Tag: books

The Tanah–Migrations, Chapter Two

[The following is the fourteenth 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, and here is the thirteenth–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.]

The Luminosians would wander in the neighbouring land for weeks without ever finding a city to settle in. The elders had advised them to stop using magic for at least the time being, fearing that an excessive use of it would lead to evil.

The elders were the only ones among them who still thought the old teachings had any worth. They insisted that the people be patient and wait for a new crest of good luck to come for them. Surely it wouldn’t be long before the weary Luminosians found a city where they’d find food and rest.

It would still be a long time, though.

While they had managed to feed themselves with a combination of food they’d taken with them from the land of Tenebros as they were carried up in the air to this new land, and food hunted for and gathered here, it would soon prove to be insufficient. As the food ran out, they traveled farther, and when the food ran out in these new areas, they continued moving.

Instead of finding a city, though, they found a desert. A few shrubs were here and there, with no animals or rain. They were beginning to starve.

“What of your teachings now, old men?” a young man shouted at the elders.

“Yes, where is that crest of good luck you keep promising us?” a young woman shouted at them.

“Patience!” one of the elders said.

“I’m fed to the teeth with your ‘patience’!” another woman, a mother of several, shouted. “I want my children fed to the teeth with food, and now!“

Shouts of agreement were heard all around.

“Enough with the teachings!” the young man said. “Let us get aid from the Crims. They helped us before, when the teachings failed us; they can help us again. We can prepare another ritual.”

More shouts of agreement were heard.

“No, no!” another of the elders said. “The crest of good luck from the magic just used can, if overused, lead to a trough of bad luck. Remember the failed rituals from before the successful one, the only successful one. There is a danger–“

“There is a danger of starvation!” the mother shouted back. “My babies need food now!“

“We need only to learn from our mistakes when using magic,” another young man said. “See that small, withering shrub over there?” He pointed at it, several yards in front of him. “Let us go over to it and do a ritual there.”

Those among them who had practiced magic went over to the shrub with him. One of the magic practitioners piled up pebbles and dirt around the shrub. Another licked her finger and raised it to the air to feel for a breeze. A third lit the withered shrub on fire. A fourth got some water from his goblet and got ready to pour it on the fire.

“Drofurb, Weleb, Nevil, and Priff have assembled,” a fifth worker of magic said. “We may begin the chant.”

All five chanted together, in the sacred language. “Crims, Crims, feed us, Crims!” They repeated it in a rhythm, to the beating of a drum.

The elders watched and shook their heads in disbelief and dismay.

When the chanting, which had reached its loudest, was finally done, the water was poured on the waving flames. The shrub, burned black, began to shake.

Moans and sighs of anticipation and excitement were everywhere.

The shrub began to grow into a large, brown tree. At the highest of its growth, it began to grow leaves. Then, ripe fruit began to grow on all of the branches. Yellow, orange, and red fruit, fresh and delicious-looking.

The famished Luminosians rushed over to the tree and ripped the fruit from the branches, then filled their faces with it. Once everyone had sated himself with the fruit, the workers of magic began a new ritual to provide other forms of food.

It involved another burning shrub with gusts of wind, nearby piles of pebbles, and water poured on the fire after chanting, “Crims, Crims, give us food!” over and over again, louder and louder, to the beat of the drum.

Instead of the shrub turning into another fruit tree, though, there was a moment of silence…then soon of shaking.

“Well?” said one of the elders. “What of your magic now, you young fools?”

“Even if we had another fruit tree, we cannot live on fruit alone,” a middle-aged man said.

Then the source of the shaking presented itself to them.

Coming from the incline of a hill the Luminosians had come up was a huge herd of deer running in their direction. Some of the people had bows and arrows they’d made in the previous weeks for hunting whatever animals could have been found. Now they were firing every last arrow in a frenzy to kill as many deer as they could.

So much deer flesh was cooked over campfires that everyone was sated by nightfall. The Luminosians slept in peace and contentment that night. Even the elders, though annoyed at having been proven wrong, were pleased to have their bellies full.

The next morning, they all continued on their way to find a city to settle in. Further encouraged by their ability to use magic to provide what they needed, they continued on their trek with little complaint.

By noontime that day, they reached the top of a cliff that looked down on a settlement. It was a beautiful city, with a nearby lake, grass, and trees all around it.

“Civilization, at last!” an old woman yelled.

“We’re saved!” a young man shouted.

“As you can see,” one of the elders said, “our patience has rewarded us. The promised crest of good luck has come, as we said it would.”

“But will the people living there take us all in?” that mother of many children asked. “There are so many of us. Hospitality has its limits.”

“We will do what we can to appeal to their mercy and generosity,” another elder said. “We can do no more than that.”

“Oh, we can do much more than that,” one of the magic workers said. “Relying on their kindness will be far less effective.”

“Please,” a third elder said. “No more magic.”

“Why not?” the young man said. “It has worked before.”

“And it has failed before,” the third elder said. “Recall the Luminosians killed when we tried to free ourselves from Tenebros.”

“But we’ve learned so much since then,” a young woman said. “And we’ll continue to learn.”

“Yes!” the young man said.

“What do you plan to do with this city, if they refuse to take so many of us in?” another elder asked.

“Quite simple,” one of the practitioners of magic said. “We’ll use our magic to take the city for ourselves.”

“No!” all of the elders shouted at once.

“Why not?” that magic worker asked, with a smug grin on his face.

“How can you ask, ‘Why not?'” one of the elders asked. “It is their city, not ours for the taking.”

“It will be ours soon enough,” the young man said.

“But we have no right to take it from those people,” the same elder said. “Do not be so wicked.”

“The world was wicked to us in making us slaves to the invading Tenebrosians,” the magic worker said. “The world owes us for how we have suffered.”

“This is Mad Thinking!” an elder shouted. “The first of the Ten Errors! You are denying the unity of all things by denying the rights of those people to live in their city in peace. How do you plan to remove them?”

“By having them killed, if necessary,” the magic worker said, with a malevolent smirk on his face.

“Murder!” that same elder shouted. “The sixth of the Ten Errors! You deny the unity of all life by trying to remove some of it! Your contempt for all of life will come back to you! The Echo Effect…”

“Oh, enough of your ridiculous teachings!” the young man said. “They’ve done us no good! I say, we use magic for what we need, from now on!”

The other people cheered in agreement. The elders stood back and watched in helplessness and horror as the magic workers prepared for yet another ritual.

Commentary

While many in the ancient world condemned witchcraft as evil (the Bible being a noteworthy example), it is impressive to see in a text so old a condemnation of the evils of settler-colonialism. As we know, there are many even in our modern world who still won’t condemn these evils, and yet there were writers back then who knew better.

The Tanah–Migrations, Chapter One

[The following is the thirteenth 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, and here is the twelfth–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.]

Not a week had gone by, since the funeral and grieving over Rawmios, that an invading army came into Lumios and conquered the city. A third of the citizens of the city, including men, women, and children, were savagely slaughtered.

The survivors were taken captive and forced to leave their city while the invaders were now to settle and reside in it. The Lumiosians were taken by foot on a long, arduous journey to the land of their invaders, Tenebros. Here, the Lumiosians would be sold into slavery.

Years of drudgery and back-breaking work went by, the women often being subjected to sexual slavery, and the disobedient men beaten, often to death. They tried to comfort themselves with Rawmios’ teachings, as well as those of his predecessors.

They thought of the Unity of Action, and how their current suffering was just a large trough they were going through. Surely, sometime fairly soon, they would rise out of that trough to a new crest, and they would be liberated from the cruel and oppressive Tenebrosians.

But that crest never came.

Their continued disappointment and frustration with the failure of the old teachings to materialize in a change of fortune for them caused many Lumiosians not only to give up on those teachings but also to give up on life itself. Many committed suicide, and the remaining, dwindling Lumiosians were desperate to think of an alternative to the teachings to restore a sense of hope to them.

Some Lumiosians remembered the Crims, the four energies behind the air, Weleb, the fire, Nevil, the earth, Drofurb, and the water, Priff. These four were the material foundations of everything, and maybe they could be juxtaposed, merged, or balanced in certain ways to influence material outcomes and thus change the fortunes of the Lumiosians.

In other words, one could practice magic.

Many experiments were attempted to bring about the desired changes…at first, usually with catastrophic results, killing off many more Lumiosians than Tenebrosians. Still, the few successes were encouragements enough to continue the trial and error.

After all, the Lumiosian slaves had nothing to lose.

They continued tampering with merging various proportions of he four Crims to find just the right mix, combined with a refining of their verse incantations and rituals to find just the right way to have the Crims hear their prayers and deliver them from bondage.

Their methods gradually improved, with fewer and fewer injuries to themselves, and more and more injuries to their slave-masters. It became clear to the Lumiosians that they had to create, rather than await, their crests of better luck.

Here are some early attempts of the Lumiosians at spells, rituals, and incantations.

On a windy day, a fire would be lit, next to which would be placed a large bowl filled with water, and beside that, another large bowl filled with soil. These four elements represented Weleb, Nevil, Priff, and Drofurb, respectively, of course.

A chant would be repeated, over and over again, while standing among these four elements. One chant was repeated thus, in a special, mystical language: Blow out the fire of our sorrow!

What happened as a result of this ritual was that a hurricane, sent by Weleb, came upon the land of Tenebros; but the hurricane hit mainly where the slaves were tilling the farmers’ fields or building great edifices in the cities. It appeared too quickly to be warned against, and while some of the Tenebrosians were carried away to their deaths, far more of those who were carried away to their deaths by the hurricane were Lumiosian slaves.

Another chant would be said again and again, with the four elements representing the Crims present as before in the ritual. This time, the mystical words were thus: Burn our oppressors to death!

What resulted this time was a huge fire sent by Nevil, scorching the farmers’ fields, which again came up too suddenly for anyone to react to it. Alas, again, while some slave-masters were killed in the fire, most of those burned to death were slaves.

A third ritual was attempted, with a new incantation, again, with the four elements present. One chanted, Bury the wicked deep in the earth!

These words prompted Drofurb to cause a great earthquake to tear a huge hole in the middle of the capital city, leveling it. Many Tenebrosians lived there, and therefore they fell into the gaping hole and died. Yet again, far too many more Lumiosians were there, too, and so they fell into that hole and died as well, making the loss of so many Tenebrosians hardly worth the effort.

Yet another ritual was attempted in the same fashion, with the same elements, but with a new chant: Flood the evil in a watery grave!

Priff made it rain hard for five months without stopping, making a deluge to cover the land of Tenebros with water rising above the tallest buildings of the cities. Some of the slaves, and many more of their masters, were clever and resourceful enough to find boats or chests to get into so the flood would carry them up to the surface of the water and not drown them, while everyone else perished.

The Lumiosians managed never to be suspected by the Tenebrosians of causing any of these natural disasters; but the slaves realized that they had to be more precise in aiming the destructive aspects of their magic at their slave-masters, and only their slave-masters. So, they worked on refining the set-up of their rituals and the careful choice of words for their incantations.

They also thought of mixing the elements more thoroughly, rather than just placing them side by side, to see if they could achieve better results. First, they tried combining the water with the soil into one huge bowl of mud. Then they chanted, May the Tenebrosians sink in holes of quicksand, their slaves safe on firm ground!

This combined power of Priff and Drofurb gave far more welcome results. Lumiosian slaves stood in astonishment as they saw their masters, right beside them, sinking down in pits of mud thin enough for only them to drown in. Those slaves then ran off, out of their masters’ houses and fields, to freedom.

