Tag: writing

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 Nine

[The following is the tenth 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, and here is the ninth–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, now forty years old, went to the city of Lumios wearing his black silk coat. There he found five followers, eager to hear his teachings. They were two men of the ages of thirty-four and thirty-two, a woman aged thirty-five, a boy aged fourteen, and a girl aged thirteen.

They went to a park and sat on a small hill there. Standing at the top of the hill, Rawmios began teaching.

“The whole universe, and everyone and everything in it, is like a huge ocean extending everywhere,” he began. “We are all drops of water in that endless ocean, all united. Our fortunes are like the waves, ever rising and falling. When they rise, we must beware of the coming troughs; when they fall, we must be patient, waiting for the coming crests. Sometimes the crests and troughs come quickly, sometimes slowly, but they will come.

“We drops of water are not separate from each other: we’re all as one. Our joys and sorrows are all as one, too, but we forget that. Remembering our togetherness makes us selfless; forgetting makes us selfish.

“No time is more important than now, for now is the only temporal reality. We must use now in the best way possible.

“These Three Unities, of space, time, and action, rule the world. If we live by their laws, we will be happy. If we forget them, we will be sorrowful. Remembering how all of us–man, animal, and plant–are one, and that our joys and sorrows are one, will teach us to be kind, giving, caring, and thoughtful to each other. Forgetting our oneness will make us cruel, greedy, selfish, and uncaring.

“Caring and kindness beget happiness; selfishness and cruelty beget suffering. Remembering to use now wisely brings the most out of us; forgetting to use now, by brooding over the past and worrying about the future, brings the least out of us. Remembering that good actions from us send out waves of good that will return good to us; forgetting this, and sending out ripples of evil in our sinful actions, brings those evil ripples back to us.

“Remembering that good fortunes will pass away teaches us to be prepared for difficulty, thus reducing its pain; forgetting this makes the pain sharper. Remembering that ill fortune will end teaches us to be patient, thus reducing our pain; forgetting this makes the pain more stinging.

“Do not just learn my teachings,” Rawmios concluded. “Remember them.”

The youngest of his five followers, the girl Zilas, asked him, “How can I rid myself of the pain my mother gives me? She calls me ‘ugly’ and ‘plain.’ She says I must marry the first man who asks me, for few will ever ask me.”

To this Rawmios said, “Her words are lies. Do not believe them. You are not an ugly girl. If your mother does not stop lying to you, you must leave her as soon as you can take care of yourself, but no sooner.”

Next, the boy, Dolnyeros, spoke: “What you say is wise, but new and different from what I was taught. My father told me never to trust any teachings other than what I have learned.”

Rawmios said, “His words are lies. Do not believe them. Wisdom’s details always change in time, though the basic truths stay the same. What I teach is the same wisdom as before, only I use new words. Do not honour your father’s bigotry.”

Next, the woman Yatacas said, “I have a younger brother who shows no love or caring in my family. I get angry with him and chide him for this, but he still doesn’t change.”

Rawmios said, “Probably your anger and chiding are what make him show no love. One cannot even make a show of love; it must be real, from the heart.”

Then the younger man, Noigos, spoke to Rawmios. “I, too, have a younger brother who frustrates me. He shows no concern for the needs of others. I get angry and push him to do better, but he won’t heed me.”

The teacher said, “Again, your anger and pushing are probably what make him withdraw. Maybe he shows no concern, but still has concern. It is better to have goodness than merely to show it.”

Finally, the man Dolhonyeros, the oldest of the five followers, spoke: “My father was disappointed with my capacities, and spoke cruelly to me for years. He has seen improvements in me since then, and he is now loving to me. Still, I have this rage inside me, and I shout cruelly at my stepson whenever he disappoints me. I know I should not, but I cannot stop it.”

Rawmios said, “Your anger should be directed at your father, not your stepson.”

“But I must honour my father,” the man insisted.

Rawmios explained, “The five of you remind me so much of my own family. I see their folly reflected back at me through your troubles. The Fifth Error is family fighting, not confessing the faults of our parents. Mothers and fathers are not gods; they are frail human beings, susceptible to the same weaknesses as everyone else. To see these faults in our parents–when the faults are evident–is not to dishonour our parents. Far more dishonourable it is to deceive ourselves about their strengths or weaknesses than it is to acknowledge them. Admit that your father’s excesses were wrong, admit that your own excesses against your stepson are wrong, and you can begin to tame your rage against both of them.”

Rawmios continued with his teachings to all five of them: “Families can be a bright beacon of light for us, or they can be a void of darkness. If our families are the former, teachers like me are not needed. If our families are the latter, they are a sickness to be cured of, and to be avoided. It is no sin to guard oneself against an infection. By avoiding a wicked family, or husband, or wife, one isn’t fighting them: one is protecting oneself. Therefore, this avoidance is no error.”

Dolnyeros spoke again, “What you say is wise, but I fear you are introducing new gods, false gods, to us.”

