Cliffs

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

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

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

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

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

Analysis of ‘Pawn Hearts’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“What course is there left but to die?”

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

“What cause is there left but to die?”

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

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

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

“But there still is time…”

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

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

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

“What choice is there left but to try?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here is a link to the Amazon page.

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

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

‘Mama,’ a Psychological Horror Novel, Chapter One

I killed my mother!

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

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

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

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

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

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

Not so with Mama.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dad is dead.

Just like Mama.

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

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

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

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

Dripping

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

’til

you

can

not

take it anymore.

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

but

you

do

not

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

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

and

no

one

is

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

Analysis of ‘Un Homme Qui Dort’

Un homme qui dort (“The Man Who Sleeps,” or “A Man Asleep”) is a 1974 French film directed by Bernard Queysanne and Georges Perec, based on Perec’s story of the same name. It stars Jacques Spiesser.

The film’s script is taken completely from the text of Perec’s prose, though in a condensed form. The text is in the second person singular, as though the narrator (recited by Ludmila Mikaël in the original French, and by Shelley Duvall in English translation) were speaking to Spiesser’s character.

The black-and-white film was almost lost, but it was restored on DVD in 2007. It received some critical acclaim, winning the Prix Jean Vigo in 1974.

Here is a link to quotes from the film in English translation, here is a link to an English translation of Perec’s story (or is it the script for the film?), and here is a link to the film with English subtitles. Here is a link to the English language version.

A twenty-five-year-old Parisian university student (Spiesser), whose name is not given (thus making him a kind of everyman), lives in a one-room chambre de bonne. His feelings of alienation have risen to such a pitch that he no longer wishes to participate in social life. “…you discover, without surprise, that something is wrong, that you don’t know how to live and that you never will know.”

The notion that he is “a man asleep” is metaphorical. Actually, he wanders the streets of Paris instead of going to school and hanging out with friends. He’s living the life of an automaton, devoid of human interaction; it’s an attempt at indifference as a way of alleviating suffering. Self-isolation, he hopes, is a way to nirvana.

He’s as passive as can practically be achieved: “…it’s not action at all, but an absence of action…”

He imagines that someone else, his twin, his double, will get out of bed, wash, shave, dress, go out, and attend school for him. This idea of a double is significant, for it is expressed in other forms: the narrator, addressing him as “you,” is the rambling of his own thoughts in a kind of unwritten diary; also, there’s his cracked, Lacanian mirror, the specular image of which he is alienated from, too.

Finally, there’s the reproduction of René Magritte‘s 1937 surrealist painting, La reproduction interdite, showing a man standing in front of a mirror, his back to us and facing it; but instead of seeing the man’s face reflected back to us, we see the back of his head just as we do of the actual man in front of the mirror. About fifteen minutes into the film, when the student has gone into a theatre to see a movie, we see a surreal variation of this picture, but it’s the student, and the images show him repeatedly facing away from his ‘reflection.’ More self-alienation.

All of these doublings of himself indicate his having left the social and cultural world of the Symbolic Order in order to regress into the narcissistic, dyadic world of the Imaginary. In time, the horrors of the Real will jolt him out of his isolation, and force him to reintegrate into the Symbolic.

It’s also significant that the movie is in black-and-white, when colour film was easily available, and when, by the early 70s, virtually all movies were in colour. I see the choice of black-and-white to be symbolic of black-and-white thinking, or psychological splitting, part of the cause of this young man’s psychological problems.

According to Melanie Klein, the paranoid-schizoid position causes us to split people into being perceived as all-good or all-bad, the bad ones being projected outward and split off from us. This is what the student is doing, though he seems to feel that virtually all elements of society are bad, so he splits them off, including his internal objects of them, and projects them outward, imagining himself to be safe without them.

But of course, he won’t be safe without them, because the internal objects are a part of himself; hence, towards the end of the film, when the tension is raised and he realizes he can’t just cut himself off from the world, we see the black-and-white film in negative images.

Still, for the time being, anyway, he feels a sense of peace and bliss from no longer engaging with the world. Wouldn’t we all love to break away like this?! To give up on all responsibilities, to let Freud‘s death drive kick in, and be at rest, no longer suffering with the rest of the world.

Pleasure, for Freud, consists in the relaxation of tension, which in the form of death, is the ultimate relaxation of it; hence, the death drive as being merely the other side of the same coin as that of the libido, part of Eros. We sense that the young student is aiming for just such a relaxation of tension, though, like Hamlet, he’s too chicken to go through with suicide.

So life as a passive, indifferent automaton seems a reasonable compromise. Indifference, in this regard, is like that of the Buddhist avoiding gratification of desire, or attachment to the world…but without the Buddhist’s hard discipline, of course. The non-existence of nirvana, no-thing-ness, the escape from existence as pain, dukkha, is the death-paradise the student seeks.

We’re reminded of Hamlet’s soliloquy:

“…to die, to sleep
No more; and by a sleep, to say we end
The heart-ache, and the thousand natural shocks
That Flesh is heir to? ‘Tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wished. To die, to sleep…” (III, i)

It is in this sense that we should understand the young student to be “the man who sleeps.”

Recall that the narrator, his anima mirror-double, says, “You have no desire to carry on […] the fleeting and poignant desire to hear no more, to see no more, to remain silent and motionless. Crazy dreams of solitude.”

At one point, in the middle of this solitude, he imagines he has reached this point of nirvana, for the narrator says the following to him:

“As the hours, the days, the weeks, the seasons slip by, you detach yourself from everything.
You discover, with something that sometimes almost resembles exhilaration, that you are free, that nothing is weighing you down, nothing pleases or displeases you.
You find, in this life exempt from wear and tear and with no thrill in it other than these suspended moments, an almost perfect happiness, fascinating, occasionally swollen by new emotions.
You are living in a blessed parenthesis, in a vacuum full of promise, and from which you expect nothing.
You are invisible, limpid, transparent.
You no longer exist…”

His friends have stopped over to say hello, but he ignores the knocking on his door and the paper messages slipped under it. He wants no contact with others, for he has come to understand that hell is other people; he doesn’t want to bear their judgemental gaze…yet the narrator, his internalized Other, addressing him with a judgemental “you,” ensures that he will never escape the hell of judgemental others. Therefore, there is no exit for him, not even in indifferent solitude.

(We hear, almost an hour into the film, “Il n’y a pas d’issue,” that is, “There is no way out,” or “There is no exit”; now, Sartre‘s play is named Huis clos–“Closed Door”–in the original French, but English translations of the play with titles like No Way Out and No Exit would have been well known by the time Perec began writing his story. Besides, the student, when in his chambre de bonne, typically has his door closed, anyway.)

When we see him wandering the streets of Paris, we usually see few if any other people there. This can be seen in the middle of the day, when the streets presumably would be far busier: could he be dreaming during these moments, experiencing wish-fulfillment?

Alone, in his chambre, he smokes, drinks Nescafé, looks up at the cracks on his ceiling (easily associated with the cracks in his mirror, all symbols of his fragmented self), and plays a game of cards similar to solitaire. This escape from the social world, into one of solitary play and contemplation, is not too far removed from the maladaptive daydreaming of traumatized people, or the self-isolation of sufferers of stress from Adverse Childhood Experiences.

His room–small, hot, claustrophobic, and with those cracks in the ceiling and on the mirror–is nonetheless “the centre of the world” for him. The room thus in many ways represents himself: fragmented, narcissistic, a place to hide himself in sleep, and a place to escape from when he can no longer stand himself. He’s as passive as that dripping tap, or those six socks soaking in the pink plastic bowl–sharks as indolent as he is.

With his loss of interest in social life comes also his loss of interest in time, whose passing he barely notices. Similarly, when during his wandering of the Parisian streets, two twin boys in identical clothes are running past him from behind while rattling a ruler against the palings of a fence he’s walking beside, he isn’t at all irritated by the noise. The boys’ duality parallels his duality as against his alienated self, his image in the mirror, the man twice seen in the Magritte picture with his back to us, his imaginary double replacing him in going about his normal daily routine, and his anima narrator…except that the boys are, in their energetic, enthusiastic participation in life, his dialectical opposite–what he still could be if he weren’t so alienated from everything and everyone.

In the Luxembourg Garden, he watches the pensioners playing cards, comparable to his own playing of his solitaire-esque game in his room. Such a comparison suggests a unity of self and other vis-à-vis him and the pensioners…also a dialectical unity between the elderly and his young self.

In a development of this theme of self and other, young vs. old, we see him watching an old man sitting on a bench staring into space “for hours on end,” as if mummified, “gazing into emptiness.” The young man, admiring the elder, would like to know his secrets, for the latter seems to have attained the ideal of detached indifference for which the former has been striving. (One is reminded of Prince Siddhartha seeing a holy man, and thus being inspired to find enlightenment himself.) He looks at the old man as if staring into a mirror, gazing at his ideal-I…so much better than his reflection in his cracked mirror in his room.

At one point, while reading the business news in Le Monde, he imagines himself to be some important businessman or politician smoking a cigar and getting out of a car. Ending the narcissistic fantasy of him identifying himself with important men, he is seen as his ordinary self, playing pinball.

When playing his solitaire-like card game, he removes the aces, so he has no ‘ace in the hole,’ or ‘ace up his sleeve.’ Accordingly, he rarely succeeds at the game, yet winning doesn’t matter to him, for what would winning mean to him, anyway? The card game, after all, is like life: if he’s indifferent to life, why would he care any more about winning at some card game? He goes through the motions like an automaton, all meaninglessly, just as he does through life.

We’ve noticed, by now, that he’s been biting his nails.

As I mentioned above, he reaches a point when his ‘mastery,’ as it were, of the indifferent life has allowed him to attain a kind of bliss. He seems as indifferent as the dripping tap, as the six socks soaking in the plastic pink bowl, as a fly, as a tree, as a rat.

He speaks no more than is absolutely necessary: in this disengagement with language, and therefore with society, he is leaving the Symbolic. “Indifference dissolves language and scrambles the signs.” Though he’d seem to be blissfully regressing to the narcissism of the Imaginary, before long, he’ll experience the trauma of the undifferentiated Real.

In this sense of non-differentiation, he finds himself with a series of choices of ‘you do, or you don’t do.’ These include:

You walk or you do not walk.
You sleep or you do not sleep.
You buy Le Monde or you do not buy it.
You eat or you do not eat.

A little later, the narrator says, “You play pinball or you don’t.” All of these ‘do or not do’ expressions remind us of Hamlet’s “To be or not to be” soliloquy. Just as Hamlet suffered from an inability to act, whether in killing his uncle Claudius or in killing himself, so does the young Parisian student feel incapable of acting, hence his automaton-like passivity and indifference. Still, in the end, like Hamlet, he must act.

Tense music can be heard playing in the background, suggesting that he is reaching the limit of how long he can continue to live the ‘indifferent’ life. Though I mentioned above the black-and-white film as representing his black-and-white psychological splitting, there’s also the preponderance of grey, for he is “a grey man with no connotation of dullness.” Indeed, his life has grown so dull that he’s forgotten what excitement is.

