Category: myth

Analysis of ‘Stalker’

Stalker (Russian: Сталкер) is a 1979 Soviet science fiction film directed by Andrei Tarkovsky and written by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, based loosely on their 1972 novel, Roadside Picnic. The film stars Alexander Kaidanovsky (in the title role), Anatoly Solonitsyn, and Nikolai Grinko, with Alisa Freindlich and Natasha Abramova.

The premise of the novel is that after an alien “Visitation,” various items of the aliens were left behind in “Zones” in six places around the world. These alien artifacts have properties not understood by humanity, as are all the strange and dangerous phenomena experienced in the Zones. Still, some people, known as “stalkers,” illegally sneak into the Zones, risking apprehension by the police who guard the dangerous areas, and hoping to take some of the items out and sell them.

In the novel, Dr. Valentine Pilman compares this leaving-behind of alien artifacts to garbage left behind after a picnic on the side of the road, hence the name of the novel. According to Pilman’s analogy, the aliens are the picnickers, we humans are like the animals living where the picnic took place, exploring all the items left behind, not understanding what they are, things that may even be dangerous to the animals.

The novel is divided into four sections (preceded by an introduction involving an interview with Pilman) of which the last is the basis of Tarkovsky’s film, and even this section of the novel is radically reworked. An alien “Visitation” is considered a possible reason for the existence of the “Zone” in the film, though it may have been caused by a meteorite hitting the Earth. Redrick “Red” Schuhart of the novel is simply known as the “Stalker.” Instead of going into the Zone with young Arthur Burbridge, who dies in the “meatgrinder” of the novel, the Stalker goes in with two middle-aged men, known as the “Writer” (Solonitsyn) and the “Professor” (Grinko), neither of whom dies in the meatgrinder. In the novel, they seek the wish-granting “Golden Sphere” (or Golden Ball, depending on the translation); in the film, the three men seek a room that grants one’s deepest desires.

The making of the film was fraught with difficulties. It was originally filmed with film stock that was unusable, so Tarkovsky had to reshoot it almost entirely with the help of new cinematographer Alexander Knyazhinsky. Stalker initially got mixed reviews, but it has since been regarded as a classic of world cinema. The British Film Institute ranked it #29 on its list of the “100 Greatest Films of All Time.”

Here is a link to quotes from the film in English translation. Here’s a link to the full movie with English subtitles. And here is a link to Antonina W. Bouis‘s English translation of Roadside Picnic.

During the credits of the film, we see a black-and-white shot of a bar (which, in the novel, is called “the Borscht”). Next, we get a shot, still in bleak black and white, of the Stalker’s home, through half-way open doors leading into his bedroom. He, his wife (Freindlich–Guta in the novel), and their daughter, “Monkey” (deformed because of the Stalker’s exposure to the Zone, and played by Abramova in the film) are all lying in the same bed.

As they’re sleeping, we hear a train going by outside, shaking up the room. The Stalker is already awake, ready to get up and sneak out, to meet with the Writer and Professor, to take them into the Zone and find the desire-granting Room. His wife wakes up soon after, noticing he’s taken her watch; she begs him not to go and risk being put in jail again.

She fears his going back to jail, this time for ten years instead of five, as he did last time (in the novel, Redrick is incarcerated for a time for having been in the Zone); but the Stalker insists that he’s “imprisoned everywhere.” This ‘imprisonment’ is what the black-and-white filming is supposed to represent: the bleakness of their everyday existence, from which the Room in the Zone is supposed to be an escape.

He won’t be dissuaded from going, and he leaves her. She falls to the floor, weeping after having cursed at him for ruining her life. What we notice here is the close relationship between the nirvana of the Room and the suffering caused by desire for that Room, the heaven of the Room and the hell that surrounds it.

As we’ll learn soon enough, heaven and hell, nirvana and samsara, are even closer together than that.

He meets with the Writer near some train tracks (indeed, as his wife was weeping, we heard another train going by their home). The Writer has been drinking and chatting with a pretty young woman about how “boring” life is (i.e., black and white), and therefore there are no flying saucers, ghosts, or God to make it interesting. There isn’t even a Bermuda Triangle, according to the Writer…yet, there’s a wish-granting Room in the Zone that he’s risking going in to find?

The two men meet with the Professor in the bar. It’s fitting that they’d all meet here, with the Writer drinking in particular; for alcohol is as much an escape from pain for him as the Zone, and the Room, are an escape from pain for the Stalker, as we’ll see.

The Professor is in the sciences, physics in particular, though he alludes enigmatically to an interest in chemistry as part of his reason for seeking the Room, a reason he’d not have the other two know about until they find the place. The Writer claims he’s going there to regain his lost inspiration.

The Stalker tells them that their train has arrived, so they must go. He tells Luger, the bartender (named Ernest in the novel), to call on his wife if he doesn’t come back. Those trains we keep hearing and seeing represent that wish to go out there to find happiness…as opposed to being content with the happiness we have here, but don’t appreciate; and this is precisely what Stalker is all about.

(Though “stalker” in the novel and film has no relation to our notion of a disturbed fan or rejected lover following around a celebrity or other object of desire, one can in a way see a connection between the two uses of the word…someone obsessively chasing a desire or form of happiness that isn’t his to have.)

They drive to the entry to the Zone, dodging and hiding from the police who patrol the area on their motorbikes. Since the Zone is, for the Stalker in particular, a kind of Eden away from his miserable world, those police are like the cherubim and the flaming sword that forbid re-entry into paradise, to get at the Tree of Life (Genesis 3:24).

Now, how should one think of the ‘happiness’ as promised by the Room in the Zone? Since Stalker is a Soviet film (i.e., one approved by the Soviet government), one might think that one’s deepest desire is for the establishment of full communism: a classless society with such an abundance of commodities as pure use-values that one can obtain without need of money, and therefore no state is needed, either, to protect the interests of one class against those of the other. Police preventing entry into the Zone can thus represent capitalist encirclement–imperialism.

Now, while Tarkovsky, as his son would later insist, was no political dissident with regards to the ideology of the USSR (i.e., he didn’t leave the USSR during his last years for political reasons; and it should be noted in this regard how George Lucas once said that one had greater artistic freedom as a filmmaker there than in Hollywood, as long as one didn’t criticize the government), it would be too simplistic to reduce the meaning of wish-fulfillment and ultimate happiness to the socialist goals of the Soviet Union. No: Tarkovsky was far too spiritual for dialectical materialism.

The point is that happiness, having what one wants most deeply in one’s soul, in the true, spiritual sense, is elusive, and there is much pain that one must go through to find that deeper happiness, not just having one’s wishes granted.

And in the end, one often finds that what one truly wants is not what one thought one wanted. The Writer admits, early on, that he isn’t really seeking inspiration from the Room, and that one often doesn’t know what one does or doesn’t want. He acknowledges this unknowing before even entering the Zone.

Still, the three men risk apprehension by the police at the entry to the Zone, then risk all the booby traps in the Zone that surround the Room…all to attain a most enigmatic happiness. Such is the seductive allure of nirvana, the desire to end the desire that causes suffering.

The Stalker drives their car on a train track among the patrol guards, who shoot at them. When one has seen the filthy urban sprawl that they live in, blanketed in pollution, one can begin to understand the lengths they’ll go to in their quest for a better life.

Having gotten past the cops, the three find a railcar to go on to get into the Zone. We see in this transport the connection between the trains and the going out there to find happiness. We hear the clanking of the railcar against the tracks as the three men go forward into the Zone, thus reinforcing the thematic connection between the sound of trains and the search for happiness…out there.

The police won’t follow the three into the Zone because they’re scared to death of what’s inside, as the Stalker explains to the Writer, who asks him what it is that’s inside. The Stalker says nothing to answer the Writer’s question, because nothing is precisely the answer to the question–a nothingness of nirvana, Wilfred Bion‘s O, Lacan‘s Real Order, a paradox of heaven and hell, Rudolph Otto‘s notion of the numinous, a mysterium tremendum et fascinans.

As the three men are going along the track, we hear the clanking of the railcar and other twanging noises as a fitting soundtrack to the sights of industrial clutter all over the land, a reminder of the bleakness of their world. And finally, the black and white of that bleakness changes to colour, and the railcar stops.

We see mostly the green beauty of nature, with trees, bushes, and grass…but still some urban clutter to remind us that the world isn’t as perfect as it may seem. The Stalker nonetheless joyfully says that they’re “home at last,” for in spite of the dangers of the Zone, the three have arrived at his conception of happiness, hence, the change to colour. He loves how still and quiet the place is, a stillness and quiet of peace, without the hell of other people…apart from the three of them, though, of course.

To navigate the Zone and avoid its booby-traps, the Stalker will use a kind of slingshot, throwing metal nuts here and there, rather like David’s way of defeating the danger of the Philistines (this flinging of nuts from a slingshot is also done by Redrick in the novel).

They have to proceed through the Zone in a very roundabout way, to avoid the dangers therein. In the novel, there’s even a reference to minesweepers that were used by stalkers in the Zone, and how two stalkers were “killed by underground explosions.” This is the sort of thing that I mean when I refer to booby-traps in the Zone. Indeed, in keeping with the socialist interpretation of the heavenly aspect of the Zone and the Room, one might associate these mines and other booby-traps with the mines and other bombs that the imperialists left in places like Laos during the Vietnam War.

On a deeper level, we can see in the heaven/hell paradox of the Zone a symbolic association between the meteorite/aliens and humans, on the one hand, and the sons of God mating with the daughters of men, on the other (Genesis 6:1-4). The offspring from the Biblical mating were the Nephilim; in the case of the Zone, the offspring of stalkers, who have been exposed to the alien presence, are children like the deformed “Monkey”–unable to walk, but possessing telekinetic powers, as we discover at the end of the film.

The point is that, in the Zone, there is, symbolically speaking, a taboo mixture of the human and divine worlds, giving rise to the heaven/hell paradox of the place. Wishes may come true, it’s divinely beautiful in its greenery, but people die here. I discussed, in my analysis of the primeval history in Genesis, how any mixture of the human and divine worlds resulted in evil (i.e., man trying to be like God in having knowledge–expulsion from Eden; man trying to be like God in deciding when another will die–Cain’s punishment; and the mating of the sons of God with the daughters of men–the sinful world leading to the Flood).

The Stalker describes the Zone as a complex maze of death traps where “everything begins to move” when people are there. The Zone is an alien land, altered by divine, celestial beings, as it were, and when man enters it, we have that mix of divine and human that brings with it the danger of a deluge of evil.

This is why, though the three men have quickly found the building where the Room is, they cannot risk death by directly walking into it. They must follow the deliberately circuitous path directed by the Stalker. “Former traps disappear; new ones appear,” he says. Safe paths become dangerous, and vice versa: a dialectical shift between the opposites of good and evil, shifting up and down like the waves of an ocean…or a flood.

The Stalker speaks of the Zone in almost religious language, as though it’s a God-like presence that will punish you with death if you don’t behave properly. Still, he thinks that it isn’t the good or evil who either make it to the Room or perish. It’s the wretched, those who’ve lost all hope, who go thus from the lowest low up to the highest heaven. Yet even the wretched may perish if they misbehave here.

So, instead of going into the building, they will get there indirectly by first going into a dark wood where the Stalker has tossed one of his slingshot nuts. Thus we come to Part Two of the film. “Long is the way/And hard, that out of hell leads up to light.” (Milton, Paradise Lost, Book Two, lines 432-433)

The Stalker hopes, again in that quasi-religious attitude of his, that the other two men will believe (i.e., in the truth of the Zone), believe in themselves, and “become as helpless as children.” (Mark 10:14-15)

Another paradox in the film is the Stalker’s belief that it is in softness that there is life, and in death we find hardness. Strength and hardness kill, in his view; in softness and flexibility are life, rather like the notion that the meek are blessed, for they shall inherit the earth (Matthew 5:5).

The Professor, not realizing that the Stalker has been continuously guiding him and the Writer to the Room, however circuitously, but incorrectly thinking he has just been showing them something, has left his backpack and wants to go back to retrieve it. The Stalker insists that he mustn’t, for fear of the death traps, but the Professor won’t be dissuaded, because he has something in that backpack that he needs when reaching the Room.

The Stalker and Writer come to a place of rushing water that the former calls “the dry tunnel,” as a joke. Since the Professor is no longer with them, they assume correctly that he’s gone back for his backpack, and that they must go on without him. They go through the soaking wet of the “dry tunnel,” and after we see a close-up shot of rippling, shallow water with such various forms of leftover trash as used needles and pieces of paper, the two men are surprised to find the Professor on the other side, with his backpack and calmly eating and drinking from his thermos.

They’ve managed to get through an area the Stalker deemed dangerous, a watery area the Professor has navigated with no help (and the Writer has alluded to Peter almost drowning, a reference to Matthew 14:22-32); here, we see the Stalker, the most ‘religious’ of the three, being the one “of little faith,” while the Professor hasn’t needed any faith.

The three men lie down and have a rest.

Since this place is, on the one hand, a wish-fulfilling paradise, and paradoxically on the other hand, a place of death, a heavenly Hades, if you will, the appearance of a dog–whose howling we heard when the three men arrived on the railcar–is fitting. This dog is symbolic of Cerberus, guarding, as it were, the underworld of ultimate fulfillment.

We see a brief black-and-white shot of the water, close up, leading to the Stalker, who is lying prone on the ground by that water, his head on his hand in an attitude of exasperation. Meanwhile, the other two have been chatting about whatever wishes they may hope will be granted them. Inspiration for the Writer? A Nobel Prize for the Professor? The latter taunts the former about his talentless, vain writing, but the Writer, spitting on humanity, is interested only in himself. The Stalker’s exasperation must come from his secret knowledge that the granting of one’s wishes is a truly empty pursuit.

Still, taking people into the Zone is extremely important to him, as a kind of act of religious faith, as we’ll see towards the end of the film.

“Truth is born in arguments,” we hear. Indeed: dialectical thinking is the basis of all the paradoxes of Stalker.

We return to colour, with the Stalker now lying supine on the grass. He seems more at ease now. He brings as many people as he can into the Zone, wishing to bring in more…to find happiness. He agrees that one has never found a single happy person in the world, a reminder of the first of the Buddha‘s Four Noble Truths…yet the Stalker still wants to bring people here.

One seeks happiness like a dog chasing its tail, never catching it. Still, one chases after it.

When asked if he’s ever used the Room, the Stalker says that he’s happy as he is…with no smile on his face.

…and we briefly return to black and white, with the dog running up to him. His whole world is just as bleak in the Zone as it is outside. Deep down, the Stalker knows that the Room’s promises of happiness are empty, so he only brings other people here to give them that hope. He is, in essence, a kind of religious charlatan, selling bliss, and he knows it.

He’s lying on a tiny island, as it were, of land, just big enough to include his body, and he’s surrounded by shallow water. Sometimes Brahman is compared to an ocean (as I have done), with Atman compared to a drop in this ocean. But here, this water is shallow, like the shallow hope of happiness the Stalker is selling. Sometimes, nirvana is compared to an island, but his ‘island’ is so small as to be insignificant.

