The Danger of Counterrevolution

Introduction

Thanks to bourgeois propaganda, when the average person hears a communist say a word like counterrevolution, it is assumed that the speaker is paranoid about his ‘idealistic’ system being overthrown and replaced with something ‘reasonable’ like bourgeois liberal democracy. Recall, for example, the scene in The Last Emperor, when a communist shouts at Puyi that he is “a traitor,…a collaborator, and…a counterrevolutionary!” (You can find the lines almost mid-way into the script here; I can’t find a YouTube video of the scene, but I remember how hysterically the man shouts the line.)

The fact is, though, that as the past thirty to thirty-five years have shown, the danger of counterrevolution is no paranoid fantasy, and ‘liberal democracy’ is not all it’s cracked up to be, as I intend to prove.

Stalin, during a speech at The Seventh Enlarged Plenum of the E.C.C.I. (December 1926), famously said, “What would happen if capital succeeded in smashing the Republic of Soviets? There would set in an era of the blackest reaction in all the capitalist and colonial countries, the working class and the oppressed peoples would be seized by the throat, the positions of international communism would be lost.” 

Such a black reaction is exactly what has happened in the world.

Since I don’t wish to go through another rehashing of my defenses of socialism and communism, you can look at these, Dear Reader. My focus here is on how the post-Soviet world has been an unmitigated disaster, one that makes the faults and problems of socialism trivial in comparison.

New World Order

When George HW Bush did his “Towards a New World Order” speech on…egad!…September 11th, 1990, he was talking about the emerging post-Soviet world, since the West knew that the USSR was soon to be dissolved (for this was their plan all along–counterrevolution, with Gorbachev‘s help). Though “new world order” wasn’t meant to be understood as the totalitarian world government of the conspiracy theory, this new world order that emerged in the 1990s would certainly have disastrous consequences.

In his speech, Bush was talking about a new era of international cooperation, promoting peace and democracy, and all that kind of bullshit, all while the run-up to the Persian Gulf War was going on. We can always rely on politicians to put a positive spin on something that will ultimately prove diabolical. As would become apparent soon enough, this post-Cold War world order would actually be one of unipolarity, with the US as the one world superpower, the global policeman.

Though of course I don’t agree with the conspiracy theorists about the exact character of this new world order (i.e., such absurd ideas that it’s based on Satanic secret societies, the end-time emergence of the Antichrist, etc.), I would characterize this totalitarian, one-world government as being based simply in Washington, DC. We’re dealing here with plain-old American, capitalist imperialism, a globe-spanning empire with US military bases all over the world, backed by its quisling NATO allies.

Accordingly, among the first things we saw these imperialists do, after reuniting Germany and thus including the former East Germany in NATO, was to lie about not moving NATO “one inch” eastward, when moving eastward would most certainly be the plan. Now, NATO allies, former members of the Warsaw Pact, are right against Russia’s border, antagonizing and provoking the nuclear-armed country.

Similarly, the former Yugoslavia was being carved up. All attempts to preserve socialism in the area were being thwarted, with a socialist champion in Slobodan Milošević being demonized in the media. This demonizing would soon become a standard way of manufacturing consent for more and more wars, a normalizing of pro-war sentiment that is getting increasingly dangerous.

The False Dichotomy of Conservative vs. Liberal

Before I continue discussing the depredations of post-Soviet imperialist war-mongering, I need to discuss a popular political myth: the confusion of liberals with socialists. It is assumed, far too often, that the American Democratic Party, the Liberal Party in Canada, the Labour Party in the UK, George Soros, etc. are on the left.

THIS IS NONSENSE.

Just because the Republicans in the US, the Tories and Canada and the UK, etc., are further to the right than their liberal counterparts, this doesn’t make their opposition way over at the other extreme. Their liberal opposition is ‘leftist’ (if it can be called that at all) only as a matter of degree…and by degree, it’s usually only a few degrees left of the Attila-the-Hun political right, which should tell you something.

It’s truly remarkable, especially over the past fifteen or so years, how much more conservatives and liberals have agreed, on most policies, than they have disagreed. Nevertheless, the mainstream media in its usual mendacity exaggerates the significance of any disagreements we see between conservatives and liberals. I’m not a fan of Noam Chomsky, in whom we can see an example of a ‘leftist’ who’s really just a liberal, but he does have one useful quote that fits the occasion: “The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum.”

I wrote an article on the liberal mindset, which you can look at here, Dear Reader, but I want to go more into the problem now. Liberals are not on the left; rather, they bend and sway left or right depending on which way the political wind happens to be blowing at the time. Back in the 60s, 70s, and 80s, liberals tended to sway towards the moderate left. In the 90s, they drifted to the centre, and since the 2000s, they have drifted further and further to the right. Now, liberals are virtually indistinguishable from conservatives, except perhaps on such social issues as the support of transgender rights, and as for economic reforms, they’ll advocate raising taxes on the rich, acknowledging that an unregulated market is far from infallible. Apart from these, the difference between the two tends to be a matter of…to Trump, or not to Trump…

As far as the issues that really matter to the world are concerned, though–keeping the class system intact, as well as furthering the interests of imperialism and Western hegemony–liberals are quite at one with conservatives. Prominent Democrats supported the Iraq War (including Hillary Clinton, Biden, and John Kerry); liberals like Hillary Clinton supported the US/NATO ruining of Libya, they supported the destruction of Syria (even cheering for the Trump administration’s bombing of the country), and now, they support Ukrainian Nazis, even to the point of the Canadian Liberal Party’s embarrassing celebration of a Ukrainian ex-Nazi from WWII!!! (Recall also Chrystia Freeland‘s Ukrainian grandfather, who worked for a pro-Nazi newspaper back in WWII.)

Still, the myth that liberals are far detached from conservatives persists, and both conservatives and liberals proudly distinguish themselves from each other. Conservatives often idiotically call liberals “communists” and “socialists,” and liberals consider men like Trump to be utter abominations in politics, even though the things the Trump administration did–awful things, to be sure–were essentially the same things Obama did and Biden is doing.

As surreal as it is to distinguish two approximately equal sides, it is nonetheless a politically useful thing for the ruling class to do, especially if liberals can be convinced that a right-wing policy is acceptable when liberals get behind it, whereas if conservatives support it, only then is it evil.

Examples of this double standard include NAFTA, which George HW Bush originally tried to push through, but couldn’t quite do it because of considerable Democratic opposition at the time. Then Clinton signed it in late 1993 without much difficulty. NAFTA devastated Mexico’s rural sector and increased poverty. This is the kind of thing that began to happen in the post-Soviet world, with a weakened socialist movement to curb the excesses of capitalism.

Elsewhere, Republicans would have loved to cut huge gashes out of Welfare during the Reagan years, but again, Democratic opposition prevented it at the time. Then Clinton came along, and in the mid-1990s he gutted Welfare with little, if any, Democratic opposition. Again, this kind of thing would have been much harder to do if the Soviet Union had still existed, and with it the threat of more socialist revolution if the capitalist class continued to provoke the working class.

The Clinton administration also interfered with the Russian election in 1996, ensuring that America’s puppet, Yeltsin, would stay in power instead of voting back in the Communist Party, still popular with many Russians (and there are right-wing morons out there who think that the Democrats are all “communists”!). Poll after poll has consistently shown that at least slight majorities of Russians preferred the Soviet system to the current one, or at least dislike the current one, while feeling some nostalgia for the Soviet one. It’s easy to see why there was such nostalgia. An attempt was made in 1993 to bring down Yeltsin’s government and restore the Soviet system, but he brought out the tanks and prevented it from happening. No, the return to capitalism in Russia was no triumph of freedom and democracy, and it wasn’t “the end of history”: it was a counterrevolution, plain and simple.

Normalizing War

In the lead-up to the US invasion of Iraq in 2003, though many were so shaken up by 9/11 (including myself, I must guiltily admit) that we supported the invasion, many others had the good sense–and no illusions about the true motives of US imperialists, of which I, at the time, was quite ignorant–to oppose the upcoming war. When the invasion happened, and Saddam’s supposed WMDs were nowhere to be found, the world was righteously angry with the Bush administration for its lies, as well as those of the Labour Party’s leader, Tony Blair.

The world had already demonized Milošević, who recall was found innocent of war crimes. Saddam was demonized in the media for supposedly having WMDs and working to enrich uranium to make nuclear weapons, and it turned out that there was no evidence of any of these dangers. Has the Western world since learned from our mistakes in hastily vilifying those heads of state that the American government wants us to vilify? Not at all, it would seem.

They demonized Gaddafi, and with the destruction of Libya came his sodomizing with a bayonet. Obama may have regretted the debacle in that country, but his remorse rings hollow given the subsequent demonizing of Bashar al-Assad and the ravaging of Syria soon after. Liberals and fake leftists backed this ‘civil war’ in part because the Obama administration was behind the plan for regime change, imagining that the fraudulent White Helmets were doing a legitimate service. Currently, the US army is controlling a third of Syria and stealing the country’s oil and wheat, while the media is mostly silent about these crimes.

With the multiplying of all these wars, something once abominated from the days of the hippies to the protest against the Iraq War, anti-war activism has since become scanted. There was minimal outcry against the war in Yemen, while the governments of the US, Canada, the UK, and European countries were selling billions of dollars in weapons to the Saudis so they could kill Yemenis. While some, during a DNC rally back in 2016, were shouting “No more wars!” during Leon Panetta’s speech, other voices were chanting “USA! USA!”; in a video I remember seeing of the situation, the voices of the latter group were drowning out those of the former group.

…and to bring matters to the worst state they could possibly be in, the US and its allies have, for the past five to ten years, been provoking two nuclear-armed countries, Russia and China, all because their rise means the decline of the US as the sole superpower in the world. Don’t listen to the propaganda against these two countries being ‘autocratic’: the US, with its rule-by-the-rich, dual party system, its surveillance of the people, its extreme income inequality, and its censorship of the media and internet (to say nothing of 90% of its ownership by only six corporations, who therefore control the access of information to Americans), is hardly in any position to be judging the democratic faults of Russia, China, or any other country on the Earth.

Again, there is far too little opposition to Western hostilities against Russia and China, which are far more threatened by the US and its allies than vice versa. Russia and China don’t have their navies along the east and west coasts of the US, but above I mentioned the NATO buildup along the Russian border, and American military bases are surrounding much of China in what has been compared to a noose.

