‘Pointy Sticks,’ a Short Prose Poem by Cass Wilson

A poet friend of mine, Cass Wilson, whose work I’ve looked at before, has recently published this new prose poem on her Spillwords page. Let’s take a look at it. Again, I’m putting her words in italics to distinguish them from mine.

Pointy Sticks

Incessant pointy sticks, endlessly poked at her through the bars of her self imposed prison.
She grabbed at the earth, pushing it inside the wounds, foolishly thinking if she could fill the holes left by the sticks, then she’d be complete once more.
But one stick was replaced by two. Then four. Then multiplied until she was just a hole herself. Nothing left of her but a vast, empty black hole where her heart once was.
The other parts of her, incarcerated in the illusionary safety of her solitude, the place she longed to be and to flee, both simultaneously; just floated away over time, grains of someone who had once been, but was no more.

And now, for my analysis.

The “incessant pointy sticks” can be seen to represent a number of things. Since they’ve “poked at her,” they can easily be seen to be phallic, the poking thus symbolic of the sexual abuse (I certainly hope, for the writer’s sake, that this isn’t meant to be literally autobiographical!) of a woman. Her pushing of the earth “inside the wounds,” suggestive of an introjection of the mother goddess in the hopes of healing, is an attempt to heal the injured female of the wounds of male dominance.

Another way to think about the pointy sticks is to think of them in terms of projective identification, a Kleinian concept that Wilfred Bion expanded on through his theory of containment. Normally, in a healthy mother/infant relationship, the mother is a container of her baby’s anxieties, frustrations, etc., taking in those harsh emotions (the contained), detoxifying them, then returning them to the baby in a form it can tolerate, thus soothing it. (Click here for more on Bion and other psychoanalytic concepts.)

The container is given a feminine symbol, suggesting a yoni, and the contained is given a masculine, and thus phallic, symbol. So containment, or projective identification as a primitive, preverbal form of communication between parent and infant, can be seen as symbolized by the sex act, with energy passing from one person to the other, then back again.

The problem arises when this containment is negative. Instead of leading to a soothing of one’s anxieties, a processing of trauma, in negative containment, seen in abusive parent/child relationships, the pain is intensified; this is what we see described in this prose poem. The pointing sticks are phallic daggers causing yonic wounds in the poet’s body, a symbolic rape.

Healing from such trauma isn’t a simple matter of appealing to the mythological feminine. One tries to rid oneself of the pain by pretending it isn’t there, and so one never frees oneself from one’s “self imposed prison.” It’s self-imposed because one isn’t doing what one must do to free oneself, even though one knows one must heal the pain by confronting it, by feeling it.

The pointy sticks are like the heads of the Hydra, for when one cuts a head off, it is “replaced by two.” When one cuts the two off, then there are four. Since the sticks are phallic, cutting them off–castration as symbolic of hating men–isn’t the solution, for however justified women’s anger is at the all-too-typical male attitude, hating men leads to an even more intensely misogynistic reaction from them. Whatever we send out there, karma brings back to us.

Please don’t confuse what I’ve said above with victim-blaming; I’m not trying to judge women for being angry with men, something they very, very often have a perfect right to do. This isn’t about passing judgement; it’s about finding real healing.

Ending male dominance must be dealt with more subtly, in a manner that makes an ally out of a former enemy; otherwise, the female sufferer will be nothing but a giant yonic dungeon of her own pain, of her own making, “a vast, empty black hole where her heart once was.”

Part of how negative containment intensifies pain, turning anxiety into what Bion called a nameless dread, is the use of projective identification to eject parts of the self out into the external world in an attempt not to have to deal with the parts of oneself that one doesn’t want to accept. These ejected parts are the “other parts of her, incarcerated in the illusionary safety of her solitude, the place she longed to be and to flee.”

If one ejects too many of the undesirable parts of oneself, one feels oneself to be disintegrating, suffering psychological fragmentation, leading to a psychotic break with reality. Narcissism can be a dysfunctional attempt to protect oneself from this kind of fragmentation, the danger of an underlying borderline structure, as Otto Kernberg has observed.

Those ejected parts of herself “just floated away over time, grains of someone who had once been, but was no more.” Those ejections, accumulating over time, result in the fading away of the self, a gradual disintegration. The projected parts that float away become what Bion called bizarre objects, or hallucinated objects felt to be in the external world but which are imbued with characteristics of one’s own personality.

One cannot rid oneself of pain by projecting it outwards. The broken pieces must all be put back together. Instead of division and fragmentation, there must be oneness. Splitting must be replaced with integration of one’s good and bad internal objects (e.g., the internalized ‘good mother’ and the ‘bad father’ of the psyche), or reparation–a shift from what Klein called the paranoid-schizoid position to the depressive position.

The broken-off parts must be freed of their incarceration, from one’s “self imposed prison.” One’s solitude, or hiding from the world, gives an “illusionary safety,” but it will never give one lasting healing. True healing comes from connection with others, from a communal love.

‘Sirens,’ a Horror Novella, Chapter Three

Two nights later, reporter Nancy Sayers got a tip about another accident, this time just outside a warehouse near downtown Sulla. She raced over there in her car. She arrived about twenty minutes later.

A crowd surrounded the police, the paramedics, and the accident victim. Some crates were piled near the crowd; she climbed up a few of them so she could see. The victim, a young white male, was impaled through the belly on the left of the raised blades of a forklift. The paramedics were trying to remove the body from the blade; blood was splattered everywhere.

“Oh, God!” she gasped, wincing at the sight.

A bicycle lay on its left side just by the forklift and immediately after a huge pothole. Nancy assumed that it was the victim’s, him having fallen after hitting the pothole.

He must have been drunk or stoned not to have seen such a big pothole, she thought.

“Come on, all of you!” a police officer shouted. “Make room, clear the way! We’ve gotta get the body to the coroner, and we can’t do that with all you people in the way!”

The young man’s body was on a stretcher now and being carried into the ambulance. The crowd was dispersing, except for a few reporters.

“No reporters!” the cop said angrily. “Get outta here. I’ll answer your questions at the station. I won’t have much to say beyond what we see here, because I have to wait for the coroner’s report. C’mon, people. Go!”

Nancy noticed that the forklift blade the boy’s body had been impaled on was chipped and jagged at the edge. Small wonder it cut clean through the body. But why would such a defective forklift be kept for use at a warehouse?

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

Two days after writing up and publishing her brief, initial story on the death–which didn’t have much to say beyond the fact that the young man’s name was Tor, he was 23, and it was his bike–she heard the coroner’s report. As with Ari, Tor was neither drunk nor stoned at the time of the accident.

How could a sober guy have missed that pothole? she wondered. I interviewed his parents just before publishing my story, and they said he had no suicidal or self-destructive tendencies at all. He was always a happy boy. Just like Ari, this was an accident that should never have happened. It makes no sense at all!

The time of death was estimated at about 6:30 in the evening, a pretty accurate estimate given how quickly his body was discovered and sent to the coroner, about 10:00 that night. There were clear signs of lividity in Tor’s body, but rigour mortis hadn’t set in yet, so he couldn’t have been dead for more than three to four hours upon discovery of his body.

The bicycle was definitely his, for Nancy learned from her interview of his parents that they’d bought it for him as a birthday gift a year ago. Since he’d been riding his bike at around 6:30 in the evening, the sun hadn’t set yet, so Tor had plenty of light to see that large pothole in the road by the forklift. He was perfectly sober, and known to be an excellent bicyclist–he had won several trophies in bike races in his teens, and habitually rode every day.

It doesn’t make any sense at all that he hadn’t noticed the pothole, she thought. Yet it seems he rode right into it, causing him to fly off his bike and onto the forklift blade.

As odd as it was that the blade he hit had a jagged edge, it was even odder to see the blades raised up to about five feet in the air.

It was as though someone had premeditated, planned out his death, she thought. What living person could have done such a fantastic thing? It was like something right out of The Omen, a conspiracy of demons.

Then, Nancy remembered Ari’s accident, and how odd that death was.

Nah, they couldn’t be connected, she thought. I’m thinking crazy now.

Shootings

Cops
have
been
getting…away…with…the…
shooting
of
black
people
for
far
too
long.

Black
skin
should
…not…be…a…sin…in…the…eyes…of…police.
Crime
comes
in
blue
and
in
white
far
more
often.

Riots
arise
from
this
senselessness…It…is…a…fact…
that
brutality
bears
such
strange
fruit.

Ending
unrest
…can…not…come…in…the…guns…of…militias’
mad,
wild,
eager
fingers.

One
day,
all…the…shots…will…fly…out…of…the…
rifles
fired
from
revolution.

Then,
pigs
will
…get…it…in…the…gut…as…they’ve
given
it
so
far
more
often.

‘Sirens,’ a Horror Novella, Chapter Two

THE SULLA DAILY NEWS

MOTORCYCLIST KILLED IN HIGHWAY ACCIDENT

September 2, 2020

by Nancy Sayers

Last night, at about 11:30, Ari Schneider, 22, was riding his Yamaha Midnight Star motorbike down Route 36 between Sulla and Carupton when, inexplicably, he suddenly swerved into the opposing lane and crashed into an approaching semi-trailer truck. His body went under the wheels and was torn in half.

An autopsy revealed no drugs in his body, only a very small amount of alcohol, far too little for him to have lost control the way he did. The truck driver claims he had “an ear-to-ear grin” on his face, and his eyes were “squeezed shut” just before the collision. Yet he was hardly intoxicated at all, in spite of appearances.