“I am introducing no gods at all,” the teacher answered. “Nor am I denying any of the old gods. I am not interested in speculating about any god or gods. You may hear my words and still follow your religion, or no religion, if you wish.”

Soon after, the five followers spread the word about the man in the black silk coat, and about his teachings. Many more people now followed the man, and learned from him. He became a voice of inspiration to thousands.

Commentary

Rawmios’ five followers uncannily resemble the five members of his family. Their bitter words mirror the abuse he suffered from his family. He learned that his family’s teachings were lies, and now his teachers, as it were, have become his learners.

This is the way of the world: the Unity of Action shows us the close, dialectical relationship between all the pairs of opposites–teacher and student, good and evil, wisdom and folly. This relationship can be seen in the symbol of the serpent biting its tail, or in the symbol of the undulating water of the ocean, with its crests and troughs.

The crests and troughs image also reflects the Hindu and Buddhist idea of karma, or as it says in the Bible, that we reap what we sow. All of this is part of the Unity of Action.

Here is yet another poem reflecting this teaching, given again in a visual, concrete poem form.

………self……………………….the past
The………..and………souls,……………and
……………………other…………………………..future,

………all good………………….teachers
and……………..and…….even…………….and
………………………..evil,…………………………..learners

…………contraries………………………..the surfaces:
aren’t……………….but………….under……………………look
……………………………..unified……………………………………inside,

……..black………………………………and you
so……………and……….have grey,……………and…..are we.
……………………..white…………………………………..I

The crests………………………………move–they
………………and…………..of waves………………..are not
…………………… troughs………………………………………..rigid.

……………………before……………………nothing,
What’s called………….and…………is……………..for now
…………………………………….after……………………………….is all.

……summer,………………………………..night,
In………………prepare………………..at…………wait for
……………………………..for winter;…………………………..the day.

Analysis of ‘Sleuth’

Sleuth is a 1972 mystery film directed by Joseph L Mankiewicz, with a script by Anthony Shaffer, based on his 1970 Tony Award-winning play. The film stars Laurence Olivier and Michael Caine, both of whom got Oscar nominations. Mankiewicz’s final film, Sleuth received overwhelmingly positive reviews, with an Oscar nomination for Best Director, too, as well as one for Best Original Score.

Here is a link to quotes from the film, a link to the script, and links to the full movie (in case any of them are pulled from YouTube).

Hints to what the dominant themes of the film are–theatricality, deception, mind games–are already given during the opening credits…provided one already knows better. Fictional actors’ names are listed, meant for roles that do not exist onscreen. These include ‘Alec Cawthorne’ as Inspector Doppler, who is actually played by a disguised Michael Caine; also, ‘John Matthews’ as Detective Sergeant Tarrant, ‘Eve Channing’ as Marguerite Wyke, and ‘Teddy Martin’ as Police Constable Higgs, all characters only referred to by Andrew Wyke (Olivier) and Milo Tindle (Caine), the only two people ever seen throughout the film. The reason for this deception was that the production team wanted to reveal as little as possible to the audience to maximize the element of surprise.

Another hint of the theme of deception at the end of the opening credits (as well as at the end of the film) is the framing of the visuals in a theatre stage with curtains. It’s hardly necessary to show such a framing in the cinema–as opposed to a stage production of Sleuth–unless the very idea is to stress that what we’re seeing isn’t real.

The film begins with Tindle driving into Wyke’s country manor house, a vast area of property indicating how obviously wealthy Wyke, a bestselling writer of crime fiction, is. That Wyke considers the enjoyment of his genre of writing to be “the normal recreation of noble minds” is a further association of him with the aristocracy, something against which middle-class Tindle, who “[doesn’t] know very much about noble minds,” will be sharply contrasted.

As Tindle is walking about outside trying to find Wyke, he can hear the latter reciting his prose aloud into a tape recorder. Wyke is among hedgerows designed like a labyrinth, and Tindle cannot locate the voice until Wyke moves some hedge, which has been like a wall separating the two men.

When they meet, introduce themselves, and shake hands, Wyke welcomes Tindle to “Cloak Manor,” the name of his home and yet another early indication of the film’s theme of subterfuge.

Wyke notes how “all detectives were titled,” as is the sleuth of his novels, Lord Merridew. His sleuth, far cleverer than the comparatively dimwitted and frequently baffled police detectives of his novels, represents an idealized version of his egotistical, elitist self. This is so in spite of Wyke’s claim that we are living in a “classless society,” a bizarre assertion to be made in capitalist England, when not even any of the socialist states of the twentieth century, for all of their accomplishments, ever achieved classlessness, let alone the giving-up of money or the withering-away of the state.

Snobbish Wyke would never allow his fiction to be adapted for television, which for him is “no recreation for noble minds.” Wyke leads Tindle inside, where he is now to be acquainted with Wyke’s many automata, including a sailor named Jolly Jack Tar, who laughs at Wyke’s jokes. These automata, or fake people, once again reinforce the themes of theatricality and deception.

