Category: poetry

Analysis of ‘It,’ Part II

Here’s a link to Part I, if you haven’t seen it yet.

VI: Derry: the First Interlude

As Mike has written in his notes about Derry, “Can an entire city be haunted?” (page 189, King‘s emphasis) The entire city of Derry can be seen to symbolize the mind, a kind of collective mind, peopled with a host of characters who could thus represent everything from Melanie Klein‘s internal objects, both good and bad, to Carl Jung‘s archetypes.

The surface world of the town, from the ground up, would represent consciousness, where all is sunny and sweet. The underground, the sewers, and the cellars of each house, as I mentioned in Part I, would represent the unconscious mind. It, that is, Pennywise, would thus personify the Collective Shadow, normally repressed and dormant for about 27 years at a time, then let loose for about a year. One tries one’s best to repress, hide, and forget about trauma, but it eventually will out all the same.

The whole adventure that the Losers go through, once as kids in the late 1950s, and again as adults in the mid-1980s, can be seen as allegorical of what Jungians call Shadow work. In order to heal from trauma in a lasting way, one must face one’s traumas, and this is what we see the Losers doing (in an allegorical sense), first only partially achieving it as kids, then thoroughly achieving it as adults in their final confrontation with Pennywise.

Though confronting one’s Shadow, where all the dark traumas of the unconscious reside, is necessary for the sake of healing, it’s also dangerous. Jung himself, in his explorations of his own unconscious through Active Imagination, Shadow work, and other methods of integrating the conscious and unconscious aspects of his mind, brought himself dangerously close to a total psychotic breakdown.

In their final confrontation with It, Eddie dies; the surviving Losers aren’t even able to carry his body out from the underground. What’s more, this confrontation happens during a huge storm, the worst in Maine’s history, with rains reminding us of the Great Flood and that rainstorm at the beginning of the novel, an apocalyptic storm that causes the downtown area of Derry to collapse. This collapsing of downtown Derry, which is a merging together of the upper and lower worlds, is symbolic of that necessary but dangerous integration of the conscious and unconscious through Shadow work.

VII: Ben Hanscom Takes a Fall

As Ben sits on his airplane flight to Derry, “as drunk as a lord,” according to the stewardess observing him (page 211), he finds the old memories finally starting to come back to him. In his state of drunkenness, as well as his hovering between consciousness and unconsciousness, he finds “the wall between past and present disappear[ing]” (page 215). He is entering a world of non-differentiation, the traumatic Real, as Lacan would have called it.

It is fitting that Ben is drunk and falling asleep as he is starting to get these old memories back. As Nietzsche noted in The Birth of Tragedy, Dionysus, the god of wine, chaos, irrationality, emotion, and disorder (as opposed to Apollo as god of logic, clarity, the sun, and the principle of individuation), is also a god of unity, of non-differentiation. So drunk Ben, between wakefulness and sleep, is also experiencing a blur between the past and the present, the trauma of non-differentiation.

This is also rather like the non-differentiation of the Great Flood as paralleled in the rainstorms at the beginning and climax of the novel, when the waters above meet the waters below, recreating the primordial Chaos, tohu wa-bohu, in chapter one of Genesis.

Ben’s memories of being a kid at school, when he was fat and therefore an easy target of bullies like Henry Bowers, Belch Huggins, and Victor Criss, were also a disordered mix of good and bad, because it was also then that he had his crush on Beverly (pages 216-217). He demonstrated his poetic talent by writing his verse celebrating her beautiful, fiery red hair…”winter fire,/January embers” (page 246).

His trip down memory lane is compared to the adventures of the time-traveller in HG Wells‘s classic story; in particular, we’re reminded of “the land of the Morlocks, where machines pound on and on in the tunnels of the night” (page 215). This hellish, subterranean world is easily associated with the underground of Derry: its sewers, cellars, and representation of the unconscious and the Shadow, personified by that ultimate Morlock, Pennywise.

Henry is mad at Ben for not letting him copy his test answers in class. Henry likes to call overweight Ben “Tits” (page 252). We soon learn that Henry is much worse than your average bully: he’s a violent psychopath, a fact proven when he takes out a knife, has Belch and Victor hold Ben, then digs the blade into Ben’s gut.

That cutting into Ben’s flesh, apart from the obvious pain and terror it causes the boy, is a violation of the boundaries between self and other, that traumatic non-differentiation of the Real, of Dionysus.

It’s significant that Ben escapes Henry and his gang by falling through the fence separating the street they’re all on and the Barrens, which is a stretch of scrub land next to Derry, a swampy area where the sewers are. The Barrens, therefore, can also be symbolically linked with the unconscious…perhaps with the preconscious, since, though lower, it’s still outside. Ben’s breaking through the fence is also representative of a non-differentiation between consciousness and unconsciousness.

VIII: Bill Denbrough Beats the Devil (1)

Just as Ben has been flying in a plane on the way back to Derry, going from utter oblivion to flashbacks of childhood memories, so has Bill. And just as Mike’s writing about Derry has been a form of therapy for him, so has Bill’s writing of horror novels been a form of writing therapy for him.

All the stories he’s written, all the novels–they came from Derry, Bill muses (page 283). They came from that summer, when George died. They came from his trauma. His interviewers would ask him where he got all of his ideas from, and he’s answered by speaking of the inspiration coming from his unconscious…yet he’s doubted, more and more as the years go by, if there ever was such a thing as an unconscious (page 284). This unbelief in the unconscious comes from his total forgetting of Derry.

Eventually, though, a memory starts coming back, one of “beating the devil.” (page 285) The unconscious, be it a Freudian or Jungian version of it, doesn’t come back to Bill as a subterranean world of Morlocks, as it has for Ben; it’s just Derry. Bill’s focus on the conscious world of Derry is his resistance against confronting the unconscious.

Bill remembers his old bicycle from his childhood, named Silver, after the Lone Ranger’s horse. Bill is indeed a hero on that bike, beating the devil on it as he rides dangerously fast on it to save a life, be it Eddie’s, when he has to race off on it to get the asthmatic’s medicine, or be it Audra‘s at the end of the novel, when he races on the bike with her, risking a crash for both of them, to get her to snap out of her catatonia.

Beating the devil is just like beating Pennywise. Fittingly, as Bill rides the bike, he imitates the Lone Ranger, calling out, “Hi-yo Silver, AWAYYY!” (page 288) His risk of death, on both occasions on that bike, brings him to the brink of hell, then past it, coming around to salvation in heaven, as it were, for Eddie’s and Audra’s sakes. Bill is thus like a Christ figure, harrowing hell, then causing a resurrection of sorts (Audra’s), and ascending to a metaphorical heaven. In this way, he’s beaten the devil.

Bill wants to help Eddie because he failed to help his little brother. First, he helps Eddie with a nosebleed he gets after an altercation with Henry’s gang; Bill helps Eddie the way Bill’s mom used to help Georgie when he had nosebleeds (page 292). And when Eddie’s aspirator is empty, Bill rides off to the drugstore for his medicines…which, as it turns out, is mere tap-water (page 302).

When Bill goes off to get the ‘medicine,’ Ben stays with Eddie in the Barrens, where he’s met the two just after escaping Henry’s gang and getting the knife cut in his gut. After Bill returns with the ‘medicine’ for Eddie and rides off, Eddie tells Ben about the murder of Georgie, that it happened “right after the big flood” (page 311).

Eddie, as a double of Georgie, dies when the second “big flood” happens, and not too long after that, adult Bill rides dangerously on his bike for Audra’s sake, beating the devil once again.

Bill may have saved Eddie in the Barrens, but the boy cannot get over having failed to protect his little brother, and the night of that very day in the Barrens, when Bill is back home, he has a terrible fright reminding him of his guilt over George.

He remembers when Georgie was alive, and the two boys were arguing in front of the TV over who got to eat the popcorn (page 313). This kind of sibling jealousy and rivalry would have been part of the basis for Bill’s unconscious wish to get rid of his little brother, an unconscious wish that, in turn, has become Bill’s guilt now that George is really dead.

Bill goes into George’s bedroom and takes out an old photo album with pictures of the little boy in it. A shocking thing happens, something that has now happened a second time, the first time being the previous December, after which Georgie was killed.

Bill has been looking at a picture of George “fixedly for some time” (page 319). He’s about to close the photo album when he sees Georgie roll his eyes in the picture, then turn them up to look in Bill’s eyes. Then, with “a horrid leer,” Georgie winks his right eye at Bill (page 320). Apart from the obvious supernatural aspect, Bill’s fear stems from his guilt regarding the original wish-fulfillment of a dead, still, smiling Georgie, changing into a living, moving, vengeful little brother.

