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.

‘Mama,’ a Psychological Horror Novel, Chapter Three

It’s celebration time here at home! Four hours into it, and I’ve already had a glass of red wine to start off, then two glasses of Kahlúa and milk, three glasses of Bailey’s Irish Cream, and four glasses of Jim Beam and Coke.

I. Am. So. Wasted.

I’ve been listening to music from YouTube videos, often annoyed by the ad interruptions. For the past hour, I’ve been playing a compilation video of songs from the 1980s. At the moment, I’m hearing one I haven’t heard in years. I don’t remember who did the song; I’m too wasted even to remember the song’s name, as ridiculous as that sounds.

The rhythm section sounds like a combination of heavy pounding on the drums with a drum machine. The keyboards are dark and eerie, while the singer–whose voice sounds really familiar, but I’m too drunk to place it–keeps doing a perverse, evil laugh.

What I do remember, and vividly at that, about the song is a line I’m singing along to: “Don’t leave me, Mama!” I sing it out loud, powerfully…then I remember my neighbours, above, below, and on either side of my apartment. I listen carefully for any reactions to the noise I’m making.

All I hear, apart from the song, is a feminine voice whispering, “I won’t leave you, Roger…ever.”

I stagger, almost falling on the floor.

*************

Several days have passed by since my little solo party on the night of the funeral day. I was too oppressed by my killer hangover the next day even to give a second’s thought about the voice I’d heard. So far, since hearing that whisper, I haven’t noticed anything disturbing or unusual.

My aunt is running the pet food store with the expected efficiency. I begged her to let me call her just by her name, without “Aunt”: she’s grudgingly allowing me to, thank God.

Sometimes, as I’m walking from my apartment to the pet food store, or the other way around, or if I’m out for any reason, such as to buy something from the grocery store, I’ll see that man again. He’ll gesture to me, wanting to get me to talk to him. I’ll turn my head away and pretend he’s not there. I really hope he’ll get the hint and stop bothering me.

Anyway, here I am on the sidewalk, on my way to the pet food store. As I’m walking past a park, I can see that man sitting on a bench under a tree. Oh, God, he’s waving at me! I’m turning my head away to ignore him–that should work.

Wait…what’s that over there? The face on the street sign on the other side of the street. It’s showing a man selling beer, but the mouth is moving. I hear, “Go on. Talk to him,” in a feminine voice.

It’s the voice of my mother.

I trip over a break in the sidewalk and fall on my face. As I get up, I can hear people laughing at me.

****************

Having arrived at work, I’m visibly shaken, for my aunt has noticed the fear on my face. “Roger, what’s wrong?” she asks.

“Oh, uh…I fell down,” I say. “It was embarrassing. People were laughing at me. You know how sensitive I am about that kind of thing.”

“Well, be more careful,” she says. “When you change into your Pet Valu shirt, the first thing I want you to do is face the cans.”

“OK,” I say; I change into the shirt, and go into an aisle to face the cat food cans. I see a middle-aged couple entering the store–a man and his wife, I assume. They’re coming into my aisle to look at the cat food.

After looking at the cans for a while, the woman says, “Hmm. No Whiskas to be seen anywhere here.”

“We should be getting a shipment later today,” I tell her. “Any time, really. I’m surprised it isn’t already here.”

“Could you ask your boss, please?” she asks.

“Sure,” I say. “Ma–er, Aunt–er, J-Jane?”

“Yes, Roger?” I hear her say with a sigh of annoyance, obviously from my not calling her Aunt Jane. “What is it?”

“Have the Whiskas arrived yet?” I ask her.

“The truck is on its way as we speak,” she says.

“When do you think it will get here?” I ask. “There’s a lady here who wants to buy some.”

“It should be here in about ten minutes,” she says.

“Can you wait ten minutes?” I ask the customer.

“Well, I’ll come back in about a half hour,” she says. Then, just as she’s walking away, I hear her say, “Go talk to that man in the park.”

Her voice changed distinctly into that of my mother.

The cans I had in my hands have fallen to the floor, just barely missing my feet.

**************

I haven’t heard Mama’s voice at all for the rest of the day, but I’ve been shaking the whole time. Is that voice real, or have I been imagining it? It sounds too exact, too vivid, to be an auditory hallucination.

After a week, I’m lying in bed at night, drifting off…

At night, I see the graveyard where Mama was buried. My eyes are like a movie camera, slowly coming closer to her grave. I see a yellow mist rising from the ground before the headstone. The mist stays there for a moment, hovering there. Then it floats away.

I see it moving down the street, in the direction of my apartment. My camera-like eyes follow the mist like a tracking shot. A white fog, like the kind you’d see in England, is all around, surrounding the original mist, which is still floating along, a hazy spot of yellow moving in the white haze. The yellow reaches my home.

It slips through my bedroom window like a ghost. Indeed, it is a ghost, for it wakes me from my sleep. I hear Mama’s voice: “Roger! Roger, wake up! It’s Mama.”

I wake up and look at the yellow mist, in the centre of which I see her face forming. She is grinning malevolently at me. “What do you want?” I ask in a tremulous voice. “You haven’t come here to kill me, have you? Have you come here for revenge?”

“Oh, no!” she says in a hissing voice. “On the contrary, I want to thank you for helping me to liberate myself from the limitations of my physical life.”

“Limitations?” I ask, my eyes and mouth wide open.

“Yes. Being in a body puts great constraints on the magical powers that a witch like me can use. Now that I am all spirit, I am free to roam anywhere and do anything I like. Killing myself wouldn’t have worked, because the spirit world frowns on suicide as a sin, just like the Church does. So I needed to prod you into making that voodoo doll and killing me with it. And you, my dutiful son, did exactly that! You freed me from the prison of my body, and now I want to thank you for your gift of love! My good boy!”

“And what are you planning to do with all your newfound freedom?”

“Oh, I’m planning all kinds of mischief! Nothing I can tell you about in detail, though, since you, now acquainted with the magical arts, might try to stop me. If you want to stop me, you’ll have to hone your skills to a level matching a witch who’s been a master for decades, so you’ll have a lot of catching up to do. And with that bad habit of yours, always seeing and hearing things, you already have quite a bad handicap, so I’d advise not even trying to interfere with my plans, OK? Gotta go now, son. I have some wickedness to indulge in, now that my corporeal chains have been broken, thanks to you. Oh, how delightful it is to have power over so many people! What fun this will be! Don’t worry about it. You’ll see what I’m up to soon enough. ‘Bye!”

The glowing, golden mist evaporates, leaving me in total darkness.

I rise from my bed with wide open eyes, a pounding heartbeat, and sweat all over me. I’m shaking. My bedroom is as black as it was before, minus the mist. Was that a dream, or a vision? It’s hard to tell the difference between the two. Has this all been real, or have I been imagining it? Is Mama really a ghost, reappearing in my life to torment me, or is all of this just a reflection of my fears and guilt?

Come to think of it, it makes perfect sense that she would have planned my killing of her with the voodoo doll. That was far too easy; surely, she would have known, or at least suspected, what I was doing, with her far greater mastery of magic. So as strange as it may seem to believe she’s returned as a spirit, believing I, a novice in magic, could outwit her, is even less plausible.

This must be real.

As a witch, she’d know all about the spirit world and how to use it to aid her in her manipulative purposes. To become such a spirit herself would simply be the next step for her, no longer needing the aid of other spirits.

I’m in trouble.

The whole world is in trouble.

I’m not going back to sleep, that’s for sure.

Jenga

Today’s
world’s
a game
which is
played
by fools,
teetering,
a tower
liable to
fall at any
time now.

The left
is
marginalized
as
usual.
Few, if any,
are
listening
to any of
their
dire
warnings.

The right
is
dominating
discourse
while
pretending
that
affairs
aren’t
enough
to
the
right.

The centre
pretends
to be
left,
while
inching
further
and
further
to
the
right.

Pieces
keep
being
pulled
out
without
any
regard
for
balance.

The edifice
will one day fall to the floor,
a heap of ruins we’ll have to clean up,
yet may not live to do so. There are far too
many holes in the stack as it is: let’s be careful.

‘Resurrecting Ptah,’ an Erotic Horror Short Story

I: Dedication

This short story is dedicated to my Facebook friend, she who goes by the intriguing pseudonym of Dorian Grey (I must do an analysis of that novel one of these days; in the meantime, there’s this one, which has lots of allusions to the novel.), and she whose AI art is full of black cats, witches, mushrooms, cat-women, nuns, etc., which have inspired this story as well as my other one, “Sister Sorceress.” This story is also dedicated to her “old familiar,” Peta, and a friend of hers, Cain Helsson. I hope they like what I wrote.

II: Loss

Clara Jefferson bawled as she held the dead body of Ptah, her beloved black cat named after an Egyptian god, in her arms. The loss of this pet, her only friend in this whole rotten, cruel, uncaring, stinking world, was unbearable to her.

The one thing that gave her the hope to carry on was that she had been practicing sorcery for so long. The shelves on her walls were filled with books on such topics as ceremonial magic, how to contact the spirit world, various spells, world mythologies and religions, and the like. At the age of forty-five, Clara had been studying these books for almost thirty years. She was a master, and now she was about to work out a master plan to resurrect her cat.

It was either resurrect Ptah, or kill herself, for she knew she could never live without him. She hadn’t become a master of the spiritual and magical arts just to commit suicide, though.

She already knew, from memory, a number of rituals and spells she could use in aid of bringing Ptah back to life; but this would be such a difficult and complex act of sorcery that she would have to study hard, in the minutest detail, to get this done right. She put the cat’s body on the floor and immediately reached for a few books on her shelves.

She spent hours perusing these and many other books, jotting down notes, ignoring her hunger and fatigue. After reading enough, for the moment, she decided it was time to summon the spirits to give her aid and counsel.

…and which spirits were those that she confided in?

Trusting few, if any, people in this world of liars, cheaters, abusers, rapists, and corrupt politicians and clergy, Clara had sought the rarest, most obscure religious traditions she could find, searching for one untainted by the lure of money and power. She learned of the ancient pagan traditions of the Liput, an old tribe living on a small island off the west coast of what is now Finland. Over two thousand years ago, the Liput practiced animism and a kind of polytheism that phased into pantheism, or a spiritual oneness of all things. Such ideas appealed to Clara.

III: Summoning Divine Aid

Deep in a state of meditation, she was beginning to hear the soft, inarticulate moans of Talas, the Liput goddess of the sea. Soon, those moans became intelligible speech, the ancient language of the tribe, in which Clara had become fluent after years of rigorous study.

I know what you want, the goddess said in Clara’s mind. Are you aware of the great price you will have to pay to get Ptah back?

Yes, I’m aware, Clara said in her thoughts to Talas. Tears were rolling down her cheeks. I still want my cat back.

It is not natural to move the energy, which has left your cat, back to its body, the goddess warned. All life comes and goes, Clara. You must accept that. You should allow the energy of Ptah to flow where it will in the universe, wherever that may be, as far away from you as it may be. Give up your attachment to your dead cat, and your suffering will end.

I want my cat back! Clara insisted in her thoughts. She was moaning and sobbing. I’ll do anything to get him back!

Very well, Talas answered. There is a way to bring Ptah back, but you will need the aid of Lechi, the Liput god of mischief. In your studies of us gods, you’ll know his ways. He can be outright evil if he wants to be. However you negotiate your way into getting his aid, you will have to be extremely watchful of his tricks. Ensuring that you have come the closest you can to having your genuine cat back, in body and spirit, while also ensuring that he can do as little wickedness to you, in body and spirit, as possible, will demand the subtlest and cleverest use of spells and ritual magic that you can possibly muster.

I’m aware of the complications and dangers, Clara told Talas. To work with Lechi, while making my ritual flawless, will be like navigating a mine field. Still, I want to do this.

I will summon Lechi for you tomorrow morning. For now, study your books thoroughly. Take no detail for granted. Think of every possible obstacle, for he will find ways to get through your protective walls. Good luck, Clara.

Thank you, Talas.

Remember that the cat you resurrect, even through the best and most careful of rituals, won’t be absolutely the same as Ptah was. It may be the most ingenious of facsimiles, but it can never be exactly the same cat, however close it may come to such sameness.

I’m prepared to accept that.

Also know that as tight as your security is against Lechi, he will find some way to get at you, however slight that way may be for him. What he does to you will be, at the very least, something unsettling, something disturbing. Your safety against him may be impressively close to perfect, but never absolutely perfect. He is a god, after all, and you are just a mortal. You will have to accept whatever he demands from you in return for his aid, however you may circumscribe it.

I understand, Clara told Talas before the goddess vanished.

IV: Fear of Violation

After reading through all of the relevant passages in her books, anticipating what to expect from Lechi, Clara got out all of her tools and magical weapons, laying them out all over the floor of the red room where the ritual was to be done. These weapons were all daggers and swords, and the tools included several wands. A large magic circle was drawn on the floor, with a pentacle inside.

So many daggers and swords were needed to repel Lechi’s advances, since Clara knew, from her extensive reading, of how lewd and lascivious the god was. His sexual proclivities, being often quite perverse, triggered the most sensitive of feelings in her, for Clara was first raped by her father when she was a teen. In fact, she got into magic in order to learn how to protect herself from his lust.

Her mother had ignored her cries for help when he was preying on her, conniving at it, even, so Clara would satisfy his desire so her mother wouldn’t have to. It was for reasons such as these that Clara eventually used her magic to kill both of them in a car accident, then collect their vast amount of money and property so she could live self-sufficiently without need of a job.

She’d feed herself through gardening and a vegetarian diet; her garden was also where she collected various magical properties and drugs from her herbs and many mushrooms. Having no job was a blessing: no need to deal with so may people in whom she had no trust.