“He looked like he was interacting with friends on his bike,” the truck driver, Ben Lewiston, said. “But no one was on the bike with him, and he wasn’t wearing headphones or a microphone to be talking with anyone else. I was surprised to hear that he wasn’t drunk or stoned. He must have been mentally ill or something.”

His family members, however, insist he had no mental health issues at all. “He never had a suicidal inclination of any kind,” his father, Lee Schneider, said. “Nor was he ever prone to hallucinating, not in the slightest. There is no reason for him at all to have thrown himself under that truck. It was so easily avoidable an accident. He was more or less sober. How could this have happened?”

A private funeral is being arranged for him for next week.

Analysis of ‘Lolita’

Lolita is a 1955 novel by Vladimir Nabokov. It was made into two movie adaptations, the first one (1962) directed by Stanley Kubrick and with a screenplay by Nabokov (of which “only ragged odds and ends” were used in the film [Nabokov, page xii]; in spite of his having been credited with writing the screenplay, it was actually rewritten by Kubrick and James B. Harris). The second adaptation (1997) was directed by Adrian Lyne and written by Stephen Schiff. There have also been stage and musical adaptations of the novel, as well as an opera.

I’ll be basing this analysis on the novel, Nabokov’s screenplay (his “vivacious variant” of the book [Nabokov, page xxiii]), and the two movies. Though the story is controversial for its depiction of a middle-aged man’s sexual obsession with a 12-year-old girl, “not a single obscene term is to be found in the whole work; indeed, the robust philistine who is conditioned by modern conventions into accepting without qualms a lavish array of four-letter words in a banal novel, will be quite shocked by their absence here” (Nabokov, page 4).

Here are some quotes:

Lolita

I have no intention to glorify H.H.. No doubt, he is horrible, he is abject, he is a shining example of moral leprosy, a mixture of ferocity and jocularity that betrays supreme misery perhaps, but is not conducive to attractiveness. He is ponderously capricious. Many of his casual opinions on the people and scenery of this country are ludicrous. A desperate honesty that throbs through his confession does not absolve him from sins of diabolical cunning. He is abnormal. He is not a gentleman. But how magically his singing violin can conjure up a tendresse, a compassion for Lolita that makes us entranced with the book while abhorring its author!
As a case history, Lolita will become, no doubt, a classic in psychiatric circles. As a work of art, it transcends its expiatory aspects; and still more important to us than scientific significance and literary worth, is the ethical impact the book should have on the serious reader; for in this poignant personal study there lurks a general lesson; the wayward child, the egotistic mother, the panting maniac — these are not only vivid characters in a unique story: they warn us of dangerous trends; they point out potent evils. Lolita should make all of us — parents, social workers, educators — apply ourselves with still greater vigilance and vision to the task of bringing up a better generation in a safer world. –Foreword, by Dr. John Ray, Jr., PhD.

Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta. She was Lo, plain Lo, in the morning, standing four feet ten in one sock. She was Lola in slacks. She was Dolly at school. She was Dolores on the dotted line. But in my arms she was always Lolita. –Part One, Chapter 1, opening lines

You have to be an artist and a madman, a creature of infinite melancholy, with a bubble of hot poison in your loins and a super-voluptuous flame permanently aglow in your subtle spine (oh, how you have to cringe and hide!), in order to discern at once, by ineffable signs—the slightly feline outline of a cheekbone, the slenderness of a downy limb, and other indices which despair and shame and tears of tenderness forbid me to tabulate—the deadly little demon among the wholesome children; she stands unrecognized by them and unconscious herself of her fantastic power. –Part One, Chapter 5

My very photogenic mother died in a freak accident (picnic, lightning) when I was three, and, save for a pocket of warmth in the darkest past, nothing of her subsists within the hollows and dells of memory, over which, if you can still stand my style (I am writing under observation), the sun of my infancy had set… –Part One, Chapter 2

All at once we were madly, clumsily, shamelessly, agonizingly in love with each other… –Part One, Chapter 3, of Humbert and Annabel

Between the age limits of nine and fourteen there occur maidens who, to certain bewitched travelers, twice or many times older than they, reveal their true nature which is not human, but nymphic (that is, demoniac); and these chosen creatures I propose to designate as “nymphets.” –Part One, Chapter 5

When I was a child and she was a child, my little Annabel was no nymphet to me; I was her equal, a faunlet in my own right, on that same enchanted island of time… –Part One, Chapter 5

Oh, my Lolita, I have only words to play with! –Part One, Chapter 8

Lolita, when she chose, could be a most exasperating brat. I was not really quite prepared for her fits of disorganized boredom, intense and vehement griping, her sprawling, droopy, dopey-eyed style, and what is called goofing off — a kind of diffused clowning which she thought was tough in a boyish hoodlum way. Mentally, I found her to be a disgustingly conventional little girl. Sweet hot jazz, square dancing, gooey fudge sundaes, musicals, movie magazines and so forth — these were the obvious items in her list of beloved things. The Lord knows how many nickels I fed to the gorgeous music boxes that came with every meal we had. –Part Two, Chapter 1

The following decision I make with all the legal impact and support of a signed testament: I wish this memoir to be published only when Lolita is no longer alive.
Thus, neither of us is alive when the reader opens this book. But while the blood still throbs through my writing hand, you are still as much part of blessed matter as I am, and I can still talk to you from here to Alaska. Be true to your Dick. Do not let other fellows touch you. Do not talk to strangers. I hope you will love your baby. I hope it will be a boy. That husband of yours, I hope, will always treat you well, because otherwise my specter shall come at him, like black smoke, like a demented giant, and pull him apart nerve by nerve. And do not pity C. Q. One had to choose between him and H.H., and one wanted H.H. to exist at least a couple of months longer, so as to have him make you live in the minds of later generations. I am thinking of aurochs and angels, the secret of durable pigments, prophetic sonnets, the refuge of art. And this is the only immortality you and I may share, my Lolita. –Part Two, Chapter 36

Lolita: a Screenplay

The CAMERA also locates the drug addict’s implementa on a bedside chair, and with a shudder withdraws. –Prologue, page 1, in Quilty’s home

“My mother was an Englishwoman. Her death preceded that of my father by two decades: she was killed by a bolt of lightning during a picnic on my fourth birthday, high in the Maritime Alps.” –Humbert’s voice, Prologue, page 4

“I loved her more tenderly than Tristan adored Isolde, more hotly than Petrarca desired his Laura, more romantically than Poe loved little Virginia.” –Humbert’s voice, speaking of Annabel, Prologue, page 6

QUILTY: Say, didn’t you have a little girl? Let me see. With a lovely name. A lovely lilting lyrical name–
CHARLOTTE: Lolita. Diminutive of Dolores.
QUILTY: Ah, of course: Dolores. The tears and the roses.
CHARLOTTE: She’s dancing down there. And tomorrow she’ll be having a cavity filled by your uncle.
QUILTY: I know; he’s a wicked old man.
MISS ADAMS: Mr. Quilty, I’m afraid I must tear you away. There’s somebody come from Parkington to fetch you.
QUILTY: They can wait. I want to watch Dolores dance. –Act One, pages 57-58

CHARLOTTE: Shall we take these candles with us and sit for a while on the piazza? Or do you want to go to bed and nurse that tooth?
HUMBERT: Tooth. –Act One, page 69

HUMBERT: Other commentators, commentators of the Freudian school of thought. No. Commentators of the Freudian prison of thought. Hm. Commentators of the Freudian nursery-school of thought, have maintained that Edgar Poe married the child Virginia Clemm merely to keep her mother near him. He–I quote–had found in his mother-in-law Mrs. Clemm the maternal image he had been seeking all his life. What piffle! Listen now to the passion and despair breathing in the letter he addresses to Virginia’s mother on August 29, 1835, when he feared that his thirteen-year-old little sweetheart would be taken away to be educated in another home. “I am blinded with tears while writing this letter….My last, my last, my only hold on life is cruelly torn away….My agony is more than I can bear….for love like mine can never be gotten over….It is useless to disguise the truth….that I shall never behold her again….” –Act One, pages 70-71

HUMBERT: Where exactly did he take you when you gave me the slip?
LOLITA: Yes, that was awfully mean, I must admit that. He took me to a dude ranch near Elphinstone. Duk-Duk Ranch. Silly name.
HUMBERT: Where exactly? What highway?
LOLITA: No highway–a dirt road up a small mountain. Anyway–that ranch does not exist any more. Pity, because it was really something. I mean you can’t imagine how utterly lush it was, that ranch, I mean it had everything, but everything, even an indoor waterfall. You know when Cue and I first came the others had us actually go through a coronation ceremony.
HUMBERT: The others? Who were they?
LOLITA: Oh, just a bunch of wild kids, and a couple of fat old nudists. And at first everything was just perfect. I was there like a princess, and Cue was to take me to Hollywood, and make a big star of me, and all that. But somehow nothing came of it. And, instead, I was supposed to cooperate with the others in making filthy movies while Cue was gadding about the Lord knows where. Well, when he came back I told him I wanted him and not that crowd of perverts, and we had a fight, and he kicked me out, and that’s all.
HUMBERT: You could have come back to me. –Act Three, pages 207-208

Lolita (1962)

Humbert: Are you Quilty?
Quilty: No, I’m Spartacus. Have you come to free the slaves or somethin’?

Humbert: Do you recall a girl called Dolores Haze?
Quilty: I remember the one guy, he didn’t have a hand. He had a bat instead of a hand. He’s…
Humbert: [Bangs on the table loudly with the paddle] Lolita?!
Quilty: Lo-li-tah. Yeah, yeah. I remember that name, all right. Maybe she made some telephone calls. Who cares? [Humbert draws a gun] Hey, you’re a sort of bad loser, Captain. I never found a guy who pulled a gun on me when he lost a game. Didn’t anyone ever tell ya? It’s not really who wins, it’s how you play, like the champs. Listen, I don’t think I want to play anymore. Gee, I’m just dyin’ for a drink. I’m just dyin’ to have a drinkie.
Humbert: You’re dying anyway, Quilty. Quilty, I want you to concentrate – you’re going to die. Try to understand what is happening to you.