IX: One of the Missing: A Tale from the Summer of ’58

We learn of a ten-year-old boy named Edward Corcoran, who went missing back in the summer of 1958. He and his four-year-old brother, Dorsey, were abused by their stepfather, Richard P. Macklin, who actually beat Dorsey to death with a hammer, though he lied about it, claiming the little boy died of a fall from the top of a ladder. (Chapter 6)

Edward’s teacher reported seeing bruises all over his body, and she was so concerned for him that when she heard that he’d gone missing, she prayed every night that he’d run away from home, sick and tired of his stepfather’s abuse, rather than killed from another of Macklin’s beatings.

Though Macklin was suspected in the disappearance of Edward, we learn that It really killed the boy, It in the form of the Creature from the Black Lagoon, though originally appearing in the form of Dorsey (pages 336-341). Still, it could be argued that Macklin indirectly killed Edward, since his repeated physical abuse of the boy drove him to run away from home, thus exposing him to the danger of It. Besides, It–as the personification of trauma throughout the novel–is the killer of the boy only insofar as trauma killed him, the trauma inflicted on him by his raging stepfather.

Family abuse, of course, isn’t limited to the Corcoran family. As we know, Beverly suffered it from her own father, who is incorrectly referred to as her stepfather on page 330–a fortuitous error in that it helps to link the Corcoran boys to her through the theme of family abuse.

Edward Corcoran’s death is further linked thematically with the Losers’ experiences on pages 330 and 331 by a kind of synchronicity. On June 19th–though Macklin had nothing at all to do with the boy’s death (in the literal, physical sense, of course)–he died when Ben was watching TV with his mom, Eddie Kaspbarak’s mom was neurotically worrying about her boy possibly catching “phantom fever,” Bev’s “stepfather” [sic] kicked her in the derrière and told her to dry the dishes, Mike “got yelled at by some high-school boys…not far from the farm owned by Henry Bowers’s crazy father,” Richie was looking at pictures of half-naked girls in a magazine, and Bill was throwing the photo album across the room because Georgie’s photo winked at him.

All of the Losers “looked up at the exact moment Eddie Corcoran died…as if hearing some distant cry” (page 331). It, the creature, was behind this synchronicity, a synchronicity of shared trauma and abuse.

Mike couldn’t sleep on the night of the beginning of summer vacation, so soon after Corcoran’s death. He went out, rode his bike for a while, then parked it and walked to the Canal (pages 341-342). On the way, he found a pocket knife with the initials EC on the side. He also saw grooves in the grass leading to the Canal. “And there was blood.” (page 343)

The horror of these sights, where Corcoran died, brought back memories in Mike’s mind of a giant bird attacking him. We see how all of these traumas are thus interlinked.

It would be interesting to look at, compare, and contrast three mythical creatures in It. We’ve already looked a bit at the Turtle. There’s also the actual form if It as a giant spider. And now, we have the giant bird Mike confronted.

The first two giant animals, as representations of good and evil, have in common the fact that they crawl. This comparison suggests that It, the Satan of this cosmology to the Turtle’s God, is trying to do an evil emulation of good, is being parasitical to good. Satan is sometimes described as being an imitator of good, of wanting to be like Him.

“The prince of darkness is a gentleman,” Edgar says in King Lear. ” ‘The devil can cite Scripture for his purpose,” Antonio says in The Merchant of Venice. And in Paradise Lost, Book IV, Satan says, “Evil, be thou my good.” Pennywise similarly starts off with friendly charm before killing Georgie; his crawling on spiders’ legs can thus be seen as an imitation of the Turtle’s crawling on its legs.

Now, the giant bird that Mike has to fend off is, of course, evil, and contrary to the first two giants that crawl, this one is way up in the sky. On the other hand, when Stan has to fight off It as a child, he uses nothing other than a book of birds to help him. Crawling creatures can be good or evil; flying creatures can also be good or evil. Dualities of this sort pervade It.

X: The Dam in the Barrens

As Eddie Kaspbrak is driving a Cadillac in Boston, on his way to Derry, he’s thinking about such things as the subways, bad places to go, like tunnels (page 373). Such subterranean places would remind him of the Derry sewers, the Barrens, and the dirty cellar of the house at 29 Neibolt Street, in one of the windows of which he, as a child, saw a leper.

Such underground places–like the realm of Ben’s Morlocks–are crawling with germs, the sources of all of Eddie’s fears. Indeed his very sickness is his fear, the poison of his childhood memories (page 373).

Eddie remembers the day, when they were all kids, that Ben, whom they’d all recently met, decided to build a dam in the Barrens. On this same day, Bill talks about his experience seeing Georgie wink at him in that photo. It’s a brave confession on Bill’s part, him risking ridicule and disbelief; but since Eddie, Ben, and Stan have had–and Richie in the not-too-distant-future will have–comparable supernatural frights, they all hear Bill with sympathetic ears.

Interestingly, when Ben decides to build the dam, using his already remarkable talents as an architect, he says, “We could flood out the whole Barrens if we wanted to.” (page 376) The dam’s stoppage of the river water doesn’t, of course, flood out the whole Barrens, but this choice of words is still significant in how it can be linked with the rainy day when Georgie died, as well as with the flooding and destruction of downtown Derry during the climax of the novel.

These associations with the Great Flood suggest the washing away of all evil and the ultimate defeat of Pennywise. Building the dam, stopping and thus controlling the waters of the Barrens, which are associated with the turbulent world of the unconscious and the Shadow, thus represents a conquering and controlling of the boys’ fear.

This day is also a great bonding moment for these Losers. The building of the dam is actually a rebuilding of a dam destroyed by Henry and his gang. Rebuilding it, and bonding with each other, is doubly therapeutic for the boys, as is the beginning of a discussion about It.

Since It personifies trauma, talking about It is a kind of talk therapy for healing trauma. When Bill can talk about his photo album and George’s wink, Eddie can find it easier to talk about the leper in the cellar of the house on Neibolt Street, Ben can talk about his close encounter with It, and Stan can talk about his scary experience.

Eddie uses one word to describe the moment when he knows it’s finally safe to talk about his traumatic experience: “Recognition.” (page 395) The boys are sharing a mutual validation of their trauma, and building the dam on the same day, after their bullies destroyed the first one, is well juxtaposed with this talk therapy, for they are all beginning to rebuild their lives as well as the dam–as new friends.

I mentioned earlier how duality pervades It, in the form of mixtures of good and bad: good and bad birds, good and bad crawlers. There is also good and bad in, on the one hand, experiencing trauma, and on the other, talking about trauma, releasing the pain, and bonding with friends as a result of the discussion of trauma.

Similarly, there’s the horror of Eddie’s seeing a leper crawling out from under the porch of the house at 29 Neibolt Street, and hearing him offer the boy “a blowjob for a quarter” (page 400). A blowjob in and of itself is a pleasant thing, but not given to a child by a leper! My point is that we see dualities of good and bad mashed together on many occasions in It.

Remember also that the Shadow is not always evil; it’s just the ego-dystonic aspects of our minds, the things we want to reject. These things are often evil, but sometimes they’re hidden talents we’re afraid to acknowledge in ourselves because acknowledging them might force us to rise up to challenges we’re afraid of facing. Eddie has to learn to accept the reality of germs and sickness, that using his immune system will strengthen him against sickness. Facing and defeating It will turn the Losers Club into the Winners Club…even if a few of them die trying.

Now that Bill has told his photo album story about George, Eddie can tell them all about the leper, Ben can tell them about seeing the clown in the form of the mummy, and Stan is about to tell them about his experience of It, but all of them are interrupted by Mr. Nell (page 412), a police officer who reprimands them for building the dam and making a mess of the river in the Barrens. The water that’s being dammed up is waste from the toilets and dirty, used sink water; it’s all a great congregation of germs that would make Eddie retch if he knew.

Part III is coming soon.

Stephen King, It, New York, Pocket Books, 1986

Analysis of ‘It,’ Part I

I: Introduction

It is a 1986 horror novel by Stephen King. The story is told in a kind of non-linear narrative, alternating between two time periods separated by a 27-year interim: the late 1950s, when the protagonists are kids, and the mid-1980s, when they are adults with established careers, many of them married.

King conceived of the story back in 1978, and he started work on it in 1981, finishing it in 1985. The titular antagonist was originally meant to be a troll as in “Three Billy Goats Gruff,” but inhabiting the city’s sewer system instead of living under a bridge.

