The Tanah: Crests–Chapter Three

[The following is the forty-sixth of many posts–here is the first, here is the second, here is the third, here is the fourth, here is the fifth, here is the sixth, here is the seventh, here is the eighth, here is the ninth, here is the tenth, here is the eleventh, here is the twelfth, here is the thirteenth, here is the fourteenth, here is the fifteenth, here is the sixteenth, here is the seventeenth, here is the eighteenth, here is the nineteenth, here is the twentieth, here is the twenty-first, here is the twenty-second, here is the twenty-third, here is the twenty-fourth, here is the twenty-fifth, here is the twenty-sixth, here is the twenty-seventh, here is the twenty-eighth, here is the twenty-ninth, here is the thirtieth, here is the thirty-first, here is the thirty-second, here is the thirty-third, here is the thirty-fourth, here is the thirty-fifth, here is the thirty-sixth, here is the thirty-seventh, here is the thirty-eighth, here is the thirty-ninth, here is the fortieth, here is the forty-first, here is the forty-second, here is the forty-third, here is the forty-fourth, and here is the forty-fifth–about a fictitious discovery of ancient manuscripts of a religious text of narratives and magic spells. Its purpose for my readers and me is to provide a cosmology and mythography on which I am basing much, if not most, of my fiction–short stories and novels. If anyone is interested in reading this fiction, he or she can use these blog posts as references to explain the nature of the magic and universe in my fiction.]

Translator’s Introduction

This chapter is the last of the Crests. It is also the last of the texts of the Tanah to be translated…for now, until more have been discovered, to be translated and commented on when the time comes.

As has been explained in the commentary on earlier chapters, this crest is an ambiguous one. What is to become of humanity after the third and most terrible trough? Is man to be reborn in a new, peaceful world, or is he to exist only in a spiritual, nirvana-like state in the oneness of Cao? The elders of the tribe who saw the vision of this final crest do not know. The reader will have to decide for him- or herself.

Chapter Three

The last vision that we elders had, the final crest, was difficult to interpret. What was the true nature of the peace that we saw? Was it the quiet of man no longer fighting his brother, or was it the quiet of man no longer in existence, since death is often the highest peace, the one true escape from pain? Our uncertainty was chilling.

We saw flatlands with no plants or animals. We saw only barren desert waste and rock. Total silence. Not a single man, woman, or child could be seen anywhere, near or far, to populate the land.

Still, we could feel humanity; the souls of all people were a vibration throughout the air. These souls were all one, united in peace, with no bodies to make them seen or heard. Still, that collective soul was there, all in harmony.

Finally, after a long wait, what seemed like years, maybe hundreds or thousands of years, we saw the beginning growth of green, a tiny plant. Our vision thus ended.

We asked each other many questions about what we saw. Will the Pluries fall again, animating the rain with divine spirit and life? Would this plant we saw be the first of many more to come? Would new animal life come after the plants? And then, at last, would man reappear, to live in peace and harmony with his brother?

We can only hope so.

If not, may the united souls of man, in that vibration in the air, remain in peace by always being at one with Cao.

The Tanah: Crests–Chapter Two

[The following is the forty-fifth of many posts–here is the first, here is the second, here is the third, here is the fourth, here is the fifth, here is the sixth, here is the seventh, here is the eighth, here is the ninth, here is the tenth, here is the eleventh, here is the twelfth, here is the thirteenth, here is the fourteenth, here is the fifteenth, here is the sixteenth, here is the seventeenth, here is the eighteenth, here is the nineteenth, here is the twentieth, here is the twenty-first, here is the twenty-second, here is the twenty-third, here is the twenty-fourth, here is the twenty-fifth, here is the twenty-sixth, here is the twenty-seventh, here is the twenty-eighth, here is the twenty-ninth, here is the thirtieth, here is the thirty-first, here is the thirty-second, here is the thirty-third, here is the thirty-fourth, here is the thirty-fifth, here is the thirty-sixth, here is the thirty-seventh, here is the thirty-eighth, here is the thirty-ninth, here is the fortieth, here is the forty-first, here is the forty-second, here is the forty-third, and here is the forty-fourth–about a fictitious discovery of ancient manuscripts of a religious text of narratives and magic spells. Its purpose for my readers and me is to provide a cosmology and mythography on which I am basing much, if not most, of my fiction–short stories and novels. If anyone is interested in reading this fiction, he or she can use these blog posts as references to explain the nature of the magic and universe in my fiction.]

Translator’s Introduction

This chapter, too, seems eerily prophetic. It seems to predict not only the French Revolution and the rise and fall of Napoleon (or are our researchers letting their imaginations run wild here?), but also the end of the Commons due to enclosure, forcing English farmers to enter cities to work in factories. We’ll let you decide if our researchers’ speculations are correct.

Chapter Two

The next crest we saw in our visions would be a short one–so short as almost to seem non-existent. Indeed, this crest seemed almost to overlap with a trough, and to overlap almost fully.

Those who wore the bracelets came to hate them, suspecting rightly that it was the bracelets that were the creators of their woe. So when the time came that the bracelets would no longer stick to their skin, and the wearers were to feel compelled to pass them on to be worn by the next generation, the wearers, having finally become able to remove the bracelets from their wrists, resisted giving them to their sons and daughters. They felt a terrible headache from their resistance, but they prevailed all the same, not knowing the Crims or their divine power in the bracelets.

This unwitting disobedience to the Crims–the people’s not knowing that it was to be the Crims who decided when the wearing of the bracelets would end, and not the people to decide–would result in good and ill fortune at nearly the same time. True, the ill fortune of servitude to the lords of the land would end, the curse of wearing the bracelets, but a new ill fortune would creep up on the unsuspecting people, their punishment for rejecting and discarding the bracelets before the time the Crims deemed a fit one.

The people with naked wrists rejoiced at the cutting off of the heads of their oppressive kings and queens. They rejoiced no longer to have to work on land owned by lords who took most of the food they produced. They were delighted that a new state, with men to represent the needs of the common people, was born…almost still-born, they would soon learn.

Indeed, new evils were soon coming to replace the old ones–new evils that followed like toes of boots stepping on the heels of the feet of the old ones.

A great new leader, once thought to be a liberator of the people, would soon call himself “emperor,” and would conquer many nations–though he would be defeated soon enough.

More significantly, while those farmers who now lived off the land in relative peace, without lords to have to give most of their food to, were happy in this state for a time, new masters would come. These would buy off the land and force the farmers off of it, making them move to the cities to find work in filthy, smoky buildings, castles that blew fumes into the skies.

The people would work for a pittance, barely enough to live on, and thus would begin a new trough, the worst of them all.

Analysis of ‘The Soft Machine’

I: Introduction

The Soft Machine is a 1961 novel by William S Burroughs. It originally came from manuscripts from The Word Hoard, a large body of text (roughly 1,000 typewritten pages) produced between about 1954 and 1958, and used as the basis also for Naked Lunch and the Interzone collection, as well as some of Nova Express and The Ticket That Exploded. TSM is the first part of The Nova Trilogy.

An experimental novel, TSM uses the cut-up technique, an aleatory narrative that involves taking a written or typewritten text, cutting it up into pieces, and rearranging them to create a new text. The concept started with Dadaists like Tristan Tzara in the 1920s, yet writers like Burroughs in the 1950s popularized it.

Two things from Burroughs’s novel were later applied to music: its title, which became the name of a late 1960s/1970s psychedelic/jazz-fusion band from the Canterbury scene (check out an analysis I did of their third album here); and the expression “heavy metal,” used by Burroughs originally to describe a heavy, “metallic” kind of drug addiction.

I am basing this analysis on the second edition of TSM, with which most readers are familiar. Here is a link to it, and here is a link to Burroughs reciting “Uranian Willy,” which is a different version from the text I’ll be using.

II: General Remarks

As I did with my analysis of the Naked Lunch novel, I’ll only be looking at select parts of TSM, since the cut-up technique has created a chaotic incoherence that would make an analysis of everything virtually impossible, at best turning a blog article into a book. I’ll be looking at those parts that do read as a linear narrative (or approximately so), such as ‘The Mayan Caper,” among others.

Because of the cut-up technique’s causing of the story to jump back and forth instead of being linear, it would perhaps be best to read TSM more like an extended prose poem than as a novel, appreciating each piece of imagery for what it is, instead of trying mentally to put all the pieces back in order, a frustrating process that would negate Burroughs’s purpose in cutting up the text anyway.

His reason for cutting up the text and rearranging it was not some kind of avant-garde self-indulgence for its own sake. He was trying to subvert the reader’s sense of perceiving the linearity of language as a manipulative or coercive power. As with so much of Burroughs’s writing (as I observed in my analysis of NL–link above), he was preoccupied with systems of power and control, as manifested in religion, the government, drug addiction, and sexual indulgence as an attempt to escape from such control.

Burroughs may have written about drug abuse a lot, but he by no means glorified it. He knew the pain of addiction and the need to be freed of it, so notions of drug abuse are a major theme in his writing as an aspect of power structures’ way of trying to control us, as we see in NL and TSM. For Burroughs, the human body is a “soft machine,” a weak, vulnerable thing under siege by parasites, drug addiction, and totalitarian control.

One of those forms of totalitarian control is the linear use of language, so the purpose of the cut-up technique is to liberate us from the linguistic aspect of that control. One aspect of TSM is a tendency to go back and forth in time, as if in a time machine (indeed, it’s been observed that Burroughs’s title for the novel is a variation on HG Wells‘s Time Machine), so the cut-up technique can be seen as representing that moving back and forth in time, instead of experiencing it in the normal, linear way.

The idea that the cut-up technique can be a metaphor for time travel is suggested in “The Mayan Caper,” in the third paragraph of that chapter, where the narrator speaks of taking yesterday’s and today’s newspapers and rearranging their pictures to make a montage: as he does this, he’s literally moving back in time to yesterday.

Though it’s the first novel of The Nova Trilogy, TSM is also widely regarded as a sequel to and extension of NL, since both novels are taken from The Word Hoard, as mentioned above, and so TSM continues NL‘s habit of explicitly describing drug abuse and homosexual sex, these being ways of trying to escape the miseries of totalitarian control through the government and religion, yet also paradoxically keeping us in its thrall, as slaves to our own desires.

The political aspect of that control, as depicted in NL, was in the form of political parties that all (except for the sympathetic Factualists, who represented Burroughs’s libertarian socialist individualism) in their own ways stifled the individualism that Burroughs valued. The religious aspect of that control in NL was represented by the Muslim faith (i.e., “Islam Incorporated”); in TSM, it’s represented by the Mayan religion, which leads me to a discussion of…

III: The Mayan Caper

This is not only the one genuinely linear narrative in all of the novel; it’s also central to understanding the meaning behind the cut-up technique as a means of undoing the manipulative and coercive power, as Burroughs saw it, of language, especially as it passes through linear time. One upsets the established order by literally upsetting the word order of syntax and temporal order (i.e., going back in time to the Mayan era).