Finally, Wyke gets to the point of why he’s invited Tindle to his home. He knows that Tindle has been having a sexual relationship with his wife, Marguerite, for some time, and so he, in all bluntness, asks about Tindle’s wish to marry her.

Normally, a man would be furious to learn that his wife has made him a cuckold, especially a man as narcissistic as Wyke obviously is. Nonetheless, he pretends not to be angry, and instead acts as though Tindle’s affair with her is an excellent opportunity for Wyke to get rid of her by having Tindle take her off his hands. Then, Wyke can be free to live with his mistress, a girl named Téa.

Wyke needs first to know of Tindle’s family background. Tindle’s answer indicates humble beginnings: his mother was a farmer’s daughter from Hereford, and his father was an Italian watchmaker who immigrated to England in the 1930s and anglicized his original name, Tindolini.

Now, just as Wyke has disingenuously claimed that ours is a “classless society,” so does he claim that, in response to learning of Tindle’s (lapsed) Catholic background, “we’re all liberals here,” and that Wyke has no prejudice against Catholics, lapsed or not. Here, “Catholic” can be seen as a metonym for ‘Italian,’ an ethnicity against which Wyke is decidedly prejudiced, as he’ll soon demonstrate.

Changing the family name from Tindolini to Tindle was meant to make the family become English, something Wyke doesn’t seem to think is possible. The fact that Tindle’s father went broke from being nothing more than a watchmaker reinforces the class divide between him and Wyke, but it must be emphasized that none of this divide makes Tindle in any way a proletarian, and it’s important to understand this fact to make sense of the class analysis of this film.

Tindle owns two hairdressing salons, one in South Kensington called Casa Tindolini, and another in Brighton. Therefore, Tindle is petite bourgeois, as contrasted with Wyke as a member of the gentry. So the nature of the class conflict as allegorized in Sleuth is not between capitalist and worker, but between big capitalist and little capitalist; and as Marx once observed, “One capitalist always strikes down many others.” (Marx, p. 929)

The film’s liberal bias is to have us see Tindle as the poor underdog, and therefore to have us sympathize with him. If we’re paying attention, though, by the time we get to the end of the movie, we’ll realize that Tindle is every bit as cruel in his humiliating games as Wyke is. It’s the nature of the bourgeoisie, petite or haute, to step either on those below them (Wyke), or to step on those above them in their ascendancy to the top, as Tindle is attempting to do in either cuckolding Wyke, getting money for Wyke’s jewels, or playing games of revenge on him.

Now, I mentioned earlier that Wyke pretends not to mind Tindle’s sleeping with Marguerite, but sooner or later we have to see Wyke’s narcissistic injury come out. He makes a few crude references to her copulating with Tindle, offending him and making him want to leave the house in a huff. Wyke manages to deescalate the situation by pretending to reminisce about the woman he used to love, remembering how “intolerably tiresome” she is now, and asking if Tindle can “afford to take her off [Wyke’s] hands”.

As a mere petit bourgeois, of course Tindle cannot afford the luxurious life that Marguerite has been accustomed to as Wyke’s wife. Tindle will have to help Wyke defraud the insurance company that has covered the jewelry Wyke bought for her. Wyke will recoup his losses from the insurance claim, and Tindle will get enough of a cut to subsidize her now-high-maintenance lifestyle.

Note how Marguerite’s very existence is coupled with all the expensive things to be bought to ensure that she’ll stay with Tindle and not go running back to Wyke for support. This is because she is a much an object to Wyke (and to Tindle, as Wyke imagines) as the expensive things are objects to her. In capitalism, people are as commodified as things are.

This brings us back to my point about the liberal bias of this film, which makes us see Tindle as the poor underdog, when, though nowhere near as wealthy as Wyke is, he’s as much a capitalist as Wyke is. Marguerite is Wyke’s property, and Tindle is appropriating that property for himself, as part of his ambitious upward mobility.

The actual underdogs of Sleuth are so marginalized that we never see them onscreen. They’re only referred to in Wyke’s and Tindle’s conversations: the women (Marguerite, Téa, Joyce, Wyke’s maid, his secretary) and the servants (Wyke’s gardener, etc.). They’re invisible because they hardly matter. The sexual objectifying of Wyke’s two women, in fact, is so complete that their very names sound like puns on drinks–tea, or thé in French, and margarita.

Wyke wants Tindle, disguised, to ‘break in’ and ‘steal’ the jewels, all as deception to defraud the insurance company. Though Tindle has his worries about the crime going wrong and him being charged, Wyke will reassure him that they can pull it off safely.

The two enter a room with a pool table and play a brief game of billiards as the topic of Wyke’s sexual relationship with Téa is broached. Note the sexual symbolism of the men’s handling of phallic pool cues, knocking balls into yonic holes, as Wyke insists upon his his sexual prowess…at his age, in about his mid-sixties, to go by Olivier’s age as of 1972. Such bragging is, of course, reaction formation and denial of Wyke’s actual impotence, as revealed by the end of the film, rather like how his professed liberal lack of bigotry is reaction formation and denial, as well as his supposedly not being infuriated at having been cuckolded by Tindle.