She did her rituals in the nude, and sometimes peeping Toms would watch her through her windows at night. Though forty-five now, she used her magic to ensure she’d always have the shapely, buxom figure of a twenty-year-old. Nine lecherous men in her neighbourhood liked her for her beauty, though through her magic, she made sure they’d never get their filthy hands on her!

She shuddered every time she realized any of those nine men were looking in her window during her rituals, often feeling PTSD flashbacks of what her father had done to her. This was why she needed so many consecrated daggers and swords, all fanned out in a circle surrounding her: they were a crucial part of her magical, protective wall, ensuring that no one could ever get inside her house, already protected with an electronic security system to be extra sure, or get at her body.

In fact, she was so sure of the efficacy of her daggers and swords that she found it amusing to think that those voyeurs/potential rapists all wanted the lovely naked body they saw, but could never have it. Her tantalizing of those men was her torturous punishment for all rapists.

Still, dealing with Lechi would be far more difficult. She’d need more than her daggers and swords to keep him away from her. They would be necessary, but not sufficient; and sure enough, having her delicious body would be one of his demands in exchange for his help in resurrecting Ptah. Clara would have to be extra subtle in tricking him into thinking he’d get what he wanted, while ensuring he’d never actually get it.

V: Lechi

The next morning, nude and meditating in the red room, sitting in the middle of her magic circle and pentacle, she summoned Lechi.

You are lovely, he told her mentally, in what felt to her like a grunt of lust, as he studied every inch of her body. I already know what I will want in return for helping you get your cat back.

Talas told you? Clara asked him in her thoughts.

No, I read your mind just now, my pretty.

She shuddered, knowing how difficult it would be to stop a mind-reader from knowing of her plan to cheat him out of having her. She would have to bury her thoughts and feelings deep down in her unconscious if she was to have any hope of him not detecting them.

I know what you want from me, she told him. I know your reputation as an incubus. Please spare me the filthy details. Just tell me what I have to do to get Ptah back, and I’ll do whatever you want.

One detail I must share, he insisted. I want to have you in a physical form, not just as a spirit. I want to enjoy you sensually.

Very well, she told him while a tear ran down her cheek. What must I do in the ritual to bring my cat back from the dead?

One thing crucial to the success of your ritual will be the collection of nine human skulls, he said.

May I dig them up from a graveyard? she asked.

No! You must have nine people decapitated. Have someone else do it for you, to deflect the bad karma away from you. Your killing of your mother and father is already a bad enough karmic burden for you. Find a young, strong, but naïve man who is in love with you; such a man would be willing to do anything for your love, and your magic and mushroom drugs should make him all the more obedient to your will. Gordon Marsh, from your neighbourhood, would be a good choice.

She trembled again at the realization of how thorough Lechi’s knowledge was of her private thoughts–to know of her killing of her parents–and of her neighbours. He’d only just come here, and already he knew of Gordon, one of the peeping Toms! Outwitting this god would be a formidable task. Still, she wanted Ptah back, and would do anything to have him again.

Why must it be nine skulls, specifically? she asked Lechi.

Come, come, Clara! A sorceress who has practiced for as many years as you have should already know of the symbolism of nine. Three symbolizes completion, so three times three reinforces that completion. Also, cats have nine lives, don’t they? Not literally, of course, but my point is that not only can I help you get Ptah back, but I can also allow you two potentially to live forever together…would you not like that? That is what the ‘nine lives’ will symbolize. Finally, I am aware that there are nine people in this neighbourhood whom you would like to see dead, are there not?

Yes, there are, she answered, remembering not only the eight peeping Toms other than Gordon, but also the woman she suspected of poisoning her cat for always trespassing in her garden, Ms. Bellows…that bitch! Still, such killings would be dangerous to her in terms of karma, as desirable as they were to her, so her next question to Lechi (though she already knew the answer to it) was this: and why must I have nine people die so Ptah can live?

Oh, Clara, I am disappointed in you! You surely know the religion of the Liput better than that! You’ve read of the unity of opposites as a central feature of the tribe’s belief system. There is also the unity of life and death. To have the one, you must allow its opposite. To bring about Ptah’s life, you will have to bring about someone’s death.

Yes, I suppose so, she acknowledged.

And with my willingness not only to help you bring your cat back, but also to let you and him live potentially forever in love and happiness, surely you will be willing to let me enjoy you while I am in physical form? he asked. She could feel his lewd smirk. Not only do I assure you that I will not hurt you at all, but I will also make it most pleasurable for you, even more than for myself.

His promises reminded her of her father’s words before raping her: “Don’t worry, honey,” Dad would say while unzipping his fly. “I’ll be gentle. In fact, I’ll make it better for you than it is for me.”

She cringed at the recollection, but she couldn’t let on to Lechi that she was unwilling to indulge the god in his disgusting desires. Very well, she told him. As you wish.

Good, he replied. Go find that young man, Gordon Marsh. Get him to hack off the nine heads. He, as one of your peeping Toms, could be incited to do the violence with a combination of you promising him he can enjoy your charms with a spell you can put on him to make him more obedient.

Yes, Lechi, I’ll do all of these things. Just help me get my cat back, she begged.

I will keep my promises if you keep yours, Clara.

He vanished.

VI: Preparations

Resurrecting Ptah would test her skills at magic to the maximum. Could she outwit a god? Could she ensure that Lechi kept his promise to her while she failed to keep her promise to satisfy his lust? She would have to set up powerful spells to keep him bound to his promises, while also sufficiently augmenting her sword-and-dagger protection against his every attempt to ravish her.

Also, she’d have to ensure, through her own spells and the structure of her ritual, that the resurrected cat really was Ptah, in body and spirit. Though Talas was right to remind her that the resurrected cat could never be 100% Ptah, Clara had to try to bring him as close to that 100% as possible–97%, 98%, at least.

She certainly didn’t want the new cat to be anything like “Church,” from that old Stephen King novel. She wanted a cat to cuddle, not one to recoil from.

She immediately went to work at preparing her spells and ritual for defence, for restoring Ptah as faithfully as she could, for deflecting away from herself the bad karma for the killings, and for charming Gordon into committing them.

Her extensive study of the ancient Liput language, a ritually powerful one, allowed her to remember certain ambiguities of meaning that she could use to her advantage. She could remember them without need of consciously thinking about them, which mind-reading Lechi might pick up on and thus thwart her plans.

One such ambiguity was in the meaning of the Liput word zvarge, which could mean “container” or “cage.” She could use this word in her ritual when putting Lechi’s spirit in the body of her cat. Ptah’s body would contain his spirit, yet also cage it, that is, trap it. The nuances of zvarge could be used to trick him into thinking he’d be put into a body–pita in Liput–when really he’d be trapped in her cat…forever able only to see and hear her, and to receive Clara’s touch, but never able to control Ptah’s body.

Lechi would thus be like John Cusack’s character at the end of Being John Malkovich: trapped in a girl’s body, forced to see, hear, and sense only what the girl wants to, and never able to control her body. Clara planned to do the exact same thing to the souls of the nine decapitated people, as well as with Gordon when she was finished with him. She’d sense the longing of all of them in Ptah’s eyes, while only receiving the affection of her cat. She considered such a punishment–such an imprisonment–fitting for all those potential rapists, as she saw them.

She would be sure to say the words zvarge and pita (this second word with the accent on the second syllable, making its pronunciation identical with that of Ptah) nine times, to reinforce the completeness of the imprisonment of all those lechers, to ensure her safety…and revenge.

The nine skulls would be used to augment the protective power of her swords and daggers, making it sufficient to keep Lechi away. She’d have the spirits of the nine decapitated to act as eunuch guards, so to speak, of her body, to ensure no violation of her.

Another convenient ambiguity in meaning was that of the Liput word slivu, which literally meant “decapitated,” but which metaphorically meant “castrated,” “emasculated,” or “impotent.” Her saying of this word nine times in her ritual would also ensure no danger of rape.

Clara would say these words with no especial emphasis on them, to suggest no alternative meanings to the basic ones, while allowing the ambiguities to slip by, undetected by Lechi. She felt she was safe.

VII: Gordon

Now that everything was planned, she had to find Gordon. He seemed a rather simple soul, easily manipulated. He was easy to find, too, for all she had to do was look out her front window and there he was, standing before her house on the sidewalk, looking in, obsessively hoping to see her.

Trembling and reluctant, she nonetheless put on her best smile, went over to her front door, and opened it.

“Hi, Gordon,” she said. “Come here. I wanna talk to you.”

“Oh, hi, Clara,” he said, amazed that she finally noticed him. Smiling back, he hurried over to her. Now standing on her porch two feet in front of her, he was trembling and excited. “What can I do for you?”

“Actually, it’s what I can do for you,” she purred, “if you do something for me, that’s what matters.”

“Oh?” he asked stupidly, his erection pushing painfully against his pants.

“Yes,” she said, still smiling. “Did you know I’m a witch?”

“A witch?“

“Yes.” she dropped her black dress, revealing her frontal nakedness to his amazed eyes.

He was overcome with the sight of all of that lovely, creamy flesh. Unable to resist, he reached over with one had to grab one of her large breasts, and with the other to stroke her shaved vulva.

“Uksha leida binko!” she shouted at him, the Liput words shooting at him like bullets from a machine gun, and the magic causing an electric force field to form, protecting her body from his intrusive fingers, giving them a shock.

“Oww!” he shouted, sheepishly pulling his hands back.

“You may look, but not touch!” she said angrily. “Only when you have done what I want you to do will I let you touch me. For now, enjoy only looking, to motivate you to do my will.” She turned around to give him a view of her curves and her callipygian behind. He gazed at her milky skin, stunned at its flawlessness.

“W-what would you have me do, goddess?”

“Robaya kinestro koubra,” she said, making her dress rise up and go back on her body. “You’ve seen enough, and as you can see, I really am a witch. How old do you think I am?”

“I dunno. Early twenties?”

“I’m forty-five. I look so young because of my magic. That should be enough to convince you that my magic is real. Do you believe I’m a witch now?”

“Not the ugly kind, that’s for sure,” he said. “I’d say you’re a goddess, with your beauty.”

“Aww, you’re so sweet,” she said, smiling and caressing his cheek, which made him sigh and moan. “Are you ready to do what I need you to do, Gordon?”

“Yes, Goddess! I’ll do anything for your love!”

“Anything? Even decapitate nine people with one of my consecrated swords, remove all the flesh, hair, and innards, and give me the skulls for a ritual I need to do?”

He stood speechless and motionless for about ten seconds.

Finally, he asked, “H-how w-will I avoid jail?”

“My magic will protect you from the police,” she assured him.

“What if these people a-are too strong for m-me to overpower them?”

“My magic will give you the strength you need.”

“What if I can’t…I m-mean, what if I don’t have the…stomach to do a-all this bloody business? Cleaning o-off skulls, a-and everything?”

“My magic will give you the ability, physical and emotional, to do all of that.”

“L-look, I’m really crazy about you, Clara, but I-I don’t know if I’m u-up to killing a…”

“Shadzock abba ultika!” she said while looking dead straight into his eyes. He felt a line of energy go straight from her eyes into his.

He was shaking, his eyes and mouth wide open.

“You will do what I need you to do, Gordon. You will not flinch. You will not question it. You will obey me from the beginning to the end.” She kept her steely eyes fixed on his the whole time. “Do you understand, Gordon?”

“Yes, I understand, Clara. I will obey you.” He stood there in a trance.

“Good. I’ll go and get the sword you will use to kill the nine people.” She went back into the red room, got the sword, and returned to him. “Here it is. You will kill these nine people from our neighbourhood: Kurt Davies, Ron Sweeney, Bill Wynn, Shaun Holmes, Jim Fredricks, Phil Sulikowsky, Chris Culig, Jon Schmidt, and Ms. Adrianna Bellows. You know all of them, right?”

“Yes, I know them all. Those eight guys are all big and strong. Your magic will help me win in fights with them all? I hate them all for always watching you, knowing they’d probably have a better chance with you than I could ever have; so I’ll be glad to get rid of them…with your help, of course. But why Ms. Bellows? What did she do to you?”

“She killed my cat, which I want to bring back to life.”

“Oh, you have enough power to do that, eh?”

“Yes, I do.”

“Then, you’ll have enough power to help me kill those guys?”

“Of course I will,” she said with perfect confidence.

He smiled.

“Those guys bully you a lot, don’t they?”

He sighed and frowned, then said, “Yes.”

“Then you have all the more motive to kill them. Go.“

VIII: The Killings

That night, Jon Schmidt was parking his car in his garage. After he got out and closed the door, he heard a shuffling noise in the shadowy corner behind a stack of boxes near the door into the house. He stepped forward.

“Is that you, Ginger?” he asked, thinking it was his cat.

As he got closer, he saw a human figure in the shadows.

“Hey, who are you?” he said defensively.

Gordon emerged from the boxes with the sword.

Jon laughed. “What? That’s you, Scrotum Breath? WIth a sword? You’re gonna kill me with that? You’re so weak, I bet you can’t even lift it.” He continued laughing.

Gordon felt a surge of magical energy buzzing in his arms. That warm tingling was his cue to action. He raised the sword effortlessly to the level of Jon’s neck.

Jon was impressed. “Wow, you can lift it.”

Gordon swung the blade in a graceful arc, cutting off Jon’s head in a smooth stroke.

**************

About a half hour later, Jim Fredericks was sitting on a chair in his backyard patio enjoying a beer and listening to music on his iPod. He’d had his eyes closed for much of the time, so Gordon was able to sneak in with his sword and a large bag holding Jon’s head.

When Jim opened his eyes to reach for his beer, though, he saw a black silhouette moving in the bushes by his fence. “Who is that?” he whispered, then removed his earplugs and got up.

He stepped off the patio and walked across the grass with caution, as tipsy as he was. That human silhouette in the bushes remained unmoving.

“What are you doing on my property, whoever you are?” he said, squinting and failing to make out any details that might have identified the intruder.

Gordon remained silent and still as Jim came closer.