The Writer acknowledges the emptiness of his desire to gain inspiration from the Room. After all, the whole point of being a writer, for him at least, is to prove his worth, as such to himself and to others. This need to prove himself is fueled by his own self-doubt. If the Room grants him his wish of genius, he has no more need to prove himself; then, what need has he anymore to write?

What we can see here, therefore, is a kind of ouroboros of wish-fulfillment. I’ve discussed, in many other articles, my use of the serpent biting its tail as a symbol of the dialectical relationship between opposites. The ouroboros, coiled in a circle. represents for me a circular continuum; extreme opposites meet and phase into each other where the head bites the tail, and every point in between has its correspondence on every intermediate point on the serpent’s coiled body.

So, for the Writer to achieve his wish of inspiration is to lose his whole motivation and meaning for writing. The talent of writing kills the writer. The Stalker knows, deep down, that the granting of wishes, the giving of happiness, kills it; therefore, he’ll never use the Room. The Professor knows of the potential danger of misuse of the wish-granting of the heaven-hell Room, so he has special plans for it, which necessitate his bringing along of his backpack.

One can conceive of an ouroboros of the Zone, too. When the three men arrive, having come from the black-and-white bleakness of their ordinary world and the danger of being shot by the patrol guards, we come upon a colourful world of beautiful trees, grass, and bushes. What’s more, the Room has been discovered to be quite close.

They can’t go in directly, so they’ve had to travel from the heavenly biting head, as it were, of the ouroboros of the Zone, down the coiled length of its body in the direction of its bitten tail, where the deadly meatgrinder is, just before the Room. As can be expected, this move along the coiled length of the serpent’s body, so to speak, has meant an experience of less and less bliss, more and more pain. The Stalker has to guide them through the increasing intensity of danger. Hence, these black-and-white moments, indicating a decrease in heavenly bliss; hence also the increasing lack of civility in the men’s discussions.

We see a shot of what looks like a stretch of muddy land, yet it moves in waves…at once like that Brahman-ocean metaphor I discussed above, yet also like a field of diarrhea. Such is the heaven/hell paradox of the Zone.

We hear a voiceover recitation of Revelation 6:12-17 begin as the Stalker, still lying on his little island, stares in front of himself in a wide-eyed daze. The film switches to black and white again, with a slowly moving close-up shot of the shallow water with random pieces of trash in it: a needle, coins, a picture of a saint, a gun, etc., and muddy tiles on the bottom. The shot ends with the Stalker’s hand.

With what is heard and seen, we again have juxtapositions of the holy and the horrifying: a description of the terror of Armageddon from the Bible, and the oceanic Brahman of water, but shallow water with things that hurt (the needle and gun); a holy man’s picture, but that which, if we love it too much, is the root of all evil (1 Timothy 6:10).

We return to colour, with a shot of the dog. The Stalker rises from his resting place, and he contemplates the two disciples going to Emmaus and seeing the risen Christ (Luke 24:13-18). This narrative, of course, brings us from the despair of the disciples, over Christ‘s crucifixion, to the joyful realization of His resurrection…only the Stalker stops his recitation just before that moment of realization. Instead, as the Stalker discusses music, we see a shot of a beautiful lake, surrounded by trees. Renewed hope and joy can come in surprising forms.

Recall the presence of the dog…for the next scene shows the entrance to a tunnel leading ultimately to the Room. This is the place of death, a kind of Hades, that one has to go through before reaching the heaven of the Zone. This is the bitten tail of the ouroboros that I mentioned above. It’s a harrowing of hell, the meatgrinder one must risk death going through if one is to reach the nirvana known as the Room, the serpent’s biting head.

In the novel, Redrick simply plans, from the beginning, to sacrifice Arthur to the meatgrinder, so the former can gain access to the Golden Ball. In the film, the Stalker has all three men draw straws to see who will go first into the meatgrinder and risk death. The Writer is the unlucky one.

Like Arthur, the Writer is the Christ figure who must suffer so the others get the benefits of the Room. Unlike Arthur, though, the Writer won’t die; he’ll just have to endure the stress of thinking he could die. He’ll have to go through this dark, filthy, polluted tunnel that curves like the inside of the coiled ouroboros. The Writer, before drawing straws, says he doesn’t think he should go in first, rather like Jesus, praying in Gethsemane, hoping God would let this cup pass from him (Matthew 26:39).

The Writer goes through the tunnel, the Stalker and Professor following from far behind. The Writer reaches a door, through which he must go. Before opening the door, though, he takes a pistol out of his coat pocket; the Stalker forbids him to use it, for it would seal their doom. Christ, during His Passion, of which the Writer’s current ordeal is the representation, never used a weapon–neither must the Writer.

He opens the door, goes into a passageway flooded with water, and must descend stairs to get chest deep in it to reach the other side. Of course, the other two must follow. The gun must be left in the water.

The Writer has gone ahead into an area with wavy hills of sand on the floor, reminding us of that stretch of muddy land outside that undulated. The Stalker warns the Writer to go no further. Those waves of sand again remind us of the oceanic nature of the Absolute, which is both heaven and hell. The Writer is lying on his side in a puddle, in exasperation, as the Stalker was before.

The Writer gets up, then speaks of this place as someone’s “idiotic invention.” The Zone, like religion, is just an invention to him. He’s furious with the Stalker, believing he cheated him into taking the wrong straw.

The Stalker is amazed at the Writer’s good luck in having survived, since so many have died in the meatgrinder. The Writer’s survival, allowing the other two to get through alive, is thus symbolic of Christ’s redemptive sacrifice and resurrection. Later, we will even see the Writer put on his head a wreath of branches like the crown of thorns.

Finally, they’re in the Room. What’s fascinating about the shot Tarkovsky takes of the Room is that we see it from outside, from the entranceway, just like his opening shot of the Stalker’s home, with the doorway leading into the bedroom. A similar shot has been given of the way in the bar. The implication is that these similarities show that the way to true happiness is not somewhere out there, a place we have to find, but right here at home, if only we had the eyes to see it. The problems is that we are, so to speak, colourblind–hence, the black-and-white shots.

A telephone rings in the Room. The call is from a clinic, the Professor’s place of work, and he phones back to talk to the caller, a colleague he has contempt for. The Professor proudly admits to what the caller knows that he intends to do to the Room. In a sense, the Professor is having his deepest, secret wish come true right here, for he has found the courage to tell the caller that he is defying the wishes of the institution of his employment, from which he expects to be fired.

…and what does the Professor want to do, and why does he need that backpack so badly? In it, he’s been carrying a bomb he’s meant to use to destroy the Room, so no one can misuse it to grant wishes of power, or to do other forms of evil.

The Stalker struggles with the Professor to take the bomb away and to prevent him from destroying the Room, but the Writer stops the Stalker, still mad at him for cheating him into making him go first into the meatgrinder. In any case, the Professor will change his mind, take his bomb apart, and toss the pieces into a large puddle. What we truly want is often a surprise to us, for we don’t really know what it is.

The three men look out at a large opening where a wall would have been, as if this were the entrance to the Room. We never see what’s on the other side, as if to preserve the mystery of the Room; but I don’t think that this opening leads there, however much it is implied that it does. The light coming out from it suggests that it’s the way back outside, rather than the way into the Room. (When we saw the building earlier from the outside, when the three men had just arrived and the Writer was approaching it, we saw a huge hole in it, a wall removed, and a door to a small room to the right; what we see now corresponds perfectly to this earlier sight.)

I believe the little room with the telephone and a glowing ball of a ceiling light (corresponding to the novel’s Golden Sphere?) is the actual Room, though Tarkovsky may have been teasing us with ambiguity as to which area was the real Room (i.e., which way is the real way to heaven?). The men have just stepped out of the Room for a moment, having not yet decided on what their wishes will be; then they’ll go back in.

The little room has a telephone, electricity, even sleeping pills…all odd things to find in one of so many abandoned buildings of junk and filth, if this isn’t the wish-granting Room. Still, what we want is so often not what we really want, hence the ambiguity as to which place is the real Room.

And in spite of how ambiguous this Room is in terms of its wish-fulfilling properties, and its paradoxical heaven/hell status, the Stalker still wants his Room to continue existing, not just so he can continue making money taking people here, but because he sees in it the importance of maintaining a sense of hope in life, a faith in some kind of religious feeling. He is, as the Writer observes, “one of God’s fools.”

When the Stalker talks about making one’s wish, now that the time has finally come, he is nervous and dripping with sweat, as though getting one’s wish is a terrifying thing. Heaven is hell.

So what the men end up doing is sitting outside between the Room and the open space, in quiet contemplation, instead of making wishes. All this effort…for nothing.

Yet, the Stalker mentions again, as he did when they’d first arrived in the Zone, how still the place is.

They return to the bar, and we return to black and white. The Stalker’s wife is there, with Monkey. We see the two of them outside, through the window of a door, in a shot reminding us of those of the Room, of the way in the bar, and of the way into the Stalker’s home’s bedroom. The place of our wishes is here with us, with family and friends, all in its dull black and white, with all of its troubles and miseries.

The dog has come with them, further demonstrating the unity of the Zone and what’s outside it. When the Stalker goes home with his family and the dog, we return to colour, with the Stalker carrying Monkey on his shoulders.

Back in his home, the Stalker, not feeling well, is complaining of the lack of respect and appreciation the Writer and Professor have for the Zone and Room, like a religious person complaining of atheists. Fittingly, we see black and white again, to reflect his own lack of appreciation for all that he has, in his own home. He ends up back in bed, as he was at the beginning of the film, which has thus come full circle.

His wife, in a monologue that breaks the fourth wall, speaks of never once regretting marrying him, in contrast to her cursing of him at the film’s beginning. She, too, calls him “one of God’s fools.”

She concludes that, in spite of all the sorrows she’s had with the Stalker, she has no regrets because, as the film has pointed out so many times with all of its symbolism, without pain, there’s no happiness or hope, either.

…and who is her hope, and his hope? Monkey, of course!

And this is how the film ends, in colour, with Monkey seen reading a book. A golden shawl is wrapped around her head and draped on her shoulders, presumably to hide her deformities. She is mute throughout the film. We hear the Stalker’s wife, in voiceover, reciting a poem as the child, having put the book down, sits there staring into space.

The film ends with her using telekinesis to move two glasses across a table, making one of them fall off of it. Here we see the true meaning of wish-fulfillment: using one’s mind to make happen what one wishes to happen. As a deformed child of the Stalker, and therefore of the Zone, Monkey is clearly his wish-fulfillment personified, even if he doesn’t realize it. As the offspring resulting from the symbolic mating of one of the sons of God and the daughters of men, she isn’t literally one of the Nephilim, but she is a giant hope for her parents.

The fulfillment of wishes, the finding of happiness, isn’t supposed to be selfish–it’s to be shared with others. This is why we see colour now in the Stalker’s home: his happiness is here because his wife and daughter are here. They are his happiness. Happiness is a collective one, not an individual one…which is actually the goal of socialism, incidentally.

A similar conclusion is made in the novel when Redrick shouts out, in imitation of Arthur, who has first shouted it before being killed by the meatgrinder: “HAPPINESS FOR EVERYBODY, FREE, AND NO ONE WILL GO AWAY UNSATISFIED!”

Nonetheless, we hear the rattling of that train again, the wish to find happiness out there. The temptation to go astray is ever present. As the camera does a closeup on Monkey, though, with her head lying on its side on the table, her like a reclining Buddha, we hear a chorus singing Beethoven’s Ode to Joy.

How fitting.

Analysis of the Christ Myth

I: Introduction

Before I go into this analysis, I need to clarify a few things for my readers. If you wish to read a characterization of Christ that reaffirms all the orthodox notions of him, I recommend going back to your Bible, or to your local church and listen to your preacher. There’s no point in my simply restating what’s already been said so many times before.

I’m attempting here to argue something different: a combination of ideas from modern Biblical scholarship with some literary interpretations of my own. So if you, Dear Reader, happen to be a Bible-believing Christian who doesn’t like to have his or her cherished beliefs challenged, I’m afraid that this analysis isn’t for you; stop reading, and do as I suggested in the above paragraph. I respect your right to have your faith, but I don’t share it.

Also, if your beliefs are as I’ve said above, don’t assume that you’ll read this through, then ‘prove me wrong’ in the comments section with a reading list of links and books. Don’t assume you’re going ‘to win my soul for Christ’: almost twenty years ago, I went through a Christian phase, for about six or seven years, then I lost my faith by the end of the 2000s. I’d say bringing me back into the flock, through a little online arguing, is most unlikely.

Finally, if my analysis offends your sense of orthodoxy, I’d advise against making abusive comments, as such an attitude is decidedly un-Christian, and therefore will have the opposite effect of changing my mind. Recall Jesus’ words in this connection: “You have heard that it was said, ‘Love your neighbor’ and ‘Hate your enemy.’ But I tell you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, that you may be sons of your Father in heaven. He causes His sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous. If you love those who love you, what reward will you get? Do not even tax collectors do the same? And if you greet only your brothers, what are you doing more than others? Do not even Gentiles do the same?” (Matthew 5: 43-47)

Then, there’s what Bill Hicks said in response to offended Christians (<<<at about 1:20).

Furthermore, if my interpretations seem to be ‘manipulative’ of Scripture, keep in mind how manipulative the Church and others in power have always been in their interpretation of the same Scriptures, typically for political ends. For those manipulations, the accepted ones, are ones that have been made by the owners of the most real estate!

Now, as for those of you who are open-minded enough to consider a different point of view, I welcome you.

II: Jesus, the Anti-imperialist Revolutionary

Jesus was not a “Christian.” He had no intention of starting a new religion, nor did his immediate followers, including James and Peter. It was Paul, apostle to the Gentiles, who introduced the idea of Jesus dying for our sins to save us from eternal damnation (see The Mythmaker: Paul and the Invention of Christianity, by Hyam Maccoby, for a full argument), faith in this salvific death replacing the Torah, something neither Jesus nor his immediate followers ever intended to abrogate, an idea they would have been horrified even to contemplate.

Jesus saw himself as the Messiah in the traditional Jewish sense of the concept: descended from David (even Paul acknowledged this in Romans 1:3), a king “who would restore the Jewish monarchy, drive out the Roman invaders, set up an independent Jewish state, and inaugurate an era of peace, justice and prosperity (known as ‘the kingdom of God’) for the whole world.” (Maccoby, page 15) He did not consider himself divine; such an idea was added decades later by the Pauline Church. For him, ‘Son of God‘ was not meant to be taken literally, but was rather expressive of how he was a righteous follower of God, as used in the Hebrew Bible.

Now, I don’t subscribe to Caleb Maupin’s notion that Jesus was a socialist, but this notion of Christ as a revolutionary, who didn’t come to bring peace, but a sword (Matthew 10:34), is an inspiring concept for us anti-imperialists today. For as Mao taught us, “Revolution is not a dinner party,” and “Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.” As I will argue below, there are revolutionary things Jesus and his followers said and did that can inspire us socialists today, if in a symbolic, allegorical form.

Of course one wouldn’t know that Christ was a revolutionary to read the New Testament, since the followers of the Pauline Church, including the four evangelists, edited out and minimized all discussion of militant action. Only a few such remarks, such as the quote given in the link from Matthew in the previous paragraph, remain in the Gospels as, so to speak, Freudian slips that go against the tendenz of the general message, and therefore hint at the hidden truth.