It won the British Fantasy Award in 1987, and it was nominated for the Locus and World Fantasy Awards the same year. Two major adaptations of the novel have been made: a two-part TV miniseries in 1990 starred Tim Curry, Richard Thomas, John Ritter, Tim Reid, and Annette O’Toole; and two films–It and It Chapter Two–came out in 2017 and 2019 respectively, starring Jessica Chastain, James McAvoy, and Bill Skarsgård, among many others.

As in many of King’s novels, novellas, and short stories, It is set in Maine (him being a native of Durham), in particular, in the fictional town of Derry, a place that seems pleasant and normal on the surface, but underneath (literally!), there are hidden evils. In the sewer system, and even in the cellar of the Denbrough house, there is the symbolism of hell, the unconscious, and Jung‘s Collective Shadow.

II: General Thoughts

It is a novel of such massive, epic scope that I cannot be expected to do justice to all of its oh, so many aspects, but I’ll deal with as much of it as I can, and I’m dividing it up into parts so that its admittedly tedious length can be bearable. The page numbers I’m using to quote or reference scenes are based on this edition.

I’ll start by mentioning the more obvious themes of the novel, including childhood trauma brought on by bullying, family abuse, and ethnic and racial prejudice. With this trauma comes repressed memory causing a total forgetting of all that happened in Derry, both when the protagonists (“the Losers Club“) were kids and immediately after having killed It once and for all. Connected to this forgetting is, in turn, the collective looking-the-other-way that the residents of Derry always do whenever something evil happens.

On another level, one hardly dealt with beyond brief nods to it in the two movies, and not dealt with at all in the TV miniseries, is the dualistic cosmology of It. While It, in Its typical form of Pennywise the Dancing Clown, is the principle of darkness, evil, and chaos, the principle of light, good, and order is represented in the form of a giant turtle named Maturin, which was little doubt influenced by various myths about the world being supported on the back of a giant turtle.

So Maturin, having vomited out and thus created the universe, is like God to Pennywise’s Satan. Maturin would be maturing, putting away the childish things of clownish Pennywise, just as the Losers’ quest to defeat Pennywise and thus face their fears ridding themselves of their traumas, is their own putting away of childish things.

III: After the Flood (1957)

To keep the Biblical allusions coming, the story begins with a rainstorm in Derry, and in the neighbourhood where Bill and George Denbrough live, little Georgie wants to play with a paper boat–made by his big brother Bill–his little ark in the Great Flood. “By that time, many people in Derry had begun to make nervous jokes about arks.” (page 4)

To finish making the paper boat for George, Bill-being too sick in bed with a fever to get it himself–wants George to go down to the cellar and get the paraffin. The cellar–which as I said above, is as symbolic of hell, the unconscious, and the Collective Shadow as is the sewage system–is terrifying to the little boy.

The smell of the cellar is awful, made worse by the flood (page 9)–recall the Great Flood allusion made above, and connect this all with the apocalyptic deluge ending of the novel. Down there, Georgie sees an old can of Turtle Wax; he stares at it in a daze for almost half a minute (pages 9 and 10). Naturally: in such a devilish dungeon, the frightened little boy would want to bond with Pennywise’s angelic opposite.

Though annoyed and impatient with his little brother’s fear of the cellar, Bill nonetheless loves him, and shows that love by making the paper boat as well as he can for little Georgie’s enjoyment. The little boy goes out in the rain in his raincoat with the boat, innocently unaware of how the Great Flood allusions are foreshadowing of his imminent, violent death.

When the paper boat slips into the storm drain, he’s so preoccupied with getting it back that he doesn’t seem anywhere near as scared of the dark underground as he was of the cellar. And instead of seeing the God-like turtle, he meets Satanic Pennywise, who like the Big Bad Wolf to Little Red Riding Hood, puts on the charm for Little Yellow Rain-Slicker. (Note in this connection that, in Charles Perrault‘s version of the children’s tale, she is eaten up by the Big Bad Wolf [symbolic of a child molester], and that’s the end of her–she simply dies, just like Georgie.)

In this iconic scene, which is probably the first that comes to mind when anyone thinks of It, just before Pennywise bites off Georgie’s arm and leaves him to bleed to death, he says, “Everything down here floats,” after saying, “when you’re down here with me, you’ll float, too” (page 18). Everything floats like a balloon filled with air; every dead soul floats down in Hades, the air of its spirit wandering aimlessly and hopelessly.

The violent tearing-off of Georgie’s arm is a symbolic castration of the sort, given his age (six), that represents, in Lacanian terms, the traumatic shift from the comfort of the dyadic, Oedipal, mother-to-son relationship to one with the larger society, as personified by the intervention of a third party, the father. Properly understood, the Oedipus complex in its expanded sense is a universal, narcissistic trauma, in which the child must learn to give up the dyadic, one-on-one relationship with one parent (traditionally, the mother), a relationship in which the child wants to hog the one parent all to him- or herself, and the child must accept sharing this parent, as well as all other people, with the world.

This giving-up of the one parent who’s done everything for you to share him or her with others, who has been conceived as an extension of oneself, and going from other to Other, to use Lacanian terms, is too difficult for some to do, as Georgie’s death can be seen to symbolize (i.e., he leaves his house, goes out into society, and he gets killed). This stage in life is a shift from the dyadic, narcissistic Imaginary (represented by seeing oneself in a mirror, or looking in the loving eyes of one’s smiling mother, whose face is a metaphorical mirror) to the social, cultural, and linguistic norms of the Symbolic, the entering of people other than one’s Oedipally-desired parent into one’s life, forcing one to interact with many people.

This is a traumatic change in a child’s life. The difficulty of accepting the social world of the Symbolic, wit its shared language and customs, can result in a clumsy adjustment to it, as symbolized by Bill’s stammer. His trauma over his little brother’s death stems from guilt over having failed to protect Georgie, which in turn can be seen to have stemmed from an unconscious wish to remove Georgie, so Bill can have his mom and dad to himself.

This trauma of entering society, sharing those you love with others, and dealing with nasty people is dealt with and developed in many different forms throughout the novel. Bill is bullied for his stutter; Beverly Marsh is bullied for being a girl who hangs out with a bunch of boys (i.e., she’s slut-shamed); Stanley Uris, a Jew, has to deal with antisemitic prejudice; Mike Hanlon has to put up with, among other things, being called a “nigger”; Ben Hanscom as a kid is bullied for being fat; Eddie Kaspbrak is picked on for being weak, an asthmatic hypochondriac, and having an overprotective mother; and Richie Tozier is bullied for his loudmouthed antics and his often inappropriately-timed attempts at humour (being a “four-eyes” doesn’t help him, either).

IV: After the Festival (1984)

Another example of the nastiness of entering society, as opposed to staying only with the one you love, is when, in 1984, Adrian Mellon and his partner, Don Hagarty, are harassed by a group of homophobic punks, the situation escalating to Adrian’s murder, him being thrown off a bridge. While the group of punks clearly parallels Henry Bowers’s gang of bullies who terrorize the Losers in the late 1950s, with Adrian’s death is also the presence of Pennywise (pages 23-24).

The point is that, on the literal level of It, Pennywise is the killer, but on the symbolic level, he personifies trauma and the frequent inability to overcome that trauma. It’s especially difficult for little kids to do so, and that’s why Pennywise typically kills children. When King created It as appearing usually in the form of a clown, it was because he concluded that children fear clowns “more than anything else in the world.” It feeds on people’s fears.

One way we could think of calling the monster “It” is as a pun on id, that part of us that desires, wants, and craves, typically to the point that is socially unacceptable or wrong. It craves the kids as food, satisfying Its hunger on them.

Now, of course, to say that It is merely a personification of the id is a grotesque, even absurd oversimplification, since there’s obviously so much more to It than animalistic desire. Still, seeing “It” as a pun on id is helpful in that it orients us in the right direction as to understand what the monster in the sewers really symbolizes. The id is completely repressed and in the unconscious…not partially–fully. Those sewers are the unconscious. They represent repressed memory; this is why the Losers forget everything that happened in Derry when they were kids…all except Mike, who never left the town, and has worked there as a librarian right up to the 1980s part of the story.

So when It has finished Its 27-odd-year hibernation, It resumes Its preying on kids in the town, the way repressed traumas keep coming back to the surface in some form or another. No matter how hard we try to hold the traumas back, they keep resurfacing, coming back up from the dark, smelly sewers of our minds.