This is beyond dangerous. The one peace dividend we were supposed to have gotten from the dissolution of the Soviet Union was that at least the Cold War was over, and so we didn’t need to worry about nuclear war with Russia anymore. Now, we’re in a new Cold War with both Russia and China. I remember when the Doomsday Clock was set to two minutes to midnight: now, it’s at ninety seconds to midnight.

Neoliberalism

As we can see, nothing good has been gained from the counterrevolution against the socialist states of the twentieth century. People are by no means freer. Many have been plunged into poverty, while a few rich oligarchs have risen to the top. Cutting taxes on the rich and deregulating the market have not brought about economic prosperity to the world as was promised by the market fundamentalists; in fact, we’ve had two major economic crises over the past fifteen years. The neoliberal agenda is the true god that failed.

…and yet, millions are still fooled by the fairy tale of the “free market.”

Again, I do not wish to repeat all my arguments that debunk the idea of “true capitalism” as being the “free market.” If you want to see those, Dear Reader, you can go here, here, and here. Even market fundamentalists have the modicum of intelligence needed to understand that the current political way of doing things has been an absolute nightmare.

They just can’t admit that the problem is capitalism.

Owning private property (factories, farmland, office buildings, apartment buildings, etc.,…not toothbrushes or underwear!) is part of capitalism. Producing commodities to maximize profits is capitalism. Accumulating capital is capitalism, hence the name of this particular mode of production. How much, or how little, the state is involved in the economy is completely irrelevant if the above conditions apply.

The past thirty years have been nothing less than a disaster–a capitalist disaster called neoliberalism, which means the new liberalizing of the market. Yes, neoliberalism, like imperialism (hence, all these wars), is a right-wing ideology. This is part of why conservatives and liberals are far closer to each other than is commonly assumed.

This capitalist disaster has hurt us both locally and globally. We see it locally in such forms as the homelessness epidemic, a problem exacerbated recently by the Covid pandemic, which in turn exacerbated the injustice of the superrich getting even wealthier through the profits made from the vaccines and online shopping on sites like Amazon.

The global hurt of this disaster has been in the form of imperialism, as I brought up above. The market fundamentalists tend to deny how imperialist war and plunder are connected with capitalism, since they naïvely think that capitalism is just about Mom and Pop store owners innocently buying and selling things on a market, and that warmongering is just a ‘government thing,’ rather than acknowledge that the government works for the capitalists.

On the other side of the coin, such liberals as the hippies dream of a world at peace, and wring their hands asking why we can’t have peace and love, yet they make no attempt to answer why we can’t. To solve the problem of war, we must understand the problem, and an understanding of the problem of war must centre on economics.

The survival of the capitalist system depends on endless expansion, to offset the tendency of the rate of profit to fall. This means that when markets dry up in one’s own country, one must seek out markets in other countries. Exporting capital to other countries is one of the major factors resulting in imperialism, as Lenin argued. The truth of this should be easy to see when we consider the real reason for the Iraq War, which was for the imperialists to get their filthy hands on Iraqi oil, not that nonsense about ‘freedom and democracy.’

Similarly, the real motive behind achieving regime change in Libya was to stop Gaddafi from creating financial independence from the West in Africa by establishing the continent’s own currency. The purpose of regime change in Syria was to stop Assad from making business deals with Russia and Iran, two major economic rivals of the US, over Syrian oil, when the US wanted an oil pipeline to be built to provide Europe with the oil.

Part of the purpose of the US and NATO provoking Russia to invade Ukraine was to end German use of cheaper Russian oil, and to have Germany buy the more expensive American oil instead. Hence, the destruction of the Nord Stream pipelines, of which–along with Norway’s help–was most obviously the doing of the American government…they practically confessed to it.

…and all of this bellicosity against China? The American government wants to stop the Chinese government and industry from profiting off of TSMC. The building of a new TSMC in Arizona is in the works, along with the hiring of many Taiwanese there, in a desperate attempt to replicate the success of the original TSMC. There has even been talk, if a war with China happens, of the US army bombing TSMC in Taiwan! So much for ‘defending Taiwan from China,’ or for defending ‘freedom and democracy.’

Ultimately, imperialist war is linked with capitalism because war is a business. Smedley Butler knew this ages ago. As all of this killing has been going on, weapons manufacturers like Boeing, Raytheon, Lockheed-Martin, and Northrop Grumman have been laughing all the way to the bank. These companies must keep the war going to perpetuate a maximizing of profit. To know what’s going on in the world, follow the money.

These defence contractors are currently capitalizing big time on Israel’s current, ongoing genocide in Gaza. This killing could provoke a larger conflagration in the region, making WWIII even deadlier than it will be with China and Russia.

Conclusion

Though the socialist states of the twentieth century certainly had their share of faults and problems (particularly after the death of Stalin, and these problems were at their worst under Gorbachev’s leadership), they at least were a counterbalance to, and represented a hope of one day defeating, Western imperialism. They gave support to liberation movements, in the Third World especially, and they fought the hardest against fascism, and after WWII, the capitalist West took the surviving Nazis in and gave them lucrative jobs in NATO, NASA, and the American and West German governments, punishing only a minimum of them.

At their best, the socialist states also provided a safety net for the poor, provided free healthcare, free education up to university, and universal housing and employment. With the demise of most of the socialist states, there has been a sad decline in the enjoyment of these social benefits.

Meanwhile, the imperialist war machine has gone on for decades unchecked, as I demonstrated above, with manufactured consent for war largely replacing the peace movement, and uncritical acceptance of the demonizing of the leaders of any country who dare to defy the rule of the American empire.

These evils all resulted from counterrevolution, and they all prove how real the danger of counterrevolution really is. If we socialists ever manage to spread communism around the world the way we did in the twentieth century, we must be all the more determined to root out and prevent the spread of reactionary ideas…not because we “hunger for power,” but because we hunger for world liberation.

‘Mama,’ a Psychological Horror Novel, Chapter Fourteen (Final Chapter)

I see three large pins leaning against the wall opposite me, the sharp ends pointing up, the white ball handles resting on the ground. They’re all the size and length of spears.

They look just like the pins I used on the voodoo doll for Mama, except of course for their huge size. Since that’s what they look like, and there’s a window on that wall they’re resting against, I probably ought to stand up and take a look at my reflection in it.

Yep, just as I thought: instead of seeing myself as I actually look, I see a giant voodoo doll version of myself. Another of my vivid hallucinations, for sure.

…and check this out. Those pins are now rising up from the ground, floating horizontally, with their sharp ends pointed directly at me. I suppose they’re going to fly right at me, like thrown spears, and stab into my chest and guts. If only this wasn’t a hallucination–I’d love to die.

In the window reflection, I still look like a giant voodoo doll. I’m surely fantasizing that Mama’s ghost is taking her revenge on me for sticking pins into that voodoo doll of mine that I’d made of her. That’s the logical explanation for this hallucination I’m seeing here.

It’s funny how, even though I finally realize what my mind is doing, I’m still hallucinating. Though I’ve brought my unconscious fears and desires up into my consciousness, I am by no means cured of my propensity to see and hear things. My eyes and ears continue to deceive me because I want to continue deceiving myself.

Oh, here they come. Those pins are flying right at me.

I’ll stick my chest and guts out to receive them better, even though I know I won’t be…

“Unghhhh!!!”

This is…the most intense,…the most vivid…hallucination…I’ve ever had.

I really feel…three stab wounds…one just above…my heart…towards my shoulder…one towards…my left side…under my nipple…and one in…my gut…just over…and to the…right of my…belly button.

I’m coughing blood…It really feels…like I am…The pain is sharp…and intense…My whole torso…is drowning…in blood…I’m lying…flat on my back…on the ground.

The pain…is still here…I’ve never hallucinated…this intensely…before…I’ve seen things…I’ve heard things…but I’ve never felt things…not this badly, anyway.

This is no hallucination…this is really happening!

I saw no attacker, though…I saw no one…running into…this alley,…sticking a knife…into me…three times…then running off…If I hallucinate…I’ll at least…see a distortion…of what…really happened…there will be…a hallucinatory substitution…of the actual event.

The three pins…could have represented…three stab wounds..but I should have…seen someone…or something…to represent my killer…Besides, who would have…come in here…randomly wanting…to kill me?

Who’s this…coming up to me now?

“Here he is,” a man among them says. “Ooh! He’s been stabbed! Who did this? I saw nobody else come in this alley.”

“Neither did I,” a woman beside him says. “There’s no murder weapon lying around anywhere, either. No knife, no…He’s already lost a lot of blood. I’m amazed he’s still conscious. It’s a good thing another ambulance got here. We’ve gotta rush him to the hospital!”

As they’re…putting me…on a stretcher, I’m thinking…Don’t bother…I’m gonna die…I want to die…I hate my life…My life is…Hell…

Wait a minute…I can’t explain…what reality…this hallucination…corresponds to…These people…are putting me…into an ambulance…All of this…looks normal…They’ve put…an oxygen mask…on my face.

Could it be…that I didn’t hallucinate…that last time?

Did Mama’s ghost…really do that…to me?

None of those people…saw a killer…run in and…stab me…then run out…They do see my stab wounds, though….They’ve bandaged them.

Very clever, Mama.

You wiped out…Aunt Jane…and that man…because you didn’t…need them anymore…They served their purpose…and you removed them…In making me…doubt myself,…you reinforced…my feelings of worthlessness…so I’d stop trying…to resist you…Now that you…have killed me,…you can torture me…in the deeper, darker regions…of Hell,…while you…destroy the world…without my ability…to stop you.

There is no escape for me.

My no longer believing…in the supernatural…was a wish fulfillment…I could hope…for a quick death…and nothingness afterwards…a nothingness…of peace…no Hell.

Now,…with her spirit…on the loose…since she no longer…has a body…to limit her magical powers…she can do anything…and with me dead,…I can’t use…what magic I know…to stop her.

Wait a minute…

With my death…I’ll be free…from the limitations…of my body, too…As pure spirit,…I’ll be able…to gain access…to all kinds…of magical formulas…just like her…I can still stop her!

The hospital staff…are taking me…out of the ambulance.

A mushroom cloud…just blew up…in the distant sky…The ground is shaking.

The staff…were startled by it…They reacted to it.

I didn’t just…imagine it…The explosion…was real.

Mama’s ghost…is destroying the world…I must die quickly,…free my soul…from my body…and fight her…with my own magic.