In his narcissism, in his imagined mastery of the indifferent life, he fancies himself “the nameless master of the world.” Buddha-like, he has seen that motionless old man the way Prince Siddhartha saw the impressive holy man (after having seen the old, sick, and dead men, as you’ll recall from his legendary life story), and now he imagines he has attained enlightenment. “All you are is all you know.” Total, narcissistic solipsism…nirvana? I think not.

So in his ‘mastery’ of the indifferent, he’s “inaccessible, like a tree, like a shop window, like a rat.” We again see a shot of him watching the motionless old man, as if he were looking in a mirror at his ideal-I, or like the Buddha seeing the holy man. We see a shot of that indifferent dripping tap, too, as well as shots of a walkway with trees, benches, and fences on either side, yet devoid of any people…the misanthropic young man’s ideal world.

But he soon comes to realize all of the ways that he is not at all like the ‘enlightened’ and ‘indifferent’ rat; for rats don’t have sleepless nights, they don’t bite their fingernails, they don’t wake up bathed in sweat, they don’t dream, against which the young man has no protection.

We come back to Hamlet: “to sleep, perchance to dream.”

Just as Hamlet couldn’t use the “sleep of death” as an escape from his problems, for he’d then have the nightmare of hell to deal with after having committed the sin of suicide, so can’t this young student use the sleep of indifference as an escape from his alienating world, for his nightmares are the return of repressed pain that he’ll never be able to project onto the world and be rid of.

Such an understanding “makes us rather bear those ills we have, than fly to others that we know not of”.

To get back to the biting of his fingernails, we learn that he bites them so violently that they bleed and are in unbearable pain. This violent biting is an example of his excessive attempts at splitting off and projecting those ‘black’ parts of himself that he doesn’t accept. The biting represents his alienation from himself, his refusal to integrate his Shadow.

Rats don’t play pinball, either, and when he plays, for hours on end, he’s in a rage…hardly indifferent. No, he isn’t much of a Buddha. But like Hamlet, he “can play or not play.” He can’t start up a conversation with the pinball machine, though, and this incidentally would seem to be his reason for preferring pinball to people. At the same time, a pinball machine cannot give him the human response, the love, that he so obviously needs.

It is in this very retreat from human company, replacing it with things that will never satisfy, that we can all relate to the young man; for don’t we all, in our own way, attempt a sleep of indifference to the world?

The narrator says repeatedly that he drifts around the streets, an odd behaviour for someone who has supposedly ‘found the answer’ to his problems. He goes back to his room and tries to go to sleep, but he can’t; instead, he would “calmly measure the sticky extent of [his] unhappiness,” and he goes out again and wanders the streets at night.

It is around this point that we start noticing a switch to negative film, back and forth between this and regular black-and-white film. We also hear the first of a series of references to “monstrous” things, or to “monsters”–in this case, “the monstrous factory gates.” We also hear of “impatient crowds,” which I believe are the “monsters” he’s been trying so hard to rid himself of.

Now, unhappiness hasn’t come to him all of a sudden: it’s gradually appeared to him, as if without his knowing until it was fully formed. Unhappiness has been in the cracks on his ceiling, and on his mirror, in the dripping tap, in those things in which he saw blissful indifference. All of his wandering has been meaningless.

As we see him biting his fingernails again, there’s a rapping, percussive sound in the background, reinforcing the sense of his agitation. He keeps playing his absurd card game, having removed the aces, but it offers no way out of his malaise…the same as with his wandering.

By now, an hour into the film, the narrator is speaking faster, with more urgency in her voice. We see negative film again, with crowds of people on the street. That rapping noise is still being heard. “The monsters have come into your life,” the narrator says, “the rats, your fellow creatures, your brothers. The monsters in their tens, their hundreds, their thousands.” These crowds of people are the ones he’s been trying to get away from…but can’t. This is also one of the first references to “rats” that is negative…interesting that this is happening now.

As we see more of the negative film, we hear the narrator say, “You follow their shadows [i.e., those of the “monsters,” the crowds of people], you are their shadow [i.e., you are the very thing you see in them that you won’t accept].” As the rapping sound continues, we also hear the narrator speaking faster, and we hear a dissonant chord played on a keyboard.

We see more shots of crowds of people walking on the streets, we hear more rapping, and the dissonant keyboard chord. Images of condemned, torn-down buildings, too. More references to “monsters,” all those people he hates. The juxtaposition of all these jarring images, sounds, and words is, of course, deliberate. The narrator’s voice is getting more and more agitated. The film alternates between normal black and white and negative film during this climactic moment.

The narrator mentions “…all the others who are even worse, the smug, the smart-Alecs, the self-satisfied…” These people seem suspiciously like projections of himself as the would-be indifferent Buddha. Again, he’s trying to split off and throw away what it is inside himself that he doesn’t like–the Shadow he needs to integrate.

After more repetitions of “monster,” the wanderer in his ongoing bitter meditation starts tossing around the word “sad” through his narrator mouthpiece: “sad city, sad lights in the sad streets, sad clowns in sad music-halls, sad queues outside the sad cinemas, sad furniture in the sad stores.”

His heavenly bliss of indifference has become the hell of a most non-gay Paris.

He feels like a prisoner in his cell, like a rat trying to escape its maze. Again, how odd it is that only now is a rat being used as a simile for something negative. He’s starting to realize that his retreat from the world has never been anything good.

The narrator has finally calmed down. Among the shots of rubble, we see a surrealist image of a sink standing alone; instead of containing water, though, we see a flame on it. Should we interpret this rubble of torn-down buildings, and his flaming sink, as representative of his chambre de bonne, in turn representative of himself, torn apart, fragmented, burning, in a psychotic break with reality, in the traumatic agony of Lacan’s Real Order?

“You are afraid,” the narrator says as he looks at all of the rubble, the home he meant to return to. We see a shot of his cracked mirror again, in between the shots of him looking at the rubble. He runs away, another attempt to run away from himself and his problems. We see the burning sink collapse.

Next is a shot of him calmly walking down a street between parked cars. He is calm, and it seems that he has come to accept the necessity of returning to a life in the real world. We hear an eerie tune played on an organ: a repetition of D to G on the right hand (and variations thereof), a descent in the bass from G to F, then to E-flat and to D-flat. A female voice accompanies the organ by singing a high G.

The young man is no wiser from his detachment from the world. “Indifference has not made you any different.” The nirvana of indifference has led back to the samsara of involvement with the world. Still, he won’t be judged for his failed experiment, for he has done nothing wrong. “No, [he is] not the nameless master of the world.” He’s no Buddha. He is afraid, waiting for the rain to stop…as we all are.

The film ends with the same shot of the buildings of the city that we saw at the beginning. The film has come full circle; he’s back where he began. He’s woken up from his metaphorical sleep, ready to go back into the world with the rest of us. We must all wake from our sleep of death, of indifference, and be involved in life again.

‘Slashers,’ a Sci-Fi Short Story

Two small spherical objects, one red, the other blue, were flying through space in search of life. They entered the Milky Way, then our solar system, having already sensed life on Earth.

They had a kind of cloaking device, ensuring that we would not detect their imminent arrival. By the time they had passed Jupiter in their approach to Earth, they had already absorbed volumes of information about us, including our warlike nature.

The red and blue balls were not spaceships. They were intelligent, technologically-advanced life forms who communicated with each other in a kind of mental telepathy. This is what they said to each other about humanity.

RED: What a hateful, hostile, and cruel life form!
BLUE: Yes. They maim and kill each other, and they do the same to all the subordinate life forms.
RED: If they are allowed to keep living, they will only prolong their own suffering and that of every other life form on the planet.
BLUE: Yes. Ending all their lives quickly, rather than letting them slowly kill themselves, would be kindness to them. Any potential for good in them is far too scanted to compensate for all the evil. We must destroy them.

The balls descended on the Earth, passing through our atmosphere as undetected as before. Only when they hit the ground, with crashing thuds that caused dirt to fly in the air, did we become aware of their presence.

…and even then, instead of being alarmed by this new, alien intervention in our lives, we found ourselves mesmerized by them, too fascinated to be afraid. This hypnotic state was caused by the balls’ technology.

The balls had landed on a flat field about fifty yards apart from each other. They began rolling towards each other on the bumpy ground, slashing through the grass and cutting into the dirt, for as soon as they’d landed, sharp, bonelike spikes came out of the balls, each about ten centimeters in length.

A family having a picnic saw them rolling at each other and causing the sliced-up earth to fly in the air in jumping spots of brown. The father and his two sons of six and eight ran closer to get a better look.

“What are those things, Dad?” the eight-year-old asked.

“I have no idea, Ian,” his dad said.

The balls smashed into each other with a loud, metallic, clanging noise, making them bounce back the way they came. A strange odour emanated through the air beyond the man and his two boys, so that the mother, having remained back at the picnic layout of food on a quilt, also smelled it.

The entire family felt a little dizzy for a few seconds on inhaling the smell.

After that, the man and two boys came closer. The mother left the picnic area and joined them.

Rapt, all four of them watched the spiked red and blue balls roll at each other again.

“Dad,” Ian asked, “did they just get a bit bigger?”

“Yeah, it looks that way,” the father said. “First, they were about the size of basketballs. Now, they’re a bit bigger than the size of medicine balls. The spikes are proportionately longer, too.”

“They’re fighting, aren’t they, Daddy?” the six-year-old asked.

“It looks that way, Jimmy,” Dad said.

“I hope the red one wins,” said Ian.

“So do I,” Dad said.

“Yeah, well, I’m rooting for the blue one,” Mom said.

“Me, too, Mommy,” Jimmy said.

The balls smashed into each other again, making another terrible, deafening metallic sound. All four family members winced and covered their ears. Nonetheless, they were enjoying the show…especially after breathing in more of that alien smell, which wafted in the air in a light pink smoke.

“Could they be aliens?” Ian asked. “Y’know, like Transformers?”

“Could be,” Dad said. “They got bigger again.”

Indeed, the diameter of the balls was the length of the man’s torso, from his waist to his neck. Each time they raced at each other, it was from a distance in between that grew in proportion to the growth in their size. As they accelerated at each other, the family anticipated the noise of the coming crash by covering their ears.

Some other people, coming by car, stopped and got out, then ran in the tall grass to get a closer look at the growing, clashing balls. They smelled the pink fumes and quickly chose sides to root for.

The dirt being dug up and flying in the air looked like swarms of insects. The balls smashed together again, causing a painful ringing in everyone’s ears.

Still, the people couldn’t take their eyes off the spectacle.

They breathed in more of the pink fumes, and felt themselves, after a brief dizziness, more and more hypnotized, transfixed by the battling balls.

“Come on, Blue!” the mother called out.

“Yeah, go, Blue, go!” Jimmy shouted.

“No way!” Ian said. “Red is better! Go, Red!”

“Blue is better!” Jimmy shouted, snarling at his older brother. “Red sucks!”

“It does not!” Ian said, frowning hatefully down at Jimmy. “Blue is the one that sucks!”