Other examples of the truth slipping out include how Jesus’ disciples included one called “Simon the Zealot,” as well as the “Sons of Thunder” (or does Boanerges mean “Sons of Tumult,” or “Sons of Anger”?). Why would a mild-mannered preacher of peace and love, so willing to “render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s,” include a Zealot, as well as such aggressive types, among his disciples?

A more important question is why this militant, revolutionary message was edited out (with the exception of such oversights as those mentioned above). Though some scholars have claimed that Roman rule over Palestine in the first century CE wasn’t all that oppressive, others say it was. Romans crucified men for the crime of sedition, as I discussed in my analysis of Spartacus. Thousands of Jews claiming to be the Messiah were put to death in this cruel, excruciating way. Why kill them this way if the revolutionary threat wasn’t so great, and why risk such a painful death if one’s oppression wasn’t all that severe?

The earliest of the Gospels to be written was that of Mark, written around 66-74 CE, either just before or just after the destruction of the Second Temple in Jerusalem in 70 CE. The other three Gospels were written years, if not a decade or two, after this event, when the brutally defeated Jews were too demoralized to take up the revolutionary struggle so soon again.

For the early Christian Church, having just been persecuted under Nero, any antagonism of Rome would have been inadvisable, to say the least; whereas gaining as many Roman converts as possible would have been in the Church’s best interests. Hence, as appeasing an attitude to Rome as could be achieved, while also contradicting the known history as minimally as possible, was desirable to these early Christian missionaries.

Added to this issue was the growing antipathy between the original Jewish Jesus movement and the Gentile Pauline Church (In this connection, consider how defensive Paul gets in 2 Corinthians 11 against those “super-apostles” who doubt his authority as an apostle; consider also the controversy between Paul and the Jewish Christians as expressed in Acts 15.). It would work to the Church’s advantage to reinforce the bad Roman feeling against the Jews while as the same time ingratiating Rome. Hence, the Gospels’ shifting of the blame of Christ’s crucifixion onto the Jews and away from Rome.

Small wonder Jesus is understood to have said, “My kingdom is not of this world.” (John 18:36) This statement is a clever de-politicizing of the notion of the Kingdom of God as wiping out Roman rule and reinstating the Jewish monarchy. Small wonder, when the Jews insisted that Pontius Pilate release insurrectionist Barabbas and crucify Jesus (“His blood be on us, and on our children!” [Matthew 27:25]), the Judaean governor washes his hands of the decision, carrying out the Jews’ apparent wishes while absolving himself, and all of Rome, of responsibility.

It is also easy to see how all of this whitewashing of Roman responsibility, and placing it instead on the Jews, brought about almost two millennia of Christian, particularly European, antisemitism, culminating in the Holocaust.

III: The Son of God, Figuratively to Literally

As I said above, the traditionally Jewish use of ‘son of God’ only meant someone with a special, close relationship with God, not one literally begotten of God, the way Zeus impregnated maidens to give birth to Greek heroes. Such a use originally applied to Jesus, too, though that would change over the decades and later New Testament writings.

Let’s start with Paul’s letters, the earliest New Testament writings, generally dated around 48-57 CE (i.e., Galatians, 1 Thessalonians, 1 and 2 Corinthians, Philemon, Philippians, and Romans; all others attributed to Paul are either of doubtful authenticity or not considered authentically his writing).

One striking thing to note about this early Christology is that Paul doesn’t seem to know anything about the Virgin Birth. As I pointed out above with the quote from Romans 1:3, he said that Jesus was descended from King David, but that he was “declared to be the Son of God with power, according to the spirit of holiness, by the resurrection from the dead” (Romans 1:4).

In other words, according to Paul, Christ wasn’t the pre-existing Word from the beginning (John 1:1); he was “born of a woman, born under the law” (Galatians 4:4), that is, born fully human. He became the Son of God when God rose him from the dead–no earlier.

Let’s move ahead a decade or two to the Gospel of Mark, which establishes Jesus’ Sonship, well, earlier, specifically, at his baptism, after which the Holy Spirit was said to have descended on him like a dove, and God declared that Jesus was “[His] beloved Son, in whom [He is] well pleased” (Mark 1:11). Still no mention of a Virgin Birth.

We get the Virgin Birth in the Gospels of Matthew and Luke/Acts, respectively believed to have been written around about 70-85 and 80-90 CE. There’s one little problem with this notion of a Virgin Birth, though: it’s based on a mistranslation.

Matthew 1:23 quotes Isaiah 7:14 as follows: “Behold, a virgin shall be with child, and shall bring forth a son, and they shall call his name Emmanuel, which being interpreted is, God with us.” The problem with this is that the author of Matthew was quoting the Septuagint Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible, which used parthenos, “virgin,” for the Isaiah verse; the original Hebrew Bible, however, uses almah, “young woman.” If the prophesy had intended to refer to a miraculous birth, why not use betulah, “virgin,” instead?

Another curious thing should be noted, one that will doubtless infuriate the fundamentalists, who insist that the Bible is ‘the inerrant Word of God.’ If one were to compare the genealogies of Jesus as given in Matthew and Luke, not only do the names differ so much as to be surely the genealogies of completely different men, but if one were to reckon only those names from King David to Joseph, one would find that in Luke, there are about fifteen more generations (Luke 3:23-31) than there are in Matthew 1:6-16.

In any case, we can see that Jesus was getting more and more divine by the decades. With Paul’s notion of Christ dying for our sins and being resurrected, we sense the, at least unconscious, influence on Paul of the dying and resurrecting gods of pagan mystery traditions (i.e., Attis, Osiris, Tammuz, etc.–see Maccoby, pages 195-198). As the notion of Christ’s divinity grows through the Virgin Birth, Mary, the Mother of God and Queen of Heaven and Earth, also slowly begins to acquire quasi-pagan/divine attributes.

We can see this Marian development already in Luke 1:28-55, from the angel Gabriel calling her kecharitomene up to the Magnificat. Mary has been full of grace right from the beginning of her life, as kecharitomene implies, according to the Catholic interpretation, which is used as proof of the Immaculate Conception. One doesn’t have to go far from this to the Cult of Mary (in spite of the Church’s condemnation of it), and thence to her role as Co-Redemptrix. Since Paul was, as I mentioned above, Apostle to the Gentiles, and Luke was written for a Gentile audience, notions of a dying-and-resurrecting son of God, born of an immaculate mother, must have inflamed their pagan imaginations.

Finally, it’s in the Johannine writings (the Gospel of John, in its final form, having been written probably some time between 90-110 CE) that we find Christ as the pre-existing Logos who was made flesh. He’s truly coming closer to God, though the Trinitarian doctrine isn’t yet quite fully established. An argument can be made that the Gospel of John is presenting the Arian position that Christ is homoiousios, not homoousios–similar to, but not the same, as God. After all, Christ seems to be denying his identity with God (John 10:30) to his accusers of blasphemy when he says, “Is it not written in your law, I said, ‘ye are gods?” (John 10:34-38).

The hypostatic union, that is, Jesus understood in the Trinitarian sense of being God and man, all in one indivisible whole, suggests that goddess-like status of Mary, the Theotokos, who couldn’t be merely the mother of a physical, but not spiritual, nature, as in the Nestorian heresy. The pagan influence on Christianity goes back pretty early, doesn’t it? Small wonder the Church was able to accommodate so many pagan traditions (i.e., transforming pagan gods into Christian saints, turning pagan holidays into Christian ones, etc.) so easily.

IV: The Ouroboros of Christ

So as we go towards the later New Testament writings, we go further away from the Jesus of history and more and more towards the Jesus of faith, or of myth, however you prefer to see it. As much as I see these later developments as ahistorical, though, I don’t see them as completely without merit or worth. I will, nonetheless, interpret their meaning in an unorthodox, metaphorical way.

In the last section, we saw Jesus rising from a man favoured of God to being man and God at the same time, since the Church insisted he must be both, for soteriological reasons. Now, however, we’re going to see Christ descend, though in a very different way. Here, I give you a new, metaphorical interpretation of the Christ myth, one that paradoxically uses the orthodox concepts to symbolize how we can think about the original, revolutionary message.

In the beginning was the already existing Word, the idealized, spiritual version of Christ, who dwelt with God. I like the New English Bible translation the best: “…and what God was, the Word was.” (John 1:1) It suggests the Arian notion of homoiousios, similarity between God and Christ, an emphasis of Jesus’ virtues and closeness to God, good qualities to have in a revolutionary figure.

When the Word was made flesh (John 1:14), though, a transformation of Christ occurred that requires us to take note of the influence of Gnosticism on Pauline Christianity. In particular, I’m referring to the dualism of the spirit vs. the flesh. Naturally, the spirit is idealized, Godlike, and the flesh is corrupt, evil, of the Devil.

Now, since Pauline Christianity is, as Maccoby conceived of it, a combination of Judaism, Gnosticism, and pagan mystery tradition, Paul was only a moderate Gnostic (Maccoby, pages 185-189). For Paul, the physical world and the Torah weren’t created by the evil Demiurge, but by God; instead, Satan took over this world from the time of the Fall, perceived as a radical plunge from God’s grace to the depths of sin (a notion whose logic I questioned here–scroll way down to find the relevant passage), and the Torah for Paul was only a temporary guide to be superseded by belief in Christ’s sacrificial death (Romans 8:3), the pagan element of Paul’s conception of Christianity.

So the physical world and the Torah aren’t evil in an absolute sense for Paul; they’re just inferior…bad enough. Indulgence in physical pleasure, and insistence on adhering to the Law, though, are evil for Paul; hence, his celibacy and recommendation of it to those who can resist sex (1 Corinthians 7:1-2), and “the power of sin is the Law” (1 Corinthians 15:56); also, there’s Romans 3:20.

My point in discussing this Gnostic influence on Paul, that the spirit is good and the physical is evil, is that it has a bearing on the Incarnation. As perfect as Christ is understood to be as both God and man, his very physicality is a descent from the absoluteness of that perfection. Small wonder the heretical Gnostic Christians couldn’t accept a Christ that came in the flesh (2 John 1:7); for them, he, not having a body, couldn’t be crucified, but someone else had to have been crucified instead (Simon of Cyrene), an idea that managed to appear in the Koran (surah An Nisa, 157).

Christ’s Incarnation is thus the beginning of his mythical descent, one that will end with his crucifixion, death, and harrowing of hell. His resurrection, in a spiritual body that’s incorruptible, is thus his return to that absolute state of perfection from the beginning, a coming full circle for him, which leads to a point I’ve made many times before.

I use the ouroboros as a symbol of the dialectical, unified relationship between opposites. I feel that that relationship is best expressed in the form of a circular continuum, with the extreme opposites meeting and paradoxically phasing into each other. For me, the ouroboros shows us that meeting of opposites with the serpent’s head biting its tail. Of course, every intermediate point on the circular continuum is corresponded to on the serpent’s coiled body.

Now, as I see it, the biting head of the ouroboros of Christ represents the pre-existing Word from the beginning of Creation up until just before he is made flesh. With the Incarnation, we shift from the serpent’s biting head to just after it, at the neck. The newborn baby is surrounded by the love of Joseph, Mary, the gift-bearing Magi, the shepherds, and the angels, but he is in the humblest of mangers.

Later, as a young man, Jesus is tempted by the Devil in the wilderness (Matthew 4:1-11). As we all know, he of course resists this temptation completely, but none of this is to say he doesn’t at all feel the itch of temptation: after all, without at least the urge to give in, it’s hardly temptation, is it? Thus, this is a further move down towards the tail.

After that, he begins his ministry, with the assembling of his twelve disciples. As we know, he performs many miracles–turning water into wine, feeding five thousand, walking on water, healing the disabled, etc.–so even though he’s gone further down the body of the ouroboros, he’s still in the upper half of it. At one point, however, he’s hungry and goes to a fig tree, one that is out of season; angry that it has no figs for him to eat, he curses it, causing it to wither away (Mark 11:12-14). This is hardly saintly behaviour, no matter how Christians try to rationalize or allegorize it. His enjoining us to forgive others so God will forgive our sins doesn’t seem to dovetail well with his cursing of the fig tree (Mark 11:20-25). Why couldn’t he forgive it? He has thus slipped another inch or two down the serpent’s body.

In his exorcising of evil spirits in a madman, Jesus sends them into a herd of about two thousand pigs, which immediately run into a sea and drown themselves (Mark 5:1-13). Why kill them? Couldn’t Christ have simply sent the demons back to hell? That large herd of pigs was surely part of a farmer’s livelihood. Couldn’t Christ have taken that into consideration? Again, he seems to have slipped a bit further down the serpent’s body in the direction of the tail.

One striking thing about his teachings, often in the form of parables, is that they’re part of the Pharisee style of teaching. Indeed, in spite of the hostility Jesus is portrayed in the Gospels as having showed the Pharisees (whose way of doing things would evolve into rabbinic Judaism), he seems to have been a Pharisee himself (see also Maccoby, chapter 4). Though the Pauline New Testament tries to vilify all Jews not converting to Christ, his real condemnation is towards only those particular Pharisees and Sadducees who were collaborators with Rome, outwardly appearing to be righteous, but inwardly full of hypocrisy and iniquity (Matthew 23:28).

Indeed, as the controversies between him and the Jewish religious establishment grow, we find that, because of his popularity with the regular Jewish people, those authorities are afraid of showing antagonism to him. Recall that Jesus was thoroughly a Jew, not at all intending to destroy the Law or the Prophets (Matthew 5:17). Those Jews who opposed him weren’t ordinary Jews, as John would have you believe (John 8:44-49)–those Jews in particular were collaborators with Rome.

Now, with these controversies come the nearing danger of Jesus’ arrest and crucifixion, which therefore brings him further down the serpent’s body and closer to the tail. Since he is opposed to these collaborators with Rome, they at one point try to test him on his position on taxation, to which he gives a cleverly ambiguous answer (Mark 12:13-17).

I referred to the “render to Caesar” quote above, giving the interpretation that favours acquiescence to taxation, and therefore to Roman rule. The opposing interpretation, though, I’d say is the far likelier one, given Jesus’ revolutionary bent, and that is that what is Caesar’s is nothing, while what is to be rendered to God is everything.

As for the nature of Christ’s revolutionary leanings, as I said above, he was no ‘socialist,’ or even whatever the ancient equivalent of that would have been. Nor was he, much to the chagrin of your typical Christian fundamentalist today, the ancient equivalent of a right-winger, in spite of his Jewish traditionalism, and in spite of the later Pauline Church’s acceptance of the master-slave relation (1 Peter 2:18).

Jesus spoke of a kind of egalitarianism that many right-wingers today would balk at as being ‘socialist,’ even though it was nothing of the sort; and as I said in my analysis of It’s a Wonderful Life, such talk of Christian charity as socialism tells us more about the mean-spiritedness of those right-wingers, who often consider themselves Christian, than it does of whether or not such charity is at all socialist.