I already mentioned above how the narrator ‘traveled time’ by rearranging the pictures of the day’s newspaper with those of the newspaper from the day before to make a montage–analogous to the cut-up technique’s rearranging of the order of cut-out sentences on strips of paper. He will also mention how the oppressive Mayan priests will use the Mayan calendar–a record and arrangement of the order of time–to control their slavish, toiling population, who work in the fields doing slash-and-burn agriculture.

After rearranging temporal order with the newspaper pictures, the narrator goes to a film studio and rearranges the order of time by learning “to talk and think backwards on all levels…by running film and sound track backward.” An example of such retrograde motion includes going from satiety to hunger. He will also run a film first at normal speed, then in slow motion…he applies the same method to such physical practices as achieving orgasm, which I assume means either delaying it (what fun!) or reversing it.

He next goes to Mexico City and learns all he can about the Mayan language (which he finds easy to learn) and their culture. The absolute power of the Mayan priests, about two percent of the population, depended on their control of their calendar. As I explained above, control over temporal order and the concepts of language–as expressed, for example, in their calendar–is essential to manipulating and having power over the people–this is why messing up that order is so crucial to liberating the people, as Burroughs saw it.

Slash-and-burn agriculture–what the priests use to keep the population obedient, ever-toiling slaves–is a matter of precise timing, according to the narrator. It must be done at specific times; “a few days’ miscalculation and a year’s crop is lost.” We see once again how temporal order is strictly maintained for the priests to retain power over their people.

Most of the hieroglyphs from the Mayan writings refer to dates on the calendar; the other, undeciphered symbols probably refer to the ceremonial calendar. Yet again, we see how language, mixed with temporal organization, is used to manipulate and control the Mayan people.

After learning of the Mayan language and culture, the narrator has to find a “vessel,” that is, the body of a Mayan boy in whom the narrator is to be transferred–his soul moved into it for the purposes of mixing in unnoticed among the Mayan population after traveling in time back to their era. The two are to do this procedure, an illegal one, with an American doctor who has lost his certificate due to having become addicted to heavy metal [!].

What’s ironic here is how the narrator’s mission–to liberate the Mayan people from their oppressive priests and systems of language and the temporal order of their calendars–is to be facilitated with the help of a doctor also in need of liberation (i.e., the “soft machine” of his body controlled by the hardening, heavy, metallic nature of his drug addiction). Furthermore, the doctor learns, from his examination of the Mayan boy’s naked body, that his body “is riddled with parasites,” which are another major form of control dealt with in TSM. Another paradox of liberation via the aid of the non-liberated.

The narrator “would be eaten body and soul by crab parasites” if the doctor used “the barbarous method used by…[his] colleagues”, so instead he’ll use a different technique for the transfer operation. He’ll operate with molds, keeping the narrator intact in deepfreeze.

Once the transfer operation is done, the narrator goes to find a “broker” who will help him achieve time travel to the Mayan era. The method of traveling time should be of no surprise to those familiar with Burroughs’s writing: it involves nothing other than drinking a drug, made from dried mushrooms and herbs that the broker cooks in a clay pot.

The narrator feels the motion sickness of time travel, he pays the broker his fee, and he finds himself in a jungle. When he comes to a clearing, he sees a number of workers in a field planting corn. He feels “the rushing weight of evil insect control forcing [his] thoughts and feelings into prearranged molds, squeezing [his] spirit into a soft invisible vise”, and he is handed a planting stick from one of the workers. He’s gone from time machine to soft machine, the parasitic insects taking control of his body.

He comes across as “a half-witted young Indian”, which will be useful to him, since he’ll never be suspected by the priests as a threat to their power. He can thus possibly be transferred from field work to rock carving the stellae after a long apprenticeship and the priests have total confidence he’ll show no resistance to their power. He stays, therefore, for months as a field worker and keeps a low profile.

He learns of two horrible punishments for anyone who tries to challenge, or even just thinks of challenging, the priests’ authority: “Death in the Ovens,” and “Death In Centipede“, this latter one involving being strapped to a couch and eaten alive by giant centipedes–executions carried out secretly in rooms under the temple.

In order to mess with the system of controlling the people and thus liberate them, the narrator needs access to a machine the Mayans know how to use, but not how to repair were it to be broken, or how to build a new one were it to be destroyed. Since the machine uses recordings (i.e., on magnetic tape, something not invented until the 1920s), it’s clearly an anachronism that Burroughs, in his surreal imagination, has invented out of poetic licence–this anachronism is also reflective of TSM‘s theme of rearranging the temporal order of things.

To gain access to the machine, the narrator agrees, in all disgust and reluctance, to do a sexual favour for one of the priests–the latter transforming himself into a green crab from the waist up during the sex act. The narrator is able to endure all of this by reassuring himself that he’ll enjoy killing the man when the time comes. So after the narrator’s sexual ordeal, the priest transfers him to janitor work in the temple, where he witnesses executions: bodies torn into insect fragments by the ovens, and centipedes born in the ovens from those fragments. It’s time for him to act.

The narrator uses the drug he got from the doctor to take over the priest’s body, he gets into the room where the codices are kept, and he photographs the books. He dismantles the machine by mixing the order of recordings and images, a change that will be picked up by the machine and fed into it. Recorded agricultural operations–the slash and burn–are shuffled so they’ll occur at the wrong times, losing a year’s crop, and causing famine.

He sends out a new command, essentially: “Smash the control machine–Burn the books–Kill the priests–Kill! Kill! Kill!” And with this, to make a long story short, comes the toppling of the Mayan “regime,” to use the word in, of all sources with an obvious liberal agenda, the Wikipedia article. This leads to my next point.

Now, a bringing of an end to the Mayan tyranny is all fine and good…if such is an accurate representation of what their priestly authority was really like. Yet with an anachronism like their machine and its ‘recordings’ as central to the priests’ power, I’d say such accuracy is rather unlikely, to put it mildly.

Matters get more sinister when we consider how this whole “Mayan caper” (interesting choice of words in itself) has been conceived by, of all people, Americans, and for the purpose of toppling an aboriginal “regime” in what’s today Latin America. Yes, the tankie in me is coming out for commentary again.

Of course, there’s nothing inherently socialist about the Mayan “regime.” Remember also, though, that in the opinion of an anarchist–as Burroughs can reasonably be described to have been–neither were the USSR or the Soviet Bloc, nor have China, Cuba, Vietnam, North Korea, or Laos ever been ‘genuinely socialist.’ Any state is oppressive, whether right-wing, left-wing, or centrist, in the eyes of your average anarchist or ‘left-wing’ communist, especially in the eyes of individualist libertarian socialists like Burroughs…so what difference did it make to him whether or not the Mayan priests were socialists?

The point is that it has been a standard practice of US and Western imperialism to do regime change on any country out there that goes against imperialist interests. The first step of such regime change is to justify it by claimning that those “regimes” are oppressive: exactly what we are meant to understand about the Mayan priests–it’s all propaganda, meant to manufacture consent for said regime change.

The ruling class has always found anarchists useful in agreeing that state socialism isn’t ‘real socialism,’ and is therefore tyrannical. The capitalists can say of the anarchists, “See, even fellow leftists agree that the socialist states are no better than capitalist ones, so we should oppose them!” In helping imprialism crush, for example, the Soviet resistance, through their own propaganda, anarchists give the working class “the unkindest cut.”

IV: Uranian Willy

“Heavy metal,” as Burroughs used the expression, had nothing to do with music, of course. I recall seeing him on TV (back when I was still living in Canada) talking about his use of “heavy metal”; I wish I could find the video of him talking about this on YouTube so I can share it here, but my foggy memory of it will have to serve. He was talking about a “metallic” drug experience.

So Uranian Willy, “the heavy metal kid,” personifies drug addiction at its worst: where it has gone from the organic (vegetable) to the mineral (metallic). Willy thus represents the final stage of addiction, a “heavy metal” addiction to junk, sex, and power.

He may be among the “Nova Mob,” a group of parasitic entities attempting to destroy the Earth by manipulating human thought and flesh through “word and image” machines (rather like that of the Mayans, just discussed above), but also being closely associated with Will Lee (who in turn represents Burroughs), Uranian Willy also wishes to break free of his drug addiction and thus free everyone else from addiction’s thought control. Hence, he is also known as “Willy the Rat,” or “Willy the Fink,” for having turned his back on and snitched on the Nova Mob. “He wised up the marks”–that is, he got them to understand how they’re being manipulated. Recall Burroughs’s dictum from Naked Lunch: “Hustlers of the world, there is one mark you cannot beat: the mark inside.” You can fool others, but you cannot fool yourself.

Willy’s efforts to liberate others (“the marks”) from heavy metal drug addiction is compared, on one level, to a pilot in a fighter plane attacking “the Reality Studio and retak[ing] the universe”–“target[ing] Orgasm Ray Installations.” On another level, Willy’s resistance can be compared–in terms of its somewhat similar language–to the narrator of “The Mayan Caper” and his changed commands in the Mayan machine to “Burn the books–kill the priests–Kill! Kill! Kill!”

“This is war to extermination,” Willy understands of his wish to end his dependency on heavy metal. He must “wise up the marks everywhere,” and get them to understand the dangers of drug addiction and how the powers-that-be use it to control the minds of the masses. To wise them up, he must “show them the rigged wheel,” how the marks are being played by those in power. He must save the “Souls rotten from the Orgasm Drug” of heavy metal.

So in this context, we can see how passages like “Photo falling–Word falling–..Take Studio–Take Board Books…Towers, open fire” are similar to what happens when the narrator in “The Mayan Caper” messes with the Mayan machine and its words and images to overthrow the Mayan regime.

Now, members of the Nova Mob are alarmed at Willy’s having suddenly gone rogue and against them, so they try to get him to stop his attack: “Pilot K9, you are cut off–Back–Back–Back before the whole fucking shithouse goes up–Return to base immediately.”

It seems, however, that the Nova Mob have failed in their attempt to stop Uranian Willy, for “It was impossible to estimate the damage–Board Rooms destroyed–Enemy personnel decimated–…Shift linguals–Cut word lines…Photo failing–Word failing…”

Note how “Shift linguals–Cut word lines…” and “Word failing…” sounds a lot like the cut-up technique’s disruption of the natural flow of language as a way of liberating humanity from systems of control. The Nova Mob is being overthrown just as the Mayan priests were.

V: Gongs of Violence

The sexes are at war, dividing the planet right down the middle. It’s a perfect way for the ruling class, with their systems of power and control, to keep us all from resisting and fighting them: make us all fight each other instead, through idpol. [This battle of the sexes, incidentally, should not be confused with the legitimate and necessary struggle for the equality of the sexes, to allow equal opportunity for women, to end their domestic servitude, and to end their sexual degradation. Such an attainment of equality necessitates solidarity between men and women through the adoption of socialism, not the divisiveness of edgy liberal identity politics.]

The armies on both sides seem to have adopted homosexuality, for one army has “Lesbian colonels in tight green uniforms.” Those on either side are deemed “the Sex Enemy.”