But her power…is so much…greater than mine…I’ll have to learn…a lot of magic,…and quickly…to stop her.

How can I…grow in power…quickly enough…to stop her?

Transcending my ego,…uniting my spirit…with that of…the world spirit…should give me…the power I need.

In my dying moments,…I must meditate…my fading…consciousness…should make it…easier for me…

And with no me…no Roger…separate from the world…no ego…for Mama…to target,…she won’t…be able…to stop me.

I…must…concentrate…

There is…no Roger…I’m merging…with Brahman…

My blood…is spreading…out everywhere…as is…my soul…It’s uniting…with the world…

My union…with the world spirit…will defeat…her ghost…

My…inner peace…will destroy…her hate…and wickedness…

Mama,…I’m gonna…kill…you…again…

THE END

Analysis of ‘Halloween’

Halloween is a 1978 horror film directed by John Carpenter and written by him and producer Debra Hill (he also composed the film’s music). It stars Donald Pleasance and Jamie Lee Curtis in her film debut, with PJ Soles and Nancy Loomis.

Grossing $70 million, Halloween became one of the most profitable independent films of all time. Carpenter’s direction and score were particularly praised. The film, along with Psycho and Black Christmas, helped establish the slasher film genre; it’s considered one of the best horror movies ever made.

The franchise that resulted from the 1978 film is made up of thirteen films whose extensive backstory for antagonist Michael Myers sometimes diverges from previous installments. There are also a novelization, a video game, and comics based on Halloween.

Here is a link to quotes from the film.

Carpenter’s score is indeed an achievement in its own right. Apart from the eerie, atmospheric main theme in 5/4 time, subdivided into eighth notes of 3+3+2+2 and played mainly on the piano, we often hear tense minor seconds and parallelism in the harmonic progressions. Not bad for a filmmaker who dabbles in music and, by his own admission, can’t read music.

We hear the main theme as the credits are shown with a jack-o’-lantern. What must be remembered about the origins of Halloween is that there was a belief that during Samhain, on which Halloween was based, evil spirits walked the Earth, and such things as jack-o’-lanterns, bonfires, and the wearing of scary costumes were meant to ward off ghosts. Today, these things are done only for fun and so we can see in the film that the people in the fictional town of Haddonfield, Illinois are not protected from evil spirits.

Yes, an evil spirit is how we should conceive of The Shape (played by Nick Castle), that is, the shape that the evil spirit takes in the body of Michael Myers. Carpenter himself has described the killer as “almost a supernatural force…an evil force” that is “unkillable.” For me, that’s close enough to Myers being possessed by an evil spirit.

Halloween was strongly influenced by Bob Clark‘s Black Christmas, by the idea of a serial killer acting without any apparent motive. In fact, Carpenter’s film is almost a sequel to Clark’s film, since Carpenter asked Clark what he would do if he were to make a sequel to Black Christmas. Clark had no intention whatsoever of continuing that story, but he said that if he did, Billy would have escaped from the mental institution he’d inevitably have been locked up in, he’d have returned to the neighbourhood that he’d originally terrorized, and he’d have resumed the killing…but on Halloween instead of Christmas.

We should keep the relationship between these two films in mind when we watch the opening shot of Halloween, with the camera approaching the white Myers’s house on Halloween night in 1963. Similar shots are seen at the beginning of Black Christmas, with the POV of Billy coming to the house of the sorority where he’ll enter through the attic window and begin killing the girls living there.

The shot of Billy’s POV is somewhat shaky, suggesting his body movements; but the camera approaching the Myers’s house, being as I imagine it to represent the POV of a disembodied spirit, moves more or less smoothly for that very reason. The evil spirit enters the house, reminiscent of Billy’s bodily entrance, and once inside, a light is turned on in a dark room, presumably little Michael’s doing, and we see his hand go into a kitchen drawer and pull out a knife. At this point, I’d say the evil spirit has just entered his body.

For this reason, I’d insist that possessed Michael is otherwise an innocent six-year-old boy. Seriously, there’s no reason for him to pick up a knife and stab his naked older sister, Judith, to death. Why would a boy so young have already developed such extreme, violent, psychopathic traits? Though Michael is generally expressionless, when we see his father remove the mask on the boy’s face, he seems remorsefully sad over the murder he’s been forced to commit.

To get back to his expressionlessness, though, we learn from Dr. Samuel Loomis (Pleasance) that Myers hasn’t spoken a word since that night. His face is devoid of any human feeling. Of course: what emotions would an evil spirit have?

Now, this lack of the use of language, combined with his relentless killing and the trauma that it causes the survivors, makes Myers the very personification of Lacan‘s notion of the Real. It’s a traumatic, undifferentiated world that cannot be verbalized; recall that Myers generally kills only at night, when the differentiation between things is obscured under the cover of darkness.

Some imagine that, because Myers’s victims tend to indulge in such naughty pleasures as marijuana and premarital sex, that Halloween, like the Friday the 13th movies, is a kind of puritanical morality play (one might recall that scene in Scream when Randy Meeks [played by Jamie Kennedy] insists that one mustn’t sin if one is to survive a slasher movie). Carpenter has strenuously denied any attempt to moralize against the partying of teens, and I agree.

Myers is “purely and simply…evil,” according to Dr. Loomis. If so, why would he kill sinning kids in a ‘morality play’? Laurie Strode (Curtis) smokes pot in one scene: shouldn’t she deserve to be killed, too, by Meeks’s analysis? And what sin does the German Shepherd commit (apart from some barking that annoys Annie Brackett [Nancy Loomis]) that it deserves to be killed no less than the teenagers? Myers kills because he is evil, not his victims.

The one murder we know of Myers committing in the daytime is of a mechanic, and he takes the man’s coveralls and wears them, along with a white, expressionless mask. Thus, he has his iconic look, his ‘Halloween costume,’ as it were.

Just as Black Christmas subverts and does evil parodies of Christmas traditions (see my analysis, link above), so does Halloween parody traditions of its holiday. As I mentioned above, the wearing of costumes was originally meant to ward off evil spirits; whereas Myers’s ‘costume’ seems to make him more complete as an evil spirit incarnate, and a killer. Recall six-year-old Myers’s clown costume when he killed his sister.

His mask is of particular interest. The one used for the film has the contours of the face of William Shatner, an actor known…and loved…for his, well, emotive performances, a quite ironic fact given that the mask renders Myers with a coldly emotionless face, one without any expression.

Though it’s just a mask, like the clown mask he wears as a little kid, one that by no means gives him any anonymity, it seems to give him a special power as a killer, a special evil, if only in a symbolic sense. When the mask comes off, as just before the six-year-old is to be sent to the sanitarium, and when Laurie takes it off his face, he seems to have lost his ability to kill. When it’s back on his face, though, and Loomis shoots him and he falls out the window and onto the lawn, he soon gets up, ready to kill again in the first sequel.

As when the mask is taken off the face of six-year-old Michael, when Laurie takes it off his face at the end of the movie, we see a sad expression on him, suggesting the real, remorseful Michael who is being forced to kill by the evil spirit possessing him. The power of the mask seems to come from how it hides feeling through its expressionlessness.

This understanding leads us to a discussion of where the evil in Halloween comes from. The mask’s lack of expression is linked to a general lack of social connection in Haddonfield. Myers always kills; he never talks, and we generally never see his face. As a personification of the inexpressible Real, Myers won’t enter the social and cultural world of the Symbolic, Lacan’s world of language, customs, and traditions…including those of Halloween.

Not to defend the superstitious beliefs surrounding Samhain and Halloween, but one virtue of tradition is that it has a way of binding communities together. The idea of warding off evil spirits, in the context of this film, can be seen to symbolize the more general idea of communities protecting each other. Older societies, though believing in a lot of religious nonsense, as well as bigoted, chauvinistic nonsense, at least had a basic sense of togetherness, motivating them to be more protective and loving towards each other.

In contrast, modern society, though better educated in scientific matters and thus more open-minded and freer–all undeniably good and indispensable advances–is nonetheless plagued by alienation and self-centeredness. As a result, we see in Haddonfield a number of examples of parental neglect–with babysitters looking after kids…and often enough, the babysitters themselves are neglectful of the kids.

Annie Brackett–with her wandering off to wash her clothes, and her plans to hook up with her boyfriend, Paul, leaving Lindsey Wallace (played by Kyle Richards), the little girl she’s supposed to be babysitting, alone to watch The Thing from Another World (a film Carpenter would do a remake of several years after Halloween) on TV–isn’t the only one neglectful babysitter of the movie. So was Judith, who instead of watching over her little brother was making love with her boyfriend just before she was murdered.

Laurie can be said to be the surviving babysitter for moral reasons in that she is the one babysitter who is properly doing her job–watching over little Tommy Doyle (played by Brian Andrews) as well as Lindsey. Note that Tommy correctly identifies Myers as “the bogeyman.” It’s fitting that one of the three boys who bully Tommy at school, mocking him for his fear of the bogeyman, runs into Myers immediately after. The bogeyman is believed to punish children for bad behaviour; those teen babysitters who neglect their work are also ‘punished’ by Myers.

The bullies, supposedly too old to have childish fears of things like the bogeyman, nonetheless go to the Myers’s house on Halloween night, one of them being dared to go inside. The notion that a house where a murder has been committed has become haunted with the ghosts of the victims is a popular belief in small towns like Haddonfield, hence its inclusion in the film. The three ‘tough’ little boys are easily scared away by Loomis’s imitation of an angry spook hiding behind a bush near the house.

Even with these three boys, though, why aren’t they at home? Why aren’t their parents watching out for them? It’s this kind of neglect that leads to so much family dysfunction, which in turn results in the traumatic basis for so many mental disorders, which in turn, often enough, results in criminally insane behaviour, such as what we see in Michael Myers. Hence the evil in Halloween is the result of societal neglect and alienation.

Further proof that Myers must be possessed of a demon is in his unexplained ability to drive a car. All that Loomis can jokingly say is that, maybe, someone in the mental hospital gave Myers driving lessons. Only an evil spirit, with its supernatural abilities, could steer a car in the body of someone locked away since he was six.

While it’s still light out, Myers is driving around the neighbourhood of his boyhood, surveying his prey in Annie, Lynda Van Der Klok (Soles), and especially Laurie, who is the most disturbed of them by the presence of the man in the white mask. She’ll see him briefly for one moment, look away in worry, then look back to see he’s gone. We see, in how this stalking leads to the murders, that it’s the alienation between Myers and the girls that is the basis of the evil.