The surviving Tenebrosians sent out their army to catch and bring back the runaway slaves. Those Lumiosians still held as slaves were encouraged by their success, but they knew they’d have to do more to make the success a lasting one. More rituals would have to be performed to ensure complete escapes out of the country.

A ritual involving the lighting of torches and waving them in strong gusts of wind was now attempted. The chant devised was thus: May the winds of fortune gently blow us Lumiosians to freedom and safety! May their pursuers be consumed in flames!

This combined power of Nevil and Weleb carried all the Lumiosians, those already escaped and those still among their masters, even those who had done the ritual and incantation, high in the air, out of the cities and out of Tenebros to safety in a neighboring country, as if peacefully gliding in a breeze…men, women, and children. The bodies of their pursuers all burst into flame. Screaming, they fell off their horses and chariots, and died. Charred corpses littered the roads.

The Lumiosians could see, from across the border, their Tenebrosian pursuers all burning to death. The slaves, free at last, cheered and screamed deafening cries of triumph and jubilation.

“Who can match the mighty Crims, among the gods?” was a common shout, as were these: “Praise the four mighty Crims! Weleb, Priff, Nevil, and Drofurb, our powerful saviours!”

From then on, the celebrating Lumiosians would embrace magic fully, and they would regard the old teachings as a quaint memory at best, and as utterly useless at worst.

This would be so…for good or ill.

Commentary

Now we come to a crucial point in the narrative of these ancient manuscripts. The old ethical teachings are no longer to be revered, instead to be dismissed with contempt. From now on, the careful manipulation of the elements–magic–in order to influence outcomes will be the preferred way of solving problems. There will be no more following principles or perceived laws of nature; instead, one will try to bend nature to one’s will. In time, this new solution to one’s problems will lead to new problems of their own, as well as new sources of strength.

Analysis of ‘Jaws’

Jaws is a novel by Peter Benchley, published in 1974 and adapted the next year by Steven Spielberg into a movie that starred Roy Scheider, Richard Dreyfuss, and Robert Shaw, and costarring Lorraine Gary and Murray Hamilton.

While it is more usual to say that a book is better than its movie adaptation, it is almost universally felt that the reverse is the case with Jaws. The novel’s characters are generally felt to be unlikeable and unsympathetic, and so the changes made to them for the film are justified. Also, while the film streamlines and simplifies the plot to focus on the shark threat, the novel does a detour in the middle to make it into a character study, focusing on their conflicts.

Now, while I would agree that the film is far more entertaining than the novel–indeed, the film established the notion of the summer blockbuster–there are important thematic elements in the novel, only lightly touched on in the film, that deserve a more thorough exploration, so I’ll be focusing on the novel a lot here…without neglecting the film, of course.

Here is a link to quotes from the film, and here’s a link to an audiobook of the novel, whose quirky AI narrator makes lots of amusing mispronunciations.

While the great white shark of the film is just a menace to be defeated, the shark of the novel, somewhat like the white whale of Moby-Dick, is symbolically a force of nature ready to fight back against a most predatory human race. Just as the crew of the Pequod hunt and kill whales as their way of making money (e.g., to get the oil), so do the people of the fictional town of Amity use the beaches and swimming as a way of making money, which can be seen as a human muscling in on the fish’s natural territory.

So the people in the novel are as much predators in their own way as the shark is. Indeed, predation in general is a major theme of the novel, something stripped away to a minimum in the film. When making the film, Spielberg famously said he’d been rooting for the shark as he was reading Benchley’s novel, since the characters were so unlikeable. I would argue, though, that the unlikeability of the characters was the whole point of the novel.

A careful reading of the book demonstrates a critique of capitalism that Spielberg and his fellow moviemakers were trying to shy away from…and in making not only the first summer blockbuster, but also a well-loved, classic film that has since raked in hundreds of millions of dollars worldwide (the result of an aggressive marketing campaign that had included such merchandise as a soundtrack album, T-shirts, beach towels, blankets, toy sharks, etc.), they succeeded most admirably in making the film all for capitalism, rather than against it.

The film, while scary, gave viewers a sense of hope, whereas the novel is much darker in tone, giving us a sense of how much nastier we can be than sharks. Small wonder people like the movie so much more than the book.

I will go into the capitalist critique later on, in particular as regards the…business relationships…of Amity Mayor Larry Vaughn (Hamilton), something removed from the film. For now, though, consider the reality of such things as the polluting of our oceans, which harms so much of marine life because proper disposal of garbage is more costly and eats into profits. Also, there’s the hunting of sharks for their fins to be eaten as a delicacy. Indeed, Benchley later regretted how the Jaws phenomenon led to hostility to a marine animal that doesn’t attack humans all that much, thus making him preoccupied with marine conservation and protecting sharks. As I said above, man is every bit the predator that sharks are, if not much more so.

An understanding of that reality can help us to see how, on a symbolic level, people going out to swim in the waters of Amity Beach are intruding on the territory of marine animals. So while in the movie, as well as in the novel, young Christine Watkins may be innocently skinny dipping, then to die a violent death, that is just our human point of view. From the shark’s point of view, too, she’s just its prey…killing her is of course nothing personal. But the shark, often called “the fish” in the novel, represents the vengeful wrath of nature against her human predators. On a couple of occasions in the novel, a resident of Amity claims that the shark is God’s agent of retribution for the town’s sins.

When police chief Martin Brody (Scheider) learns of the killing of Watkins, and that it was probably a shark attack, he wants to close down the beach to prevent any more attacks. The problem is that the summer tourist season has come, and the Amity economy depends almost entirely on tourism. Because of this problem, Vaughn and the town’s selectmen want news of the shark attack to be kept secret. And so the editor of the local newspaper, Harry Meadows (played by Carl Gottlieb, who also did rewrites of Benchley’s original script for the film, and whose role as Meadows was little more than a cameo, as opposed to Meadows’s much more substantial part in the novel), gives no reports of the attack.

Issues of class difference having an impact on the novel first become apparent in the dissatisfaction of Ellen Brody (Gary) with her marriage to Martin. Her family background is further up in terms of social class than his, so her having become the wife of a police chief feels as though she’s ‘married down.’ As a result, she feels alienated from the Amity community, who seem ‘beneath’ her, and when she meets Matt Hooper (Dreyfuss), an ichthyologist from a class echelon similar to hers–and whose older brother she once dated, years before knowing Martin–she develops a sexual interest in him. Needless to say, none of this is in the movie.

What must be understood here is that the unpleasantness of these characters (her lust, Hooper’s snottiness to Martin, his jealous suspicions of Hooper with his wife and resulting antagonism to him, etc.) is all part of the novel’s critique of class conflict and alienation, all products of capitalism, which in turn is an important part of the overall theme of predation in the novel. Recall, in this connection, Einstein‘s words: “the real purpose of socialism is precisely to overcome and advance beyond the predatory phase of human development.”

Because no one yet knows of the danger of the shark, some people go out to the beach for a swim. Brody is there, too, watching over the area just in case. A little boy named Alex Kintner goes into the water and is eaten by the shark; in the film, his blood is splashing with the water, the shock of it vividly captured in the famous dolly zoom of Brody’s reaction to the killing.

Because of technical difficulties with ‘Bruce,’ the mechanical shark used in the film, its appearance had to be limited. Spielberg was able to turn this problem into a virtue, however, by instead suggesting the shark’s presence: filming from its POV, using shadow, and having John Williams‘s famous music, with the E-F-E-F-E-F-E-F in the cellos, double basses, etc. The result was something incalculably scarier, with the sense of approaching danger.

When Alex’s mother (played by Lee Fiero) learns that Brody had known of the shark danger, yet let the beaches stay open, we see her approach him and slap him. In the film, her reaction is gentle compared to the rage she shows him in the novel, and it’s another example of how the film makes the characters more likable and sympathetic.

Still, despite Brody’s attempts to have the beach closed, especially since he’s racked with guilt over Alex’s death (Brody has sons of his own: two in the film, and three in the novel), Mayor Vaughn insists on keeping the beaches open for the sake of the summer season and the health of the town’s economy.

Now, in the film, Vaughn seems to be a well-intentioned, but short-sighted and foolish mayor, dismissing the shark threat and trivializing it in comparison to the, to him, far greater urgency of keeping the town’s economy healthy. In the novel, though, things get far more sinister and darker when we learn of his business dealings with the mafia.

In many posts, I’ve described the presentation of the mafia in film as symbolic of capitalists, since I consider the exploitation of labour to be criminal. The mafia’s criminal actions are illegal, with mainstream capitalists, their criminal actions are legal. In the Jaws novel, though, the mafia are literally capitalists, who have bought up local property at cheap prices and are hoping, during the summer tourist season, to sell it at much higher prices to get a nice profit.

So the mafia is pressuring Vaughn, who in turn is pressuring Brody, to keep the beaches open, with no regard whatsoever for the safety of the swimmers. The mafia at one point even kill the Brody family cat, which Brody angrily tries to blame on Vaughn. Now, Vaughn, incidentally, also needs money from the tourism to pay off some debts. So in all of these issues, we can see not only a sense of predation far greater than just that of the shark, but also how Benchley’s novel is a critique of capitalism.

In man’s muscling into the marine animals’ territory to make a profit, we can see how one of the residents of Amity considers the shark to be an agent of God’s retribution against the wicked.

Quint (Shaw) is introduced in the film far earlier than he is in the novel, which is just before he, Brody, and Hooper go out hunting for the shark. At a town meeting, where a $3,000 bounty is placed on the shark, the eccentric Quint, after scratching his fingernails on a chalkboard where a shark has been drawn (suggesting his Ahab-like hatred of the great white marine animal), he offers his own shark-hunting services for $10,000.

Other shark hunters go after the shark, but end up catching a different one, a tiger shark. At about 6:47 in this set of deleted scenes, we see not only their shark hunting, but also their rowdy competition with each other, hitting the butts of their rifles against other boats, throwing bait at rivals in other boats, foolishly taking their dogs in their boats, and recklessly firing their rifles into the water. Though the film managed to remove much of the novel’s human predation, this deleted scene demonstrates at least an attempt to compensate for those removals.

Because the shark seems to have been caught and killed, Vaughn confidently assures everyone it’s OK to come to Amity Beach and have a good time in the water. He reminds us that amity means “friendship,” though for those who know the town of the novel, the unlikeable characters imply that the town would be more aptly named ‘Enmity.’

Indeed, the sense of unfriendliness and alienation is so keenly felt in a reading of the novel that at times it’s to be noted even in the narration itself. Homophobic slurs pop up occasionally, and racist stereotypes are presented in the insistence that rapists in the town must be black. I suspect, in all fairness to Benchley, that these elements aren’t meant to be a reflection of his character, but are meant to be present in whoever is narrating the story, presumably a resident of Amity.

To get back to the film version, we note that people are on the beach again, though at first they’re nervous about going into the water. Vaughn has to urge an elderly couple to go in, to prod all the others to go in also, by imitative conformity. Brody has people patrolling the water, watching it like hawks in case the shark that had been caught was the wrong one.

Around this time, we see a TV news reporter saying a cheesy line about how Amity Beach has a cloud over it in the shape of a killer shark. This, by the way, is a cameo by none other than Peter Benchley himself (a former reporter for the Washington Post)…and one wonders if the clichéd line he speaks is meant to be a dig at the writer’s prose.