“This isn’t funny. Get off my property, or I’ll pick you up and throw you out.”

Jim was now right in front of the bushes.

“Come out of there!” He brushed a few leaves aside and saw a familiar face. “Scrotum Breath?”

The sword went through his gut before he could laugh his first “Ha.”

************

Twenty minutes after that, Gordon slipped through the unlocked back door of Jim’s next door neighbour, Ron Sweeney, whom Gordon saw lying fast asleep on the living room sofa. The TV was left on, at a low volume, but enough to mask any sounds of Gordon entering and approaching.

By the time Gordon was standing right in front of the sofa, though, with the sword raised up high and ready to come down, slicing into Ron’s neck, his eyes were half open, just making out the black outline of Gordon’s figure.

Ron whined and trembled at first, then switched on the nearby lamp. “Scrotum…?”

The sword had already sliced through before he could say “Breath.” His head fell on the floor and rolled a few times in the direction of the TV.

***********

Carrying a bag with three heads, our swordsman got to the house of Chris Culig about a half hour later. He was taking out the garbage, at the side of his house.

Chris reached for the lid of one of the garbage cans. Gordon was in it, his sword coming up and stabbing Chris in the chest before he could say that hateful nickname.

************

Shaun Holmes lived two doors down from Chris, so Gordon could get there and ready to kill in about ten minutes. Clara’s magic was working like a dream, for though he could hear the screams of neighbours and police car sirens, he felt a kind of force field surrounding him, assuring him that, no matter how sloppy and careless he was being with these killings, he was easily eluding the cops.

Again, the door was left unlocked, thanks to Clara’s magical influence, so Gordon was able to slip inside. Sensing, again, through her magical guidance, that Shaun was coming down from the bedroom to get a bite from the fridge, Gordon waited by the kitchen.

Shaun went in the kitchen with the light left off. He opened the fridge door and focused on all the food he saw there: chicken, a half-finished cherry pie, three quarters of a chocolate cake, etc. He licked his lips as he thought about which food to choose. Finally, after ten seconds of consideration, he chose the pie.

He took the plate of pie out, then looked up from the fridge. The light from the opened door alerted him to the presence of his killer, who hacked his head off after he gave a gasp.

The clanging of the sword against the freezer door, and the smashing of the plate on the floor, were noisy enough to rouse his wife from their bed; but Clara’s magic muted the sounds.

***********

Kurt Davies lived several blocks down the road from Shaun, but Gordon was able to get to him within about ten minutes, because he saw a drunken Kurt staggering on the sidewalk just a few houses from Shaun’s. Gordon tiptoed a few feet behind his next victim.

He particularly hated Kurt for, among many other reasons, inventing the “Scrotum Breath” nickname. Now that he had confidence in his skill at wielding the sword (with Clara’s magical guidance, of course, since normally Gordon was rather spastic), he wanted Kurt to see who his killer was.

“Hey, Kurt,” he whispered from just by Kurt’s right ear.

“Huh?” the drunk said while turning his head.

“This is for you, courtesy of Scrotum Breath,” Gordon said while swinging the sword. Kurt was only able to say the “Sc” before the blade slashed through his neck.

*************

Killing a woman would be hard for Gordon to do, even with Clara’s magic pushing him to do it.

Ms. Bellows’s house was just a few houses down the street from where Gordon had put Kurt’s head in the bag. Though slowed down with reluctance, he knew he had to get it over with, and her house’s proximity made now the sensible time to do it.

He went up to her porch and put his hand on the doorknob. When he turned it, he was relieved to find it locked at first…then he heard a click, unlocking it. Clara’s magic, for sure.

He gulped and stepped inside. She had to be in bed asleep by now. He found the stairs and went up them, as slowly and quietly as he could.

Ms. Bellows was an unpleasant woman, to be sure: cranky, often crabbing at people for some petty reason or another. She once growled at Gordon for walking on her front lawn. But did she deserve to die, and in such a bloody way?

At the top of the stairs, he was now walking down the hall to where he could hear her snoring in her bedroom. At the door and about to turn the knob, he was hesitating: killing those guys for Clara was fine, even enjoyable, but decapitating Ms. Bellows was too much.

Just then, he heard Clara’s voice whispering in his ear: She killed my cat, whom I loved dearly and who deserves to be avenged. Kill Ms. Bellows, and you can have me forever, Gordon.

He turned the doorknob as carefully as he could, not that she’d hear it over her snoring. He walked over to the bed. He raised the sword over his head.

He heard police sirens outside. His hands were shaking. He felt that force field around himself, giving assurance that the cops wouldn’t get him, but he still felt pangs of guilt over killing a defenceless, middle-aged widow in her sleep, all just over a cat.

He looked back from the window and down at her.

Her eyes opened.

She saw his dark silhouette standing over her.

She gasped, shook, and clutched her weak heart.

He brought the sword down, silencing her forever.

***********************

As he lugged the heavy bag of heads out of Ms. Bellows’s house and back to the sidewalk, amazed that the cops taking Kurt’s headless body away on a stretcher found him invisible, Gordon was shaking and nauseous over this last killing. At least there were only two left to kill now, and they were guys he didn’t like at all.

Phil Sulikowsky’s house was on the other side of the block from Ms. Bellows’s, so Gordon had to lug that big, heavy bag all the way around. When he got there, he saw Phil walking his dog, returning from the park.

They were facing each other. “What’re you doing out with that bag, Scrotum Breath?” Phil asked, then chuckled. “Hey, I got some chocolate for you.” He gestured with the plastic bag of his dog’s shit.

Gordon was so angry that he raised the sword and rushed at Phil, even screaming, knowing Clara’s magic would make everyone else deaf to it.

“Hey, what are you…?” Phil said, eyes agape. “No!”

His head spun a few times in the air, blood spraying everywhere.

***********

One more man to kill: Bill Wynn, Phil’s neighbour from across the road.

Baggy-eyed, exhausted, and emotionally drained, Gordon plodded over to the house like one of the undead.

He stood by the porch, with the sword hidden behind him, looking through the front window and seeing Bill in his living room. Bill looked back, saw Gordon, and went over to his front door.

He opened the door and said, “What the fuck are you doing on my lawn, Scrotum Breath? Get out of here.”

“Come out here and make me,” Gordon hissed.

“You telling me what to do? Oh, you’re gonna get it now.”

Bill went out on the porch with a balled fist. He went down the steps and on the grass where Gordon was. Before he could swing, though, the sword suddenly appeared and went through Bill’s gut and out the other side. Gordon’s bloody work was finished.

IX: The Ritual

Everything was now ready. Gordon had brought the bag of heads to Clara’s house. She had him run bath water over all of them, and as the water poured from the shower nozzle onto each head, she said a magical formula in Liput and waved a magic wand in the shape of a pentacle, making all the skin, hair, eyes, ears, and everything inside each head dissolve and disintegrate, and leaving only nine skulls.

Since Gordon had blood all over him, she even used her magic to clean him and his clothes. She needed all traces of the violence removed from her ritual, to ensure that no bad karma would contaminate it.

Everything was laid out as planned in the red room, around the magic circle and pentacle. The swords and daggers were fanned out in all directions, with the nine skulls at the tips of the swords (including the one Gordon had used), all along the periphery of the circle and facing outwards, to keep out any unwelcome spirits, including Lechi’s, most especially, for the moment at least.

Clara, nude, was sitting in the middle of the circle with Ptah’s body in her lap; she’d used magic to keep the corpse from decomposing and putrefying. Gordon was standing in the circle, facing her, but also in a magically-induced trance, to ensure that he couldn’t interfere with the ritual in any way.

Indeed, she was worried that the magic she had used on him wasn’t as effective as she’d hoped it would be. During the killings, he’d showed signs of reluctance and hesitation that shouldn’t have been there at all. She would have to use stronger formulas and incantations to keep him fully under her control.

After all, she had no intention whatsoever of keeping her promise to satisfy his desires in bed, any more than she did with Lechi. Their souls were to be trapped forever in Ptah’s body, able only to see, hear, and feel her passively; the cat alone would retain control of his body.

When Gordon and Lechi were to realize that they were being double-crossed, they were naturally going to try to get out of their prison in Ptah’s brain. Clara was going to have to ensure the prevention of such a danger. She knew some incantations that surely would work to stop these two would-be lovers.

Just before the ritual began, she gave Gordon a cup of hot tea she’d prepared. “Here, Gordon. Drink this.”

“Thank you,” he said, taking the cup and saucer from her. “What is it?”

“Just tea,” she said with a smile. “It’ll help you to relax during the ritual. Drink up.”

As he sipped it, she watched him, noting how he was–in spite of the trance she’d put him in–still shaken up after having killed those people. She needed him to be totally calm, relaxed, in a meditative, suggestible state of mind.

…and magic mushroom tea would do the trick.

He gulped it all down, suspecting nothing, even as he saw her lips moving, whispering a secret incantation to make the drugged tea take effect faster.

Within ten minutes of his having drunk all of it, she was ready to begin, for she could see that his trance-like state was now complete with the aid of the tea. She began the ritual by summoning Lechi, and having the god’s spirit enter Gordon’s body, feeling all of his physicality.

What is this? Lechi thought. Gordon is…under the influence…of mushroom tea. I can feel his…euphoria, and his dazedness. I told Clara…to have him…ingest her mushroom drugs…so she could better…control him…while he was killing…the nine people…not during…this ritual.

She then used this incantation–“Ud Lechi eek zvarge im atta dis Gordon”–to ensure Lechi’s caging, or containment, in Gordon’s soul, or self. There was yet another useful ambiguity in the Liput language: atta could mean self, or soul.

Lechi, already addled by the high from the mushroom tea, wouldn’t notice the ambiguous meaning of atta. The god would think that his spirit was being contained in Gordon’s self, his person, his body, rather than caged in Gordon’s soul. Lechi would think he was merely being put in Gordon’s body so he could enjoy sex with her, rather than being eternally imprisoned in Gordon’s soul. This spiritual incarceration would ensure her safety against ever being sexually assaulted.

To be sure of this safety, Clara of course said this incantation nine times, each time pointing herself in the direction of one of the nine protective swords. Her next incantation would be this: “Ud Lechi ed Gordon ed nuna hashan dis atta zvarge im pita sola chi!” That is, “May Lechi and Gordon and the nine victims’ souls be safely contained in the body [of Ptah]!” Again, she chanted this nine times in the direction of each sword.

Finally, she intoned the following: “Ud Lechi ed Gordon ed nuna hashan slivu its im pita atta zvarge solachi!” Or, “May Lechi and Gordon and the nine victims beheaded/castrated be, safely in the body/soul/self of Ptah!” Again, there was ambiguity in the meaning of these words, beyond the ambiguities already explained. Did her words mean, “the decapitated nine victims,” or did they mean, “May Lechi, Gordon, and the nine victims be emasculated, made impotent, in Ptah’s body”? Clara was hoping to slip this meaning by drugged Lechi without his suspecting; and she chanted this last incantation nine times, in the direction of each sword.

At the end of this chanting, she noticed, as expected, that Gordon was getting sluggish, enervated. He was having difficulty staying on his feet. Now Clara chanted, “Ptah, vivoka! Schlink bur ta tenki!” Or, “Ptah, come to life! Embrace the souls entering you!” And this was said nine times in the same way as before.

She looked down and saw Ptah’s body beginning to stir, ever so slightly. A tear of joy ran down her cheek. She was shaking with expectation.

Gordon fell to the floor, motionless, but with his eyes looking straight at hers, accusing her. She shuddered, knowing that not only was Gordon looking at his betrayer, but also Lechi was. Still, that same look of anger and heartbreak seemed to reassure her that those souls would truly be trapped in Ptah’s body forever.

Outside, there was the sound of the sirens of approaching police cars. Then, Gordon did something unexpected.

He got up.

With hate in his eyes, he plodded like a zombie towards her.

She gasped.

Lechi won’t be contained? she wondered.

Then, Gordon tripped, she used her magic to raise up a sword under him (the same one he’d used to kill the nine victims with, fortuitously), and he fell on it.

Now he would stay motionless.

She could hear the cops barging into her house, so she quickly wrapped a nearby black blanket around her nakedness.

“Oh, God, please help me!” she screamed as the cops came into the red room and saw Gordon lying on the floor in a widening pool of blood. “He just barged in here and tried to rape me and kill me with my sword!”

“Then why has he been stabbed with it?” a cop asked.

“He got clumsy, tripped, and fell on it,” Clara said in sobs. “Earlier today, he barged in here, stole my sword, and ran off with it. I normally use it with all these others for my rituals, but he had this crazy look in his eyes, always yelling, ‘Revenge!’.”

“That’s plausible,” a second cop said. “That’s Gordon Marsh lying there dead. I knew him. You should’ve seen how clumsy he was. All those guys whose heads were cut off, they used to pick on him. I don’t know why he killed Ms. Bellows, but the rest of the girl’s story makes sense to me.”

“Nine decapitated victims,” a policewoman said, “with one of her swords, and nine skulls lying here. The swords are for your rituals, are they? Satanic rituals, by chance?”

“Of course not,” Clara said, then lied, “they aren’t real skulls. They’re all made of plastic.”

“They sure look real to me,” the policewoman said, reaching down and about to pick up a skull.

“Ni tchah!” Clara shouted, suddenly making all the police oblivious to the skulls.

“Well, we’re going to need to borrow your sword for evidence,” the first cop said. “You’ll get it back when we’ve finished the investigation. Apart from that, I’d say the girl’s story fits in with everything else we’ve seen. We’ll need a full testimony from you as we put together the rest of our investigation here.”

“OK,” Clara said, thinking, I’ve finished the ritual. The cops’ taking away my sword shouldn’t negatively affect my magic. The souls are all safely trapped in Ptah’s body. Speaking of which…

She looked over at her cat. The body was stirring a little more. Her heart was beating faster with hopefulness.