Mute Myers can’t communicate with them, neither verbally nor in gestures, and that mask ensures no facial expression of feeling. He just stands and stares, with neither the ability nor the willingness to connect with others. Exiled from the social realm of the Symbolic, Myers can only wait for the night to obscure the distinction between things so he can embody the traumatizing, inexpressible Real, and kill people.

His one, concrete (pardon the pun) act of communication is to steal the headstone from Judith’s grave and to place it at the head of the bed on which he’s laid Annie’s corpse, to give Laurie an especially bad scare before he attacks her. In Halloween II, Carpenter ret-conned her character to be Judith’s and Michael’s younger sister, adopted into another family, hence her new surname, Strode. Carpenter would regret this change; Quentin Tarantino rejects it altogether.

The idea that Myers is obsessed with killing his sisters is rather absurd. He kills more or less indiscriminately, though there’s an emphasis on babysitters as victims (Judith, Annie, and Laurie; bear in mind that I have little interest in the contradictory sequels, and therefore their wider variety of victims) because, as I’ve argued above, Myers has found them to be negligent in caring for kids.

The evil spirit entering the body of little Michael can be seen to symbolize the violent effect of the childhood trauma of feeling neglected and abandoned, felt to be a kind of betrayal from not only his parents leaving him at home to have dinner (or whatever it was that they were doing instead of watching over him), but also from his older sister, who was more interested in making love with her boyfriend than in taking care of him.

This isn’t to say that parents are never to be allowed occasionally to leave their kids with a babysitter to enjoy an evening together as a couple; nor is it to say that babysitters can’t occasionally relax and do a few enjoyable things while minding the kids. And of course, I’m not saying that these people deserve to be murdered for negligence! I’m saying that the laxity we see in Myers’s parents and in his sister on that fateful Halloween night in 1963 is symbolic of the kind of neglect that can lead to trauma in children, which in turn can lead to mental illness and violence.

Laurie, as I said above, is the only babysitter showing a proper concern for others’ well-being, so she manages to survive. Myers, in the traumatic state he’s in, symbolized by the evil spirit possessing him, can’t distinguish between good and bad babysitters (or good and bad people in general), so he tries to kill her anyway.

The other one seriously concerned about human life, Dr. Loomis, tried for years to connect with expressionless Myers, but couldn’t get through, because the damage had already been done, symbolized by the demonic possession. Loomis saw “the devil’s eyes” in little Michael. This disturbing look on the boy’s face was inspired by Carpenter’s having visited a mental institution in Kentucky, where he saw, among the most extreme cases, an adolescent boy with a blank, “schizophrenic stare.” Hence, the evil in Myers represents extreme mental illness.

Note that not only were Myers’s parents and sister neglectful, nor was only Annie neglectful of little Lindsey, but also Annie’s father, Sheriff Leigh Brackett (played by Charles Cyphers), isn’t all that motivated to find and stop Myers. He doesn’t even seem to notice the marijuana smoke in his daughter’s car when she and Laurie have been smoking up in it. His lack of sufficient vigilance leads up to his daughter’s murder.

Myers’s being possessed by an evil spirit, as well as his ‘Halloween costume,’ can be seen to symbolize something else–his alienation from himself. Trauma changes us, it causes a distortion of what we originally, really were. Whether the demon entered little Michael’s body outside the house, with the boy standing there and looking through the windows before entering, or if it entered the house, found and entered his body in a dark room before he turned on the light and got the knife, ultimately doesn’t matter. A little boy was left alone in the dark, left uncared for, and in his sensitive state, he found it emotionally overwhelming. The resulting trauma made him take on a false persona, that of a costumed, possessed killer, and the real Michael has hidden behind that false self ever since.

Of the many things that Friday the 13th ripped off from Halloween was making explicit what is implied in the latter and vastly superior film: negligent childcare leads to madness and murder. Unlike the Friday the 13th films, which are orgies of gore, Halloween shows next to no blood at all; the filmmakers wisely knew that the key to making a horror film genuinely scary is to maximize suspense and use lots of darkness and an eerie atmosphere (i.e., Carpenter’s music). [As a side note, I find it amusing that, though I originally intended to finish and publish this analysis just before Halloween, I ended up publishing it on Friday the 13th!]

Note how the two houses where the babysitting is going on, and where Myers is lurking, are facing each other across the street. The houses are like a head looking at itself in the mirror, and someone looking at himself in a mirror is in itself a Lacanian metaphor for the narcissist admiring himself and using others (metaphorical mirror reflections) as a means of furthering his self-interest, as Annie does when taking Lindsey Wallace across the road and having Laurie watch her while Annie drives off to get her boyfriend, Paul. Myers kills her in her car.

Similarly, Lynda and her boyfriend, Bob, arrive at the Wallace house expecting Annie and Paul to be there so all four of them can party there together. Finding themselves alone and not knowing that Annie’s just been murdered, Lynda and Bob make love and drink beer, them being no less self-centered than Annie.

Lynda is especially self-centered and narcissistic, wanting Bob to get her a beer from the fridge, then, after Myers has killed Bob and disguises himself as his victim with his glasses and a white sheet for a cheesy ghost costume, she flashes her breasts for ‘Bob.’ She expects him to mirror her narcissism back to her with a compliment on her beautiful body, and of course, Myers stays mute, because he personifies the non-verbal Real, while Lynda exemplifies the narcissistic, mirroring Imaginary.

There is a dangerous proximity between the trauma of the Real and the narcissism of the Imaginary, since the one dialectically phases into the other, as I see it. Narcissism is often a protective façade against the fragmentation that leads to psychotic breaks with reality. I suspect that six-year-old Michael was so neglected, so ignored by his family, that he traumatically found verbal communication to be pointless, and so he replaced it with ‘communicating’ through stabs of the knife, symbolically a kind of projective identification, in Bion‘s sense of primitive, pre-verbal communication, the stab wound being the yonic container (a receiving of Myers’s pain), and the knife being the phallic contained (the non-verbal expression and projection of his pain).

Since the Wallace house is where the narcissistic, self-centered behaviour occurs, this is also where the murders occur, for as I said above, traumatizing fragmentation (the Real) is dangerously close to narcissism (the Imaginary); it is only in the social, verbally-expressive realm of the Symbolic that mental health resides, hence Laurie is in the house across the street, the Doyle house, where responsible babysitting is going on. Unlike Annie and Lynda, Laurie is concerned for Others–not just one other person as a mirrored, narcissistic extension of herself. So when she hears Lynda dying on the phone, Laurie naturally wants to cross the street to find out what’s going on in the Wallace house.

She finds Annie’s corpse on the bed Lynda and Bob were making love in, with Judith’s headstone there, Myers’s way of telling Laurie that his sister is, if you will, the archetypal negligent caregiver. Jamie Lee Curtis demonstrates her scream-queen credentials here, and Laurie takes on the role of the final girl. Myers’s knife slash on her arm is, again, his non-verbal communication as projective identification, negative containment (Bion, pages 97-99), a kind of containment that does the opposite of soothing, resulting in a nameless dread. Six-year-old Myers, not having received the proper soothing of his anxieties because of negligent parenting, felt this nameless dread, an inexpressible fear of annihilation, and he has been trying to project that fear onto others in his murders.

All of Laurie’s and Dr. Loomis’s attempts to kill Myers fail because, apart from my interpretation that an evil spirit is animating his body regardless of how many bullet holes and stab wounds it has, evil never dies. Since Halloween is derived from Samhain, a festival when the souls of the dead come back to walk the Earth, it marks the beginning of winter, the darker half of the year, with the dying of the sun god, who will be reborn in midwinter.

Just as pagan myths of dying and resurrecting gods reflect such cycles as the changes of the seasons of the year, so does trauma have a way of being repressed and forgotten about temporarily, then returning, often in an unrecognized form. Myers killing his sister, being put away in the sanitarium, and “the night he came home” wearing a mask, can be seen to represent the original trauma, its repression, and its disguised return, just like the coming of fall, then winter, spring, summer,…and the return of the fall.

His obsessive, relentless killing can be seen as representative of Freud‘s notion of the death drive and the compulsion to repeat a traumatic experience. Hence, he personifies evil, which never dies.

…and an undying evil, as demonstrated in the inexplicable disappearance of Myers’s body on the lawn after having been shot point blank by Dr. Loomis, is what makes Halloween such a scary movie, even sans sang.

‘Mama,’ a Psychological Horror Novel, Chapter Thirteen

Whoa! Look at that huge mushroom cloud in the sky, far off in the distance. No one, other than myself, has even noticed it, much less reacted to it. Now that Mama’s ghost is having me put away, where I can’t do anything to stop her, she can go ahead with her plans to destroy the world and bring us all to Hell, to join her. The people on the streets aren’t reacting to the nuclear blast because her magic is restraining them, hypnotizing them into a state of total apathy!

No one cares. No one will help me. Aunt Jane and…that man everyone says is my father…are just working for Mama’s ghost, to keep me under her control so she can be free to unleash her mayhem on the world. I’m powerless to save everyone from her.

I wanna kill myself so badly, but I can’t, because: I can’t escape from the clutches of the staff taking me back to the mental hospital; I’m too chicken to endure the pain of slashing my wrists, or jumping off of a building, or any other violent form of suicide; I have no pills to OD on; and besides, killing myself will only bring myself further into Hell and under Mama’s control.

There’s nothing I can do to relieve my pain. No…

Oof! What…the…? Did one of those boats on this surreal road just collide with the elephant I’m riding on? Oh! It’s losing balance…I’m falling off!

Aah! I just hit the road on my left side, hurting my upper arm and hip. Now I’m in pain on both sides of my body, after that motorcycle crash I had before.

Hey, I see Aunt Jane and…that man…lying on the road, too. They’re all bloody and unconscious. Are they dead? I’ll check for her pulse: oh, my God, she is dead. She was working for Mama’s ghost, though, helping to ensure that I stay locked away in the mental hospital, so I couldn’t stop Mama from using her magic to make a Hell here on Earth. Why would Mama kill my aunt all of a sudden?

What’s that? Coughing coming from…that man. I’ll go over to him, in spite of my revulsion from him. What does he want from me now?

