Tag: books

The Gods Must Be Furious–Chapter Four

The next day, the incident was discussed on social media. Of course, virtually nobody, outside of a few in the neopagan community, mentioned the face in the water.

“I have no sympathy for the dead,” one embittered woman, one of the staff on the yacht, said about the wealthy there. “I overheard their conversations while I was serving them. They showed no sympathy for how the economy was affecting the poor. They were also often rude and impatient with our service. Why should I feel bad for them?”

The woman who’d tried to help clean the bad-tempered guest’s dress said this about her: “The ocean cleaned her dress. Good enough.”

Michelle and Gary were in a group chat with their friend, Nina.

“So, you had the same dream as us?” Gary asked Nina.

“Judging by how the two of you described it, I’d say I had the exact same dream as you,” Nina said. “I know there were a few people who claim they saw a bearded face in the clouds the night of the thunderstorm, and a bearded face on the waves when the yacht sank.”

“Were the people who saw the face any of the staff on that yacht?” Michelle asked.

“No, they were people on the rescue boat, including people who don’t believe in any gods, just people too shocked to believe their own eyes,” Nina said, “and too reluctant to go public with what they saw.” 

“Another thing should be talked about,” Gary said. “The people who were killed were all rich and powerful.”

“They were also widely hated,” Nina added.

“Yes,” Michelle said. “And when you put that together with the fact that the world is being destroyed by global warming, constant wars, and economic hardship, you can see why the gods are intervening. Us all having the same dream, the faces of—let’s use Greek names, for convenience—Zeus and Poseidon in the clouds and water, these are clear signs that something major is happening. This is all way beyond mere synchronicity.”

“We can be sure of one thing,” Gary said. “The gods are very, very angry.”

“Angry?” Nina said. “They’re enraged.”

“Infuriated,” Michelle said.

“As they said in the dream, man’s wickedness has gone too far, and the gods don’t wish to sit idly by anymore,” Gary said.

“We’re going to have to keep our eyes and ears open,” Nina said. “Something big is going to happen, and we don’t want to be among those who suffer and die in it. We must discuss this with more of our friends and fellow believers, as well as our families.”

“My brother manages a country club where lots of rich folks go to play golf,” Gary said. “I have a premonition something’s going to happen there. I had a dream in which I saw the earth-goddess’s weeping face. It ended with the green of a golf course. It really looked like the one in my brother’s country club.”

“Oh, my God!” Michelle said. “Did you see the globe of the Earth with a woman’s crying face, coming nearer and nearer to you, like a camera closeup?”

Gary gulped and said, “Yes.”

“So did I,” Michelle said.

“So did I,” Nina said. “Exactly as you both described.”

None of them said anything for several more seconds.

Gary was the first to type something next: “Some of us have family who won’t ever open their minds to anything even remotely pagan. Still, that won’t stop us from loving them. My brother, whom I mentioned a little while ago, is such a person. How are we going to convince them to do what needs to be done, if a worldwide disaster is coming, as all the signs seem to be showing?”

“That’s a good question,” Michelle responded. “My mother is a Christian, but the books I’ve bought her over the years, ones by Bishop ‘Jack’ Spong, have opened her mind up a little. I might be able to get her to listen to reason, but I don’t think it will be easy. I wonder if she’s had the same dreams as us.”

“Let’s pray for the best,” Nina said. “My husband doesn’t share my faith, either, but I bet I can nag him to do what needs to be done. As I said, let’s pray to the gods for help when this all starts to get scary, as it looks like it will.”

The Gods Must Be Furious–Chapter Three

A week later, Mr. and Ms. Plantagenet, owners of a large investment company named after themselves, were on their yacht with some wealthy friends on a California shore. The yacht was tied to the pier, and all the people aboard had each already had several drinks.

“I’m so glad the stock market crash didn’t affect any of us, Tom,” a female guest said to Mr. Plantagenet.

“That’s because, due to our ability to pull the strings of the banks and the federal government, we could prevent the stock market crash from affecting us,” Tom said.

All the guests chuckled.

“A phone call here, an email there, and our representatives can bail out anyone we need them to,” Ms. Plantagenet said.