X: The Cat Came Back

Clara had to get dressed and go to the police station to give her full testimony and help the cops finish their investigation. It took hours! Thankfully, they didn’t think any more about her magical practices than those of the harmlessly eccentric behaviour of a kook loner.

By the time she finally got back home, though, the sun was already up. She was exhausted, and just wanted to strip and fall down naked on her bed.

As she climbed the stairs to her bedroom, though, she heard something that gave her a sudden burst of adrenaline, making her run the rest of the way.

She heard a meow.

She ran into her bedroom and saw Ptah lying on the bed, licking himself and purring.

“Ptah!” she screamed with tears of joy running down her cheeks. “You’re back! I’ve got you back!” She got on the bed, picked him up, put him on her lap, and stroked him. She couldn’t stop weeping. She was shaking with happiness.

Then, just to make sure, she picked him up and looked all over his body to see if anything at all was different about him. She knew, as Talas had told her, that the cat wouldn’t be 100% the same as before, but he seemed amazingly close to that 100%, for she saw absolutely nothing different.

All of his fur was black, he had his claws, though he knew to keep them in whenever she held him, for she’d used her magic to teach him never to scratch her, even by accident. She abhorred declawing.

The only thing that seemed different, and even this, ever so slightly so, was the even greater love she saw in his eyes, obviously the result of the trapped souls of all of those in Ptah’s consciousness, those of the men–and Lechi–who lusted after her.

XI: Nodding Off

Looking into Ptah’s loving, longing eyes with soaking wet, teary eyes of her own, she whispered, “I love you so much.” Then she kissed him on the top of his head, put him at the foot of her bed, and began undressing.

She giggled as she saw the cat staring at her as she got naked, thinking, This is all you boys in there will ever have of me. When fully nude, she turned around for the cat and giggled some more. See me fulfilling my promise to you, Lechi and Gordon? The cat just sat there looking, with that caged desire in his eyes.

She lay on her back on the bed with her legs apart at about a forty-five-degree angle, with her right foot touching Ptah. She closed her eyes for a few seconds, taking a deep breath and relaxing.

When she opened them, she looked down and saw, of all the bizarre things, Michelle Pfeiffer’s Catwoman licking her between her legs! It felt so good: Clara was getting wet, her labia were beginning to swell, and her clitoris was hardening. Oddly, Pfeiffer’s tongue felt much smaller than a human tongue, but it was still effective. Clara closed her eyes, sighed, and moaned softly.

She opened her eyes again and looked down, but now she saw Julie Newmar’s Catwoman licking her! The tongue’s size felt the same, but so was its deliciously tickling skill as good as ever. Clara was getting wetter, sighing more and more, and moaning louder.

Newmar put two fingers inside Clara, gently and slowly moving them back and forth while tickling her vaginal walls. A third finger was rubbing against her hardening clitoris. While she felt all of these thrills, Clara found that those fingers inside her felt more like one thick finger–in fact, it felt hairy, even fuzzy.

She closed her eyes again and decided not to wonder about the oddity of the sensations; she’d rather just have enjoyed them. She was fidgeting on the bed and letting out little yelps of pleasure.

She opened her eyes and looked down again. Instead of seeing another actress as Catwoman again, though, this time she saw Sister Rosalie Mason, her old grade ten teacher of religion class. This nun, with her pretty face and kindness to Clara (as she’d been enduring her father’s abuse), caused her to have a lesbian crush on her back then in her teen years; so seeing her in her habit, licking her, was just all the more enjoyable. She was soaking wet between her legs, her clitoris fully engorged, and her labia swelling.

She closed her eyes for a few seconds, anticipating an even better lover on opening them. When she did open them, though, she looked to her left and saw Ms. Bellows, standing by the foot of her bed and grinning maliciously.

Then she looked straight up and saw Gordon. He was also looking at her with a malevolent smile. Instead of tongues and fingers, she now felt a phallus moving in and out of her…a furry one, but nonetheless a phallus.

Gordon said, in the panting voice of Lechi, “You actually thought…that your feeble skills…at magic…would be a match…for my power? You did need…that ninth sword…to lie in position…with all the others…to ensure…the efficacy…of your spell. Now all of us..will enjoy you…every time you sleep!”

Clara now felt phalli entering her anus and her mouth. She sensed in them the presence of Bill Wynn and Ron Sweeney. Soon after, she felt a phallus between her breasts, with invisible hands pushing them together and wrapping them around the invisible phallus. This, she sensed, was Jon Schmidt.

The fact that these were all incubi is what kept if from being physically impossible. Next, she sensed the phalli of Kurt Davies and Shaun Holmes respectively in her left and right hands. After beginning to masturbate these invisible masses of meat, she felt two more, those of Phil Sulikowsky and Jim Fredericks, pushing against her left and right armpits respectively. Finally, the invisible hands of Chris Culig took her feet, put them on either side of his invisible phallus, and had them rub it.

None of this probing hurt; in fact, her arousal was soaring. She was sweating and moaning a high-pitched “Mmm!” with every thrust she received, them all being perfectly synchronized. Finally, after another minute, she climaxed with a scream, then they all sprayed bukkake, soaking her with come from head to toe.

The incubi all disappeared. Her eyes were closed, and her mouth wide open, the sides of her lips curled up in a smirk. She let out a long sigh. Then she opened her eyes.

Instead of seeing Gordon on top of her, she saw her father.

“I told you I’d make it good for you,” he said in Lechi’s voice.

Clara woke up screaming. Shaking all over, she needed a few minutes to calm down and feel her heart rate slow down to normal. She whispered over and over, “It was just a dream. It wasn’t real. They never had me.”

Finally calm, she looked down to the foot of the bed. A puddle of come had soaked the sheets between her legs. Ptah was sitting just behind it, with his tongue sticking out.

“A wet dream?” she whispered. “I haven’t had…one of those…since I was…in high school.”

Then she looked at Ptah again. His right front leg was soaked in her gushing. He was looking at her with those loving, longing eyes. He was purring.

“Oh, my God!” she yelled, then, “No, no. That could not have happened. Not my Ptah, no. H-he just…he dipped his leg in the puddle, that’s all! Yeah, I gushed quite a lot, and that’s how he g-got so much of his leg wet with it. That explains it! I just had a dream about those men. They’re all trapped in Ptah’s consciousness; my ritual was c-complete, perfect! There’s no way they could have got out of the mental prison I put ’em in.”

She picked up her cat and hugged him.

“I got you back, Ptah! That’s what matters. I’ve had bad dreams before. They just reflect my unconscious traumas, that’s all. I have you back, and that’s what’s important, even if you did put your foot in my–no, that couldn’t have happened! My life is complete again with you. I’m so happy to have you back, Ptah! I love you so much.”

She would spend her whole day petting, feeding, playing with, and cuddling her cat. That look of longing and love in his eyes never stopped, not even for a second. She was in an ecstasy with him right until sundown, when she would go to bed with him at the foot of it. She would fall asleep smiling from ear to ear.

To sleep, perchance to dream.

Ay, there’s the rub.

Analysis of ‘Blow Out’

Blow Out is a 1981 thriller film written and directed by Brian De Palma. It stars John Travolta and Nancy Allen, with John Lithgow and Dennis Franz.

Though the film pays homage to Hitchcock and a number of slasher films, it is directly based on Michelangelo Antonioni‘s Blowup, replacing the medium of photography with that of audio recording. In this way, Blow Out is also influenced by The Conversation, by Francis Ford Coppola.

Though Blow Out was largely praised on release–in particular, Travolta’s and Allen’s performances, De Palma’s direction, and the film’s visual style–it didn’t do well at the box office. Over the years, however, it has developed into a cult film. Quentin Tarantino has called Blow Out one of his favourite films.

Here is a link to quotes from the film.

Since Blow Out is based on Blowup, it’s useful to compare and contrast the themes in both films. I discuss the themes of Blowup in my analysis of that film, so you can look there, Dear Reader, for a more thorough discussion of that; whereas here I’ll only briefly refer to them as I compare and contrast them with those of Blow Out.

In Blowup, there is an exploration of how one’s perception of reality is deceptive: something caught and frozen in mid-action in a photograph may not be what it seems, since reality is fluid, in endless motion, and so what is caught in the photo may be wildly out of context. Similarly, sounds can go by in time so fast that our ears can miss them…unless one happens to have the sensitive, attentive ears of a sound effects technician like Jack Terry (Travolta).

There are crucial contrasts between these films, though, in their exploration of perception and reality. Thomas, the photographer in Blowup, overanalyzes photos he’s taken, and he ends up imagining a murder having taken place that, in my interpretation at least, probably never happened. His analysis has led to an illusion, projected from himself onto the scene based on his own guilt feelings. Jack’s analysis of sounds he’s recorded, on the other hand, lead to the truth, as well as proof of that truth…though his attempts to publicize that truth are thwarted.

Thomas’s conflict between his faulty perceptions and reality are of a more philosophical nature. Jack’s difficulties proving the truth of what he’s perceived–the sound of a gunshot blowing out the tire of a politician’s car, causing it to fall into a lake, killing him–are the stuff of a political conspiracy, which in the end Jack cannot prove, because the evidence is destroyed.

So both films explore how reality is manipulated in some sense: in Blowup, it’s manipulated in Thomas’s mind in an effort to deflect personal guilt; in Blow Out, a Chappaquiddick-style killing is manipulated to look like an accident, with all the evidence of the blown-out tire removed.

Another point of comparison between the two films is how they deal with sexism. Thomas is routinely disrespectful to his models, generally female, until an assertive woman in the park where he took the photos, which included her and her lover, confronts him about them, demanding him to give her the negatives. In Blow Out, pretty much every woman (apart from extras and a TV anchorwoman) is young, beautiful, sexualized, and–I hate to say it–ditzy. Rather than being a promotion of sexism, though, I’d say that De Palma’s film, like Antonioni’s in its own way, is a comment on sexism.

By presenting almost all the women in Blow Out as hot-looking bimbos, we’re seeing a commentary not on how women actually are, but rather how they’re perceived in society, especially in the media. Remember that a theme common to both films is the contrast between perception and reality, and how perception is manipulated through such instruments of the media as photography and sound effects.

Feminists have written book after book about the evil of presenting women as sex objects, and of how such presentations of women give men power over them. The film’s portrayal of women as stupid and talentless reinforces that sense of female powerlessness under men. It’s easy to see the link, therefore, between on the one hand, female beauty (so attractive to sexual predators) and a woman’s perceived lack of intelligence or talent (i.e., those awful, fake screams for the slasher film that Jack is doing the sound for), and on the other hand, women’s vulnerability to male serial killers. One is reminded of that old Chinese misogynist saying, “女子無才便是德” (“If a woman has no talents, that is virtue for her.”)

Blow Out is known as a film concerned with the mechanics of movie-making, how visuals and sound are put together to make an effective illusion (e.g., Jack’s synching up of the recorded sounds of the blow out and car crash with a set of photos of the incident, run together to make a crude, short film), a story for an audience to get lost in watching. The element of political conspiracy in the film, and the cover-up of the assassination of the politician in the car, presenting it in the media as a mere accident, shows how this film’s preoccupations with the mechanics of visuals and sound can be expanded on into a general critique of the media as a tool used by the powerful to thwart the powerless.

The film begins as what looks like a third-rate slasher film. We see things from the POV of the killer, who is approaching a sorority house at night; we’re reminded of the opening of Black Christmas. That many of the sorority girls are engaging in various forms of naughtiness (dancing in see-through nighties by a window, where a security man is enjoying the show; a woman having sex with a man by her window, where the killer watches them; a woman masturbating in her room) before the killing spree starts suggests a parody of Friday the 13th, released the year before Blow Out.

That POV camera also suggests Hitchcock’s voyeuristic camera, and the killer’s first victim being a girl in a shower is an obvious allusion to Psycho. The actress’s terribly unrealistic scream at seeing the killer’s knife destroys the illusion, and we soon realize that we’ve been watching Coed Frenzy, a slasher film that Jack and producer Sam (played by Peter Boyden) are doing post-production on.

This shift from thinking the slasher film is the real story to knowing it’s a film within a film is comparable to many moments in Blowup when we’re led to believe, for example, that at the beginning Thomas is one of the destitute men until he gets in his nice car and drives away. As in Blowup, a major theme in Blow Out is the tension between appearance and reality.

And just after we’ve been briefly tricked into thinking that Coed Frenzy is the real story, we soon come to realize that much of what’s going on in Coed Frenzy is paralleled in what’s going on in Jack’s story. The theme of maniacal men terrorizing the powerless is seen not only in the killer in the slasher film; he has his double in Burke (Lithgow), a psychopath working for the rival candidate of McRyan, the presidential hopeful killed in the car crash.

Sam likes neither the showering girl’s fake-sounding scream nor the wind that Jack has chosen for the beginning of Coed Frenzy (i.e., with the killer outside the house at night), so Sam wants Jack to help him find a better female screamer as well as to record new wind effects. This altering of sounds to get a more ‘realistic’ effect ironically makes the film all the more fake (i.e., getting the sounds from sources far removed from the originals), and it reinforces the theme of how the media, a tool of the powerful, is used to deceive the powerless.

Jack goes to a park by a lake to record wind that night. As he’s recording the blowing of the wind, we see an example of De Palma’s use of the split screen (i.e., Jack recording in one half, and a closeup of an owl in the other…to get that ominous effect). This splitting-up of the screen causes a kind of Brechtian alienation effect, destroying the movie goers’ illusion that what they see is an actual world, and reminding them that they’re seeing a show. Again, the use of split screen is part of the theme of media as an illusion used to manipulate the emotions of the common people.

Wind, air, breath–these make up a recurring motif in the film, symbolic of life and of communication. If Jack hadn’t been out there this night recording wind, Sally (Allen) would be dead in McRyan’s car at the bottom of the lake–drowned, her air supply cut off. Burke typically kills his victims by strangling them with piano wire, by cutting off their air supply.