Since there is no true love between the sexes in this world, there are no heterosexual marriages or families, and there’s no natural parenthood. Children, therefore, are just “property,” usually not owned by their biological parents.

Each of these “properties” has a “life script,” which sounds again like the use of a predetermined language for the purposes of control by the ruling class. Those with “a lousy grade B life script” may complain…to their mothers, whether adoptive or biological?…”Fuck my life script will you you cheap downgrade bitch!”

The idea that “time-nappers jerk the time position of a property” sounds like an example of how normal linear time is also used as an instrument of power and control by the ruling class, and so “time-nappers,” who “jerk the time position,” are engaging in acts of resistance against the powers-that-be. “The property can also be jerked forward in time and sold at any age,” which sounds as though those in power also manipulate temporal order to maintain power, through the selling of children.

With vivid descriptions of a cityscape we also have vivid descriptions of fighting and violence there, presumably manifestations or results of the battle of the sexes. “Rioters of all nations storm the city in a landslide of flame-throwers and Molotov cocktails.”

Amidst all of this fighting and surrealist description is the ongoing battle for the souls of the people: on one side, those trying to liberate us from the heavy metal addiction: “We are converting to vegetable state–Emergency measure to counter the heavy metal peril”; and on the other side, there are those trying to keep us all addicted to heavy metal: “we are converting all out to heavy metal. Cabonic plague of the Vegetable People threatens our Heavy Metal State…Do not believe the calumny that our metal fallout will turn the planet into a slag heap.”

“Gongs of violence” on the one hand sounds like explosions ringing out like the banging of gongs, and on the other hand like a pun on ‘gangs of violence,’ a male gang vs a female one in the sex war.

The world of this sex war seems to be a future dystopia, which fits in well with the sense of time travel going on throughout TSM. The destruction of cities is implied in the spelling of a number of them without the first letter of each: Ewyork, Onolulu, Aris, Ome, Oston.”

VI: Cross the Wounded Galaxies

In this final chapter, we seem to have traveled time yet again: this time, to the very beginning of human consciousness. The “muttering sickness” has come to “the ape forms,” or the first primitive man, who are able to speak. Since Burroughs regarded language, and the normal, ordered use of it, to be a form of power and control over humanity, he saw it as a “sickness.”

The sickness was brought to the narrator of this chapter “from white time caves frozen in [his] throat.” The “sick apes spitting blood laugh, sound bubbling in throats torn with the talk sickness.” The primates are learning to speak, which is a kind of forbidden fruit of the Tree of Knowledge, so to speak, that is going to lead them all to their collective ruin.

And with language, they now have names. They’ve come out of the mud and are about to enter civilization, and all the irreparable harm it causes, as Burroughs saw it. “The sickness leaped into our body…cold screaming sickness from white time…spitting ape wounds…the talking sickness had names…we had names for each other.”

The “talking sickness” sounds like a rejection of the psychoanalytic “talking cure.” Just as Burroughs didn’t trust language, he didn’t trust the Freudians as people who used therapy as a tool of control. On the other hand, the “ape forms” problematically having names for each other sounds representative of ego formation, which a later Freudian–Jacques Lacan–saw as illusory.

“White time” and “the white worm-thing inside” (this latter being a parasite as yet another instrument of control) seem to represent white supremacy. The “fear-softness in other men” would be the soft machine, or the vulnerable human body in its susceptibility to all the forms of control: time, language, parasites, and heavy metal drug addiction.

“The thing inside [him, that is, “the white worm-sickness in all our bodies”] would always find animals to feed [his] mouth meat.” The parasites inside us that control us always make us kill for food, which includes eating other humans.

There seems to be a jump ahead in time later on in the chapter, for we read of “sewers of the city, crab parasites in [their] genitals.” What was parasitic in prehistory is still parasitic now.

As we have moved from prehistory to the modern world, in Burroughs’s time machine of the rearranged words of his cut-up technique, we encounter a proliferation of the evils begun in the era of the “ape forms”: more parasites and tapeworms, people with names (“Mr. Bradley Mr. Martin”), the authoritarianism of religion (“I am Allah. I made you.”), and shattered windows (“Glass blizzards”), the result of vandalism, or war? There are even Orwellian “Think Police”.

Time travel seems to go into the future again, with presumed astronauts who “cross the wounded galaxies”: Earth seems not to be the only planet infected with parasitical forms of power and control. After all, the “heavy metal boys” are from Uranus, hence “Uranian Willy, the heavy metal kid.”

VII: Conclusion

What TSM is trying to tell us is that the most significant and dangerous forms of manipulation and control that we have to be wary of are not so much those of the government, religion, or even the capitalist class. They are those that we have all internalized: what the parasites and the heavy metal addictions are metaphors for–whatever we allow inside ourselves to have power over and harden the soft machine of the human body.

The Tanah: Crests–Chapter One

[The following is the forty-fourth of many posts–here is the first, here is the second, here is the third, here is the fourth, here is the fifth, here is the sixth, here is the seventh, here is the eighth, here is the ninth, here is the tenth, here is the eleventh, here is the twelfth, here is the thirteenth, here is the fourteenth, here is the fifteenth, here is the sixteenth, here is the seventeenth, here is the eighteenth, here is the nineteenth, here is the twentieth, here is the twenty-first, here is the twenty-second, here is the twenty-third, here is the twenty-fourth, here is the twenty-fifth, here is the twenty-sixth, here is the twenty-seventh, here is the twenty-eighth, here is the twenty-ninth, here is the thirtieth, here is the thirty-first, here is the thirty-second, here is the thirty-third, here is the thirty-fourth, here is the thirty-fifth, here is the thirty-sixth, here is the thirty-seventh, here is the thirty-eighth, here is the thirty-ninth, here is the fortieth, here is the forty-first, here is the forty-second, and here is the forty-third–about a fictitious discovery of ancient manuscripts of a religious text of narratives and magic spells. Its purpose for my readers and me is to provide a cosmology and mythography on which I am basing much, if not most, of my fiction–short stories and novels. If anyone is interested in reading this fiction, he or she can use these blog posts as references to explain the nature of the magic and universe in my fiction.]

Translator’s Introduction

The following is the first of a trilogy of writings of visions of periods of good fortune, this first one for the Luminosian tribe specifically, and the other two for the future of humanity in general, with whom the tribe would be intermarried.

The tribe’s plan for liberation–to make bracelets marked with images of the four Crims personified, and to wear them faithfully–worked gloriously for them, not only freeing them from slavery to the Zoyans, but also ushering in a long period of peace and prosperity for the tribe. The tribe is warned never to lose faith in the Crims as they continue wearing the bracelets, though, lest their fortunes should turn ill.

Such a loss of faith would come one day, though, many generations down the line, and the tribe, by now intermarried with other ethnic groups they’re living with, would then begin a descent into another trough, the “feudal” one described in “Troughs, Chapter Two.”

Chapter One

Glory be to the mighty Crims, who in response to our faithful wearing of their bracelets, will not lose faith in us, and who will soon liberate us from the oppressive Zoyans!

The drugs we extracted from the plants and herbs of Drofurb’s earthly body have given us visions of a certain future of liberation from slavery to the Zoyans. We will be free; we will prosper!

In our visions, we saw a pestilence overwhelm our Zoyan oppressors, wiping them out quickly, one by one, until none of them are left…yet the pestilence will not affect even one of us Luminosians! We will all walk out of Zoyan land unhindered and unscathed, free to find a new land to settle in.

When we find that new land, as our visions have shown, we will have the wisdom not to take the land from those who live there, as we had the Zagans, but instead to live with them peacefully and in mutual respect. We will engage in commerce with them, and we will thrive with them, growing from our poverty as wandering former slaves into a wealthy, happy people!

For many generations since that time, we will continue to live well, because we will keep faith in the Crims as we pass the bracelets from the old to the young. We will remember those four of the air–Weleb, the earth–Drofurb, the fire–Nevil, and the water–Priff, who all saved us from servitude, and we will teach the younger generations to have the same respect.

Thus will the land we live in grow in fertility and bounty, giving us plentiful food, good weather for growing crops, and a peaceful coexistence with the other peoples we mix with. We will even marry with them, adopt many of their cultural values and beliefs, and become much more than just Luminosians.

There should be nothing wrong in any of these changes, as long as we continue to keep faith with the Crims as the bracelets are passed down; but over time, as the newer and newer generations are diluted of our Luminosian values and beliefs, they will forget, if not be utterly ignorant of, the importance of believing in the Crims as they wear the bracelets.

O, the new generations will love the beauty of the bracelets! They will not, however, understand, much less appreciate, their meaning. This ignorance will be the people’s downfall, for the good luck given from the bracelets comes only from faith in the Crims. Wearing the bracelets without that faith leads only to ill fortune.

The faithless wearers of the bracelets will see that ill fortune in the beginning of a new trough.

The Tanah: Troughs–Chapter Three

[The following is the forty-third of many posts–here is the first, here is the second, here is the third, here is the fourth, here is the fifth, here is the sixth, here is the seventh, here is the eighth, here is the ninth, here is the tenth, here is the eleventh, here is the twelfth, here is the thirteenth, here is the fourteenth, here is the fifteenth, here is the sixteenth, here is the seventeenth, here is the eighteenth, here is the nineteenth, here is the twentieth, here is the twenty-first, here is the twenty-second, here is the twenty-third, here is the twenty-fourth, here is the twenty-fifth, here is the twenty-sixth, here is the twenty-seventh, here is the twenty-eighth, here is the twenty-ninth, here is the thirtieth, here is the thirty-first, here is the thirty-second, here is the thirty-third, here is the thirty-fourth, here is the thirty-fifth, here is the thirty-sixth, here is the thirty-seventh, here is the thirty-eighth, here is the thirty-ninth, here is the fortieth, here is the forty-first, and here is the forty-second–about a fictitious discovery of ancient manuscripts of a religious text of narratives and magic spells. Its purpose for my readers and me is to provide a cosmology and mythography on which I am basing much, if not most, of my fiction–short stories and novels. If anyone is interested in reading this fiction, he or she can use these blog posts as references to explain the nature of the magic and universe in my fiction.]

Translator’s Introduction

The last of the “Trough” chapters describes a world without any knowledge of the Crims, let alone how to worship them or use the magic of the Tanah. In the eyes of the ancient tribe that wrote these texts and prophesied this future in their visions, it’s a future world that has totally lost its way, with nothing to give its people any kind of moral guidance.

Accordingly, the trough depicted here is a particularly bleak one. Though a corresponding crest is supposed to follow it, as was mentioned in the translator’s introduction to Troughs, Chapter One, there’s an ambiguity as to whether humanity’s salvation will result in physical survival in a better world, or if it will be only a kind of spiritual survival, a nirvana without physicality.

In any case, this trough also shows a disturbing, uncanny prescience of our modern, capitalist world, or so do some of the researchers in our group believe. Most people will face appalling poverty, state repression, and social alienation, while a small elite own most of the land, money, and property. There’s a description of money-making that reads like a formula from Marx’s Capital–M-C-M’, meaning money-commodity-valorized money (i.e., money with added profit).