Since we’re dealing here with a young man and another old enough to be the father of the first, the two having possession, in one sense or another, of the wife of the second man, we can see in them transferences of both the Oedipus and Laius complexes. Both men, as we learn later on in the film, would be rid of the other, if not actually, then in their games’ representation of actuality, to be free to have Mama-Marguerite. Wyke may not love her anymore, but she still ‘represents’ him (i.e., she is his ‘property’), as he’ll tell Tindle with his pistol pointed at the terrified man’s clown-wig-covered head.

The reason so much of Wyke’s wealth is put into jewelry, by the advice of his accountant, is to avoid being “virtually castrated by taxation.” Having Tindle fake the grand larceny of Wyke’s wife’s jewels in order to collect the insurance money is thus one capitalist helping another to cheat the ‘socialist’ taxman in his attempt at Wyke’s “emasculation.” Wyke is thus protecting his family jewels [!].

Marguerite and the servants are all away for the weekend, during which the entire film is set, so now is the perfect opportunity for Tindle to do the fake break-in and theft. Tindle’s worries about the criminality of the act are trivialized by Wyke, who notes how “all good moneymaking schemes in England have to be [criminal] these days,” a trenchant comment on capitalism. After Wyke reassures Tindle of the safety of the scam, as well as promising him that his cut will be 70,000 pounds, in cash, tax-free, Tindle agrees to do it.

Part of the reason for the disguise, which will be a clown costume (part of Wyke’s secret plan to humiliate Tindle), is to have him wear large shoes to hide his actual footprints. Tindle follows Wyke, who leads him down–with a further demonstration of his racism by ‘slanting’ his eyes with his fingers and imitating an Asian accent–to a room holding a number of disguises, including of course the clown outfit.

As they go down there, Wyke tells Tindle of how, before television, people used to amuse themselves with “treasure hunts, charades, games of infinite variety.” Just as the modern media lies to us with its corporate agenda, so did these games deceive, as Wyke’s and Tindle’s especially will, we’ll soon see. Take whichever form it will, the capitalist class tries to deceive us, engages in make-believe, manipulates us, just as Wyke does to Tindle, then later, vice-versa.

They rummage through Wyke’s old dressing-up basket, trying out a number of disguises before deciding on the clown one. Instead of “an old pair of sneakers and a sock,” Wyke insists on the disguise having a “sense of style,” some “amateur aristocratic quirkiness,” which once again links the ruling class with the film’s theme of theatricality and deception.

All costumed up, Tindle goes outside to get a ladder to put up on a wall leading up to a second-storey window for him to break into. Since he’s about to steal Wyke’s jewels (symbolic, on one level, of emasculating him–nicking his family jewels and cuckolding him), Tindle is also, as it were, climbing the social ladder, going from middle class to upper class, as he hopes.

This going up the ladder is difficult for him, as he’s “not very good at heights,” and he hopes that Wyke will hold the ladder steady for him. This is comparable to how difficult-to-well-nigh-impossible it is to move up from class to class, in spite of such fantasies as “the American dream.” Of course, Wyke won’t help Tindle, because this fake burglary must be simulated sufficiently to approximate reality so as to satisfy the police. Wyke also won’t help Tindle because it’s only natural that the upper class won’t help the middle class rise.

As Tindle is clumsily trying to go up the ladder in those big, awkward clown shoes, Wyke is inside pretending to be a female servant hearing Tindle’s noises outside. Wyke is speaking in a falsetto woman’s voice: this is one of a number of examples of Wyke pretending to be someone else, often imitating other accents. It’s part of the film’s theme of theatricality, fakery, and pretense.

Once Tindle is inside again, he must vandalize the place in a search for jewels whose location he pretends not to know about. When he finds the safe and blows it open with explosives, he discovers a red ruby necklace. Wyke never wanted to see it around Marguerite’s neck, feeling it made her “look like a blood sacrifice.” Again, the association of jewels with balls makes his aversion to the blood red colour symbolic of castration anxiety.

Tindle, on the other hand, wishes his father could see the rubies, for the poor old man never knew what success was. Wyke, as Tindle’s father transference, thus is part of a family romance, Tindle’s wealthy dream-father, as opposed to his broke real one.

Now that the jewels are pocketed, the explosion is meant to wake Wyke up, and a struggle between the two is to ensue. Tindle has to leave a wound of some kind on Wyke to convince the police. Since it would be rather difficult to hit Wyke hard enough without hitting him too hard, he suggests having Tindle tie him up; then he imitates the cleaning woman’s voice, imagining her to have found him all tied up and working on one of his stories. More of his theatricality and pretense.