Charlotte: My yellow roses. My – daughter….I could offer you a comfortable home, a sunny garden, a congenial atmosphere, my cherry pies.
…[Humbert decides to rent the room]
Charlotte: What was the decisive factor? Uh, my garden?
Humbert: I think it was your cherry pies!

“Mind if I dance with your girl? We could, um, sort of swap partners.” –John Farlow, to Humbert, about Charlotte, with whom he leaves to dance

“Did you know that you’ve had the most remarkable effect on her. Did you know that?…she’s begun to radiate a certain glow. When you get to know me better, you’ll find I’m extremely broad-minded…In fact, John and I, we’re both broad-minded.” –Jean Farlow, to Humbert

What drives me insane is the twofold nature of this nymphet, a veteran nymphet perhaps, this mixture in my Lolita of tender, dreamy childishness and a kind of eerie vulgarity. I know it is madness to keep this journal, but it gives me a strange thrill to do so. And only a loving wife could decipher my microscopic script. –Humbert, voiceover

Lolita: Hi!
Charlotte: Darling, did you come back for something?
Lolita: Mona’s party turned out to be sorta a drag. So I thought I’d come back and see what you two were doing.
Humbert: We had a wonderful evening. Your mother created a magnificent spread.

The wedding was a quiet affair. And when called upon to enjoy my promotion from lodger to lover, did I experience only bitterness and distaste? No. Mr. Humbert confesses to a certain titillation of his vanity, to some faint tenderness, even to a pattern of remorse, daintily running along the steel of his conspiratorial dagger. –Humbert, voiceover

Charlotte: Oh Hum, hum-baby, you know, I love the way you smell. You do arouse the pagan in me. Hum, you just touch me, and I-I go as limp as a noodle. It scares me.
Humbert: Yes, I know the feeling.

You must now forget Ramsdale and push our lot and poor Lolita and poor Humbert, and accompany us to Beardsley College where my lectureship in French poetry is in its second semester. Six months have passed and Lolita is attending an excellent school where it is my hope that she will be persuaded to read other things than comic books and movie romances. –Humbert, voiceover

I cannot tell you the exact day when I first knew with utter certainty that a strange car was following us. Queer how I misinterpreted the designation of doom. –Humbert, voiceover

Humbert: What happened to this Oriental-minded genius?
Lolita: Look, don’t make fun of me. I don’t have to tell you a blasted thing.
Humbert: I am not making fun of you. I am merely trying to find out what happened. When you left the hospital, where did he take you?
Lolita: To New Mexico…to a dude ranch near Santa Fe. The only problem with it was, he had such a bunch of weird friends staying there…painters, nudists, writers, weight lifters. But I figured I could take anything for a couple of weeks because I loved him and he was on his way to Hollywood to write one of those spectaculars, and he promised to get me a studio contract. But it never turned out that way and instead, he wanted me to cooperate with the others making some kind of a, you know, an art movie.
Humbert: An art movie?…And you did it?
Lolita: No, I didn’t do it. And so he kicked me out.
Humbert: You could have come back to me.

Lolita (1997)

I looked and looked at her, and I knew, as clearly as I know that I will die, that I loved her more than anything I had ever seen or imagined on earth. She was only the dead-leaf echo of the nymphet from long ago – but I loved her, this Lolita, pale and polluted and big with another man’s child. She could fade and wither – I didn’t care. I would still go mad with tenderness at the mere sight of her face. –Humbert, voiceover

What I heard then was the melody of children at play, nothing but that. And I knew that the hopelessly poignant thing was not Lolita’s absence from my side, but the absence of her voice from that chorus. –Humbert, voiceover, last lines

Since “Humbert Humbert” (James Mason in Kubrick’s film, and Jeremy Irons in Lyne’s film) is the guilty narrator of Nabokov’s novel, we should be careful with all the information he provides. As an unreliable narrator, he will try to present himself in as sympathetic a light as possible. We should always bear in mind the assessment of him given by his psychiatrist, Dr. John Ray Jr.: “he is a shining example of moral leprosy.” (Nabokov, page 5)

This making of Humbert as a sympathetic character is extended into the two movies, which have the suave, urbane, and debonair Mason and Irons portraying him. What’s more, the films tone down his hebephilia, making only occasional references to his taste for “nymphets” in general, contrasting with his ogling of girls other than Dolores Haze, and his propositioning of an underage prostitute, as given in Nabokov’s novel and screenplay (Nabokov, pages 16-17, 21-23; screenplay, pages 8-9).

He tries to charm us with his “fancy prose style,” showing false modesty when asking if we “can still stand [his] style,” with its puns, French passages, excessive assonance, and its mellifluous, poetic rhapsodizing. We shouldn’t let ourselves be taken in by his erudition: this man is a creep.

He tells us of a childhood romance he had with “Annabel Leigh,” whose name is almost identical to that of the girl (and I do mean girl!) in Edgar Allan Poe‘s famous poem, a girl believed by many scholars to have been Poe’s 13-year-old bride. This love of Humbert’s youth is meant to make his obsession with 9- to 14-year-old girls seem almost legitimate, the tragic result of a childhood trauma (Annabel died of typhus); but her seeming derivation from Poe’s poem gives us the impression that Humbert has made her up.

He’s a child molester. Period.

He murders Clare Quilty (portrayed by Peter Sellers in Kubrick’s film, and by Frank Langella in Lyne’s) for having taken Dolores away from him. Humbert claims, in his narrative, that Quilty (a pun on guilty) is every bit the pedophile pervert he is, even given to enjoying and producing pornography (as well as doing drugs); but since Humbert is the narrator, should we believe his vilifying of the playwright? Is Humbert not just projecting his own sinfulness onto Quilty?

For all we know, Quilty may have innocently worked to rescue Dolores (played by Sue Lyon in Kubrick’s film, and by Dominique Swain in Lyne’s) from her sexual abuser, and Humbert the madman simply murdered his would-be doppelgänger out of a wish to get revenge. Then he tried to justify his murder by blackening the name of his victim. This speculation is a distinct possibility.

Nabokov leaves the murder of Quilty to the climactic near-end of the novel (Part Two, Chapter 35), while mentioning only that Humbert is a murderer…of whom?…at the beginning. Nabokov’s screenplay begins with Humbert confronting Quilty in his home, and neither man says a word, then Humbert shoots Quilty (page 2). At the beginning of Kubrick’s film, we see the confrontation with dialogue (though censored–i.e., no reference to “erector sets” is heard [note the pun]) taken from the novel’s climax; then we see an abbreviated repeat of the scene at the end. Lyne’s film begins with Humbert having already killed Quilty: he’s driving his car, swaying left and right, with despair on his face while the police are pursuing him; and this scene is an abbreviation of the pursuit at the end.

I’d say, ironically, that Nabokov’s screenplay version of the killing is the weakest one (because, without the dialogue, what’s the point?), while Kubrick’s rewritten version is the strongest, because emotionally it’s the most powerful: for the rest of the film, we slowly discover why Humbert has killed Quilty. It gives Humbert all that undeserved sympathy, since his narration is so unreliable; but as I observed in my analyses of Falling Down and Reservoir Dogs, this provoking of false sympathy in us, the audience/readers, is a moral test of our ability to know with whom we should sympathize.

At the beginning of Nabokov’s novel, a detail is put in, as if in passing: Humbert’s “very photogenic mother died in a freak accident (picnic, lightning)” [Nabokov, page 10] back when he was three. In the screenplay, her death occurs on the boy’s fourth birthday, with a dramatic screen direction depicting her death, including this sight: “Her graceful specter floats up above the black cliffs holding a parasol and blowing kisses to her husband and child who stand below, looking up, hand in hand.” (Nabokov, page 4)

Apart from the low likelihood of being struck by lightning in a given year, or in one’s whole life, as well as our being given Humbert’s unreliable narration, this death is too absurd to be taken seriously. I do suspect, however, that his beautiful mother did die when he was a child, and when the boy was going through an unresolved Oedipal fixation (Freudians often consider such perversions as pedophilia to have their root in an unresolved Oedipus complex). I also suspect that it was she, and not his likely-fictional Annabel, who died of typhus in Corfu.

This unresolved Oedipal trauma would have been repressed to the point of his mother being the vaguest of memory traces in his mind (“save for a pocket of warmth in the darkest past, nothing of her subsists within the hollows and dells of memory” —page 10). His subsequent desires for nymphets–so young, and therefore with their whole lives ahead of them, far less likely to die on him–can be seen as a reaction formation–a dialectical shift from the far older to the far younger–against his unconscious wish to possess his mother, or any possible adult transference of her. Hence, his revulsion to any “dull adult woman” (Nabokov, page 10). His predictable disparaging of psychoanalysis can also be easily explained away as a form of resistance.

None of this is to deny that Humbert has tried to have normal sexual relations with women, assuming he isn’t lying about his ex-wife, Valeria [pages 25-29], or Rita, the alcoholic he’s involved with after Dolores runs off with Quilty [pages 258-263]. Even if these attempts at having a normal sex life are true, though, they don’t last long. Humbert is a perv.

Nabokov’s Humbert is more honest about his perviness (though dishonest about so many other things) than that of Kubrick or Lyne. When Humbert arrives in Ramsdale, he originally tries to get a lodging in the McCoos’ house, where he’d be teaching French to the family nymphet…as well as indulging in all things “Humbertish” (Chapter 10, page 35). But the house burns down, so he goes to the Haze home instead.