“Roger…Roger,” he’s saying between gasps and coughs. “I…am your…father. Why…can’t you…just accept me?” More coughing from him–it’s revolting to watch and hear.

Again, though, I must ask myself: why would Mama’s ghost kill off the people who were helping her? I see the hospital worker, the one who was steering the elephant we were on, lying next to ‘Dad,’ dead and covered in his own blood, too.

“I…love…you, Roger,” says ‘Dad,’ then his head falls to the side, and he’s lying there dead, with his eyes wide open. I’m checking his pulse. No, he’s definitely dead.

I don’t understand any of this. Why is Mama doing this?

None of it makes any sense, unless…

…unless it’s all just been figments of my imagination the whole time.

Is that why no one responded to the nuclear blast I saw a few minutes ago? Because there was no nuclear blast?

My seeing boats on the road instead of cars, celery sticks instead of lampposts, animal heads on people’s bodies, mushrooms instead of skyscrapers, fire in the background, blue elephants instead of ambulances to take me back to the mental hospital,…none of these are Mama’s magic, but just my hallucinations going to such an extreme?

All because I can’t accept that this man was my father?

Hey…as I look all around me, I see that the surreal imagery I’d seen before is all gone. Now, everything looks normal: cars and buses on the road, lampposts, tall buildings, pedestrians with human heads, no fire to be seen anywhere at all, not even on the horizon. All there is before me is that car crash–my ambulance lying on its side, with the back door wide open so I could crawl out and look around outside, and my aunt and…my…father…lying here, dead.

The world is just an ordinary place.

And I am just an ordinary man.

I’m no hero. My life isn’t the great melodrama that I imagined it to be, with a demonic mother persecuting me. I probably didn’t even kill her; as everybody else told me, she just died of a heart attack, and I was just a fool sticking pins into a doll that had no effect on her at all. I’m nothing special; I’m just a deluded idiot.

And because of my resistance from them, I just lost the only two people in the whole world who actually cared about me. I’m mediocre, and alone.

This existence is worse than any fiery Hell I could imagine…and it’s all of my own creation.

People are crowding around the ambulance. I’ve got to get away from them, or else I’ll be put in that mental institution for the rest of my life, and I don’t want the rest of my life to be a long one.

Since there’s no mother-demon trying to get me, suicide is still a viable option for me. I’m getting out of here, now, before another ambulance arrives!

Umph! Oh, getting this crowd of onlookers to open up a path for me is annoyingly difficult!

“C’mon, you people! Out of my way!” I shout.

“Hey, don’t be so pushy!” a man says.

“You’re injured,” a woman says. “You need to go to the hospital, Sir.”

“Mind your own business!” I shout, then get free.

I’m running away from the crash scene and down the street. I see an alley between two tall buildings, and I’m running towards it.

A voice whispers in my ear, “Yes, Roger, go in there.”

That was another hallucination, of course, the voice of ‘Mama.’ I don’t believe any of that’s real anymore, but I’m still going into the alley. Piles of garbage bags and boxes are lying against the walls on both sides. Is this where I was before, when I crashed the bike? It smells just as bad.

Looking back, I can see a few people running after me. I’d better hide.

Behind these boxes here will be good. Yeah, those people just ran past. I can hear them running farther and farther away, their footsteps getting softer and softer. I hear nothing at all now.

Good. I’m all alone now. No one to bother me. Absolute peace.

…except for the war going on in my heart.

I hate my life. I never amounted to anything. The only way I could make my life have any meaning was to make up a melodramatic, hallucinatory story about my mother being a witch and a demon from Hell bent on destroying the world, so I could fancy myself a hero about to save everyone. What a load of ridiculous nonsense, all fabricated to hide the truth from myself, that I’m just a pathetic loser! I couldn’t have an average man as a father, because I’m below average.

If only I could have just accepted that man as my father! I could have grown to love him, to receive his love, and then finally learn to love myself! And now he’s dead.

Now I have nobody to value me in any way.

I hate myself, and I want to die. But I’m too scared to kill myself, as much as I hate living.

If only I could kill myself quickly and painlessly. I have no sleeping pills or other drugs to OD on. I have no access to a bathtub and razors so I can do it the old Roman way. And I don’t have the guts to jump off of a tall building.

What am I going to do? I don’t want to be in a mental institution for the rest of my worthless life.

I want to die…now…but I can’t do it.

If only there were somebody out there who could do it for me. Any murderers out there?

Is there anything in these boxes or garbage bags that I could use? Any bottles I could break, and use the jagged edge to cut myself? Let me take a look…

Hey, what’s that over there, by the opposite wall? Another hallucination? Very well–bring it on. Nothing else is helping.

The Ouroboros of Music

Introduction

I’ve written a number of articles on how the ouroboros, normally a symbol of eternity expressed in endless cycles, can also be used to represent the dialectically unified relationship between opposites. The serpent, coiled into a circle and biting its tail, can represent a continuum that, instead of being conceived as a straight line with both extremes at distant, opposite ends, can also be coiled into a circle, with the opposite ends meeting, where the serpent’s head bites its tail.

I believe that this close relationship between opposite extremes, the one phasing into the other, or the one being an immediate reaction to the other, can be applied universally. I’ve tried to demonstrate this universality with a number of examples, usually Marxist ones, as with dialectical materialism, capitalism, neoliberalism, the workers’ state, and the tendency of the rate of profit to fall.

As for (largely) non-Marxist topics, I’ve also attempted to apply my ouroboros symbolism to more-or-less mystical ideas, to psychoanalysis, and to philosophy. Now, I’d like to try to apply it to music.

What I’m about to attempt here will surely be far from exhaustive, but what follows are, I believe, some quite significant aspects of music, some important parameters of it. These include consonance vs dissonance, dynamics, planned structures vs non-planned ones, rhythm vs arrhythmicality, and simplicity vs complexity as alternating in different periods in music history. I’ll be examining examples from classical music, jazz, and rock. I’ll be discussing the psychological effects of such music more than the actual physical properties of the sounds.

Now, before we begin, I want to state at the outset that I am no trained musicologist or historian of music, so take my opinions here with a generous grain of salt. Just so you know, however, that I’m not a complete musical ignoramus, either, I have demonstrated what musical knowledge I do have, for what it’s worth, in these analyses: on two Gentle Giant albums, three Pink Floyd albums, one by King Crimson, one by Van Der Graaf Generator, one by the Who, by Jethro Tull, by Rush, and by Frank Zappa. I’ve also analyzed works by a number of modern classical composters, including Richard Strauss, Béla Bartók, Charles Ives, Arnold Schoenberg, Alban Berg, Igor Stravinsky, and Edgard Varèse.

Finally, I’ve also composed and recorded (though not always very well) my own music, including mostly modernist classical compositions using Finale software, and pop songs on which I sang and played all of the instruments. For good or ill, all of these will give you an idea of what I know…and don’t know…when it comes to music.

But enough of this. Let’s get started.

Consonance vs Dissonance

As Schoenberg says in his Harmonielehre, one should not think of consonance and dissonance as dichotomous opposites, but rather as on a continuum from most familiar harmony to least familiar harmony: “the distinction between them is only a matter of degree, not of kind. They are no more opposites than two and ten are opposites, as the frequency numbers indeed show; and the expressions ‘consonance’ and ‘dissonance’, which signify an antithesis, are false. It all simply depends on the growing ability of the analyzing ear to familiarize itself with the remote overtones, thereby expanding the conception of what is euphonious, suitable for art, so that it embraces the whole natural phenomenon.” (Schoenberg, p. 21)

The difference, only a relative one, between consonance and dissonance is especially apparent in the contemplation of the overtone series, wherein the first overtones after the fundamental are the octave, the perfect fifth, the perfect fourth, the major third, the minor third,…and only by our reaching of the eighth and ninth harmonics do we come to major seconds, then by the fifteenth and sixteenth harmonics, we get a minor second, the harmonics in between these being microtonal.

So as Schoenberg points out, the only dissonances to be designated as such are the major and minor seconds, and their inversions, the minor and major sevenths respectively, and the major and minor ninths, which are just the seconds plus an octave, as well as the diminished and augmented fourths and fifths, etc. (Schoenberg, p. 22)

Unisons and octaves are, of course, perfect consonances, as are perfect fifths and perfect fourths (this latter particularly if the upper tone is perceived as the tonic). Note how the tense major seconds and their inversions, the minor sevenths, as well as the sharply dissonant minor seconds and their inversions, the major sevenths, are just a step or half-step away from unisons and octaves respectively. In these, we have a basic example of the ouroboros of music, a shift from the bitten tail of extreme dissonance to the biting head of perfect consonance.

A parallel thing happens with respect to the dissonant next-door neighbours of perfect fifths and fourths. The tritone, regarded as strongly dissonant, is only a half-step flat of a perfect fifth, or a half-step sharp of a perfect fourth. Major, and especially minor, sixths are also only a step or half-step above a perfect fifth. Again, perfect consonance and extreme dissonance meet where the ouroboros’ teeth bite its tail.

Unlike the harsh use of dissonance in twentieth-century classical music, the traditional use of dissonance in the art music of previous centuries always kept it subservient to consonance; harmonic tension had to be resolved, and fairly quickly, too. Most people intuitively feel that this subservient role is justified, since we usually can tolerate only so much harshness. This subservience also acknowledges the universal nature of the ouroboros of music: to hear the full range of musical expression, one must pass from the bitten tail to the biting head.

The seventh degree of the major (or melodic or harmonic minor) scale is called the leading tone because, traditionally, one cannot just stop on that note. This tone leads us back to the tonic: it “will bring us back to do,” as Julie Andrews once sang. Incidentally, there’s also a descending, or upper, leading tone, going from a flat second to the tonic. According to Allen Forte, the strongest melodic or harmonic progressions are by half-step, or as I would call it, the ouroboros of shifting from extreme dissonance to the proximate, perfect consonance.

Suspensions and retardations are more examples of shifting from dissonance to consonance, sometimes from extreme dissonance to perfect consonance, as in the 4-3 and 9-8 suspensions by a half-step, or the 7-8 retardation, also by half-step. Again, it’s these stepwise, short distances from dissonance to consonance that demonstrates the ouroboros-like proximity of the harmonic extremes.