V: Six Phone Calls (1985)

And so, remembering the promise that all of the members of the Losers Club made when they were kids after defeating It in the late 1950s–that if It came back to terrorize Derry again–that they would all come back to Derry, too, and kill It once and for all, Mike starts calling up all of his old friends to tell them about the problem.

Even as adults, some people cannot handle facing their old trauma head on, so when Stan Uris receives his phone call from Mike, instead of packing his things and heading back to Derry to keep his promise, he goes into his bathroom ostensibly to take a bath, but gets razorblades, and “slits his inner forearms open from wrist to the crook of the elbow” (page 76). With his blood, he uses his finger to write IT “on the blue tiles above the tub” (page 76).

Before Stan even receives the call from Mike, there is a long section describing how his life has been since the late 1950s, and sandwiched in between many of these events is a brief reference to those scary days, a kind of God-is-dead moment of despair, foreshadowing Stan’s suicide “The turtle couldn’t help us.” (page 62, King’s emphasis)

The Losers each have different ways of hanging onto their traumas. We’ve seen how Stan has hung onto his so much that he’d rather kill himself than face them again. Mike has hung onto his by being the only Loser to stay in Derry and to research the history of Pennywise; his writing down and journaling of events is his way of processing his traumas.

Bill processes his traumas by writing about them in the form of horror novels; he’s so focused on depicting the traumas vividly that he’s developed a talent at it and become a successful author, even married to a movie actress, Audra.

Other Losers have ways of hanging onto their traumas in a way best described through object relations theory, that is, how one’s early childhood relationships (e.g., with one’s parents) become repeated in later relationships. We see these repeated patterns in Eddie and Beverly.

Eddie’s mother is obese and overprotective of him, instilling an intense hypochondria and fear of germs in him. His choice of a wife, Myra, is similar in both her physicality and personality. Eddie “looked from Mother to Myra and back again to Mother.
“They could have been sisters. The resemblance was that close.” (page 118)

Beverly’s father, Alvin Marsh, is abusive and controlling, always ‘worrying about her,’ and suspecting she’s been fooling around with boys. She ends up marrying Tom Rogan, also an abusive, controlling man. Eddie and Beverly continue in dysfunctional relationships because they know no other way to relate to people. Someone like Tom preys on emotionally vulnerable women like Beverly, and he was able to spot her vulnerabilities easily: “But she was weak…weak somehow. It was as if she was sending out radio signals which only he could receive.” (page 137)

Richie Tozier has always dealt with his trauma through his joking around, a defence mechanism for coping with the terror around him by psychologically running away from it and reaching the opposite, happy side. In this way, his humour is a kind of manic defence, an avoidance of pain and sadness by putting on a happy, excited front. Connected to this avoidance of reality through frivolity is his vast array of fake Voices, which are the wearing of a False Self to hide his True Self. Though not on a pathologically narcissistic level for Richie, this fakery of his is narcissism on a small scale, a defence against the psychological fragmentation that could result if his childhood traumas, exacerbated by Pennywise, were to push him over the edge.

When Mike phones Richie to come back to Derry, the latter is again doing one of his Voices, not one of the comical ones he does on the radio as a DJ, “but a warm, rich, confident Voice. An I’m-All-Right Voice. It sounded great, but it was a lie. Just like all the other Voices were lies.” (page 77) So Richie has hung onto his trauma through this ongoing comic routine, and through the use of these fake Voices.

The record collection he has as a DJ, the vaults of records, his collection of Golden Oldies, were also a cover for something much darker. “They’re not records but dead bodies. You buried them deep but […] the ground is spitting them up to the surface. You’re not Rich ‘Records’ Tozier down there; down there you’re just Richie ‘Four-Eyes’ Tozier […] Those aren’t doors, and they’re not opening. Those are crypts, Richie. (pages 82-83)

As the memories come back to him, Richie remembers Henry Bowers chasing him, “and he felt more crypts cracking open inside of him.” (page 84)

Ben seems to have been doing the opposite of hanging onto his childhood traumas. He lost his weight with proud determination and kept it off, all the way to the mid-1980s, when he’s received his phone call from Mike…and this is why he needs to get drunk at the local bar before going back to Derry.

While Ben is doing heavy drinking instead of overeating as he did as a kid, the association of childhood trauma and ingesting a form of food is still here, for psychological purposes. There’s also a dialectical relationship between his so complete amnesia over his childhood in Derry that he doesn’t even know of the amnesia (page 104), and hanging onto the trauma, as we saw in the marital choices of Eddie and Beverly, or in Bill’s relapsed stammer.

Part II is coming soon.

Stephen King, It, New York, Pocket Books, 1986

My Short Story, ‘The Harvest,’ Is Now Published in This Alien Buddha Press Anthology

They’re Conspiring Against the Alien Buddha Too! is now published on Amazon, and here’s a link to it. My short story, ‘The Harvest,’ is on page 52 in the anthology. The paperback is $16.99.

Other writers who have written great stories and poetry for the anthology are Aishwariya Laxmi, E.W. Farnsworth, Lynn White, L.B. Sedlacek, James Schwartz, Zachary Kocanda, Mark Heathcote, Tulpa Fedrodianna-McAngophora, Robert J.W., (my story comes next in this order), Joan McNerney, Andrew K. Arnett, Brian Simmons, Cliff McNish, D. Rudd-Mitchell, Robert Walton, J. Rocky Colavito, Joseph Farley, Bryan Franco, Nick Romeo, Buck Weiss, James Dorr, Mark Lipman, Brendan Jesus, Roberta Beach Jacobson, Shannon O’Connor, and Collin J. Rae.

Please go check out this great anthology, now that it’s out!

Raised Fist

O, keep your fingers
on the pulse of what
the people need in this
alienating, unfair world!
A good rule of thumb is
remembering we can’t
do all of this alone.
We all must raise
our arms together
in loving solidarity.
Alone, we’re weak;
together, we’re not.
When our muscles
are stacked, one on
top of the other, we
can be unstoppable,
a giant which could
pound the crap out
of the ruling class. There are so many more of us than there are of them.
They want us just to be fingers and thumbs, all insignificant sinews. We
must link up–as ligaments–muscles and bones. A fist that’s connected
can punch out the rich, so let’s raise it together. Our rulers would have
us all fighting, so we won’t be fighting them, defeating them for good.

Droppings

A
plane
flies over a helpless people,
dropping

bombs

on

a

frightened, hungry, homeless, unarmed group of civilians.

A
plane
then flies over that helpless people,
dropping

rotten

food

to

dirty, starving civilians who are shot at when trying to get it.

A
plane
that does these things might as well be
dropping

shit

in

a

toilet, since that is how they look down on Gazans.

Analysis of ‘In the Wake of Poseidon’

I: Introduction

In the Wake of Poseidon is King Crimson‘s second studio album, released in 1970. It came into being during a period of great instability in the band, since founding members Ian McDonald (alto sax, flute, clarinet, Mellotron, vibraphone, and backing vocals) and drummer Michael Giles quit after the band’s American tour. To make matters worse, lead singer/bassist Greg Lake would also leave, during the recording sessions of Poseidon, to cofound ELP.

Though the album was well-received by critics upon its release, citing the execution and production quality as better than its predecessor, Poseidon has since been regarded as something of a mere copy of In the Court of the Crimson King. Indeed, apart from “Peace–A Beginning,” all the tracks from Side One of Poseidon are parallels of those on Side One of the first album. Furthermore, on Side Two of Poseidon, towards the end of “The Devil’s Triangle,” there’s a clip from the title track of the previous album, the “Ah…ah, ah-ah, ah, ah-ah” vocals.

Still, in spite of what would seem legitimate criticisms of this reworking of the first album in the way guitarist/leader Robert Fripp would have had it, I’ve always preferred Poseidon to Crimson King: I find this second album to be bolder and more colourful than the first (though I consider the lyrics of the first album to be preferable overall to the obscurantism of those of the second). In an attempt to rationalize this ‘redoing’ of the first album, I’d say that Poseidon can be seen as the ‘epitaph,’ if you will, of Crimson King, a kind of ‘lament’ over the demise of the great original lineup.

Here is a link to all the album’s lyrics, and here is a link to all the tracks from the album, including the shorter single version of “Cat Food,” “Groon” (the B-side of the “Cat Food” single), and Greg Lake’s guide-vocal version of “Cadence and Cascade”.