“Red sucks! Blue’s the best!”

“Red is the best! Blue sucks!”

“Red sucks!” Jimmy kicked Ian in the knee.

“You little bastard!” Ian gave Jimmy a hard shove, throwing the little boy down in the grass and banging his back against a sharp rock.

Jimmy’s bawling was completely ignored by his older brother and parents, who continued watching the clashing balls, which were now of the diameter of the father’s height. Since with every bouncing back after a collision, the ever-growing balls were proportionately widening their distance from each other, now they were slashing more than just the grass and dirt of the field. Groves of trees on both extreme ends of the field were being mown down by the balls.

The fascinated spectators, breathing more and more of the increasingly potent pink fumes, were now stepping forward, closer and closer to the action, utterly oblivious to the danger they were subjecting themselves to. That family was closest to those spiked balls, but the people who’d arrived later in their cars weren’t far behind.

All of them were chanting “Red! Red! Red!” or “Blue! Blue! Blue!” as they got perilously closer.

The supporters of the red ball came together in a group, as did the supporters of the blue ball. None of them gave a second’s thought to being crushed under the weight of the balls, or of being slashed by the spikes.

They all just kept chanting their colour and walking closer.

By now, those groves of trees were completely torn into fragments and shards of brown and green, lying in a mess on the ground. The balls were three times the size of the tallest of their watchers.

Jimmy was the first to be killed, crushed under the blue ball that he’d been rooting for. He’d shown no fear at all as he, ever-mesmerized, walked under it. His mother, equally unafraid and in a daze, would die next, her body sliced in two by a spike from her beloved blue ball.

Ian would then get crushed under the red ball, one of whose spikes would stab his father through his chest, the bloody point going far out of his back.

Indeed, the balls deliberately calculated their moves, as well as the moves of the people, to ensure every one, without exception, was killed by the very ball they were cheering for, as a kind of cruel irony.

In the end, the entire field was turned into a mash-up of brown, green, and red.

And the balls just continued rolling at each other from farther and farther away from each other, then clashing, then growing again.

By the time they were three times the size of a barn, they’d both crashed into and destroyed several barns and houses. The occupants of these, as mesmerized by the pink gas as the first group of people were, all were crushed, stabbed into, or bisected…all without even one scream of terror.

No police or army made the slightest attempt to stop the red and blue balls. Nobody in the news media, mainstream or alternative, uttered a word of warning, though all media reported on the phenomenon as if it were the most riveting of entertainment. Indeed, all anyone did in response to the balls’ presence was to go over and look with fascination, or if too far away, to watch it on TV, read about it online or in newspapers or magazines, or hear about it on the radio.

All of those who watched the clashing in person, of course, breathed in the pink fumes and became all the more enthralled with the spectacle.

Within an hour of the entire event, the balls had grown to the point of their diameters equalling the height of apartment buildings. By this time, they were rolling through cities on either side of that field, crushing and destroying houses and skyscrapers far faster than any wrecking balls could.

Still, there was no hope of any resistance from the people, who just stared at the rolling, slashing, and crushing like mindless zombies. A mass chanting of “Red! Red! Red!” and “Blue! Blue! Blue!” could be heard throughout both cities.

Any words or actions other than these were those of people fighting with each other for cheering on the ‘wrong’ colour. This fighting would end when the supporters of either ball wandered into their respective groups, always chanting the colour of their choice.

…until that colour crushed, slashed, or stabbed into them.

And with all that clashing into each other, neither ball had even one, ever-so-tiny, scratch on its red or blue surface.

Still, the supporters of each side imagined the other ball to be losing. With each clash, the supporters of Red would watch Blue bounce back as if badly damaged, and would pay no mind to how Red would bounce back with equal force, though Blue’s supporters would watch Red’s bouncing back and ignore Blue’s.

The people would argue these absurdities:

“Ooh! Red took a real beating that time.”

“You mean Blue took the beating.”

“No, Red did! Blue doesn’t even have a scratch.”

“Red doesn’t have even a scratch! Are you blind?”

“Are you blind?”

Then the two would have a fistfight.

…yet, as I said, neither ball had even one scratch.

By the time the spiked balls’ diameters had equalled the height of the tallest buildings in the world, they were now rolling back and forth way beyond the widths of fields or cities, but now back along the entire width of the North American continent, from the east coast to the west, destroying everything and killing everyone, man, woman, and child, in their path.

Nobody felt any fear when coming dangerously close to the paths rolled on; all anyone ever did was watch, on TV or in person, and cheer for his or her colour.

When the red ball went back beyond the west coast and across the Pacific Ocean, as when the blue ball went past the east coast and across The Atlantic Ocean, both balls flew across the surfaces of the water, not sinking down into it…though their spikes managed to slash into or stab much of the marine life.

By the time the balls, in their rolling back from clashes, had reached the shores of northern Asia and Europe, they’d grown monstrously huge, easily visible from space. Blue rolled through Paris, killing everyone to a man and destroying every piece of architecture there; one would never see the Eiffel Tower or the Arc de Triomphe again. Red went through the Great Wall of China, smashing a huge section of it to pieces.

The pink fumes by now had spread around the world, ensuring that not one person could resist being enthralled by the spectacle. No one even flinched at the sight of crushed cities or massacred people from the ceaseless rolling and clashing of those two ever-growing juggernauts. People imagined they saw damage only on the ball they were opposed to.

Once the balls had been rolling so wide apart that they were clashing twice at a time, that is, rolling so far back that they’d roll all the way around the world, to clash once in North America, then in Kazakhstan, they’d grown to be each about a sixth of the size of the Earth, excluding their proportionally lengthening spikes, which were digging deep into the ground and ripping it up.

Now that they were rolling along the entire diameter of the Earth, the balls changed the direction of the rolling, to destroy the rest of the planet. No longer tearing up just the north, they shifted more and more southward, slashing into southern Europe and Asia, ripping through all of the US, mutilating Africa, and destroying Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean islands.

…and all the (momentary) survivors did was continue watching in awe, never budging from their TVs, computer screens, tablets, or–so to speak–front-row seats.

When nuclear arsenals got smashed into, the destruction their explosions caused was insignificant compared to what the balls were doing.

By the time the balls were starting to roll across the southern hemisphere, slashing into the northern countries of South America, central Africa, Indonesia, and the northernmost tip of Australia, the balls and their spikes had grown so much that they were tearing the Earth up into chunks of rock that broke away. The planet no longer even remotely resembled a sphere; instead, it was looking more and more like an asteroid field with a huge chunk of jagged rock in the middle.

…and the ever-so-few survivors, the remainder of their lives now so pitifully brief, only continued staring at the giant balls…if their electricity and Wi-Fi were still working. If not, they just stared mindlessly at black screens, unmoving.

Once everything was essentially destroyed, the balls pulled in their spikes, floated away from the chunks of Earth–smashing into a number of now-useless satellites–and shrank back to their original sizes.

As they flew out of the solar system, they reflected on what they’d just done.

RED: Now the people of Earth know true happiness, as they could ever have it.
BLUE: Yes. They have death to enjoy.

Funnels

There have always been
a concentrated group
of people who
will know
how
one
may
see

the wise way to go, but
how do we get all
the others out
there to
see
the
way
out

of our current trap?
There are those
to the right,
they who
can
not
see
one

thing amiss about
class conflict,
but believe
markets
to be
the
one
way
out.

Then, there are those
on the ultra-left
who are not
satisfied
unless
all
is
set
up

without any faults.
how can one
funnel
such
men
in
so

thin a space to get
us all out of
this mess
that
we
are
in?

Analysis of ‘Burn!’

Burn!, or Queimada, is a 1969 historical film directed by Gillo Pontecorvo. It stars Marlon Brando, with Evaristo Márquez and Renato Salvatori. It was written by Franco Solinas and Giorgio Arlorio, who based the fictional story partly on the activities of William Walker, an American filibuster involved in the 1855 invasion of Nicaragua, and whose name was used for Brando’s character. The music was composed by Ennio Morricone, with the beautiful, anthemic “Abolisson” (“abolição,” or “abolition”–i.e., abolition of slavery, or abolition of private property) playing during the film’s opening credits.

Burn! has been critically acclaimed in the US and abroad. Edward Said praised it and Pontecorvo’s film, The Battle of Algiers, saying they “…stand unmatched and unexcelled since they were made in the 60s. Both films together constitute a political and aesthetic standard never again equaled.” The film gives a raw and uncompromising depiction of colonialism, imperialism, and slavery. Of these three evils, David N. Meyer said in The Brooklyn Rail that “…few other films ever address them at all,” something Michael Parenti has also observed. Indeed, anti-imperialist cinema like Burn! typically gets minimal distribution in theaters…for reasons that should be obvious.

Here is a link to quotes from the film, and here is a link to the full movie, partly in English and partly in Italian with English subtitles.

Sir William Walker is an agent provocateur, sent to the island of Queimada in 1844 by the British Admiralty, for the purpose of stirring up a slave revolt among the blacks on the island to remove the Portuguese regime, so the Antilles Royal Sugar Company can take over and economically exploit the place. In the Lesser Antilles, Queimada literally means “burnt,” because the Portuguese once had to burn the entire island down to put down the resistance of the indigenous people, after whose deaths blacks were brought to the island to work the cane fields.

The flames of Queimada are the hellfire of imperialism.

It’s interesting how in this film we have an American actor playing a British character based on an American, a casting that suggests the intersection of American and British imperialism. The notion of burning the entire island down, in a film made in 1969, when the Vietnam War was still going on, also invites comparison between the destructiveness of the imperialism of the past with modern imperialism, with its napalm fire and bombings of all those people today who try to defy the US/NATO empire.

Empire rules by a cunning combination of the carrot and the stick. We usually note the stick, but don’t pay enough attention to the carrot. Burn! brings our focus to the carrot in how we see Walker entice José Dolores (Márquez) into leading a slave rebellion to help the British oust the Portuguese.

In all of Walker’s machinations we also see an example of inter-imperialist conflict. As competitors in the production and sale of sugar, the British and Portuguese naturally dislike each other, as we see in the altercations between Walker and Portuguese soldiers at the beginning of the film.

We should wince when we see the stark contrast between the wealthy whites, in their fine clothing, getting off the boat with Walker, on the one hand, and the appalling poverty of the blacks, the children of whom are typically half- or fully naked. José appears, offering to carry Walker’s bags: this offer of service will be a motif repeated in the middle of the film and at the end, with strongly ironic overtones…of the sort of the Hegelian master/slave dialectic.

Walker’s original intention on coming to Queimada has been to meet with a black rebel named Santiago, but the rebel has been caught, and he is to be executed. Walker is informed of the bad news by Teddy Sanchez (Salvatori, in dark makeup), a man of mixed African and European background with revolutionary ideals for the island, but ultimately an ineffectual leader. José is standing by as Walker hears the news, a kind of foreshadowing that he will soon replace Santiago, for Walker’s purposes.

