabbles are mere right-wing infighting is especially true in a neoliberal world in which income inequality is at an extreme, homelessness is an epidemic in many parts of the world, most mainstream politicians, conservative or liberal, support the US/NATO proxy war of helping Ukrainian Nazis to fight Russians, thereby provoking the danger of a possibly nuclear WWIII, and most of these politicians support Zionism.

We cannot expect real change when we get upset if a party representing one side of the capitalist class, the side we don’t personally like, wins, but we rest on our laurels when the party representing the side we do like wins. The entire system must be dismantled. The only way to achieve this dismantling is through revolution, not through voting, which is meaningless and only perpetuates the system.

As Mao said, “Revolution is not a dinner party.” Revolution isn’t ‘nice.’ It is violent, it is forceful, it is difficult, and it requires planning and organization. People like voting because it is easy; the ruling class likes voting because it takes the people’s minds off of revolution.

A true left-wing revolution, as opposed to mere liberal, social-democrat reforms, will guarantee such things as these:

–the means of production are controlled by the workers
—private property is abolished
–commodities are produced to provide for everyone
—elimination of class differences, leading to…
–…no more centralized state monopoly on power, and…
–…no more money (i.e., replaced with a gift economy)
–an end to imperialism and all the wars it causes
–an end to the huge gap between the rich and the poor
–an end to global hunger in the Third World
–free universal health care 
–free education for all, up to university, ending illiteracy
–housing for all
–equal rights for women, people of colour, LGBT people, disabled people
–employment for all, with decent remuneration and hours
–a social safety net in case of job loss

Conservatives abominate such changes. Liberals speak of gradual, gentle nudging in the left-wing direction without ever really delivering. When some progress has been made in the leftist direction, the right-wingers complain, liberals tend–in varying degrees–to cave in, and we move back in the rightist direction, as we have for the past thirty to forty years. Small wonder Stalin once said, “Social-Democracy is objectively the moderate wing of fascism.”

Does that quote sound too extreme to you, Dear Reader? Consider how the Social Democratic Party of Germany opposed the failed communist German Revolution of 1918-1919, favoring instead the Weimar Republic, upon whose foundation it took only a decade and a half thereafter to lapse into Nazism. Consider how the Democratic Party, about five years after the dissolution of the USSR, gutted welfare, created the Telecommunications Act of 1996 (merging the American media into six corporations), and interfered with the 1996 Russian election to keep pro-US Yeltsin in power. Finally, there’s of course the Biden administration’s pouring of money into Ukraine.

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III: Conclusion

That list you saw a couple of paragraphs ago–those are the leftist fundamentals, right there. I just had to expand on some of them, and make a few more important points to show how indispensable these ideas are to eliminate capitalism and imperialism once and for all.

The point is that once a revolution has been achieved, that isn’t the end of the struggle. The forces of reaction will do everything in their power to restore capitalism, and we have to have a strong defence against that. This is why a socialist state is needed: not only to implement the transition (the dictatorship of the proletariat, or a workers’ state–true democracy) from capitalism to full communism, but also to protect the gains of the revolution; otherwise, our efforts will all be in vain.

Whenever a socialist state was either weak or non-existent, the revolution was short-lived. The Paris Commune and the Spanish Revolution of 1936 are noteworthy examples of such nobly lofty, but ultimately failed, revolutions.

In today’s perilous times, we can’t afford to be soft leftists (translation: liberals); we have to be HARD leftists, always wary of backsliding into liberalism. That means that in today’s imperialist stage of late capitalism, we can’t stop at being Marxists: we have to be Marxist-Leninists.

To be this way, we must advocate a state-planned socialist economy; we must oppose all forms of imperialism, but especially in its current Anglo-American-NATO form as the contemporary, primary contradiction (though if, in the future, any of the emerging powers from BRICS grow to be substantially imperialist, they must then be opposed, too); we mustn’t trust the mainstream, corporate media and its pro-empire propaganda; and we must oppose the entire system of capitalism/imperialism, not just get upset if, for example, the GOP wins, but be content if the Democrats win (or vice versa).

There are no quick and easy answers. Our enemies are far too well-equipped militarily, and far too adept at using the media and modern tech to play mind-games on us and surveil us, to keep us compliant. We must similarly undergo training–that is, our young and able-bodied comrades–and we must learn to organize and plant seeds of revolution in the minds of as many fence-sitters out there as we can. This latter is what I try to do here on this blog.

Let’s do it, comrades.

‘The Ancestors,’ a Horror Story, Chapter Eleven

Hannah’s heart was beating even harder and faster now that she heard the door open and Freddie and Emily walk into their parents’ bedroom. It wouldn’t take long for them to deduce that she was hiding under their mom’s and dad’s bed.

Her mind was still racing, trying to make sense of all of the craziness that had been happening up until now, and especially now that she was next to be killed. Still, her priority was wondering what she’d do when Al’s brother and sister…and Al himself, once he was to come down from the attic after that kick she’d given him in the balls…found her. She had no time to process any of this.

She listened for Freddie and Emily.

Total silence.

No shuffling around, looking for her.

What were they doing? If they knew she was under the bed, why not just get down, look under, and grab her by the feet? Were they toying with her?

Yes, they were, actually.