After a prank pulled by a couple of boys in the water, a false alarm that allows for some temporary relief in the tension, the shark really makes an appearance, killing a man, whose dismembered leg is seen floating down in the water, his blood mixing with it. Later, Vaughn is finally showing some remorse over his trivializing of the danger and his overconfidence that there was no more shark to worry about.

Around this time in the novel, Ellen has seen Hooper again, and with a tense dinner party in the Brody house, her predatory seduction of him begins. Martin, sensing the chemistry between them, is getting drunk and making things awkward for everyone.

After the party, she arranges to meet Hooper in a restaurant for lunch, and the flirtation between them continues. At one point, she makes an odd comment about having rape fantasies. While it is true that some women have these (though they’d be more accurately described as fantasies of being ravished or of having ‘good, rough sex,’ the word ‘rape’ being used here for its connotations rather than its denotative meaning, since ‘rape’ by definition is something one does NOT want to be subjected to), one cannot but be suspicious of the inner motives of a male novelist putting such fantasies in the mind of one of his female characters.

Still, as unseemly as such fantasies may be in Ellen’s mind, they do, in a way, fit in with the general theme of predation. If we see sexual predation and seduction as forms of sexual sadism, then ‘rape’ fantasies could be seen as examples of sexual masochism. Ellen, in this sense, would prey on Hooper and be preyed on by him. In this connection, note what Freud once said: “A person who feels pleasure in producing pain in someone else in a sexual relationship is also capable of enjoying as pleasure any pain which he may himself derive from sexual relations. A sadist is always at the same time a masochist.” To paraphrase Freud, a predator is always at the same time prey. The shark will certainly be the prey of Brody, Hooper, and Quint.

Anyway, Ellen and Hooper will go to a hotel after their lunch date and prey on each other, as it were, in bed. Martin, in the meantime, will try to reach both of them by phone that afternoon, and being unable to do so, will feel his jealousy swelling in him.

Other examples of what could be called predation in Amity include some local scammers trying to take advantage of tourists, who want a glimpse of the notorious shark they’ve heard about in the media; the scammers will trick the tourists into buying unneeded tickets for admission to the beach! Brody finds out about this, and realizes he has to apprehend the scammers.

Finally, after a boy narrowly escapes being eaten by the shark, Brody closes the beach and convinces the town’s selectmen to hire Quint. Now, as we know, insanely jealous Brody and snotty rich kid Hooper are not likable (as opposed to their portrayal in the film, of course), but neither is the Quint of the novel, who disembowels a blue shark and uses an illegally caught unborn baby dolphin as bait, angering ichthyologist Hooper. Once again, we see man as much more of a predator than sharks are.

Now, while in the film there is some friction among the three men on Quint’s boat, the Orca (aptly named after the killer whale that is the natural enemy of the great white shark), such friction is expressed in a generally light-hearted manner. Recall Dreyfuss’s Hooper making faces at Quint after being told he can’t admit when he’s wrong.

In the novel, however, the friction among them gets much nastier, and this contributes to their unlikeability. As I mentioned above, neither Brody nor Quint likes snotty rich kid Hooper, and in this we see the alienation caused by class differences, caused in turn by capitalism. On top of that, Brody’s rising jealous suspicions of Hooper having played around with Ellen (also, as we’ve seen, a product of class differences) fill him with so much rage that at one point he physically attacks Hooper, strangling him for a moment.

While in the movie, the men go out in the Orca one time and confront the shark at the end, in the novel, they go out on four separate trips, each time returning to shore at the end of the day. They never see the shark on the first day, but they do on the second, and Brody is amazed at the size of it. In the film, his amazement can be related to the scene when he’s ladling chum into the water, the shark suddenly appears, shocking him, and he backs up and says the famous line to Quint, “You’re gonna need a bigger boat.” (Incidentally, Scheider improvised the line.)

The third day is not only when Brody and Hooper have their fight, but also when Hooper brings the shark cage and, unlike in the film, he dies underwater in it when the shark attacks him. Now, he was originally supposed to die in the film that way, too, but footage filmed of a great white shark attacking the cage (with no one in it) looked so compelling to Spielberg that he wanted to use it, and this meant rewriting the scene so Hooper instead would escape and swim to safety on the ocean floor, then resurface with Brody, and together they swim to shore at the end. Besides, the problems with ‘Bruce’ were a constant source of changes to the story.

The fourth and final day, of course, is the final confrontation with the shark, both it and Quint dying, though the latter dies in a more Ahab-esque way, and the former in a far less…explosive…way. But I’ll come back to that in more detail later.

While in the film, there is some friction among the three men, there’s also a lot of camaraderie, which adds to their likability. This is especially so in the night-time scene on the Orca, when they have a few drinks and engage in male bonding in the form of Quint and Hooper comparing scars on their legs.

And it is at this point that we come to one of the most important film contributions to the story: Quint’s recollections of what happened to the crew of the USS Indianapolis. This incident really happened in 1945; the ship delivered the components of an atomic bomb to Tinian in a mission so secret that when the ship was sunk by Japanese torpedoes while on its way to Leyte, the Philippines, the navy was late to learn of the ship’s non-arrival in Leyte.

The surviving crew at the time were left adrift over an ordeal of several days, leaving them without food or water, to suffer from exposure to the elements that resulted in such problems as hypothermia. Then there were the shark attacks, which of course are the focus of Quint’s telling of the story, as well as the source of his Ahab-like hate of sharks.

Just as Captain Ahab, in his rage, tells his crew of when the white whale bit off his leg, so does Quint speak, though in a calm, sombre voice, of his trauma and fear from that ordeal in the water. The scene adds depth to his character, to help us sympathize with him, and also to add an Ahab relation to him in a way that Benchley’s attempts at such a relation come off as contrived and superficial in comparison.

There’s another thing that the Indianapolis story adds to Jaws: the element of capitalism’s muscling in on the sea, causing nature to get revenge on it in the form of shark attacks–God’s retribution on the sinful, as that Amity resident sees it.

The sending of the atomic bomb components to Tinian, “the Hiroshima bomb,” as Quint calls it, was of course part of the plan not only to defeat Japan in WWII, but also, as I explained here, to give the Soviets a great big scare. The nuking of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was meant to demonstrate the military superiority of the American empire to the world. As we Marxists know, imperialism is the highest stage of capitalism, WWII was an inter-imperialist war between Anglo-American imperialism on one side and fascist imperialism on the other.

The nukes didn’t just kill between one and three hundred thousand Japanese; they were also an outrage against nature. The shark attacks, thus, are a symbolic revenge.

In the novel, after Hooper dies, Brody believes the shark can’t be killed and tells Quint he doesn’t think the town can pay him anymore. Quint, however, decides he’ll go after the shark with or without the money, so determined is he in his Ahab-like drive to kill it.

In the final confrontation, the shark attacks the Orca, causing it to sink. In the novel, after harpooning the shark several times, Quint gets his foot entangled in the rope of one of the harpoons he’s hit the shark with, and as the shark goes back into the water, Quint is pulled in with it and he drowns, in true Ahab fashion. All he’d have to say, to make it perfect, is, “from hell’s heart, I stab at thee…”

This link with Moby-Dick is feeble and anticlimactic compared to Quint’s spectacular death in the movie, since we know of his trauma from the Indianapolis incident being reawakened as he kicks in terror and slides down to the shark’s eager mouth to get that fatal bite in the belly.

While the shark’s confrontation with Brody in the novel is, again, anticlimactic, at least it’s more realistic than the spectacular blowup at the end of the movie. Benchley hated the changed killing of the shark so much that he got kicked off the set when they were to film it. Brody’s shoving of a pressurized tank into the shark’s mouth, then firing a bullet into the tank, would not have caused it and the shark to explode; still, Spielberg felt a more dramatic ending was more important than realism, and from the point of view of the movie’s commercial success, he was right.

As for the novel, though, the wounded shark moves closer and closer to Brody, who is afloat on a seat cushion now that the Orca has sunk, and he’s resigned to his fate. But the shark, right up close to him now, just…dies. It succumbs to its harpoon wounds, and sinks down to the ocean floor with Quint, his leg still stuck in the harpoon rope.

Then Brody, like sole-surviving Ishmael, starts swimming to shore–the end!

This is the way the novel ends, not with a bang but a whimper. Again, it’s not an exciting ending, it’s certainly an abrupt ending for the novel, but that was Benchley’s point. This is reality: people aren’t generally very nice (sorry, Dear Reader!), and problems aren’t normally solved in a dramatic, Hollywood fashion.

Jaws the movie is a great moment in cinematic history, to be sure, and is thoroughly entertaining, but it is so because it’s a capitalistic crowdpleaser. Jaws the novel, on the other hand, is an exploration of the darker, predatory nature of man as well as, if not much more so than, of sharks, of which the one in the novel is just a symbolic projection of ourselves.

Predictably, the phenomenon of the film led to the sale of Jaws-related merchandise as I mentioned above, as well as sequels that got worse and worse until being totally ridiculous. Then there were attempts to capitalize on marine animal terror with different movies, like Orca. So the first Jaws film may be justifiably far more beloved than the novel, but it also proved Benchley’s point about the predatory nature of capitalism.

The Tanah–Beginnings, Chapter Eleven (Fragment)

[The following is the twelfth 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, and here is the eleventh–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.]

Rawmios had a new teaching for his followers. This is what he said: “Your focus determines your reality. If you focus on the good, you will be happy. If you focus on the bad, you will suffer. Life is a mix of good and bad: though we desire the good, we cannot escape an experience of the bad. We must not imagine the bad to be any bigger than it really is. In the Unity of Action, good and bad alternate like the crests and troughs of the ocean: sometimes they alternate quicker, other times, slower, but they do alternate. When the good comes, prepare for the bad; when the bad comes, patiently wait for the good to return. We don’t like the bad, but we mustn’t despise it. The bad flows into the good, and the good flows into the bad.

“We must not focus on the things we know we cannot have: we would suffer such pain as to go mad. Vainly hoping to gain the love or respect of those who will never give it to us will drive us mad. This is the First Error: mad thinking. Mad thinking denies cosmic unity by thinking we can have love and respect, all from one area, and no hate or scorn also from that area. Reality, however, is fluid: love and hate flow in and out of each other, as do respect and scorn; also, these opposites move from place to place, often going back to the original place, but never staying in any place.

“In the Unity of Action, all things are in permanent flux. Therefore, instead of fixating on one place, vainly hoping to get what we want, always from that place, we must be willing to follow what is good as it moves from place to place. This does not mean we may divorce at the first sign of a marital problem, or repudiate friendships or family whenever any difficulty arises: often enough in these situations, the bad will flow back into the good quite soon; but if it rarely flows back to good, and then only briefly good, we must leave to find our love elsewhere.

“Another aspect of the Unity of Action is the Echo Effect: whatever we send out will come back to us, as the echo of a sound we make rings out back to us. We must not think the evil we do won’t come back to us, just because no one knows what we did…it will. Suffice it to say: if you want something to come to you, you must give that something to others.

“To maintain unity in the universe, an excess in one direction results in an excess in the opposite direction. If our attraction to someone beautiful has us come too close to the desired person, that person will push us far away. […]”

Commentary

As can be surmised by the reader, what we have here is only a fragment of a larger chapter that has been lost. Perhaps the rest will show up in future excavations, and then we can translate it and put this entire chapter together, along with any chapters after this one, to complete the account of Rawmios’ life. For now, though, this is all we have, and what will come after is the next book of the Tanah–“Migration,” which will give narrations after Rawmios’ death.