A way to intensify dissonance before resolution is to add a minor seventh on top of the leading tone, in the context of a dominant seventh chord. Thus, a tritone, from the third degree of the (Mixolydian) scale (leading tone) to the seventh degree, becomes a major third in the resolution with mere half-step movements in the intervals’ notes closer to (or farther away from, if they’re inverted) each other (or, if the dominant seventh chord resolves to a minor tonic chord, the minor seventh moves by a full step to the minor third of the tonic chord; either way, the movements from dissonance to consonance are only slight). Further, sustained harmonic tension can be created through secondary dominants leading up to the final resolution.

Now, so far I’ve only discussed the relationship of dissonance with consonance largely in the context of diatonic harmony (that is, except for my brief reference to the descending leading tone). The chromaticism of the music of the Romantic period intensifies dissonance all the more (listen to Wagner‘s Tristan und Isolde for a noteworthy example); since this music is still traditionally tonal, though, its necessary resolution to consonance further brings out the ouroboros of extreme dissonance, the bitten tail, to peaceful consonance, the biting head.

The pushing of this dissonant chromaticism takes tonality to its limits in the music of Richard Strauss (i.e., Salome and Elektra) and Gustav Mahler. Then, we get post-Romantic, Impressionist composers like Debussy and Erik Satie, who often sidestep tonality while refraining from harshness. Examples of such sidestepping include Debussy’s use of the whole-tone scale in such compositions as Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune, and the use of quartal harmony in Satie’s Fils des étoiles.

Matters get even more dissonant, though still rooted in tonality, if in a vague, expanded sense, in Bartók‘s music, as early as such pieces as his first string quartet. His use of axes of symmetry were meant to prove to Schoenberg that one could treat all twelve semitones equally, yet remain tonal. Note how the extreme chromaticism of that string quartet mentioned above resolves with a closing chord, at the end of the final movement, on A, with fifths (E) and ninths (B). Now, such a chord is quite consonant…by Bartók’s standards.

Stravinsky‘s experiments with polytonality, as well as his use, from time to time, of the octatonic scale, in such compositions as The Rite of Spring are nonetheless still basically tonal, and they end in at least relatively consonant harmonic resolution. The same can be said of much of Ives‘s music, in spite of the many clashing independent parts. Dissonance generally is resolved, if imperfectly…a kind of hovering between the bitten tail and the biting head of the ouroboros.

It’s when we come to the Second Viennese School that we have the “emancipation of the dissonance.” Not satisfied with the use of the whole-tone scale and quartal harmony in his Chamber Symphony No. 1, Schoenberg wanted to treat all twelve semitones as equals. His experiments with atonality led to a need to structure the apparent melodic and harmonic chaos with his twelve-note system. Though I have a deep appreciation for this kind of music, unfortunately, most listeners have untrained ears, and therefore they find it virtually impossible to distinguish the tone rows used in it. One often cannot even make sense of the unresolved dissonance; to the average listener, this music sounds as if it has no beginning, middle, or end. One languishes, it seems, at the bitten tail of discord.

The ‘chaotic’ sense of modernist dissonance is more apparent in such music as George Antheil‘s Ballet Mécanique, much of the music of Varèse and Messiaen (this latter’s especially since the 1940s), and Stockhausen works like Gruppen and Kontakte. As a result, the classical avant-garde has been unpopular, and the average listener drifted away from it and towards jazz and rock ‘n’ roll.

Though these two popular forms started out with harmony that’s simple enough to follow, they, too, grew more dissonant over time. Examples in jazz start out with the altered and extended chords played by Thelonius Monk; dissonance later intensified with the avant-garde and free jazz of players like Cecil Taylor, with his flurries of tone clusters on the piano, or Ornette Coleman‘s improvising in no recognizable key.

Rock music grew more harmonically adventurous first with the Beatles, who proved that pop can embrace a whole world of harmony beyond twelve-bar blues and clichéd progressions like I-vi-ii-V. This experimentation continued in the psychedelic era, with Frank Zappa‘s music, and ultimately with progressive rock in the 1970s, with bands like King Crimson and Gentle Giant in particular daring to play harsh dissonances. In all of these examples, we can see a cyclical movement all the way around the body of the ouroboros of music, from the bitten tail of extreme dissonance to the biting head of simple harmony, then along the serpent’s coiled body back towards the tail–that is, more and more harmonic adventurousness in both jazz and rock.

Sometimes, the extreme dissonance of modernism in postwar classical music simply leads to, largely if not absolutely, an abandonment of sounds of definite pitch, as can be heard in such examples of music exclusively for percussion as Varèse’s Ionisation, John Cage‘s Constructions, Stockhausen’s Zyklus and Mikrophonie I and II, and Iannis Xenakis‘s Psappha. After hearing a litany of screaming cacophony, the sound of pitchless instruments can feel restful in comparison, a shift from the serpent’s bitten tail to its biting head.

Dynamics

As far as going from one extreme of dynamics to the other, from absolute silence–the serpent’s bitten tail–to deafening loudness–the biting head–is concerned, we find ourselves starting and ending with the postwar avant-garde. That is to say, we can start with Cage’s ‘silent’ works, his 4’33” and his 0’00”, and end with examples of danger music, which sometimes uses sounds so loud that they may risk deafening the listener and/or performer. Loudness leads to silence.

Less extreme manifestations of this sort of thing can be found in dance clubs and rock concerts, in which the booming music may not cause permanent, profound deafness, but it may weaken one’s hearing, requiring one, for example, to turn up the volume to an extreme loudness, just to be able to hear the talking on the TV with reasonable clarity.

Extreme loudness, the serpent’s head, leads to the silence of the hearing impaired, the tail, then to extreme loudness again, turning up the volume as a movement along the serpent’s coiled body from its tail back to its head.

From Planned Sounds to Non-planned Ones

The dialectical relationship between what is planned in music and what isn’t manifests itself in many forms. Though music is notated, there’s also plenty of room for interpreting how exactly to play those notes from performance to performance, even in precisely notated classical music or film scores.

Part of the great skill of jazz musicians is to be able to improvise, to invent melodies on the spot during a live performance. If they play a wrong note, it’s advisable to play it loud, to give off the illusory impression that they “meant to do that.”

As for soloing in rock music, the playing is largely prepared and practiced, with a little wiggle room for impromptu variations on a few notes here and there. Zappa noted this general tendency among rock guitarists while contrasting it with his own, totally improvised playing, not knowing at all what notes he would play until the very moment he began the solo onstage, fully aware of the risk of making the occasional mistake in front of his fans.

Such is the yin-and-yang relationship between planned and unplanned music along the coiled body of the ouroboros. As far as the area of the meeting extremes is concerned, where the head bites the tail, we can return to the postwar avant-garde. On the one hand, there is total organization in the form of total serialism in the 1950s music of composers like Boulez and Stockhausen, as well as the player piano music of Conlon Nancarrow; on the other, there’s the aleatoric music of composers like Cage, the extreme of which is noted in the aforementioned ‘compositions,’ 4’33” and 0’00”.

Rhythm vs Arrhythmicality

The basic units of rhythm can be broken down to twos and threes, resulting in simple duple or triple times, then compound times. Common time can be subdivided into twos and threes, such as eighth notes of 3 + 3 + 2, or sixteenth notes of 3 + 3 + 3 + 3 + 2 + 2, or into other syncopations. We follow the beat hypnotically, not needing to think about it.

Next, we have odd time signatures, such as 7/8, 5/4, 11/8, or 13/8, as commonly heard in progressive rock and jazz-rock fusion. Then, to make rhythm even more irregular, we can have constantly changing time signatures, as we hear in The Rite of Spring. Now, instead of being hypnotized by the beat, we have to think about it and figure out all of the changes in order to follow and understand the music. Unconscious listening has thus changed to conscious listening.

Matters get even more complicated when we throw in irregular subdivisions of the beat, beyond triplets and going into quintuplets, septuplets, etc. An extreme example can be heard in that opening set of seventeen rising diatonic notes played at extreme speed on the clarinet from Gershwin‘s Rhapsody in Blue. The legato notes are played so fast that they sound like a glissando. We pay no attention to the rhythmic values of these notes, because quite simply, we can’t.

Then there’s the serialism of rhythm, or ‘modalizing’ of it, as heard in pieces like Messiaen’s “Mode des valeurs et intensités,” the second of his Quatre Etudes de rythme, for piano. The accents and durations of the notes are completely divorced from conventional notions of ‘expressivity,’ but they must be played exactly and figured out by the listener (following the music with the score in hand, no doubt!) in order to understand what is being heard. The same basic understanding of how to hear the accents, durations, etc., of total serialist compositions is to be kept in mind when listening to such music by Boulez, Stockhausen, etc.

Rhythmic irregularity, though precisely planned, as noted in the above-mentioned music by Messiaen, Boulez, and Stockhausen (as well as in the player piano music of Nancarrow), next shifts to a total lack of perceived rhythmic pulse, as in free jazz and the avant-garde experiments of Cecil Taylor. Taylor’s Units would play seemingly endless flurries of atonal phrases backed by drum rolls and arhythmic licks (notably by Andrew Cyrille). One doesn’t tap one’s foot to this music, yet perhaps one will sway one’s head and shoulders in circles to it.

As a result of these extremes, one goes back, from consciously working out a planned but extremely complex rhythm, to unconsciously listening to arrhytmicality. The ouroboros of music has come full circle once again.

Historical Cycles of Simplicity and Complexity

We can find these cyclical moments in the history of Western music at a number of times, especially in the modern era, but I’ll point out a few, when music rose in complexity to an extreme that was eventually felt to be excessive (the biting head of the ouroboros), and then there was a reaction against it, a return to simplicity (the serpent’s bitten tail).

In early Western music, we had monophony, as has mostly been the case in traditional forms of music in the rest of the world. From the monophonic singing of the old Church modes in Gregorian Chant (which used melisma to add sophistication and musical interest), complexity began in the use of organum (perfect fourths and fifths sung parallel to the original melody), which was the beginning stage leading to polyphony. When parallel melody was felt to be rather ‘primitive’ sounding, an interest in creating independent, but harmonious, melodic lines began.

Now, the fascination with experimenting with polyphony, which included polyphonic settings of sacred texts, led to increasingly complex music. Consider the wildly experimental, expressive, and chromatic music of Gesualdo in the late Renaissance period as a noteworthy example.