Finally, there is a prophesied man who will usher in the end of the world: Christ, or anti-Christ? The text is unclear. Some will think he’s the former; many will think he’s the latter. We researchers think he sounds like a certain contemporary US president.

Chapter Three

O, woe to those in the future who will forget the Crims! We have seen that the people of the world will lose their way, and the punishment of their sins will be too great for most to bear.

These people will know a new kind of slavery, in which the slaves are given wages (though very little), are allowed to change from one master to another of their own accord (if they can find one to give them money and thus save them from total destitution), yet are slaves nonetheless. Exceedingly few have the most, and almost all have almost nothing. The people seem to know or care little about each other, or about themselves. People are not close to each other.

An oppressive state watches the slaves closely, puts them in prisons to work like even more abject slaves, and kills people in other nations through constant war. Wealth is created by transforming money into a product to be sold, which is then made into money again, yet a greater amount of money than before, most of it to be kept by the masters. If too little of this wealth is made in one’s own nation, one goes out to other nations, steals what is in those other nations, and makes the greater amounts of money in those other nations, all to be taken back to the first nation.

Attempts will be made to overthrow these greedy rich men, to establish just and fair societies, but through the clever machinations of those men, who always trick their people into believing that the makers of those just societies are making unjust ones, these attempts will be thwarted, plunging the world into worse oppression and greater despair.

At one point in our vision, when matters seemed to be at their worst, we saw a man emerge and rise to the highest seat of power. Our vision became cloudy and unclear: we could not decide if he was a righteous man avenging the unjust by destroying the world, or an evil man completing the destruction of it.

Some of the people thought him a saviour; many others thought him a demon. Still others thought him a mere fool raised far too high. He saw himself as a saviour; there were pictures depicting him as such. His face was orange. Whatever his intentions were, he assuredly brought on the destruction of many, leading to the end of the trough.

The Tanah: Troughs–Chapter Two

[The following is the forty-second of many posts–here is the first, here is the second, here is the third, here is the fourth, here is the fifth, here is the sixth, here is the seventh, here is the eighth, here is the ninth, here is the tenth, here is the eleventh, here is the twelfth, here is the thirteenth, here is the fourteenth, here is the fifteenth, here is the sixteenth, here is the seventeenth, here is the eighteenth, here is the nineteenth, here is the twentieth, here is the twenty-first, here is the twenty-second, here is the twenty-third, here is the twenty-fourth, here is the twenty-fifth, here is the twenty-sixth, here is the twenty-seventh, here is the twenty-eighth, here is the twenty-ninth, here is the thirtieth, here is the thirty-first, here is the thirty-second, here is the thirty-third, here is the thirty-fourth, here is the thirty-fifth, here is the thirty-sixth, here is the thirty-seventh, here is the thirty-eighth, here is the thirty-ninth, here is the fortieth, and here is the forty-first–about a fictitious discovery of ancient manuscripts of a religious text of narratives and magic spells. Its purpose for my readers and me is to provide a cosmology and mythography on which I am basing much, if not most, of my fiction–short stories and novels. If anyone is interested in reading this fiction, he or she can use these blog posts as references to explain the nature of the magic and universe in my fiction.]

Translator’s Introduction

This and the next chapter deal with “visions” of the future brought on by the use of drugs made from plants, local ones of the tribe’s area, presumably. Which plants in particular were used, we can’t be sure of, since they are never explicitly named in the text.

This chapter includes visions of a future many hundreds of years past the time of writing. The uncanny thing about this chapter is how, at least in the opinion of a few of the researchers in our team, it seems to be describing a feudal society, long before any of the tribe could have known what such a society would be like! It uses the language of someone trying to depict such a society, while of course not being able to describe it properly and accurately, all the while describing it in a way that the people of his or her own world could understand.

The chapter begins with a vision of how the tribe got liberated from the previous trough of slavery to the Zoyans as dealt with in Chapter One. Apparently, the tribe made a set of bracelets, one for each member, each decorated with personifications of the four Crims of the elements. So, Weleb has the face of a man blowing to represent air, Nevil has a face of fire, Drofurb a face of earth and rock, and Priff a watery face. These are mere suppositions of ours: we cannot describe how such bracelets looked for sure, having not yet found even one among the texts and relics.

In any case, it is the magic power of such bracelets that it is believed helped liberate the tribe, with the understanding that they would wear them with bedrock faith in the Crims. A lack of such faith in the future would result in a reversal of fortune. The liberated tribe passed on the bracelets to the next generation, warning the wearers to keep their faith in the Crims strong. The admonition worked, it seems, for many generations. At some point, though, the new wearers of the bracelets must have thought of them as little more than pretty jewelry, for the people soon enough found themselves in a new kind of servitude.

Chapter Two

Glory be to Drofurb, Crim of the earth, from whose plants we may extract drugs that give us signs of the future! From these visions, we Luminosians now know how we can liberate ourselves from the oppressive rule of the Zoyans!

We must make a bracelet for each member of the tribe; of what material each is to be made, we do not know, but we will try many kinds until we know which is correct. The bracelets are to be decorated each with an image of the four Crims, presented as if men. Weleb’s face will huff and puff and blow air; Nevil will have a fiery face; Drofurb, a face of earth and rock, with plants for hair; and Priff will have a wavy, watery face.

The most important thing of all, upon making and wearing the bracelets, is that every member of the tribe have an unshakable faith in the Crims and their ability to sustain a happy life for us all. If ever the wearer’s faith should falter, ill fortune will come back to us.

Our visions have shown that when we finish making the bracelets with the correct material, all of the tribe, fully motivated in their hatred of slavery to the Zoyans, will wear the bracelets with perfect faith. The visions show that we will be liberated; furthermore, many generations in the future will wear the bracelets faithfully, and so will continue to live well in a long, great crest. Bur our visions also show that one day, when the tribe is self-satisfied, they will grow proud, lose their faith, and treat the bracelets as if mere adornments. Then will come the next terrible trough.

Our vision of the trough to be endured was as follows. We saw wide, flat, grassy fields with men and women living off the land. Their crops yielded much food, yet the people were often hungry, for they had to give most of this food to the men who owned the land, those far richer than they.

These poor, wretched workers descended from us Luminosians, who after our liberation from the Zoyans would marry and mix with other peoples. None of these people could read or write; they were all filthy and often suffering or dying of disease at young ages. Many had few teeth, with little to eat or to grin about.

We saw no hope for any of them to rise out of their poverty and squalor. They could only raise crops and give most of the yield to their wealthy lords, who gave hollow promises of protection in exchange for food so desperately needed to fill their bellies with.

No kindness did the lords show their drudges: only an insistence that they know their place, and never try to rise from it, for pain of violence from the lords’ standing armies. We also saw the bracelets on the people’s wrists, never to be removed until passed onto the next generation, for until such a time, the bracelets were stuck to their skin; attempts to tear them off would be intolerably painful, until the Crims forced them to give them to their sons and daughters.

In time, though, one generation would rise up, conquer the evil lords, kings, and queens through bloody violence, which included the severing of heads with devices that had dropping blades. The people would then be free…if only for a short time, for the next trough would be soon to come.

The Tanah: Troughs–Chapter One

[The following is the forty-first of many posts–here is the first, here is the second, here is the third, here is the fourth, here is the fifth, here is the sixth, here is the seventh, here is the eighth, here is the ninth, here is the tenth, here is the eleventh, here is the twelfth, here is the thirteenth, here is the fourteenth, here is the fifteenth, here is the sixteenth, here is the seventeenth, here is the eighteenth, here is the nineteenth, here is the twentieth, here is the twenty-first, here is the twenty-second, here is the twenty-third, here is the twenty-fourth, here is the twenty-fifth, here is the twenty-sixth, here is the twenty-seventh, here is the twenty-eighth, here is the twenty-ninth, here is the thirtieth, here is the thirty-first, here is the thirty-second, here is the thirty-third, here is the thirty-fourth, here is the thirty-fifth, here is the thirty-sixth, here is the thirty-seventh, here is the thirty-eighth, here is the thirty-ninth, and here is the fortieth–about a fictitious discovery of ancient manuscripts of a religious text of narratives and magic spells. Its purpose for my readers and me is to provide a cosmology and mythography on which I am basing much, if not most, of my fiction–short stories and novels. If anyone is interested in reading this fiction, he or she can use these blog posts as references to explain the nature of the magic and universe in my fiction.]

Translator’s Introduction

The ancient tribe that wrote the books of the Tanah conceived of history as a series of crests and troughs, the former being periods of good fortune, and the latter being periods of bad fortune. The writers chose to collect the major troughs of their sacred history and narrate the happenings of each in the chapters of this book, and to collect the major crests of that history and tell of them in the chapters of the next book.

The beginnings of these books of crests and troughs deal with those current to the writers at the time of writing; that is, the first chapters of each deal with the enslavement of the Luminosians by the Zoyans (Troughs), and their prophesied liberation (Crests).

Subsequent chapters in each book deal with scenarios believed to happen hundreds of years after the writing: a trough of servitude to wealthy owners of land, what reads like a prophecy of feudalism; then, a crest will come, liberating the people from this servitude. A final trough concerns a world with increasing and extreme wealth inequality, with authoritarian states that use violence to keep the masses in check, and various methods of lulling the masses into docility and complacency, again, to keep them in check–that is, breads and circuses. It prophesies a world disturbingly close to our own, so accurate is its prescience.

As for the corresponding crest meant to lift the world out of that distant, dystopian future, there is an ambiguity to it as to whether the future world will be saved by the leadership of some messiah-like figure, or if the Earth’s only salvation will be a kind of Armageddon, killing and wiping out all of human, animal, and plant life, leading to a far-off, gradual regeneration of life in a completely new form. Again, the prophecy seems chillingly prescient.

Chapter One

Woe to us Luminosians! Our punishment is just!

We have been under the yoke of the Zoyans for ten years now, and no end to our misery is in sight! We only know that a crest will one day come to liberate us, yet it seems so far away from us.

We toil, we dig, we build, we break up rock, we serve meals to and clean for our betters, the Zoyans. We do all of these tasks as just punishment for our wicked and selfish use of magic, turning the once-benevolent Crims against us! We deserve our suffering!

The Zoyans degrade us because we degraded others. They conquered us because we conquered others. They make us slaves because we made slaves of others. They use our women for their sexual sport because we used the women of others for our sexual sport. The Echo Effect taught us of these dangers, but we would not listen.

These hard times that we must endure are a trough. A trough is part of a wave, and therefore a crest will come. Ill fortune is no more permanent than good fortune is. A trough will move up into a crest just as surely as a crest will move down into another trough.

We cannot know how long this trough will last. We only know that, one day, the wave will begin to rise again. Will that day come tomorrow? Will it come next week? Next month? Next year? In how many years will it come? In how many decades will it come?

We do not know any of this. We only know that the wave will rise again into a crest. We must therefore be patient, have faith, and endure.