The Hebrew word for soul is nephesh, which literally means ‘breath.’ Recall Genesis 2:7. There’s also the Spirit of God, the ruach, which literally means ‘wind,’ or ‘breath.‘ So wind and breath are symbols of life in the film.

Another point is that sound travels through air. Jack’s preoccupation with sounds, the sound of the blow-out of the tire (from Burke’s shooting of it) in particular, letting air out of the tire, further reinforces the motif of air throughout the film.

Only Jack, with his sensitive, attentive ear for sounds, is up to rescuing Sally…and at the end of the film, not even he can save her. He represents that male ideal so many modern women have wanted: a man who listens.

He is the kind of man Sally so desperately needs, because all of the other men in her life exploit her. Manny Karp (Franz) is more or less her pimp, giving her jobs to get in bed with powerful, wealthy men so he can take photos of them together, blackmail the men, and pay her far less that she’s worth. McRyan was supposed to have been thus blackmailed, him being the one challenging the president in the upcoming election, but Burke wanted to blow out the tire of his car as well.

Powerful men like McRyan exploit Sally for sex; sleazebags like Karp exploit her for money and sex (indeed, he even tries to rape her at one point), and psychopaths like Burke want to kill her to clear up loose ends, for political purposes. That Sally is pretty and speaks in a high-pitched, ‘ditzy’ voice, reinforces her sense of naïve vulnerability, her everywoman powerlessness in a male-dominated society.

She is exploited and abused in all of these ways, and she is also made invisible, in how the politicians allied with McRyan don’t want the public to know that she was in the car with him. Keeping her involvement out of the media’s awareness, to prevent a scandal that would taint his memory and hurt his family even worse, is nonetheless another example of disguising the truth with the media, by way of omission. Hence, Jack is made to sneak Sally out of the hospital so the media won’t know about her.

The theme of disguising the truth comes in other forms, including Sally’s own choices. In the hospital, she’s embarrassed to be seen by Jack without her makeup on, though he insists, being the nice, sensitive guy he is, that she looks fine without it. Later, she talks to him about her skill as a makeup artist to make women’s faces look better…that is, to disguise reality in a mask of cosmetics.

Other disguises of reality include Burke’s replacing of the shot-out tire with a new one, so the news will report McRyan’s death as a mere accident, and when Jack insists it was a deliberate murder and a cover-up, everyone will think he’s a crackpot conspiracy theorist. Certainly, Detective Mackey (played by John Aquino), who has done the investigation on McRyan’s death and doesn’t even like Jack (for having used his sound-man skills to put away a number of corrupt cops), thinks the death was an accident and treats Jack’s suspicions with contempt.

It’s significant that Burke, hired by and therefore associated with American politicians, is a murdering psychopath. Hollywood movies typically portray psychopaths as violent killers, as in the slasher films that Coed Frenzy parodies. In fact, this Hollywood portrayal is a wildly exaggerated stereotypification, for usually these people, though lacking in empathy, enjoying exploiting and hurting others remorselessly, and needing excitement, often enough get their kicks within the limits of the law. Burke thus is another distortion of reality in Blow Out.

Still, as an employee of the American government, Burke is aptly presented as a serial killer, as a symbolic critique of the imperialist US government. Consider all of the violent deaths caused by American interference in the politics of other countries. In this connection, it is grimly fitting that this serial killer is referred to as the “Liberty Bell Strangler,” given that the killings occur around “Liberty Day,” the time of celebrations and a parade commemorating the Liberty Bell.

Indeed, the murder of Sally happens right on the night of the commemoration; we see her screaming for Jack to save her while she’s standing against a huge backdrop of the American flag. This land of ‘liberty’ has a killer hired by American politicians going after some of the most vulnerable people of the world–women in particular.

The false presentation of reality–the celebration–is what is seen on the TV. The identity of the serial killer, he being an employee of the US government, is conveniently kept secret, since the news reporters claim that who he is remains unknown…which seems odd when the police, after finding his body, would presumably find some kind of ID on him. The government plot is covered up, and the people continue to believe in the ‘freedom and democracy‘ of the US.

Now, the liberal producers of Blow Out would have us believe that Burke represents an aberration of the system, since the politician in on the plot to blackmail McRyan–during a telephone conversation with Burke, and disgusted with his excesses–tries to distance himself from the psychopath. This is a common liberal tactic: the system, apparently, is OK; we just have to get rid of the ‘bad apples’ in it. Again, this is how it appears to us in the media–not so in reality.

All of Jack’s attempts to present proof of the plot to kill McRyan are erased or destroyed by Burke. Stills from video filmed by Karl are sold to a tabloid, presenting the false story of a car accident instead of a killing. But at least Jack has been able to provide better wind and “a good scream” (Sally’s) from his recordings. It’s painfully ironic that the only way the producers of Coed Frenzy can get a convincing scream is from one of a girl really being murdered.

The weakest and most vulnerable in society are looked down on, demeaned, over-sexualized, and ultimately killed. Only sensitive Jack has seen the human being behind Sally’s pretty face; as a result, he’s fallen in love with her, and he mourns her death, obsessively listening to recordings of her last words before Burke gets to her. He cares for her through listening to her, not leering at her.

Just as his attempts to root out police corruption, through wiretapping someone to record evidence, result in an undercover cop’s getting killed, so do his attempts to expose a government conspiracy, again through wiretapping Sally, get her killed. Jack’s attempts at achieving justice fail; his sensitive listening just falls on deaf…and dead…ears.

‘Mama,’ a Psychological Horror Novel, Chapter Two

And now that we’ve arrived in my apartment, I’ll take you over to Mama’s bedroom, where I’ll show you the proof that she was evil and, therefore, I had to kill her. Just step this way and follow me.

Here, her room. It looks pretty ordinary, doesn’t it? With all the usual things: her bed, her dresser, her closet, etc., nothing out of the ordinary, right? Well, let me show you something in one of her dresser drawers that will make your hair stand on end!

I’ll just open this drawer, and…here it is, this book. Look at the title: Bewitching Smells…er, Spells. Let me open it up and flip through the pages, so you can get a full idea.

Check out all these herbs she uses to make magic spells: lavender, rosemary, basil, thyme, sage, etc. I’ll flip past these pages and show you some more interesting, incriminating stuff…

Here, look at all these pictures of bottles of potions. If you didn’t know any better, you’d think they were bottles of perfume or something, but I know! They’re all phials of magic potions she’d been using on me and on anyone else she wanted to control!

Anyway, we can look at that later. I’ll just put it back in the drawer for now. Now–you, the man I see in the mirror of Mama’s dresser drawer, my superego, my conscience, as it were–come with me into the living room, and there I’ll tell you the whole story: how I found out she was a witch, how I plotted to kill her using a little magic of my own, and how she actually died at my hands. Let’s go.

Yes, let’s sit on either side of the living room TV, you on the sofa under the mirror where I can see you, and me in the big, comfy chair. It all started with this TV, where I was just starting to watch a horror movie on Netflix. I’d never seen any of the Friday the 13th movies, not being interested in any of them, but nothing else was on that night.

Mama was going to bed. “You keep the volume down, Roger,” she told me as she was going into her room. “I have to get up early tomorrow to do some work at the pet store.”

“OK, Mama,” I said as the movie began. There was this strange sound I’d hear from time to time in the movie: “Ch-ch-ch-ch…ha-ha-ha-ha…”

Several more minutes into the film, I heard her call to me from her bedroom: “Roger?”

I paused the film. “What is it, Mama?”

“I left my pillow on the sofa,” she said. “You know, my little pink one. Bring it in here for me, would you?”

“Yes, Mama,” I said, then took it into her room. I’d left the door wide open as I handed it to her. I looked over at the top of her dresser, where the book was sitting, all white and innocent-looking, except for its title, which I barely made out in the dim light coming from the living room: Bewitching Spells.

I shuddered as I stared at it, frozen in my tracks for several seconds.

“Roger?” she said, waking me out of my daze. “You can go now. I’d like to get some sleep, if you don’t mind.”

“Oh, yeah, uh…sorry, Mama,” I said, then went out of her room and closed the door. I went back to the TV and unpaused it. I no longer paid any attention to the movie, though I sat on the sofa in a trance, staring at the screen. I kept hearing an echoey, reverberating whisper: “Kill…Mama…”

That night happened a couple of months ago, and I kept hearing that whispering in my head, over and over again, in the days and weeks that followed: “Kill…Mama…” I also kept the vision in my mind’s eye of that white book cover, with that disturbing title: Bewitching Spells.

The day after that night–always hearing “Kill…Mama…” in my mind’s ear, again and again, at least once every two minutes, and often far more frequently than that–I waited for her to leave the apartment for the pet food store. As soon as she was gone, I went right into her room to look at that book again.

Now it was in her dresser drawer, the same one you and I just saw it in. I’m sure she was trying to hide it from me, though hiding it had slipped her mind on the night that I first saw it, surely.

Though I flipped through the pages and saw all the pictures of the herbs and phials of magic potions, as you and I just saw, I was careful not only to keep the book in its drawn-out drawer, but also to keep it in the exact same position in the drawer, so she wouldn’t suspect I’d found it and learned of her schemes. Indeed, apart from opening the book and flipping through the pages, I didn’t move the book one millimetre from where she’d left it.

Yet as I flipped through the pages and had my worst fears about Mama confirmed, I felt a tear or two run down my cheeks. Apart from the sheer terror I felt knowing what power she’d had over me, the power she’d always had, I also felt the most stinging betrayal. How could she have done this to me? I’m her son! She was supposed to love me, not hex me! What had I done to deserve such an evil mother?

Memories of my relationship with her flashed before me: all those times she’d bullied me, told me what to do in her growling voice, showed me no pity or compassion whenever I’d been hurt as a child, all of those things now took on a new meaning for me, a meaning that gave no comfort, but a meaning that at least made some sense of all of my life’s suffering. It had all been her fault!

The most significant of all of these memories, starting from my early childhood, was how I’d always felt incapable of fighting back. Oh, I had the rage inside me to fight, I oh, so wanted to, but somehow I couldn’t. It was something deeper, more fundamental, than mere cowardice…it was like a mental block, like Alex DeLarge and the Ludovico Technique used on him to stop him from committing crimes.

Now I knew what the cause had always been for my consistent inability to stand up for myself. It was her magic spells, all used to control me! That’s why not only could I never stand up to her, but I also could never stick up for myself against all the bullies at school, in the neighbourhood, even against little kids! Yes, I was that pathetic, but in my defence, Mama had been jinxing me the whole time!

Knowing my own mother had always wanted me to be weak and cowed, this hurt more than anything else ever had in my whole life. Her magic had done nothing less than ruin my whole life. By the end of this meditation, with her book open in that drawer in front of me, I was sobbing. Fortunately, none of my tears dropped on the pages, so Mama wouldn’t know I’d been looking at them.

I closed the book and the drawer, then I went out of her room, wiping my tears off my face. I kept hearing that reverberating whispering: “Kill…Mama…”

I’m sure that at least a large portion, if not almost all, of my hallucinating–visual and auditory, for the most part–has been the result of her spells. It was part of her scheme to control me, to make me doubt my senses and feel that I needed her total guidance in life.

My hallucinations cannot, however, have all been directly caused by her magic. That voice I kept hearing, the one that whispered, “Kill…Mama…”, couldn’t have been caused by her spells. Why would she have wanted me to kill her? She never showed any suicidal tendencies, and even if she’d secretly wanted to die, she could have simply killed herself–why involve me in it?

No, that voice telling me to kill her must have come from another source. Since she was surely using her magic to control other people, as well as me, there must be spirits out there, agents of good, that recognized her evil and wanted me to be their agent of justice, of retribution.

For though her spells weren’t the source of every single voice I’ve heard in my head, her spells surely altered my brain to the point where I’ve been creating my own hallucinations, my mind altering the things I see and hear to serve some kind of purpose that I’m not consciously aware of. I had to remove her from my life in the hopes that her spells might wear off soon after, and I will then be free to live a normal, happy life, at last!

Hey…wait a minute. Who is that? Just a sec. I wanna look out the window, and see who that is. Hey, that’s that man at the funeral, the one my aunt tried to introduce me to. What’s he doing there, standing across the street and looking up at my window? What does he want? He doesn’t still think he’s my father, does he? What a creep! I’ll give him the finger: there, that should get rid of him…good. He saw it, and he’s going away.

Alright, back to the comfy chair, and back to my story. Now, to kill her, I knew I had to be really careful, ’cause with her skill at using magic, she’d probably see me coming from a mile away; so I knew that using any spells from her book would be a no-go from the start. I’d have to get a magic book of my own. I wouldn’t even bring the book into the apartment, nor would I research anything online at my laptop here. I’d go to the library on the other side of town, take notes there, and proceed accordingly.

In the library, I found a book on how to make a voodoo doll. I knitted it up at home, telling Mama that it would be a gift for her great niece, my aunt’s granddaughter, five-year-old Emma. I did a convincing acting job, even if I say so myself, telling Mama the lie with a perfectly calm voice and face. She was surprised at my generosity: her only doubt was that I had any inkling towards doing something nice for anyone, let alone sweet little Emma, whom I sincerely adore. This was the kind of hurtful attitude I’d always resented in Mama.

Nonetheless, she never indicated any suspicions in what I’d been planning. I kept at work knitting up that doll, privately amused that she was seeing me there creating the instrument of her imminent death, and not knowing of that at all. Of course, as I was knitting away, I was careful never to think about the doll as anything other than a gift for Emma–just in case Mama’s magic gave her the ability to read my mind!

A month later, the doll was finished. It took so long because I have no skill whatsoever at knitting, of course. Mama laughed at me for the many mistakes I made, taunting me that I should have just given up. Those mistakes forced me to start all over again, many times–it was so frustrating, but I was determined to kill her. Her taunts only hardened me in my resolution.