Walker later provokes a Portuguese soldier to get himself arrested, so he can watch Santiago’s brutal execution, which includes the use of the garrote and decapitation, from the window of his prison cell. Being white and wealthy, though, Walker can get a lawyer and be freed promptly.

He follows the widow and children of Santiago as they carry his headless corpse from the prison back up a hill to their home. He gives them a hand in carrying the cart part of the way up the hill; in this act of his, knowing how two-faced he really is, we can see in Walker a personification of the liberal who pretends to care for the downtrodden, but who is really just using these people for his own ends.

We see a similar thing going on today when our movie stars are all simping for Ukraine (Ben Stiller, Sean Penn, Mark Hamill, etc.), pretending they care about the suffering of Ukrainians, when it’s really about promoting the interests of the US/NATO empire, even to the point of defending neo-Nazis (however much the celebrities in question are unaware of, or in denial of, that ugly reality). In this way, it is fitting that a Hollywood actor is playing Walker, a bad guy pretending to be a good guy (though, in Brando‘s defence, he did reject his Godfather Oscar as a protest against Hollywood’s mistreatment of Native Americans; also, Brando considered his performance in Burn! to have been the best of his career).

Alberto Grimaldi, producer of Burn!, wanted Sidney Poitier to play José, but Pontecorvo wanted Márquez for the role. I agree with the director’s choice, not out of disrespect for Poitier, of course, but because an unknown actor is more fitting to play the underdog José.

Since Santiago is dead, Walker needs someone to replace him, someone brave, who takes initiative, someone with nothing to lose. He spots these qualities in José, and tests the black man by abusing him with strikes to the face, calling him a “black ape” who stole his bags when he was arrested, slandering his dead mother, and asking if everything a white man says is correct. At first, José is submissive, suggesting he won’t make a good revolutionary leader…then José tries attacking Walker with a machete.

José is Walker’s man, after all.

What’s ironic in Walker’s provocations of José is that his white supremacism is, of course, genuine, rather than merely posturing as a test to awaken José’s rage. The reality of that white supremacism will be clear to José in good time.

Such dialectical juxtapositions of contraries as these are a theme running throughout the movie. Walker as both “friend” and foe of the blacks, the carrot and stick of imperialism, wealthy whites in their finery among half-naked blacks, and half-white, half-black Sanchez, who lives among the privileged but, sympathetic to the blacks, is ultimately powerless and useless to their cause. Even the band of blacks whom José gathers to commit a bank robbery, meet in a church…and the bank–house of the wealth of the privileged Portuguese–is the Banco Espírito Santo.

The Portuguese soldiers will be distracted by drunk, reveling blacks at night, making the robbery much easier. After informing the Portuguese of where José and his men are, Walker supplies his revolutionaries with weapons and teaches them how to use them. His playing of one side against the other reminds us of how two-faced Walker is.

Since Walker has lied to the Portuguese about a supposedly small number of black thieves, they overconfidently send too few soldiers to retrieve the stolen money, and they are killed by José’s men, an encouragement to his people. Soon they’ll have to fight more Portuguese, of course, and in the process, Walker’s robbery grows into a full-blown revolution.

In making José into a revolutionary leader, Walker has made him into both a blessing and a thorn in the side of the British, as we’ll soon see…another example of the theme of juxtaposed opposites in the film.

While José’s revolution is carrying on, Walker of course has his own, British agenda. In a meeting with a group of wealthy white men, Walker discusses how paid workers will be economically preferable to slaves.

In making his case, he uses a shrewd, if “impertinent,” metaphor: men’s use of wives vs. their use of prostitutes. The wife, in the context of the patriarchal family, is analogous to the slave; she’s her husband’s chattel, but all of her expenses are paid by him, even her burial, if he should survive her. The prostitute, on the other hand, is analogous to the modern-day wage labourer; in belonging to no man (her pimp notwithstanding!), she is “freer,” but her client pays only for her services, and she has to pay for her expenses all out of her own pocket.

This analogy is another example of the film’s dialectical juxtapositions of opposites. The British Empire ended slavery not so much out of humanitarian reasons (though these, as well as slave revolts, were significant factors) as out of the economic reasons Walker has laid out in his women-as-property analogy. Slaves are freed, a good thing; but now they’re wage slaves who are no longer provided for, a bad thing.

So, freeing the black slaves isn’t really freeing them, any more than a prostitute is freed…not if the Antilles Royal Sugar Company can help it. This means that Walker et al cannot allow José Dolores to become another Toussaint L’Ouverture.

For a time, the blacks are happy, celebrating, dancing, and making music. What’s left of the Portuguese regime is allowing them a day of freedoms, the “Dia de Reis,” a kind of Saturnalia. The increasingly demoralized Portuguese soldiers can only stand around in disgust at the sight of the costumed revelers.

Now, just as Walker is using the blacks for his purposes, so is he using Sanchez, whose blackness he sees more than his whiteness. At the same time, presumably because of that whiteness, Walker is more direct with Sanchez about how he is using him–to assassinate the Portuguese governor so Sanchez can head the new provisional government, freeing Britain to exploit the sugar cane industry.

José and his men are to lay down their arms and be workers for the Antilles Royal Sugar Company in exchange for the abolition of slavery in Queimada. We hear Morricone’s “Abolisson” again at this point in the film.

José, wearing the uniform of one of the Portuguese soldiers, doesn’t yet know of Walker’s double-dealing, and he still imagines that “Inglês” is his friend. José still thinks that Queimada belongs to him and his people.

José will soon learn the disillusioning truth, though. He’s already uncomfortable having to negotiate a new Queimada constitution with a provisional government made up of white men. He is cool even when meeting Sanchez, seeing his white skin more than his black; this is all in spite of how Sanchez warmly greets him and sincerely hopes for the best for José’s people. He warns Sanchez to be plain with him during the negotiations.

Over the course of a month of discussions with the whites over how to establish the new constitution, it becomes clear to José that they have no intention of relinquishing control of Queimada. To their obviously self-serving suggestions, he can only say “No.” In frustration, he leaves the room, calling them all “Bastards.”

They rationalize their control over the sugar cane industry by insisting it will be good for the blacks economically, but José can see through these white exploiters. All that matters to them is maintaining a maximization of profit, while he cares about his people. He orders his men to remove all the whites from the building.

Walker carries on with the rationalizing, telling José that his politically inexperienced blacks cannot modernize Queimada without the help of the whites. Walker speaks of who, other than the whites, will handle commerce, teach in Queimada’s schools, and cure the sick among the blacks; but as anyone familiar with colonialism will tell you, those whites will handle commerce, teach in schools, and cure the sick only for the benefit of other wealthy whites. The poor blacks won’t enjoy any of those benefits.

José knows that it’s better, for Queimada to go forward, if the whites go away. The blacks, in their inexperience of modern forms of government, commerce, education, and medicine, will surely stumble many times, but they’ll also learn from their mistakes, and in doing so, they’ll move much farther forward, in due time, than they will as exploited wage slaves, forever mired in poverty, because their white slave masters have never had any intention of giving up their power.

José goes outside at night to reunite with his people. He’s saddened by his disappointments with the whites, but to see his people again, those he loves and who love him, brings a smile back on his face.

Walker finds José in a tent, and with a revolver he is prepared to shoot the revolutionary he’s created; but José finally agrees to his men’s laying down of their arms and returning to the plantations. He can see the pragmatism of going along with the British, to prevent extreme poverty and starvation from engulfing the island; but he warns Walker of who has the machetes, which can cut off heads as well as the cane.

In his warning to the British, who in their selling of the cane that he and his people cut, in their dependence on their black workers, the British are reminded of the slave/master dialectic. This observation should be seen in connection with the following scene the next day, when José offers again to carry Walker’s bags, “for a friend,” as the agent provocateur is going to his ship to leave Queimada. This offer to carry Walker’s bags should be remembered at the end of the film, again in symbolic connection with Hegel’s master/slave dialectic.

Walker is going to Indochina, to do more of his imperialist cajoling there. He shares a pleasant drink with José, the two of them exchanging friendly smiles, before he boards his ship. His fake friendship with José perfectly exemplifies the two-faced nature of liberals towards those oppressed by imperialism, something the oppressed should be ever wary of.

Ten years later, Walker is sought out so he can go back to Queimada and quell an uprising of José’s in response to the British takeover of the island. What must be emphasized here is how imperialism is in the service of wealthy capitalists. It isn’t just governments who are bullying the blacks of Queimada.

A scene at the London Stock Exchange demonstrates clearly how the financial success of the sugar businesses has given them great political power over their plantations. Men from the Antilles Royal Sugar Company look for Walker, so he can do something about José. He is found in a pub, in the middle of a fistfight that he wins; this detail adds to our understanding of Walker’s brutishness, for we even see him hit the two men seeking him out.

When Walker returns to Queimada, we find not only José rebelling against British exploitation, but also Teddy Sanchez is growing to be uncooperative. Paid for by the Antilles Royal Sugar Company, Walker will act as a military advisor to help put down José’s rebellion. In this we can see clearly how imperialism and colonialism are working in the interests of capitalism; this point would normally be so obvious that it wouldn’t need to be said, except that right-wing libertarians generally refuse to admit that their precious “free market” is ever guilty of any wrongdoing. Government acts alone in these forms of wickedness, in their opinion.

Sanchez hopes Walker will be able to negotiate with José as he had before–to offer the blacks equal civil rights, higher wages, and a general amnesty. The other men in power are hoping Walker will simply get rid of him, and Walker is leaning towards their way of solving the problem.

Another example of the carrot/stick tactic of imperialism is having many black men on the island work as soldiers for the British. We see some of them round up a group of insurgents, line them against the side of a building, and shoot them. One can imagine how the other, powerless blacks must look on these uniformed men as traitors to their own people.

Walker saves one of the men to be shot, needing him to mediate between Walker and José. Though he saves the man’s life for this purpose, because the man tries to run away, Walker shoots him in the leg. In this act, we see, in a symbolic sense, how even when Walker does something good in itself, bad always accompanies the good–more juxtaposing of opposites.

In his conversation with Walker, the man repeats what he’s heard José say, which is the reason for this revolt: the plantation workers, toiling away for the most paltry of wages, are still slaves because they have only machetes, but no ownership of the sugar cane business. We Marxists have always understood how the same basic contradiction has existed throughout history, regardless of if it’s in the form of master vs. slave, feudal lord vs. peasant, or bourgeoisie vs. proletariat: those who own the land and means of production have the power, and they will always be at war with their powerless labourers.

Walker tells the man, just before he is to ride off on a horse to tell José of Walker’s intentions, that he will be pleased to see him. Walker even has the man give José an alcoholic drink as a gift. Such acts are yet more examples of the two-faced liberal pretending to be the friend of the man he’s oppressing.

Walker asks a black soldier working for the imperialists why he isn’t fighting on José’s side. The man doesn’t answer, having a look of shame on his face, but the answer is obvious: his work is safer and better paid…hence, Walker’s smile.

Walker’s container of alcohol is returned from José, with a message on it, saying that he doesn’t drink anymore. José is wise to Walker’s lies now. The message has been sent to him on a cart with dead imperialist soldiers tied to it. It’s obvious that José is done with negotiating. This is war.