Apart from the links to the first album that I’ve noted above, the second album has other links to the original lineup. Giles was retained as a ‘guest drummer’ for Poseidon, and two of its tracks are based on music the original band played live: “Pictures of a City” is based on “A Man, a City,” and “The Devil’s Triangle” is based on “Mars,” an instrumental improvisation based in turn on “Mars, the Bringer of War,” from Gustav Holst‘s The Planets.

In fact, as noted above, Lake even recorded a ‘guide vocal’ for “Cadence and Cascade” in an uncharacteristically unexpressive voice; not to bad-mouth replacement singer Gordon Haskell for his excellent performance on the recording used on Poseidon, but if Lake was available to sing the track, why didn’t he do so with his usual expressivity, then Haskell could have debuted on bass and vocals for Lizard?

Many of the themes of the first album are repeated here on the second: the horrors of war, modern alienation, capitalism, political corruption, and fear of the end of the world. The theme of modern alienation is in abundant supply in “Pictures of a City,” this album’s counterpart to “21st Century Schizoid Man.”

But as a sharp contrast to all of this negativity, remaining original members Fripp and lyricist Peter Sinfield gave us a trilogy of tracks on the ideal of peace. Of course, this ideal can never be realized if the issues of the preceding paragraph are not dealt with, but it’s good to be reminded of peace as a goal worth striving for, on three occasions spread out over the course of the album.

II: Peace–A Beginning

“Peace–A Beginning” opens with heavy reverb that will die out slowly over the course of the short track. Lake is singing a cappella in C minor. The four-line verse he sings makes references, however indirectly, to the four elements: air (“the wind”), fire (“lit by the flame”), earth (“the mountain”), and water (“the ocean” and “the river”); these are all identified with a personified peace.

Such basic, fundamental elements point in the direction of unity and permanence, which is fitting, given that peace will “never end.” It’s also fitting that there are two references to water, rather than just one; one of these is the ocean, appropriate for an album called In the Wake of Poseidon, the title track of which will deal more with the four elements.

When Lake sings the last word, we can hear Fripp softly play four notes on his guitar: A, F-sharp, C, and A-sharp. Then we go into the next song.

III: Pictures of a City

Since this song is Poseidon‘s equivalent of “21st Century Schizoid Man,” it’s fitting that we hear saxophones in it, played by McDonald’s replacement, saxist/flautist Mel Collins. His jazzy playing of the saxes reinforces the contemporary urban feel of the song. The band is playing in G minor, in a kind of twelve-bar blues before the first verse.

Rather than present any kind of narrative, Sinfield just gives us a series of urban images, true to the title of the song, as well as the sounds of the city, and the feelings that result from such sights and sounds.

“Concrete” gives us a “cold face,” leaving us “stark sharp” and “glass eyed,” lacking expression. Such are the alienating effects of modern urban life: removed from nature, with the city’s polluted air, fire breathing out smoke from cars’ exhaust pipes, earth covered up and suffocated, if you will, under concrete, and water made filthy through sewage, we’re also disconnected from community. The contaminating of the four elements means there can be no peace.

There’s a considerable amount of internal rhyme and assonance in these verses: “face cased,” “stark sharp,” “bright light scream beam,” “neon wheel,” “spice ice dance chance,” “mouth dry tongue tied.”

The third line of the first verse vividly portrays the problems of driving in the big city: road rage, screeching brakes, the honking of horns, and car accidents. Never mind wars between nations–one often finds oneself in a kind of war just by driving in a busy city.

The white of “red white green white” suggests light, like that of the “neon wheel.” Note the red and green of traffic lights, fittingly mentioned right after the “brake and squeal” of impatient drivers. Note also the absence of the yellow traffic light: one hurries up and waits, but never drives slowly.

After the first verse, we return to the jazzy twelve-bar blues riff of the harmonized saxes and guitar. City life sure can give you the blues.

Much of the imagery of the second verse, especially its first line, suggests how urban alienation leads to a desperate attempt to connect with others by looking for love in all the wrong places: “Dream flesh love chase perfumed skin.” There are other “tinseled sin[s]” going on, though. There’s the “greased hand” of political corruption and bribery. One’s teeth one ought to hide so the people we’re cheating don’t know of one’s wicked motives. “Pasteboard time slot sweat and spin” suggests the daily grind of the nine-to-five job, or wage slavery under capitalism.

This verse ends with Fripp playing a chromatic ascension of high notes going up to A-sharp, which leads into “42nd at Treadmills,” the fast middle-section equivalent of “Mirrors,” from “21st Century Schizoid Man.” Since this song is about the immorality of the city, I can interpret “Treadmill” in terms of its old use as a punishment for prisoners in the UK and US of the 19th century, used to exert labour from them, an effective metaphor for wage slavery. “42nd” suggests a doubling of the evil of “21st” from the original song.

Like “Mirrors,” “42nd at Treadmill” is essentially in a 12-bar blues structure (a cycle of four bars of the tonic chord, two of the subdominant chord, two of the tonic again, two of the dominant chord, and two again of the tonic). In fact, much of this section is simply a sped-up version of the 12-bar blues riff heard before each of the first two verses.

After this comes a soft, slow variation on the 12-bar blues structure, suggesting the night time and everyone having gone to sleep…though since this song was initially inspired by New York City, ‘the city that never sleeps,’ during King Crimson’s American tour of late 1969 and early 1970, perhaps we should imagine people tossing and turning in their beds, especially at this section’s dissonant ending, which suggests the morning and therefore the need to wake up and face yet another grueling work day.

With the final verse, instead of getting images of city life, we get what is largely the effect of city life on its residents–the alienation, brokenness, and blindness of those without political or class consciousness. Blinded by drunkenness and aimless partying, these people can’t communicate or see their reality for what it is. They’re doomed in an industrialized, urban hell.

The song ends with that chromatic ascension of high notes on Fripp’s guitar, but this time ending on B and introducing a chaotic, dissonant ending like the one for “21st Century Schizoid Man,” though I find this one to be far darker, and therefore better, than the first one. Also, you can hear in this one Fripp’s signature screaming guitar phrases, in which he quickly strums dissonant, high-pitched chords like the splintery ones you hear on “Sailor’s Tale.”

IV: Cadence and Cascade

This song is Poseidon’s equivalent to “I Talk to the Wind.” It features Fripp’s lyrical acoustic guitar playing, Haskell’s lead vocal as mentioned above, and some lovely flute solos by Collins. The song is in E major, Fripp opening with combinations of single notes, strums, and arpeggios in the tonic chord, an A-major chord, an E-major 7th chord, and A major again.

Haskell’s singing introduces two groupies, Cadence and Cascade, and the man they’re interested in, Jade, who depending on the interpretation of Sinfield’s lyric is variously portrayed as, for example, a singer, or a Silk Road merchant trading goods from the Far East. The names “Cadence and Cascade” suggest the two women’s beauty (more on the meanings of their names later); “Jade” suggests his wealth.

The women worship him for his wealth, power, and fame, but grow disappointed with him as they get to know him better: “As his veil fell aside…They found him just a man.” His phony appeal is comparable to that of a prostitute: “Sad paper courtesan.”

In the world of traditional sex roles, which still largely existed in the West as of 1970, women found their only option for gaining wealth and social status was through a man, so when they met a rich and powerful man, they idealized him…only to find later that he is just as faulty as any other man of modest means. Masculinity is an ideal that is rarely, if ever, even approached, let alone attained.

The bridge opens with Fripp playing one of his “devices,” a celeste, with an ascension of notes: B, C-sharp, E, F-sharp, and G-sharp; this is heard over an A major seventh chord, then with the switch to an A minor seventh chord, we hear celeste notes of G-sharp, A, B, C, and D, E, and F-sharp. We also hear Keith Tippett‘s jazzy piano in the background.

The verse of the bridge has Haskell singing about the lovemaking between the groupies and Jade, their worshipping of his wealth (“sequin,” and “velvet-gloved hand”) and fame (“Cascade kissed his name”). In a larger sense, the groupies’ worship of Jade can represent the idolatry of famous people in general, and the simping for billionaires. This applies to men and women, as worshippers and worshipped.

After the first flute solo, we hear a refrain of the “sad paper courtesan” verse, except that Cadence and Cascade now “knew [Jade] just a man” (my emphasis). The groupies have left him behind in their disappointment in him.

One of the biggest problems in our world is that, because of the worship of fame, wealth, status, and power, people keep aspiring to it, instead of sharing everything so that the basic needs of everyone are met. We aim for these heights, then in disappointment we fall…which leads me to my next point.