The Church became concerned with all of this growing complexity in its sacred music, since it became difficult to make out the religious texts sung in all of those intricate vocal lines. (The fact that secular tunes were being mixed into religious music didn’t ease the minds of Church authorities, either.) So there was an urge, at the time of the Counter-reformation and the Council of Trent, to simplify sacred music and tone down all of the tangled vocal polyphony. Such composers as Palestrina were considered ideal in the simplicity of their sacred music.

Homophony, beginning in sacred music, came to replace polyphony as the dominant form in European art music, the simplicity of one melody over a chordal accompaniment being preferred over the complexity of many independent melodic lines heard all at once. Small wonder JS Bach’s music, with its contrapuntal intricacy, wasn’t appreciated during his life, but rather the homophonic music of his sons, Johann Christian Bach and CPE Bach, was preferred back then.

By the Romantic period, the strict adherence to classical forms, such as the sonata form, binary form, minuet and trio, and rondo was beginning to be felt to be too limiting, and so 19th century composers were using these forms in looser and looser ways. Combining this growing freedom with more emotional expressivity and chromaticism, Romantic-era music was getting more complex.

By the 20th century, these movements towards more and more freedom, expressivity, and chromaticism was making music so eccentric, complex, and dissonant that it was beginning to alienate audiences. Some composers, like Stravinsky and Hindemith, were already toning down their modernism by resorting to neoclassicism, finding musical inspiration in the more remote past, though still presenting it with a quirky, modernist slant.

Postwar avant-garde classical music, such as the aforementioned total serialism and aleatoric music of the 1950s, as well as such developments as the micropolyphony of Ligeti, was also alienating listeners with what was perceived as its excessive complexity. And so by the 1960s, a new kind of music began: minimalism, with its simple, repetitive melodies as composed by such musicians as Steve Reich, Philip Glass, and Terry Riley.

In jazz, the complicated riffs of jazz-rock fusion in the early-to-mid 1970s were soon replaced by such leanings as simple, often Latin American, styles. One might think of how the jazz-fusion of groups like the Mahavishnu Orchestra and Return to Forever, with their flashy, virtuosic solos and tricky time changes, was a hot thing in the beginning, but then got simplified by the late 70s. Similarly, the popular Latin American simplicity of mid-to-late 70s Weather Report replaced the band’s originally intense experimentation early in the decade.

The peak of progressive rock experimentation had come by the mid-70s; then punk rock and new wave came along, and their popularity forced the prog dinosaurs to simplify their sound by the late 70s, as can be heard in the shift in musical style by bands like Genesis, Gentle Giant, Jethro Tull, and even UK (consider the difference between their first and second studio albums, from original drummer Bill Bruford‘s subtle use of dauntingly tricky meters to Terry Bozzio‘s more extroverted, but simpler, harder-hitting style). Yes’s 90125 was also essentially a pop album (as was Big Generator), with only the instrumental passage at the beginning of “Changes,” written by Alan White, sounding like prog, with its shifting from a bar each of 4/4 to 6/8, then from a bar of 4/4 to two bars of 6/8.

Asia, though being a prog supergroup with members like John Wetton, Steve Howe, and Carl Palmer, were essentially known for playing pop songs, such as their hit single, “Heat of the Moment.” The 80s King Crimson, like JS Bach in his own day, were a band born too late, as it were: the complexity of their music required too much intelligence for the average listener to appreciate, so they could only be a short-lived cult band. Still, even they wrote a few songs that could be deemed more or less radio-friendly, like the funky “Elephant Talk” and “Sleepless,” and the pop-oriented “Heartbeat.” King Crimson were the exception that proved the rule, as far as 80s pop was concerned.

Since the simplification of 80s pop and rock, some examples of a return to complexity (to an extent) have existed, i.e., the odd time signatures that Soundgarden liked to play in the 1990s, among other examples. But mainstream rock since then has simplified again, with a few exceptions here and there, along with the hybrid prog/metal of groups like Dream Theater.

Conclusion

I hope the examples I’ve shown have demonstrated how the dialectical relationship between opposites, as I symbolize with the ouroboros, can be applied to a number of aspects of music and music history: consonance vs dissonance, loudness vs softness, rhythm vs non-rhythm, and simplicity vs complexity in music history.

The wave-like, or serpentine, motion between opposites is, I believe, one of the keys to understanding all of life…rather like listening to…the music of the spheres, if you will.

“Marble,” a Modern Myth to Encourage the Discouraged

My name is Casey. I have been trapped in a huge block of marble for as long as I can remember; and I have been struggling to break out of it for what must be years, even decades.

A conspiracy of sorcerers put me in this prison. How did they construct the marble in which they encased me? They performed repeated rituals, ceremonies of shame. They made me believe that I deserved to be held forever in this cell of marble, that I am ugly, repellant, of no worth at all. I believed it, and wept in my petrified confinement.

A while back, however, I began to doubt the cruel beliefs my captors put in my head. In my first doubts, I found myself able to do something I hadn’t been able to do in years, decades, even.

I budged.

Just a bit, at first.

Then I doubted a little more, and I could move a bit more.

I’ve continued doubting, and since this growth of doubting has slowly but steadily bloomed, I’ve become able not only of more and more movement inside this casing, but I’ve also been able to make this large block of marble shake on the ground where it’s sat all this time.

How do I doubt? I just keep thinking to myself that it isn’t I who am ugly, repellant, and worthless, but rather that it’s the marble I’ve been encased in that is ugly, repellant, and unworthy.

It seems that everyone outside, looking at this huge block of marble I’m incarcerated in, thinks the marble is beautiful, protecting the world from my hideousness.

But more and more, I know better.

Attempts are made, all the same, by those outside, to make me believe that there’s nothing good in me to make it worthwhile to break free. Once I come out of my fetter of engulfing rock, I’ll realize that I can’t do anything useful for the world, or so they’d have me believe. It’s best that I stay inside, apparently…

No! I must never believe those lies!

You may be wondering how I’ve been able to live and breathe while immobilized in this marble for so long, with no oxygen, food, or even an ability to relieve myself. The explanation is simple: the sorcerers who put me in this predicament used their magic to ensure that I’d never need to breathe, eat, or do any of the normal things that people outside do all the time and take for granted.

The fact that my tormentors are keeping me alive is part of how I know that I must have a secret worth that they don’t want to be known to the world. I have special abilities that they feel threatened by; if I were free to use those abilities, my enemies would be reduced to nothing.

Still, why not just kill me? Perhaps my abilities include a defying of death: maybe they can’t kill me, so encasing me was the best they could do. Perhaps they get pleasure from the idea of so capable a man as I being convinced I’m worthless that my powers would never be used, because I don’t believe in them. They laugh at how I’m so close to greatness, yet so far away, too.

Hence all those voices outside trying so hard to discourage me from trying to break free, all deliberately made audible to me, in spite of my confinement, through the sorcerers’ magic. But I’ll show them all!

Umph! I’ve…got…to break…out!

I can feel the marble block moving, wobbling a bit from side to side. Gradually, as I push left, then right…forward, then backward, I can feel the wobbles get slightly bigger over time. I am making progress!

The space between my body and the surrounding marble was originally so tight that it was pressing into me. With my years of struggling, the tightness is gone, and now there are a few millimetres of space all around between my body and the marble. Tiny pieces of it have broken off and fallen to my feet, erosion from my struggles!

Grains of marble from the outside must be breaking off, too, hence my ability to move the block more and more, and hence the voices of the people trying to discourage me, their voices louder and louder, and more and more agitated at my progress and determination.

I am an angel trapped in this marble, and it must be carved, as it were, until I set myself free! I must become the angel that I already am!

Ungh! I…must…keep…rocking…this…block!

CRACK!

What was that sound?

How big of a crack did I just make?

Instead of small, slow bits of progress, am I about to start making large ones?

I can hear the voices outside, moaning in surprise and…apprehension? Do they fear the coming of my success?

I…must…push…harder! Oof!

CRACK!

That one sounded much bigger. I’ll be free soon!

Hey, there’s a big crack in front of my eyes now. I can see outside, and I can hear the people out there much better. Quite a crowd is gathering, making a lot of noise.

Unh! I’m…gonna…keep…on…shaking…this…thing–Oh! Until…I’m…free!…Aah!

CRACK!

“Don’t do it, Casey!” I hear a male voice warning me. “If you come out of there, you’ll only realize, without any doubt, just how worthless you really are! Just stay in there, and spare us all the irritation of your presence!”

No! I mustn’t listen to voices like that! They’re lying!

Angh! I’m…getting…closer…to…breaking…free!

CRACK!

A huge chunk of the marble just broke off! I can see all the people to my front! There are at least a dozen men and women watching me break out. Some, with worried looks on their faces, are shouting at me to give up. Others, with hopeful looks, are cheering for me!

(In fact, I remember when I had my very first doubt, I heard the voice of a woman trying to encourage me to break out. That might be her voice that I’m hearing now.)

“Come on, Casey!” a woman is shouting. “You can get out of there!”

“Shut up!” a woman beside her is saying. “Don’t encourage the imbecile. He’s dangerous. The coven warned us about him!”

Speak of the coven, and they appear.

Indeed, I can see the group of cloaked sorcerers approaching the crowd; these were the six men and women who encased me in this marble I’m almost out of.

Under their hoods, their shadowy faces are showing great fear. I find this most encouraging!

Nnhk! Gotta…shake…this…thing, and…get…out!

CRACK!

What’s this? A big piece of marble just broke off from behind me! I can turn my head, and I see the crowd from back there now!

The coven is chanting in their ancient, mystic language. I don’t know the meaning of the words, but I know the intention: to cover me in a new, hardened prison, and to make me feel unworthy of ever trying to free myself again.

I must…resist them…Urgh! I must…break out…

CRACK!

Though another piece broke off, a big one to my left, just under my cheek, I can feel a soft, liquid form building up to fill in these holes. I…must…push through them…before…they harden…and become…new marble! I’m…so tired…I don’t have…much strength left…

The coven’s chanting is getting louder and more intense. More of that liquid is filling in all the spaces. I won’t be able…to get out…before it hardens…

“Stop it!” a woman’s voice cries. “Leave him alone! Let him break free! Stop hurting him!”

“Shut up!” a second female voice shouts. “Let him be sealed up! He’s no good to us! He’s a danger! Can’t you see that?”

“No, he’s not!” the first woman shouts. “Free him!”

“The coven says he’s a danger to us all!” the second says.