In preparing for this war, Walker as the military adviser notes how, in spite of how the imperialists have far more men, weapons, money, etc. than José’s men have, the imperialists haven’t been able to defeat José for these six years; apart from the guerrillas’ inaccessible location, the reason for this frustration is that the imperialists fight for their pay and because they have to, whereas the guerrillas fight for an idea, because they have nothing to lose but their lives. They fight for their love of freedom, and this love motivates them in a way that nothing comparable can for the imperialists. Revolutionaries must never forget this edge they have over the powerful, and must use this edge to steel their courage.

The black collaborators manage to find where the guerrillas and the people they’re protecting are, and they round up the people; then, carrying torches, they burn down the forests where the guerrillas have been hiding. As with the Portuguese, the imperialists’ method of victory is total, indiscriminate destruction, with no respect for plant life, just like the “innocents raped with napalm fire” during the Vietnam War.

A dying black collaborator tells his comrades that the guerrillas emerged from the fire, themselves burning, and killed him and his fellow collaborators there at a fort. The dying man describes the guerrillas as inhuman devils, an obvious projection of how inhuman and devilish the torchers of the forest are.

The imperialists find other villages where the rebels’ people are living, and the black collaborators round them up, too, and burn down their homes. Dogs chase a guerrilla through the fields until he comes to a clearing, then he is shot.

Sanchez, ever torn between his wish to help the blacks and his being forced to help the whites (perfectly symbolized in his half-white, half-black skin), tells all the rounded-up people that the war is José’s fault, it will end soon, and they will all go back to work. The frown on his face shows how reluctant he is in telling them this.

Bread is offered on a cart to the hungry people, and while they are expected to sit and wait patiently for it to be distributed, they rush for the cart, and the collaborators have to fire their rifles to bring about order. Sanchez, in his growing frustration, makes an attempt to take control of the government for the sake of the blacks. His unwillingness to cooperate with the Antilles Royal Sugar Company will be his undoing. In his downfall, we see how the government is controlled by the capitalists, not vice versa.

British redcoats arrive on the island to help defeat José. Sanchez is arrested on a trumped-up charge of treason, and he is executed by firing squad. His arrest is “in the name of the people of Queimada,”…but we all know which people are being referred to here.

The redcoats start fighting the guerrillas, and we see them rounding up the blacks, including women and children. We see the trauma in the eyes of a naked black boy when he has rifles pointed at him. Cannon and rifle fire have left a fog of smoke and a sea of flame all over the plantations…Queimada, indeed. Guerrillas are getting shot left, right, and centre, including the one who mediated between Walker and José.

Shelton (played by Norman Hill) complains of the destruction of the sugar cane plants that has resulted from the battle. After explaining that the plants can be grown again for future exploitation by the Antilles Company, Walker tells Shelton why the island is named Queimada, and that the danger of revolutionary fervour passing from here to other exploited islands greatly outweighs any momentary loss of profits.

José is spotted in Walker’s telescope; he is climbing a mountain with his fellow guerrillas. Here he is shot and captured. Just so we have no doubts about Walker’s duplicitous nature, he describes José as “a fine specimen” who started as a water and bag carrier, made into a revolutionary leader for England’s purposes, and then when he is no longer useful, he is eliminated, “a small masterpiece”; Walker says all of this while smiling.

Just as Walker has spoken of new sugar cane crops growing after a burning, so does José speak of a rebirth of revolutionary feeling after the imperialist fire has defeated him. José says this among the black collaborationists, as if to plant the seed in their minds, to move them to redeem themselves. José knows that others with replace him after he’s executed, hence he doesn’t fear death.

Walker comes over to greet José and shake his hand, but the latter of course won’t shake the hand of the man who’s stabbed him in the back so many times. Walker offers José drink, but he remains cool. Walker has a soldier give José his horse; this gift doesn’t make Walker any more his friend by the weight of an atom.

A naked black boy is found in one of the desolate villages; Walker orders a black collaborator to grab the boy and take him with them. We hear the cries and screams of the boy as he’s carried off. As this is happening, Walker rides over to José and angrily blames the victim, calling José a “black ape” again, and accusing him of starting the bloodshed, in true imperialist fashion. José spits in Walker’s face.

When José is to be hanged, Walker hopes to free him, not out of any sense of camaraderie or remorse (as the Wikipedia article spuriously claims), but because Walker fears making a martyr out of him, inspiring future revolutionaries. If Walker can make it seem to the blacks that José has betrayed them, or has fled death like a coward, then the spirit of revolution may die with him…or at least be weakened.

This attitude is what we should see in Walker when he enters José’s tent and tries to cut him loose. He feels no remorse whatsoever for having betrayed José. In offering him a chance to save his life, Walker is making no act of atonement. Earlier, we even see Walker tie the noose to hang José with.

José chooses to be hanged rather than run free, since he knows that staying alive would be convenient to the British. His martyrdom will indeed inspire future revolutionaries among the blacks; a spark of such inspiration is to be seen in the final scene, as Walker approaches the ship to take him off the island.

The frown we see on Walker’s face as he goes there is, as I said above, not a frown of remorse, despite what the liberal editors of Wikipedia would have you believe. His is a frown from having not done the best he could have done at his job, something he earlier said he prides himself on. He’s frowning at José’s martyrdom, a danger to the empire, and a sign that Walker has ultimately failed in his imperial project.

His failure is to be openly displayed when he hears a black man offer to carry his bags again. Hearing the voice from behind, Walker has a brief hope it’s the voice of José. He frowns in disappointment to see it’s a different man, who then sticks a knife in Walker’s gut.

As he lies dead on the ground, we see black workers looking from all around at him, frowning because of all the pain, suffering, and death that his machinations have caused them, but they’re also content to have finally got their revenge. After the burning, the spirit of revolution will be reborn.

This act of service, offering to take his bags, then stabbing him, is once again a symbolic manifestation of the master/slave dialectic. Capitalists will hang themselves on the very rope they make, just as they made José hang, since he so willingly allowed it. We don’t need the capitalists; they need us, the proletariat. It’s their very dependance on our work that will be their undoing, and this is what the taking of Walker’s bags, then the taking of his life, at this final moment of the film, symbolize.

We in today’s world can use Burn! to teach us to beware the carrot as well as the stick of imperialism. When they offer us freedom in manufacturing our consent for their wars, they’re really scheming to cause us to suffer more servitude to the depredations of empire, that juxtaposition of contraries that I mentioned above.

It’s obscene to call the Ukrainian war against Russia a struggle for Ukrainian freedom and democracy (as the European bootlickers of the US assert), when the very Ukrainian authorities being given all the Western money and aid include neo-Nazis who have banned eleven opposition parties and corruptly used much of the money for their own personal use. Indeed, a substantial portion of military hardware sent to Ukraine has ended up sold on the black market.

The war planned against China, using the Taiwanese no less as cannon fodder as the Ukrainians are being used, will also be spuriously presented in the media as a fight for democracy. The real plan is to weaken China and Russia, and to bring about regime change in the two countries, and therefore to ensure a lasting US hegemony. In Burn!, we see the same basic idea: use the blacks as cannon fodder to remove the Portuguese and ensure British hegemony on the island.

We mustn’t allow the Walkers of the world to have their way. We mustn’t be the José Dolores who goes along with such schemes, only to be stabbed in the back, dolorous in the end. Instead, we must be the José who takes up the real fight, and who spits in the face of the Walkers of the world.

If we carry his bags, we must carry a knife, too.

‘Sister Sorceress,’ an Erotic Short Story

Mary MacDillon, 22, thought nothing of her being moved to a new convent in a new city. She assumed most of the nuns here, just as they were in the one she’d just left, would be almost all plain-looking or much older than she.

As soon as she came in, however, she noted a peculiar thing about the place. Not only were there, as she first started looking around at all the nuns, more…and more…young, slim nuns with pretty faces, but all of them were young, slim, and pretty…without exception!

What a strangely fortuitous occurrence, she thought…with a bit of a shudder. It was paradoxically good and bad luck for her. Secretly, she had lesbian desires that her strict Catholic upbringing would never accept, so being surrounded by unattractive women would keep her safe from temptation. But now,…

The bad luck was precisely that this was also good luck.

She whispered a “Hail, Mary” prayer over and over again as she approached the cell where she was to sleep. As she looked over the sea of faces of nuns walking by, hoping to see at least one wrinkled face or one obese body, yet being disappointed (and secretly thrilled) to see only beauties, she noticed one nun from a distance who lifted up her tunic to reveal a creamy-smooth white leg with a…tattoo?…up towards her left thigh.

No, it couldn’t be a tattoo! Mary thought. What self-respecting nun would have one of those on her body? My eyes must have been deceiving me! It was a large birthmark of some kind, surely.

Finally, she reached her cell. “Here you are, Sister Mary,” said Father Funn, the only male (also young and handsome, not that she was interested) who lived in this convent…alone in his own cell, surely! He put down her two bags of luggage by the door. “In you go now, and meet your cellmate. If you need anything, you know where to find my cell.”

“Thank you, Father,” she said as he turned around to leave. “Goodbye.” She faced the door. Before opening it, she took a deep breath and said another “Hail, Mary.” Lord, don’t put me to the test, she thought as she slowly turned the doorknob. Please, cellmate, be fat, old, and ugly.

She opened the door wide. Not only was her cellmate not fat, old, or ugly, she was also…not…dressed.

Mary stared at the naked loveliness of her new cellmate with her eyes and mouth at their widest. The young woman had her back to Mary, who in a daze was admiring her coffee-coloured skin, her curves, and her round buttocks. Her hair was a wavy cascade of brown that draped down to just below her shoulders.

She turned her head around to see Mary. She grinned from ear to ear. “Oh!” she said in high-pitched delight. “You must be Sister Mary MacDillon, my new cellmate. So nice to meet you finally. I’m Sister Jessica Bell, but everyone calls me Jessie.”

She turned around and walked towards Mary to shake her hand, displaying her frontal nudity–firm, medium-sized breasts with erect, brown nipples, and all her pubic hair removed!–in all insouciance.

Mary, in her amazement, had forgotten that the door was still open.

“Mary,” Jessie asked with a smirk, “do you want to display my body to all passersby, or do you want to close the door?”

“Oh! I’m sorry,” Mary said, snapping out of it and immediately turning around to close the door.

As the door clicked shut, Jessie began to say, “Father Funn just passed by before I reminded you of the door. I’m sure he just got the best thrill he’s had in a long time.” She giggled lewdly at this.

“I’m sorry,” Mary said again, trying to look Jessie straight in the eyes and not look any lower. Why does she have to be so immodest?

“That’s alright,” Jessie said. “It’s my fault. I just returned from the shower and took off my bathrobe. It’s been such a hot day that I didn’t want to put anything on at the moment. Instead, I was making some tea, which just heated up the cell even more. Would you like some? It’s really tasty.”

“Oh, yes, please, Jessie, I’d love some.” Why won’t she put some clothes on? God, why are you putting me to the test?