Apart from the groupies’ names suggesting their beauty, “Cadence and Cascade”–something Haskell sings several times leading into Collins’s second flute solo–are also words coming from the Latin world cadere, meaning “to fall.” There’s the musical cadence of resolving a harmonic progression back to the tonic, and a cascade is a waterfall (the element of water again, as jade is associated with the element of earth). Both meanings suggest musical or natural beauty, or the beauty of a woman’s cascade of long, wavy hair flowing down to her shoulders. There’s also the fall of the girls’ disappointment on knowing Jade is “just a man.”

V: In the Wake of Poseidon (including “Libra’s Theme”)

This track reworks the first album in two ways: the title, of course, parallels that of the last song on Side Two of the first album; more properly, though, this song is a reworking of “Epitaph,” the last song on Side One of the first album.

Sinfield apparently rewrote the lyric to this song about twenty-five times to make it tie in with the cover art, which therefore should be discussed now. I’ll describe each of the dozen faces not as they appear on the outer album cover–which shows a painting called The 12 Archetypes, or The 12 Faces of Humankind, by Tammo de Jongh–but in order of appearance as Sinfield brings them up in his lyric.

The Observer, a bald old man with spectacles up above his brow and his hand on his chin, looks pensive and scientifically-minded. His elements are Air and Earth. The opening lines, “Plato’s spawn cold ivied eyes/Snare truth in bone and globe,” refer to him. He represents Western science in the service of cold-blooded imperialism, taking over the globe and, exploiting it, reducing all indigenous resistance to skulls and bones.

The Joker, a harlequin painted in reds and yellows and smiling in a triangular hat, is the subject of the next two lines of the first verse. His elements being Fire and Air, he’d “coin pointless games/Sneer jokes in parrot’s robe.” His sardonic humor points out our everyday foibles and political corruption, but it’s “pointless” in how it does nothing to solve our problems.

The Actress is next. She’s Egyptian, with long pearl earrings and necklaces, and with tears running down her cheeks. Her elements are Water and Fire. She is represented in the lines, “Dame Scarlet Queen/Sheds sudden theatre rain.” She weeps for the sins of the world, as does…

…The Enchantress, her long dark hair going across her face. She has Water and Earth as her elements. She “knows every human pain.”

As I said above, the title track is especially concerned with the four elements, two of which are associated with each of the twelve archetypes, as we’ve seen and will continue to see. All four are also heard twice in the next verse, a bridge between the first and third verses, this latter continuing to depict the twelve archetypal faces.

Though the elements are associated with peace, as we saw in “Peace–A Beginning,” the “World [is] on the scales,” with war and destruction on one scale, balanced on the other with peace and its four elements. This “Balance of change” means the world is teetering “on the scales” between peace and war. Which side will win? Which will outweigh the other? Will it be the side that wants peace and justice for everyone, or will it be the side of the imperialistic warmongers, whose recklessness is pushing us all ever closer to nuclear armageddon?

This song, and therefore the entire album, has as much relevance for us today as it did back in 1970, with its Cold War fears of nuclear annihilation between the US/NATO and the USSR. We’re experiencing a new, and utterly needless, new Cold War between the Western, NATO-allied powers on one side, and Russia, China, the DPRK, and Iran on the other. Between the two sides are thousands of nuclear weapons, and no attempt at détente is even being considered.

To return to the archetypes, the next one is The Patriarch, an old philosopher with long white hair and a beard. He’s frowning, with a furrowed brow. Surrounding him are such shapes as flowers and snowflakes. His elements are Air and Water. Referring to him are the lines, “Bishop’s kings spin judgement’s blade/Scratch ‘Faith’ on nameless graves.” The Church controls the heads of state–The Patriarch being one of these stern religious leaders–and it pushes the kings to fight ‘holy’ wars. (One might think of the Archbishop of Canterbury and Bishop of Ely persuading Henry V to invade France.)

The Old Woman would “hoard ash and sand.” She has a wrinkled, sad face, and her hair is wrapped in white. Her elements are Earth and Air. Such women are “Harvest hags,” peasant farmers, whom we associate with the working class, yet these peasants are betraying the fellow proletarians in that they “rack rope and chain for slaves,” the next archetype to be discussed.

The Slave, a black African with earrings and a nose-ring, has Earth and Fire as her elements. The slaves “fear fermented words,” that is, they’re scared of revolution, and like the kulaks who hoarded grain during the famine in the USSR in the early 1930s, they “rear to spoil the feast.” This lack of solidarity among the poor is what allows the rich to stay in power.

The Fool, the laughing man to the centre-left of the front cover of the album, with the pink face, the blond beard, and the flowers in his hair, is “the mad man [who] smiles/To him it matters least.” In his foolish, delusional state, he doesn’t care about the corruption in the world, because like The Slave and the Old Woman, he has no class consciousness. His elements are Fire and Water.

After this verse is an instrumental passage that includes the (Libra’s?) theme (“Air, fire, earth, and water”), only it’s played by Fripp on the Mellotron instead of sung by Lake. I suspect that part of the reason this song is called “In the Wake of Poseidon” is that the god of sea and earthquakes best represents all four elements: the earth and water aspects hardly need to be elaborated on; air can be included in its being blown as wind over the sea, making waves, and Poseidon is known for his fiery temper–consider how he treated Odysseus after he blinded the god’s cyclopean son, Polyphemus. I’m assuming this section is “Libra’s Theme,” given our “world on the scales.”

To go back to the archetypal faces, the next one is The Warrior, wearing a steel helmet and a full black beard, and baring his teeth, ready to fight. His elements are Fire and Earth, and he’s represented in these lines: “Heroes’ hands drain stones for blood/To whet the scaling knife.” The weapons of war wound not only bodies, but the Earth as well.

Next comes The Logician, a wizard with dark hair and a long dark beard. He’s holding a wand in one hand while the other is held up high. There are stars all around him, presumably the magic from one of his spells. He’s represented with the lines, “Magi blind with visions light/Net death in dread of life.” He represents the theologian or philosopher who is ‘blinded by the light’ of his own dogma, preferring death and the peace of a presumed heaven over the pain of living here.

The naïve sheep of these religious shepherds are represented in The Child, a girl with long blonde hair and a face of sweet innocence. The necklace she’s wearing has a white key on it. Her elements are Water and Air, and these lines represent her in the song: “Their children kneel in Jesus’ till/They learn the price of nails.” To enter the Kingdom of Heaven, one must be as a child (Luke 18:17); hence, the key on The Child’s necklace (Matthew 16:19). Still, learning “the price of nails” means learning either to submit to the powers-that-be, whether they’re religious or political, or to suffer as Jesus did for defying them.

And the last archetype is The Mother Earth, or Mother Nature. We see her lying asleep in the grass in left profile, with dark skin and flowers and butterflies all around her. Her elements are Earth and Water, and the last two lines of the song refer to her: “Whilst all around our Mother Earth/Waits balanced on the scales.” Our Earth sits passively as mankind decides the fate of all living creatures who have her as their home: nuclear war, or peace? A healthy planet, or ecocide? Our collective fate is being weighed in the balance, “on the scales,” by psychopathic leaders who care about wealth and maintaining their power, and not about us.

To understand the deeper meaning of archetypes, one must look into analytical psychology, Jung‘s offshoot from Freudian psychoanalysis. Jungian psychology has a grounding in such psychoanalytical concepts as the unconscious and repression, but unlike Freud the atheist, Jung developed an interest in myth, mysticism, and religion far beyond just their psychological symbolism. As a result, he broke with Freud, who would later speak derisively of Jung as one who would “aspire to be a prophet” (Freud, page 280).

The archetypes are characters that reside in the collective unconscious, that aspect of the unconscious we all share and that has been inherited throughout human history. These include the Sage (which can find its equivalent in the song and album cover as The Patriarch), Innocent (The Child), Hero (Warrior), Magician (Logician), Jester (Joker), and Creator or Caregiver (The Mother Earth). The point is that we have all of these characters, hidden deep down in our unconscious; they influence how we think and interact in the world. To this extent, they control us, and therefore control mankind’s collective fate.

In this song, we can see how unhappy these twelve are, or how manipulative (or manipulated) they are. They’re in the depths of the ocean of the collective unconscious, so “the wake of Poseidon” is, literally speaking, the making conscious all of these characters that reside deep within the sea-god’s realm. If we can make their sorrow conscious, we can integrate them, become whole and healthy, then work to save our planet from ecocide and nuclear annihilation. Hence, the deep relevance of this song back in 1970 and, even more, today.