“He’s a danger only to the coven!” the first says. Out of my half-open right eye, I see her running off. In my exhaustion, I’m barely conscious. She’s come back…with a pick-axe! She’s chipping away at the marble with it! She’s helping me! She’s freeing me!

With her help, I feel valued for the first time in my life. Hers must have been that first encouraging voice I heard so many years ago. Now I have the courage to keep trying. She’s given me new strength. Nnmph! Now…I…can…break…out!

SMASH!

Fiery light is flashing out of me in all directions, now that I’m finally free. My light is burning the coven to a crisp. They are screaming in agony as they slowly die. Their blind supporters are weeping to see my enemies destroyed.

They are but ash now, blown away by the wind.

I’m free, my helper is free…we’re all free.

Free of the coven’s power over us, as their supporters are beginning to realize.

My light is shining for everyone.

Even the coven’s supporters are realizing that I’m not without value.

I am the good that the coven tried to hide in marble. I am the beauty that they called ugliness, because it was they were were truly ugly.

All the people who were lied to about me are no longer ugly. They’re beautiful, too.

We’re all beautiful, and valuable.

We’re free.

‘Mama,’ a Psychological Horror Novel, Chapter Twelve

Now, let’s see if I can remember any of those ancient verses, the ones I used to put a circle of protection around myself, to keep Mama’s ghost out.

Bide larma…No, that doesn’t sound right.

Bide lirma oda kaitan…Was that it? No.

How about Bidi lirma oda kaitan…? I think that’s closer to it, but how does the rest of the verse go?

The fact that I don’t have the materials to make the circle–the chalk to draw it, the ruler to draw straight lines for the pentacle, and the candles to light up–isn’t exactly helping me here.

I’ll try again: Bidi lirma ota kaitan…

Wait a minute: was that even from the right verse?

No! That was from the verses meant to send Mama to Hell and lock her up there. I’ve already done that, and she’s brought me here with her, too. By saying that verse, if I’m even saying it right, I’m only reinforcing my problem!

I need to remember the verse I used to say to create a zone of protection that she can’t enter. What I said when I went to the store to buy the amulet and sachet. What was it? She’s making me forget, that’s for sure.

Still, I have to try to remember it. It’s my only hope.

Oh, God, it’s so dark here. Endlessly black, all around me.

I can still hear the thumping of the elephants’ feet. Aunt Jane, that man, and the staff from the mental hospital are still trying to find me in this stinky rectum of a hiding place. It’s only a matter of time before they find me and take me back to the nut house.

Oh, what are those words I have to chant?

Wana…bagga…waiko? Is that how it begins?

Wana bagga waiko, Inan suchi zdago…I think.

Kala bodi gana, Sibako wuli…zulu? No, at least one or two of the words are wrong, because I don’t feel any safer. I’m still in the smelly black pit. But which words am I saying wrong?

I can’t give up. I’ve got to keep trying–not just for myself, but for the sake of the world, which I have to save from Mama’s magic! Now, what were those words?

Maybe if I try different combinations of vowels and consonants, I’ll eventually luck out and say the right combination, like monkeys typing forever and ever until they finally compose a novel. It’s a ridiculous thing to do, but I’m so desperate here, I can’t think of any other way to get the words right. Here goes:

Wana baka waigo,
Inan kushi zdega,
Kala bodi gana.
Sibako woli zulu.

No, still no circle of protection. I’m still trapped in infinite black. But I think I’m coming closer to saying the right words. As I do this, altering the words little by little, I think I’m beginning to remember them better.

But maybe I’m not. Maybe I’m wrong.

Still, I’ve got to keep trying.

Wana baka waigo,
Imam kuchi zdega
Kalu bodi gana.
Sibako woli zulu.

Still not right! Every word has to be perfect, or else I get nothing! Oh, how am I going to get this right? Still, I have to try:

Wana baka waigo,
Iman kuchi zdega
Kalu bodi gana.
Sibako woli…zulu.

Still wrong! I have a feeling that this time, I almost got it right. Still, it cannot be even the slightest bit wrong, or else this effort is all in vain. I’ll bet Mama’s ghost is tampering with my memory, making me forget a verse I had committed to memory not so long ago.

Oh, which part am I getting wrong?

This black void enveloping me, with that shitty garbage stink, is driving me crazy!

I’ve got to keep trying, though…every possible combination must be considered!

I’ve got to get protection from Mama…and fast!

AAAAAAAHHHHHHH!!!…

WabawakabaigoImankuchizdegaKalubodiganaSibakowolizuku…
WanwakabaigoImankuchizdegaKalubodiganaSibakowolizulu…
WanabakawaigoInankuchizdegaKalubodiganaSibakowolizuku…
WakabakawaigoImankuchizdegaKalubodiganaSibakowolizuku…
WadabakawaigoImankuchizdegaKalubodiganaSibakowolizulu…
WafabakawaigoImankuchizdegaKalubodiganaSibakowolizuku…
WagabakawaigoImankuchizdegaKalubodiganaSibakowolizulu…
WajabakawaigoImankuchizdegaKalubodiganaSibakowolizuku…
WalaBakawaigoImankuchizdegaKalubodiganaSibakowolizulu…
WamabakawaigoInankuchizdegaKalubodiganaSibakowolizuku…
WanabakawaigoImankuchizdegaKanubodiganaSibakowolizulu…
WapawakabaigoImankuchizdegaKalubodiganaSibakowolizuku…
WarabakawaigoImankuchizdegaKalubodigala Sibakowolizulu…
WasabakawaigoImankuchizdegaKalubodiganaSibakowolizuku…
WatabakawaigoImankuchizdegaKalubodiganaSibakowolizulu…
WavabakawaigoImankuchizdegaKalubodiganaSibakowolizuku…
WawabakawaigoImankuchizdegaKalubodiganaSibakowolizulu…
WayabakowaigoImankuchizdegaKalubodiganaSibakowolizuku…
WazabakawaigoImankuchizdegaKalubodiganaSibakowolizuzu…
WanababawaigoImankuchizdegaKalubodiganaSibakowolizuku…
WanabakawaigoImankuchizdegoKalubodiganaSibakowolizulu…
WanabalawaigoImankuchizdegaKalubodiganaSibakowolizuku…
WanabamawaigoImankuchizdegaKalubodiganaSibakowolizulu…

Oh, my God, I’m never going to get this right!

Surely, Mama’s ghost is making me mispronounce at least one word at a time, to drive me crazy!

My face is soaked in my tears. I’m shaking and sobbing so loudly, surely those elephants will hear me over their thumping feet!

What can I do to save myself from her?

Could I try finding Jesus? No, I tried that years ago. Didn’t work. There’s no Heaven to save me from this Hell.

If only I could kill myself…but that would just plunge my soul–if I even have one–straight into Hell all the more, where she could really torment me…forever.

What if I attempted…a dissolving of my ego? A transcending of my ego…ego death! The merging of my Atman, as it were, with Brahman? What if I adopted selflessness, in the Buddhist sense of the word? She cannot harm me if there’s no me to harm.

Through intense meditation, I can achieve ego death, nirvana. It’s worth a try, at least.

I’ll start by focusing on my breathing…slow, deep breaths…in…and out…I don’t need to close my eyes, because there’s nothing to see but absolute black everywhere.

Oh!…That awful smell! The shit of the asshole I’m trapped in!

No, I don’t want to inhale that so intensely. Bad idea.

I’ll have to try concentrating on something else.

The present moment, and my oneness with my surroundings.

Yes,…I must think about every second that passes by, and think about there being no distinction between myself and everything out there that isn’t me.

Oh, my mind keeps wandering. Roger, concentrate!

Mama, like Mara the tempter, is trying to thwart this Buddha.

I’m at one with everything…I’m aware of every passing second…

My body feels as if it’s beginning to dissolve, to merge with my surroundings…good…

Wait…am I dissolving, or am I…being pulled apart, in all directions?

I still can’t see anything in this black, smelly void, but it feels as though my arms are being pulled to their far left and far right, and it’s like I’m rising from the ground. All of me feels…pulled outwards, everywhere.

Is this a merging, or is it a…melting?

Maybe this is how becoming at one with everything is supposed to feel. I don’t know.

What’s that up ahead? A tiny dot of white light, gradually getting bigger. I feel as though I’m floating towards it. The light at the end of the tunnel? My salvation?

Wait a minute: instead of a growing ball of white light, I’m seeing the city I was riding that motorcycle through the streets of. I’m at the tight sphincter now, coming out like a turd squeezing through…POP!

I’m back out in the city now. Oh, thank God I don’t smell that fecal stink anymore. It’s as surreal out here as it was before: giant mushrooms for buildings, tall celery stalks for lampposts, boats on the roads instead of cars, a glowing basketball for a sun shining in a brown sky, and pedestrians with animals’ heads.

Yes, the magic of Mama’s ghost is as strong as ever.

Hey, wait! What am I riding on? This isn’t that motorbike I stole: I’m riding on a blue elephant! Other blue elephants are walking beside, in front of, and behind mine. I know what they represent: Aunt Jane, the staff of the mental hospital, and…that man.

They’re taking me back to the nut house…that prison!

I have to stop this from happening, but how?

I’ll try jumping off of this elephant…what? There’s some kind of invisible wall, or a force field of some kind, keeping me on the elephant! I can’t get away! Mama’s magic is keeping me here!

“Let me go!” I scream. “I don’t wanna go back to that horrible hospital!”

“Sorry, Roger,” I can hear Aunt Jane’s voice saying from farther off. “But we trusted you the last time, and you violated that trust. Now, I’m afraid we have no choice but to take you back there and keep you there for as long as it takes. Judging by the way you’ve been acting, I’d say you’ll probably have to stay locked up there for the rest of your life. I hate to say it, but it’s true.”

“NOOOO!!!”

“And don’t try that act of sanity again, Roger,” one of the hospital staff says. “We’re wise to your tricks now.”

Mama has won.

She has me locked away forever.

And she’ll be able to destroy the world without me able to stop her.

It was better in that giant asshole. At least I could meditate there, have a hope of dissolving my ego, and end my suffering…of course, I could meditate in the padded cell they’ll most likely incarcerate me in, wearing that straitjacket again. It will be uncomfortable, but I should be able to do it.

No, I can’t! Not with all those people there! I have to be alone. How can I dissolve my ego through meditation if I’m constantly being disturbed by shrinks and nurses determined to make me believe that that man is my father?

I really am in an eternal Hell of other people.

There is no exit for me.