As for this fragment, we explore further the dialectical unity of opposites, and how one cannot have one opposite without the other. This unity of opposites is a recurring theme throughout the Tanah, as has been expressed either directly in the narratives and their philosophy, or indirectly in the untranslatable nuances of the original language (their rhythms, the connotations in the imagery, the musical qualities of the diction–alliteration, rhyme, assonance, etc.).

Another idea Rawmios touches on here, the “Echo Effect,” is what the Hindus and Buddhists would call karma, or where in the Bible it says that we reap what we sow, or the idea in physics that for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. With this idea is the injunction to do unto others as we would have them do unto us. Perhaps in the lost remainder of this chapter, and any other lost chapters after this one, he developed this idea more than the brief account of it we unfortunately only have here. Maybe one day we’ll find it.

Since this is just a fragment, we can only assume that there was supposed to be another concrete poem to finish it off. The poem, if it ever existed, has been lost, too. One can only speculate on how the poem expressed, in the visual arrangement of its verses, the “Echo Effect” and the wavelike unity of opposites.

‘Confessions from the Think Tank’ is Published!

I have three written works published in Confessions from the Think Tank, a Kids’ Space Camp Charity Anthology (originally “A MUFON Charity Anthology“)–two short stories, “The Portal,” and “Neville,” and an essay originally published here on my blog, When Tech is Dreck. The book is a Dark Moon Rising publication, and it is published on Amazon in e-book and paperback, Barnes and Noble e-book, and here in e-book format.

Here’s what “The Portal” is about: a woman high on LSD stumbles into a portal that takes her to an alien world with human collaborators who are helping the aliens colonize the Earth and steal its resources. She’s come back through the portal to Earth to warn her friends about what she’s seen. But is it real? Has she really seen these sights, or is it just part of her drug trip? Is there really something out there to worry about, or is she just going insane, as her friends think she is? Read it to find out!

“Neville” is another alien conspiracy involving stealing from the Earth, though it’s food this time, and the story is a bit of a parody on the Noah’s ark myth. And again, the characters do a lot of drugs. My essay, “When Tech is Dreck,” is about the potential dangers of modern technology. If you read it and doubt the veracity of any of my arguments, my blog post (link above) has lots of links to back up my arguments.

Other great writers in this conspiracy-oriented anthology include Alison Armstrong, John Bruni, J. Rocky Colavito, Dawn Colcalsure, Brady Ellis, Thomas Folske, Megan Guilliams, Kasey Hill, J.L. Lane, J.C. Maçek III, Pip Pinkerton, Edward Radmanich, John Reti, Neil Sanzari, David L Tamarin, Rob Tannahill, Edgar Wells, and Walter Wiseman.

Go out and get yourself a copy of this amazing book. You’ll love it! 🙂

The Tanah–Beginnings, Chapter Ten

[The following is the eleventh 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, and here is the tenth–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.]

Indeed, Rawmios fully proved that even though his family had spoken so ill of him, and had made all expectation of him seem small, he took that smallness and made big accomplishments with it. This doing much with little would be an important theme for him, and for his teachings.

He was gaining fame as a teacher, but he knew he needed to improve how he presented his ideas, for his listeners either couldn’t understand the more abstract notions, or they found his method of presentation dull. Rawmios needed to use all of his resources and talents to reach out to his followers.

He decided that presenting his ideas in song, art, or dramatic forms would better convey, in symbols, his more abstract and abstruse ideas. He had some success with this: singing and playing lute-like instruments; drawing pictures; and performing one-man plays to narrate, in parable form, his ethics. He was still, however, very limited with this, so he found more resources.

He was fortunate enough to be living at a time when many amazing new inventions were available and affordable, so he bought some of them. He didn’t, however, know how to use them very well. There was a device in everyone’s home, connected through a network with this device in every other home around the known world. On this device, one could record images and sounds and publish them on the network so everyone would know what one recorded. Rawmios would use this device to record songs, art, and dramas.

He could also record several separate performances, and through editing put them together so as to seem like one big performance. Thus he could record himself singing, playing lute-like instruments, hand drums, and pipes–all for one song–and with all the recordings put together, it would seem like the performance of a large band instead of many performances by one man.

Similarly, he could put several drawings one after another in the form of a slideshow, so they could tell a story. Finally, through the use of costuming, make-up, and editing of recordings of several dramatic performances, he could do dramas with multiple characters, all played by him.

One may ask why he didn’t simply get other actors or musicians to perform with him. The reason is that few people living in Lumios, or anywhere in Nawaitos, were committed to a life in the arts. The local people were practical, devoted to work that made large sums of money to support their families. Much of the work, in fact, was in making the very inventions Rawmios used to make colleagues in performance unnecessary.

Because Rawmios’ work was in teaching, philosophy, and the arts, he made less money, which made the production of quality recordings difficult. His relative inexperience with recording predictably made producing quality work an elusive thing, too. When he published his recordings, people praised his creativity and originality, but criticized the poor quality. This was something he would have to improve on, in time.

These criticisms reminded Rawmios of the fourth time he left the city of his family in Canudos, and of the man who told him he needed to focus on his art in order to improve. This he would have to do, to improve the quality of those recordings.

Some critics, though pointing out the poor recording quality, made something of a virtue out of it, in that here we had a man who could do much with so few means. Other people recorded music, art, and drama with far more resources but with far less originality. Many people made lavish productions with derivative ideas.

Rawmios used this perspective as the basis of a lesson to teach in relation to the Three Unities and the Ouroboros. He said, “Our focus determines the quality of our work. If we focus on the clever manipulation of devices, but not on artistic originality, we know how our work will be in the end. If we focus on our art, but not on the proper use of the devices, we know how our work will be in the end. We must not focus too much on the one and not enough on the other. Devices used in excess become the biting serpent’s head; art used negligently becomes the serpent’s bitten tail–the one bites, and destroys the other. The same is true of art as the serpent’s head and devices as the serpent’s tail.”

Rawmios continued working on recording songs, art slideshows, and dramas. While he worked harder to improve their technical quality (and some aspects did improve), still there were significant flaws. Ultimately, he decided not to dilute his work by diversifying so much; instead, he would focus on recording the songs and improving their sound quality. In time, he would learn how to improve the quality of recorded images, and then resume doing slideshows and dramas.

He saw this, too, as a lesson to be taught to his followers, and he related this idea of focus to the Three Unities, and to the Ouroboros. He said, “Our focus determines the quality of our work. The capacity of our focus is limited. If we stretch that focus out over many things, each thing has little focus, and therefore little mastery. If we focus on few things, each thing has much focus, and therefore much potential for mastery. Trying to master a diversity of things is like the biting serpent’s head; the many things one tries to master simultaneously are like the serpent’s bitten tail–the one bites, and destroys, the other. Pride causes this excess; humility will curb the excess. Mastery of a few things avoids the biting and the bitten. Mastery of many things can only be done slowly and patiently, after mastering the few things first.”

Commentary

There is much to be praised in the one who can achieve much after being maligned as incapable. In this we see the oppressed, bitten tail of the Ouroboros shifting over to the masterful biting head. Still more is there to be praised in the one who achieves much with few resources. In the right circumstances, those limitations can drive one to use diligence and ingenuity to compensate for them, thus making hard work with limitations oppressive at first, yet at last emerging triumphant–here we see again the shift from bitten tail to biting head, from wretch to master.

The one with many resources, however, may get too complacent with his work, especially if he has been praised to excess. This comfort may cause him to work with less thought given to quality, and his work will suffer–the biting head hurts its own tail. Similarly, if we try to master many things, this is too much mastery, and our work suffers–the biting head wounds its own tail.

Now, one more thing needs to be addressed about this chapter: the baffling appearance of advanced technology in the ancient world. Our scholarly team has no way to account for its mysterious and bizarre presence here. While there are some who believe that ancient civilizations had advanced technology that has since been lost, there is no archaeological evidence of any kind, anywhere, to substantiate such fanciful claims.

Yet, here we are, with an apparent ability to “record” sounds and visuals, not by jotting the ideas down on paper: zavedzka, in the ancient texts, means capturing visual and/or auditory moments or events and keeping them to be experienced again and again. What devices Rawmios had to enable him to do this, we team of scholars have no idea.

Similarly, the arranging of these “recorded” visual events in the form of a “slideshow” (kolnika, an array of images appearing in close succession), images that, like the “recorded” sounds, can be “edited” (volsnay), or altered to improve their visual or auditory quality. Finally, there is a “network” (tibilsk) that connects all of these things to be experienced by people in homes all over the known world…an ancient internet? Again, it’s just too bizarre to be believed.

Still, these ancient texts insist on the existence of such technology. What was the true nature of these invented devices? How could they have been created back then? Why are there no traces of them now? Again, that joking comment of one of our scholarly team, with regard to the linguistic anomalies in the text, comes back to haunt us with regard to this technology…aliens?

Here’s another of the text’s concrete poems.

A
house
of
gold

that
topples…….
easily……………….

is……………………..built
by…………………………………men…………………………………of mediocrity

BUT

Those
who
can
build
a
lasting
edifice
from
straw
are
truly
men
of
genius.

Analysis of ‘Breakfast at Tiffany’s’

Breakfast at Tiffany’s is a 1958 novella by Truman Capote. It was adapted into a film by Blake Edwards in 1961, starring Audrey Hepburn and George Peppard, with Patricia Neal, Martin Balsam, Buddy Ebsen, and Mickey Rooney. The film differs from the novella in many significant ways, as will be discussed below.

The novella is so short, not even a hundred pages, to go by the edition I have, that ‘novella’ seems to describe a story too long for BAT, and ‘short story’ is too short for it. Since, as is the case with my copy, the story is often published with three short stories–“House of Flowers,” “A Diamond Guitar,” and “A Christmas Memory“–I’ll make a number of references to these stories whenever they share comparable or contrasting themes with BAT.

The novella is as short as it is, but the film is almost two hours long, suggesting a much longer story. Neal’s character, Mrs. Emily Eustache “2E” Failenson, is nowhere to be found in Capote’s story.

The unnamed narrator of the novella is named Paul Varjak (Peppard) in the film. He and Holly Golightly (Hepburn) develop a love relationship that is absent in Capote’s story (in fact, true to the writer’s own sexuality, the unnamed narrator–it is implied–is gay, therefore making his story at least somewhat autobiographical, since the narrator is as much a writer as Capote was).

The regrettably racist caricature of a Japanese, in the klutzy Mr. Yunioshi–played by Rooney in yellowface–isn’t in Capote’s story, either, though Yunioshi is referred to with a racial slur–a “Jap”–by Joe Bell, a bartender near the beginning of the story.

The film ends with a typical Hollywood rom-com cliché, with Varjak getting the girl and kissing her in the rain; while in Capote’s story, there is a far more ambiguous and uncertain ending, with Holly leaving the narrator and going off, out of New York City and into the world.

As for the casting of Holly for the film adaptation, Capote was hoping for Marilyn Monroe to play the part, and he was angry that the part ended up going to Hepburn (though he came to like her performance, all the same). Given that Holly is a romantic dreamer of a girl, chasing wealthy men, I find Capote’s preference of Monroe to play her strange and ironic, when Monroe, having married Arthur Miller at one point, demonstrated left-wing sympathies that may have contributed to her having been murdered, as opposed to the official suicide story of her death. The only thing Monroe had in common with Holly was the blonde hair (well, bleach-blonde, in Monroe’s case), and so brunette Hepburn had blonde streaks added to her hair.