He predictably finds Charlotte Haze repulsive, but when he sees her 12-year-old daughter sunbathing in the backyard (“beautiful, beautiful, beautiful!” —page 40), he claims that he’s seen his Annabel reincarnated (page 15)…though I’d say he’s incarnated his mother in her.

The fact that Humbert would rather refer to Dolores as “Lolita” than by her real name is significant. In changing her name, in characterizing her as the giggling, sexually precocious child that the name “Lolita” is now associated with, as opposed to acknowledging her real name, Dolores (meaning “dolorous,” or sorrowful, as one would expect a traumatized victim of child sexual abuse to be), he is creating a false image of her, an idealized one to contrast with who she really is.

What must be emphasized here is that, from Humbert’s narration, we know virtually nothing about Dolores Haze; “Lolita” is a fantasy concocted in his mind. The novel’s first and last word is “Lolita” (and that includes even the Foreword by Dr. John Ray). The real girl is virtually nowhere to be found in the story.

The giggling, sassy little sex kitten, his fantasized version of her, with her “lovely lyrical lilting name,” (so expressive of the gleeful naughtiness he imagines her to have) is really just a projection of his own wickedness. Humbert writes of a boy at camp, Charlie, having already “debauched” her (Chapters 31 and 32, page 135; also, page 133), of how she tempts Humbert to kiss her in the car on the ride from camp to The Enchanted Hunters hotel (pages 112-113, Chapter 27), and of her having seduced him in the hotel (pages 132-134, Chapter 29). All of these are attempts by him to mitigate his guilt. She ‘wanted it,’ so he wasn’t all that much of a rapist/child molester. The actual, weeping Dolores is nowhere in these pages.

As his fantasized image of the perfect “nymphet,” she, as “Lolita,” is what WRD Fairbairn would have called the Exciting Object of Humbert’s Libidinal Ego (part of Fairbairn’s endopsychic personality structure, which he used to replace Freud’s id). She mirrors back to Humbert what he projects out to her of his own sinfulness.

Normal, mentally healthy people have predominantly what Fairbairn called the Ideal Object interacting with the Central Ego (replacing Freud’s ego); this object is “ideal” because it’s made up of real relationships that one should have with other people, as opposed to the fantasized object relations we all too often have in our minds. Dolores Haze would be an Ideal Object for Humbert’s Central Ego, were he to be a normal stepfather who had no sexual interest in her at all, but only healthy, paternal affection. Instead, there’s only her as a Dolores of the mind: “Lolita.”

As I’ve argued above, “Lolita” and all other “nymphets” are just transferences of his long-lost mother, transformed by reaction formation from that older object to the younger ones that he wishes to possess. Now understood as a kind of inverse Oedipal fixation, or of a mother/son relationship metamorphosed into a daughter/father one, we can see not only his obsession with “Lolita” as his ultimately unattainable objet petit a (i.e., a sought-out replacement for his Oedipally-desired mother), but we can also see why he has such a servile attitude towards her. He’s a slave to her power the way a little boy is because he fears losing Mommy’s love.

There is a third part to Fairbairn’s endopsychic personality structure, and Clare Quilty embodies this part: it is the Anti-libidinal Ego (formerly called the Internal Saboteur), which links with the Rejecting Object. It corresponds only roughly with Freud’s superego, but Quilty can be seen to represent both Freud’s and Fairbairn’s corresponding concepts.

Since Humbert’s narration is unreliable, his depiction of Quilty is as dubious as is his of Dolores. We know little of Quilty, except that he is a playwright and that Humbert has murdered him. Just as “Lolita” represents everything fun, sassy, and sexy in Humbert’s lewd imagination (the Exciting Object), so does “Cue” represent everything repellent in Humbert, everything he hates about himself (the Rejecting Object).

At the same time, though Humbert projects all of his hebephile perversions onto Quilty, his nemesis also embodies his guilty conscience, his superego. His conversation with then-unknown Quilty, with the latter’s taunts (“Where the devil did you get her?” and “You lie–she’s not.”–Chapter 28, page 127; and, of course, Quilty later following Humbert’s car) shows the inner critic of Humbert’s superego plainly personified. The same goes for Peter Sellers’s nerdy cop improvisation with James Mason in the corresponding scene in Kubrick’s movie.

So, both “Lolita” and “Cue” represent opposing tendencies in Humbert’s mind. In turn, these two opposing tendencies have their representations in the novel (and therefore in Lyne’s film too, since it’s far more faithful to the novel than Kubrick’s is) and in Kubrick’s film respectively. Consider how Kubrick’s version greatly expands Quilty’s role; and where, as film critic Greg Jenkins noted, the film begins and ends with the word “Quilty,” just as the novel begins and ends with “Lolita.”

Humbert, at his core, is narcissistic, as is clear in his ostentatious writing style. Since, as I’ve speculated above, his hebephilia can be seen as a dialectical turning upside-down of his unconscious, unresolved Oedipus complex, which in turn is a universal narcissistic trauma (i.e., one wishes to hog Mother all to oneself), one can see how sassy “Lolita” is a mirror reflection of his narcissism.

Similarly, Quilty, being overtly narcissistic himself, is a mirror reflection of those dark qualities that Humbert wishes to disavow and project onto others. Recall how, in Lyne’s film, we see Humbert who, having confronted Quilty at gunpoint in his home, is weeping in horror at the plainly confessed lasciviousness of his would-be doppelgänger. But Quilty’s sin is Humbert’s own.

The whole novel is a journey through Humbert’s mind, with “Lolita” and “Cue” as opposing, yet dialectically akin, internal objects floating around in his head like ghosts haunting a house. The naughtiness of the spouse-swapping Farlows and Mr. Swine in Kubrick’s film are just more of such projections of Humbert’s filthy mind.

Now, Nabokov was known for disavowing any allegorical intent with Lolita (“On a Book Entitled Lolita,” page 314), but I’ll give two reasons why I doubt that we should take his words at face value. First of all, he could have made such disavowals in order to prevent any one scholar’s interpretation, however convincing it may be, to be deemed the ‘definitive’ interpretation; in other words, Nabokov’s denial may have been meant to encourage a maximum of possible interpretations.

Second, even if he really meant that he hated allegorizing, that doesn’t mean he couldn’t have unconsciously intended one. Certainly, Martin Amis saw in Lolita an allegory of a ‘Soviet rape,’ if you will, of Russia; and Nabokov, a classical liberal, hated communism. (For my part, I find Amis’s use of Robert Conquest‘s work in his research to be dubious in itself, to put it mildly, but I digress…) So anyway, I’d like to try a few allegories of my own.

One allegory we can see in Humbert’s seduction of Dolores (as opposed to his projection of “Lolita” supposedly seducing him; or, a reversal from Freud’s female Oedipus complex back to his seduction theory) is that of the European colonizing North and South America, with the colonizers rationalizing their conquest by claiming an intent ‘to civilize’ the natives. I’m reminded of John Donne‘s poem, Elegy XIX: To his Mistress Going to Bed: “Licence my roving hands, and let them go,/Before, behind, between, above, below./O my America! my new-found-land,/My kingdom, safeliest when with one man man’d.” (lines 25-28)

The innocent natives being plundered is symbolized by Humbert’s sexual abuse of Dolores; the converting of those natives to Christianity can be seen as symbolized by Humbert’s attempts to introduce her to culture (e.g., his buying her such books as Browning‘s Dramatic Works, The History of Dancing, The Russian Ballet, and The Theatre Guild Anthology so she’ll have something to read while in hospital [page 242]). Similarly, the white man (Humbert, the “white widowed male”) taking possession of and enslaving black Americans (represented here by Dolores) is another reasonable allegory, since Nabokov was vocal in his opposition to the mistreatment of African Americans.

Humbert’s relationship with Dolores, as symbolic of that of the European and American, is also seen in his comments on American pop culture, as opposed to European high culture. As heard in Kubrick’s film, Humbert speaks disapprovingly of Dolores’s taste for “comic books and movie romances.” He complains of her “eerie vulgarity,” a reflection of the stereotypically cultured European as against the equally stereotypical philistine American, and which can in turn be seen as symbolic of the ‘civilized’ white attitude to the ‘uncivilized’ ways of the natives.

Another allegory of Humbert’s desire for nymphets, especially evident in Kubrick’s film, is the yearning of the older characters (Humbert and Quilty) for a return to youth, as personified in “Lolita.” We see this in Kubrick’s film whenever Charlotte, the Farlows, etc., refer to each other as “kids” or “other young marrieds.” Then there’s that elderly spectator or two, envious of the smooth style of dancing Quilty and Vivian Darkbloom (later, Charlotte), trying to bop along to the music and appear as hip as they can.

But to return to one of my earlier speculations, towards the end of the novel, we find Humbert looking at pregnant Mrs. Dolores Schiller, and finding himself all the more in love with her. At seventeen years old, she’s too old to be a nymphet! As a mother-to-be, she is triggering his repressed Oedipal fixation.

“…I looked and looked at her, and knew as clearly as I know I am to die, that I loved her more than anything I had ever seen or imagined on earth, or hoped for anywhere else. She was only the faint violet whiff and dead leaf echo of the nymphet I had rolled myself upon with such cries in the past…but thank God it was not that echo alone that I worshiped…I insist the world know how much I loved my Lolita, this Lolita, pale and polluted, and big with another’s child, but still gray-eyed, still sooty-lashed, still auburn and almond, still Carmencita, still mine…” (Part Two, Chapter 29, pages 277-278)

His loving of her, older and with another man’s baby, reminds one of a little boy’s Oedipal jealousy over his father’s having of his love-object, jealous of how she will be preoccupied with taking care of his younger sibling-to-be; because the Oedipus complex is a selfish, narcissistic trauma, and his seeing his “Lolita” in this way is bringing back those feelings that have been buried deep down in his psyche. This element, hidden among all the lies of this unreliable narrator, is the core truth of his whole narrative.