Jesus told a wealthy man to sell what he owns and give the money to the poor, in order to inherit eternal life (Mark 10:17-22). A little later, he says it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the Kingdom of God (Mark 10:25); this goes hard against the Protestants’ notion of the “Prosperity Gospel,” in which the material success of certain Christians is supposed proof of God’s favouring of them, rewarding their faith with wealth. On the contrary: as Jesus himself said, “many who are first will be last, and the last will be first.” (Mark 10:31)

In this connection, we must also allow for some nuance regarding this idea that one is saved only by faith in Christ’s death for our sins. The Gospel of Matthew, understood to have been written for a Jewish audience, seems to be an attempt to reconcile Pauline Christianity with the original Nazarene message, which insists on sticking with the Torah and even expanding on its morality (Matthew 5). After all, Jesus’ original teachings seem to have survived through an oral passing-on of them, as well as through the collection of Q sayings, so the Pauline Church would have had to address and reinterpret these words of his that wouldn’t go away.

The insistence on doing good works (Matthew 25:31-46) isn’t limited to Matthew: it’s seen also in the Epistle of James (e.g., James 2:17), which, as I see it, is another attempt to reconcile Pauline and Nazarene Christianity.

As I’ve been saying, Jesus has been slipping further towards the tail of the ouroboros, and he knows it. He predicts his betrayal, arrest, and crucifixion (Matthew 20:18). Along with his lowering of fortunes comes more temptation not to have to endure the Passion, hence his grievous praying in Gethsemane, hoping that God will “let this cup pass from [him]” (Matthew 26:36-39). In his temptation, his fear of the terrible pain he is about to endure, Jesus is showing us more and more of his human, rather than divine, side.

Of course, he is then betrayed by Judas Iscariot, fortuitously named from the point of view of the increasingly anti-Jewish Pauline Church, and arrested. Jesus is now definitely down in the rear half of the ouroboros’ body, and getting closer and closer to the bitten tail. His suffering is vividly and graphically shown in Mel Gibson’s movie on the topic, the film that unfortunately affirms the antisemitic passages of the Gospels.

Jesus is beaten, mocked, and crowned with a wreath of thorns…he’s inching closer to that tail. This is quite a descent from the high position of the pre-existing Logos, from the loftiest honour to an abyss of degradation, culminating in what’s been represented in the pitiful images of those Ecce Homo paintings.

Nailed to the Cross, Jesus retains some of his nobility by saying of his persecutors, “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do” (Luke 23:34), indicating that he’s still some way from the serpent’s bitten tail. Shortly before he dies, though, he quotes Psalm 22:1, saying, “Eli, Eli, lema sabachthani?” (Matthew 27:46). One would expect someone of moral perfection to suffer without complaint, knowing that God’s abandoning him is for the salvation of all of us.

With his death, understood to be confirmed by the spear in his side (John 19:34), and his descent into hell, we see Jesus reaching the bitten tail of the ouroboros. This is the lowest point of the low: his revolution has failed, it seems. His followers are all despondent.

A similar feeling has been felt in all the failed revolutions of history, including the short-lived Paris Commune, the 1905 Russian Revolution, the Spartacist Uprising, the Spanish Revolution of 1936, etc. After all the deaths and repressions, one can imagine the despair the insurgents felt.

Still, the early Nazarenes believed, apparently, that God rose Jesus from the dead (note that Paul also wrote of the passivity of his resurrection, as opposed to him raising himself from the dead). Now, we’ve gone past the bitten tail to the biting head of Christ’s return to glory. We also can see here the dialectical unity of his suffering, degradation, and death, on the one hand, and his resurrection in an incorruptible, spiritual body, in all his glory, on the other. The disciples’ hope has also been revived. To save one’s life, one must be willing to lose it (Luke 9:24).

V: The Resurrection and the Second Coming

We all know the traditional, literal meaning of Christ’s resurrection and Second Coming at the end of the world, so I have nothing new to say about that. Instead, given what we know of the original, revolutionary intent of the Nazarenes, I think it would be illuminating, and inspiring, to reinterpret the meaning of these two crucial Christian ideas in symbolic terms.

A revolution may fail; it may die…but it can be revived–it can come back to life, as it were…it can come a second time, or many times, until it finally succeeds. The Paris Commune failed, as did the 1905 Russian Revolution, but the revolution of 1917 succeeded (furthermore, the Soviet Union may have been dissolved, but that doesn’t extinguish the hopes of its return). The Cultural Revolution suffered many difficulties and setbacks…but look at China today.

The Messiah is supposed to come at the end of the world (or, for our purposes, the end of the world as we know it), establishing Zion and the Kingdom of God (hence Orthodox Jews are especially opposed to the man-made creation of Israel, along with a generally Jewish opposition to the oppression of the Palestinians, a situation that’s in ironic contradistinction to the plight of the Jews in first-century, Roman-occupied Palestine), a new era of peace and justice. For those of us who aren’t Bible-believing Christians, the resurrection and Second Coming can be seen to symbolize revived hopes of anti-imperialist revolution.

Of course, we have to believe, to have faith, hope, and love, those three things that last forever (1 Corinthians 13:13); recall Che’s words on revolution and love (the greatest of these), in this connection. Our love of the world drives us to try to make it better, to feed, clothe, house, educate, and give medical aid to the poor, as Christ would have wanted us to do (Matthew 25:40).

Now, the early Christians were no socialists, of course, but they did have some interesting practices worth discussing: they “sold their possessions and goods, and parted them to all men, as every man had need” (Acts 2:45). Also, “the multitude of them that believed were of one heart and of one soul: neither said any of them that ought of the things which he possessed was his own; but they had all things common.” (Acts 4:32) These practices influenced Thomas More in his writing of Utopia, a book about a fictional Christian island with a form of welfare and without private property, ideas which in turn influenced socialism.

The Nazarenes may have failed to kick their Roman oppressors out of Palestine, but Paul’s Gentile Church, over time, accommodated itself with Rome, a kind of changing of the system from within. The problem with this takeover is that one authoritarian, oppressive system got replaced with another.

Indeed, the Church authorities, in replacing the pagan Roman ones, were rather like Orwell’s pigs in a manner that the Bolsheviks never were, in spite of the intended narrative of Orwell’s polemical allegory. Such examples as the Church’s stamping out of heresies (including the many thousands of lives lost over the iota that marked the difference between the orthodox homousios and the Arian homoiousios, as noted above–Hegel, page 339), including, for example, the horrors of the Inquisition, should be enough to illustrate my meaning.

This difference between the Nazarene and the Pauline Church’s way of dealing with the Roman Empire can be seen to symbolize the difference between the virtues of revolutionary change and the vices of accommodation with the imperialist system. There is no room for opportunism or compromise.

We wipe out imperialism and replace it with a “kingdom of heaven,” so to speak–‘heavenly’ in the sense that, ideally, it will provide for all human needs, and a ‘kingdom’ in the sense that all authority will be used to ensure that providing for those needs. We must believe in such a possible future world; have faith in, and hope for, it. In such a world, we’ll love our neighbour as ourselves (Matthew 22:39).

It was believed that the ancient Hebrews fell under the Babylonian captivity as punishment for their sins, which sounds suspiciously to me like blaming the victim (similarly, many who suffer under capitalism today blame themselves unjustly for their suffering [i.e., they ‘lack ambition and talent’], instead of blaming the system that is causing their suffering). Nonetheless, those ancient Hebrews saw their prophesied Messiah as saving them from their sins, as Christians see Jesus has having done.

We secular-minded people, on the other hand, can see Jesus’ death and resurrection as symbolic of how revolutions at first fail, then hope in them is revived, then a ‘second coming’ ultimately leads to the success of the revolutions. Belief in his salvific death can thus symbolize our faith in persevering in a painful struggle that, after so many failures (and an unjustified blaming of oneself for those failures, our ‘sins’), ultimately leads to success, a kind of ‘eternal life’ in a much-improved world.

VI: Conclusion

So, this is my secular, allegorical interpretation of the Christ myth, which I hope will inspire my comrades. Of course, many won’t be happy with what I’ve written.

Indeed, many will want to point out to me how my sources are at best controversial, and at worst, the validity of those sources has been eviscerated with criticism. The fact is, objectively, we don’t really know for sure what happened in first-century Palestine. One camp of scholars says this, another camp says that, using whatever arguments they have to back up their agendas; we all pick which story we prefer. As far as I’m concerned, criticism of the interpretation that my sources have given has less to do with their technical, historical inaccuracies than with hurting Christians’ feelings. It’s more about politics than logic.

So as I said above in the Introduction, if my reinterpretation of ‘sacred history’ is offensive to certain Christian readers who chose not to heed my warning not to read something they surely wouldn’t like, being abusive to me in the comments will neither change my mind nor do you much credit. So please, don’t waste your time with that.

Still, if what I’ve said here bothers you that much, perhaps there’s one thing you can do that will make you feel better.

Pray for me (Matthew 5:44).

Hyam Maccoby, The Mythmaker: Paul and the Invention of Christianity, San Francisco, HarperCollins, 1987

Michael D. Coogan, ed., The New Oxford Annotated Bible, Third Edition, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2001

Samuel Sandmel, general ed., The New English Bible with the Apocrypha, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1961

Georg W.F. Hegel (translated by J. Sibree), The Philosophy of History, Buffalo, New York, Prometheus Books, 1991

‘The Targeter,’ a Surreal Novel, Chapter Twenty-One (Final Chapter)

Wow, that stinging I’ve been feeling on my left arm, under the elbow, on my right leg, just under my ass, and those two spots on my back, as well as all my other cuts and grazings on my neck and arm…it’s all hurting more and more…they’re sharper pains now.

My ketamine high must be finally wearing off.

Though I’m hurting more, and I don’t feel quite so stoned, I don’t feel more awake. As I lie here, prone on the road and soaked…in my blood?…I seem to be hovering between wakefulness and sleep.

Wait a minute…those weren’t large insects that smacked into me. I’m hearing more and more intense gunfire all around me. That pain I feel…those are bullets inside me!

Oh, my God. I’m going to die.

Estranged from my family, I’ve no way of contacting them. All of my foreigner friends have left the island, so I’ve no one to help me. Those Chinese men who were leading me to safety, I see them lying dead in pools of blood no different from my own growing pool of blood.

I’m dying, and no one is here to help me.

I’m getting light-headed. My K high is wearing off, but it hasn’t gone completely. My semi-conscious state, almost like hypnosis, is replacing my high, in keeping my mind in a dreamlike state…

BOOM! A huge explosion just rocked the area I’m lying in. It must have been close, for I just felt a shower of pebbles and dirt fall all over me. The flash of light from the explosion blinded me for the moment.

My whole body feels like it’s vibrating…I’m drifting off…

Wait!…No, that isn’t my blood all around me…it’s just my melted form again, merging with my surroundings…My surroundings are merging with me, too, all those pebbles, and that dirt…

Everything within me, and outside of me…we’re becoming ONE.

That pain I feel…it’s just the last remains of my suffering ego…as I merge with the Absolute…

I don’t want to lie like this, on my chest and stomach anymore…I’ll shift and lie on my left side…There’s that’s better.

I can barely keep my eyes open…Everything’s a blur in front of me…Sometimes flashes of light break up the darkness of the night…Some of the light is glowing…it seems like flames…Am I in Hell?

No, it can’t be Hell…I, Sid Arthur Gordimer, may be about to die, but as a saint and spreader of peace, love, and social justice, I’m leaving this world of pain and entering nirvana…Yes, that’s it!

I can hear the faint mumble of voices…people running by…Maybe some of them are staying here, by my side, wishing to help me and keep me company…how kind of them…They must be my surviving followers!

I should say something to them before I die…I have so little energy left…Can I think of the right way…to say it in Mandarin?…Let me see…

“All things,” I begin mumbling, in my surely broken, if not totally inarticulate, Chinese, “come to be…then they are no more…You must strive…to end the wars…help everyone…find peace of mind…feed, clothe, and house the poor…with all diligence.”

Was what I just said…at all intelligible?…I doubt it.

Whoa! Another blinding flash of light…with a deafening boom!…That was the closest explosion yet…More pebbles and dirt…are dropping on my body.

Everything’s black and silent…for the moment, at least.

Wait: a faint, but growing glow…and an indistinct hum…moaning, unintelligible sound…Getting clearer now…

Hey! Is that my father, the king?…I’m having a vision…

“Son,” he begins to say. “You are about to enter the realm of the Absolute. I must warn you, though: it won’t be pleasant at first. Recall the Unity of.Action, how all opposites are united and flow, each from one extreme to the other. These include Heaven and Hell, pleasure and pain, good and evil, love and hate, peace and war. To experience true nirvana, you must first endure the most excruciating of pain. To know the mastery of the biting head of the ouroboros, you must first know the pain of its bitten tail. Prepare yourself.”

“Yes, Father, I’m ready,” I say in a hoarse, weak voice that I can barely hear. He is showing me a father’s true love, for the first time in my life! This is so cathartic! Am I healing my wounds with my family? Is this the end of my estrangement from them?

“Also, remember the Unity of Space,” he continues. “In your union with the Absolute, you will also feel your ego merging with everything around you. It will be painful, but only insomuch as you are still attached to your separate state of existence. Allow your body to be scattered into an infinite amount of infinitesimal pieces, and you will feel minimal pain.”

“Yes, Father,” I say. “I’ll remember.”

“Sidney,” a familiar female voice rings in my ears.

“Is that my stepmother, reconciling herself with me?” I ask.

“No,” she says. “This is your mother, who never died. There is no stepmother. You imagined that. Stop splitting your living mother into good and bad halves. Accept me as one, with all my imperfections.”

“Yes, Mother,” I say. “Sorry.”

“Your life is done,” she says. “You wanted nirvana, so we as a family didn’t stand in your way. Before you enter it, we wanted to say goodbye to you. We all love you.”

“Thank you,” I say, teary-eyed. “I love you, too.”

“Goodbye, my husband,” Jessie says. “Raoul wants to say goodbye, too. See him waving to you?”

“Yes, I do,” I say, waving back to him. “Goodbye, my son.”

“Goodbye, Sid,” David says. “I’m sorry for all the fighting. I was in the wrong. I shouldn’t have been so envious.”

“Goodbye, David,” I say in sobs. “I’m sorry, too, that things ended so badly for you. I never meant you any harm.”

“It’s my fault,” he says. “I brought it all on myself.”

“The time has come, Son,” my father says. “Go in peace.”

Suddenly, a huge explosion blasts right in front of me, like a giant, fiery mushroom, burning my skin and blowing pieces of rock all over me. It stings with powerful blows on me, jerking me back a bit; but amazingly, I’m still lying in my reclining position, as if it had been only a gust of wind.

Still…I really feel…as though…the end…is near.

The end…not only for me,…but also…for all of the world.

I knew it all along…We’re all going to die.

My eyes…are barely open…I’m lying…limp…on the ground, but still…reclining…on my left side.

I’m looking up…into the night sky. Is that…a bomber plane…right above me? It’s so dark…Is something…dropping from it?…A black angel…coming down from…Heaven…to take me up…and carry me away…to paradise?

I’ve experienced…the flames of Hell…so now,…I should be going…from the one extreme…to the other…to Heaven.

Yes, that’s it!…Before the extreme light…of bliss,…I must be enveloped…in extreme black…like that black void…I swam into before…

The dropping black object…is getting closer…and closer…

Everything is…infinite black now…it’s just about here.

