Analysis of ‘Barfly’

Barfly is a 1987 film directed by Barbet Schroeder and written by Charles Bukowski, who also does a cameo. It stars Mickey Rourke and Faye Dunaway, with Alice Krige, Frank Stallone, Jack Nance (whom you might remember from Eraserhead), and JC Quinn.

Barfly is a semi-autobiographical film with Henry Chinaski (Rourke) as a fictionalized version of young Bukowski. The film was entered into the 1987 Cannes Film Festival, where it competed for the Palme D’or. Dunaway was nominated for a Golden Globe for Best Actress in a Drama. Barfly was also nominated for two Independent Spirit Awards: Best Actor for Rourke, and Best Cinematography for Robby Müller.

Here’s a link to quotes from the film, and here’s a link to the whole film.

Destitute LA alcoholic/writer Henry Chinaski exemplifies the Dionysian lifestyle, and it goes way beyond the obvious link with drinking. To understand the extent to which Henry embodies Dionysus, we must understand everything the wine god represents beyond just wine: dancing and pleasure, or partying, and irrationality and chaos, including passion, emotions, and instincts.

More important than even these, though, to consider how Nietzsche discussed Dionysus in The Birth of Tragedy, the god represents disorder, intoxication, emotion, ecstasy, and unity, as opposed to the Apollonian principle of individuation. What does wine itself represent, when emptied from the bottle or wine glass and poured into one’s mouth? It represents a dissolution of boundaries (i.e., the bottle or wine glass that gives shape and boundaries to the drink), and in entering the drinker’s body, the wine becomes one with the drinker. The intoxication from the alcoholic drink causes blurred vision and slurred speech–more dissolution of boundaries, more non-differentiation.

Thus, in Henry, we have not only a drunk, but also a law-breaker and a brawler…that is, one who doesn’t respect societal boundaries. His fists cross boundaries to hit the face and body of Eddie (Stallone), the “unoriginal, macho…ladies’ man” bartender he so despises. Henry’s hands cross boundaries to steal a sandwich right out of the hands of a man who’s just paid him to fetch the sandwich, or to break into a neighbour’s apartment to steal his food and wine.

Henry, as a writer, is the Dionysian artist whom Nietzsche saw as having “identified himself with the primal unity, its pain and contradiction” (Nietzsche, page 49). In total unity of everything, there is no ego, no self, no individuation, and no boundary between self and other. The contradiction of identifying self with other is painful, because the ego one is attached to is an illusion, whereas the fragmented existence is the only reality, like that of mutilated Zagreus.

Henry is much like Zagreus after that first fight with Eddie in the alley behind the bar. He’s lying all bloody on the ground, practically left for dead. Later, after being hit several times on the head with a purse held by angry Wanda (Dunaway), he looks at his bloody head in the bathroom mirror and recites improvised poetry, which includes the word, “euphoria.” He’s seeing his Lacanian ideal-I in the reflection, seeing his suffering Zagreus-self as a role model to live up to.

Getting drunk is, as we all know, an escape from all the suffering of the world, a manic defence against life’s depressing realities. Bukowski once described drinking as a kind of slow suicide; it’s a pleasure that ends the pain of life by throwing oneself into death, or at least trying to.

Freud wrote of two opposing ways of achieving pleasure, either through Eros, the life instincts that include libido, or through the death drive (called Thanatos by Freud’s followers), since death brings the organism back into a state of total rest, just as the achievement of libidinal pleasure tries to do. “To die, to sleep, no more,” as Hamlet said.

Similarly, just as the Hindus and Buddhists hope to achieve moksha or nirvana through a dissolution of the self (be that in the form of Atman realizing its identity with Brahman, or in the form of realizing, as the Lacanians do, that the ego is an illusion, that there never was a self to begin with–anattā), so do Dionysian types like Bukowski, Henry, and Wanda attempt a kind of ego death, but through drink, and through all things considered sinful or self-destructive.

In other posts, I have written of the ouroboros as symbolizing the dialectical unity of opposites. The serpent’s biting head is one extreme opposite, and the bitten tail is the other; every intermediate point is corresponded on the relevant place on the serpent’s coiled body, which represents a circular continuum. Thus, heaven or nirvana can be seen at the biting head, for example, and hell can be the bitten tail. The normal spiritual quest goes to the head away from the tail, that is, along the length of the coiled body towards the head; the Dionysian, in contrast, gets to the biting head by passing across the bitten tail. People like Henry are trying to get to heaven by passing through hell first, as Christ did.