“Have you eaten dinner? They just finished serving it, and we all just ate in the dining hall, so I think you’ll be too late to have some.”

“Oh, I’ve eaten already. I’m quite tired actually, and ready for bed.”

“Oh, good,” Jessie said, handing Mary a fresh cup of hot tea.

Mary brought it up to her nose. “That’s quite a unique aroma.”

“Yes, I combine a lot of special ingredients–herbs, spices, mushrooms, and other things–to get a unique flavour. Try it. It’s also very healthy.”

“Yes, of course,” Mary said, then took a sip. “Mmm. As you said, it’s really tasty.” She turned away from Jessie for obvious reasons, put the cup on the bedside table, and looked with alarm at the one bed she was to share with Jessie every night, Jessie who was as unashamed as Eve was before eating the forbidden fruit. Trying to take her mind off her temptation, Mary reached down to her bags to begin unpacking, and said, “I always thought cells were supposed to be lived in by only one person at a time. In my previous convent, we all slept together in a dormitory, but I thought I’d be alone in my cell here.”

“Well, there are budget constraints in our convent, so we nuns are paired up in our cells,” Jessie explained, still not bothering to put anything on. “Often, new nuns like you are paired up with nuns like me, who have been here for quite a while, to show the new girls the ropes. Only Father Funn sleeps alone in his own cell, and I hardly need to explain to you why that is.” She giggled lewdly again.

“I see,” Mary said with a sigh of annoyance at Jessie’s flippant attitude. Mary took some clothes out of her bag and put them in a drawer by the bedside table.

“Drink your tea,” Jessie said. “Don’t let it get cold.”

“Oh, I won’t.” Mary picked up the cup and had another, larger sip, then went back to unpacking. She looked out the window for a moment: the sun was setting. She noticed, while still trying to resist the temptation to look at Jessie’s body, that her nude companion wasn’t having any tea for herself. “Aren’t you going to drink some?”

“Oh, I’ll have some a little later. You just enjoy yours for now.” After that, Mary noticed that Jessie was whispering something to herself…was it in Latin?

Once Mary finished unpacking, she began taking off her habit. It would feel good to take it off, for as Jessie had observed, it was a really hot day; though Mary had her own reasons for sweating so profusely–her nervousness, for the eyes of ever-naked Jessie had lit up to note her undressing. Mary had another gulp of her tea and tried not to think about that naughty nun.

She made sure that she had her nightgown ready to throw on as soon as she was stripped down to her bra and panties, for Jessie was still looking at her. Jessie also hadn’t drunk any of the tea she’d made, though Mary finished her cup and gave it back to Jessie with a “Thank you,” naïvely not even considering the possibility–with all of her worries of her naked cellmate watching her undress–that there might have been something…unusual…in that tea.

Mary got into bed and closed her eyes, now feeling remarkably relaxed. “Good night, Sister Jessie,” she said, then let out a big sigh and let herself go.

After turning off the light, ever-nude Jessie climbed into bed beside Mary, using the dim night light from the opened window to watch her silhouette drift into…what Mary would assume to be…unconsciousness.

Jessie continued chanting in Latin, but no longer in whispers. Mary was able to make out fragments of what Jessie was saying, the first fragment being, “Blessed art thou among women…” Was Jessie chanting the ‘Hail, Mary’ prayer? Mary wondered. Whatever she was chanting, it suggested that Jessie was a good nun after all, if a little eccentric.

Next, Mary heard, in Latin, “He who loveth not knoweth not God, for God is love,” emphasizing the word love. Again, Mary felt reassured of Jessie’s commitment to her faith. Her nudity must have been an anomalous occurrence, nothing more. Mary was able to relax even more, though something in her was making relaxing surprisingly easy.

Then she felt a light, brief kiss on her lips.

Instead of rising from her bed in wide-eyed shock, though, Mary just enjoyed the sensuous touch of Jessie’s lips. She opened her eyes slowly and saw…her young mother’s face? No, that couldn’t have been: her mother was now fifty-five and living in a city on the other side of the country. Mary must have been having a dream.

The dark room was moving left to right in slow waves, as Mary saw it. A spot of moonlight from outside, coming in the window from Mary’s far right, was trailing in a wavy line when her eyes moved to the left, away from it. She felt her body undulating with the waves in the air all around her. She felt as if she were merging with her surroundings.

She felt another kiss on her lips. Her eyes, having adjusted to the dark, met those of her kisser, and she could make out Jessie’s face this time. Again, though, instead of being shocked, she welcomed the kiss. Something in her body was telling her there was nothing sinful about what she and Jessie were doing.

She felt more soft kisses on her lips, cheeks, nose, and forehead. She fell Jessie’s hands stroking her hair and caressing her cheeks. Jessie said in Latin, “These three last forever: faith, hope, and love; and the greatest of these is love,” this last word being stressed, as before.

Now Mary felt Jessie moving up on the bed to bring her breasts level with Mary’s face. She felt the raspberry nipples of those sugary breasts brushing gently against her face. Mary opened her mouth and took Jessie’s left nipple inside. She sucked on it for several seconds, then looked up at the face of her naked lover.

The face shifted back and forth between being Jessie’s and being her mother’s. Still, Mary wasn’t shocked: she just enjoyed her ‘dream.’

Jessie moved back down to bring her face level with Mary’s again; as she moved down, she brushed her breasts against Mary’s chin, neck, and chest.

They resumed kissing, but this time with Jessie sliding her tongue deep inside Mary’s mouth. Jessie put Mary’s right hand between her legs, soaking her fingers. She also put her hand under Mary’s nightgown and slid her fingers under her panties to touch her in the same, wet place. As she stroked Mary’s vaginal opening and hymen, Jessie did more Latin chanting, but this time it was nothing from the Vulgate Bible or anything Mary recognized as being even remotely Catholic. In fact, Mary felt herself to be in such a dream-state that she couldn’t make out the meaning of this Latin at all; she only knew that it was Latin.

She didn’t want to listen to or interpret any Latin, anyway. These were the best sensations she’d ever felt in her entire life! After another minute or so of this delectable touching, she let out a high-pitched sigh with Jessie, and they both climaxed. In Mary’s dream-state, she had a vision of a river flowing from between her legs.

**********

She woke up just as the sun was beginning to peek through the window. She saw Jessie in an almost unrecognizable form: she was fully dressed, in a nun habit!

Jessie looked over at her with an unexpectedly innocent smile. “Oh, you’re awake!” she said. “Good morning, Sister Mary. You must be hungry. Hurry up and get dressed if you don’t want to miss breakfast in the dining hall.”

“Oh, yes,” Mary said as she got out of bed. Nowhere on her body did she feel any traces of the sensations she’d felt the night before, though she remembered them all vividly. It was just a dream, she thought.

As she changed into her habit, Mary found herself always wanting to look at Jessie’s pretty face. Oddly, now that her cellmate was finally decent, this was when Mary found she couldn’t stop staring at her.

Jessie didn’t exactly look like Mary’s pretty mother, though her eyes and voice bore an uncanny resemblance to those of her mother. The humble, pious attitude that Jessie was demonstrating now, in radical contrast to her vampish ways the night before, also reminded Mary of her beloved, almost saintlike mother.

The fact that Mary had…dreamed?…of receiving such sensual pleasure from naked Jessie only cemented her feelings for her cellmate all the more.

Was she falling in love with Jessie?

Oh, nonsense!

That couldn’t be!

Mary was wedded to Christ!

Jessie took Mary to the dining hall, where they sat across from each other and ate breakfast together. As they talked about the daily routine of the convent, Mary couldn’t stop looking deep in Jessie’s eyes, sighing at the sound of her voice, and grinning at her beauty, knowing what anatomical delicacies were hiding underneath her habit.

She imagined the bread she was biting into was Jessie’s flesh.

“After breakfast, I’ll need to take a shower,” Mary said.

“Be quick about it,” Jessie said. “We have to go to deliver crates of food to an orphanage on the other side of town.”

“Oh, yes, of course,” Mary said, then drank from a glass of milk while looking down at Jessie’s chest, and remembering the relevant part of her…dream?

**********

She hurried over to the shower, went in, got naked, and ran the water over her body as she lathered the soap in her hands. As she rubbed the lather on her upper body, she looked at herself in a tall mirror on the other side of the room. She frowned at what she saw.

Small breasts, pale skin, a bit of flab on my belly, and an excess of pubic hair, she thought. I wish my body could be as attractive as Jessie’s is. I’m sure that would please her more.

After rinsing off her upper body, she rubbed some lather between her legs. She yelped in shock at what she felt down there…or rather, what she didn’t feel down there.

My hymen is gone! she thought with a gasp. My virtue! My virginity…is gone? That can’t be!

How could she have lost it? How could it have disappeared? Nothing happened the night before. She’d only had an erotic dream…didn’t she?

And even if Jessie had really seduced her, if she had punctured her hymen, why wasn’t Mary at all sore?

**********

After her shower, she quickly rejoined Jessie to help with delivering the food to the orphanage, always trying to stop herself from staring at her beautiful cellmate…but rarely succeeding. The bright, hot sun reminded Mary of God looking down on her from heaven. At least the act of charity to the orphans had a somewhat mitigating effect on her guilt.

She was touched by the devotion she saw in Jessie as she gave to the orphans, working so hard to be of help to them in all ways possible. Jessie’s actions so reminded Mary of her mother’s charity. The love was swelling in Mary’s heart.

When they returned to the convent, Mary went into the church to pray at a pew.

When she bowed and did the Sign of the Cross before the altar, she looked over at an icon of the Virgin Mary. On the face of the Blessed Virgin, she imagined she saw the face of her mother, what seemed a disapproving face, and Mary felt a pang of shame.

She hurried over to a pew, knelt there, and put her hands together. She remembered St. Paul’s words in his Epistle to the Romans: “God gave them up unto vile affections: for even their women did change the natural use into that which is against nature.” She shuddered at the memory of that verse, one she’d always successfully used before to control herself.

God, help me, she prayed in her thoughts. Deliver me from the Evil One. Help me to love Jessie in an honourable, decent, Christian way. A tear ran down her cheek.

She looked up from hearing the sound of shoes tapping on the floor of the aisle to her immediate right. Father Funn was walking by. She got up and went over to him.

“Father?” she said from just behind his left shoulder.

He looked behind himself. “Yes, Sister Mary?”

“I know this is abrupt, but do you have time to receive my confession?”

“Why, yes, I have a few minutes,” he said. “Come this way.” He gestured to an exit leading to the confessional booths.

They went over and got in.

“Bless me, Father, for I have sinned,” Mary said with a trembling voice.

“Be at peace, Mary,” he said soothingly. “The Lord is always willing to take back any lost sheep who have strayed from the flock.”

“I have had…,” she began, “…impure thoughts.”

“What kind of impure thoughts?” he asked with…a smirk on his face?

“Lewd ones. Lustful ones. Unnatural ones. Shameful ones.” She began sobbing. “And I don’t think I’ll be able to stop myself from thinking them again.”