The black angel…is just upon me…almost touching…

Wow! Bright light everywhere, burning, scattering me all over the–

Analysis of ‘Simon of the Desert’

Simon of the Desert (Simón del desierto) is a 1965 Mexican short surrealist film written and directed by Luis Buñuel, the screenplay cowritten by Julio Alejandro. It stars Claudio Brook and Silvia Pinal, both of whom were also in The Exterminating Angel, and the latter also in Viridiana.

The film is loosely based on the life of Simeon Stylites, a fifth-century Syrian saint and ascetic who lived for thirty-nine years on top of a pillar, hence, the stylites who emulated him. My poem, “Towers,” alludes to him.

Two contradictory reasons are given as to why the film is only forty-five minutes. Buñuel said he ran out of money, while Pinal claimed that his was supposed to be one of three stories, all done by different directors. The other directors originally meant to be part of the production backed out later, leaving only Buñuel’s third filmed.

Simon of the Desert was highly acclaimed from its original release. It has a 100% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes, based on reviews from seventeen critics.

Here is a link to quotes from the film, and here is a link to a YouTube video of it, with English subtitles.

The film begins with a crowd of monks and peasants walking in the desert toward the ten-foot-tall pillar on which Simon (Brook) is standing. As they approach him, they’re singing holy music…this will contrast sharply with the ‘music of the Devil’ that we’ll hear at the end of the film.

After standing on top of this pillar for six years, six weeks, and six days (O, portentous number!), Simon is being offered a new, much taller pillar to stand on, a gift from a wealthy man (played by Ángel Merino) for having cured him “of an unspeakable disease.” What an odd gift of thanks! To be set much higher off the ground, tempting greater acrophobia, to practice an even more intense asceticism, rather than giving him comfort!

Such a gift from a wealthy man to a saint represents how the ruling class has always used religion and its grueling disciplines for the sake of social control, ostensibly ‘to edify’ the masses, when the rich could use their wealth to improve the material conditions of the poor instead.

Simon gets down from the first pillar, and as he is led to the new one, peasants are crowding around him, hoping for blessings and miraculous forms of aid from the holy man. One peasant even rips off a small piece of the material from Simon’s filthy old robe, in the superstitious belief that it holds divine properties. Such is the desperation of the poor, who have only the opium of religion to give them comfort.

As they all continue towards the taller pillar, Simon is presented with his aging mother (played by Hortensia Santoveña), who wishes to be with him, by the foot of the pillar, to contemplate him in his asceticism, and to be near him until her death. This devotion is comparable to that of Mary, the mater dolorosa who was at the foot of Christ’s Cross. When Simon meets her there, he calls her “woman,” as Christ called Mary at the Wedding at Cana.

If she can be compared to Mary, then Simon, of course, can be compared to Jesus. Indeed, as Simon is standing on the new pillar, (his “Calvary,” as a priest calls it), his arms are typically stretched out, as in a “Jesus Christ pose.” As a saint, Simon is certainly an imitator of Christ. We wonder, though: is this ascetic acting out of genuine piety, or is he motivated by pride? His eventual succumbing to the temptations of the Devil (Pinal) suggest the latter motivation.

When a priest (the same who refers to Simon’s new pillar as his ‘Calvary,’ played by Antonio Bravo) wishes to bestow holy orders on the ascetic just before his ascent up the ladder to the new pillar, he refuses them, insisting that he, a lowly sinner, is unworthy of them. Buñuel’s atheistic disdain for religion, however, suggests that this show of humility is just that–a show. The only thing worse than immodesty is false modesty

At the top of his new pillar, Simon leads the group in a prayer of Pater Noster, just as Jesus taught his followers (Matthew 6:9). A poor peasant family interrupts the prayer, complaining of the father’s having lost his hands; they were chopped off as punishment for stealing. He insists he is repentant, though, and the family begs Simon to work a miracle and give him back his hands.

Everyone prays in silence for a moment, led by Simon, and the peasant gets his hands back. Instead of thanking Simon or praising God, though, the peasant family leaves immediately, knowing they have urgent work to do at home. When one of the man’s daughters asks if his hands are the same as his old ones, he shoves her and tells her to be quiet. Some repentance! Some newly-found religious piety!

We see in this moment the real motive most people have for religiosity: not a genuine wish to be close to God for its own sake, but as a crutch to be used to improve one’s material conditions whenever the need arises; when the need is no longer there, one’s religiosity quickly becomes scanted.

Of course, it is never even contemplated in the film that cutting off a man’s hands might be too cruel a punishment for theft. Wouldn’t imprisonment for several years suffice? Neither is it considered that a redistribution of wealth, lifting the peasants out of their poverty, just might reduce the need for theft to a small minimum.

Everyone leaves Simon alone, except for his mother and four of the monks, who wish to accompany him in prayer. As they are kneeling in prayer, a beautiful young woman passes them by carrying a jug. (Actually, she’s the Devil.) Testing the monks, Simon asks them who she is, deliberately claiming she has only one eye, when of course she is normal.

When one of the monks corrects Simon about the woman’s eyes, and says he knows because he looked at her face, Simon knows the monk has sinned by allowing himself to be distracted by her, and thus tempted by the Devil when he was supposed to be concentrating on his prayer. Simon admonishes him for his sin, reminding him of the kind of warning Jesus gave his male followers in Matthew 5:28. The monks leave Simon and his mother.

In the next scene, a young, short-haired, and clean-shaven monk named Matias (played by Enrique Álvarez Félix) comes to the desert to give Simon some food; but first he briefly chats with a dwarf goat-herder (played by Jesús Fernández). The dwarf praises the udders of one of his she-goats, in a way that strongly suggests he has lewd feelings for the animal. Matias softly chides him for having such thoughts, then leaves to see Simon.

It’s significant that Matias warns the dwarf of the Devil’s presence in the desert, just after Simon has warned the monk against letting his praying be distracted by a beautiful woman passing by, and when Simon himself is soon to be tempted, not only with thoughts of coming down from his pillar to enjoy closeness to his mother, but also with the Devil in the seductive form of a pretty, yet naughty girl.

Simon’s temptation thus is not only like that of Jesus in the wilderness, but also–since Simon’s pillar can be seen as symbolic of Christ’s Cross–like the Jesus of Nikos Kazantzakis‘ novel. In mid-prayer, Simon finds himself distracted, forgetting the end of the prayer. Without even a beautiful woman at the time to tempt him, he is showing himself clearly to be not much more spiritually elevated than that monk.

After receiving the food and water from Matias, who then skips away like a merry child, Simon bad-mouths him as “an idiot, the conceited ass,” and a “wretch”–an odd attitude for a holy man to have. In his continued fasting, he wants to be worthy of God…yet isn’t the whole point of the Christian faith that one can never be worthy of God by one’s own good works, hence the need for Christ’s crucifixion?

Next comes Simon’s temptation to go down to the ground and be with his mother, a temptation curiously juxtaposed with one of the Devil in the form of a beautiful young girl. Normally, Satan is male. As a surrealist, Buñuel used disturbingly incongruous images to give expression to the urges of the unconscious mind, urges that include–according to psychoanalysis–the Oedipus complex.

Seeing a fantasy of Simon playing on the ground with his mother, as if he were a child, then immediately after that, the female Devil is showing off her legs and breasts, strongly implies a link between both urges, a sexual link. Properly understood, the Oedipus complex is a universal, narcissistic trauma, a wish to hog Mommy all to oneself, to be the sole object of her love, a desire that, of course, can never be fulfilled–hence, the trauma. Such narcissism is also linked, by displacement, to the grandiose wish to be honoured as a great holy man, Simon’s secret motive as he stands up high on that pillar.

Buñuel’s point is that all religious aspiration is ultimately as narcissistic as Oedipal urges. One wants God the Father all to oneself just as one wants Mother all to oneself…and for the same reason.

The Devil appears to him as a girl in modern clothes (a school uniform), anticipating the end of the film, when she has Simon in the modern world, having succumbed to his temptation. Though she has Pinal’s curvaceous, womanly figure, she behaves like a little girl, all sweet and innocent (prior to her exhibitionism, of course).

This juxtaposition of Simon being tempted to “feel Mother Earth under [his] feet,” then to put his head on his mother’s lap (like Hamlet‘s “country matters” with Ophelia), and finally to see the Devil-girl’s garters and breasts (like the mother’s breasts he once sucked on as a baby), all suggests that his pedophile temptation to have the Devil-girl is a reaction formation against his unconscious Oedipal feelings. (I made a similar speculation about Humbert Humbert’s unconscious motives for wanting nymphets in my Lolita analysis, i.e., replacing a son-to-mother desire with a father-to-daughter one). Recall also, in this connection, all that largely unpunished sexual abuse of children by Catholic priests.

So the Devil, as a female, is the doppelgänger of Simon’s mother. Both are at the foot of his pillar, tempting him with worldly pleasures, though in different ways. These two females are dialectical opposites: different, yet identical. And since Simon, a double of Jesus, has a mother who is a double of Mary, Buñuel here is having another moment of atheistic irreverence in equating Mary with the Devil. Woman as angel and whore are one in his film.

There are other dialectical opposites played around with here. The she-devil would have Simon “cease from [his] folly” in her childlike song, as if giving him edifying spiritual advice; indeed, one must be as a child to enter the Kingdom of God [!]. He would brush his teeth clean “with Syria’s urine,” more paradoxes of filth and cleanliness juxtaposed (also, those ancient Romans who crucified Christ used urine to clean their teeth with).

Simon asks where she’s come from, and where she’s going. Her answers, “over there,” while pointing in opposing directions, suggest Satan’s answer to God in Job 2:2.

He resists all of her sensual temptations, from the showing off of her legs and breasts, and her tongue tickling his beard, even to her pricking him in the back. The Devil leaves angrily, nude, but in an aged, ugly, and almost androgynous form. “Neither is everyone what they seem,” as she has sung while showing off her “innocent” legs and garters. This observation is most true, as we’ll soon see.

Immediately after the Devil leaves, we see Simon’s mother again, reinforcing the dialectical link between the two. What seems saintly can be evil, and vice versa.

In my analysis of The Exterminating Angel (link above), one of the three Buñuel films that Pinal appears in, I compared the morality of her role in that film with her roles in this one and in Viridiana. I described her as good in Viridiana, evil in Simon of the Desert, and a mix of good and evil in The Exterminating Angel. My observation there was essentially true, but I need to qualify it here.

The nun Viridiana is essentially good, but narcissistic in her drive to be as pure as the Virgin Mary (as Simon is narcissistic in his drive to be as pure as Jesus). As I argued in my analysis of the film (link above), her moments of unconsciousness, leaving her vulnerable to being taken advantage of by lustful men, symbolically suggest a repressed, unconscious wish to be sexual. This wish to be sexual is implied even more at the end of the film, when she joins a man and a woman in a card game, implying the beginning of a three-way sexual relationship between them. Thus, these moral imperfections of hers are the black yin dot in her yang.

Similarly, Pinal’s Devil is largely evil in her tempting of Simon away from his asceticism; but this tempting of him is also his potential liberation from a religiosity Buñuel deems useless, and therefore foolish. As she sings to him in that girly voice, “Cease from thy folly.” These words are sound advice, the white yang dot in her yin.

Simon continues his praying and devotion through the night, as observed by his mother (a double of Satan?). We see hm eating some lettuce from the bag of food provided by Matias; we also hear military drumming, as has been heard earlier, suggesting the onward marching of Christian soldiers as they continue fighting against temptation. For him, eating the food and drinking the water, as necessary as they are, are also concessions to the flesh that feel dangerously close to sinning. We see his mother have a drink of water, too. What evil indulgence!

The next day, Simon leads the visiting monks in prayer and a discussion of how properly to practice austerities. He speaks in a manner reminiscent of Christ (Luke 14:26). Brother Trifon (played by Luis Aceves Castañeda), however, accuses Simon of accepting delicious cheese, bread, and wine–foods not to be indulged in by a saint! His mother hands some of the food to a monk.

We learn soon enough, though, that Trifon is the one who put the food in Simon’s bag to slander him, and harm and undermine the faith of his followers. Trifon has done this because, as we find out, he, cursing the hypostatic union, is possessed of the Devil! He will be taken away to be exorcised. In the monk’s act of wickedness, we see Buñuel once again placing piety side by side with impiety, thus blurring the distinction that the Church tries so hard to put between them.

As the monks pray for guidance to determine if Simon is guilty of indulgence in tasty food, or if Trifon is guilty of slandering Simon, we see his mother observing ants crawling in the sand; she brushes her hand over them. One might be reminded of the ants crawling out of the wound of a man’s hand in Un chien andalou. As I observed in my analysis of that film, these ants are symbolic of the death drive, Freud‘s “myrmidons of death” (page 312), like the drive the Devil uses to destroy Trifon’s piety, and later, Simon’s.

Before the monks leave Simon, he tells them that Matias, being clean-shaven, must be kept apart from the other monks until he has grown a beard; only then may he rejoin them, as beardless youths “live near the temptations of the Devil.” One is reminded of how strict Muslim fundamentalists require all men to be bearded. Apparently, clean-shaven youths may remind us of the pretty cheeks of women, and may thus provoke homosexual feelings in other men. [!]

It is the excess of this kind of religious strictness that Buñuel is satirizing in this film. Ascetic self-denial, the refusal of tasty food, chastity and celibacy (even when Paul himself said that one may have a wife if one couldn’t help oneself), refusal of cleanliness in body or clothing, no dancing to rock ‘n’ roll (at the end of the film), and the insistence on bearded monks! These are all such absurdly high standards of moral perfection, so needless and offering so little, if any, good to the world, that they are deserving of critique. If one truly wants to be good, why not just work towards feeding, clothing, and housing the poor? Besides, excesses of repression can lead to an explosion of indulgence one day.

Another day goes by, and we hear those marching drums again. Onward, Christian soldiers, it would seem. Simon’s mother walks by with some wood, looking up at him with his arms out in that “Jesus Christ pose.” He is praying, but he acknowledges that his thoughts are straying from Christ. Fittingly, the Devil appears…with a group of lambs.

Recall that Jesus is the Lamb of God. The otherwise feminine Devil also has a beard now, as Simon has required of Matias. This Christ-like appearance of Satan is thus confusing to Simon. Just as a beardless man apparently looks like a woman, and thus there’s the fear of him arousing lust, so is a bearded woman, holding the animal symbolic of Christ, one to be confused with a holy man, and thus there’s the fear of her leading Simon astray with false religiosity.

And so, this bearded Belial tries to tempt Simon to come down from his pillar and enjoy the pleasures of the world. We’re reminded of those who abused Christ on the Cross, who said if He’s the Son of God, He should come down from the Cross (Matthew 27:40). But here, it would seem that God is telling Simon to come down, that his asceticism is excessive and unnecessary. Could it be?

Her dropping and kicking of the lamb she held has made it clear to Simon that her bearded appearance is yet another of Satan’s tricks. In his frowning at the Devil, Simon reminds her of how she was once Lucifer, one of the greatest of all angels. When she asks if, through repentance, she could ever return to her former glory, Simon denies the possibility. (Now, this may be the Devil, but I thought that God’s love and mercy were boundless.)