This perverse pilgrim’s progress of Henry’s explains why he is content to be left beaten to a pulp in an alley at night, helped by no one. It explains how he can look at his bloody head in a mirror and say, “euphoria,” how he can think that people who never go crazy must lead “truly horrible lives,” that “nobody who could write worth a damn could ever write in peace,” and that “endurance is more important that truth.”

Wanda as a drinker is going through the same pilgrim’s progress. After some heavy drinking one night at home, she is lying in bed and imagining she’s dying. She imagines an angel has come to take her away. She’s saying this to Henry as some beautiful Mahler, the andante moderato third movement from the sixth symphony, is playing. Henry is so convinced she’s dying that he calls some paramedics, who correctly conclude that she’s just drunk.

The point is that with each experience of suffering, the Dionysian pushes himself further, into even greater suffering, a move further towards the ouroboros’ bitten tail in the hopes of finally passing it and reaching the head of paradise. ‘Tis a consummation devoutly to be wished.

After being beaten by Eddie several times, Henry keeps coming back for more. He’ll do occasional jobs here and there, since he’s got to have at least a little money to live…and pay for drinks, of course!…but he is loath to get a regular job and join “unoriginal” society. (He’ll only try to get one for Wanda’s sake.) He’s been in jail twelve times, but he keeps breaking laws at every opportunity.

Now, one shouldn’t confuse his coarseness for a lack of culture. He’s a talented writer of poetry and prose, so talented that his writing has touched publisher Tully Sorenson (Krige), whose wealth and intervention in Henry’s life represent where Apollonian order intersects with Dionysian wildness. He listens to classical music, Mahler and Mozart in particular. He hates movies (as did Bukowski, who really needed a financial incentive to write the script for Schroeder’s film!), but he likes Schopenhauer, whose philosophical pessimism, by the way, is a Buddhistic opposition to existence.

His aspiration towards ego death is in such an advanced state that when Tully, on meeting him face-to-face for the first time in his frequented watering hole, asks him who he is–“the eternal question”–and he gives her the eternal answer…he doesn’t know.

Tully’s intervention into his life represents not only the intersection of the Apollonian with the Dionysian: it also represents the intrusion of capitalism into the world of the lumpenproletariat, which Henry so perfectly personifies. She is a wealthy book publisher, wearing fashionable clothes, living in a beautiful, large home, and–let’s face it–hoping to turn a profit off of his talent. Having a basic sense of class consciousness, though, he can’t accept her world, “a cage with golden bars.”

His class consciousness, knowing that “nobody suffers like the poor,” doesn’t mean Henry’s at all motivated to help organize anything like a worker’s revolution. Men like him are why Marx and Engels didn’t see any potential in the lumpenproletariat. Like so many of the poor, Henry feels incapable of pulling himself out of poverty, let alone doing so for the working class in general; hence the wish to escape his misery through drink.

Instead of supporting a vanguard-led revolution, he simply lives as an anarchist would in an otherwise capitalist world. He does what he likes, and has no respect for authority. His stealing of food, as is Wanda’s stealing of corn, is a kind of putting into practice the socialist ideal, “from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.” The same can be said of Wanda’s living off of Wilbur’s charity.

Henry’s meeting of Wanda in the bar where we see the Bukowski cameo is serendipitous, for in this meeting we’ll see the beginning of a relationship that will mitigate his misanthropy. His leaving of his dump of an apartment to live in hers, in a way, can also be associated with his Dionysian lifestyle, since as a chthonic god (i.e., of the underworld or of agriculture…recall that corn Wanda wants!), the wine god can also be associated with matrilineal and matrilocal forms of social organization.

Indeed, Henry’s anger at Wanda over her cheating on him isn’t based on some patrilineal notion that he ‘owns’ her: he explicitly acknowledges not owning her. He simply cannot stand that she’s slept with Eddie, of all men!

Henry’s jealousy of her over Eddie, paralleled with her jealousy of him over Tully, has as a coincidence how, when either of them is cheated on, the other has gone off to look for a job. Henry, after coming back to the bar from his job interview, tells Jim (Quinn) that he hates how society tells us we all have to do something, or to be somebody–i.e., to have a job and form one’s identity around it. Similarly, when upon meeting Wanda, Henry asks her what she does, she says, “I drink,” instead of saying a job title. So in betraying themselves to the capitalist system by trying to get jobs, they end up betraying each other sexually.