The opening scene in the novella is nowhere to be found in the film, which during the credits shows Holly window-shopping outside a Tiffany’s store. We come to understand that Holly loves being in Tiffany’s because the luxury jewelry store is the only place where she can feel a sense of safety, peace, and calm in her turbulent world. She imagines that nothing bad can ever happen there.

She denies that she likes Tiffany’s for the jewelry (Capote, page 35). While it may not literally be the jewelry that she likes so much about the store, surely it’s the sense of a luxurious life that Tiffany’s represents that gives her that safe, serene feeling.

Holly is a socialite who, as a kind of “American geisha,” dates wealthy men and accepts cash gifts from them; she also aspires to marry such a man. If it isn’t about the wealth that makes Tiffany’s so appealing to her, then why is it that store, of all stores, that gives her that feeling of peace and security?

Material abundance, of the sort that a luxury jewelry store can easily represent, can give one a great and obvious sense of security, of safety and therefore of calm, peace, and serenity, that nothing bad can happen. Thus, Tiffany’s is a capitalist paradise. After all, money isn’t everything, but having one’s basic material needs taken care of certainly gives a sense of peace of mind, so material abundance ensures that peace of mind all the more.

Why does Holly want to “wake up one fine morning and have breakfast at Tiffany’s” (page 35)? Why breakfast at Tiffany’s, which at the time sold only jewelry, and not food (the Blue Box Café first opened in 2017)? Consider the origin of the word ‘breakfast’–a breaking of a fast. So it’s the ending of a period of going without food.

The implication here, symbolically understood, is that one is going from rags to riches, from fasting or starving to abundance, all in one fell swoop. Such has always been Holly’s ambition: to go from her humble beginnings as Lulamae Barnes, married in her teens to a veterinarian named Doc Golightly (Ebsen) in Texas, to her now glamorous life in New York City, renamed Holly Golightly and chasing rich men to subsidize her now high-maintenance lifestyle, and thence, she hopes, to marriage and solid security with such a rich man, who would be Tiffany’s personified.

What we have here is a traditional woman’s version of the American Dream: social mobility through marrying up. The story takes place before the Sexual Revolution, and so women were still chained to the fetters of traditional sex roles, meaning they had to get their access to wealth through successful men…if they were young, pretty, and desirable enough…which Holly assuredly is, at the age of about eighteen or nineteen.

Beyond this dream of chasing wealth, though, is the pursuit of what Lacan would have called an ultimately unfulfillable desire. Tiffany’s symbolizes a nirvana one can never attain, though Holly will never stop trying, romantic dreamer that she is. She can never settle for an ordinary life, and that’s why she leaves New York City and the unnamed narrator for the unknown at the end of Capote’s novella. She may not have married José Ybarra-Jaeger (José da Silva Pereira in the film, played by José Luis de Vilallonga), the rich Brazilian diplomat, but she does go to Brazil in search of a similar dream.

This endless seeking out of more and more to satisfy a desire that can never be satisfied, is not only the essence of what drives Holly to do what she does (symbolically, what Lacan would have called jouissance), but also her unfulfillable desire can be paralleled to capitalism’s endless pursuit of profit (i.e., the Marxist notion of surplus value and Lacan’s plus-de-jouir, or “surplus enjoyment”). Hence, Tiffany’s can be seen as a capitalist paradise.

It is common for people to dream about striking it rich rather than doing the hard work of fighting for workers’ rights and reducing income inequality. Hence, even in today’s world of the obscenely wealthy few vs the impoverished many, we still have all this simping for billionaires going on. Holly can be seen to represent such people, on at least some level.

We can contrast her lifestyle among the affluent in New York City with the uniformly poor in “House of Flowers,” set in Third World Haiti, “A Diamond Guitar,” set in the austerity of an American prison, and “A Christmas Memory,” about a family so poor that the narrator, when a boy and close to his older female cousin, had to save up every penny they could get over the year to pay for the ingredients they needed to make Christmas fruitcakes (page 144). While Holly dreams of the security that comes from wealth, so many others just struggle to survive.

Capote’s novella begins with bar owner Joe Bell telling the narrator about photos of a black man holding a wooden sculpture of a woman’s head, and the woman looks exactly like Holly. Yunioshi is the one who found the wooden head while traveling in Africa, and he informed Bell of it.

It seems that Holly’s been to Africa some time since the end of the narrator’s story about her. Bell imagines she’s “got to be rich to go mucking around in Africa.” (page 8) In this incident, we see again the contrast between being a girl from the First World Who aspires to wealth, and people in poverty with much more humble dreams, as those in Capote’s aforementioned three stories.

The story about her in Africa causes the narrator to recall his story about her from years before, back in the 1940s. Though she had dreams of wealth, she lived in a modest brownstone apartment building in Manhattan’s Upper East Side. Yunioshi, in an apartment on the top floor, complains about Holly ringing his bell and waking him up to open the door for her.

This scene corresponds with the beginning of the film after the opening credits, though as I said above, the novella doesn’t portray Yunioshi as a spastic racist Asian stereotype, bumping into things, and having buck teeth sticking out of his face. Blake Edwards films are full of slapstick, but it’s sad that he stooped to this low for cheap laughs. In all fairness to Rooney, though, when he realized how offensive his performance was, he expressed the deepest remorse and publicly apologized to Asian communities. Edwards was similarly contrite.

Anyway, the narrator has seen her for the first time during this altercation with Yunioshi (page 11). He describes her as having “an almost breakfast-cereal air of health” (page 12). In this context, we note that a man who’s just “pick[ed] up the check” for her, one of those male pursuers of hers who pay for things for her in the hopes of getting…something…back from her. This picking up the check is the so-to-speak breakfast–the end of her poverty–that she hopes will one day lead to Tiffany’s.

From then on, she isn’t ringing Yunioshi’s bell, but the narrator’s, and they haven’t met yet (page 13). He learns more about her nonetheless, such as her cat (which is never named) and her playing the guitar, something she sometimes does sitting out on the fire escape as her hair dries (page 15). We’re reminded of the scene in the film when Hepburn is there, strumming and singing “Moon River,” with music by Henry Mancini.

When the narrator finally does meet her, it’s out by his window. Coming into his room, she explains that she’s trying to get away from another suitor. She notes the narrator’s resemblance to her brother, Fred, and so, feeling a brother transference, she wants to call him Fred. Note how she doesn’t go by her real name (Lulamae), she doesn’t call the narrator by his real name (which we never learn in the novella, and as I mentioned above, is given as Paul Varjak in the film), and the cat is never given a name (except “Cat” in the film).

At the end of the film, Holly contemplates their no-name status when justifying to Varjak why nobody belongs to anybody, and saying that she doesn’t know who she is. Namelessness, thus, represents social alienation, between people and in one’s own species-essence.

Linked with this alienation from within and without is how OJ Berman (Balsam) characterizes Holly: “She is a phony,” and “She isn’t a phony because she’s a real phony.” (page 27) Berman is a Hollywood talent agent who has groomed Holly in the hopes of making her into a movie star. She believes all the nonsense she says about herself, and his grooming of her, which has included French lessons to help her get rid of her original hillbilly accent from Texas, has been part of the process of creating her phony personality as a café society girl. (page 29)

To get back to her meeting of the narrator, he tells her he’s a writer. He also tells her that it is Thursday, which reminds her that she has to go to Sing Sing and meet a mafia man incarcerated there named Salvatore “Sally” Tomato. She’ll get the “weather report” from him: a coded message to transmit information about such criminal activities as the narcotics smuggling that she’ll get entangled in and arrested for towards the end of the story. She’ll give that “weather report” to Sally’s lawyer, Oliver O’Shaughnessy, every week.

As I’ve pointed out in many other posts, I regard mafia men in movies and fiction as representative of capitalists in general, since as a Marxist I regard capitalism’s accumulation of surplus value to be a theft of the value that workers put into the production of commodities; therefore, capitalism in general is criminal activity, whether legalized or not.

Holly’s regular involvement with Sally, therefore, is part of her own simping for the rich, which in turn is part of her dream of finding that peace and security that comes from wealth, as represented by Tiffany’s. The chaotic and troubling world from which she wishes to escape into a capitalist paradise is the capitalist hell of poverty, which she naturally fears. One is reminded of what Belle says to Scrooge in A Christmas Carol as an explanation for his own pursuit of wealth: she says to him, “You fear the world so much” (Dickens, page 50).

To get back to OJ Berman and whatnot, he first appears at one of Holly’s many parties, in which she hobnobs with rich and socially important people like him. In the film, you can spot a couple of Asians in the background, extras with no dialogue: they seem to be there as if to say, ‘Look, the filmmakers are not saying that all Asians are like Yunioshi.’ The inclusion of these two non-caricatured Asians hardly compensates for Rooney’s performance, though.

One presumably wealthy man that Holly shows interest in is Rusty Trawler. He’s thrice divorced, but he’ll end up marrying someone else (page 66). Rusty also seems to be a Nazi sympathizer, for according to a set of clippings from gossip columns about Holly and Rusty, “he attended rallies in Yorkville“, he’d “sent her a cable offering to marry her if Hitler didn’t” (recall that the narrator’s reminiscences about her take place during WWII, when her brother Fred is serving in the army), and Winchell always referred to [Rusty] as a Nazi (page 33).

Yes, Holly, in her pursuit of that capitalist paradise of peace, symbolized by Tiffany’s, is even willing to marry a fascist if he has money. Supporters of capitalism are willing to lean that far right, if need be.

Her wish to marry money runs deeper than mere gold-digging, though. The transactional relationship between men and women as a result of sex roles (he gives her money in exchange for at least the hope of sex) is, of course, profoundly alienating, exacerbated by modern capitalism. She opts for this transactional relationship with men (while also having something of a bisexual attraction to women, using the word “dyke” in a non-derogatory sense, and hinting at this sexuality in the stripper scene in the film) because, as I mentioned above, deep down, she cannot relate to people in a deep, meaningful way.

Her platonic friendship with the narrator, therefore, is an ideal escape from the usual ‘I give you something, so you give me something back’ trap between men and women, because recall, it is strongly implied, if you’re paying attention as you read, that the narrator is gay. Holly observes that if a man likes neither baseball nor horses, “he don’t like girls.” (page 34) The narrator likes neither; he’s even tried riding a horse with her in the park (pages 77-78), and he loses control of his mare and falls off. Also, when saying she’ll never rat out Sally Tomato in exchange for the cops dropping the charges against her in her connection with him, she addresses the narrator as “Maude,” slang at the time for a gay man or a male prostitute (page 91).

He has no sexual interest in her, a girl whom, recall, Capote wanted Marilyn Monroe to play, therefore Holly’s something of a sex goddess. He is, nonetheless, fascinated with her in the way a gay man might be with a beautiful woman or a talented female singer like Judy Garland, that is, adoring her for aesthetic reasons rather than sexual ones.

To get back to Rusty, when the narrator has learned that he’s married for the fifth time, according to a newspaper (page 66), he assumes that Holly is the bride, and he’s most unhappy to have learned of this. Later, he realizes that it isn’t Holly whom Rusty has married, but Mag Wildwood, a fellow socialite, friend and sometimes roommate of Holly’s, and a model with a stutter (page 67). He goes “limp with relief” to have learned of this.