What’s interesting here is how it was Lucifer’s very pride that brought about his downfall. Simon is showing a similar pride, and he is soon to fall, too.

Still, Simon tries to cloak his pride in a show of humble penitence for having allowed himself to be fooled by a “wolf” in the guise of a “lamb.” So he imagines that even more rigorous austerities, now in the form of standing on one foot (his legs are already covered in scars and scratches), will make him worthy of God. Again, salvations is sought by good works, instead of passive, humble faith; man isn’t supposed to be glorified through his efforts, yet Simon is still using this proud method.

A false show of modesty is still replacing real modesty.

That monk who was distracted from his prayers, by beautiful Satan carrying her jug, has returned to the pillar to talk to Simon, who has been praying for the poor (when the wealthy giving to them would be far more effective).

In his pondering out loud of a wish to give blessings, Simon finds himself not understanding what he’s been saying. Next, the dwarf appears and after Simon has spoken loquaciously about such things as his being sufficiently supplied with food, and that he’s “so withered up,” the dwarf replies that, of all of Simon’s long speech, he’s understood only the last two words.

Indeed, the dwarf imagines that Simon is “not quite right in the head,” a result of “stuffing [him]self with air.” This inability to understand one’s words, from someone so high up in the air, suggests yet another association to be made with Simon’s pillar: the Tower of Babel, whose attempt to reach heaven angered God, prompting Him to confuse the speech of its builders, creating all the languages of the world. Again, Buñuel, through symbol, uses religion to undermine itself.

The monk ascends the ladder to speak with Simon face to face, apologizing for having gazed upon that woman. He also wants to warn Simon about “the hordes of the Antichrist…advancing on Rome.” Man will be in a perpetual state of “fratricidal conflict,” based on a jealous competition over what’s “‘yours’ and ‘mine’.” I am reminded of what I said in my analysis of The Omen: material contradictions of the rich vs. the poor as symbolized in that movie.

Simon, in his abiding self-denial, can’t seem to grasp the idea of selfish hoarding that plagues the world; and as the monk observes, Simon’s penitence and self-denial are “of little use to man.” It is the wealthy who must deny themselves their wealth; the poor aren’t the ones who should be denying themselves anything. What can poor men like Simon give to the poor? On his Tower of Babel, Simon tells the monk that they “speak in different languages.”

He is in a desert, a symbol of want and lack. He stands on a phallic pillar in that desert of want, proudly elevating himself above the earth and engaging in false modesty. I’ve described his unconsciously Oedipal relationship to his mother, a double for the seductive female Satan. The manque à avoir of the desert, and the manque à être of the phallic pillar by which his mother stands, these represent Lacan‘s lack, which give rise to desire, not to spiritual edification. Again, Buñuel turns religion on its head.

The narcissistic trauma of the Oedipus complex is thus transformed into a narcissistic aspiration to piety. The female Devil, for whom he has temptations to lust, is thus a transference of Simon’s feelings for his mother, and she can take advantage of his narcissism, and thus succeed in making him give in to his temptation.

After the monk descends the ladder and leaves, she reappears…in a coffin sliding on the dirt and approaching the pillar. As we recall, “the wages of sin is death” (Romans 6:23), so her coming in a coffin is apt. The ants in the sand that his mother caressed, those “myrmidons of death” that are the death drive as well as the “guardians of life” (Freud, p. 312–i.e., the life instinct that includes libido, the sex drive, and therefore desire and sin), these are linked to the Devil in the coffin.

Unlike last time, Simon knows this is Satan, who comes out with frizzled, wavy hair sticking up like hellish flames, and with her right breast exposed, how like a mother’s breast about to be used to feed a baby. He seems to be showing his most determined resistance to her, but it’s just a show. She’ll succeed this time, taking him into the future of that Antichrist the monk spoke of.

We learn that, just as good works (austerities, etc.) won’t save Simon, neither will faith. The Devil, too, believes in the one living God: one is reminded here of that passage in the Epistle of James, which says, “Thou believest that there is one God; thou doest well: the devils also believe, and tremble.” (James 2:19). If Simon and the Devil–of whom Simon himself has said will never return to his/her former angelic glory–are very much alike, then Simon is as doomed as Satan is.

An airplane is seen in the sky, and Simon is taken into the modern world, that of the mid-1960s, in a dance club in the city, where youth are seen dancing to the music of a rock ‘n’ roll band–Satan’s music, as many preachers have called it, right from its beginnings.

The first of the dancers that we see, significantly, is a young man with a beard; so much for bearded saintliness, I suppose. Pinal’s daughter, incidentally, is among all these young dancers. After seeing all of them living it up so wickedly, we see Simon and the Devil at a table, with drinks and cigarettes. He has his hair cut short and his beard trimmed…like Samson, he’s lost his strength in God from a haircut; devilish Delilah, naturally, is loving the music. Recall, in connection with her enjoyment of the music, the end of Viridiana, with the rhythm and blues song heard when Pinal’s character, the nun, gives into temptation and joins the man and woman in the beginning of an implied menage à trois.

The closest Simon can come to a pious resistance to all this sinful fun is to be bored with it. The closest he can come to being interested in it is to ask what the dance is that all the dancers are doing, them shaking so frantically. The Devil calls it “Radioactive Flesh,” and it’s the latest dance…and the last dance, eerily suggesting how close we all have been to a nuclear end of the world, as real a danger of that Cold War as it is in our current one.

Yet so many today, like these kids on the dance floor, would rather party than heed and avert the danger.

A young man asks the Devil to dance, which she accepts. Simon would rather go home, but she tells him he can’t. “Another tenant’s moved in,” she says. It seems that modern-day capitalism’s accumulation of private property has taken away Simon’s real estate, his pillar, and has rented it to a new pretender of piety.

What was given to him by a wealthy man of the ancient world has been taken from him by one of today’s bourgeoisie. The landlord giveth, the landlord taketh away.

Still, Simon shouldn’t complain. The Devil just did him a big favour in liberating him from his pointless austerity and planting him in an infernal party where he must abandon all hope of its ever ending. As I said above, Pinal’s Viridiana isn’t all good, and her Devil isn’t all bad.

Buñuel knew it as well as AC/DC did.

Hell ain’t a bad place to be.

‘The Targeter,’ a Surreal Novel, Chapter Twenty

Hey, a whole bunch of shots were just fired!

Did I get hit by any of them? I don’t feel anything: my ketamine high is still keeping me desensitized to any pain. What about my comrades?

I’d better take a look around me; in my stoned stupor, I’m still pretty slow in my perception of anything. I’ll need a moment to process all of what’s just happened.

My friends aren’t standing beside me anymore…wait! Behind me…oh, shit! they’re lying behind me on the road, in a pool of blood. I guess I’ll never know where they were going to take me.

So, who were the shooters? David is gone, so his followers might as well join mine. If they’re joining me, whoever shot at us must be those fighting for the island’s ruling class.

I’ll look ahead to where the shots came from. In the distance, far down the road from here, I see a number of armed men in uniforms coming towards me. They must be from the ruling class’s army; I’ll bet some of them are private mercenaries, since such is the way the capitalism my comrades and I are fighting against does things these days–minimal government involvement and maximum privatization. I’ll bet they’ve already killed a thousand or so of my followers.

I may not have to fear David anymore, but these men coming at me are obviously trying to kill me and my followers. They’re trying to stop my movement of peace, love, and social transformation. If I wasn’t so high right now, I’d be terrified, frantically running away.

Speaking of running, one of those armed men is running at me now. He’s shot at me a few times, missing. I’d better turn around and go the other way.

I’m still so stoned, with so little feeling in my body, that I have no sense of my legs moving fast in running. Rather, I feel like I’m slowly floating; if anything, I’m just casually walking away from my pursuers.

Behind me, I hear them shouting something. Is it in Chinese, or English? “Ying gai shi ta!” (“It should be him!”), or, in English, “Engage the man!”? I’m not sure: there’s so much other noise–gunshots, explosions, and people screaming–that it’s hard to hear clearly. My being stoned out of my mind isn’t exactly helping, either, of course.

They shouted the same words again. Was it a man’s name? It sounded like “Angus LeMall.” That must be the name of the man chasing me. Yes, Angus LeMall, whoever that’s supposed to be, is coming after me, trying to kill me!

I’ll look behind again. Wow, the ferocity in his eyes! He looks like someone possessed of a demon, someone who’s killed nearly a thousand people, at least! And I’m to be his thousandth kill, it seems. I’d better keep my distance from him, though I don’t feel capable of going any faster that this slow walking…or floating…whatever my body is doing.

“Stop!” I hear him shout from not too far behind me.

“Why don’t you stop?” I say, then look behind. He seems much farther away from me than he should be; after all, he’s the one running, and I’m just walking. How can he still be so far away from me? Now, he’s stopping.

Is he going to repent of his murderous ways and join my peaceful cause? I hope so. A few more gunshots were just fired. I’m looking ahead, so I didn’t see who fired. I hope it wasn’t him. I just felt two light tapping sensations on my left arm, under the elbow, and on my right leg, just under my ass. It hurts a little, but only a little. I’m still so high from the K that I hardly feel much of anything.

To be safe and sure, I’ll send out my watery vibes of peace and love, to pacify my pursuers. That should ensure that Angus LeMall converts to my cause.

I seem to be lying on my chest on the road now. I’m melting into my watery form again. Indeed, I can see a dark liquid pouring out from my body to my left and right; it’s a dark liquid…is it red? No, it can’t be–it’s just my melted, watery form. The night, with a scarcity of street lamps at this part of the road, is what’s making my watery form only seem bloody. That’s it!

Yes, my watery vibes of peace and love are emanating from me and touching Angus and my other pursuers. They’re repenting and joining my cause now! Wonderful! Now that he is on my side, he’ll have to be patient and endure the bad karma he’s earned from having killed so many up until now. He’ll have to deal with the anger and curses of the grieving family and friends of all of those he’s killed over the years. It’s going to be hard for him; I hope he can handle it!

Anyway, I feel quite at rest here, lying prone on the road. I can see my dark liquid form flowing out in a lake…a red lake?…no, that can’t be!…all around me. This feels so peaceful.

Ketamine gives you such a powerful high!

What was that? A few more of those tapping sensations, this time, on my back. It stings a little. It must have been more flying insects crashing into me.

I hope the bugs aren’t too badly hurt.

‘The Targeter,’ a Surreal Novel, Chapter Nineteen

Whoa! Something else just shot by me, like the insect last time, only this time it touched me–it scratched past my right arm. If that was a flying insect speeding by, it was a big one.

I’d better check my arm…hey, blood! It cut a hole in my shirt sleeve, and there’s a cut on my arm. No insect would do that. Was it a bullet?

My ongoing ketamine high is still desensitizing me to pain. I’d really be groaning if I was sober. The blood is really staining my sleeve.

More gunshots, just over my head, about three of them! I’m too stoned to be scared, but my comrades, these Chinese who’ve helped me cross the road from the park with the temple on the other side, they sure look scared! Where are they taking me?

I feel like I’m here and not here at the same time…or here one moment, and elsewhere at another, for example, floating in the sky, or swimming in the ocean. I sense that I’m in danger, but it feels like a dream I’ll wake up from soon enough.

Another gunshot flew by! I felt it touch my neck, on the left side, a slight grazing. Let me check: yes, more blood on my hand where I touched the grazing. I, the targeter for a world of peace, love, and social justice, am the targeted by these warmongers!

Who are they? I’m so wasted that it’s hard to think straight. I’m trying to focus on the action I see on the streets, as my comrades are taking me God knows where. Soldiers in uniforms are running up and down the street, firing at each other. I see a few tanks, also. Whoa!…a boom and a flash of light in the night sky!

Who are these people? I’m trying, in the midst of my peaking high (recall that pill I took in the park…it’s really adding to the mix, whatever it was…ecstasy? Who knows.), to remember the earlier events of this night leading up to now. My brain is floating in the air one moment, swimming in an ocean of stonedness the next.

Needing a moment to remember my Mandarin…OK, I’ll ask these guys with me. “What’s happening? Who’s shooting at us?”

One of them says, “Dawei…” something. It’s hard to hear clearly over all the shooting and explosions all around us. Being on drugs doesn’t make interpreting Chinese any easier, either, of course. I’ll need a moment…what is ‘dawei’ in English? Is it ‘captain’? Is it ‘the great one’?

Wait! ‘Dawei’ is David! Yes, that’s it! My cousin David has his followers, who are coming after me. My followers defeated his for a while, but now they’ve regrouped, and are making a fresh attack!

My followers, who have also grown in number, are trying their best to repel his followers, but his followers are growing in number, too, and perhaps are setting up more and more rival organizations to stop mine. David is relentless! He’s probably aiding the ruling class to stop us and grab power for himself.

These people shooting at me were probably sent by David to assassinate me! Yes, that’s it! If he has me killed, my movement will be decapitated, and then he can take over. That’s his plan!

Wait! Something just flew by me, something really big. It made a huge, roaring sound, like an engine, as it went by. What was it? I’ll look back and see.

Nothing there. My comrades are really hurrying me to wherever they want me to be. Somewhere safe, I assume. Oh, my sometimes floating, sometimes swimming mind….

I hear that roaring sound coming back from behind. I’ll look back: it’s hard to see in the dark, especially when you’re high on K.

Another explosion in the sky has caused a flash of light, and I saw something coming at me, just higher than my head. Was it some kind of helicopter, flying low, with gunners trying to shoot at me? More gunshots are flying past, coming very close to my body, but not hitting me.

Yet another flash of light in the sky has illuminated the approaching thing, which looks greyish and big.

Wait…an elephant? Has David sent a roaring elephant to chase and trample me? That’s it!

Whoa!…my comrades and I are dodging the elephant as it runs by. That was a close one!

I’ll hold out my hand and send out some vibrations of peace and love to calm the elephant. There…sending out some good vibes. It’s turning around, ready to come back at me. Hey, another explosion and flash of light in the sky, right by the elephant! It has fallen on the road, many yards in front of my comrades and me. My vibes seem to have pacified the animal, which is now lying on the road, peacefully asleep. Good.

Now I see a man running up to me, with an angry look. Hey, he’s white! What does he want? If I get a chance to talk to him, I can just use English. He’s dressed in a military uniform. Is he an American?

I need to blink my eyes a few times to focus and see him better. My comrades are shouting at him, trying to say something in very broken English, hard to understand, but it sounds hostile: “You! Go away! No hit us!” is as much as I can make out in my wasted state.

What does the white man have in his hand–an axe? Since when do soldiers carry axes? He’s getting closer. I can see his face more clearly now…it’s David! He’s come to kill me!

One of my followers, those men who’ve been escorting me to safety, has come to my defence. He’s struggling with David, trying to stop him from hitting me with the axe (or is it an ice-pick?).

David is proving himself stronger, and he’s overpowering my friend. Oh, no! David just cracked the guy’s skull open with the axe, and there’s blood all over the place; but one of my other comrades is moving in on David. He just kicked David in the gut.

The axe has fallen out of David’s hand. My friend just picked it up. Whoa! He just hit David in the side of the head with the axe…or ice pick. I’m so stoned that I can’t see clearly in the dark. All I see is David’s corpse on the side of the road, with his blood flowing into a nearby gutter.