During Henry’s job interview–with a woman with beautiful, pantyhose-covered legs he ogles and gets a “hard-on” from–he answers “none” to questions about hobbies, religion, education, and even his sex. Once again, he’s demonstrating his Dionysian dissolution of identity…as well as his satyr-like lust.

After Wanda has beaten and bloodied his head with her purse and stormed out of her apartment, he gets back at her by throwing her clothes out the window, once again demonstrating his Dionysian disregard for people’s boundaries.

His Lacanian lack of an ego, combined with his lack of respect for boundaries and his embrace of violence, indicates his experience of the undifferentiated, traumatic, and nonverbal world of the Real. His writing of poetry and prose, however, bring him back to the verbal, social, and cultural world of the Symbolic, as does his making of money from that writing, through Tully’s cashed cheque of $500, which allows him to buy rounds of drinks at the bar to win “all [his] friends,” who will surely give him emotional support for his next fight with Eddie. His moment of “euphoria” in front of Wanda’s bathroom mirror, idealizing himself as an eternal fighter, a Dionysus, is Henry’s experience of the narcissistic Imaginary.

There are other Dionysian personalities in Wanda’s apartment building, mind you, than just her and Henry. Wanda’s next-door neighbours are an old man and woman, the former of whom, it seems, is physically abusing the latter. Henry notes, in near-Buddhistic fashion upon hearing the nastiness next door, that hatred is the only thing that lasts.

Still, even a Dionysian like Henry has a sense of gallantry, and after being fed up with the disturbing fighting he’s been hearing through the wall, decides he wants to help the poor old woman over there, right when he’s finally met and chatted with Tully. He breaks down the neighbours’ door to confront the old man over his vicious treatment of his woman. As it turns out, though, she likes being hurt by her man! It’s a kind of sadomasochistic kink that they’re into, another Dionysian embrace of violence and transgressing of boundaries.

It doesn’t take long for Tully to realize that her Apollonian world is incompatible with Henry’s. Not only can’t she convince him to be “a non-drunk,” and not only can’t she compete as a drinker with him, but she is horrified with his violent nature, gutting the old man with his knife, and driving his car into and pushing the car of two “unoriginal,” publicly kissing lovebirds into an intersection. Henry sees another Eddie in that man, and wants to trespass beyond his boundaries.

It’s an amusing example of projection when rich Tully, annoyed with Henry’s confrontational attitude toward two “romantic” lovebirds in their car, that she calls him “a spoiled asshole” (my emphasis). It’s even more amusing when Henry says that she “hired a dick [Nance] to find an asshole,” my favourite line in the whole film!

One cannot have Dionysus without Maenads, and Henry has one in Wanda. Her jealous fury over Tully having slept with him causes her to have violent designs on the rich, wealthy publisher.

Indeed, Tully’s disapproval of Henry’s wild dipsomania, and her wish to take him out of that unruly world and into her tame, Apollonian one, makes her into a kind of female Pentheus, the king whose banning of Dionysian worship caused him to be lured into the wine god’s sylvan milieu and torn to pieces by the Maenads, as is presented in Euripides‘ tragedy, The Bacchae.

Similarly, Tully feels pulled into Henry’s world, in spite of her opposition to it, and as soon as Wanda smells the perfumed proof of Tully’s closeness to Henry, the hostilities between the two women begin. This tension is building just as that between Henry and Eddie is being rekindled, the latter being annoyed over the former’s tardiness in paying for all the drinks he’s offering everyone in the bar to buy their friendship and backing in the two men’s upcoming fight.

Wanda grabs Tully by the hair and pulls her, screaming, off her barstool, just like a maniacal Maenad. Tully fights back as best she can, even biting Wanda’s hand; but her bourgeois sense of decorum just can’t let her endure in a fight, so she knows she has no hope of taming Henry. She leaves Dionysus in his world, and she returns to that of Apollo.

Now, this ‘catfight‘ won’t be the only entertainment of the night, since Eddie is hungry for revenge after his humiliating loss the last time. Henry is all too happy to oblige, of course, and the film ends with the eternal recurrence of Dionysian violence with which Barfly began.

After all, hatred’s the only thing that lasts, isn’t it?