On a Monday in October 1943, he is with Holly in Joe Bell’s bar drinking Manhattans (pages 47-48). Then, after lunch in a cafeteria in the park, they avoid the zoo, since Holly can’t stand to see anything in a cage; oddly, for Christmas she’ll buy him a beautiful bird cage and make him promise never to put a living thing in it. (page 53) She sees herself as a free bird.

On that Monday in October, they pass a Woolworth’s, and she wants him to go in with her and steal something (page 49). He goes in reluctantly, and she eyes some Halloween masks. The two of them put on masks and walk out of the store wearing them. After they’ve run off for a few blocks (they’ll wear the masks all the way home), she tells him how she used to steal things when she had to or wanted to, and she still does it every now and then. The scene is replicated in the movie.

That a young woman who attracts wealthy men in the hopes of one day marrying one, and who feels peace of mind only in a luxury jewelry store, would engage in shoplifting from time to time makes perfect sense to me. She embodies the self-centered materialism of capitalism; capitalists accumulate their wealth by stealing the fruits of workers’ labour.

In the film, the shoplifting scene comes right after a scene with the two in Tiffany’s, then in the public library. Note the contrast between the private property of the jewelry store and the 5 and 10 store where they steal the masks. Sandwiched in between in a place for the public, one she significantly doesn’t know about. As a lover of all things connected with capitalism, Holly is fully aware of those places that are private property, but she’s a bit of a fish out of water in public places.

Eventually, that dull, unromantic life she’s tried to run away from tries to find her and get her back. Such a life is personified in Doc Golightly (Ebsen), who’s been snooping around near the brownstone building and getting the narrator’s attention (pages 57-58). This is after the narrator has had a falling-out with her, over a slur he’s made about her way of getting money from men (page 56).

Doc is a personification of the cage she never wants to be trapped in. His appearance and the falling-out between her and the narrator sandwich her bird cage gift that he puts in front of her door: then she rejects it as much as he has, having put it “on a sidewalk ashcan waiting for the garbage collector.” (page 56), then it’s taken back by him into his room. She’ll reject Doc the cage again when he tries to take her back with him to Texas.

Oddly, her revulsion against animals in cages is disregarded by the moviemakers when we see a shot most deliberately taken of a bird in a cage in Holly’s apartment, early on in the film, during that party scene. We see Balsam as Berman looking at the bird. Is Holly supposed to be enigmatically contradicting herself here? Or is it a wish-fulfillment on the filmmakers’ part to put Holly in a cage, as we see when she decides to stay with Varjak at the end of the movie?

When the narrator first meets Doc, he imagines that the man, being so much older than Holly, is her father rather than her husband (page 59). Doc married her when she was just going on fourteen, making her the stepmother of kids he’s had from a previous marriage, kids older than she was! (page 60) Doc claims she had no reason to be unhappily married to him, as his daughters did all the housework and she didn’t have to lift a finger (pages 60-61).

As a horse doctor, he presumably has been able to provide a decent life for her. But the point is that, beyond how cringe we today would find such a marriage to a girl so young, Holly is a romantic who wants to rise up above the mediocre and the ordinary, to the heights that capitalism promises (but rarely delivers) and to those pleasures that jouissance wants (and never fully delivers). Hence, she left him, and despite his pleas for her to come back, she never will.

Still, when Madame Sapphia Spanella, another tenant in the brownstone, sees Holly and Doc embracing, she assumes he is another of Holly’s johns and is morally appalled. Holly thought she’d see her brother Fred before being surprised by Doc (page 64). Later, after Rusty’s married Mag, Holly learns of Fred’s having been killed in action, and she smashes everything in her apartment in a rage of grief. Spanella is as horrified now to know of this tantrum as she was scandalized before with her and Doc. As it turns out, not everyone in the past of otherwise self-centred Holly is contemptuously tossed aside. Elsewhere, now that Rusty is unavailable, she now has a new rich man: the Brazilian diplomat, José.

After Fred’s death and the arrival of José into her life, Holly is changed in many ways. She’s nowhere near as sociable as she once was, José has replaced Mag as her roommate, she generally never mentions Fred anymore, and she no longer calls the narrator “Fred” (page 71). The only times she ever leaves her apartment are on Thursdays to see Sally in Sing Sing.

Because she imagines she’ll soon marry José, she’s developed a “keen sudden un-Holly-like enthusiasm for homemaking,” thus making her buy a number of things that it doesn’t seem quite like her to buy. She’s bought two Gothic ‘easy’ chairs from the William Randolph Hearst estate, and given his tendency to have flirted with fascism around this time, though, perhaps this purchase in particular isn’t all that un-Holly-like (page 71). She’s also trying to learn Portuguese so she’ll be comfortable living in Rio when her husband-to-be takes her there (page 72).

Now, since Holly is taken to having rich men pay her way, whether they be husbands or not, it is apposite to point out that in the movie, Varjak also has someone paying his way. This is the wealthy Emily Eustache “2E” Failenson (Neal), his “decorator.” The inclusion of this character has a way of equalizing things between the sexes; it’s as if the filmmakers, in spite of preferring to put Holly in the ‘cage’ of a relationship with Varjak, don’t wish to leave the receiving of cash in exchange for sex to be stereotypically the exclusive domain of ‘gold digging women.’

After the fiasco with the horses, the narrator finds “photographs of Holly…front-paged by the late edition of the Journal-American and by the early editions of both the Daily News and the Daily Mirror.” (page 79) She’s been arrested in a narcotics bust connected with Sally Tomato (page 80).

The narrator imagines it must be Spanella who is to blame, given how she always complains to the authorities about Holly in a way we see Yunioshi do in the film (Yunioshi is also the one in the film who gets the cops on Holly for the drugs).

Joe Bell, who also likes Holly, wants the narrator to call her rich friends to help her out (page 83). The narrator tries Rusty and Mag, who turn on Holly, not wanting their names at all to be associated with her. Calling Doc in Texas is out of the question–Holly would never want that. Then the narrator tries Berman, who says she’ll be out on bail (pages 84-85).

When the narrator goes to find her in her apartment, though, she isn’t there. He does find a man in her home–José’s cousin, who has a message from José for her (pages 85-86). He wants to break off the marriage plans, because, like Rusty and Mag, José doesn’t want his name, family, and reputation to be stained by association with a girl mixed up with drugs. The narrator finds Holly in a hospital room, where she’s been since the arrest. There he reads her José’s letter (pages 87-88).

Now, she’s heartbroken to know that José has dumped her, that he’s just another “rat like Rusty” (page 88), but she’s not going to let that stop her from going to Brazil anyway. The narrator tries in all futility to stop her from jumping bail, for she won’t “waste a perfectly fine ticket” (page 90), and she won’t testify against Sally Tomato, even though she admits that she is “rotten to the core” (page 91).

I’m not interested in the sentimentalized, rom-com Hollywood ending of the film, so I’ll stick with the novella’s ending. Holly really does leave New York and the gay narrator, and she even gets rid of the cat, putting it outside the car taking her to the airport and telling the cat to “f___ off!” when it won’t leave her. (page 95)

Some may think of Holly favourably as a feminist free spirit for leaving the narrator, as opposed to her choosing to stay in her ‘cage’ in a patriarchal relationship with straight Varjak. But when we read the ending of Capote’s version, in which she isn’t freeing herself from a relationship with a gay friend–who has no wish to dominate her as a husband might–and where she doesn’t want to take responsibility for her involvement in a mafia racket or even for her cat, we realize that the narrator is right when he says to her, “You are a bitch.” (page 95)

She tosses the cat aside because of her fear of commitment, her wish never to be chained to anyone or anything, not caring at all about who or what she’s hurting as a result of abandoning them–Doc, the cat, or her friend the narrator. She is just that self-centred, on an endless quest to satisfy her insatiable thirst for jouissance, that surplus-value plus-de-jouir that connects her desires with capitalism, hence her trip to Rio when she’s lost her José.

Still, the narrator will find the abandoned cat and take care of it (page 97). He gets a postcard from her, saying she’s been to Buenos Aires, liking it there far more than Brazil. She’s “joined at the hip with duhvine Señor. Love? Think so.” He’s married and with “7 brats,” though (page 97). In other words, she’ll use him for his money, for as long as the relationship lasts. Then, as we learned from the beginning of the novella, she’ll pursue her elusive jouissance somewhere in Africa. The narrator just hopes that Holly, like the cat that in many ways is a double of her, has found a place where she truly belongs (page 98).

As I said above, the three stories in my edition of the book that fallow BAT—“House of Flowers,” A Diamond Guitar,” and “A Christmas Memory”–all share certain themes with the main story, and I think they’re all worth mentioning before I end this analysis. These themes include: platonic relationships and/or friendships with implied homosexual elements, the breaking-away and ending of said friendships with the aim of attaining personal freedom, and whether or not marriage is a kind of prison.

In the first of these three stories, set in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, Ottilie is a beautiful, strong-willed prostitute, parallel to Holly as an “American geisha.” But where Holly hopes to marry a rich man and experience the capitalist paradise of peace and freedom from the “mean reds,” a paradise symbolized by Tiffany’s, Ottllie’s marriage to the aptly-named Royal Bonaparte, a marriage in the Third World, a harsh contrast to the opulence of New York City, it is a nightmare in which she is tyrannized by her new grandmother-in-law, the also aptly-named Old Bonaparte…a witch. Her new home is the cage Ottilie is trapped in, “like a house of flowers” (page 109).

In such historically impoverished countries as India and China, it was common for women to be treated like abject slaves by their mothers-in-law, since in a patrilineal society, a married woman leaves the family of her flesh and blood to live with her husband’s family, who don’t regard her as their own flesh and blood. So, the contrast between the First World and the Third World is apparent in regard to a woman’s marriage: one as, on the one hand, at least a dream of marrying up into Tiffany’s heaven, vs on the other hand, marrying into patriarchal hell.

In “A Diamond Guitar,” it’s been said that Mr. Schaeffer is parallel to Holly for being, like her, a dreamer; but I must disagree and say that he corresponds to the narrator of BAT, and that it’s Tico Feo who corresponds to Holly, and for several reasons. Tico Feo is a young man with blond hair (like Holly, young and blonde); the boy tells a lot of lies (as Holly is a “phony”), he plays the guitar, as she does, and like her, he eventually frees himself from the Alabama prison he and Schaeffer are stuck in (and just as Holly jumps bail and leaves the narrator in NYC, so does Tico Feo abandon Schaeffer in the prison).

Schaeffer’s and Tico Feo’s relationship isn’t at all physical, but “they were as lovers” (page 130), just as Holly and the narrator of BAT have a platonic relationship, but he is so fascinated with her as almost to be in love with her. The narrator in BAT expresses himself artistically as a writer; Schaeffer does so by carving dolls.

In “A Christmas Memory,” there’s another platonic male-to-female relationship, but this time in the form of a boy and his much elder cousin. Both characters are unnamed, though she calls him “Buddy,” and he, the narrator, calls her simply “my friend.” This kind of naming and non-naming is similar to how the unnamed narrator of BAT is addressed as “Fred” by Holly (recall, not her real name, either), implying a transference of her brother-to-sister relationship with the real Fred that parallels the familial relationship of cousins “Buddy” and his “friend.”