“With God, all things are possible,” he reassured her. “Remember that the Lord helps those who help themselves.”

“Yes, Father! Thank you!”

“I absolve you from your sins in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit,” he said, doing the Sign of the Cross with her.

She left the confessional so determined not to have sexual feelings about Jessie, that she would prove it every time she was around her, as a test of that determination. She went back to the pews to pray.

***********

That evening, after hours of prayer at the pew, she returned to her cell.

I will not have romantic thoughts about Jessie, she insisted in her thoughts as she approached Jessie, who was outside, tending a garden just beside the cell. Among the flowers and herbs she grew there to make her tea were a number of rather large mushrooms. The sun was sinking low, leaving darkness all over the convent.

Mary came up beside her cellmate. “Good evening, Sister Jessie.”

Jessie looked over at her and gave her such a disarming smile that Mary, shivering with pleasure, already lost half of her resolve not to think of Jessie in a sexual way. “Good evening, Sister Mary. I’m about to make us some tea. Would you like to watch how I make it?”

“Oh, yes, very much!” Mary sighed, then thought, Now, I can see if she is drugging the tea…which, surely, she isn’t! “You said last night that you mix mushrooms in the tea. What kind of mushrooms are they? I had such a wild dream last night, not the kind of thing I would ever describe, for modestly’s sake!” She tittered a little. “Those aren’t those ‘magic mushrooms,’ are they?”

Jessie let out a loud laugh. “Oh, no! Of course not! That must have been a wild dream that you had! No, these mushrooms only have a medicinal effect on the consumer. Whatever ‘wildness’ you experienced in your dream was something already inside you, I assure you.”

Though Mary felt reassured that there was nothing psychedelic about those mushrooms (and, surely, Jessie was telling her the truth about that!), she found it disturbing to think that that whole dream’s contents were just ‘something already inside her.’ Mary had always hated the unbridled sin of her unconscious mind, something she could never control.

Jessie finished collecting the ingredients for the tea, and she took them into the cell, Mary following closely behind her.

“Oh, I’m so glad it isn’t as hot today as it was yesterday,” Jessie said as she stood in front of the kettle, getting the tea ready. “These summer days have been killer. But I can tolerate keeping this habit on, at least for the moment.”

Mary let out a sigh of relief…yet of disappointment, too.

“I must say, Sister Jessie, that I admire how loving and caring you were to the orphans today,” she said. “The smiles you put on all the kids’ faces as you talked to them. Your charity is truly an inspiration.”

“Oh, it’s nothing,” Jessie said. “I’m just doing the Lord’s work. It isn’t me; it’s the Holy Spirit working through me.”

“Your humility and charity remind me of those of my mother, as I saw in her when I was a child,” Mary said, looking over at Jessie with such yearning.

“Your mother must be a remarkable woman. I’m flattered to be thought so similar to her.”

“You are, Sister Jessie, in so many ways,” Mary sighed.

“That’s very sweet of you to say–thank you.” Jessie, having finished making the tea, brought two small cups over. “Here you are, honey.” She handed Mary a pink china cup, while keeping a yellow one for herself.

“Thank you.” Mary was relieved to see that yellow cup this time, to see Jessie sipping from it. Mary thus felt encouraged to drink from hers.

(What she didn’t realize was that Jessie had made mushrooms for Mary’s tea, and no mushrooms–and different herbs–for her own.)

“OK, I’m getting little too hot now,” Jessie said, and she undid her guimpe and tunic, which for her, unusually, had front zippers. When unzipping and pulling them wide apart, she revealed a black, lace brassiere holding those creamy breasts in shape, the sight of which made Mary salivate and pant audibly. Jessie looked over at Mary, whose eyes immediately looked away. Jessie smirked.

Mary drank a gulp of tea. She looked out the window to see the growing darkness and the sun almost fully set. She yawned. “I don’t know why I feel so sleepy. Apart from moving the crates of food, I didn’t do much–just a lot of praying.”

“That’s fine,” Jessie said, continuing to undress and now just in her bra and panties. “Let’s just go to bed.”

Mary took no more than split-second, furtive looks at Jessie, who was now removing her bra. “Yes,” she yawned, “I suppose I should…take this…hot thing…off, too.”

Smiling Jessie removed her panties, turned off the light, and got into bed. Mary, too tired to reach for her nightgown, just stripped down to her underwear and got into bed. She lay on her back, closed her eyes, and let out a long sigh.

“Good night, Sister Jessie.”

“Good night, honey.”

Mama used to call me ‘honey,’ Mary thought.

That soothing, undulating feeling was beginning to flow all through Mary’s body again. She could hear Jessie whispering something in Latin again, though again, she felt too drowsy to make out the meaning of the words; she could only distinguish the pronunciation as distinctly Latin.

She felt Jessie’s hand on her right thigh.

A shiver of pleasure…and fear…rode up and down all those waves she felt permeating her body.

Still, Mary felt too much in a stupor to resist.

Jessie’s hand was playing with the elastic on Mary’s panties.

“Jessie,” Mary said in a slurred voice. “When I…showered today, I noticed…that my hymen…was missing.”

“Really?” Jessie whispered, then kissed Mary on her right cheek.

“Did you have…anything to do…with that?”

Jessie’s finger slid under the panties and began playing with Mary’s pubic hair. “I’m liberating you…from your theological prison cell.” She gave Mary a peck on the lips.

“Are you?” Mary sighed. “Ooh!”

“Purity and innocence…are lies…Not even Adam and Eve…were innocent…in the beginning.” Jessie was giving Mary kisses on her lips, cheeks, and neck as she continued whispering.

“That can’t…be true. Ah!“

“Oh, it must have been. If they were truly, utterly good, neither would have…given in…to temptation…and eaten…the forbidden fruit…There was never…a Fall, so Christ’s death…as redemption…was meaningless. There was never…primordial grace, and so there’s no grace…for us to return to…through Christ’s death. Let’s sin bravely.”

Mary opened her eyes and, her eyes adjusted to the dark and with plenty of moonlight and starlight shining through the open window, she could make out the silhouette of Jessie standing up on the bed, with her back and ass to her, her legs spread apart on either side of Mary. She wasn’t nude, though: Mary looked up and saw Jessie wearing a white coif and black veil on her head, but a tight-fitting, shiny black leather outfit was covering her from her neck to her feet, which were in black high heels. The outfit showed off Jessie’s curvy figure and round buttocks most flatteringly.

Jessie looked down at Mary over her left shoulder and asked, “Do you like it, Mary?”

“Sister Jessie,” Mary said in sighs, trying to regain at least some self-control, in spite of how stoned and turned on she was, “dressing like that…is so disrespectful…to your vows…as a nun. Remove the coif…and veil…at least.”

“Mary, what coif? What veil? I’m naked, head to toe.”

“But,…that skin-tight…black outfit…you have on.”

“I’m not wearing any outfit, Mary. I’m displaying my body, for your viewing pleasure. I know your secret desires, Mary. Don’t be afraid to express them.”

“How do you know them?”

“I have my ways. Let me help you liberate yourself, Mary.” Jessie bent down, bending her knees and lowering her back, so Mary could see what she had hiding between her legs and buttocks. Now Mary no longer saw the black clothing or the nun’s headdress. She saw naked Jessie’s delectable secrets, which were coming closer and closer to her face.

Jessie, on all fours now and facing Mary’s feet, pulled off her panties and spread her legs out wide. Both of them began tasting each other. Though Jessie was pure of any urinary or fecal smell–in fact, her vulva and anus smelled fragrant from a fresh shower–Mary was worried, after having used the toilet just before returning to their cell, that her own body odour would be most unflattering.

Yet Jessie was licking, kissing, and sucking without complaint.

(Actually, her magical, Latin incantations, herbs, and mushrooms all served to obliterate any and all unpleasant smells. Mary would learn the next day that Jessie’s magic would make even more, shocking changes to her body.)

In any case, Mary soon forgot her worries about her body odour, for she was too busy enjoying giving and receiving physical love. She no longer regretted the loss of her hymen, for Jessie’s long tongue was now free to probe deep, deep inside, tickling Mary’s vaginal walls with its tireless flickering.

It felt so good, so physically good, that she realized something.

This is no dream! she thought. This is really happening!

Both women’s sighs were rising in pitch and volume as they approached climax. Mary had a vision of two dams bursting, with rushing water coursing out between two pairs of legs. Mary’s was a river; Jessie’s, a waterfall.

…and Father Funn just happened to be passing by their cell window at that very moment.

***********

The next morning, Mary woke up with her panties back on, as if never taken off. There were no vaginal secretions as she had felt the night before, which she found inexplicable. With the sun peeking through the window, Jessie was fully dressed in her habit.

Mary saw her smiling face…O, that lovely face!

The two exchanged good morning wishes.

“Sister Jessie,” Mary asked. “What…did we…do last night?”

“We’ll discuss it tonight, Sister Mary,” Jessie said, moving about the cell in a hurry to get ready to go. “Get dressed. We have a busy morning. There’s a soup kitchen downtown where we volunteer every week on this day, serving breakfast, lunch, and dinner to the homeless. We’ll be leaving about a half hour after breakfast. You’ll want to hurry if you hope to squeeze in a shower before we go.”

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

Though they ate facing each other in the dining hall, they said little to each other, Mary fearing that the other nuns would overhear their conversation and pick up hints as to what they were doing every night. She saw Father Funn walk by their table with a smirk that made her even more paranoid.

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

After breakfast, she hurried over to the shower with a change of underwear. She had put on her habit so quickly after getting out of bed that she didn’t take a minute to notice anything different about her body. But now that she was naked and in the shower, she saw herself in that mirror; the changes couldn’t be ignored.

Larger, firmer breasts.

No flab.

No pubic hair.

No paleness of her skin.

Perfect curves.

There was no other way to explain these changes.

Jessie was a witch.

Her tea and incantations were part of her spells.

Any pleasure Mary took in the changes in her body were overridden by the horror she felt in knowing what Jessie really was.

She’d bewitched Mary.

She’d defiled her.

She’d debauched her.

She’d led her astray.

She’d made her break her vows of chastity.

Mary remembered, with a shudder, Exodus 22:18.

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

After her shower, she joined Jessie and the other nuns to go to the soup kitchen to serve meals to the homeless there. Again, these acts of charity helped to soothe and ease her guilt…to an extent. That blazing, blindingly bright, hot sun outside reminded her of God’s judgement.

As she served the homeless with a smile, she saw the same loving smile on Jessie’s mesmerizingly pretty face. Mary saw no trace of phoniness in the sorceress’s smile: it looked perfectly sincere, like that of a genuine servant of Christ.

She recalled Paul’s words: “Satan himself is transformed into an angel of light.”

Still, Mary couldn’t understand how Jessie could fake being a Christian so skillfully. Her charity looked so authentic, and it made Mary feel all the more in love with her.

It was also challenging her faith in God; for how could He allow this to happen?

Inwardly, she shook with shame at her sinful love. She remembered Paul’s words: “For what I am doing, I do not understand. For what I will to do, that I do not practice; but what I hate, that I do.”