The siblings were standing by the bed, looking down at it. There was nowhere else in the room for Hannah to have hidden, anyway–no closet big enough for her to fit into. Emily put her finger to her lips to tell Freddie to be quiet. They were smirking.

Hannah could hear light, unintelligible whispering.

“Let’s wait a while before getting her,” Emily said softly in Freddie’s ear. “Give her a moment to think through what’s happened…also drag out the terror for her, and the false hope.”

“Good idea,” he whispered back in Emily’s ear.

Hannah’s heart still pounding as hard and fast as ever, she began to think through everything that had happened to lead to this nightmare.

This was just supposed to be a pleasant dinner for both of our families to meet each other, she thought. Al was so resistant to me meeting his family, but I assumed it was just going to be some mundane problem. I never would have imagined, in a million years, that his family would be a bunch of murdering psychos…and that Al himself was one of them, too!

“Where is that loser, Al?” Freddie whispered.

“Shh!” Emily said, pointing at the bed.

All in one night, Hannah thought, I went from pleasantly anticipating meeting Al’s family, mine visiting them, and assuming I’d marry Al and unite our families in mutual love, to not only realizing that Al was being bullied by them, but also…having all of my immediate family…brutally murdered (She tried to hold back a sob), and worst of all, Al is one of the killers! I went from hopes of extending my family, to include his, to losing my family, Al’s family, and having to dump the man I love…loved! How could such extremes happen?

Now she let out an audible sob.

“Alright,” Emily whispered. “Let’s do this.”

She and Freddie squatted and looked under the bed.

Hannah at this moment was still far too absorbed in her thoughts to notice the siblings coming down to see her. This craziness has gotten so extreme, she continued thinking, that I have become a killer, too! I stabbed Al’s mom with that knife! It was self-defence, but I’d never in a million years see myself killing someone…wait…

She felt Freddie’s and Emily’s hands on her ankles, pulling her out from the bed.

“Ah!” she yelped, then grabbed onto the bedposts at the head of the bed to stop them from getting her out. The siblings kept yanking and yanking at her shaking legs, their grip irritating her skin and causing her shoulders and wrists to ache, but she kept a firm hold on those bedposts.

The siblings stopped yanking for a second, let out sighs of frustration at the same time, and in the voices of Po and Meng, they shouted, “Fang shou!”

Magic in those Chinese words forced Hannah to let go of the bedposts.

She screamed as Freddie and Emily pulled her out from the bed, her unable to conceive how mere words could force her to let go. Her screams were cut short by a blow from Emily’s fist on her head, smashing her face on the wooden floor, giving her a nosebleed and knocking her out. Meng’s spirit had given Emily’s fist extra strength.

“Let’s tie her up and take her downstairs,” she said in Meng’s deep, male voice.

“There’s rope in the room next door,” Freddie said in Po’s raspy, feminine voice. He left the room.

In the hall, he saw Al having just finished coming down the attic stairs.

“Where have you been, you loser?” Freddie asked in his own voice. “You’re fucking everything up again, aren’t you? Where are Mom and Dad? Emily and I are trying to take care of your girlfriend, and you’re wasting time in the–“

“Don’t talk to me that way, boy!” Al said in Mei’s authoritative, feminine voice. “I was stalled by Al’s determined efforts to regain control over his body. He killed your father, and Hannah killed your mother. I’ve finally subdued Al, so I can help you and Emily now.”

“Sorry, Mei,” Freddie said, bowing and gesturing to her with his hands clasped together. “I have to find some rope in the other room. Meng is with Emily in our parents’ bedroom. Hannah is knocked out. We have to tie her up and take her downstairs.” He went in the room to find the rope.

Mei took Al’s body into his parents’ bedroom.

Though Al’s soul, for the moment, was fully under Mei’s control, he was able to see, however passively, Hannah lying unconscious on the floor. He tried with all of his might to regain control over his body, but Mei was ensuring that he couldn’t make his body budge an inch.

Is Hannah dead? he wondered.

He couldn’t even weep for her.

Freddie returned with the rope, a bandana, and a small rubber ball to use as a gag for Hannah’s mouth. All three Dan family members, under the control of Po, Meng, and Mei, helped tie up and gag Hannah.

They carried her downstairs and into the dining room, and with some remaining rope, they tied her to a chair. They sat next to each other, Emily in the middle, at chairs on the other side of the table.

The whole time, Al had been trying, in all futility, to take control of his body and stop the other two. All he could do was watch helplessly, and be forced to help them through Mei’s possession of him.

“So,” Freddie said in Po’s voice. “What should we do with her, Al? We know you can see and hear us.”

“But you can’t do anything about it,” Emily said in Meng’s voice. “You broke our agreement, Al, so we’re under no obligation to do anything for you.”

“And doing things to upset you has always been much more amusing than doing things for you,” Po said. “What shall we do with her?”

“Kill her, of course,” Meng said.

“Of course, of course,” Po said. “But how?”

“In a way that Al will find the most upsetting. We should make him hold the knife that cuts into her chest.”

Al wanted to scream “NO!!!” at the top of his lungs…but he couldn’t even grunt.

“Then we can make him cut her body into pieces, cook them, and serve them as our dinner. The Dan family may have been sated at dinner, but we ancestral spirits haven’t had a bite to eat. We’ll let Al have the biggest share of Hannah’s cooked flesh.”

Mei curled Al’s lips upward in a smirk.

Al couldn’t even weep.