Finally, we must confront the “dangerous trends,” the “potent evils,” that Dr. John Ray warns us about in the Foreword. There have been attempts by some in the media recently to normalize pedophile desires; there has also been the growing problem of sexualizing little girls. These are, needless to say, dangerous encouragements to more child sexual abuse. Then there were Epstein‘s escapades, most of the perpetrators of which still seem largely unpunished. For these reasons, we shouldn’t let Humbert’s honeyed words charm us. We should heed Ray’s words instead.

Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita, Vintage International, New York, 1955

Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita: a Screenplay, Vintage International, New York, 1961

‘Sirens,’ A Horror Novella, Chapter One

The three beauties just appeared out of nowhere. Ari couldn’t believe his luck. He was standing at the bar of the dance club, waiting for the bartender to give him his beer, when the three young women walked up to him, all three of them grinning. Then they asked his name.

And now he had all three of them on his motorcycle. He was taking them on a highway towards his apartment. His bike was big enough to fit all three of them on it.

Ari couldn’t believe his luck.

All three women had wavy, shoulder-length hair: a blonde, a brunette, and a redhead. All three wore tight, sleeveless dresses that showed plenty of cleavage and went only half-way down their upper legs. The blonde wore black, the brunette wore red, and the redhead wore gold. Their high heels matched the colour of their dresses. The brunette wore black fishnet stockings.

And now they were all on his bike. Unbelievable luck.

They hadn’t said much to each other in the dance club. Though he’d drunk only the one beer, he was feeling a kind of intoxication the whole time he was with the girls.

It was strange, but why would he have cared? He was about to get the most amazing lay of his life. As he looked up at the starry, moonlit night, he imagined how the reverse gang-bang was going to be: him fucking one pussy, licking the second pussy, and fingering the third? Or would he fuck one of them while watching the other two do each other, then they’d all switch positions?

He felt a strange, buzzing, tingling vibration with those girls all around him. It felt amazingly good, too good to be suspicious about. It was like swimming in a sea of pleasure, the wavy ‘water’ soothing his whole body.

And those girls, with their curves, round asses, and huge tits! Their faces brightly painted to perfection! And they wanted him! He didn’t even have to do much work to take them home with him. It was more like them pursuing him than the traditional vice versa.

As he’d danced with them on the crowded dance floor, their hips grinding together, he could hear them singing in his ears, a beautiful, perfect three-part vocal harmony with the techno music and its pounding rhythms surrounding him. The other people dancing around him were looking at him strangely, as if he were making a fool of himself.

What’s their problem? he wondered as he felt the blonde’s ass rubbing against his pointy crotch. Haven’t they ever seen a guy dirty dancing with three hot chicks before? I’ll bet they’re just envious.

Now, all three of them were with him on his bike, the blonde in front, her ass grinding on his hard lap again. The brunette was immediately behind him, her arms around his chest, her fingers tickling his nipples. The redhead was behind her, of course, and as he could see from his rear-view mirrors, she had her arms around the brunette, her hands cupping her tits.

As he raced down the highway, on a lonely, open road, he could hear them singing again. It was odd that they would sing like that, but it was such pretty, seductive music. Hearing it made him feel as if he were high on ecstasy.

I’m still driving OK, he reassured himself.

He felt those intoxicating, wave-like vibes going around and through his body, undulating to the cadence of the three women’s singing. Sometimes the bike veered a little to the left–to the lane for oncoming traffic–or to the right shoulder of the road, near a ditch, but he generally kept control.

“What’s with all the singing, girls?” he shouted out.

“Don’t you like it?” the brunette asked.

“Well, yeah, but…” he began.

“Go faster!” the blonde shouted. “It gets me hot! Faster!“

“OK.” He sped up.

“How much longer till we get to your place?” the redhead shouted.

“Oh, about another twenty minutes or so,” he said.

“Faster!” the blonde shouted again. He went faster.

“You sure live far away from the city,” the redhead said.

“Yeah, I do,” he said.

“Faster!” the blonde shouted. He sped up again, and the girls resumed their singing.

There’s that beautiful singing again, he thought, not noticing the huge truck that was approaching in the opposing lane. Oh, those good vibrations…

He veered into the truck’s lane, so charmed was he by the singing that he was oblivious to what he had done. Those undulating, blurry vibes moving before his eyes and massaging every muscle in his body made him forget everything that was actually happening around him.

The singing continued.

That truck was getting closer.

The driver gave several urgent honks of his horn, but Ari didn’t hear them at all. The girls’ singing was drowning out every other sound in the area.

He was grinning to the beautiful harmony of their singing, as were the girls. His eyes were closed…as were the girls’.

“What the fuck is wrong with that guy?” the truck driver said, still honking his horn. “He must be stoned!”

He tried to slow the truck down and swerve out of Ari’s way, but it was too late: the bike skidded and tipped to the right, for only at the last split-second did Ari finally see what danger he was in. The very last thing he felt was his pelvis being crushed under the wheels of the truck.

And the three beauties just disappeared into nowhere.

‘Experiment,’ a Poem by Jason Morton

Here is another poem by my friend, Jason Morton, whose work I’ve written about a number of times before. Again, as before, I’m putting his poem in italics to distinguish his writing from mine:

Shattered symmetry
Breaking every side I thought i held
No longer one
I can’t see through my broken eyes
Everything I once held true
Is no longer real or harmonised
Every lip every kiss
Every touch and every finger tip
Don’t!
Touch!
Me!
I can’t shatter anymore than this
It is so visual
And the high
Is residual
Where Lucifer claims me
I fall where my blood Cascades
And puddles beneath me
In a moment I am but a breath away
From transparency….

And now, for my analysis.

The title ‘Experiment’ may seem at odds with the content of the poem, but when you consider the etymological origin of the word–it comes from the Latin experimentum (‘a test, a trial,’), which in turn comes from experiri, ‘to try, test,’ from ex, ‘out of’ and peritus (‘experienced, tested’), from the root per-, ‘to try, risk’–we can see a plausible relationship between title and poem. The poet has tried things, tested them, had experiences, and has had disastrous results.

The trauma and pain of life’s experiences, tests, and trials has resulted in psychological fragmentation for the poet. Everything has broken apart for him: he is “No longer one.” Normally, the danger of fragmentation is averted by caregivers, lovers, and friends, who empathically mirror and validate one’s feelings and experiences; but in the case of the poet, these would-be empathic mirrors, or what Heinz Kohut called self-objects, have failed him.

So he “can’t see through [his] broken eyes,” which are broken mirrors reflecting those shattered ones that failed to empathize and validate his feelings. Fragmentation can lead to a lost sense of reality. Nothing is “harmonised”; all is discord for him. In the second line, we see a deliberate use of a lower-case i, which symbolically expresses this sense of a broken self.

Those body parts and actions that normally express love and empathy, “Every lip every kiss/Every touch and every finger tip,” he is deprived of them, so he rejects any subsequent attempt to show affection for fear that such attempts are fake. They seem deceptions meant to betray his trust once again. Hence, “Don’t!/Touch!/Me!” Even these three words are broken apart, each given its own, separate line, divided with the exclamation marks of violent shouting.

After being rejected from the outside world, after experiencing frustrations from out there, one tends to respond with the defence mechanism of splitting, of breaking up objects (both internal and external) into black-and-white opposites of absolute good and bad, then expelling the bad halves to protect oneself from the pain. When taken to extremes, this splitting, this rejecting of so many parts of oneself, can result in one feeling as if he has little of himself left, hence the danger of fragmentation. Hence, the poet “can’t shatter anymore than this”.

There is a fleeting pleasure in rejecting, the relief of not having anyone around to hurt oneself, if only for the moment. Thus, “the high/Is residual”. The kind of pain typically felt is the trauma personified by “Lucifer,” the devilish inner critic, Freud‘s overbearing superego. Lucifer (‘light-bringer’), was a beautiful angel before he was cast out of heaven and thenceforth known as Satan. His goodness turned into overweening pride; thus Lucifer is a perfect metaphor for the self-righteous, cruel inner critic.

This inner critic “claims” the poet, making him “fall where [his] blood Cascades/And puddles beneath [him]”. Capitalized ‘Cascades’ suggests (if only unconsciously, like a parapraxis in typing) the many waterfalls in the world, in turn suggesting a huge outpouring of blood, so great is the poet’s pain and loss from so much splitting and projecting of unwanted objects.

“In a moment [he is] but a breath away/From transparency….” Since he “can’t shatter anymore than this,” his fragmentation is approaching disintegration. He is almost transparent because he is about to vanish. Pain and trauma can lead to the extremes of psychotic panic. These problems indicate how imperative it is not to trivialize psychological trauma. Mental illness is on the rise, and for many reasons, including some that I’ve complained about in many blog posts.

Let’s hope the poet can bring the pieces back together, and soon.

Tears

Pain wells up
inside us. It is so
poisonous that

w
e

m
u
s
t

c
r
y

i
t

o
u
t
.

Some people
turn their teardrops
into bullets,

t
h
e
n

f
i
r
e

t
h
e
m

a
t

u
s
.

The holes put
in our hearts pour
tears of blood,

t
h
e

r
e
d

r
a
i
n

o
f

s
o
b
s
.