I didn’t want Mama to see it during the final stages of knitting, because I’d managed to make it look like her, so that she’d, naturally, get suspicious. So during the final stages, I worked in my bedroom with the door locked, or when she was out.

According to the book I’d found in the library, I had to do some magical incantations in a ritual to ensure that the doll would be linked to her. I’d also used yarn and knitting needles she had handled, as well as material from an old shirt she used to wear, but which I’d rescued from the garbage just in time.

I did the ritual in my bedroom at night, with my door locked. I was taking an enormous risk, since she might have sensed, through her own magical powers, what I was doing; but I had no other choice than to do it there, for where else could I have done a magical ritual without anyone interfering?

I did the ritual with the lights off, and a circle of glowing candles surrounding me. I’d bought a black mat with a giant white pentacle on it. I played a recording of soft chanting on my laptop. Mama was already in bed, so I figured she wouldn’t notice the sounds.

My success at making the doll near her, without her suspecting anything, encouraged me to keep going, and to take the chance of doing the ritual there at home. Perhaps her powers were weakening with the onset of old age–who knows?

I stared at the eyes of the doll, visualizing that it was my real mother sitting across from me on that pentacle mat. I kept hearing “Kill…Mama…” over and over again; I softly whispered it, too, in time with the chanting as it reverberated in my ears.

I remembered, shortly before the night I’d watched Friday the 13th, that Mama had begun clutching at her chest and complaining of pains there. I understand that such pain is how heart attacks start to happen. So during my ritual, I visualized those pains getting worse, leading towards heart attacks.

I kept whispering “Kill…Mama…” while holding little pins I would soon stab into the chest of the doll; as I did these things, I’d visualize Mama having heart attacks.

I continued with the ritual, repeating the same actions for another twenty minutes, according to the instructions of the book. I never stuck a pin in the doll that night, for according to the book, you can’t do that until the effects of the completed ritual have fanned out and permeated the whole area, a process that would take the rest of the night. This was another reason I had to do the ritual near her: to ensure the spell would contact her and her energy as soon as possible.

The next morning was when I could finally put the magic to the test. I heard her moving around outside my bedroom: she was probably going to the kitchen. I was holding the doll in one hand, and a pin in the other.

I heard a familiar groan of pain from her; I imagined she was grabbing at her chest again. This seemed like a good cue to stab the pin in the doll’s chest…so I did.

Now I heard a huge roar of pain from her. A dish smashed on the kitchen floor: she’d obviously dropped it. I grinned. My doll worked!

Though I left the pin in the doll’s chest, I wouldn’t stick another one in for a few days. I wanted Mama’s death to be gradual, not suspiciously sudden. I also wanted her to suffer before she died.

Because I’d left the pin in the doll’s chest, I saw Mama going about her day frequently clutching at her chest and moaning in pain. She went to a doctor after three days of that pin in the doll; he just gave her pills.

Back at home, I stuck another pin in the doll’s chest.

In my bedroom, I heard her wail in pain in the kitchen, and this was just after she’d taken one of her pills. My grin grew wider.

Over the next few days, she took more of the pills, going from one at a time to two, then three, despite the doctor insisting she take only one at a time.

The following week, I stuck in a third pin.

She bellowed and fell to the living room floor with a thud.

I called an ambulance, and she was taken to the hospital. I let her rest there for several days, making visits, too, of course, and acting all concerned for her welfare. I think my acting job was convincing.

All the medication they were giving her had managed to cancel out the pain my pins in my doll were giving her. About a week later, she was released, and I took her back home.

The day after that, I stuck a fourth pin in the doll. She fell down dead.

The funeral happened a week after that.

…and here we are now.

Cliffs

Imagine a railroad track that ends where the bridge is out,
over a
steep
cliff
that
no one
would
ever
want to
fall off
to his
death.

People on a train
are going on that railroad track, right to the end of it.
They
don’t
seem
aware
of the
danger
that
they’re
heading
toward.

Marxists, liberals, and right-wingers
are all on that train, racing toward certain doom.
These
last
of the
three
are all
running
to the
front,
as if
wanting
to die.

The liberals are just sitting in their seats,
with a strange faith that the track will go
all
the
way
to
the
other
side
of
the
abyss.

Only the Marxists, the Leninists in particular,
are going to the back, running to jump off,
before
they
go
over
with
all of
those
fools
who
think
the
track
is safe.

Analysis of ‘Pawn Hearts’

Pawn Hearts is Van der Graaf Generator‘s fourth album, released in 1971. It has only three tracks: two ten-to eleven-minute songs on Side One, and a side-long suite, “A Plague of Lighthouse Keepers,” on Side Two–though a fourth track, “Theme One,” an instrumental written by George Martin, is included on some US and Canadian releases of the album.

The album wasn’t a success in the UK, but it went to number one in Italy, where the band were treated like superstars when touring there. Pressure from touring, nonetheless, caused them to break up for the first time in 1972.

The band originally intended Pawn Hearts to be a double album, like Pink Floyd’s Ummagumma, but Charisma Records, Van der Graaf Generator’s label, vetoed the idea. Keyboardist Hugh Banton originally didn’t want to include the side-long suite of Side Two, preferring more commercial material, like “Killer,” from the band’s previous album, H to He, Who Am the Only One. The 2005 reissue includes extra material, including “Theme One,” “W (first version),” “Angle of Incidents,” “Ponker’s Theme,” and “Dimunitions.”

I’ll be analyzing the original three tracks, though, of which the lyrics can be found here. And here is a link to a recording of the full original album.

The album’s title is derived from a spoonerism made up by saxophonist/flautist David Jackson, who said he was going over to the studio to “dub on some more porn harts,” instead of “horn parts.” Consider the saying of the spoonerism with the non-rhotic British accent, and it’s easy to hear it evolve into “pawn hearts.” Added to this is what singer/guitarist/keyboardist/main songwriter/lyricist/bandleader Peter Hammill said to album artist Paul Whitehead: “no matter if you’re a king, a pauper or whatever – you’re a pawn.” As a result, the album cover shows people of various walks of life as pawn pieces in chess floating above the Earth, with a kind of cloud curtain in the back.

We thus all have the hearts of pawns: the title of the album in this way sets the tone of what we’re about to hear. As pawns, used and manipulated by those in power, we’re like lemmings mindlessly running off a cliff. The killer lives inside us because we don’t act to help those in need, we don’t release the angels also living inside us. Our plague as lighthouse keepers, so to speak, is in sitting helplessly as others crash and die on the shore.

“Lemmings” opens with a fade-in and Hammill playing a tune of single notes on an acoustic guitar, a tune he’ll soon sing in falsetto. Banton’s organ and Jackson’s flute, the latter going back and forth from A to B, can be heard in the background, along with Guy Evans on the drums.

Hammill sings of standing on “the highest cliff top,” looking down and all around, and seeing those he loves “crashing on quite blindly to the sea.” These are the lemmings, those who foolishly follow the leader and go mindlessly to their destruction. He, knowing better, refuses to go along with their “game.”

This watching of the lemmings’ self-destruction into the sea links with the predicament of the lighthouse keeper on Side Two, who despairs as he sees sailors’ boats crash into the rocks on the shore, and he feels powerless to prevent the deaths.

The music then switches to the main riff, punctuated by Jackson’s saxophones. It’s played with an alternating of two bars of 6/8 and one of 3/4, except for the last line of each of the corresponding verses that Hammill sings, which is two bars of 6/8, one of 5/8, then a return to 4/4.

In the first of these verses, Hammill sings of “heroes” who “are found wanting.” One looks out, but “can see no dawn.” These are the words of the lemmings, who “are drawing near to the cliffs” and “can hear the call.”

While the themes of Pawn Hearts are, of course, universal, applying to the problems of any time, past, present, and future, and applying anywhere, I see them especially applying to the problems of our world today, even though Hammill had no way of predicting today’s problems. There was plenty to fear of nuclear brinksmanship back when he wrote these lyrics, back during the Cold War; and there’s plenty to fear of similar nuclear brinksmanship during our current, needless Cold War with Russia and China.

Such fears make Pawn Hearts especially relevant in today’s world, regardless of the original intentions of Van der Graaf Generator. So many of us today see the lemmings running off the cliff, and like the lighthouse keeper of the side-long suite on Side Two, we watch in despair and powerlessness as they run, crash, and self-destruct, taking us all with them.

“What course is there left but to die?”

The 6/8, 6/8, 3/4 riff returns, with Hammill again singing of our disappointment with our “high kings.” The lemmings are as disappointed as all of us are, yet they’re still willing to “hurtle on into the dark portal…into the unknown maw.” Part of this hurtling to self-destruction is because of blind foolishness; part of it is despairing resignation to our fate. “They know it’s really far too late to stop us.” Lemming and lighthouse keeper, in this way, are one, just as the lighthouse keeper will feel himself at one with the sailors/lemmings on Side Two, as we’ll soon see.

“What cause is there left but to die?”

Next comes a brief instrumental break, with Hammill strumming acoustic guitar chords in G minor, playing a melody of which a variation will be heard soon in his singing. In the verse he sings, we hear of the mental conflict felt between hope, however faint, and the resignation to doom that makes us want to end it all sooner.

This theme continues on the sax, climaxing with Hammill bellowing, three times in head voice, a high note in F, the third time with him going down from F to D. Then we have a grating segue into the “Cog” section of the song.

We hear an angular riff on Jackson’s saxophones, made all the more dissonant and angular by a counterpoint from Banton’s organ. In the verses of this section, Hammill sings of how we’re mutilated by the “steel spokes” and “cogs” of the political machines under which we all suffer. We suffer from others, but also from ourselves, since, as we learn from the final verse of the song, we’re “merely cogs of hatred.” We suffer as lemmings hurtling to our self-destruction, hating whom the ruling class manipulates us into hating; and we suffer as lighthouse keepers who watch this needless self-destruction, powerless to do anything about it.

“But there still is time…”

Next comes another segue, imitative of 1960s avant-garde jazz with its dissonant piano and saxophones. That we would hear such tense music after Hammill’s words of hope just emphasizes how flimsy that hope is. This segue brings us back to the main saxophone riff (6/8, 6/8, 3/4), and then to the final verses of the song.

Hammill sings of how we must do the opposite of what the lemmings are doing. We must “fight with our lives,” “unite the blood,” and “avert the disaster.” Whatever disaster he may have been thinking of at the time, we today can think of stopping WWIII, a very real and nearing danger, and also environmental disaster, to “abate the flood.”

“Screaming in the mob” will do nothing to help us. Instead, we must “look to the why and where we are”: we can’t solve our problems without properly understanding them. With this understanding comes the hope: “What choice is there left but to live?” It is for “the hope of saving our children’s children’s little ones.” They, the future generations, are our hope. The hope of happiness lies in creating a future that they can live in and enjoy, if we can’t do so ourselves here and now.

“What choice is there left but to try?”

The sense of the feebleness of this hope is heard in how weakly Hammill sings this last line, especially the lethargic way he says “try” at the end. The dimness of that hope is further emphasized with the song’s instrumental ending, with Banton’s dark organ chords and Jackson’s flute playing a dissonant version of that strummed acoustic guitar part before the “Cogs” section.

The song ends with a dissonant flourish of organ, flute, and drums, giving an ambiguous feeling: has hope been realized, or has it been frustrated?

“Man-Erg” is an odd title for what is quite possibly Van der Graaf Generator’s best song. One proposed interpretation, one I’m far from 100% convinced of, is that the title is an anagram for “German,” implying the Nazi stereotype (which ties in with that photo of the band in the inner sleeve of the album cover, them all doing Nazi salutes during a break from playing a game of “Crowborough Tennis.” The saluting is obviously just the band joking around: why would they be seriously advocating such an unpopular, hateful ideology?) Though the Germans of the Nazi era were certainly lemmings in their own…right, driving their country to its self-destruction, and therefore such an interpretation fits in with the general themes of the album, it detracts from the sympathy we feel for the man Hammill is singing for…unless he were understood to be having second thoughts about his fascism, and feeling remorse over it.

Another possible interpretation for the title, as I see it, is that “Erg” is literally that: a unit of energy, an amount of work as understood in physics. Such an interpretation is plausible, given Hammill’s educational background in Liberal Studies in science during his university years; consider in this connection the implied meaning of H to He (Hydrogen to Helium), as well as the S.H.M. section of “A Plague of Lighthouse Keepers” (i.e., simple harmonic motion). “Erg” thus could be understood as metaphorical of any action a man is responsible for, good or bad…or a guilty lack of needed action.

The song begins with a plaintive piano chord progression of F-major, 1st-inversion C-major (i.e., with E in the bass), D-minor 7th, and C-major, root position. We hear a high C played throughout the progression, in other words. Hammill sings of a character tormented with conflicts over the bad sides (“the killer”) and the good sides (“angels”) that “live inside [him].” “The killer” and “angels” are good and bad internal objects derived probably from his experiences with his parents, in their good and bad forms. “The killer” is the more repressed of the two sides, “lightly sleeping in the quiet of his room,” but he comes to consciousness sometimes, too, causing mayhem.

One intriguing stylistic quality of Banton’s playing of the Hammond organ is how he can make it sound like a pipe organ. Indeed, the Rolling Stone Encyclopedia of Rock & Roll aptly refers to “Hugh Banton’s churchy Hammond organ” (page 1026). This “churchy” sound is a fitting background to Hammill’s lyrics about a man with a “killer” and “angels” inside him, a man plagued with guilt, craving redemption of the sort one might try to find in a church.

…and what is he feeling guilty about? What does he need redemption for, be it through Christ, or through whomever? Since the themes of Pawn Hearts include those of helplessly watching lemmings destroy themselves, sitting back as a lighthouse keeper and doing nothing as sailors crash on the rocky shore, I’d say he feels like a “killer” for not doing anything to prevent the deaths. Recall that old saying often attributed (incorrectly) to Edmund Burke: “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.”