The Ouroboros of Music

Introduction

I’ve written a number of articles on how the ouroboros, normally a symbol of eternity expressed in endless cycles, can also be used to represent the dialectically unified relationship between opposites. The serpent, coiled into a circle and biting its tail, can represent a continuum that, instead of being conceived as a straight line with both extremes at distant, opposite ends, can also be coiled into a circle, with the opposite ends meeting, where the serpent’s head bites its tail.

I believe that this close relationship between opposite extremes, the one phasing into the other, or the one being an immediate reaction to the other, can be applied universally. I’ve tried to demonstrate this universality with a number of examples, usually Marxist ones, as with dialectical materialism, capitalism, neoliberalism, the workers’ state, and the tendency of the rate of profit to fall.

As for (largely) non-Marxist topics, I’ve also attempted to apply my ouroboros symbolism to more-or-less mystical ideas, to psychoanalysis, and to philosophy. Now, I’d like to try to apply it to music.

What I’m about to attempt here will surely be far from exhaustive, but what follows are, I believe, some quite significant aspects of music, some important parameters of it. These include consonance vs dissonance, dynamics, planned structures vs non-planned ones, rhythm vs arrhythmicality, and simplicity vs complexity as alternating in different periods in music history. I’ll be examining examples from classical music, jazz, and rock. I’ll be discussing the psychological effects of such music more than the actual physical properties of the sounds.

Now, before we begin, I want to state at the outset that I am no trained musicologist or historian of music, so take my opinions here with a generous grain of salt. Just so you know, however, that I’m not a complete musical ignoramus, either, I have demonstrated what musical knowledge I do have, for what it’s worth, in these analyses: on two Gentle Giant albums, three Pink Floyd albums, one by King Crimson, one by Van Der Graaf Generator, one by the Who, by Jethro Tull, by Rush, and by Frank Zappa. I’ve also analyzed works by a number of modern classical composters, including Richard Strauss, Béla Bartók, Charles Ives, Arnold Schoenberg, Alban Berg, Igor Stravinsky, and Edgard Varèse.

Finally, I’ve also composed and recorded (though not always very well) my own music, including mostly modernist classical compositions using Finale software, and pop songs on which I sang and played all of the instruments. For good or ill, all of these will give you an idea of what I know…and don’t know…when it comes to music.

But enough of this. Let’s get started.

Consonance vs Dissonance

As Schoenberg says in his Harmonielehre, one should not think of consonance and dissonance as dichotomous opposites, but rather as on a continuum from most familiar harmony to least familiar harmony: “the distinction between them is only a matter of degree, not of kind. They are no more opposites than two and ten are opposites, as the frequency numbers indeed show; and the expressions ‘consonance’ and ‘dissonance’, which signify an antithesis, are false. It all simply depends on the growing ability of the analyzing ear to familiarize itself with the remote overtones, thereby expanding the conception of what is euphonious, suitable for art, so that it embraces the whole natural phenomenon.” (Schoenberg, p. 21)

The difference, only a relative one, between consonance and dissonance is especially apparent in the contemplation of the overtone series, wherein the first overtones after the fundamental are the octave, the perfect fifth, the perfect fourth, the major third, the minor third,…and only by our reaching of the eighth and ninth harmonics do we come to major seconds, then by the fifteenth and sixteenth harmonics, we get a minor second, the harmonics in between these being microtonal.

So as Schoenberg points out, the only dissonances to be designated as such are the major and minor seconds, and their inversions, the minor and major sevenths respectively, and the major and minor ninths, which are just the seconds plus an octave, as well as the diminished and augmented fourths and fifths, etc. (Schoenberg, p. 22)

Unisons and octaves are, of course, perfect consonances, as are perfect fifths and perfect fourths (this latter particularly if the upper tone is perceived as the tonic). Note how the tense major seconds and their inversions, the minor sevenths, as well as the sharply dissonant minor seconds and their inversions, the major sevenths, are just a step or half-step away from unisons and octaves respectively. In these, we have a basic example of the ouroboros of music, a shift from the bitten tail of extreme dissonance to the biting head of perfect consonance.

A parallel thing happens with respect to the dissonant next-door neighbours of perfect fifths and fourths. The tritone, regarded as strongly dissonant, is only a half-step flat of a perfect fifth, or a half-step sharp of a perfect fourth. Major, and especially minor, sixths are also only a step or half-step above a perfect fifth. Again, perfect consonance and extreme dissonance meet where the ouroboros’ teeth bite its tail.