Speaking of doing what she hated, she slipped a knife under the sleeve of her habit just before the nuns all finished and left the soup kitchen to return to the convent.

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

That evening, as the sun was setting and darkness was about the envelope the convent, as soon as they’d returned, she went to Father Funn to give her confession again. In the booth, she was weeping; he had that enigmatic smirk on his face again.

“Bless me, Father, for I have sinned,” she sobbed.

“Be at peace, Mary,” he said calmly. “The Lord is always willing to take back any sheep who have strayed from the flock.”

Mary remembered that these had been his exact words from last time: they sounded like a meaningless formula now!

“I have had…more impure thoughts,” she sobbed.

She couldn’t bring herself to complete her confession and admit to the sexual contact with Jessie…not only out of her personal shame, but also because she didn’t want to expose the shame of the woman she loved.

“Have you any more confessions to make?” he asked after noting her awkward several seconds of silence.

“N-no,” she said, bowing her head in shame over her cowardice in not fully confessing.

“Very well,” he said in a voice that sounded almost bored. “I absolve you from your sins in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.” Both of them did the Sign of the Cross–so formulaic.

She stepped out of the booth and slowly walked back to her cell, frowning. I feel no peace from that at all, she thought. Surely Father Funn suspected that my confession wasn’t complete. God wouldn’t have…couldn’t have allowed such absolution…if He truly existed.

It was getting darker and darker outside.

She fondled that knife in her sleeve.

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

She walked into her cell and saw Jessie standing naked by the window, outside of which was the black of night. Jessie was facing Mary, with her usual insouciant display.

Mary began shaking, and clasped the knife, keeping it hidden in her sleeve. “Are you making more tea?” she asked with a frown.

“I don’t think I need to,” Jessie said with a smile. “Not the kind I was making for you before, to free your mind.”

“Those mushrooms really are magic mushrooms, aren’t they? You literally do magic with them, don’t you?”

“They, as well as my other herbs and my incantations, don’t do anything more than bring out what’s already inside you, Mary.”

“You’re a witch masquerading as a nun.” Her eyes tearing up, Mary let the knife slip down so Jessie could see the blade pointing at her chest.

“You aren’t going to stab me, Mary.” Jessie took a step toward Mary.

“‘Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live,’ from Exodus.”

“‘Thou shalt not kill,’ also from Exodus.”

“‘The devil can cite scripture for his purpose,’ from The Merchant of Venice,” Mary said with a shaky voice, the hand holding the knife shaking even more.

“I’m not a witch, Mary,” Jessie said, taking another step closer to Mary. “I’m a sorceress.”

“What’s the difference? the Bible makes no distinction.”

“A witch uses her magic to harm. A sorceress uses it for good.” Jessie came closer to Mary. “My spells are liberating you.”

“Liberating me from what? I love my religion.”

“You didn’t become a nun out of love for Christ or the Virgin Mary. You became one to please your mother.”

“Your witchcraft makes you read people’s minds,” Mary said, weeping.

“So, you admit it’s true?” Jessie asked, stepping forward and now with Mary’s knife mere millimetres from her breast.

“You read my mind…when I saw myself…in the bathroom mirror yesterday,…and you know…that I didn’t like…how my body looked,…and you used your magic…to change my appearance,” Mary said in sobs.

“Don’t you like how it looks now? You wanted your body to please me more. It didn’t have to be changed. I liked your body as it was, with all of its supposed imperfections. I can change it back, if you wish.”

“N-no.” Mary kept sobbing. “But you seduced me…made me fornicate with you. You robbed me…of my faith in God.”

“Is that a bad thing?”

Her face contorting with rage, Mary brought up the knife, ready to stab Jessie in the chest.

“You won’t kill me, Mary. You’re in love with me.”

Mary stood dazed for several seconds.

“Y-yes, I am.” Mary lowered her head, brought her arm down, and let the knife fall to the floor. Now she was sobbing loudly. Jessie put her arms around her.

“No!” Mary said. “Let me take this off first. If I’m going to sin with you, at least let me not dishonour the habit.”

Jessie helped her remove the tunic and guimpe, revealing–to Mary’s shock–a black corset with red lacing, and knee-high black boots with high heels, with red crosses on the knees.

“How did these get here?” Mary asked with a gasp, then she looked at Jessie, realizing how foolish her question was.

Jessie smirked lewdly as she looked at Mary. “I like it.”

“Well, I don’t. It’s tasteless. Help me take it all off. I’d rather be as nude as you; it would feel less indecent.”

“Very well; as you wish,” Jessie said, still smiling at the sight.

Mary, now nude, turned off the light, and they got into bed.

Jessie lay on her back, and Mary got on top of her. They exchanged kisses on each other’s lips, cheeks, and necks. Mary cupped Jessie’s breasts in her hands, giving them slight, gentle squeezes. Jessie fondled Mary’s bottom, giving the cheeks stronger squeezes.

They were rubbing their crotches against each other, then they put their legs in a scissor-position, rubbing their vulvas against each other and feeling their clits getting harder, and their labia swelling, moistening all over.

They were so focused on their pleasure that they paid no attention to how voices can carry. Their sighs, moans, and squeals were getting higher and higher-pitched, and louder and louder. The squeaking of the bed was getting louder and faster in rhythm, too. The wide-open window was no help in keeping the crescendo of their sin a secret.

A few members of the convent passed by their cell and heard the approaching climax. One nun peeked in the window, but saw only grinding silhouettes in the dark. The other passers-by were on the other side, listening at the door.

Finally, Father Funn rammed into the door, breaking it open. The other nuns came in after, one of them turning on the light and exposing the nakedness of the lovers, who never bothered pulling the blankets on themselves, it being such a hot summer night.

Their viewers were in bathrobes and slippers. Mary tried to pull the blanket over her body, but Funn stopped her.

“Oh, no, you don’t,” he said. “Both of you will come with us as you are. There will be no hiding of the truth.”

Mary walked out of the cell in tears, her hands covering her breasts and crotch. Jessie, walking beside her with her arms at her sides, made no attempt to cover her nakedness; she kept a lewd smirk on her face that Mary couldn’t understand. Funn walked behind both of them, his eyes never straying away from the sight of their tasty buttocks.

Mary and Jessie were taken to the open-air court area in the middle of the convent. All the other nuns were assembled there, in their bathrobes and slippers. All were looking at the naked duo with expressionless faces that weeping Mary could barely make out in the dark, with only moonlight and starlight to keep the black from being absolute. Not knowing what they were thinking, while imagining they could only be judging and condemning her sin with Jessie, was torturing Mary. Jessie, on the other hand, just kept smirking.

A bench was in the middle of the large courtyard, with two paddles lying at its sides. Mary and Jessie were taken there.

“Kneel before the bench,” Funn said. “Put your heads on the seat. Don’t move.” He picked up the paddles and gave one to one of the nuns. “Cooperate, you two, and this will be over with in a few minutes.”

He and the nun called out numbers with every whack they gave Mary’s and Jessie’s buttocks. Both girls screamed with each strike: Mary, bawling; Jessie, grinning.

“Jesus, help me!” Mary wept between screams. “Beat the sin…Oww!…out of me!…Oww!“

“Oww!” Jessie screamed. “You’re making my…Oww!…bum all red!…Oww!“

Out of the corner of Mary’s teary eye, she saw something odd.

The nuns all removed their bathrobes and kicked off their slippers. They were now as naked as she and Jessie were.

“Twenty!” Funn and the other paddler called out.

“We’re finished,” he said. He and the nun put down their paddles, then removed their bathrobes and slippers, too.

Mary and Jessie looked behind them, and all around the courtyard. Mary’s eyes and mouth were agape. Jessie was still grinning lewdly.

Everyone there was naked.

Funn was fully erect. Mary looked away with a blush, and back at Jessie.

“They’re all the same as you, Jessie?” Mary asked.

“…and you, now, Mary,” Jessie answered.

“Nuns by day, nudists by night?” Mary asked.

“Think of it as a dialectic of asceticism and eroticism,” Jessie explained. “We worship the Lord by day, and the Lady by night.”

“Lady? This indecency is worshipping the Blessed Virgin?”

“Look up in the night sky and see the Lady in her half-moon phase,” Jessie explained. “Half lit up, half dark. There is the Goddess, known by many names: Luna, Selena, Mary, Nut, Ishtar, Inanna, and so on. And in the daytime, there is the Lord, also known by many names: Sol Invictus, Helios, Jesus, Tammuz, Osiris, Dionysus, etc.”

“You’re all pagans? This is blasphemy!”

“Is the largely unpunished sexual abuse of children by priests, of nuns, any less blasphemous to the Church?” Jessie challenged. “At least we’re honest with our sexuality here.”

“As for your question of paganism, I think I can explain, Mary,” Father Funn said. “We here are a dialectical mix of pagan and Christian, to be exact. When we do our daily charity, we are sincerely Christian, but also because the world–being as prejudiced as it is against paganism–would only accept charity from the Church. But enough of this! Let’s get on with tonight’s ritual! Our weekly orgy must be done, to raise power and spread the energy of real love, grounded in the body, throughout the world, to save it from war, greed, and hate!”

“But people outside will hear, and suspect us,” Mary said.

“Not with our magic, which has, if you will, soundproofed the area,” said the nun next to the priest (Mary noticed a genuine tattoo on her upper leg; it said…Motorhead? She must have been the nun Mary saw on her first day here!). “Nobody outside will hear a thing; don’t worry.”

“But an orgy?” Mary said. “I don’t want to be involved in an orgy.” She looked over at Jessie. “I love you, and you alone. I don’t want to make love with anyone else. What I’m doing with you is fornication enough!”

“Very well,” Jessie said with a smile as she got on top of Mary. “You and I will have only each other.”

They resumed their tribadism there on the grass. Funn entered the tattooed nun. Though Mary and Jessie looked only in each other’s eyes, they heard a surrounding sea of moans and sighs. All the other nuns paired up, engaging in the licking, kissing, and fingering of vulvas, or with lips wrapped around nipples.

The group sex had a ritualized rhythm, with synchronized grinding and groaning. Everyone’s sighs and squeals rose together in pitch and volume, getting faster and faster, and resulting in a collective orgasmic scream.

As everyone lay back on the grass, panting with satisfaction, Mary looked up at the stars with a grin.

Whether the Queen of Heaven was Mary or the moon-goddess no longer mattered to her.

Jessie was right.

Mary was now free.

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

The next morning, the nuns arrived in a van at a homeless shelter near downtown, delivering used clothes there. As they all cheerfully took the boxes of clothes off the van and gave them to the volunteer workers at the shelter, Mary found herself looking at Jessie’s pretty face as often as she could.

That mix of the sensual and the saintly that she saw in Jessie, knowing what delights her habit was hiding, made Mary all the more in love with her. She looked up at the shining, hot sun–the Lord, the Son, Helios, Tammuz, whichever–and smiled, waiting for the glowing Lady to peek out of the darkness that night.

She licked her lips, wanting more of that tea.