In these three tracks, we have a Hegelian triad, with “Lemmings” and “Man-Erg” opposing each other: the first song is about the self-destructive fools whose actions the man in “Man-Erg” is so opposed to; the second song is about him confronting his own guilt in doing nothing to stop their foolishness, while his more ‘angelic’ side wishes to help; “A Plague of Lighthouse Keepers” is the sublation of the opposing former two, depicting and merging both sides, and also resolving the lighthouse keeper’s guilt by…suicide, or by finding peace through rationalizations?

Anyway, back to the second track. After “the killer” and “angels” verses, there is an abrupt break from the sweet, plaintive opening tune, into a tense middle section, introduced by Jackson’s saxophones, first screeching downward glissandi, then playing perfect fourths of G and C in three bars of 3/4 time, then a wailing bar of 2/4, and a 3/4 bar of organ notes playing eighth notes of B-flat, C, A, C, A-flat, and C.

These six eighth notes will form the second half of a tense riff in 11/8 time (subdivided 5 plus 6), the first half of which being made up of five eighth notes, being tritones of C and F-sharp, played on the organ. Banton solos over this riff on a Farfisa Professional electric organ.

[Since Robert Fripp of King Crimson played electric guitar as a guest musician on Pawn Hearts–he sat in on H to He, too–I used to think that this brief solo was by him; but I soon suspected, based on the sound of the attacks of the notes played, that it sounds more like keyboard tapping than the plucking of strings. It turns out I must be right in my suspicions; in fact, it remains an utter mystery to me where Fripp’s playing can be heard pretty much anywhere on the album, since he apparently plays on all three tracks. I find this mystery to be particularly frustrating, given Fripp’s distinctive guitar playing style, which should be easy to pick out.]

After this brief soloing, we hear an example of Hammill’s trademark tortured vocal screams, the helpless viewer of the lemmings/sailors crashing on the rocks below, him wanting to be free (i.e., of his guilt) and to know who he really is. Those internal objects I referred to above, “the killer” and the “angels” were projected into him, as I would imagine, from his parents when he was a child, telling him on the one hand never to interfere in others’ affairs, and on the other hand to do what is right. As projections from other people, neither “the killer” nor the “angels” are the real him, of course. Undue parental influence has a way of stifling the growth of our authentic selves.

The 11/8 riff does a drawn-out ritardando until the A-flat of the aforementioned six eighth-notes is stretched out and part of a tritone with D in the bass. The music calms down and switches to a progression beginning with F-major and its relative minor in D. Hammill has switched from playing an acoustic to an electric piano.

Hammill sings of his isolation (“cloisters”) and “the acolytes of gloom,” those internal bad objects that assist him in his misery, as it were. “Death’s Head” is his reminder that he can’t stop the self-destruction of the lemmings/sailors, and that their destruction is his own.

“And I am doomed,” sings Hammill against a background of F-sharp, F, E, and F major. Then he sings of “the pranksters of [his] youth” who are “laughing in [his] courtyard,” a reference to his attempts at regression to an innocent, childlike state, an attempt to escape his despair. The “Old Man,” who is the wiser part of himself, nonetheless brings him back to reality and “tells [him] truth.”

Next comes some sax soloing by Jackson, then a rather bombastic passage with a return of the acoustic piano (this passage will be heard again, in a more developed form, at the end of the song), and a return to the original theme with the F major/1st-inversion C major/D minor 7th/root position C major progression.

Along with “the killer” and the “angels,” Hammill sings of how the protagonist himself is in there, his true self…but who is this man, really? He’s no hero, that’s for sure, for he’s done nothing to prevent the deaths of the lemmings/sailors. Will he be “damned” for his inaction? He’s “just a man,” after all.

He knows that he, like all of us, is a complex combination of good and evil (“killers, angels,” as well as “dictators, saviours”). In our predicament of lemmings hurtling to their self-destruction, our sin of inaction to prevent these deaths make us no better than the dictators we often blindly follow (we’re reminded of that Nazi salute photo), for we are neglecting our potential to be saviours, not giving aid to the “refugees in war and peace.”

“As long as man lives,” there is hope…but time is running out, and for us listeners now in the 2020s, WWIII is coming ever closer, as is the destruction of our planet, ecologically speaking.

The chord progression of the “I’m just a man” section–G major and F major (twice), then A minor, G major, F major, etc.–is soon combined with the tense 11/8 riff, punctuated by Hammill singing five Gs, then F/G/E/G/E-flat/G.

The tense 11/8 riff is heard alone, followed by and ending with that bombastic passage I mentioned above, but a longer, drawn-out version, with Evans banging on tympani. Thus ends Side One, and we flip the record over.

“A Plague of Lighthouse Keepers” opens with Hammill playing electric piano, the reverberating tone of which suggests the movement of the water; we hear an opening chord of D minor 7th added 9th.

In part one of this side-long suite, “Eyewitness,” Hammill sings of a sailor “waiting for [his] saviour” as a storm at sea is tearing him apart. But perhaps this is really the lighthouse keeper empathically identifying with the suffering, dying sailor (whose “fingers feel like seaweed”), hence his guilt. He’s “too far out” and “too far in” because of his alienation from his work: too far away from the dying sailors to save them, and too introverted to reach out to help. “Too far out” and “too far in” could also refer to the sailors (with whom he identifies) as being too far out to be saved, and too far in the water to be pulled out.

When he says his “nights are numbered, too,” we can interpret these words in the dual sense given in the preceding paragraph: this could be the voice of a sailor who knows he’ll die soon in a storm at sea, or this could be the voice of the lighthouse keeper, identifying with the sailor in his fear of imminent death. It could also simply mean that the keeper is contemplating suicide.

As I said above, “Lemmings” is essentially about those rushing to their self-destruction, those other than this eyewitness; “Man-Erg” is about the eyewitness; and “Plague” is about him and those he sees getting killed–there’s a kind of fusion of both sides, of the watcher and those watched, a sublation effected through his empathy and guilt over his inaction, the “Erg” that the “Man” never does.

“The stars” don’t “shine” for him: he feels fated to die, as do the sailors/lemmings he identifies with. Indeed, he “prophes[ies] disaster,” for he knows the doom that’s coming, that which he can’t prevent (and therefore feels he’s partly responsible for), as “the witness and the seal of death.” Such a prophet of doom is what you become “when you see the skeletons of sailing-ship spars sinking low.” All of those “ancient myths” seem eerily true.

Part two, “Pictures/Lighthouse,” is an instrumental interlude starting with Jackson’s flute, imitative of birdsong, played over Banton’s organ arpeggios. A bit of saxophone is similarly imitative of bird-calls, then the saxes imitate the ships’ horns, after which Evans’s drums suggest the ships crashing. Next comes Banton’s churchy organ again, playing a passage that has been compared to Messiaen‘s Catholic pipe organ works. Perhaps this juxtaposition of ships crashing, killing the sailors, followed by ‘religious’ music is meant to suggest the dead sailors going to heaven…or is this just the keeper’s wish fulfillment, to assuage his guilt?

With part three, we briefly return to “Eyewitness” and the melancholy theme in D minor. If that organ music, as representing the dead sailors’ entry into heaven, is the keeper’s wish-fulfillment, it seems that he has rejected that wish as unattainable, for Hammill sings of the keeper as recognizing that it’s too late for “contrition” (besides, it might be hard for the keeper to conceive of those who ‘swear like sailors’ as dying in a state of sanctified grace).

All the keeper can do is sit helplessly in regret, “think[ing] on how it might have been” if he could have been able to prevent the deaths. All alone, he is trapped in the mental prison of his torturous thoughts, “locked in silent monologue, in silent scream,” this last word Hammill fittingly, and characteristically, screaming.

He sees “the waves crash on the bleak stones of the tower” from which he’s been watching the ships as they crash on the rocky shore with the waves. Seeing the waves crash on the tower, just as they–and the ships–crash on the shore again suggests his empathic identification with the sailors/lemmings. Thus, he is “overcome” with guilt, and “much too tired to speak.”

Part four, “S.H.M.”, means, as I mentioned above, ‘simple harmonic motion’ on the scientific level, but it’s also a rearrangement of the letters H.M.S., or “His (or Her) Majesty’s Ship.” He sees the ghosts of the dead sailors, heightening his guilt. Since they’re “intent on destroying what they’ve lost,” this is him, in seeing his own destruction linked with theirs, once again identifying with them. If he can be destroyed with them, his guilt will be assuaged. Thus, his imagined dying with them is more wish-fulfillment.

He compares the “lost mastheads” in “the freezing dark” to his “isolated tower,” once again to “parallel” his experience with that of the sailors, thus identifying himself with them. There’s a dark descent of notes in the bass, leading to the next section.

Part five, “The Presence of the Night,” starts with a melancholy, soft passage in A minor, going back and forth between that and F major. Fripp’s guitar is in this passage, though it’s buried under the sax, organ, and drums–you have to listen carefully to hear his soft, improvised soloing…rather similar to how he plays in a soft passage in “The Court of the Crimson King,” in the middle of the song, soft guitar notes heard behind Ian McDonald‘s flute soloing.

Hammill sings of ghosts calling out “Alone, alone,” just as the keeper is all alone, a paralleling that again shows his identification with them. Since he empathizes with them in this identification, he also wonders if anyone else will empathize with him if he died: “Would you cry if I died? Would you catch the final words of mine?”

With these words, we shift from the melancholy loneliness of the beginning of this fifth part to rising tension, building to a riff of three bars in 7/8, each subdivided 3 + 4, then a bar in 5/4, ending in eighth-note triplets before returning to 4/4. In the bass, this 7/8 passage ascends from A to B, C, D, E, and F, then in the 5/4 bar, it descends in arpeggios from C major to B minor and to a resolution back in A minor, which again is in 4/4. This section reaches a climax with the 7/8 and 5/4 parts, excluding the resolution in 4/4.

Hammill sings of wanting to be free (of his guilt) and of wanting to be himself–as he did in the 11/8 section of “Man-Erg.” He sings of the keeper’s fears of dying “very slowly alone,” yet also of wanting to be allowed to be “completely alone,” that is, to be without the company of those voices that plague him so with guilt.

[Incidentally, Hammill sings these verses in mixed voice on the album, but in a live performance of “Plague,” done on TV in Belgium in 1972, due to a lack of regular practice of the suite–since, recorded with so much studio gimmickry, it to a great extent couldn’t be reproduced live–his voice, I’m sorry to note, cracks a bit when he sings these verses.]

With the odd-metre climax of part five, we shift into part six, “Kosmos Tours,” written by Evans based around a short piano riff in A major, with tritones between the tonic and E-flat, and between C-sharp and G. It’s quite a chaotic passage, with energetic drumming and two lines of dissonant counterpoint played by Banton on an ARP synthesizer, one line in the treble, the other in the bass. The whole passage, in its wildness, musically suggests being caught in a maelstrom at sea, which leads to my next point, a brief verse ending part six.

I must be honest about this verse: I find it overdone, not only with the alliteration of “maelstrom of my memory,” but also the mixed metaphor of “maelstrom” and “vampire.” It’s rather melodramatic, even by Hammill’s standards. I never liked it.

Still, “over the brink I fall” once again links the keeper with the sailors, in how he wishes to fall over the brink of the lighthouse tower and into the sea, and in how he identifies with the sailors, who in the storm, fall over the brink of their shattered ships and into the sea. On the word “fall,” the piano bangs a hard, dissonant A minor chord with an added sixth.

Now, we move into part seven, “Custard’s Last Stand,” which melodically starts in a more cheerful C major on the organ, though Hammill’s lyrics remain as gloomy as ever. He sings of his hopes for “the key,” but he can’t “reach the door.” He wants “to walk on the sea,” like Christ in Mark 6:45-52, but he can’t “ever keep [his] feet dry.”

The keeper yearns for some kind of happiness, for peace of mind, but this is of course ever elusive. In doing his job in the lighthouse tower, he “scan[s] the horizon” and “must keep [his] eyes on all parts of [himself].” Obviously, he must also keep his eyes on the sailors, so “all parts of me”–be they as each man intact, or torn to pieces–is yet another example of his self-identification with the sailors.

He’s “lost [his] way,” and “like a dog in the night, [he has] run to a manger,” where he feels himself to be a “stranger.” The reference to a manger suggests again his wish to be like Christ. As Hammill sang in “Man-Erg,” he’s “just a man…dictators, saviours, refugees.” He feels himself to be a killer of sailors/lemmings in his inaction, and he yearns to be a saviour, since he identifies empathically with the “refugees” of the sea.

He is “chasing solitary peace,” which as I said above, he is yearning for but can’t find, an escape from the hell of other people who he feels are judging him for his inaction. Such peace will never be fulfilling, though, for he cannot escape his problems, his Jungian Shadow. He’s “too close to the light,” and so he can’t see right. The light is also the glare of the lighthouse, making it hard for him to see the incoming ships. Its light blinds himself, and perhaps its glare also blinds the sailors, who then can’t steer their ships properly; thus they will crash on the rocky shore. So “I blind me” also means ‘I blind them,’ once again identifying himself with the sailors.

A minor chord on the organ and a drum roll on a tom-tom lead into part eight, “The Clot Thickens,” which comes in attacking our ears. A tense riff beginning in 5/4 is led by Hammill singing a number of questions: Where? How? When? Who? With all of his unanswered questions, the lighthouse keeper is in a state of utter confusion, which is heightened by the intensity of the music. His identification with the suffering and dying sailors is reaching a point where he is losing his ability to distinguish himself from them: “I am me, me are we, we can’t see any way out of here.” The incoherence of his words indicate a psychotic break from reality, intensified further by the dissonant music.