Unlike the harsh use of dissonance in twentieth-century classical music, the traditional use of dissonance in the art music of previous centuries always kept it subservient to consonance; harmonic tension had to be resolved, and fairly quickly, too. Most people intuitively feel that this subservient role is justified, since we usually can tolerate only so much harshness. This subservience also acknowledges the universal nature of the ouroboros of music: to hear the full range of musical expression, one must pass from the bitten tail to the biting head.

The seventh degree of the major (or melodic or harmonic minor) scale is called the leading tone because, traditionally, one cannot just stop on that note. This tone leads us back to the tonic: it “will bring us back to do,” as Julie Andrews once sang. Incidentally, there’s also a descending, or upper, leading tone, going from a flat second to the tonic. According to Allen Forte, the strongest melodic or harmonic progressions are by half-step, or as I would call it, the ouroboros of shifting from extreme dissonance to the proximate, perfect consonance.

Suspensions and retardations are more examples of shifting from dissonance to consonance, sometimes from extreme dissonance to perfect consonance, as in the 4-3 and 9-8 suspensions by a half-step, or the 7-8 retardation, also by half-step. Again, it’s these stepwise, short distances from dissonance to consonance that demonstrates the ouroboros-like proximity of the harmonic extremes.

A way to intensify dissonance before resolution is to add a minor seventh on top of the leading tone, in the context of a dominant seventh chord. Thus, a tritone, from the third degree of the (Mixolydian) scale (leading tone) to the seventh degree, becomes a major third in the resolution with mere half-step movements in the intervals’ notes closer to (or farther away from, if they’re inverted) each other (or, if the dominant seventh chord resolves to a minor tonic chord, the minor seventh moves by a full step to the minor third of the tonic chord; either way, the movements from dissonance to consonance are only slight). Further, sustained harmonic tension can be created through secondary dominants leading up to the final resolution.

Now, so far I’ve only discussed the relationship of dissonance with consonance largely in the context of diatonic harmony (that is, except for my brief reference to the descending leading tone). The chromaticism of the music of the Romantic period intensifies dissonance all the more (listen to Wagner‘s Tristan und Isolde for a noteworthy example); since this music is still traditionally tonal, though, its necessary resolution to consonance further brings out the ouroboros of extreme dissonance, the bitten tail, to peaceful consonance, the biting head.

The pushing of this dissonant chromaticism takes tonality to its limits in the music of Richard Strauss (i.e., Salome and Elektra) and Gustav Mahler. Then, we get post-Romantic, Impressionist composers like Debussy and Erik Satie, who often sidestep tonality while refraining from harshness. Examples of such sidestepping include Debussy’s use of the whole-tone scale in such compositions as Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune, and the use of quartal harmony in Satie’s Fils des étoiles.

Matters get even more dissonant, though still rooted in tonality, if in a vague, expanded sense, in Bartók‘s music, as early as such pieces as his first string quartet. His use of axes of symmetry were meant to prove to Schoenberg that one could treat all twelve semitones equally, yet remain tonal. Note how the extreme chromaticism of that string quartet mentioned above resolves with a closing chord, at the end of the final movement, on A, with fifths (E) and ninths (B). Now, such a chord is quite consonant…by Bartók’s standards.

Stravinsky‘s experiments with polytonality, as well as his use, from time to time, of the octatonic scale, in such compositions as The Rite of Spring are nonetheless still basically tonal, and they end in at least relatively consonant harmonic resolution. The same can be said of much of Ives‘s music, in spite of the many clashing independent parts. Dissonance generally is resolved, if imperfectly…a kind of hovering between the bitten tail and the biting head of the ouroboros.

It’s when we come to the Second Viennese School that we have the “emancipation of the dissonance.” Not satisfied with the use of the whole-tone scale and quartal harmony in his Chamber Symphony No. 1, Schoenberg wanted to treat all twelve semitones as equals. His experiments with atonality led to a need to structure the apparent melodic and harmonic chaos with his twelve-note system. Though I have a deep appreciation for this kind of music, unfortunately, most listeners have untrained ears, and therefore they find it virtually impossible to distinguish the tone rows used in it. One often cannot even make sense of the unresolved dissonance; to the average listener, this music sounds as if it has no beginning, middle, or end. One languishes, it seems, at the bitten tail of discord.