So for now, we must continue to do our work, as hateful as it is. We must continue to toil, to dig, to build, to break up rock, to serve meals and clean for our betters, the Zoyans. We must do all of these tasks as penance for having made others do these tasks for us one time in the past, what had been a crest for us.

We must remember: if the beginning of a new crest has not come yet, it is because our penance for our own sins is not yet complete. It will be complete one day: we must have faith, and be patient. The Crims know when that day will be, and we know that they are faithful to us.

Analysis of ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’

To Kill a Mockingbird is a 1960 novel by Harper Lee, winning the Pulitzer Prize the following year. The book has been widely read in high schools and middle schools in the US since as early as 1963 (I read it in Grade 10 English class in the mid-1980s in Canada); the choice of TKAM as a suitable subject for teen classroom study has been controversial, given its use of racial slurs, the topic of rape, and occasional mild profanity.

The novel was adapted into a film in 1962, starring Gregory Peck (who won a Best Actor Oscar for his portrayal of Atticus Finch) and Mary Badham, with Phillip Alford, John Megna, Frank Overton, Rosemary Murphy, Brock Peters, Estelle Evans, Paul Fix, Collin Wilcox, James Anderson, Robert Duvall, and William Windom. The film was also nominated for a Best Picture Oscar.

Despite the novel’s controversial subject matter of rape and racial prejudice against blacks, TKAM is famous for the warmth and humour of its narration. Finch, the lawyer father of Jean Louise “Scout” Finch–who narrates the novel as an adult and who as a child is played by Badham in the film–is a hero and model of integrity for lawyers, since it is Atticus who takes on the burden of defending Tom Robinson (Peters), a black man falsely accused of raping Mayella Ewell (Wilcox) in a town so prejudiced against blacks that there’s no way he’ll be acquitted, even though it’s established that his ‘raping’ of her would have been physically impossible.

There was a mixed response to the novel upon its publication. Despite the “astonishing phenomenon” (to use author Mary McDonough Murphy’s words) of TKAM, with many copies sold and its widespread use in schools over the years, there’s been surprisingly scant literary analysis of it. I hope what I write here won’t be little more than a repetition and variation of what others have already said about it.

An obvious theme in the novel is prejudice, though it isn’t limited to the prejudice against blacks. A major issue, at the beginning of the story, for Scout, her older brother Jeremy “Jem” Finch (Alford), and their friend, Charles Baker Harris (“Dill”–Megna), is their fear of reclusive Arthur “Boo” Radley (Duvall), who is perceived by the three kids as a dangerous, violent psychopath. They believe this because of horrific stories about him, based on the gossip of their neighbours, which is the basis of their prejudice against him.

Actually, Boo is a shy man who would like to be friends with the kids, and so he often leaves little gifts for them in the tree knothole by the Radley house. The kids are content to take the gifts, and while they find him fascinating and mysterious, they’re still scared of him, wanting to goad him into coming out of his house so they can see him while keeping a safe distance from him.

Like Tom Robinson, Boo is a “mockingbird” of the story, against whom it would be a sin to kill. These two are kind, gentle people who would never harm anyone (except in self-defence or the defence of others, as in the case of Radley defending Jem and Scout from an assault at night towards the end of the novel, an assault from a character who is a true danger to many: Bob Ewell (Anderson).

Ewell and his family are a personification of the ‘white trash’ stereotype in many ways. Apart from their virulent racism against blacks, there’s a general vulgarity about them that anyone would find repellent.

One would feel some sympathy for Mayella, Bob’s daughter and a target of much of his abuse, of which sexual abuse is strongly implied in the story, as well as physical and emotional abuse. Still, she helps to enable the charge of rape against Tom Robinson, when we learn that it was actually she who made sexual advances on him. (Lee, pages 259-260)

There’s another child in the Ewell family, a boy named Burris, who keeps failing the first grade in Scout’s class, because he shows up only on the first day of every school year. He’s filthy dirty, and Scout’s teacher, Miss Caroline Fisher, tells him to go home and wash the lice out of his hair. The boy demonstrates his vulgarity by calling her a “snot-nosed slut” before leaving the classroom. (Lee, pages 35-37)

Now, I mention this ‘white trash’ stereotype among poor people in the story, but this doesn’t mean that stereotypes are tossed around everywhere without any sensitivity in TKAM. On the contrary, Lee takes pains in her narrative to defy stereotypical thinking as much as possible. The Ewell family, as well as the ‘ladylike’ but hypocritical Mrs. Merriweather and her gossipy ilk, are exceptions to the rule.

To contrast a good (or at least relatively good) poor family against the Ewells, there are the Cunninghams, who are portrayed in a largely sympathetic way. Little Walter Cunningham is invited to the Finch’s house for a meal, since the boy is hungry; this is after he’s got into a fight with Scout at school. He helps himself to a generous amount of molasses during the meal, at which Scout frowns in disapproval, then she is reprimanded by Calpurnia (Evans in the film) for being judgmental about his indulgence. (Lee, pages 32-33) The Cunninghams are so poor, hit hard by The Depression, that they can’t pay in cash for anything.

The boy’s father, Walter Cunningham Sr., pays off his debt to Atticus for his legal services by giving him firewood, vegetables, and other supplies. As a poor farmer, Mr. Cunningham is a mix of good and bad. His willingness to give things in place of money in exchange for this or that good or service shows how honorable he is to respect others for what good they’ve done for him (on an individual level, what he’s doing is rather like gift culture).

His bad side, however, is seen when he is part of a mob intent on lynching Tom Robinson. A moral weakness of many among the poor is their tendency ‘to punch down,’ or to hurt those in a weaker social position than they’re in, as with poor white Cunningham as against poor black Robinson; this is equally true of Mayella and her false rape accusation. These people would do better ‘to punch up,’ or fight the rich capitalist class instead.

It is Scout’s sweet, innocent words to Mr. Cunningham that make him relent and take his would-be lynch mob back home (pages 204-206). She asks him about his entailment (<<< from legal 3rd definition) and his son, Walter Cunningham, Jr. In this relenting, Mr. Cunningham redeems himself a bit and thus rises above the ‘white trash’ stereotype.

Scout herself is the perfect embodiment of a character in TKAM who defies stereotypes, for she is a tomboy. She typically wears denim overalls rather than dresses, and she often gets into fights with boys at school; I mentioned above her fight with Walter Jr. She is a lovable contrast to the stereotypical gossipy ladies like Mrs. Merriweather (Chapter 24).

It’s important that the novel confront the problem of stereotypes and then defy them, for of course it is stereotypical thinking, with the sweeping generalizations it makes about this or that group of people (‘all blacks are like this,’ ‘all poor people are like that,’ ‘all women and girls do this or that sort of thing,’ etc.), that leads to prejudice against those people.

Prejudice, as we know, often leads to killing. Because of prejudice against Tom and the stereotyping of blacks, he’ll not only be found guilty of a crime he didn’t commit–a crime it should be easy to see he couldn’t possibly have committed–but also shot dead…with seventeen bullets…when trying to run and escape from prison (page 315).

Atticus decries the stereotyping of and sweeping generalizations made against blacks during his closing statement to the jury for Robinson’s trial (page 273). He speaks of “the evil assumption–that all Negroes lie, that all Negroes are basically immoral beings, that all Negro men are not to be trusted around our [i.e., white] women” (Lee’s emphasis). Atticus speaks ironically that this is “a lie as black as Tom Robinson’s skin”.

One ought to remember that such racist generalizing about blacks is not limited to poor, uneducated, ignorant ‘white trash,’ much to the dismay of the educated liberal. Even a philosopher as otherwise brilliant as Hegel was not above making unfair generalizations about “the Negro” (a word which, by the way, was once the polite word to use for black people, as was colored…back during such times as the Jim Crow years). One need only read the Introduction of Hegel’s Philosophy of History (“GEOGRAPHICAL BASIS OF HISTORY,” pages 91-99) to see what I mean.

He claims that Africa is “the land of childhood,” (page 91) that “The Negro…exhibits the natural man in his completely wild and untamed state” (page 93), and that among them “moral sentiments are quite weak, or more strictly speaking, non-existent.” (page 96) Thus, apparently, to paraphrase Hegel’s conclusion on page 99, Africa should be left out of a serious discussion of history as “movement or development”.

Apart from the general lack in Marx of the ugly racism we see in Hegel, my other reasons for preferring Marx to Hegel include how Marx’s theory of the base and superstructure can explain how it’s the social relations of production (the base) that result in the legal, political, and cultural realms (the superstructure) that are in turn used to justify the base, therefore perpetuating the entire system in a seemingly endless loop. In other words, Marx explains how class antagonisms result in the very racism Hegel so thoughtlessly rationalizes. It is not Hegel’s “World Spirit” that will bring mankind closer and closer to freedom, but Marx’s revolutionary overthrow of the system that will do so.

To get back to Boo Radley, the kids regard him as “a malevolent phantom” (page 10), a “haint” that lives in the Radley house. We imagine a ghost saying “Boo,” and this nickname that the kids have for him sounds like a short form for the racial slur “boogie,” which had already been used against blacks since the early 1920s (i.e., through its association with ‘boogie-woogie’). Though the use of “spook” as a racial slur for blacks was only first used in the 1940s, well after the setting of TKAM in the Depression-era 1930s, the book’s publication in 1960 means that Lee must have been aware of its use as a slur, and so the notion of regarding Boo as a ghost fits in with how prejudice against him parallels prejudice against blacks.

When we finally get a physical description of Boo Radley, we learn that his skin is a sickly white, his face and hands in particular–so white as to be far whiter than normal (page 362). There’s an irony in how this far whiter than white skin is on a man against whom the prejudice parallels that of a black man like Tom Robinson.

According to the gossip of Miss Stephanie Crawford (Dill’s aunt in the film, and played by Alice Ghostley), Boo took a pair of scissors and stabbed them in the leg of his father (page 10). This stabbing of phallic scissor blades in his father’s leg can be paralleled symbolically with Tom Robinson’s supposed rape of Mayella. It’s another apocryphal story used to reinforce prejudice against someone who’s actually gentle.

Jem gives “a reasonable description of Boo” on page 16. Actually, it’s a sensationalistic, exaggerated, and terrifying description. Apparently, Boo eats raw squirrels and cats, which explains his bloodstained hands. There’s a long, jagged scar going across his face. His teeth are yellow and rotten, of those he still has. His eyes pop, and he usually drools. Such an ugly description parallels that of any racist for the ‘ugly,’ dark appearance of black people.

As scared as the kids are of this supposedly terrifying man, though, they’re also fascinated with him, Dill in particular wanting to know what he looks like (page 16). They start daring each other to go up to the Radley house and get an up-close look at him (pages 16-19). This mix of fascination and fear of those one is prejudiced against can be compared to the human zoos of the past, where whites would look at, for example, Africans in enclosures; then there’s that opening scene in Office Space, on the commute to work, when Michael Bolton is grooving to hip hop in his car, but he gets terrified when a young black man approaches, so Bolton locks his car door and turns down his music.

Going against all of this prejudice are the words of wisdom that Atticus imparts onto Scout: “You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view….until you climb into his skin and walk around in it.” (page 39) Put another way, empathy is the cure for prejudice.