Just before Wyke throws in the first plot twist and has Tindle understand that the whole fake jewelry burglary has just been the former setting the latter up to be shot and killed with the burglary as a pretext, Wyke does a number of things to foreshadow this twist. First, with the pistol in his hand, Wyke fires at a jug in Tindle’s hand, frightening and enraging him. Then, he makes “a bad Italian joke” about it being “open season all year round for…seducers and wife stealers,” as well as deliberately claiming that Italy, not England, is Tindle’s “country of origin.” In connection with Wyke’s elitist bigotry against even other Europeans, note that his surname is a pun on white.

While his intention to kill Tindle is as much theatricality and deception as is the fake burglary, or even the intention of defrauding the insurance company, his hatred of Tindle is real. It’s bad enough for Wyke that he’s being cuckolded, his wife and ‘property’ stolen from him–the narcissistic rage he feels from that alone is unbearable; but that the other man, of all men, is even just half a “wop” or “dago” (the same way being only part-Jew is tantamount to being a full-Jew to a Nazi) is enough to require a tit-for-tat humiliation. Sleuth being an allegory of class antagonisms, we see in Wyke vs Tindle how capitalism, even between haut and petit bourgeois, is all about abasing the competition to glorify oneself.

This is why Tindle must be ‘killed’ while fully dressed in his clown costume, right after he’s tearfully begged Wyke not to kill him. Tindle must be brought down because, as a mere petit bourgeois “half-dago,” he’s “a jumped-up pantry boy who doesn’t know his place” (a line loosely quoted, by the way, in The Smiths‘ song, “This Charming Man”). Just before shooting clowned-up Tindle in the back of the head, Wyke says, “Farewell, Punchinello,” a reference to Pulcinella, a clownish character from commedia dell’arte, and its English descendant, Punch.

The scheme to kill Tindle with legal impunity from the apparent attempted burglary is, as I’ve said, all just one of Wyke’s many games of humiliation, not at all real, more theatricality and deception. The firing of a blank from his phallic gun suggests Wyke’s impotence, his own private feelings of humiliation projected onto Tindle.

After the game is over, and Tindle, having come to from fainting and having gone home, we see Wyke at home alone, gratified from the narcissistic supply he’s got from humiliating Tindle and listening to old recordings of Cole Porter songs like “You Do Something to Me” and “Anything Goes.” In the former song, “that voodoo that you do so well” reminds us of the deceptive ‘magic’ of Wyke’s games. His old-fashioned taste in music reinforces the sense of the Generation Gap between him and Tindle.

This gap between crusty old conservatives and young liberals is emphasized in the lyric to “Anything Goes.” The breaking of the old Victorian taboo of “a glimpse of stocking,” as well as the switch from “better words” to “four-letter words” (as had only about a half-decade before Sleuth‘s release been allowed in films, and before that, “the end of the Chatterly ban”), reflects a social rift that distracts us from the ongoing rift between capitalist and worker.

“Detective Inspector Doppler” arrives at Wyke’s home, saying he’s there to investigate “the disappearance of a Mr. Milo Tindle.” Now, to those who’ve never seen the film or the play, Doppler is a third character just introduced to the story, played by “Alec Cawthorne” and not by Caine disguised in a clever makeup job to make him look like a middle-aged man, almost Wyke’s age. The theatricality and deception are as much for us, the audience, as they are for Wyke. Tindle’s disguise is so complete, it even includes his use of a rhotic accent.

As “Doppler” does his investigation, he gives off the impression that not only is Wyke genuinely guilty of having killed Tindle (we haven’t yet seen Tindle as himself since the firing of the pistol, so for all we first-time viewers know, that was a real bullet fired), but Wyke has also carelessly left out circumstantial evidence for “Doppler” to find. Actually, Wyke’s denials to “Doppler” of being guilty of murder are real, for Tindle sneaked into the house to plant the incriminating evidence (blood on the bannisters, Tindle’s clothes “all screwed up on the floor of a wardrobe”) while Wyke was out of the house for the day.

In playing this game on Wyke, Tindle isn’t just getting revenge for himself; he’s also avenging the sullied reputation of police detectives, who are routinely looked down on in Wyke’s fiction as “baffled” and not particularly intelligent. It is always the noble, titled Lord Merridew who, as the brilliant sleuth, solves the case.

Wyke here is demonstrating his elitism once again, with Merridew representing the gentry, and those “baffled” police inspectors representing the common masses, as Tindle is thought of as representing. What must be remembered, though, is that just as Tindle is a member of the petite bourgeoisie and is therefore no less a capitalist than Wyke, the police, of whatever modest means they may be, represent and defend the interests of the capitalist class. So Tindle’s humbling of Wyke through the clever detective work of “Doppler” is not the working class one-upping the bourgeoisie, but rather a capitalist doing this to a fellow capitalist.

Of course, in spite of Wyke’s looking down on common cops, just as with his denial of prejudice or Othello-like jealousy, he denies that condescension by claiming that “Merridew would have been proud of [Doppler]” for being so diligent in his tireless attempts to contact Tindle by phone. Now, Tindle knows this compliment to be fake, but in keeping with the theatricality and deception going on with both men, “Doppler” says the compliment is “praise indeed, Sir,” and claims to enjoy Wyke’s fiction.