How do we
make the weeping
stop? Not by

m
a
k
i
n
g

g
u
n
s

o
f

o
u
r

e
y
e
s
,

but by making
mirrors of them, by
looking at each

other, listening.
We can dry our faces,
and see clearly.

‘Want,’ a Horror Short Story

“I can’t believe you just did that, you humongous animal!” Dr. Will Cameron shouted in sobs as he looked up and watched his gigantic colleague, Dr. John Gula, licking human blood off his fingertips. “How could you just…pick up…Dr. Sanders and…eat her?”

“I was hungry,” thirty-foot-high Dr. Gula said, then belched.

“You were hungry?” Cameron said. “That’s all you can say, you cannibalistic monster!”

“It must be one of the bizarre side effects of Aggrandizin, the drug we were going to test on the diseased fish around this island…”

“And you’re still hungry, after all those apes you ate,” Cameron said, looking up at Gula in horror. “Making you grow to that monstrous size.”

“Another…surprising…side effect of the drug,” Gula said, pulling up the tarpaulin he had wrapped around his waist to cover his nakedness. “And you know I had to eat the drugged apes, to stop them from eating us. One of them almost got you.”

“I’d rather we were eaten by the apes then to see this nightmare as it’s unfolding! I keep hoping I’ll wake up from a nightmare, but this…insane…moment seems all too real!”

“I find it as hard to believe as you do, Cameron.”

“We were only supposed to dose marine animals with the Aggrandizin, to speed up their ability to heal wounds and recover from disease, after the exposure to the pollution and toxic chemicals surrounding the island. How did this simple experiment turn into such a nightmare?”

“That baby shark grew in size, and hunger. It bit Sanders, she bumped into me, and I accidentally injected myself with the drug. I already explained that to both of you.”

“How much of the drug did you dose yourself with? Ten times the amount we gave that shark?”

“It must have been at least about ten times the amount we were going to dose the fish with,” Gula said, without a trace of emotion.

“And you ate all those apes!”

“It was either that, or they were going to eat us. We saw how ravenous they got after they, it’s more than safe to assume, broke into the phials of Aggrandizin in the boat, and how they grew like me, each time after they ate something. We saw how insatiable their hunger got, like mine, even to the point of eating what no animal of their species would normally ever eat, including flesh. We saw how they ate most of the plant and animal life here…”

“And you ate the rest, and Dr. Sanders, just now!”

“I couldn’t help myself, Cameron! Try to understand! I’m not any happier about it than you are.”

“You don’t seem to give a shit, John!”

“You don’t know the hunger that Aggrandizin causes!”

“I don’t wanna know!” Cameron bawled. “How could this have happened? How could we have gotten this drug so horribly wrong? This is like something out of a B science fiction movie. How could a mere drug cause someone to grow into a giant, of all things, and to hunger so much, that he’d eat apes, and another human being?”

Speaking of hunger, Gula was looking down at Cameron and licking his lips.

“John, don’t look at me like that,” Cameron said, backing up a few steps, with trembling legs.

“I can’t help it.” Gula was drooling as his eyes explored Cameron’s meaty body.

“John, only I can fit into the boat to go back out and get help for you. There’s no more food for you to eat here.”

“I’ll go fishing by hand in the ocean after I eat you.”

“The massive pollution in the water surrounding this island means that you won’t be able to eat any edible marine life here,” Cameron insisted. “That’s why we chose this island to do our experiments: to dose the sick fish, and hopefully save them from the poisons in the water. You can’t eat the marine life here. You’ll get sick.”

“The drug dose I took should be strong enough to repel any toxins from the dead fish near here.” He licked his lips again at Cameron, who shuddered at the sight.

“The toxic chemicals dumped in the water are so poisonous that even your Aggrandizin dosage, as excessive as it was, surely won’t be strong enough to counteract the toxicity of any dead fish floating around here.”

“You don’t know that for sure. You’re only saying that because you want to believe it. But even if what you say is right, I’ll go further out into the water. I’m getting larger and larger. I could conceivably wade far enough, with my gigantic size, to get past the polluted part.”

“You can’t swim, by your own admission, and the toxic chemicals are already spread out so far into the ocean around here that, even at your size, you won’t be able to wade out far enough to get past the pollution surrounding the island. The ring of pollution is like a thick donut, and this island is like the small hole in the centre, there’s so much donut out there.”

Gula licked his lips and said, “Donut.”

“OK, bad comparison,” Cameron said, shaking spastically at how Gula’s eyes were staring at him, appraising his tastiness. “Look, you need me alive to sail the boat back to the African mainland and get help. Just hang on, be patient, control your hunger, for God’s sake.”

Gula’s hand reached down to pick up Cameron, who dodged the huge fingers and started running away. “You can’t catch me; how can you expect to catch any fish by hand in the ocean?”

“I’ll practice and get better.” He reached for running Cameron and missed again.

“If you eat me,…you’ll have…no food left.” Cameron raced for the leafless trees that Gula and the apes had already fed on. “What will you do…after eating me…eat yourself? You eat, you grow…and only get hungrier. Aaaah!”

Gula grabbed him and picked him up.

“The tarp is slipping off your waist!” Cameron said, hoping to distract Gula and make him let go.

“So what?” Gula said as he brought Cameron up to his face. “Nobody else is here to see me with my cock and balls hanging out.”

“After you eat me, the tarp won’t…be big enough…to cover you! You’ll rip out of it…the way you…ripped out…of your clothes…after eating…those apes!”

“Nobody will be here to see me.”

“Exactly!” Cameron shouted. “Without me, you’ll have…no one to help you! You’ll be trapped…alone…on this island! With no more food!”

Gula opened his mouth wide enough to bite off Cameron’s head. Cameron put his hands on Gula’s upper lip, pushing away to keep from going in his mouth.

“Only I…can help you…find food!” Cameron shouted while kicking at Gula’s chin and swinging away from his mouth. “The water’s…toxicity…will damage…your skin…if you wade out…to find fish. The Aggrandizin…won’t be strong enough…to heal you. If you eat me, you’ll die!”

“Yeah, I probably will.”

“Then, why won’t…you resist…the temptation…to eat me? Unh!”

“I can’t help it,” Gula said, grabbing Cameron’s legs and aiming the feet at his mouth. “It’s in my nature to keep eating. I’m the scorpion, and you’re the frog, like in that old fable.”

He put Cameron’s legs in his mouth, up to his thighs. Cameron was screaming and kicking at Gula’s uvula, and at the roof of his mouth.

“No! John, don’t!”

He felt Gula’s sharp incisors bite through his waist, cutting through his skin and muscles, and cracking the bones. He screamed as he saw the blood spraying everywhere. His now-separated upper half hung loose and shook; his eyes and mouth were wide open in horrific disbelief. He passed out.

Gula was chewing, cracking the bones and sighing with relief that his hunger was being satisfied…for the moment. He felt his body vibrating, as it always did whenever he ate something since his Aggrandizin dosage. He grew by about a foot.

He looked down. Cameron was right. The tarpaulin had fallen from his waist and onto the sand on the beach. A breeze was caressing his balls.

He gulped down Cameron’s masticated bottom half, licked the blood from his lips, and belched out loud.

“Goodbye, Cameron. Sorry about this.”

His mouth was now big enough to stuff in, with the greatest of ease, all of the upper half of Cameron’s body, so he did.

Crunch! Crunch! Crunch!

Blood splattered all over his face. The bald head of the chubby man looked like that of a giant baby’s having eaten tomato sauce and soaked red all over his cheeks. The white tarpaulin would be his diaper. How appropriate.

Gulp. Burp!

He wiped the blood off his face and licked his hand. To see the day when he would actually find cannibalism to be appetizing…what a shock. His body vibrated again, and he grew another foot or so.

He picked up the tarp and wrapped it around his waist. “You were wrong about one thing, Cameron. It’s still large enough to cover my dick and ass.”

Then, he felt another pang of hunger.

“Oh, shit. What do I do now?”

He walked over to the edge of the shore, where the filthy water washed up pieces of plastic and dead fish. The water was a mix of blue and yellow from all the toxic waste in it.

“Eww,” he groaned at the sight of the dead fish’s unnatural colours. As hungry as I am, he thought, there’s no way in hell that I’m eating any of those.

He looked far out to sea. Cameron was right again: the pollution went so far out that Gula couldn’t see any pure blue water anywhere beyond the filth. Even at his enlarged size, he still couldn’t see far enough.

I wonder if I can see the shark out there, he thought, straining his eyes. I’ll bet it’s gotten really huge by now. If I were to see it, I might consider going out there, trying to swim and risking drowning, then eating it if I caught it…or letting it eat me, even. I can’t imagine wanting to continue living like this. A part of me actually wouldn’t mind drowning or being eaten by the shark.

His stomach was growling.

To think, that shark was a baby, swimming just outside the periphery of the ring of pollution. We caught it in a net, Sarah Sanders held its wiggling body, and I stuck the needle of Aggrandizin in its side. I dosed it with a generous amount. Then it bit her on the arm.

The hunger in his gut was getting painful.

She screamed and jerked her arm. Her elbow nudged my arm, and I stabbed the needle into my left wrist. I accidentally pushed the plunger all the way in and injected a huge dose of the drug into my arm. Neither she nor Cameron noticed what I’d done, they were so busy fussing with the shaking, growing shark and throwing it back into the water, then worrying about treating her bite wound. Cameron said the baby shark had already grown to almost twice its size, just from the one bite.

Another stomach growl.

Back in the water, it caught a fish in its teeth and ate it. It grew some more. We saw it eat a few more fish; now it had grown to about the size of a great white shark…and like at the end of that old Spielberg movie, it attacked our boat.