BOOM! Another explosion just flashed a bright light in the sky and has shaken the ground under my feet. At least, I think that’s what just happened. I see that hole in the ground where David’s blood is flowing. Is it the gutter, or…is it a crack in the ground, from the earthquake?

Yes, that’s it! A huge black crack in the earth, just opened into a hole…and down goes David’s body into that hole, him and all the blood that was flowing into it before. The earth just opened up and swallowed him!

With his rival movement just decapitated, as it had tried to decapitate mine, his followers can now join mine. We can now move forward in unity and solidarity, to defeat the island’s ruling class, end this war, and establish social and economic justice!

I see good times ahead.

Whoa! More gunfire!

It’s a good thing I ducked in time.

Atropos

When will the third of the Fates
snip the cord of my life?
How will she do it,
and where?
Will I go gently, or
will I scream in a panic?
Will it be quick, or drawn out?

Will the
snipping cut me up,
leaving my blood in a splash,
staining my clothes and surroundings,
or will it be painless, me not
knowing it happened
at all?

And what of the fate of the world?
will it end with a bang,
or a whimper?
Will the
scissors snip
with a piercing clack,
or with an unnoticed smoothness?

All I know
is that her scissors
are right by the thin string.
The blades surround it, and they
are ready to close and cut.
The string trembles
in terror.

‘The Targeter,’ a Surreal Novel, Chapter Sixteen

What was that thud I just heard…and felt? My followers and I just came down from the air to hit the ground. It didn’t really hurt; my ketamine high is still protecting me, desensitizing me to pain.

Some people are running over to us. They’re helping my followers and me to get up. I see them all talking to each other, with expressions of care and concern on their faces. I can’t quite make out what they’re saying, since those loud explosions and the machine-gun-like noise of the fireworks and firecrackers we started hearing a minute ago have caused a ringing in my ears, a temporary deafness.

Wait: my hearing is coming back. Apart from the continuing firecracker noise in the background, I’m hearing fragments of Mandarin, people saying to me, “You…good…Are you OK?…you are great!…Do you need help?…” and so on.

I know! They’re saying that I’m good, great, a great revolutionary leader! They are offering to help us in spreading our spiritual message of love and revolution! With the help of these people, we can overthrow the ruling class and transform society from one motivated only to make profits to one motivated to provide for everybody’s needs.

More loud explosions and flashing lights in the sky. No, they aren’t fireworks. I’m hearing machine gun fire, not firecrackers. It isn’t Chinese New Year, or anything like that. There’s a war going on around us, a revolutionary war to topple the warmongering ruling class!

I don’t like war. I abhor violence, but we cannot get rid of the rich and powerful without it. We cannot achieve our goals by inviting the wealthy to eat, as our dinner guests.

I see my new followers have set me under that tree again, the tree for meditating. They’re touching my cheeks, arms, and legs as if they’re treating wounds on my body. How thoughtful of them.

I’ll close my eyes and meditate again. I’m no soldier; I’d be hopeless holding a rifle, so I’ll leave all the fighting to my comrades, some of whom I see running by on the street, firing machine guns.

BOOM! Wow, another explosion causing the ground near us to shake. I’d rather not deal with such nastiness in my still-stoned state. I need to relax.

With my eyes closed now, I can help the situation as I know how to. My meditative thoughts can influence my surroundings by sending good vibes that will radiate outward and inspire those around us with thoughts of peace and love.

My followers and I may be the targeted, that is, targets of the warmongering ruling class, but I am the targeter, that is, he who targets them and hits them with my vibes of peace and love.

In my meditative state, I can feel those vibes ripple in growing, centrifugal circles around me, like water in a lake after you drop a stone in it. Yes, the vibes are in me and around me. I’m melting again, into a sea of love and bliss. My water is growing all around me, soaking everyone in the immediate area and fanning outwards to reach other people further away, inspiring love, discipline, and self-control in all of them, comrade and non-comrade alike, in my followers and all of those who will be my followers.

The water that was my body is everywhere now. The banging of bombs and rat-tat-tat of machine gun fire are being muted and they are all submerged in my growing ocean. Hatred is being tamed by my power. War is being transformed into peace, thanks to me!

Is someone picking me up and taking me away? No, that can’t be: I’m all water now–no hands can grab me and move me anywhere. I move myself.

I won’t open my eyes; I don’t want to see what’s going on as the other people see it at their lower level of consciousness. I am in such a state of beautiful bliss that I never want to be woken from it.

In this peaceful state, I can never die! As endless water, I am no longer limited with a human body!

Still, I should get an idea of what’s going on out there. I’ll return to my human form. I’m sucking back all the water, making it congeal and concentrate onto me, sculpting, as it were, the waters to make them conform to the shape of my body.

There, I’m back. Fearing what horrors of war could be out there, I’ll open my eyes only the slightest bit. I no longer seem to be under the tree. Someone moved me. Now I’m on the sidewalk in front of the apartment building, with the street immediately in front of me.

…and what’s that on the road? A tank, with its gun turret pointed to face me, the end of the tank gun pointed right at my face? I need to blink my eyes a few times and focus, just to be sure.

No, it isn’t a tank…it’s a giant snake, its head a few inches away from my face! Its forked tongue is hanging out from between its long, pointy fangs. Its eyes are fixed on mine; its mouth is curled up in a malign grin.

I hear the chatter of terror among my crowd of followers. Again, I can make out only fragments of Chinese: “Do what?…Finished!…Shi neige.”–were those last two words “…is that” in Chinese, or were they “snake,” pronounced clumsily in English? I’m so stoned!

Well, I see a snake, so I’d better use my powers as a great spiritual man and tame this giant monster. I’ll send out more of my vibes of peace and love…that should de-escalate the situation.

The vibes are flying out of my fingers and at the snake’s green face. It’s closing its mouth…slowly, hiding those long, sharp fangs. Its eyes are not so fixed on mine now. Its head it recoiling a bit. The fearful voices of my followers are getting softer, calmer. My vibes are calming everyone, not just the snake.

Now, the snake is turning away from me, its head pointing to my right. I see it slithering away down the street, with the grinding sound of…the road wheels of a tank? No, it’s a giant snake, I tell you…its slinking body making friction against the pavement.

All the people behind me are heaving sighs of relief. I tamed the snake…I saved us! I’m a hero! They all love me! The vibes I can send out are a tried-and-true way to influence the world and bring us all peace and plenty.

With the continuing sound of explosions and gunfire, I can still feel safe with my new powers.

God, K gives such a great high!

‘The Targeter,’ a Surreal Novel, Chapter Fifteen

I look around at all of the water that surrounds me and is me, and just as I expected, some of it is concentrating, congealing, coagulating, swirling into the shape of my body so that I’m returning to my human form.

In fact, instead of seeing nothing but endless water in all directions, I’m beginning to see the front yard of my apartment building again. I look up and down, and I see the tree above me, the tree I saw that wise old man meditating under so peacefully, and I see myself seated under it, having finished peacefully meditating myself.

I look ahead and, just as I predicted!…my five followers have returned. Surely, they want to hear me tell them my new insights. Along with my enlightenment, I seem to have acquired clairvoyance into the future!

I’ve become a saint!

I see the five of them crouching before me in a semicircle. eager to learn the Way. They’re looking at me with loving, attentive, concerned eyes.

I hear an explosion from up in the sky, with a flashing light. Then I hear some machine gun fire.

Meh. I’ll ignore it. I have much more important things to do than worry about that right now.

“I will now teach you the Three Unities,” I begin in a slurred voice. (My ketamine high is still strong; I hope it won’t impair my ability to impart my message.) “These are the Unities of Space, Time, and Action.”

I see confusion on all five faces. Surely what I’m saying isn’t so abstract, is it? And my speech, as slurred as it is, isn’t so unclear that my words are unintelligible, is it?

Oh, wait: yeah, I’m in East Asia. These five people are Asians, and in all likelihood, none of them understands a word of English, or certainly not well enough to follow what I’m trying to say.

I’ll repeat what I just said, but in Mandarin. Surely I’m not too drunk and stoned to be able to speak intelligibly in Chinese, am I? I’ve lived on this island for many years, having achieved a reasonable level of fluency in the local language, so I’ll try again…

…After having said in Chinese what I said before in English, I see them still sneering at me, not seeming to understand a word I’m saying.

I close my eyes, open them, and try again.

Now I see myself in ancient Asian robes, as are all five of my followers, who look at me with smiles of love. We’re inside what seems to be a palace, all ornately designed like one of the old Chinese emperors’, with gold on the walls. Rapt, my five followers eagerly await to hear what I have to say.

In broken Chinese, I say again, “I teach you of the Three Unities, those of Space, Time, and Action. Mastering these ideas in meditation, you’ll gain wisdom, end all of your suffering, and lead the world in a quest for peace and justice.”

The five of them are looking at me with glowing eyes and toothy grins, hungrily digesting my message.

I continue, in the best Chinese my wasted ass can muster: “Everywhere within us and around us, up above, down below, behind us, in front of us, and to our left and right, is all one. The ego is an illusion. When we fully understand this, selfishness vanishes, replaced by selflessness and compassion for everyone and every living thing.”

I look in their eyes and listen to their responses. In my continuing drug trip, I can’t make out their every word, but can hear only distinct fragments of what they’re saying–words like “crazy,” “love,” and “talk.”

I think for a minute, trying to put these pieces together. I know! They said, “I’m crazy about his message! I love to hear him talk!” That’s it!

“All of time is in cycles of beginning, middle, and end,” I continue, looking in the eyes of my captive quintet of an audience. “But the only time that matters is NOW, for NOW is the only time that is real. The past and future are just mental constructs with no real meaning.”

I listen for their responses. “What’s he talking about?” I think one of them has said with a sneer. Did one of them just call me “crazy”? I think I just heard the words “on drugs.” Well, they’re right about that.

BOOM! Wow, I just heard another loud explosion, with a blinding flash of light. The machine gun fire is louder, too.

The golden palace walls just disappeared, and we’re all outside again, in front of my apartment, in our modern clothes.

I’ll just have to keep on trying to explain, and maybe my five listeners will understand. I must be as clear as I can with my ungrammatical Mandarin.

“All action, all phenomena in the world,” I resume, “are examples of yin and yang, of unified opposites.” I’m trying my best to get these ideas across with the limitations of my Chinese vocabulary. Maybe they can relate to what I’m saying by my comparing it to Taoist concepts. We’ll see.

I’m straining my ears, with all the noise of war around us, to make out their comments. I’m hearing only fragments. I hear “loves,” “hear,” “himself,” and “talk.” I need a moment to put it all together…”I love…to hear…him talk”…that’s it! How encouraging! I’m getting through to them! The golden palace walls have returned, as have our ancient clothes.

“We must see people…and the world,” I carry on, “in a way…that’s not too far to one extreme…or the other. Don’t over-idealize people and things, and don’t hate or be too rejecting…of them.”

Are they smiling at me…or sneering? It’s hard to see in the dark, when you’re high on K. The golden walls are gone.

“We must be open with each other,” I tell them. “To heal, we must express ourselves, in speech, writing, and art. We must also help others…to express themselves…by giving them our ears.”

They’re giving me their ears, but their sneering must mean I still haven’t made myself clear. It sure is hard to communicate when you’re stoned. We’re in our modern clothes again.

BOOM! Another, even louder, explosion has lit up the sky with an even brighter flash of light. I know! It must be the light of understanding coming to my followers, for I see we’re all flying in the air, about to spread the word of the Way.

Yes, we’ve flown out the windows of the golden palace, our flowing Asian robes fluttering in the night sky, as we travel long distances to spread the word.

What’s that noise? No, it can’t be more machine gun fire, not with the light of liberation glowing all around. That must have been fireworks and firecrackers: my followers and I are celebrating the coming of enlightenment to the world!

Analysis of ‘A Farewell to Kings’

A Farewell to Kings is the fifth studio album by Rush, released in 1977. The album demonstrates remarkable musical growth in the band, with their shifting away from their original, Led Zeppelin-inspired hard rock sound and into the realm of progressive rock.

To this musical end, the trio expanded from a basic guitar/bass/drums sound to one incorporating not only six- and twelve-string acoustic guitars, but also classical guitar (by Alex Lifeson). Furthermore, singer/bassist Geddy Lee adds a Minimoog, and both he and Lifeson play bass pedal synthesizers; this electronic sound would be further expanded to the use of more synthesizers by the 1980s, this being a dominant aspect of their music throughout that decade.

Drummer Neil Peart adds a wide array of percussion instruments on this album, including glockenspiel, tubular bells, Vibraslap (heard during Lifeson’s solo on “Closer to the Heart“), and Chinese temple blocks. These new musical colours, combined with Peart’s growth from his original Keith Moon-inspired aggressive drumming style to one of prog rock virtuosity, show the newer influence of the crackingly precise chops of Carl Palmer and Bill Bruford.

But just as newer musical ideas are being phased in, so are older ideas being phased out. As I said above, the hard rock sound, though still present to a large degree, is noticeably less here than on previous albums. And although Lee’s soaring head voice (with its grating vibrato) is as evident as ever here (in fact, on “Cygnus X-1,” he hits his highest note ever, a B-flat 5…or 6?), it won’t be long after this album (two albums later, specifically) that he will phase out the use of head voice and limit his highest notes generally to those within mixed voice, and focus on his lower, chest voice.

A Farewell to Kings is an album that Rush were most pleased with: Lee has never found fault with it, and Peart said that the title track “seems to encapsulate everything that we want Rush to represent.” It’s one of my personal favourites of the band’s, if not the favourite–it’s the first of theirs that I’d heard as a little kid, not long after it was released. Apart from all the musical colours I described above, A Farewell to Kings is genuine art rock, not only with long songs divided into sections, but also with a more prominent use of odd time signatures and superb musicianship that had since become synonymous with Rush.

Here is a link to all the song lyrics on the album.

The cover, by Hugh Syme, shows a demolition site in the background as juxtaposed with, in the foreground, a king slumped on a throne and made to look like a marionette. The picture expresses some of the themes of the title track, and by extension, those of the rest of the songs on the album, as I’ll explain below.

Decades ago, I spotted the obvious theme of morality, but a much more important theme is idealism, particularly the idealizing of the past as against the disillusionment felt in the modern world. Also, there’s the theme of the danger of recklessly seeking to attain those ideals, leading to one’s self-destruction.

The title track begins softly, with Lifeson playing a classical guitar melody with one bar in 3/4, then three bars in 4/4 before returning to the 3/4 beginning, and playing the whole cycle all over again. He plays it a third time, but with the first two of the three 4/4 bars, replacing the third with a transitional bar in 5/4, then one in 4/4, to introduce a middle passage with Lee’s Minimoog and Peart’s glockenspiel.

The first theme returns with all three instruments, and with the 5/4 theme played three times. Though this gentle introductory tune includes a synthesizer, the classical guitar’s lute-like sound makes one think of a time hundreds of years ago. The music’s tranquility makes one imagine, correctly or incorrectly, that that old time was a better, more peaceful one.

A sharp contrast is heard when the electric guitar, bass, and drums come crashing in, suggesting the turmoil of the modern world, a sad decline from that (perceived) idyllic opening. We hear two bars of 4/4, then a switch to several bars of 7/4 before returning to 4/4.