VI: Peace–A Theme

This is a short instrumental for solo acoustic guitar, about a minute long, in A major.

Fripp plays the melody Lake sang a cappella on “Peace–A Beginning,” as well as the bridge melody (“Searching for…, etc.) that we will hear on “Peace–An End.” Fripp opens with a strum of an open A major chord with an added sixth.

From this chord, he embellishes the melody Lake sang before with an appoggiatura: he does a hammer-on and a pull-off as part of the continuing melody with E, F-sharp, E, and D-flat. Then, he strums a D-flat minor 7th chord, and single notes D-flat and E, then a hammer-on to F-sharp, and a strum of a D-major 7th chord, the E, D-flat, and an A major chord, with a high note of D-flat.

Next, he strums the D-major 7th chord, and plays the above appoggiatura with the E, F-sharp, E, and D-flat. Then, there’s the strum of the D-flat minor 7th chord again, then a strum of an E dominant 9th chord, then a strum of a D major 6/9 chord, and an ending of the melody that includes another appoggiatura, a hammer-on and pull-off of F-sharp, A, F-sharp, and E, then the D-major 7th chord again.

All of the above is repeated, then we come to the bridge (“Searching for…,” etc., in “Peace–An End”). Fripp strums an A-major chord, then an A chord with a major second instead of a major third, then the A major six chord again. Then he plays arpeggiated chords of D-flat suspension 4th and a D-flat major. Next, a melody of F-sharp, A, B, D-sharp, E, D-sharp, B, G-sharp, and F-sharp is played over chords of D-major 7th, D-flat minor, and D-major 7th again.

After an E suspension 4th chord and an E major chord in the dominant, Fripp repeats the bridge section as described in the previous paragraph, but he ends the piece with a strum of an A 6/9 chord, only without a third, and with the sixth in the bass; then he softly hits an E-flat, a flattened fifth for A major.

VII: Cat Food

This song is another example of King Crimson doing a perverse variation on the 12-bar blues structure, with Tippett mixing in dissonant tone clusters with his more usual jazzy piano playing, and with the usual 4/4 time getting bars of 6/8 thrown in between from time to time. The song is in E minor.

The song is satirizing capitalism and consumerism, and all of the maddening effects these have on people, hence the piano discords. A woman shopping in a supermarket wants to talk to the manager, presumably to make a complaint. “Grooning to the muzak” sounds like an ironic comment on Fripp’s instrumental with drummer Michael Giles and his bassist brother, Peter (who plays all the bass parts on this album instead of Lake), “Groon,” Side B to the “Cat Food” single. Groon is a pun on groan, a complaining sound.

The blatantly atonal “Groon,” truly an acquired taste for most listeners, is a piece of avant-garde jazz that sounds like a Cecil Taylor improvisation, but with Fripp’s guitar replacing Taylor’s piano. The supermarket shopper, however, is annoyed with the muzak, or ‘elevator music,’ which is annoying at the other extreme: it’s music so bland, so ‘nice,’ and so conventional that it desperately needs a little dissonance to make it half-way interesting to listen to. The contrast between “Groon” and muzak is also the contrast between music as experimental art and music as sellable commodity.

She lays out her goods, as if to complain about them to the manager. They’re all “conveniently frozen,” so she can “come back for more” as soon as she’s finished with them. This is convenient for capitalists, who can make more money when she comes back. Ironically, this ‘convenience’ is what she has to complain about.

Next, the woman shopper is cooking at home, whipping up “a chemical brew/Croaking to a neighbour as she polishes a sabre.” The “chemical brew” suggests some kind of processed food from the supermarket, superficially tasty, but ultimately bad for you. Just as she ‘grooned’ to the muzak, now she ‘croaks’ in complaint to a neighbour, suggesting the social alienation that comes from the same source as the fetishized commodities that she’s bought–capitalism. The ‘sabre’ she polishes is presumably her cooking knife, but calling it a sabre evokes the idea that it’s used for killing rather than feeding.

She “knows how to flavour a stew,” but her meal is “poisoned especially for you,” because as I said above, this processed food, in its “tin,” is bad for you. “Hurri Curri” sounds like a brand name of cat food, or its particular flavour. It’s also a pun on hara kari, a form of ritual suicide, given how willingly eating such innutritious, processed food, this ‘hurried curry,’ this instant food, is bad for you.

Because the capitalist system is focused more on profit than on providing a nutritious product, we get the blues from it, hence the song’s 12-bar structure. The alienation from capitalism causes mental health problems, too, hence the piano dissonances, Lake’s mad cackling at the end of this second verse, and “your mother’s quite insane,” in the repeated bridge verse.

“Cat food…again?” sounds like a complaint about eating the same old crap over and over again. Cat food, with its unpleasant smell and even more unpleasant contents, is a metaphor for all the unhealthy junk food we all eat at least once in a while, enriching its producers.

“A fable on the label” of so many of these food products, stuffed in cans, suggests the lie that they’re full of vitamins, minerals, and other nutritious ingredients, when actually the processing and artificial colours, additives, and preservatives ruin the said nutrients, in all likelihood. It’s “drowning in miracle sauce,” meaning that the sauce, however superficially tasty it may be, is killing the nutrients by drowning them. With all of this understanding, the last two lines of the song should be self-explanatory.

The song ends with improvising over the 12-bar blues structure, with its alternating of a few bars of 4/4 with one in 6/8. Michael Giles does a few great drum licks here, as Tippett does with his colourful, jazzy piano.

VIII: The Devil’s Triangle

As I said above, this piece evolved out of “Mars,” the instrumental improvisation that the original King Crimson lineup played in their live shows, based in turn on the first movement of Holst’s The Planets. For this reason, I see the resulting studio version as still thematically linked to the horrors of war, and it’s therefore fitting to have it immediately precede “Peace–An End,” for dialectical purposes as I’ll explain later.

The piece includes three sections, titled “Merday Morn,” “Hand of Sceiron,” and “Garden of Worm.” The first part gives partial writing credit to McDonald, but not the last part, which includes the clip from “The Court of the Crimson King,” which he wrote with Sinfield.

“Merday Morn” opens with a long, slow fade-in: the listener may get impatient waiting to hear any music. It’s as if the music were the sun slowly rising over the watery horizon of the ocean, the beginning of the ‘day of the sea,’ hence the name of this section. We sense that Poseidon is waking up, hence the album’s title, taken literally.

Recall that ‘the Devil’s Triangle’ is another name for the Bermuda Triangle, the legend surrounding the place–the three corners of which are Bermuda, Miami, and Puerto Rico–being that ships and airplanes entering it mysteriously disappear. One senses the fiery wrath of the sea-god here, and why the music is so spooky.

In the entire piece, we have all four elements represented: in “Merday Morn,” the sea obviously represents water, and the rising sun represents fire (as well as Poseidon’s fiery wrath); in “Hand of Sceiron,” air is represented at the end of the section by the sound of strong winds, as if ships are entering a storm; and “Garden of Worm” suggests the element of earth, symbolic of a grave for the dead in sunken ships at the bottom of the ocean, the ground of the seabed.

When we finally start hearing the music, we hear Michael Giles playing a martial beat in 5/4, accompanied by his brother, Peter, on the bass. Fripp is providing melody and harmony on the Mellotron, at first with string section tape, then, when the music starts to get tense, he uses brass section tape. To add to the tension, we’ll hear him play a lot of tritone intervals, which are fitting as the diabolus in musica.

“Hand of Sceiron” begins with a foghorn sound, suggesting that ships are approaching a dangerous area at sea. Along with the tritones heard on the Mellotron, we hear lots more dissonance on, for example, Tippett’s piano. This section ends, as noted above, with those winds. Sceiron refers to violent winds in a myth from an area described in Book IX, Chapter One (section 4) of Strabo‘s Geographica. A ticking metronome sounds like a clock that is ticking towards the end of one’s life.

Of course, the tension is raised to a climax in the “Garden of Worm” section, with its faster tempo and heightened dissonance. Independent layers of sound are put together: the 5/4 martial beat heard on the drums, with the bass in 4/4 playing descending fifths, and dissonance in the Mellotron and piano tone clusters. It all descends into chaos, including, by way of xenochrony, a brief passage for string section, and the clip from “The Court of the Crimson King.” It all ends with flurries of flute notes and a soft, arpeggiated resolution in E major on Fripp’s acoustic guitar.