Another hunger pang.

Cameron got out his binoculars, and after about half a minute of frantically searching for somewhere we could go to save ourselves from the shark, he spotted this island. Getting here would have been the fastest way to get to safety from the shark, which we saw eating more and more fish, and growing and growing, and trying to ram a hole in the side of our boat. We turned on the motor and raced over here. We’d already eaten all of the food on the boat, so I was holding back as best I could…as I am now—oh, this is getting difficult! Anyway, when we got here, I ran over to the trees and wolfed down as many of the leaves as I could stuff into my mouth. Cameron and Sanders were shocked at my behaviour. They left the boat and ran into the woods with me. Some apes must have gotten into our boat, found the phials of Aggrandizin, broke the glass, and drank from it; because soon after, they were growing and eating like the baby shark and me.

His hunger was getting unbearable.

As I, grabbing at leaves and grass to eat, was being chased by Cameron and Sanders, the apes that must have had the drug ran back into the woods with us. They ran around eating leaves and other animals, too. We ended up eating all the leaves off the trees on this tiny island. I was ripping out of my clothes. One of the enlarged, ravenous apes jumped on Cameron; in its new taste for flesh-eating, it would have eaten him, but I grabbed it and ate it. Again, Cameron and Sanders were shocked at my behaviour. I fought off the other attacking apes, and ate them.

Another stomach growl. “Unh!” he grunted.

After having feasted on the rest of the island’s apes, plants and insects, Gula continued in his thoughts, I’d grown so big, I ripped out of my clothes. Sanders gave me the tarpaulin to cover myself with, then…I…ate her. How could I have done that? But…how could I not have…

Oh, the hunger…

He was shaking…gasping and wheezing…

“Aaaaaah!” he screamed, running into the water. It was slimy and disgusting. He grabbed a large shark’s corpse and tried eating it out of desperation. It tasted so awful, he spat it out within a second. He waded out as far as he could go. The…liquid…more like piss than water, had reached his chin. Waves splashed on his face. Then he remembered: “I…can’t…swim.”

He turned around and rushed back, plodding in the water and almost falling into it, till he finally got back onto the land, soaking in caustic filth and sobbing in despair. The Aggrandizin managed to heal his skin reasonably well, but his stomach was growling so much, it was like having a huge second mouth…or many little mouths…in his belly.

“For God’s sake,” he said in gasps and sobs. “We made Aggrandizin…to make animals stronger, more immune…to disease and injury, not to make them…become giant gluttons!” We didn’t see any of these side effects during the lab experiments on the rats, he thought. Granted, we gave them very small doses, unlike with the baby shark (or me, for that matter). We weren’t in charge of feeding them afterwards, and we came out here quickly after what seemed successful experiments. I guess I was too proud to wait and see if there would be any undesirable after-effects. I just saw quick healing, and we all jumped to conclusions. There was an email or two from the people in the lab; we never got around to reading them—maybe the messages were a warning about such after-effects. I don’t know—it’s too late for me now.

He looked down at his arms.

They looked tasty.

He was salivating.

“Come on, John,” he said. “You can’t be serious.”

The growing happens only after eating, he thought as he looked at that meaty flesh. My powers of healing, particularly strong after my large dose, could compensate for the bite wounds, at least to enough of an extent that, if a boat comes by, I can be taken away and saved.

His stomach growled again. He was shaking.

“I can’t take this anymore. It’s crazy, but I have to do it.”

He bit off a huge chunk off of his left forearm. Blood sprayed everywhere.

“Aaaaah!” he screamed in clenched teeth as he began chewing.

The pain was excruciating, but the delicious flesh was satisfying in a way that made him forget the throbbing.

He swallowed. He felt the flesh enter his stomach, filling in the void.

“Aaaaah!” he sighed. Thanks to the Aggrandizin, the pain was subsiding, the blood clotted faster, and he felt every encouragement that the wound would soon just be a crater in his arm. He felt those familiar vibrations, and grew a tiny bit.

He enjoyed a few fleeting minutes of relief from his hunger. The pain in his arm disappeared.

“Wow,” he said. “That was a fast recovery.”

Then he felt another hunger pang.

“And that was fast, too,” he said. “Fuck!” I can’t just keep taking bites out of myself…but what else am I going to eat? My shit when I crap? (Funny thing: I’ve eaten so much, yet I never piss or shit…why is that? Is it another side effect of the Aggrandizin? What kind of bizarre voodoo drug did we synthesize in that lab?) “Am I drugged, or possessed of a devil?”

He looked at his left arm, where the freshly healed crater was. Then he looked at the flesh right next to it, just before his elbow.

Maybe a huge ship will sail by and find me here, he thought. Hope, hope.

Another pang…a sharp, stinging one.

He opened his mouth wide, and his head dove onto that arm.

“Unh!” he grunted as he sank his teeth into that coveted arm-flesh. His teeth dug deep enough to reach the bone, several square inches of which were exposed after his ripping the flesh off, spraying blood all over the place and making him groan muffled whimpers of pain as he chewed.

Again, when the flesh hit his stomach, the more important pain was gone…for the moment.

He trembled, then grew another tiny bit.

With my growing size, I should be more visible to ships, he thought, massaging his throbbing arm as it healed. Then again, I’m not growing as much as I was before. It must be because I’m eating myself instead of eating other living things.

Speaking of eating, he wanted more flesh. He felt like a pregnant woman whose belly was a womb with half a dozen hungry fetuses aching for food.

“I’m getting used to the pain,” he said as he looked at his upper left arm. “If only I could get used to the hunger.”

He bit off the bicep; again, the bite went all the way to the bone. His face was red with blood. He grunted in pain, but indeed, he found it more and more bearable.

His want of flesh continued to grow.

He looked over at his right arm now…and he coveted the flesh he saw.

All I do is want, want, want! he thought. I always want more! I only want more! I can never stop wanting! I’m wanting of flesh on my arms, and I only want to eat more. I have a surplus of want, and a lack of anything to eat other than myself! This is madness!

He bit off a chunk from his right forearm. He was so used to the pain now that he easily ignored it. His body wasn’t growing anymore, though.

The only thing growing now was his hunger. He now felt as though his, so to speak, belly-womb was housing a dozen so-to-speak hungry fetuses instead of half a dozen.

The moments of relief were getting shorter and shorter. Within an hour, he’d ripped off and eaten all of the flesh on his arms. He’d chewed off the flesh on his hands and fingers. All that was left of them were bone and ligaments.

The sharp ends of his finger-bones were useful; he could use them to rip off flesh on parts of his body that he couldn’t reach with his head.

Now that his arm flesh was all gone, he looked down at his legs.

He licked his lips.

Oh, so much meat, he thought.

Without even hesitating anymore, he dug his bony fingers deep into his upper right leg flesh, tore off a huge chunk, right down to the bone, and didn’t seem aware of any pain in his leg as he brought the meat up to his grinning face. He munched on it with manic glee.

No sooner did he gulp it down and feel it hit his thankful stomach, but he felt more hunger pangs.

I’m slowly killing myself, he thought, but I can’t help it. It’s my nature. I’m the scorpion on the scorpion. I’m sitting on my own back, crossing the river and stinging myself.

He tore off a chunk of flesh from his upper left leg and stuffed the bloody mass into his greedy mouth. He chomped on it with a gory grin.

“Mmm!” He swallowed and belched.

Next, he ripped off his left calf and stuffed it in.

I am so high in protein! he thought, then let out a macabre laugh.

He shrank a little.

He ripped off his right calf and ate it. His hunger went on in an unbroken line—no more brief moments of relief, not even for a few seconds. He dug his fingers into the remaining flesh on his legs, tore it all off, and ate it. He shrank some more.

Within another hour, all four of his limbs were just bone and ligaments. His hunger, the only thing growing, was growing far faster than he was shrinking.

He dug his fingers into his cheeks, ripped them off, and ate them. The sight of all of his teeth, in what would have looked like a perpetual grin (were he to have looked at his reflection in the water), made no difference in terms of his facial expression; for if that cheek and lip flesh were to have remained on his face, he’d still have been grinning from ear to ear, his teeth just as fully exposed, he was enjoying his ghoulish meal so much.

The healing effects of the Aggrandizin were still working just enough to keep him alive, but they were abating, fading away little by little. Though his healing was slower, his growing urge to eat overshadowed the pain from the wounds so much that he seemed numb everywhere except in his stomach.

He ripped all the skin off of his face. After eating that, he felt himself shrinking again. He was now just slightly larger than his original size.

He looked out to sea; he saw no ships anywhere.

His stomach was growling, louder and louder, like a thousand voices inside, whining for food.

He felt his energy beginning to wane, too.

With effort, he ripped off the flesh on his chest and ate it. In his skeletal hands, he cupped the blood, as best he could, to stop it from dripping on the sand, then he drank it.

Still, he just got hungrier and hungrier.

He tore the flesh off his neck, all the way around from the front to the back. His neck bone, larynx, and esophagus were showing. He ate the flesh, chewing with lethargic slowness.

He looked down at his chest, where his upper ribcage was showing. Though he’d shrunk all the way back to his original size, his stomach was bloated with all the rest of his eaten body. Instead of being rotund, though, it oddly had a number of bumps on it.

Yet still, his stomach felt as if empty.

He ripped the flesh off of his buttocks and ate it. Then, amazingly, his cock and balls became appetizing, so he tore them off and ate them, his hunger so severe that he gave no thought to how disturbing it would be to lose them. There is no castration anxiety when one is as famished as he was, apparently.