“That’s so reassuring, Donna,” a male guest said to Ms. Plantagenet. “Since my company was one of the ones that needed a bailout.”

“As Donna and I know, let the common people suffer under the bad economy, not us,” Tom said.

The rope that moored the yacht was loosening and untying…all by itself.

“I agree, Tom,” the male guest said. “The masses are not our problem.”

“Hear, hear,” Tom said. All the guests clinked their champagne glasses together.

“If the masses don’t want to suffer, they should lay off the drugs and stop wasting money on non-essentials,” Donna said.

“Agreed,” the others said together.

The boat was drifting into the ocean, though everyone was too caught up in the conversation to notice.

“A most annoying thing happened to us while at work today, you know,” Tom said.

“Oh, and what was that?” the male guest asked.

“A bunch of university students were protesting in front of our building this morning, can you believe that?” Donna said with a sneer.

“Protesting about what?” the female guest asked.

“Oh, the usual bullshit,” Tom grunted as he had his glass refilled. “We’ve too much influence on the banks and the government, we have too much money and they have too little, all that crap.”

The other guests groaned in annoyance.

“What did you do about it?” another guest asked.

“We called the cops and got rid of them, of course,” Donna said. “A few of the long-haired young men resisted arrest, so the cops beat them.”

“Served the bastards right,” Tom said.

“Oh, definitely,” the third guest said.

Finally, one of them looked out at the water. “Where are we?” she asked.

“What do you mean, ‘where are we’?” Tom asked, then looked out at the ocean. “What?”

Everyone was looking out at the water now.

The pier and shore were nowhere in sight.

The sun had set. Clouds were covering the moon and stars. The guests had only the yacht’s electricity for light. Worried murmurs were heard.

“Derrick?” Donna called out to a staff member. “Radio the Yacht Club onshore. Ask for help.”

“Yes, Donna,” Derrick said, then went off to do it.

Heavy gusts of wind started blowing. The waves were rocking the yacht. Drinks were spilt.

“Dammit!” one of the guests yelled at the stain on her dress. “You!” she shouted at one of the female staff. “Come with me and help me clean this!” They left for the washroom.

The wind and rocking of the yacht continued; it was getting more intense. It also started to rain.

“Oh, no!” Donna said. “Derrick, have you contacted the Yacht Club? What did they say?”

“There’s something wrong with the radio,” he said. “I can’t get any connection with the shore. I tried and tried, but I couldn’t.”

“What are we going to do?” a guest said. “It’s looking like a storm out there!”

A sudden crack of thunder startled everyone.

A flash of lightning scared them even more.

The rain was splashing down. The rocking of the yacht was giving everyone the feeling of a real possibility of capsizing. Everyone onboard was panicking.

Derrick looked out on the water. He blinked and looked again. When the lightning flashed and provided some brief light, he was sure he saw a man’s bearded face among the waves. Apart from the moving of the waves distorting the image, it was as precise as a photograph. The face looked malevolent.

I haven’t had a drop of booze tonight, he thought. No pot, no LSD. And I never hallucinate.

Suddenly, there were bumping, crunching, and snapping sounds, as well as several great jerks as the yacht hit a rock.

The screaming got louder as the yacht was sinking. Everyone was trying to hang onto something to stay above the water, but only the staff managed to do so. Tom, Donna, and all their guests went straight underwater; it felt as though watery arms were pulling them all down. Some of them thought they actually saw and felt watery arms grabbing their bodies.

Before they all passed out, the last thing they saw, because of a few more lightning flashes, was that same bearded, scowling face among the shadows of the deep.

Hardly a second passed by since the last of the rich drowned, then the storm ended. The stars and the moon reappeared, restoring some light to the scene. The staff, hanging onto pieces of the broken yacht or to the huge rock it had smashed into, saw a boat approaching. A light from the boat shone on them. The staff cheered at their rescuers. 

As they got on the boat, a few of them, including Derrick, looked into the water, and with the light from the boat shining out onto the water, they saw that bearded face. Their eyes all widened.

This time, the face was smiling.

The Gods Must Be Furious–Prologue

This was the dream.