Still, the kids persist in their fantasies about Boo Radley, even acting out dramas of the Radley family, with Scout playing Mrs. Radley, just sweeping the porch, Dill playing old Mr. Radley, pacing the sidewalk and coughing, and Jem playing Boo, who “shrieked and howled from time to time.” (pages 51-52) This is rather like how so many of us, even when told about the virtue of empathy, persist in our prejudices against blacks and other minorities, scorning empathy as “woke.”

Only in the case of Jem, Scout, and Dill, they’re all just little kids who don’t know any better. Unlike so many adults who persist in their bigotries, the three kids will learn the error of prejudicial thinking, thanks to their progressive-minded father and their closeness to Calpurnia, who helps humanize blacks for them by her example. Indeed, during Robinson’s trial, the kids will go up to the area of the courtroom to watch the trial with the blacks, including Reverend Sykes. This kids’ sitting with the blacks is a symbolic desegregation that will be very good for them, and it will help pave the way for Scout’s acceptance of Boo Radley by the end of the story.

The kids’ gradual learning of the evil of prejudice may be good for them, but it’s also painful, for in this process of learning, they will also lose their innocence. Jem’s loss of his pants while escaping from Boo can be seen as symbolic of that loss of innocence (Chapter 6, pages 72-73).

With the theme of the loss of innocence is all feigned innocence masking guilt, as well as imagined guilt hiding an actual innocence. We see the former in how the three kids seem all sweet and innocent, yet they’re being naughty in their repeated trespassing on the Radley property, which is based on their not-so-innocent prejudging of Boo Radley.

There’s also the seeming innocence of the charming Maycomb community, who seem all sweet, innocent, and Christian, yet they’re tainted with racial prejudice. This problem is by no means limited to the Ewells: others, including Mrs. Merriweather in the Missionary Society, put on hypocritical airs of Christian piety (Chapter 24), yet they display blatant racism towards blacks (Merriweather, for example, uses the word “darky” to refer to blacks on page 310). Then there’s the attempt, led by Mr. Cunningham, to lynch Tom Robinson. There’s also the gossiping of the community.

On the other side of the coin, there’s the real innocence of Boo Radley and Tom Robinson, which is obscured behind all the prejudice against the two. It should be clear early on that Boo means no harm to the kids when he leaves the gifts in the tree knothole for them. Finally, his defence of Jem and Scout against Bob Ewell’s assault on them proves once and for all what a good man Boo is. Near the end of the story, when Scout sees him and says, “Hey, Boo,” then Atticus gently corrects her by saying, “Mr. Arthur, honey,” it’s like someone telling a racist not to use racial slurs when referring to blacks.

Speaking of blacks, Tom Robinson is clearly a kind, gentle human being who only wanted to be helpful to Mayella in doing little household chores for her, and with no remuneration for it. Her sexual advances on him, then her accusation of rape, were not only an attempt to hide her guilt behind a veil of innocence, but also a projection of lechery onto him.

Robinson, like Radley, is a “mockingbird,” a symbol of innocence. It’s a sin to kill, or otherwise harm in any way either of these men–or people like them–because they do no harm to anyone; they do only acts of kindness, just as how mockingbirds will just “sing their hearts out for us,” as Miss Maudie says to Scout (page 119), to explain to the little girl what her father meant by it being acceptable to shoot all the bluejays she and Jem want to shoot with their air-rifles, but never to shoot mockingbirds.

Never harm the innocent.

One of the biggest problems we have in this world is our inability to tell the difference between the innocent and the guilty. That inability is the result of our minds being tainted with prejudice–a loss of our own innocence.

Because of this taint of prejudice, Atticus’s job of defending Robinson, what should be a straightforward one of establishing a reasonable doubt that he raped Mayella, has become nearly impossible. The fact that Robinson’s left arm is useless and crippled, the result of an accident with a cotton gin when he was a child, demonstrates that he couldn’t possibly have given Mayella the facial injuries she got from the rape she accuses him of, injuries that in all probability came from the left hand of her assailant.

Bob Ewell, however, is left-handed, as he shows the people in the courtroom when he writes his name on an envelope for all to see (page 237). That it’s far likelier that a villain like Bob, who drinks and poaches to feed his poor family, is the one who hit and perhaps even raped Mayella, rather than Robinson, is completely lost on the prejudiced jury.

There are no lengthy debates between Atticus and Mr. Gilmer, the prosecutor (Windom) during the trial. Gilmer must imagine, correctly, that he’ll easily win this case simply because the defendant is black. The “witnesses [have] been led by the nose as asses are,” older Scout notes in the narration (page 252), which is an allusion to a soliloquy by Iago in Othello (Act One, Scene iii, lines 444-445), a play about a black man being manipulated by scheming, vengeful white Iago. Just as Othello is led to his destruction by Iago, so is Robinson being led to his destruction by the lies of a white supremacist society.

Because of all of these problems, what should be an easy defence for Atticus has become a near-impossible one. Not only will this job be as difficult for him to do as I’ve said, but he’ll also be hated as a ‘nigger-lover’ for doing it (e.g., Bob Ewell’s vengeful attempt on the lives of Jem and Scout). If he refuses the job, though, he won’t be able to live with himself, let alone give non-hypocritical moral guidance to his kids (pages 139-140).

His annoyance at having to deal with problems that shouldn’t exist when defending Robinson is rather like in the incident when he has to shoot the rabid dog (Chapter 10). Sheriff Hector “Heck” Tate (Overton) wants Atticus to shoot the dog because Atticus is a much better shot than Tate (page 127); similarly, Judge Taylor wants Atticus to take on the Robinson case. Shooting the mad dog is symbolic of ridding Maycomb County of racial prejudice. Here is an animal that should be killed…to protect the truly innocent.

Interestingly, TKAM also explores how racial prejudice can go in the opposite direction. In Chapter 12, Calpurnia takes Jem and Scout to the church of the black community, and a black woman there named Lula is annoyed to see two white kids in their church. Now it’s Calpurnia who has been put in Atticus’s shoes, telling Lula there’s nothing wrong with whites attending their church (page 158).

Lula’s the only one there who has this negative attitude, though, for as Zeebo, the garbage collector, says, the rest of the black community are all mighty glad to have Jem and Scout there in church with them (page 159). It’s in this church that the kids meet Reverend Sykes, who as we know later will have the kids with all the blacks in the balcony area of the courthouse for the trial. Of course, the kids have no prejudice against blacks, for Scout would like to go and visit Calpurnia at her home (pages 167-168), and Calpurnia would be glad to have them come over.

Now, just after Scout has asked to see Calpurnia in her home, Scout looks over at the Radley Place, “expecting to see its phantom occupant”, but it isn’t there. She still needs to get over her hangups about Boo.

Older Scout as narrator observes “a caste system in Maycomb, where the people “took for granted attitudes, character shadings, even gestures, as having been repeated in each generation and refined by time.” (page 175) Examples of such “character shadings” and stereotypes are then given for the gossipy Crawfords, the morbidity of one third of the Merriweathers, the dishonest Delafields, and the idiosyncratic walk of the Bufords. Here are examples of Maycomb prejudices and stereotypical thinking that have nothing to do with race or ethnicity.

Another such example of prejudice is in Aunt Alexandra and her attitude toward the Cunninghams. She won’t have little Walter Cunningham over to the Finch’s house because, in her opinion, “he–is–trash, that’s why” (page 301). We know the Cunninghams, for all of their faults, are nowhere near as bad as the Ewells, but they’re poor enough to be “trash” in Aunt Alexandra’s eyes.

To get back to Robinson’s trial, when Mr. Gilmer is cross-examining him, it’s clear that the prosecutor is relying a lot less on examining the evidence for or against Robinson than on using anything about him to reinforce stereotypical thinking about him, to get an easy conviction. Gilmer begins his cross-examination by mentioning Robinson’s having gotten thirty days for disorderly conduct, implying that Robinson had beaten up “the nigger” really badly, when actually, it was Robinson who got badly beaten (page 262).

Next, Gilmer links Robinson’s being strong enough to bust up chiffarobes and kindling with one hand, “to chok[ing] the breath out of a woman, and sling[ing] her to the floor.” (page 263) It doesn’t matter if there’s any actual proof of Robinson doing that to Mayella…just establish the possibility (however unlikely) of him doing that, just because he’s black. Gilmer also reverses the sense of appearance vs reality with Tom by saying he’s “a mighty good fellow, it seems” by helping with the Ewells’ chores “for not one penny” (page 263).

Gilmer is shocked to hear Robinson say he helped Mayella for free because he felt sorry for her (page 264). It doesn’t matter how poor or ‘white trash’ the Ewell family are, or how it should be obvious that Bob Ewell abuses her. Robinson has every reason in the world to feel sorry for her, but such an idea is unmentionable, since she is white and he is an ‘inferior’ black man.

Yet the whole problem with such things as racial and ethnic prejudice, class conflict, sexual abuse, and the mistreatment of women is that there’s a lack of feeling sorry for people, a lack of empathy, the presence of which would be the beginning of a cure to these problems. We’ll notice how in this trial there’s no real concern with getting justice for Mayella–not even she is really concerned with it, so indoctrinated is she with the prejudices of her community. It’s all about finding a scapegoat in the form of a black man, to rid the Maycomb community of its sin.

What’s deeply saddening is how, in Atticus’s real hopes that an appeal of the guilty verdict will lead to an acquittal, “the shadow of a beginning” (page 297), Robinson still ends up shot and killed.

Yet another example of the liberal hypocrisy in the Maycomb community is when, in Scout’s class with Miss Gates, the teacher contrasts the “DEMOCRACY” of the US with Hitler’s fascism and persecution of the Jews (pages 328-329); yet Scout has also seen Miss Gates leave the courthouse after the Robinson trial, and she’s talking with Miss Stephanie Crawford about how the blacks in their community should learn a lesson from the trial about “gettin’ way above themselves, an’ the next thing they think they can do is marry [white people].” (page 331)

Jem and Scout have come to a better understanding of people by the end of the novel. Scout figures “there’s just one kind of folks. Folks.” (page 304) Jem can understand that idea, but he’s upset about how that “one kind of folks” always “despise each other”. He can understand that it’s this contempt for one’s fellow man that makes Boo Radley want to stay shut up in his house all the time.

In a conversation earlier with Jem on page 196, when the boy mentions the Ku Klux Klan, Atticus dismisses the idea, saying “It’ll never come back.”

After the attempted lynching of Robinson that Atticus saw, one wonders how he could be so sure of there being no return of the Klan.

Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird, New York, Grand Central Publishing, 1960

Analysis of ‘The Last House on the Left’

I: Introduction

The Last House on the Left is a 1972 rape and revenge film written and directed by Wes Craven, his directorial debut. It was produced by Sean S Cunningham, who helped create and who directed the first Friday the 13th film. TLHOTL stars Sandra Peabody and Lucy Grantham, with David Hess, Fred J Lincoln, Jeramie Rain, Marc Sheffler, and Martin Kove.