He was sitting in a lake of reddened sand. All that was left of his body were his skull-like face, with his eyeballs showing because he’d ripped off and eaten his eyelids, his exposed skeleton—his ribcage being the only cover of his heart and lungs—and the skin on his back.

He couldn’t bear the sight of his lower body. He’d have shuddered to think what his face must have looked like in the reflection in the water. What have I reduced myself to? he wondered. And the Aggrandizin is still keeping me alive…how?…even though I can feel my life slowly fading away. My energy is draining from me, little by little. The only energy I seem to have in large amounts is in my guts.

He looked out to the polluted sea…still, no ships to be seen anywhere out there.

He looked back down at his bloody, mutilated body, at the protrusions in his belly.

“There is nothing good to see, anywhere,” he said. “And still, I’m hungry.” His bony index fingers stabbed into his eyes. “Unghh!” He pulled them out of their sockets, each pull making a popping sound, then he popped them into his mouth.

He wanted to sob, but he had only blood for tears pouring out of the sockets.

His stomach felt about to burst, it was so stuffed.

Still, he hungered.

He began scratching his back for more flesh to eat, his diminishing strength making those scratches slower and shallower. As he stuffed his bony face with the bloody flesh, he felt the strain on his stomach.

And he was still hungry.

After ripping off all the flesh he could reach on his back and eating it, he tore into his guts, ripped out his pancreas, bits of intestine, and his kidneys. He stuffed the meat in his mouth. It tasted awful, but it gave some relief—not much—to his hunger.

How am I still alive? he wondered. I can feel myself slowly weakening, slowly dying, but I should have already been dead long ago. Was the dose I gave myself really so strong as to sustain me in this extremity?

His hunger pangs continued to grow, even as his energy was fading away.

I don’t wanna live anymore, he thought. That’s for sure. Maybe I can speed up my death. Destroying my vitals should do it. The apes that had the Aggrandizin died soon enough when I ate them; surely I can die soon enough if I keep eating myself, right to the bone. Surely the Aggrandizin won’t keep me going forever.

He dug his hand under and behind his ribcage and tore out a lung. He ate it. Fantastically, he was still conscious and breathing. He tore out and ate the other lung: he still lived. He couldn’t believe it—the drug apparently made breathing unnecessary to live. He ripped out his heart and ate it. The Aggrandizin was, to some extent, counteracting all of these mutilations, though his life was ever so slowly fading away.

Has the drug made me immortal? Am I hallucinating in my fading consciousness? Is that how these impossibilities are possible?

He felt a jiggling of those protrusions in his stomach—not the rumblings of hunger so much as the sensation of what seemed to be small living beings in there.

Am I immortal, or are there immortal beings inside me? Has the drug resurrected and regenerated all the bits of flesh that I’ve digested? Is Aggrandizin making us all immortal, me and those inside me? Or, in my delirium, am I hallucinating their existence?

With his energy level so low now, he couldn’t lift his arms to rip off any more body parts to stuff into his mouth. Yet his hunger kept growing…especially the hunger of whatever had awoken and was growing and fidgeting around inside his belly.

Those things were poking bubbly bumps against his belly, making wavelike movements along the surface of his skin there. After a while of this continued pressure, one of the things poked a hole in his belly, spitting blood out of the opening.

It kept pushing, ripping a larger hole and spraying out more blood. The rest of his body lay still and, finally, he was dead. The thing pushed its way out of the hole, followed by all of the others, one by one, until the bloody belly lay empty on the soaking red sand.

Those things, kept alive by the Aggrandizin that they all shared, were blood-covered blobs, lumpy but basically spherical, with mouths that had serrated, teeth-like protrusions all along the edges. They looked like gruesome, deformed 3-D Pac-men, each about the size of a tennis ball. They rolled out over the sand in a blind search for food, their mouths flapping open and shut without ever tiring, while making grotesque grunting sounds: “Ngah-ngah-ngah-ngah!…” They quickly turned beige as more and more sand grains stuck to the blood on them.

Some rolled out to sea, eating the plastic and dead fish. They would die of food poisoning minutes after their exposure to the impurities in the water. Others rolled into the woods, eating the few remaining blades of grass and leaves on the trees. As they ate, they grew somewhat.

By the time they’d eaten everything alive on the island, they too found their energy waning as their insatiability only strengthened. Instinctively, as they had sensed while hibernating inside Gula’s guts, they knew that eating each other was futile. Each of them about the size of a medicine ball now, they just lay on the ground, rocking from side to side as their mouths faced the sky, as if babies wishing to cry out to their mother for something to eat.

All of them were in the middle of the leafless forest, hidden by the trunks of the trees. Night was falling. They were saving what little energy they had left for any possible food that chance might provide. They didn’t make the slightest sound.

Within an hour, the stars and moon offered the only light. A large, lost boat came ashore, filled with about twenty people—adults, elderly, and children.

“Where are we?” a ten-year-old boy among them said as they began disembarking.

“I don’t know,” his mother said. “It stinks here. Pollution in the water…Do I smell blood?”

Everyone got off the boat after a few minutes. Some of them, those who hadn’t smelled the blood, wandered into the woods.

The eating blobs felt the vibrations from all the footsteps. Their mouths curled up into smiles.

Some Pop Songs I Wrote

Back about eight to twelve years ago, after having composed a number of classical compositions, I wrote and recorded three albums’ worth of pop songs. They were originally published on the Jamendo website, which is based in Luxembourg. I’ve had difficulty gaining access to those songs due to problems with the website (and my computer, as I suspect). Fortunately, I’ve published some of the songs on other places, like SoundCloud, ReverbNation, Jango, and Fandalism. If only I could get access to the rest of the songs published on Jamendo.

I wrote, recorded, sang all of the vocals, and played all of the instruments (electric, acoustic, and classical guitars; two electronic keyboards [a Korg and a Yamaha] with not only organ, electric and acoustic piano, clavinet, and synth sound patches, but also sound patches for bass guitar, drums, orchestral instruments, etc.; percussion, including bongos, tambourine, maracas, triangle, claves, Chinese temple blocks, cowbells, etc.; and wind instruments like recorders and harmonica). I was only learning how to record music, though, so such errors (especially with the first recordings) as bad mixing, EQ, and compression are evident.

“Let Me Come In” is a dance-oriented song that I wrote at the synthesizer, the main riff being an A minor ninth and E minor 7th-added major 2nd (no fifth), then a D minor 7th and D minor 6th. Unfortunately, you don’t really hear the synth part in my recording, since I didn’t mix and EQ the keyboards well; instead, you hear the rhythm guitar playing the main riff.

I sang much of the lead vocals in falsetto, since I hadn’t yet learned how to sing in head and mixed voice. The lyrics to the song can be found here. The song actually opens in 5/4, and the main riff is in 4/4, though there are a few changes to 3/4, including, just before the chorus, three bars of 3/4, one of 2/4, (“No way!”), then back to 4/4 time.

“I’m Breathless” is a song about loving someone and being unable to tell the person, for fear of rejection. The lyrics are included with the SoundCloud link; you’ll need to read them, for this is another early recording in which I didn’t mix the vocals well. Sorry.

Elsewhere, the electric piano part, at which I wrote the song, has melodic influences including Jethro Tull’s “Alive and Well and Living In,” UK‘s “Thirty Years,” a melody from Yes’s “Remembering (High the Memory)” combined with Schoenberg‘s notion of Klangfarbenmelodie, Genesis’s “Can-Utility and the Coastliners,” Ricky Lee Jones’s “Company,” ABC’s “When Smokey Sings,” the six opening notes (I played them simultaneously here) of the slow third movement of Bartók‘s 4th string quartet (Non troppo lento) on top of which I sang a melody derived from Diane Tell‘s “Marie-Jeanne, Claire, et Sophie,” and the last verse is melodically inspired by a section from Van der Graaf Generator‘s “Plague of Lighthouse Keepers” (v. The Presence of the Night/Kosmos Tours)

“Without You With Me” is a Latin-jazz-oriented pop song whose lyrics are about a vacation I had over twenty years ago in Thailand with a certain special somebody (nudge-nudge, wink-wink). You should be able to hear the lyrics OK, which I sang mostly in a low baritone; they are here.

I wrote the song at the acoustic guitar, whose rhythmic strumming carries the song all the way through. The chords of the main riff are A major 7th, C major 7th, D minor 7th, and F major 7th; then there’s a repeat of the first three chords, but now a F minor 7th instead.

“I Lie Alone” is a slow song I wrote at the piano. It’s a song about loneliness caused mainly by having excessively high beauty standards for potential partners; here are the lyrics.

“She Was a Funky Girl” is, predictably, a funk song I wrote at the electric guitar. Here are the lyrics: I’ll let you figure out for yourself what I’m singing about.

“Blow” is an electronic dance tune with guitar and synthesizer solos. It’s about people trying to pick each other up in dance clubs. Here are the lyrics.

I’m afraid I was in a rather naughty mood when I wrote “Lucille,” about a young French lady I was briefly fascinated with years ago (here are the lyrics: try not to judge me too harshly). Still, I’m quite proud of what I created musically with this song: that is, the beat, the dark clavinet riff in the octatonic scale, and the guitar, keyboard, and percussion solos. Maybe that’s what should be focused on, rather than what I was singing about.

“Angelic Devils” also has a dance-oriented beat, though the subject matter of the lyrics (here) is much more serious than in the previous song. It’s about how people in positions of authority (parents, religious leaders, and politicians) abuse their power while seeming good on the outside. I wasn’t quite awake politically at the time, but I was getting there with this song.

Anyway, that’s it for now. If anyone out there, who likes what I did and wants to hear more, could help me get access to the rest of the songs on Jamendo, I’d appreciate it; then I can post a sequel to this one.

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