Wyke enjoys the narcissistic supply he gets from hearing that “Doppler” reads his work, but his ego trip is short-lived when he isn’t allowed to finish naming his favourite of all of his books, The Case of the Crucified Communist (the title of which sounds like a capitalist’s wish-fulfillment), before “Doppler” resumes talking about the Tindle case.

As the evidence against Wyke seems to be mounting, he and “Doppler” go outside to where the dirt has been freshly dug, implying that this is where Wyke has buried Tindle’s body. Wyke tries to maintain his innocence by saying his gardener has been “aching for an opportunity to slander his employer.” In this quote, we see not only an example of class conflict, but also one of the marginalization of a worker, one only spoken of, not ever seen.

“Doppler,” on the other hand, defends gardeners and has nothing but praise for how perceptive he finds them to be. Note here how Tindle, in taking the side of gardeners, is again associating himself with the poor, downtrodden working class, as liberals are wont to do; though as a bourgeois himself, Tindle is no more a worker than Wyke is.

Finally, the pressure rises on Wyke until the circumstantial evidence against him seems so strong that “Doppler” makes to arrest him. Wyke is now feeling a stress and fear comparable to Tindle’s when he thought he was about to die. Then, “Doppler,” behind Wyke, pulls off his face makeup, wig, etc., to reveal Tindle underneath it all.

Now, the first-time viewer sees that not only was the fake burglary artifice, but so was Tindle’s death and the very existence of Doppler, a veritable doppelgänger for Tindle. Wyke is now as enraged as Tindle was to discover his fears were all for nothing.

Tindle is not yet satisfied in his lust for revenge, though. He’s got more tricks in store for Wyke, including the next game, immediately to be played on the old man.

He insists, though, that this game he’s about to play on Wyke is not pretend. He claims that he’s actually murdered Téa and planted four pieces of evidence about the house that will incriminate Wyke, and that the police will show up in a matter of minutes, find the evidence, which is all hiding in plain view, and charge Wyke with the murder.

To agitate Wyke all the more, Tindle claims he has had sex with her, her willing to it, before strangling her to death with one of the four pieces of evidence. Wyke has been assuming that Tindle is having him on (as he should), until he phones Téa’s home, getting her roommate, Joyce, to answer the call and tearfully confirm that Téa has, indeed, been murdered.

Now that Wyke is convinced the murder is real, he frantically goes about searching for the four objects: a stocking, a shoe, a false eyelash, and a bracelet. After finding and disposing of the four things, Tindle reveals that no cops have arrived as he’s led Wyke to believe. It turns out that Têa and Joyce were happy to help Tindle get even with Wyke, for Wyke has often played games of humiliation on them, too. Wyke personifies the ruling class that humiliates the marginalized with phony set-ups, targeting marginalized people like women.

Téa, for example, is so marginalized that it takes quite some time, since knowing of her ‘murder,’ for Wyke to express any pity for her, a callousness that Tindle notes. Women like her, Marguerite, and Joyce are never seen and never heard…silenced, in effect. They are represented only in the words the two men use to refer to them.

Similarly, people of colour are marginalized in the presentation of this story, even to the point of them being marginalized, as Tindle imagines they must be (and probably correctly so, given Wyke’s obvious racism), in Wyke’s novels. Tindle assumes that blacks don’t “play much of a part in the books [Wyke] write[s]…Except for the odd, eyeball-rolling darkie, to take his place alongside the swarthy Yid, the oily Levantine, and others.” The point is that Shaffer’s marginalizing of workers, women, and people of colour by not presenting any of them physically on the stage or screen is to indicate how slightly they have been regarded in real life.

To get back to the ending, where Wyke realizes that the danger of the cops finding the four pieces of evidence is all faked, Tindle hits him with one final bit of humiliation…and this time, it’s all too real. He tells Wyke that Téa, having actually met Tindle in the house while Wyke was away, has told Tindle that Wyke is impotent and hasn’t done it with her for over a year.

This narcissistic injury is too much for Wyke to bear. He cannot risk Tindle circulating this tidbit of gossip, not even just to Marguerite. Now the pistol must have only real bullets. Tindle’s murder cannot be faked this time. The firing of a real bullet into him is symbolic of Wyke’s phallus working properly.

Tindle insists, though, that since he’s told the police about the faked burglary story after Wyke’s faked shooting of him, and…maybe…the police will stop by the house, Wyke won’t be able to use the burglary story to justify shooting Tindle. Since Tindle’s been lying the whole time, Wyke nonetheless figures he doesn’t need to believe him this time, so as Tindle is walking toward the front door with Marguerite’s fur coat (a further theft from Wyke), he gets shot in the back.