The movie is a kind of modern retelling of Ingmar Bergman‘s Virgin Spring, which in turn is based on the Swedish ballad “Törres döttrar i Wänge.” TLHOTL was cut many times for the MPAA to get an R rating; as a result, there are many different versions of the film on DVD and VHS reissues, and it’s difficult to get a completely uncut version of the film. Some incomplete scenes include a forced lesbian sex scene between the two victim girls in the woods, Mari (Peabody) in her room naked while reading birthday cards, and Mari raped by Sadie (Rain) in the woods. As we can see, TLHOTL is a rather “vulgarized” version of Bergman’s film, as the Christian Science Monitor News Service called it.

TLHOTL got largely negative reviews on release, but its critical reputation improved somewhat over the years, with some praising the narrative and Peabody’s and Hess’s performances. It’s now considered a cult film, and it was nominated for AFI’s 100 Years…100 Thrills in 2001. A remake was made in 2009, though it’s generally considered inferior to the original.

Here is a link to quotes from the film, and here is a link to the full movie.

You might be wondering, Dear Reader, why I have chosen to do an analysis of this film rather than of The Virgin Spring, TLHOTL‘s inspiration, and artistically a far superior film. The fact is that it is the very vulgarity of TLHOTL that I find important to discuss, as well as the sadism of it, not only in the sexual abuse of the two girls, Mari and Phyllis (Grantham), but also in the violent revenge that Mari’s parents take on the gang who rape, degrade, and murder Mari and Phyllis.

The reason that I am so intrigued by this vulgarity and sadism is that I see a way to watch so unsettling a film, a way that makes it relevant to some of the horrors we’ve been learning of in recent years. Just as films like Salò and Eyes Wide Shut have been related to the Epstein crimes, so can TLHOTL in a way, and this latter film can also galvanize us, if watched in the right frame of mind, to push for justice for, if not outright revenge on, the rapists of those then-underaged girls whom the Epstein criminals had (Mari, while played by an older actress, has just turned 17 in the story).

It should be infuriating to all of us that so little has been done about the Epstein scandal, so watching Mari’s parents, normally mild-mannered, bourgeois people, carrying out as violent and sadistic a revenge against a gang of sadists could help galvanize us to do what’s necessary to get justice for Epstein’s victims.

II: Comparing TLHOTL, The Virgin Spring, and the Epstein Crimes

*TLHOTL*	*The Virgin Spring*	Epstein Crimes
Mari and Phyllis go to the city to attend a rock concert.	Karin and servant Ingeri take candles to church.	Underage girls go to, and are groomed by, the Epstein criminals.
Sadie assists “Weasel” and Krug in their degradation of Mari and Phyllis.	Ingeri, envious of Karin, “wills” her to be raped.	Ghislane Maxwell, Naomi Campbell, and Hillary Clinton are involved, in one way or another with (i.e., grooming for, winking at, if not outright participating in), the Epstein crimes.
Phyllis is gang-raped by “Weasel,” Sadie, and Krug, then Mari is raped by Sadie and Krug. Both are murdered. Junior watches and does nothing.	Two herdsmen rape and murder Karin. A boy who’s with the herdsmen watches and can do nothing.	Epstein, Trump, et al sexually abuse the underage girls. There are also killings, including by cannibalism, allegedly. Most others who personally knew Epstein and about the crimes have generally done nothing to help the victims find justice.
Two incompetent cops can do nothing to help the girls or Mari’s parents.	No law enforcement involved.	Law enforcement so far has been pretty much slack, if not useless, in seeking justice for the victims.
Mari’s parents brutally kill the rapists/murderers.	Karin’s father, Töre, kills the herdsmen and the boy.	What is to be done? Revolution is not a dinner party.

III: The Opening Act of TLHOTL

A postman notes all the birthday cards being sent to Mari, who is then seen taking a shower. Her mom and dad are uncomfortable about her going to the big city at night with only Phyllis to accompany her, and especially with Mari not wearing a bra; still, they let her go.

Their house is way out in the woods, isolated, hence the name of the film. We see the two girls out there for a while, enjoying themselves; our sense of sympathy for them is being established. We also get a sense of Mari’s budding sexuality, too, which will be turned into something tragic and horrifying soon enough.

In the city that night, Mari and Phyllis hope to buy some marijuana. Meanwhile, Krug Stillo (Hess), his illegitimate son, Junior (Sheffler), Fred “Weasel” Podorowski (Lincoln), and Sadie are on the lam from the cops after Krug and Weasel broke out of prison. The girls have heard a news report about the criminals on the car radio, but they don’t show much concern. They meet Junior by the building where the gang is hiding out for the moment; he promises he can get them some weed if they go up to his room with them. Once inside the room, the girls are abducted.

IV: Juxtapositions of Good and Bad

What’s interesting at this point in the movie is how scenes of the gang terrorizing the girls in that room alternate with scenes of Mari’s mom and dad preparing her birthday party (decorations, birthday cake). The hideous and the innocent are so closely juxtaposed here. This is significant given how later, the girls will be further abused and murdered in the very same woods that lead to Mari’s parents’ house, where the killers will later go for accommodations, since their car broke down, the telephones often aren’t working, and Mari took the family car into town. It’s a small world, isn’t it?

The point is that there’s a kind of providential proximity of the ‘heaven and hell,’ as it were, in this movie. As a result, karma comes swiftly.

There is, however, an odd incongruity between the film and its musical soundtrack…from time to time, at least. This incongruity was intentional, apparently, as a conscious break from conventional horror movie music scores. The writers of the music, Stephen Chapin and Hess (who also plays Krug, recall), used a mix of folk rock and bluegrass for the movie. Synthesizer noises tend to be used during violent moments, though.

The incongruity between the narrative and the music is at its sharpest in the scene when we see the gang take the girls, bound and gagged, from the apartment and into the trunk of their getaway car. While this is happening, we hear what sounds like an inappropriate choice of music: an upbeat, bluegrass instrumental called “Baddies Theme.” During what should be a great moment of terror, we hear music that, if anything, sounds flippant in attitude to the situation. A hint to the intention is in the music’s title: from the point of view of a psychopath, one who regards people as mere toys to play with, this moment of terror is sheer fun.

Indeed, there are many examples of a juxtaposition of good and bad, including extremes of these. Mari is a sweet, innocent 17-year-old virgin, yet she isn’t wearing a bra (to the consternation of her parents), and she and Phyllis hope to score some weed before going to a rock concert, the band having the name of “Bloodlust.” It’s an ill omen for them.

Her parents are the typical “nice” people, even willing to accommodate a group of strangers; then, when these strangers turn out to be the murderers of their daughter, the parents immediately plan a vicious revenge, and thus become murderers themselves. Their home is by a beautiful, serene forest, yet here is where Mari and Phyllis are degraded, raped, and murdered.

The house is a place of safety for Mari, but a place of death for her killers. The killers are perfectly safe to kill her and Phyllis in the forest, but they’re anything but safe in the house.

The cops are supposed to protect the community, but the two in question are so incompetent, they can’t even arrive at the house on time to stop Mari’s parents from killing the gang.

V: Doublings

Apart from these juxtaposed opposites, there are also a number of doublings in TLHOTL. Two girls are raped and killed, rather than the one in The Virgin Spring. Two parents avenge their daughter, rather than the one father in TVS. There are two bumbling cops.

We see Mari naked in the shower at the beginning, then she’s naked and victimized later. After her murder, we see Sadie washing the blood off of herself in the lake, then she’s killed at the end of the film. Both Mari and Sadie, when killed, are seen floating head up in water (the lake, and the family’s swimming pool, respectively).

The girls can’t find any weed and Junior never gets a “fix” for his heroin addiction. There are two families: Mari and her parents, and Junior and his abusive father, Krug.

VI: The Middle Act of TLHOTL

To get back to the story, the gang is going in their car with the girls in the trunk, but they have car trouble, and they have to stop it on the side of the road by the forest near Mari’s house. They can’t fix it, so they take the girls out of the trunk and go into the woods.

Meanwhile, Mari’s parents at home are talking with the two cops (the sheriff played by Marshal Anker and the deputy by Kove) about how Mari is missing and their worries about her. The juxtapositions of good and bad continue when Mari, though terrified and crying over what’s to happen to her and Phyllis, also sees her family’s mailbox and therefore knows she isn’t far from home, thus giving her hope. Also, when the cops leave Mari’s home, they drive past the mailbox and the gang’s abandoned car. The deputy suggests they find out whose car it is and help them, but the sheriff says they have more important things to do (helping Mari, in all irony!), so they drive away–so close to saving the day, yet so far away from it.

When the gang gets the girls out of the car, Phyllis bites Krug’s hand, making him want to hurt “that bitch.” With the girls in the middle of the forest now, Krug wants to get his revenge by humiliating Phyllis. He tells her to piss her pants right in front of the laughing gang. After seeing Weasel cut Mari’s finger with his switchblade for not doing as she’s told, Phyllis pisses her pants with a frown. Then they make her take her soiled pants off in front of them and make her hit Mari. Then the two girls are forced to get naked and engage in lesbian sex in front of them, Mari weeping the whole time.

VII: TLHOTL and Epstein

The degradation that Mari and Phyllis are being subjected to can be compared to what Epstein’s victims were put through. Mari is only 17, reminding us of the underage Epstein victims. There is the sexually perverse nature of what both the fictional and the real victims have suffered. There’s also the impotent law enforcement, who have the crimes practically before their eyes, yet they are either unable or unwilling to do virtually anything about it.

There is, however, one crucial difference between the gang in the movie and the Epstein perpetrators: the former are common criminals, lacking in money and political power, while the latter have these in abundance. Small wonder the law enforcement today cannot or won’t properly investigate and prosecute the wealthy offenders, for to do so would have to be so extensive as to bring down so many, if not virtually everybody in power, that the entire system would come crashing down like a house of cards.

I mentioned above that one of the lost scenes was of Sadie raping Mari. (Ghislaine Maxwell not only enabled the Epstein sexual abuse, grooming the girls, but also participated in the sexual abuse herself.) We may frown on the use of such language today, but–during the scene of Phyllis’s attempted escape from the gang, and upon Sadie’s catching of her, she’s hit by Phyllis with a rock–Phyllis’s calling Sadie a “stupid dyke” is understandable.

VIII: Two Shakespeare Allusions

There’s one moment in the film with a possible Shakespearean allusion, and another one with a definite allusion to the Bard. The possible one is from Othello, and the definite one is from Hamlet.

While Phyllis is running from Weasel and Sadie, and Krug has gone away to the car, Mari is left alone with Junior, who is being trusted to keep her from escaping. She hopes he’ll help her get away, though, to her nearby home, and even promises him he’ll get a “fix” (some Methadone, since her dad is a doctor). Trying to win his friendship and trust, she starts calling him “Willow.”