The 5/4 riff repeats instrumentally a few times, then we come to a climactic level of tension in which, the keeper in his growing psychosis over his unbearable guilt, cannot tell the difference between himself and the drowning sailors at all. His wish-fulfillment, in this growing delusion, is to imagine himself dying and drowning at sea with them, his punishment and atonement for his sinful inaction, an assuaging of his guilt.

An angular synthesizer tone is heard playing an awkward, irregular theme in a fifteen-beat cycle that can be subdivided 4 + 5 + 6; I would interpret it either as 4/8, 5/8, and 3/4, or perhaps 3/4, 3/8, and 3/4. It suggests another maelstrom, or an otherwise wild storm at sea (yet, symbolically, it’s also his psychological fragmentation), with boats smashed to pieces and sailors’ bodies mutilated. Banton adds a Mellotron with wavering pitch bends of tapes of the string section, to add to the musical tension and chaos.

Note Hammill’s reference to “the lemmings coming,” his equating of them with the sailors–hence my frequent reference to the lemmings/sailors in this analysis. He also repeats “I’m just a man,” a line from “Man-Erg.” Thus we can see how all three songs are thematically united, and why I treat them all as telling the same story, if from somewhat different points of view.

The final parts of the suite, “Land’s End (Sineline)” and “We Go Now,” begin with a more cheerful, optimistic piano progression in E-flat major. Hammill sings of the keeper being “pulled into the spell,” that is, into the water; yet, “spell” could also metaphorically mean magical spell, that is, the ‘magical’ illusion of a hallucination. He says he feels he is drowning, but if he is, how can he be able to give voice to the experience?

It’s been said that the ambiguous resolution to the story is that the keeper either kills himself by throwing himself in the water and drowning, or he finds peace of mind by somehow rationalizing his situation. I’d say that, in a way, he does both: by hallucinating a psychic merging with the sailors, he imagines he’s drowned with them, and in this way, he’s found peace of mind through an imagined atonement.

The cheerful melody thus represents his illusory peace. Only through such a deep state of delusion, imagining he is a ghost among the other sailors’ ghosts, can he feel reconciled with them. Delusion is his rationalization.

“I feel you around me; I know you well,” Hammill sings. The keeper imagines he is at one with the ghosts and with the sea. In his psychotic state, he is experiencing the undifferentiated state of what Lacan called the Real. It’s a paradoxical state: it can be both traumatizing and mystical, like Bion‘s O, the “deep and formless infinite.” It’s traumatizing if one is still attached to one’s ego, but if one gives up one’s individual existence, one can find peace. “Whose is my voice?” the keeper asks, suggesting a giving-up of the ego, a merging with the sailor-ghosts.

Still, one isn’t too sure if he means it when he says, “It doesn’t feel so very bad now…begin to feel very glad now.” He could be simply in denial of his ongoing pain; “the end is the start” could refer to his attainment of an ouroboros-like, cyclical infinity, or it could mean he’ll cyclically return to that pain after a temporary respite from it.

“All things are a part/apart” is a most ambiguous ending line. Are all things a part of a Brahman-like infinity, the keeper’s Atman linked to a pantheistic whole, an ouroboros of nirvana? Or are all things torn apart, through a physical mutilation and drowning at sea, or apart in the sense of psychological fragmentation, his psychotic breakdown? Is it a combination of the two?

Since the cheerful melody starts to decay into dissonance at the end of the suite, I suspect that the keeper has simply gone mad, and that his ‘peace of mind’ is only a delusion whose purpose is to keep his mental state manageable…though this stability can only last for so long.

We go now…he and the sailor-ghosts as a merged unity–into heaven, or hell?

Fripp is supposed to be playing at the end of the suite: again, is the soloing we hear by him, or is it Banton’s Farfisa?

Though as I said above, the themes of this masterpiece album by Van der Graaf Generator are universal and applicable to any time, I feel that they are especially relevant to us now in the 2020s. Many of us, including myself, are watching the madness of our political leaders in the West, who are needlessly provoking Russia and China into war, all because the US/NATO imperialists won’t accept the emergence of a multipolar world.

The mainstream corporate media in the West continue to scapegoat Russia and China, and the masses in the West far too often buy into these media lies, which are told to manufacture consent for war and greater nuclear brinksmanship. As I said, many of us feel like prophets crying out in the wilderness, or like the lighthouse keeper, watching the lemmings, or sailors–choose whichever metaphor you prefer–going along with the banging of the war drums, cheering on the Ukrainian soldiers without realizing–or in denial–that many of them are Nazis (eerily giving that inner sleeve photo of the band greater thematic weight)!

This isn’t about being ‘pro-Russia’ or ‘pro-China’: it’s about being anti-war.

Like the lighthouse keeper, we’re watching this growing madness, ourselves going crazy trying to warn people. Yet still, the lemmings just keep on supporting the political status quo, running off the cliff, dooming us all.

Will we drown in the madness of a nuclear WWIII, or will we drown as a result of rising sea levels and global warming? Are we going to sit back and watch helplessly, or are we going to be a man and…erg? Are we going to have pawn hearts, or peace-loving ones, those of people who can think for themselves?

My Short Story, ‘Family Dies,’ Published in the Western Horror Anthology, ‘Shut Up and Bleed’

My Western horror short story, ‘Family Dies,’ has been published in Shut Up and Bleed, a new Western horror short story anthology soon to be found on Amazon (June 1st, to be exact). Other great horror short stories in the anthology are by Christine Morgan, Katie Berry, Tim Curran, C. Derick Miller, Chuck Buda, BL Blankenship, Megan Stockton, and Jon Steffen.

Here is a link to the Amazon page.

Many thanks to BL Blankenship, who set this up for all of us writers included in the project! He also set up the Book Without a Name Western horror short story anthology, in which I have two stories published, namely, “Ghost Town,” and “The Lake.”

So, come June 1st, please go over to Amazon and order yourself a copy of Shut Up and Bleed! 🙂

‘Mama,’ a Psychological Horror Novel, Chapter One

I killed my mother!

Nobody knows it was I who killed her, of course: everybody thinks she simply died of a heart attack; that’s how the doctor says she died. But I know…

I’ll tell you how I did it later, for if I tell you now, you’ll never believe me. In fact, you’ll think I’m crazy for believing such a method would work.

Since you’re probably assuming I’m a terrible person for doing what I did, since matricide is considered one of the worst crimes anyone could ever commit, I should explain my reasons for doing it, in the hopes that you’ll understand me, and not judge me so harshly for my extreme act.

My name is Roger Mark Gunn, and I’m in my mid-thirties. I’ve lived with Mama in an apartment in Toronto my whole life. That’s right: we never moved, and I’ve never been able to find a job that pays enough so I could move out, find a girl, fall in love, get married, and live a normal life. Even if I could have, though, Mama wouldn’t have allowed it, anyway.

The only work I’ve ever done has been as a cashier in her pet food store. It’s been so humiliating having to call out “Mama!” to the back of the store to get her to come to the front every time I needed her to help with a customer. But that embarrassment was among the least of my problems with her.

Most people have fond, affectionate feelings for their mothers. Their mothers truly want what’s best for them; these mothers encourage their sons and daughters to chase after their dreams, and they comfort you when you’re down.

Not so with Mama.

What you have to understand about Mama is that she was not a normal person. She was insane. She was domineering, clingy, and demanding. She messed with my mind. She made me believe that I lack abilities where I really do have them. She undermined my ability to develop self-confidence, and she did this on purpose–the opposite of what a mother is supposed to do!

Worse than all of this, she would tell me that my perception of reality is distorted, that I hallucinate regularly. She started saying such things to me when I was a child, around when I was nine or ten years old. To give her lies an aura of authority, she claimed that psychiatrists had examined me thoroughly, and that I was a diagnosed psychotic. She said they recommended putting me away in an institution, but out of her ‘love’ for me, she saved me from such a fate!

She claimed that she’d done everything out of love for me, that only she knew how to take care of me. I don’t believe a word of any of this, though. I know better.

She was trying to control my life by making me believe that I couldn’t do anything without her, that I’m nothing without her. Well, I’m about to prove her wrong!

What I’ve said so far surely hasn’t convinced you that she deserved to die, as awful as she was to me, based on what I’ve just said. After all, she did leave me a lot of money to live on, so I can live comfortably on my own for the rest of my life. But she was much, much worse to me that what I’ve said so far. Again, I can’t tell you everything just now, since you’ll think I’m crazy. I have to let you know bit by bit, so you’ll be prepared for the worst. Please be patient.

I never knew my father. Mama told me he ran off as soon as he learned he’d got her pregnant, but I’m convinced she was lying. I’m sure she killed him, but in a way that no one would ever suspect her of murder, in a way I’ll explain later, when I think you’re ready to hear the shocking truth.

All through my childhood, adolescence, and young adulthood, I felt as though there was a terrible void in my life, a huge gap, a hole in which something vital was missing. This missing element was a father, someone to help me make the transition from childhood to adulthood, to teach me how to be a man. Mama took him from me.

All my mental health problems stem from this lack, I’m sure of it. I’ve lived in that apartment with Mama as if no one else existed in the whole world. It was only Mama and me, the two of us looking in each other’s eyes as if each of us were looking at him- or herself in a mirror reflection. It’s as though I existed as an extension of her, and her as an extension of me. It’s as if we were joined at the hip–well, I finally cut myself loose!

There was always this feeling as if we owned each other. No one else was ever allowed to share the attention of either of us. That, I believe, is why she removed my father from our lives, and that is why she always found ways to frustrate my every attempt at making friends.

The guidance of a father would have helped me make a smooth entrance into society. Mama never wanted me to achieve such an entrance; this is why I never made friends at school or in the neighbourhood, why I was always picked on and bullied by my classmates and the other kids in the neighbourhood, and why I could never hold down a job with an employer other than Mama. She ruined my life! She made me into a loser!

I’m sure that my father was really a great man, though she only spoke ill of him, to deceive me, to make me believe she was the only one who truly loved me. She wanted me to remain completely under her control. That is why I had to kill her: to free myself from her tentacles! Since my whole sense of myself was always bound up in her, now that she’s gone, I can finally be free to be my true self!

If only it didn’t feel as if my true self were a bottomless pit of infinite blackness.

I’ve always felt alone, as if there were a huge brick wall separating myself from the rest of humanity. Before, I at least had her to keep me company. Now, as I stand here, at Mama’s funeral, there are all of these people here, including my aunt, her sister, and other family and ‘friends’ whom I barely even know.

Even here, with all of these people, I still feel all alone, in a world that’s almost like a dream.

Oh, no…my aunt is coming over here to talk to me! God, give me strength!

“Roger?” she says to me with a fake smile. “Will you be OK without my sister to take care of you? I don’t like the idea of you living alone in that apartment. Also, there’s no way you can take care of that pet food store all by yourself. No offense, sweetie, but you have a rather feeble grip on reality as it is, as we all know, and you’ll need some help managing the store, so I’m willing to fill in for Anne, being with so much free time of my own these days.” She stops speaking for a moment and frowns. “Are you listening to me, Roger?”

“Yes,” I say coolly. “Do whatever you want.”

She sighs and sneers at me, then she says, “Look over there, Roger. Do you see that man standing by the minister? The one about your mother’s age? His name is Reynold, and this is amazing luck that we found him here and now, but he’s your long-lost fa–“

“Impossible,” I say, not even looking at the man. “My father died decades ago.”

“Roger,” she says. “He approached me just before the funeral started. He told me about his relationship with your mother. He told me details about her that could only have been known by a man who knew her intimately, around the time your mother was pregnant with you. He wants to meet his son.”

“Well, I’m sure his son is out there somewhere in the world,” I say, looking away from her and from the man with the iciest of faces. “Let the man seek him out, for he isn’t me. I mean, look at him.” I gesture over to the bald, frowning man, in his mid-sixties, skinny and with a gut bigger than mine, wearing a dull grey suit. “I’m sure my father was much more of a man than that.”

Now my aunt is frowning at me, then her eyes and mouth are agape, in as much of a shock at my rejection of the man as he is. “Roger, you horrify me,” she says.

I see her walk back to the man, shaking her head and apologizing to him. It makes no difference to me.

Dad is dead.

Just like Mama.

The funeral service is finally over, thank God. Now I can go home. There, I’ll show you all the proof there is to see that she was the kind of person I know her to have been. Then you’ll know why I was perfectly justified in ending her life.

Again, I can’t quite tell you why yet, not until I show you the proof and explain the background, so you won’t think I’m crazy. Come home with me.

For now, the only hint that I can give you is that I’m so justified in my killing of her, even the Bible sanctions it…not that I believe anything in the Bible, mind you, but I mention it to emphasize my freedom from guilt.

The relevant verse is Exodus 22:18, if you’re curious.

Dripping

We can sweat the small stuff, enduring those tiny drops
that don’t upset too much, being so small. Yet, them being
so cold, irregular, and incessant, the irritation slowly builds

’til

you

can

not

take it anymore.

It’s like Chinese water torture: sweat will drip off your chin
as the cold drops slowly fall, tapping on your scalp. Knowing
when they are coming, you’re prepared, and they’d be bearable,

but

you

not

know when they will hit, so the anticipation is crazy-making.

Gold was supposed to trickle down decades ago, but it
was pyrite. The decades went by, the trickling was icy cold,
& now we’re mad, getting cut off from reality more and more,

and

one

helping us, or organizing, or showing us a way out of this mess. Each drip
may just be one drop of water, but these all add up to a lake of fire over time.
Someone, please, turn off the tap, so we can all have peace.

	The Tanah: Lyrics–Mo… on The Tanah: Lyrics–The Fi…
	The Tanah: Lyrics–Mo… on The Tanah: Proverbs
	The Tanah: Lyrics–Mo… on The Tanah–The Preaching: The R…
	The Tanah: Lyrics–Mo… on The Tanah–The Preaching: Four…
	The Tanah: Lyrics–Mo… on The Tanah–The Preaching,…