Shortly afterwards, the police do show up, as promised, by the front door. Wyke is truly screwed now, and just as Tindle’s fake murder has turned real, so is the fake danger of Wyke being arrested now real. As Tindle is dying, he activates all the automata in the room, particularly Jolly Jack Tar, notable for his hearty guffaw as demonstrated a number of times throughout the film, and now laughing with Tindle at Wyke.

If only that gun could have been, with a blank, as impotent as Wyke’s biological gun is. then he could tell the cops, “it was just a bloody game.”

The movie ends with a shot of the theatre and a quick drop of the curtains, giving off a Brechtian alienation effect to remind us that Sleuth is just a bloody play. It’s as unreal as any of the games Wyke and Tindle have played on each other.

The emphasis on the unreality of the story is to suggest that who Wyke and Tindle represent–gentry vs petite bourgeoisie, conservative vs liberal, or the opposing mainstream political parties representing these two factions, whichever–are more play-acting in their vying for power than they are really competing. We always focus on these two groups, while ignoring the politically marginalized people represented by their absence on the screen or stage.

The political tap-dance the two groups do is a distraction from the people we should be concerned about–workers like the gardener, cleaning lady, and secretary; women like Marguerite, Téa, and Joyce; and people of colour like blacks, Levantines, or in any case anyone not of Anglo-Saxon stock, like Jews…or Italians, for that matter.

We see these two mainstream groups battling it out in debates on TV, keeping the spectrum of the otherwise lively debates strictly circumscribed, so as to ensure that certain touchy issues–like poverty, income inequality, endless war, student debt, homelessness, genocide, government surveillance, etc.–are kept out of the debates, since their inclusion might threaten the capitalist/imperialist structure that the ruling class wants kept intact.

Accordingly, the two sides’ debates are all just theatre, all fakery and deception, all “just a bloody game,” like the ones Wyke and Tindle play on each other. For if the debates were real, they’d actually be relevant to the common people. And we can’t have that, can we?

The Tanah–Beginnings, Chapter Eight

[The following is the ninth 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, and here is the eighth–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.]

Though Rawmios found success as a teacher and performer, he was still haunted by the painful memories of his wicked family. It was obvious to him, from his reputation all over Nawaitos as a gifted teacher, that his mother’s description of him–as feeble-minded–was a perfidious lie. It was a big lie, an absurd lie.

Rawmios came to realize that much of what we know isn’t really the truth, but just a human construction that claims to represent reality (for what do we really know about anything?). Therefore, if the human representation is harmful, and has been proven invalid, then it must be replaced with a better, healthier construction that is closer to reality. Rawmios had to take all of the lies his family told him about himself, and wipe the slate clean.

He would take all of the family’s cruel misrepresentations of him and replace them with their honourable opposites. Since he had been deprived of these virtues, he now had the right to claim them as his own. If he had possessed all of the vices the family claimed he had, he had acquired those vices only by power of suggestion. Now he would use power of suggestion to acquire the opposite virtues.

Therefore, since his mother said he was feeble-minded, now he could believe himself to be gifted in intelligence. Since his father taught him to believe unquestioningly all of Lorenzos’s teachings, and to be intolerant of any heretical changes to them, now Rawmios would be free to change any of those teachings that were clearly wrong-headed. Since his brothers called him vile names, he would claim the sweetest of names for himself now. If he was once called selfish and absorbed in himself, now he was selfless and concerned more with others than with himself. If his sister called him weak and cowardly, he would now be brave and strong.

Fashioning a new identity for oneself is never easy, so Rawmios reinvented himself with the powerful aid of meditation. He would not stop meditating until he had fully remade himself.

During meditation, one is always assailed with distractions; so was Rawmios. The distractions came at him like an army of demons, assaulting him with his old painful memories. Rawmios was determined to conquer them all, and he did. He did so by looking at the demons, right in the eyes, and saying these words: “You demons are all liars.” At the sound of these words, the demons all fell.

The demons regrouped, and started a fresh assault. But this time, their weapon wasn’t pain: it was pleasure. They would distract Rawmios with images of naked women in lewd poses, with thoughts of Rawmios’ music and poetry–what he had yet to finish, and would eagerly finish–and with thoughts of how pleasurable it would be to tell his family, “You are liars.”

Rawmios was determined to reconquer the demons, and he did. He did so by looking at the demons, right in the eyes, and saying these words: “The pleasure of a clean slate is greater than the pleasure of naked, lewd women, greater than finishing my music and poetry, and greater than cursing my family.” At the sound of these words, the demons all fell.

Again the demons regrouped, and they started another assault. This final time, their weapon was neither pain nor pleasure: it was to alert Rawmios of his responsibilities. They reminded him of his work as a teacher, and of how his students lacked him. They reminded him of his responsibility to his wife, who lacked him. They reminded him of the listeners of his music and poetry, and of how his listeners lacked him.