This sounds to me like an allusion to the “Willow scene” in Othello, in which Desdemona tells her maidservant, Emilia, about her mother’s maid, Barbary, who was in love with a man who went mad and forsook her. Barbary would sing “a song of willow” to express her heartbreak, and she would die singing it. The song is full of imagery from nature, including “a sycamore tree,” “a green willow,” and “the fresh streams,” all fitting imagery to be associated with Mari in the woods.

As for Junior, or “Willow,” he could be seen as analogous to the man Barbary loves, for “Willow” is going mad from his heroin withdrawal (to say nothing of his intimidation from being constantly bullied by his father, Krug), and he–in not sufficiently helping Mari to escape out of fear of Krug killing him–will forsake Mari, too.

She will die from a gunshot in the back from Krug as she walks in the lake, dazed in her trauma from having just been raped by him (as well as having his name carved into her chest). She’ll float head up, her body surrounded by plants, like Ophelia in Hamlet. She, too, was forsaken by the Danish prince, who also, it seemed, proved mad. If I’m right about the Othello allusion, then these two allusions are yet another doubling in TLHOTL.

IX: Bionian Psychoanalysis and TLHOTL

Please indulge me, Dear Reader, while I go off on a tangent for a moment. I’ll relate this tangent to TLHOTL soon enough.

Object relations psychoanalyst WR Bion had an application of Melanie Klein‘s notion of projective identification in which it’s not just about projecting feelings and manipulating others into embodying those feelings. For Bion, projective identification is a primitive, pre-verbal form of communication.

Such communication–originally between a baby and its mother, and later, between a (psychotic) patient and his psychoanalyst–is Bion’s theory of containment, which is normally about the mother or analyst (the container) soothing and processing the unbearable agitations of, respectively, the baby or patient (the contained). It’s normally a positive experience, helping the baby or mental patient to grow in the ability to think, learn from experience, and build a stable identity.

Bion’s notion of container/contained, represented by the female/male symbols of ♀︎/♂︎, implies a sexual symbolism of phallus (the contained) in yoni (the container), or the act of coitus. I find this symbolism extremely useful in analyzing TLHOTL, for sometimes the container/contained relationship is a negative one, -♀︎/♂︎, in which the container cannot process or manage the projections, a problem represented in the movie with the rapes, stabbings, carving of Krug’s name in Mari’s chest, him shooting her in the back, and later, with her parents’ revenge–her mother biting Weasel’s dick off and slitting Sadie’s throat, as well as Mari’s dad shooting Krug in the shoulder and finishing him off with the chainsaw.

Because of the psychopathic nature of the gang, their pain cannot be soothed or processed–it cannot be contained. Here, containment is not the quietening of a baby’s crying and soothing it to sleep; containment isn’t a psychiatrist soothing and helping to process the ranting and raving of a mentally ill man.

With the gang, the contained is a raping phallus, a switchblade stuck in Phyllis’s back, the knife cutting Krug’s name in Mari’s chest, and a bullet in her back. The container is the violated yoni of either girl, the stab wound in Phyllis’s back, the knife wounds on Mari’s chest, and the bullet wound in her back. The same goes for her parents’ revenge: the phallic contained is her mother’s teeth on Weasel’s dick, the switchblade going through Sadie’s throat, the bullet from Mari’s dad’s shotgun, and the chainsaw blade entering Krug’s flesh. The wounds that the gang received were all the yonic containers. These are all negative, destructive forms of containment, -♀︎/♂︎, for no one can process or manage such painful projections.

That we can see two perfectly straight, bourgeois parents immediately consumed with violent hate for their daughter’s murderers demonstrates projective identification utterly, even if the gang never intended to project their violence onto the doctor and his wife. The parents have become as violent and murderous as their daughter’s attackers.

X: The Final Act of TLHOTL

I said it above, and I’ll say it again: it is most extraordinary to see two straight, nice people transformed into not only killers, but bloodthirsty ones, and so quickly.

It is emphasized from the beginning of the film how straight, conservative, and nice Mari’s mom and dad are. They are uncomfortable with her wearing no bra, saying “tits,” and going to a rough area of town to attend a rock concert by a band called “Bloodlust.” Still, they’re laid-back enough to let her go.

We later see the two innocently preparing her birthday party in scenes alternating with those of Mari and Phyllis being terrorized by the gang in that apartment. They’re full of worry as they trust the two incompetent cops to find their daughter.

Mari’s parents are so nice and straight that they even give accommodations to a group of strangers, not knowing they’re Mari’s rapists and killers. They provide a nice dinner for them, Sadie gluttonously drinking their wine. They’re given Mari’s bedroom to sleep in; here, naturally, is where the gang sees photos of the girl they’d just raped and killed, and they know they must be careful of what they say with her parents potentially in earshot…though they’ll fail to be careful enough.

First, Mari’s mother picks up on clues: Junior is wearing a Peace necklace Mari’s dad bought and gave her as a gift at the beginning of the film; Junior’s heroin withdrawal and bad dreams of the murders cause him to shout out “Sorry!”, which causes more suspicion; then, her mom finds the gang’s bloody clothes in their luggage; then, she overhears the gang talking in Mari’s room about her body floating in the lake, prompting her mom and dad to go outside and find it there.

As I said above, what must be emphasized here is the sadism of the revenge that the parents get on Mari’s killers. The father doesn’t just get a shotgun and shoot all four of them, then plan to tell the cops he did it in self-defence. His and the mother’s revenge is out of unmitigated rage…stemming, ironically, from a deep love of their daughter.

The father sets up an electrocution booby trap by the back door of the house, having sprayed a slippery white cream on the floor by the door of Mari’s room, where the gang is sleeping. The mother pretends to seduce Weasel by taking him outside by the lake, and she even deliberately catches his penis in his zipper and calls it “little,” before beginning oral on him and biting it off, then leaving him to bleed to death there.

Krug fights with the father and has the upper hand until still-remorseful Junior threatens his dad with a pistol. Just to get a sense of how psychopathic Krug is, we see him manipulating his own son into pointing the gun at himself and blowing his brains out, which Junior does. Meanwhile, Mari’s father sneaks away to the basement and gets the chainsaw.

As explained above, the mother slits Sadie’s throat with the switchblade after a brief scuffle outside by the swimming pool, and the father kills Krug with the chainsaw, the cops having arrived too late to stop him. The film ends with the grieving parents knowing there’s no way they can pretend that their revenge was out of self-defence. Surely, though, they regret nothing.

XI: Conclusion

TLHOTL is a disturbing film to watch–no doubt. Knowing what the Epstein criminals did is even more disturbing, especially when we consider what little, if anything substantive, has been done about it (Were Epstein and Maxwell apprehended, or was that faked to placate us all?).

I think that a good use can be made of this movie by watching it while thoroughly identifying with 17-year-old Mari’s parents. We must imagine the Epstein victims as if they were our own daughters in order to build up the kind of rage we need to have to fight for justice (and this is just after International Working Women’s Day, as of the publication of this article)–instead of just passively accepting the crimes, imagining nothing can be done about them because the criminals in question are too rich and powerful to stop.

Just as Mari’s parents were just two ordinary people filled with rage over what was done to their daughter, driven to revenge without a thought as to how much stronger the killers were, so should we, on watching TLHOTL, be filled with a sufficient rage to rise up against the much more powerful pedophile ruling class, overthrow them (not necessarily in a sadistic manner, of course, but in a decisive one), and establish a just society.

For our law enforcement is little better than those two incompetent cops.

The Tanah: Amores–Four More Love Spells

[The following is the thirty-eighth of many posts–here is the first, here is the second, here is the third, here is the fourth, here is the fifth, here is the sixth, here is the seventh, here is the eighth, here is the ninth, here is the tenth, here is the eleventh, here is the twelfth, here is the thirteenth, here is the fourteenth, here is the fifteenth, here is the sixteenth, here is the seventeenth, here is the eighteenth, here is the nineteenth, here is the twentieth, here is the twenty-first, here is the twenty-second, here is the twenty-third, here is the twenty-fourth, here is the twenty-fifth, here is the twenty-sixth, here is the twenty-seventh, here is the twenty-eighth, here is the twenty-ninth, here is the thirtieth, here is the thirty-first, here is the thirty-second, here is the thirty-third, here is the thirty-fourth, here is the thirty-fifth, here is the thirty-sixth, and here is the thirty-seventh–about a fictitious discovery of ancient manuscripts of a religious text of narratives and magic spells. Its purpose for my readers and me is to provide a cosmology and mythography on which I am basing much, if not most, of my fiction–short stories and novels. If anyone is interested in reading this fiction, he or she can use these blog posts as references to explain the nature of the magic and universe in my fiction.]

Translator’s Comment: apparently, men in the ancient world were as insecure about their size as they are today.

Phallus Enlargement Spell

[Burn a small flame on the ground outside on a windy day. Hold a long, thick rock over the flame, close enough that the flame is almost touching the rock. Recite the following line over and over.]

Drofurb, grow it!

Comment: try not to chuckle as much as we translators did.

Improve Lovemaking Skills Spell

[Put a pot filled with water over a small flame on the ground. Do this outside, on a windy day. As the water begins to boil, start dropping small, spherical rocks into it. Stir the rocks inside slowly with a wooden spoon as you repeatedly chant the following verse.]

Weleb, blow a lover’s skill into me!
Nevil, make my lover burn with desire for me!
Drofurb, ground, solidify our love!
Priff, have effortless pleasure flow through us!

Power Through Vulnerability Spell

[Take a ritual bath in water that has been heated in pots over a large fire. Have round stones placed on the bottom of the bath. Get naked, go in the water, and lie on your back after briefly soaking your head in it. Stay in the water as you chant the following verse slowly, nine times.]

Weleb, in my weakness, give me strength.
Nevil, in my coldness, give me heat.
Drofurb, in my nakedness, clothe me.
Priff, in my thirst, give me drink.

Comment: this spell is one of the most blatant to use the principle of the unity of contraries as a basis of the power of magic. In weakness and vulnerability, one finds strength and power, because these opposites are one, as are all opposites understood to be, for the one always flows toward the other, like Priff’s water.

Because of women’s lack of political power in the ancient world, it was women who usually used this spell to gain some kind of power, however indirectly. Being naked while doing the spell was thus indispensable for this purpose.

Resolving Arguments/Making-up Spell

[If the other party does not wish to take part in this spell, you must make an effigy of him or her, life-sized and as close in likeness to the other as possible, to make this an effective spell. Either you and the other party, or you and the effigy, must embrace tightly while reciting the verses over and over. Recite them twice as many times if with the effigy.]

Weleb, blow the two of us back together!
Nevil, change our fire of hate to love!
Drofurb, make our love as strong as stone!
Priff, make our love flow into each other’s!

Comment: this is one of those rare ‘Amores’ spells that the elders actually approved of.

	The Tanah: Crests–Ch… on The Tanah: Crests–Chapter Two
	The Tanah: Crests–Ch… on The Tanah: Crests–Chapter One
	The Tanah: Crests–Ch… on The Tanah: Troughs–Chapter Thr…
	The Tanah: Crests–Ch… on The Tanah: Troughs–Chapter Two
	The Tanah: Crests–Ch… on The Tanah: Troughs–Chapt…