Now, the lyrics come in, Lee singing what amounts to be a conservative’s complaint of “Whatever happened to the good old days?” (If one didn’t know any better, one might think of Archie and Edith Bunker singing “Those Were the Days” at the piano.)

Added to this conservative lament is the use of medieval imagery in Peart’s lyric (i.e., references to “castles,” all things “kingly,” and “nobles”). Let me just get this straight: a farewell to kings, that is, to feudalism, is a bad thing? Morality can be upheld only through the absolute power of a monarch, the ‘divine right’ of kings?

Such would be a very strange position for three young, long-haired rockers (who only the previous year sang of the pleasures of dope in “A Passage to Bangkok“) to take. Either Peart was being ironic, or he was being metaphorical in his references to kings and castles as an ideal, or the lyric is in the voice of a reactionary whose political ideals are in sharp contrast with those of the band.

I’d say that a hint to what Peart was really writing about, perhaps by way of a Freudian slip, is in the line “Ancient nobles showering their bitterness on youth.” Does this line not encapsulate what the whole lyric presents to the listener–grumpy old men griping about all these bad kids, with their long hair, loud rock music, and sex and drugs, only it’s expressed with all this medieval imagery, just to reinforce how “ancient” the complainers are?

One thing to remember about Rush, and about Peart in the 1970s in particular, was the influence of right-wing libertarianism, and of “the genius of Ayn Rand” in their reworking of her novella, Anthem, in their side-long suite, “2112” (not to mention their song of the same name as her book, and in the name of Rush’s record label). Surely, these three haters of ‘Big Brother government’ weren’t holding up the monarchy as a fitting alternative. And if the idealizing of monarchy is meant as a metaphor, then for what?

I want to give Rush credit here, and say that this song, however much Peart insisted would “encapsulate everything that [they wanted] Rush to represent,” is meant as an ironic presentation of the views of authoritarian conservatives “showering their bitterness on youth.”

In other words, Rush represents ironic tongue-in-cheek.

Sandwiched in between these verses is a tight instrumental section in alternating 4/4 and 2/4, with Lifeson doing a solo with a delightfully angular tone on his Gibson ES-355 over Lee’s Rickenbacker bass octaves in A, and Peart’s tight drumming. Lifeson stops soloing for a moment and plays an A-chord with Lee’s A octaves and Peart’s drumming of the 4/4 and 2/4 rhythm; then we have just 4/4 and a chord progression of A major, G major, and D major, over which Lifeson resumes soloing before a reprise of the “Cities full of hatred…” verse.

A final verse, to the same music as that of the reprised verse, ends with the hope for a world that’s “closer to the heart,” an allusion to the famous song that acts as a solution to the problem presented in the title track. More on that later, of course.

Though lyrically, “Xanadu” is inspired by Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s classic poem “Kubla Khan,” Peart’s idea originally came from the classic film Citizen Kane, in which the titular character (based in part on William Randolph Hearst) owns a mansion called Xanadu. Just as the title track yearns for an ideal morality in the feudal past (metaphorically, if not literally), so does “Xanadu” involve a quest for the ideal of eternal life.

As with the title track, “Xanadu” begins with birdsong (indeed, Messiaen would have loved it!). We also hear a low E played on the bass pedal synthesizer, along with Lifeson soloing with a volume pedal, and Peart playing the Chinese temple blocks, swiping the chimes, and tapping an E on the tubular bells.

Next, Lifeson plays–no longer with the volume pedal–a seven-note cycle of E–E (octave higher)–A–B–E-flat–A-flat–A, which then brings in the bass and drums. After this passage in 7/8, we return to 4/4, still in E major, with a riff including a whirlwind of notes starting on D, in the E-Mixolydian mode. Then, we’re back to 7/8 (Rush’s favourite odd time), with Lifeson quickly strumming chords of E-major, D-major, B-major, A-major, and G-major, but with an open high E string (he does a lot of this–playing E-shape barre chords, but with the high E-string open, without the barre–at various points in the song). Peart joins in with cowbells of different pitches, and Lee with the bass pedals set at a treble range. The bass and drums soon join Lifeson in this 7/8 passage.

The instrumental opening goes on for about five minutes before Lee finally begins singing, making allusions to Coleridge’s poem. “Drink[ing] the milk of Paradise” is what the speaker hopes will confer immortality onto him, though the milk, combined with honeydew, also suggests the use of narcotics (recall, in this connection, “A Passage to Bangkok,” as well as Coleridge’s own drug use).

The speaker seeks the ideal of eternal life, and hopes to find in Kubla Khan’s “pleasure dome” the ideal abode, paradise. But just as hoping for moral ideals in a romanticized past in “A Farewell to Kings” is foolish, so is the speaker’s hope for happiness in immortality in Xanadu foolish.

A thousand years pass, and the speaker has no hope of dying. He yearns for the end of the world, hoping to be destroyed with it, and thus to be freed of the “prison of the lost Xanadu.” Just as Charles Foster Kane can find no happiness or fulfillment in his wealth and power, the speaker, in his “bitter triumph,” cannot find any in honeydew and the milk of paradise.

Wealth, power, immortality, ideals…these don’t provide happiness. That’s what A Farewell to Kings is all about.

Now, “A Farewell to Kings” may have presented the problem of immorality (just as “Xanadu” explored the problem of immortality), but “Closer to the Heart” presents an attempt at finding solutions. Obviously, “the heart” is meant to indicate that we need a world of love as the solution, though as I’ll later argue, the solution as given isn’t adequate.

From a formal, structural perspective, the song’s lyrics (written by Peart, but inspired by a verse by Peter Talbot, a friend of the band’s) are cleverly written, with parallel structure from verse to verse. Examples of such parallelism include the rhyming last words of the third line of each verse (“reality,” “creativity,” “mentality,” and “destiny”); in the first line of each verse are references to different careers one could have (“men who hold high places,” “the blacksmith and the artist,” “philosophers and ploughmen,” and “captain”); the blacksmith would “forge,” and the artist use his “creativity,” ploughmen “sow” the philosophers’ “new mentality,” and the captain goes “sailing into [the] destiny” of “the chart” that “I will draw.” The most obvious parallelism is the repeat of the song’s title in the last line of each verse.

Now, this all makes for fine rhetoric, which again uses archaic diction, as in the album’s title track, the question song to which “Closer to the Heart” is the proposed answer. Here’s the problem: nothing in the song actually details how we are supposed to move towards a more loving world.

Matters start to get a little disturbing when we consider how the band that’s preaching how we must move “closer to the heart” was only the previous year touting the ‘philosophy’ of an embittered Russian bourgeois expat in the US, she who wrote of The Virtue of Selfishness, which espoused “rational egoism,” or as I would call it, rationalized selfishness.

In all fairness to Rush, and to Peart in particular, when they recorded these 1970s albums, they were young and naïve about the world. Their expertise was in music, not politics. Given the intense anti-communist propaganda of the Cold War, the kind that raised a hack writer like Rand to fame (seriously, I read Anthem when I was young and, being similarly naïve at the time, was more sympathetic to the story’s anti-socialist message, and even then, I was not impressed with her prose), it’s easy to see how Peart could have been seduced by her ideas, as so many have been. And to be even fairer to Peart, in the last decade of his life, he confessed that he’d renounced Rand (who, incidentally, was no libertarian, but rather an advocate for capitalist government) and begun calling himself a “bleeding-heart libertarian“…translation: a liberal. Indeed, it was the individualism of her message, not the pro-capitalist one, that he’d always liked, anyway.

As for those conservative politicians whose Rand influence has stayed with them, look over the past forty years of neoliberalism and ask yourself honestly if their politics have steered the world any “closer to the heart.” Tax cuts for the rich have resulted in their wealth ballooning to the point that they can essentially buy politicians and both American political parties, ensuring that the owners of the big corporations determine the direction the world goes in, which means more for them and less for the rest of us (all of this has given a new, bitter irony to Peart’s complaints of “the seeds that we let grow”). As I’ve explained in other posts, the “free market” dialectically leads to “corporatism,” or the capitalist government that Rand wanted, the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie.

So, with the song’s championing of a more loving world, with its clever rhetoric and a lack of a concrete plan for realizing its goal, “Closer to the Heart” is another example of the album’s theme of idealism. Note that utopian thinking exists on the left and on the right. Everyone has his or her own notion of the ‘perfect world’: there are, for example, the Nazi ideals of Lebensraum and judenrein, though decent people would never espouse such horrors. “Free market” fundamentalists’ notion of unbridled capitalism, through the voodoo of the invisible hand, leading to happiness and harmony is another utopian fantasy: how does unchecked selfishness help the world? It’s easy to see how it results in unaccountable corporate tyranny, though. And leftism isn’t necessarily all idealistic: contrary to popular belief, Marxism is not, as I explained here, utopian socialism, but scientific, grounded in revolutionary theory.

Now, “Closer to the Heart” may have failed to provide a method for achieving the more loving society, but Lee’s lyric for “Cinderella Man” gives us something of an idea. Just as “Xanadu” was inspired (in part) by a classic old black-and-white movie, so was this one: namely, by Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, one of Lee’s favourites.

Longfellow Deeds (played by Gary Cooper) is dubbed the “Cinderella Man” by a newspaper reporter, named Louise “Babe” Bennett (played by Jean Arthur), because of his sudden rags-to-riches inheritance of his late uncle’s $20,000,000 fortune. He’s from a town called Mandrake Falls, and he goes to New York to get the money.

Since Deeds eventually decides to give all of the money to poor, starving farmers (the 1936 film is set during the Great Depression), powerful men scheme to get their hands on his money by having him declared insane, and therefore too mentally incompetent to be trusted with the responsibility of managing and dispensing with so huge a sum of money. His eccentric behavior, which includes suddenly punching men for no apparent reason, walking in the rain, and feeding a horse an excess of donuts, seems to confirm that he’s insane. In fact, a psychiatrist deems him to be a manic depressive. In the end, though, they “just couldn’t beat him.”

So, Lee’s lyric tells the plot of the film in an extremely abbreviated form. The proposed ideal moral solution to the problem of poverty is, essentially, a kind of charity, acts of generosity done of one’s free, individual will, as opposed to the workers’ revolutionary seizing control of the means of production, resulting in a state-planned economy providing free healthcare, education, housing, and full employment.

It’s interesting to note, in light of Rand’s influence on Peart, that Mr. Deeds Goes to Town is a film by Frank Capra, who also did It’s a Wonderful Life, another film about the value of Christian charity, and one despised by the likes of Rand, who have idiotically claimed it is a “communist” film. Capra, a kind of right-wing libertarian in his own right, didn’t even like FDR’s New Deal, which was meant to keep the Depression-era American working class from agitating for a socialist revolution. As I argued in my analysis of this latter film (link above), the notion that altruism of any kind can be airily called “communist” really only displays the mean-spiritedness of the “rational egoists.”

“Madrigal” is a simple love song, with a sweet melody that Lee plays on his Minimoog, and with Peart’s drums recorded in an echo room. Even this love song can be seen as a manifestation of the theme of ideals, for when one is in love, one idealizes the love object, ignoring his or her faults, and exaggerating his or her virtues, especially as a contrasting bulwark against this harsh world we live in, as expressed in Peart’s lyric. That the song is called madrigal is again, as with much of the diction of its lyric, an example of the use of archaic imagery (suggesting associations with courtly love poetry, which idealized the Lady as love object), reinforcing that sense of idealizing a distant past against our troubled modern world.

“Cygnus X-1 Book One: The Voyage” is, in contrast to the previous songs’ settings at different points in the past, a science fiction story about going “across the Milky Way” in a spaceship to reach a black hole “in the constellation of Cygnus.” It’s in four parts, the Prologue opening with an electronically-altered narration by Terry Brown, the producer of A Farewell to Kings and all the other Rush albums from their second, Fly by Night, up to Signals.

1 is very brief, with Lee singing of how entry “through the void” of the black hole leads one “to be destroyed,” or could it be a wormhole into either another part of the universe, or a door to a parallel one? Our protagonist dares to find out.

Lee begins playing broken-up segments of the bass line that, when Lifeson and Peart join in, will comprise a riff in 3/4, 7/8, 3/4, and 4/4. Soon after, a frantic riff comes in with chords of C-sharp minor, E minor, and G-sharp minor, which we’ll hear again at the climactic end of the song. A guitar line of G, A-flat, B, C, D, E-flat, F-sharp, and G leads into a riff in 11/8, 12/8, and 11/8, with chords in C minor, a passing chord of B minor to F-sharp major, E-flat minor, and a passing chord of D minor back to C minor. The Minimoog eventually comes in, largely doubling the chords.

2, narrated by the protagonist, describes the flight on his ship, the Rocinante, which is named after the horse ridden by Don Quixote, a foolish idealist who, having read so many chivalric romances, fancies himself such a hero, a knight-errant in search of adventure. He’s an awkward fool, engaging in a task far beyond his abilities. The protagonist in the spaceship is similarly foolish and idealistic, engaging in a dangerous quest (though, in “Book Two: Hemispheres,” he enters–through a wormhole, presumably–the world of the Apollonian and Dionysian battle of the mind and heart, achieving the ideal of balance between the two).

Beginning this section is an upbeat chord progression of C major, F major, D major, and G major, musically suggesting the rosy optimism of the protagonist. Things don’t stay positive for long, though.

A repeat of the G, A-flat, B, C, D, E-flat, F-sharp, and G leads to a solo by Lifeson with the wah-wah pedal. Next is a quieter section suggesting the traveling of the Rocinante deep into space, with Lifeson playing octaves of C, A-flat, and B. Backed by Peart’s drumming, Lee comes in with his bass soon after, with fragments of his bass line from that frantic, climactic progression heard in the Prologue and soon to be heard again–notes of C-sharp, E and G-sharp…hearing this is a foreshadowing of the protagonist’s doom. Fittingly, the bass line does a bitonal clash with the guitar line, reinforcing the sense of tension building up to the climax. But just before that climax, there’s a louder section in E, in 4/8, 3/8, and 4/8.

3 has the Rocinante spinning out of control as it reaches the black hole, with that frantic chord progression fully developed in the form of C-sharp minor, E minor, G-sharp major, and G major, then C-sharp minor, E minor, and C minor, all in 6/8. The protagonist screams out that his “every nerve is torn apart.” (The tragedy of his self-destruction in his spaceship is paralleled by the farce of Don Quixote charging, on his horse, the windmills.)

The song ends with soft but eerie chords of C minor, E-flat minor, and E minor added ninth, then E minor again, but without the ninth. This fades out, suggesting the fading out of the protagonist’s life.

The protagonist thus goes through the whole Hegelian dialectic of being, nothingness, and in Book Two, the sublation of being and non-being, that of becoming, the balance between the two (as well as that between the Apollonian mind and the Dionysian heart), the achievement of the Hegelian ideal.

But this ideal isn’t to be reached until the next album. Instead, as far as A Farewell to Kings is concerned, our quixotic hero just destroyed himself, as does the drinker of the milk of paradise in the other long song ending Side One of this album. The first hero destroys his mind in madness, and the second destroys his body; the first erases the possibility of his non-existence, the second erases his existence…both heroes doing so in the foolish pursuit of unattainable ideals.