There was a meeting of all the gods in a place so dark—was it a cave? Was it the bottom of the ocean? Was it in a starless part of outer space?—only their divine eyesight allowed them to see each other.

The gods looked upon the weeping goddess of the Earth, and on those who were her stewards, with near despair.

“Something must be done,” the sky-father said in a deep voice. “We have been dormant for too long. We have allowed man to abuse our grandmother of the Earth several hundred years now. It cannot go on.”

“They stopped praying to us centuries ago,” the god of the sea said. “We tolerated that, but their sin has reached such lows. We cannot tolerate it anymore.”

“Since the praying stopped, we have been dormant, in a state of hibernation for so long,” the king of the underworld said.

“Not I,” the god of war said. “On the contrary, I have hardly been allowed to sleep since the filth has gone into the clouds, the sea, and on the land. My energy is nearly spent. I crave rest.”

“Man is killing me, and all of my children,” the earth mother goddess sobbed. “Man is killing himself, too, only he is too blind and foolish to see it. Save us, brothers and sisters—I beseech you.”

“Our grandmother in body, and sister in spirit, we know your pain,” the sky-god said.

“We will help you, dear sister, have no fear,” the goddess of the grains said. 

“All man cares about is money,” the god of commerce said. “He must either be freed of his slavish devotion to it, or he must be killed.”

“Not all of them,” the sky-father said. “There are a few good men, women, and all the innocent children who can be spared…or resurrected later, at least. First, we will seek out a select few of the evil ones to slay, as a message of warning to the others. Those who have ears, and will listen, we will provide them with protection when we destroy the rest. As for the evil ones, we will first provide fair warning.”

“They will not heed the warning, to be sure,” the sea-god said.

“No, they will not,” the sky-father said. “We will give them warning even still, for it is the just thing to do. Their unwillingness to heed our warnings will be upon them, not upon us.”

“How shall we do it?” the god of the underworld asked. “How shall we warn them?”

“Each of us will choose a group of victims and slay them,” the sky-father said. “You, my brother, find someone in the mining business, or in the hydraulic fracturing business, and destroy him. You, our grandmother of the Earth and our spiritual sister, find fitting victims. You, my brother of the sea, can find some wealthy sorts on their yachts and lead them to their doom. I, too, will find victims. After these attacks, we will await the world’s reaction, and act in a manner fitting.”

“So the people will know that these acts are not freak occurrences of nature, but deliberately carried out by us, we will have to leave signs,” the sea-god said.

“Yes,” said the sky-father. “When the attacks are finished, we will allow ourselves to be seen: me in the sky, you, Brother, on the waves of the water, on the grassy ground for you, our sister of the Earth, and in the underground rock for you, our brother. Someone will report on the sight of our images, and though most won’t believe, enough will—those who have eyes to see and ears to hear. These ones will have the faith to be saved.”

The dream ended there.

Who woke from it?

Many, many people saw and heard the exact same dream…all over the Earth.

These dreamers all wondered: was this dream mere wish-fulfillment, a wish that the wicked would be destroyed and the Earth saved…or was the dream prophetic?

“That dream felt so real,” Michelle said with a yawn. “Were the gods talking to me?”

“Why would I dream of something like that?” Gary asked himself as he sat up in bed. “Wish fulfillment? Do I want the gods to intervene in our shitty world that badly?”

Nina was rubbing her eyes and watching her husband sleeping peacefully beside her. I feel rather disappointed that that was only a dream, she thought. Since nobody else is doing anything about the Earth’s problems, a little divine intervention for the sake of our Mother Earth would be a good thing.

Shelly woke up with a start. Then she closed her eyes again, put her hands together, and prayed: “O gods, please do what I just dreamed…but show mercy, even to the wicked.”

Across the road from Michelle’s house, her mother woke up, too.

Why would I, a Bible-believing Christian, dream about pagan gods? she wondered. That was the kind of thing my daughter would have dreamt. Or were they angels? I’d rather believe that.

Cam woke up. “What a ridiculous dream, something Gary would have dreamed,” he whispered, then went right back to sleep.

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.