So, what does all of this music mean? What does a ship entering the Bermuda Triangle and going missing there, all the passengers presumed dead, signify? The piece’s link with “Mars,” with the martial beat (though different from Holst’s original rhythm, because Holst’s estate did not give Fripp permission to use it), suggests the symbolism of war, too. But what do a ship lost in a sea storm, and soldiers killed or missing in action in a war, symbolize in “The Devil’s Triangle,” and In the Wake of Poseidon as a whole?

Recall the archetypes from the title track and the album cover, and how these reside in the collective unconscious. In the wake of Poseidon means ‘as a(n unpleasant) consequence of the sea-god.’ The realm of Poseidon, the ocean, is symbolic of the unconscious, both personal and collective. So as a consequence of confronting Poseidon and his tempestuous ways, we awaken the unconscious and discover those unpleasant parts of ourselves that we want to reject, repress, or project onto other people. To confront them is to confront what Jung called the Shadow. This is a scary, but necessary and enlightening experience.

“The Devil’s Triangle” begins in silence, and with a slow fade-in, because such a beginning represents not only the unawareness of unconscious conflicts, but also the unwillingness to learn of them, the resistance against them. As the music gets more and more dissonant, one is becoming more and more aware of the unpleasant, rejected parts of the Shadow.

The social problems dealt with in the other songs–urban alienation and decadence in “Pictures of a City,” hero-worship of wealth and celebrity in “Cadence and Cascade,” and capitalist consumerism in “Cat Food”–have their psychological roots in these unconscious, repressed conflicts. The way to end the conflicts and attain peace of mind is not to avoid them, by sailing around the Bermuda Triangle of the psyche, but to go through it and risk the dangers therein.

And dangerous it is. Jung warned of these risks when attempting to do what he called individuation through Shadow work, dream interpretation, and Active Imagination. One is advised, when doing this inner work, to have someone monitoring you, ideally a fully-trained therapist specializing in Jungian psychology. Otherwise, one risks navigating the treacherous waters of repressed traumas, leading to psychological fragmentation, a psychotic break with reality (what Lacan called The Real), which is what the “Garden of Worm” section represents.

The significant thing, though, that happens if you can make it through the maelstrom symbolized by the ending of “The Devil’s Triangle” (as Jung apparently did by bravely facing the demons of his own unconscious), and can integrate the darker aspects of your mind with the lighter ones, you can come out the other side and find peace and bliss, as symbolized by the pretty flurry of flute notes and Fripp’s acoustic guitar ending.

(Such psychological integration includes a man confronting his anima, as represented by the six female faces on the album cover and described in the title track, and a woman confronting her animus, the six male archetypes on the cover and in the title track. In this connection, the sea can be masculine, Poseidon, or feminine, Thalassa. La mer est la mère.)

I’ve written many times about my personal interpretation of the symbolism of the ouroboros, as representing the dialectical relationship between opposites as the meeting ends (the serpent’s head and tail) of a circular continuum (the serpent’s coiled body) including all intermediate points between the extremes. We can hear this oneness in contradiction in “The Devil’s Triangle” in how the music starts in peaceful silence, then the music comes in and gets increasingly dissonant, a move from the serpent’s biting head, down its coiled body towards its bitten tail. At the tail of extreme chaos and pain, we cross over to the head and back to peace and bliss, leading thus to…

IX: Peace–An End

One interesting thing about the “Peace” trilogy is how this last one is musically in ternary form (ABA), while “Peace–A Theme” is in binary form (AABB), and “Peace–A Beginning” is just the A theme heard twice. It’s as though peace begins as just a germinating idea, then it develops, and now it is complete, after having gone through the necessary hell of “The Devil’s Triangle.”

Furthermore, the first part is essentially a cappella, the second just an acoustic guitar solo, and this last part has both Lake and Fripp. It is musically thus the Hegelian dialectic triad of thesis (“Beginning”), negation (“Theme”), and sublation (“End”), this last part not only being complete, but also a resolution of the contradiction of the previous two parts. In fact, the first two parts ended without perfect resolutions: the A, F-sharp, C, and A-sharp on Fripp’s guitar ending “Beginning”; the A 6-9 chord with the sixth in the bass and the E-flat ending “Theme.”

Only now do we have a truly peaceful resolution in E major, with Lake’s last sung note, on “war,” being a D-flat, a major sixth in relation to the tonic, and so it’s reasonably consonant. It suggests, in combination with “war,” a somewhat tenuous peace–since when is perfect peace ever realized, anyway?–but it’s peace all the same, and therefore a fitting end to the album.

Two of the four elements are mentioned in the first line of the first verse–water and air (“sea” and “wind”). Water will again be mentioned in the first line of the last verse, too–“stream.” The reference to “dawn on a day without end” suggests earth and fire, in that we imagine the sun peeking over the horizon, that is, over the land, hills, and mountains in the morning. The fire of the sun will shine on an eternal day, too.

Because the four elements are so fundamentally what make up everything as we imagine it here, they bring us closer to the blissful oneness of Brahman, and therefore to peace, nirvana. Those twelve archetypal faces are each associated with two of the elements; and since attaining psychological peace, as I described it above–with my ouroboros symbolism–involves confronting the twelve archetypes in the Shadow of the ocean of the unconscious, then peace is in this way also associated with the elements.

A bird sings as you smile because it is pleased with your happiness–it is your friend. Peace causes a foe to love you as a friend; we must take those troublesome archetypes of the unconscious and make them our friends–this is how we change war into peace. We bring love to a child, like the sweet, innocent girl on the cover with the white key on her necklace. She has the key to heaven, remember, because one has to be as a child to enter heaven, the realm of peace.

You search for your friends, but can’t find them, because you foolishly don’t realize how close they are to you, like the nirvana and Buddhahood that the lost vagabond son of the parable doesn’t realize he already has, personified by his father. You search for yourself everywhere outside, but you don’t realize that you have to do the inner work, as described in my interpretation of “The Devil’s Triangle,” to find yourself within, in the twelve archetypes, the four elements, and the Atman that is already one with the oceanic feeling of Brahman.

The heart is what empathy flows from, so that’s why peace is a stream from there. Breadth, that is, the width of tolerance and open-mindedness, is the dawn, or beginning, of peace.

The fire of the sun will burn forever for peace, that is, without end; yet peace is also the end, ironically, like death, of the war. The war people would have had in mind back in 1970 was, of course, the Vietnam War, wishing it would end.

There are other wars, though, besides literal ones, that need to end. There’s the emotional war of psychological conflict, as dramatized in “The Devil’s Triangle” and the title track. The Jungian inner work described above to integrate the light and dark parts of the psyche, the conscious and unconscious, to bring about inner peace, can be compared to the Buddhist’s quest for nirvana.

Nirvana literally refers to the blowing out of a flame representing desire, and therefore suffering also. Nirvana is the resulting peace from having extinguished the fire of the delusion of a permanent ego. Yet Sinfield’s lyric, of peace as the dawn of a day without end, implies a permanently burning fire, while peace is also the end…and nirvana is the end of suffering.

How can we reconcile this contradiction, of a permanent fire and its extinguishment as both meaning peace? We can do so as the Mahayana tradition of Buddhism does, by equating nirvana with samsara, the cycle of reincarnation. We did so before with the dialectical interpretation of attaining peace by first going through the Devil’s Triangle, by passing first through hell to get to heaven. Similarly, the bodhisattva first swears off nirvana until he’s helped all living creatures to get there, hence they all travel there on the Great Vehicle, that boat that must weather Poseidon’s storm at sea.

Note how Lake’s singing on “Peace–An End” brings back the reverb at the end, just as “Peace–A Beginning” started with reverb. This beginning and ending reverb thus gives us a sense that the album has come full circle, like the cyclical eternity that the ouroboros originally symbolized. In this sense, we can see how peace never ends, even in a world full of suffering. Nirvana is samsara because we can only have peace and happiness by accepting the inevitability of pain.

X: Conclusion

Based on the interpretation I’ve given above, I must say that In the Wake of Poseidon, though not exactly a masterpiece, deserves better than being dismissed as a mere copy, or sequel, of In the Court of the Crimson King. To be sure, much of the second album does rework the first, but there are other things going on that shouldn’t be ignored.

Side Two of Poseidon is essentially new (the xenochrony notwithstanding). The first album presented the problems of the world; the second album expands on the discussion of those problems, and it also proposes a solution. Most importantly of all, In the Wake of Poseidon presents a kind of Jungian odyssey through hell to get to heaven, giving it a kind of universality of human experience that makes it an album that doesn’t just live in the shadow of its predecessor, but exists in its own right.