Rawmios was determined to defeat the demons, and he did. He did so by looking the demons straight in the eyes, and saying these words: “My students won’t lack me for long, my wife won’t lack me for long, and my listeners won’t lack me for long. Patience is indispensable. When I return to them all, I will give my students a far greater teaching than ever before; I will give my wife a love far greater than ever before; and I will give my listeners music and poetry far greater than ever before. So well will I benefit them all that my brief absence will be quickly forgotten–so quickly forgotten that my absence will seem never to have been. You demons are all liars: be gone with you!” At the sound of these words, the demons all withered and died.

Rawmios had finally wiped the slate clean. All of the bad conceptions of who he was had vanished, exposed for the lies that they all were. His pain was gone, and he had a new vision of his life.

In his vision, he saw a spark of light coming from that Higher Reason, which underlies all things. That light entered Lizas’ womb on the night that Reynholdos Sr. impregnated her. The light added a weight to her pregnancy, such that she’d describe it as if she was about “to give birth to an elephant.” So painful was this pregnancy, which she’d never wanted, that Lizas found herself hating the unborn child. Giving birth to him was particularly painful, but when she looked in his eyes, she loved him.

It became clear to Lizas very early how gifted her new son was, but she didn’t want Reynholdos Jr., Gionos, and Catyas to envy the boy. Though the boy showed aptitudes in music and storytelling, she ignored them. The dark seed of an idea grew in her mind, one of mastering the boy by making him seem the opposite of what he was. When this unnatural urge took root in her mind, the mother in her died to the boy, replaced with a smiling witch.

Though the family was wealthy, Lizas didn’t want Nitramius, as he was called then, to be any better than a common worker. She delighted in how powerful she felt, an unextraordinary woman dominating an exceptional child. She misled Reynholdos Sr., telling him the boy seemed half-witted. They had doctors examine the boy. The doctors told Lizas of the talent they saw in him, and she lied to her husband, telling him the doctors said the opposite. She was afraid of her boy achieving greatness, while the children she preferred were seen as mediocre. He was educated with less intelligent classmates, and not allowed to go outside the city in which the family lived. Nitramius was lonely and miserable.

Four times, though, he secretly left the city and found people who recognized his abilities. The first time, he sang before some people, and they loved his voice. The second time, he gave some poems to be published in a book, and they were loved by many. The third time, he acted in a short play, and he was praised. The fourth time, however, a man gave him a needed criticism: “Nitramius, you do not commit yourself to your art. You want to do everything, yet you achieve almost nothing. You need to learn how to focus, instead of dreaming.” This was very true.

He knew he needed to leave home to achieve his ambitions, but with so little confidence in himself, he was afraid to. Needing to improve his image as an artist, he bought the black silk jacket. What happened soon after has already been told, and this was the end of Rawmios’ vision.

Now that the slate was clean, he knew his mission in life, to use his talents to help others, not just to glorify himself. Rawmios had to teach others, who have also been hurt with demonic lies, how to remake themselves. Those taught to hate themselves had to remake themselves, as Rawmios had, so they could now love themselves.

In his vision, Rawmios also came to realize much in the ouroboros, the Ten Errors, and the Cycle of Decay–much that hadn’t been seen before. He saw Three Unities: the Unity of Space–that a Higher Reason permeates everything, that all is one; the Unity of Time–the only real time is now, for past and future are human constructions; and the Unity of Action–all actions and concepts exist with their opposites close by, and these opposites’ relation to each other are that of a circular continuum, like the serpent biting its tail. Head and tail are opposites, thus showing the relationship.

This last idea was the most exciting one for Rawmios, for now he could justify the remaking of bad self-images into good ones, for the sake of his followers. This was how he could help humanity. He left his place of meditation, and he went into the city to teach any who would listen.

Commentary

All spiritual growth comes from realizing the lies and illusions we have about ourselves and the outside world. In Christianity, the Devil would have us believe, in our lust, greed, pride, and anger, that we’re animals–unworthy of having God’s love. In Hinduism, we’re deceived into not seeing the atman that links us with Brahman. In Buddhism, we don’t see our Buddha-nature, because of illusory maya, and because of the lie of having a self.

Rawmios’ vision of a divine spark of light in himself, giving him all of his talents, is not egotism in him. It is another mythical expression of this same joy, found in all religions, when we sense our closeness to the Divine. The cruelty of the abusive family, lying to the boy about his capacities, giving him a pejorative name, and restricting his movement all symbolize how all of us, born into an illusory material world, fail to see the unities underneath all the differences perceived by the senses. Seeing these unities, we all find our spark of light, our inner greatness.

In reading this story, one must wonder if, again, there was a common mythical root from which it and the legendary life of the Buddha came. The poem below again expresses, in visual form, the erasing of illusions that cause sadness, to be replaced by truths that bring happiness.

Eyes^^^^^^^^^shut,
………….we do………….
…….not see what…….
…ails……………….us….

Erased,^^^^^^^^^^^

…………………………..ills
…..can be replaced…..

Souls^^^^^^^^^with
open^^^^^^^^^eyes
……………go to………….
what………………….lies
…….in lands joyous….

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.