So we can see a number of parallel themes and motifs in all these stories, including also Capote’s autobiographical elements in at least three of the four stories, through the implied homosexuality in the narrator of BAT, the platonic homosexuality of Schaeffer’s and Tico Feo’s relationship, and how “Buddy,” the boy in “A Christmas Memory,” dramatizes much of Capote’s childhood. We see the superiority of platonic relationships over transactional, sexual ones, and we also see the yearning to escape from one’s cages–literal ones, metaphorical ones, and ones made of flowers.

Truman Capote, Breakfast at Tiffany’s, London, Penguin Essentials, 1961

The Tanah–Beginnings, Chapter Seven

[The following is the 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, and here is the 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.]

The ten precepts were indeed relaxed in the land of Spirus–too relaxed, in the opinion of a man named Lorenzos. He was a soldier in Spirus’ army, and he had a wife, Maryas, and two sons, Reynholdos and Ottos. The boys were born several years after their mother and father left Spirus to settle in the land of Canudos, which was north of Spirus.

Lorenzos left Spirus out of distaste for the country’s moral laxity, as he saw it. He was troubled by a need to have the highest ethical standards possible, without reaching the excesses of Puritos. In search of answers, Lorenzos meditated diligently. One day, he had a vision.

He saw a large serpent biting its own tail. Underneath was a sign that read:

THIS IS THE WAY THE WORLD GOES

Then Lorenzos’ eyes followed the body of the serpent from its tail to its head. When the vision disappeared, he had an answer to his problem.

The Ten Errors would be interpreted no less severely than this: we journey to the serpent’s brain and eyes, but avoid its nose and teeth. This means that reason and vision are the ideal, but indulgence in appetite, sensual pleasure, and violence causes self-destruction. Thus, Mad Thinking is lustful, violent thinking; Being Dazed by Images is indulgence in spectacles of lewdness; Scurrilous Language is obscene language, but harsh words are necessary to correct a child’s wayward behaviour; and family harmony is maintained by strict loyalty to one’s parents.

Spirus would never accept the severity of Lorenzos’ interpretation, and his vision of the serpent inspired another idea: those who migrate grow stronger. That is, one leaves the old way of life to start a new one elsewhere, like passing beyond the serpent’s bitten tail to its biting head, passing from weakness to strength. Therefore, he and Maryas went to Canudos, and had their sons there, also.

Lorenzos applied his philosophy with especial strictness on Reynholdos, since he was the first-born son. Reynholdos, though, thought of his father as if he were a mad dog from all his fierceness; indeed, Reynholdos imagined himself almost sacrificed for his father’s philosophy. Still, he never complained, nor was he embittered. He admired his father’s ideals and vision so much that he carried on the same philosophy with his own children, not altering an article of it. Lorenzos had had the revelation of the serpent; Reynholdos had had none. Who was he to amend his father’s wisdom?

Believing Canudos to be the land in which his father’s wisdom would flourish, Reynholdos would stay there, teaching his father’s philosophy to all; and he married a woman, Lizas, who had migrated to Canudos from Angulos with her mother. He and Lizas had three children: two sons, Reynholdos II, and Gionos; and Catyas, a daughter. They were very happy together for nine years.

Then Reynholdos begot another son by Lizas.

His name was Nitramius. Lizas chose the name, for it means “alien.” Indeed, this is how she saw her new son, for she had not wanted any more children after her daughter, Catyas. Reynholdos was indifferently happy about a new son, for in his mind, the more children he had, the happier a father he was. Lizas, however, was irritated at having to suffer through nine months of discomfort, all to have a child she’d never wanted. Nitramius’ siblings were born the one close after the other, in yearly succession; but Nitramius himself came five years after Catyas.

Though Lizas was annoyed with this new son, she looked into the eyes of the newborn babe and felt a mother’s love. Thus she loved and hated him. Out of these conflicting feelings came an unnatural urge to dominate the boy. Having worked as a nurse for many years, she was acquainted with matters of illness (her mind was also haunted by these matters). Seeing mildly erratic behaviour in the boy, and ignoring his prodigious intelligence, she told the family that Nitramius was feeble-minded. His siblings, naturally jealous of the attention he was getting, eagerly believed their mother, and hated the boy all the more.

They were relentlessly cruel to the boy, and his mother indulged them, for she wanted Nitramius to be timid. He thought of his family, and most of the people of Canudos, as mad dogs, for the neighbours of his family were no less cruel when they saw his family’s cruelty.

Nitramius ws artistic and intellectual, but his family ridiculed his ideas, calling them childish fantasies. Though they despised him, he refused to despise himself. As a young man, he once bought himself a beautiful, long, black silk jacket. It was expensive, though, and his family was angry with him for buying what he could not afford. Creditors came after him, and his brothers beat him for his extravagance. They threw him in a ditch, and left him for dead.

Instead of returning home, Nitramius tended to his injuries himself, and when he was well enough to move about, he used what money he had to find transportation out of Canudos. His travels took him to the land of Nawaitos, to the east of Canudos. In Nawaitos, he became a teacher, and quickly paid off his creditors.

Though at first Nitramius had difficulty adapting to his new home, he soon found himself able to feel as though he was one of the locals, despite how obviously different he looked as a foreigner. He met a girl there, they fell in love, and got married. They would not have children, though, for Nitramius was afraid that he would be as bestial to them as his own family had been to him. He saw the evil in his family, and he wanted the line to end.

The notion of his family flourishing in a great nation was agreeable to him, though, and his reputation as a teacher, philosopher, and singer grew as well. When seen in his black silk jacket, he was always approached with questions. With a new family, a new country, and a new-found respect, he could fashion his identity anew. If his family thought he was dead, he could consider them dead, too.

With a new identity came a new name. Tiring of the feelings of loneliness and isolation he got from being called “Nitramius,” now he would call himself “Rawmios,” meaning “on a high hill.”

The memories of his cruel family–his distant father, his lying mother, and his violent siblings–still gave him pain, though; and when he wished to start artistic projects–music, plays, poetry–he had few resources. Still, Rawmios used these shortcomings to gain the sympathy of the people of Nawaitos and beyond; for he would use his example to show how others who suffer can escape and thrive. Thus, in helping others, he helped himself.

Commentary

The ouroboros, perhaps borrowed from the Midgard Serpent of Norse myth, is used here as a symbol of the dialectical relationship between all opposites. It’s expressed here so perfectly: one extreme, as it were, biting the other, and every point in between is part of a continuum coiled in a circle. Such is eternity, and the yin/yang-like relationship of all duality. Neither Lorenzos nor Reynholdos Sr. could see that symbolism, though Rawmios would.

People do get stronger from migrating. Lorenzos and Rawmios did. Lorenzos’ weakness was in thinking he could be severe and avoid violence, but he didn’t avoid it…nor did his son or grandsons. Reynholdos Sr. couldn’t see the harm in his father’s thinking. Rawmios could; he wisely left family and country, and he thrived.

His father’s error was seeing no error in parents. Rawmios could see parental error, and thus he shunned parenthood. The error of seeing faultlessness is an example of the relationship between opposites in the ouroboros–truth in paradox.

Rawmios’ wearing of a long, black, silk jacket suggests the possibility of a mythical ancestor of a myth as also expressed in the Biblical story of Joseph and his ‘coat of many colours.’ Below is another poem presented with visual cues to reinforce meaning.

People who stay
in their country, like grass,
with the wind sway together.
They grow very little
and move even less. But the…one

who won’t lay
himself down–like an ass
that leaves slack its short tether
and idly will whittle
away its few years–but will…………….run

far away
from his nation, its crass
souls, and familiar weather
–his patience grows brittle–
will elsewhere shine, bright as the………………………sun.

The Tanah–Beginnings, Chapter Five

[The following is the sixth of many posts–here is the first, here is the second, here is the third, here is the fourth, and here is the 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.]

When Queen Vita, her son, Prince Invidios, and his brothers and sisters arrived in their boat on the shores of the port city of Logos in the land of Nodos, they saw a most astonishing thing. It was night-time, and many members of the population of the city were seen to be walking in their sleep. The banished former queen and her sons and daughters came closer to the local inhabitants of the town, and her family could hear the Logosians talking in their sleep, too.

The sleepwalkers were reasoning amongst themselves, why they should have the right to things they had been denied by their king, a most repressive ruler named Despotes. The foreign family felt a strong urge to meet this king and his family, since they were used to the company of royalty. Invidios had a second reason for wanting to meet King Despotes: having been exiled by a similarly tyrannical ruler, King Patros, he wanted to kill the Logosian king, and rule in his stead.

The exiled royals slept in a humble inn for the night, having difficulty adjusting to such meagre accommodations. In the morning, the innkeeper gave them directions to the king’s palace. On their way there, they spoke to some of the Logosians and learned why their king was so severe: an oracle predicted his murder “by one in his own land” (by this, it was interpreted to mean, murdered by one of his own people). The severe laws were meant to protect the king.

Vita and her family also learned that the people of this city had a special talent for reasoning: the king himself was born in Logos, and was considered peerless in his gift for philosophical argumentation (or sophistry, as many of the people of Nodos would prefer to say). All of the people of the land of Nodos were famed for their roving curiosity and searching thirst for knowledge. Vita’s family were most impressed with these Nodosian traits.

When they reached the palace, her family were warmly welcomed, for it was obvious to all, from the elegance of their clothing, that they were also royalty. King Despotes showed an uncharacteristic openness to Invidios and his family, for the king assumed that no foreigner was destined to kill him. A sumptuous feast was prepared for all the nobles, local and foreign, that night; Vita, Invidios, and their family enjoyed the first meal of the sort they had been accustomed to since their banishment from Vestis. As he enjoyed his food and wine, and gave dissembling smiles to the king in their conversations at the great dinner table, Invidios busily planned out the murder of Despotes in his mind, for killing had become easy for him.

On the way to the palace earlier that day, Invidios had met a local apothecary and bought a potent poison. During the carousing after dinner, he put drops of the poison into the wine glasses of all the royal family when their backs were turned. By the next morning, when it was discovered by all that the king and his heirs were dead, Invidios and his brothers staged a coup. Its success came from Invidios’ ability to justify his regicide in a rousing oration. He told the people of Nodos that, under his rule, they were now all free of the tyranny of the dead king!

Invidios, as the new king of Nodos, quickly began to replace the harsh old decrees with newer, lenient ones. He easily won the love of the people for this, and their new-found freedoms caused their sleepwalking to end. King Invidios wanted a world combining the license of the rule of his father, Agnos, with the cultural sophistication of Vestis. The Nodosians, with their love of wisdom and yearning for new freedoms, would eagerly embrace this blend of ideas.

The sexes were equal, father-kin was replaced with mother-kin, and multiple lovers were available to all. Being naked in public was permitted, and in such a hot climate as Nodos was in summer, many–particularly the young and physically attractive–enjoyed this freedom. The surviving nobles of Nodos lay with Invidios’ sisters, and their children grew gigantically tall and proud.

King Invidios enjoyed his new power, but not its burdens, for scores of people came to him complaining of various injustices they’d experienced. It was incumbent on the king to be the judge of numerous trials, and he grew weary of it. Becoming increasingly indolent, he decreed that a crime would no longer be deemed so if good reasons could be given for committing it. He called this principle “going beyond good and evil.” This would reduce his burdens, but corrupt his entire country. (It was during this time, six years since he’d become king of Nodos, that Vita died. She was given a lavish funeral.)

Among the offences first to be made legal by justifying argument were these: relieving oneself in public places, on the grass and roads (public toilets were insufficient, and making enough for all of Nodos would cause a rise in taxes); and starting fires, including burning trees and grass (for warmth during the bitterly cold winters).

From this absurd reasoning, justification for worse vices ensued: greed was commended if it drove commerce and improved the economy; lying was permitted, for Invidios was dishonest in showing friendship to Despotes, and for a Nodosian to lie was to honour his king and saviour from tyranny; adultery was permitted, for Invidios gave everyone sexual freedom the very day he became king; murder was permitted if the victim gravely offended his killer, or if the killing was motivated by envy (besides, to kill was to emulate Invidios’ killing of Despotes, and this act would thus honour the new king); stealing was allowed, if one was too poor to feed one’s family without doing so (besides, Invidios stole Despotes’ crown); employers were allowed never to give their workers a day of rest, for continuous business would improve the economy; sons and daughters were permitted to be unfilial to their parents, and vice versa, if they had been mistreated; scurrilous language was allowed if one had been sufficiently offended or wronged; being hypnotized by images was considered good, because it is aesthetically pleasing, especially after much hard work; finally, the beliefs of the mad were tolerated on the grounds that they were “alternative perspectives.”

The result of these new freedoms was, of course, social chaos. The streets and parks reeked of excrement; forest fires were rampant; property was destroyed or stolen; honesty was rare, in business or among marriages; the blood of the murdered flooded the land; family discord was common; workers felt like slaves; speech was rarely civil; greed was deemed good; and madmen were the new philosophers.

One Nodosian, named Medias, lived with his wife and their three sons, each of whom had his own wife and family. They lived on a high hill, away from the fetid filth and fiery wildness of passion of all the other Nodosians. This family of farmers was a wise one. They lived quietly, humbly and peacefully–happily isolated from the wickedness of their compatriots.

One night, Medias dreamt of a huge wave of water submerging all of Nodos. He knew this was a portentous dream from Priff, the water Crim, for in Medias’ wisdom, he knew of a Reason higher than that of King Invidios, a Reason that reacts to excess with opposing excess. He said to his family, “The flood will clean away the foul filth of our corrupt nation; it will quench Crim Nevil’s fire and wash away the blood of Nodos’ victims. It will also kill all the wicked. So that we, too, are not killed, we must build a boat large enough to hold all of us and our animals.”

“Should we not warn the rest of the people?” asked his wife.

“They will not listen,” Medias said. “They err as unconsciously as they did when they walked in their sleep under Despotes’ rule. The first king was too rigid; this king is too lax. We need a ruler who follows a middle path.”

When the Nodosians saw Medias and his family building their boat high on the hill, far from the water, they thought him mad. Still, his madness was tolerated as an alternative wisdom…and it was.

A huge tidal wave approached the port of Logos, and the people with all their reasoning ability could not save themselves, for in their licentiousness they wandered all their days in oblivion, as if still sleepwalking. They were the first to be submerged, and the rest of Nodos followed quickly after. Medias and his family had finished making the boat just in time, and they and their animals were all safe inside it when the water had reached the top of the hill.

As the boat floated on the water, Medias and his family looked out the windows to see the drowned men and women of Nodos, many of whose bodies moved under the water as if they were on the land, walking in their sleep. They even saw the bodies of King Invidios, his sisters, and their huge sons and daughters.

After several weeks, the water receded, and the boat lay conveniently close to the hill where their farm was. Even more fortunate for them was how their farm was never touched with the water. Medias thanked Priff in his prayers. As for the rest of Nodos, all the excrement and blood were washed away, the fires were quenched, and the wickedness of the land was gone. Now the family could start anew.

Medias started with some new moral precepts, neither lax nor severe. These ten things were to be avoided:

THE TEN ERRORS

  1. Mad thinking
  2. Being dazed by images
  3. Scurrilous language
  4. All work and no rest
  5. Family fighting
  6. Murder
  7. Adultery
  8. Theft
  9. Lying
  10. Greed

These were written down and remembered throughout the generations, their meaning and interpretation extensively commented on.

Commentary

The many absurdities in this story, as well as its obvious derivations (a mix of flood myth with Moses-like moral code), show it to be allegory, not history. Is the land of Nod–Nodos–a land of nodding off to sleep or of wandering–the fusion being sleepwalking? Do such a land’s people err without knowing what they do? Is this not the essence of a wicked society?

Its kings are wicked: indeed, all leaders are so when they are too severe or too permissive. The wicked often have reasons for what they do, but these reasons do not excuse them for their wrongs. With the excesses of a tyrant come a clamour for reform, for freedom. When the freedoms from the new ruler cause chaos, decadence, putrefaction, and the fires of unruly passion, purifying waters must wash the filth away. Only rule in moderation will be a lasting rule.

Note the shifts from extreme reason to extreme unreason. This is yet another manifestation of those waves that go from one extreme to the other, a recurring theme throughout the Tanah.

Below is yet another of those concrete poems, translated and rendered as best as we scholars could to approximate the desired visual effect while retaining the meaning as accurately as possible.

Heads
of state must not grip tightly
their
poor
people; or
they’ll nightly
voice……..their
hatred…………in
their…………..dreams,
and…………………march
on………………………..kings
in……………………………killing
teams.

Heads
of state must not hold lightly
laws
and
morals; or
else, nightly,
thoughts….that
should………remain
in…………………dreams
will……………………..crawl
and prey with……..brute extremes.

Heads
of state
must ponder rightly
middle…….rule;……….so
men………………can………….nightly
lie…………………….in………………..bed
with…………………pleasant………….dreams,
and………walk
with……………thoughts
that………………………have
calm………………………themes.

The Tanah–Beginnings, Chapter Four

[The following is the fifth of many posts–here is the first, here is the second, here is the third, and here is the 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.]

Years went by, and King Patros’s son, Prixos, became a man. He would be the king’s rightful heir and successor…except other members of the royal family would have had things otherwise.

The king loved Prixos dearly, and indulged the youth to excess. When the family rode in their chariots across the island of Vestis to see their subjects, Patros and Prixos were always in the first chariot, while Queen Vita and her sons and daughters had to follow behind in their chariots. So had it been for twenty years, along with numerous other privileges that the king and his son could enjoy, all at the expense of Vita and her children.

One day, she complained of this to Invidios, her sullen first-born son. “Though I do not regret ending your father’s feckless rule, I can no longer endure the injustice of my new king’s sway. Before, I could roam about freely; now, I must be escorted everywhere either by the king or by his ten eunuch guards. Before, I could enjoy as many lovers as Agnos did with his thirty concubines; now, Patros’s eunuchs guard me against a pleasure he regularly enjoys, while Agnos’ concubines–once honoured for their love and devotion to the former king–are now disgraced as naked whores, to be enjoyed by any common man on the street for a small sum of money. Those women are never even given the money; their procurers take it all. Many of them have grown old and withered, and they are still not given the dignity of clothing. All of them would rather kill themselves than go on as they do, but none has a knife.

“As for the rest of us women–me and your sisters included–we live lives hardly less wretched than the former concubines. There is a wealth of learning in the libraries and universities, but our sex is discouraged from touching it. Though society is improved with such erudition, during Agnos’ rule the men were as ignorant as the women, and thus our sex at least had no reason to envy men. Now we do. We are disenfranchised and scorned.

“And what is the king’s reason? He asserts that it was I, and all the women of Gymnos (this island’s former name, recall), who debauched King Agnos. King Patros says that the female form, when unclothed, tempts men to lust and to look away from nobler pursuits; but it was Agnos’ decree that everyone, nude, should freely procreate. Though I never questioned the wisdom of his command, I did not inspire it, either.

“I swear to you, my son, King Patros has done us all wrong, including you and your brothers, by instituting father-kin throughout Vestis, thus denying you your natural right of succession. While I prefer the maturity of our society now to the infantile rule of your father (assuming he was your natural father), we must amend our society to embrace full equality for the sexes. The only way to ensure that will be for you to succeed Patros as king, not his son Prixos, whom I now disown for your sake. I am too old to bear the king any more sons, so if you kill Prixos, Patros will have no choice but to accept you as his heir. This will set a precedent in the law that will force all of Vestis to return to mother-kin, and women will have their rights restored. Will you kill the boy, Invidios?”

“Yes, Mother,” Invidios said. “With pleasure. I’ve always hated Prince Prixos. Not only is the treatment of Vestis’ women unjust, but also religion is practiced unfairly, and the latter is the doing of Prixos. He and his father (never mine!) have instituted the worship of a Sky-father god, to supplant our Earth-mother goddess! This god is to have animals sacrificed to him, emasculated as my wretched father was! The prince justifies this cruelty to animals by saying it signifies the death of a man’s animal nature in order to grow in the spirit. He has always scorned my cooking of vegetables as a sacrifice to please our Earth-mother goddess. When I explain how the cooking signifies the heating of the passions and instincts to inspire a man to action, the prince scoffs at me. I will no longer endure his arrogance! I will gladly kill him–for both of us, Mother.”

The next day, Invidios went with Prixos to sacrifice a goat at the top of a lonely hill. Though he told Prixos he was willing to embrace the new Sky-father god religion, Invidios found a thick branch, broken off a nearby tree, and waited for the prince to turn his back. He then beat the prince to death, and buried the body. “I killed a man to save your life,” he said to the goat before setting it free.

A farmer witnessed the murder, informed the king, and showed him where the body was. Denying her son’s guilt, Queen Vita demanded that King Patros acknowledge Invidios as his prince and successor to the throne. The king, knowing her tricks, refused this demand, and banished not only Invidios from Vestis, but his brothers and sisters as well. He even repudiated his queen, and announced his plan to marry a young princess from the land of Pudios, a neighbouring country of Gnosius, and part of its empire. She would bear him sons to succeed him.

The former queen and her sons and daughters, all disgraced, sailed on a boat away from the beloved island of their birth, never to return on pain of death. The boat eventually reached shore, and the family settled in the land of Nodos.

Over the years, King Patros, with his bashful new queen and his new sons by her, enacted new laws, even stricter than before, on women. Now they were forbidden any form of education, whereas before it had merely been discouraged. Women were warned to be silent in matters of politics, for fear of a repeat of the incident with Vita and Invidios.

Here we see the cycles of life once again: when the victims of injustice act too rashly, pushing for change without due organization and preparation, acting before the time is ripe, their own impulsiveness turns against them, and they suffer all the worse for it.

Commentary

One will note parallels between the Invidios and Prixos narrative and the Cain and Abel story. These two myths seem to have a common ancestor, one based on the foundation of a city, requiring a human sacrifice so the dead one’s spirit will be a protector of the new city. Another example of such a myth is that of Romulus and Remus, the former having killed the latter on the foundation of the city of Rome. One can also see in the Invidios and Prixos narrative, as in the Cain and Abel story, an allegory of the conflict between nomadic shepherds and settled farmers.

In any case, the story is trying to teach the moral of avoiding rashness in making changes of any revolutionary sort. If done too quickly, without sufficient planning and care, one may find one’s plans backfiring and resulting in a much worse oppression than before. Thus we see the wavelike movement from injustice to a far too sharp return to justice, then a swing right back to the original injustice, or an even worse kind.

Here’s another, admittedly awkward, translation of one of the ancient poems, again with the visual effect, preserved as best as my team of researchers could do:

Throwing

sticks

too hard

only makes them

return harder.

A soft

toss

suffices.