The ‘chaotic’ sense of modernist dissonance is more apparent in such music as George Antheil‘s Ballet Mécanique, much of the music of Varèse and Messiaen (this latter’s especially since the 1940s), and Stockhausen works like Gruppen and Kontakte. As a result, the classical avant-garde has been unpopular, and the average listener drifted away from it and towards jazz and rock ‘n’ roll.

Though these two popular forms started out with harmony that’s simple enough to follow, they, too, grew more dissonant over time. Examples in jazz start out with the altered and extended chords played by Thelonius Monk; dissonance later intensified with the avant-garde and free jazz of players like Cecil Taylor, with his flurries of tone clusters on the piano, or Ornette Coleman‘s improvising in no recognizable key.

Rock music grew more harmonically adventurous first with the Beatles, who proved that pop can embrace a whole world of harmony beyond twelve-bar blues and clichéd progressions like I-vi-ii-V. This experimentation continued in the psychedelic era, with Frank Zappa‘s music, and ultimately with progressive rock in the 1970s, with bands like King Crimson and Gentle Giant in particular daring to play harsh dissonances. In all of these examples, we can see a cyclical movement all the way around the body of the ouroboros of music, from the bitten tail of extreme dissonance to the biting head of simple harmony, then along the serpent’s coiled body back towards the tail–that is, more and more harmonic adventurousness in both jazz and rock.

Sometimes, the extreme dissonance of modernism in postwar classical music simply leads to, largely if not absolutely, an abandonment of sounds of definite pitch, as can be heard in such examples of music exclusively for percussion as Varèse’s Ionisation, John Cage‘s Constructions, Stockhausen’s Zyklus and Mikrophonie I and II, and Iannis Xenakis‘s Psappha. After hearing a litany of screaming cacophony, the sound of pitchless instruments can feel restful in comparison, a shift from the serpent’s bitten tail to its biting head.

Dynamics

As far as going from one extreme of dynamics to the other, from absolute silence–the serpent’s bitten tail–to deafening loudness–the biting head–is concerned, we find ourselves starting and ending with the postwar avant-garde. That is to say, we can start with Cage’s ‘silent’ works, his 4’33” and his 0’00”, and end with examples of danger music, which sometimes uses sounds so loud that they may risk deafening the listener and/or performer. Loudness leads to silence.

Less extreme manifestations of this sort of thing can be found in dance clubs and rock concerts, in which the booming music may not cause permanent, profound deafness, but it may weaken one’s hearing, requiring one, for example, to turn up the volume to an extreme loudness, just to be able to hear the talking on the TV with reasonable clarity.

Extreme loudness, the serpent’s head, leads to the silence of the hearing impaired, the tail, then to extreme loudness again, turning up the volume as a movement along the serpent’s coiled body from its tail back to its head.

From Planned Sounds to Non-planned Ones

The dialectical relationship between what is planned in music and what isn’t manifests itself in many forms. Though music is notated, there’s also plenty of room for interpreting how exactly to play those notes from performance to performance, even in precisely notated classical music or film scores.

Part of the great skill of jazz musicians is to be able to improvise, to invent melodies on the spot during a live performance. If they play a wrong note, it’s advisable to play it loud, to give off the illusory impression that they “meant to do that.”

As for soloing in rock music, the playing is largely prepared and practiced, with a little wiggle room for impromptu variations on a few notes here and there. Zappa noted this general tendency among rock guitarists while contrasting it with his own, totally improvised playing, not knowing at all what notes he would play until the very moment he began the solo onstage, fully aware of the risk of making the occasional mistake in front of his fans.

Such is the yin-and-yang relationship between planned and unplanned music along the coiled body of the ouroboros. As far as the area of the meeting extremes is concerned, where the head bites the tail, we can return to the postwar avant-garde. On the one hand, there is total organization in the form of total serialism in the 1950s music of composers like Boulez and Stockhausen, as well as the player piano music of Conlon Nancarrow; on the other, there’s the aleatoric music of composers like Cage, the extreme of which is noted in the aforementioned ‘compositions,’ 4’33” and 0’00”.

Rhythm vs Arrhythmicality

The basic units of rhythm can be broken down to twos and threes, resulting in simple duple or triple times, then compound times. Common time can be subdivided into twos and threes, such as eighth notes of 3 + 3 + 2, or sixteenth notes of 3 + 3 + 3 + 3 + 2 + 2, or into other syncopations. We follow the beat hypnotically, not needing to think about it.

Next, we have odd time signatures, such as 7/8, 5/4, 11/8, or 13/8, as commonly heard in progressive rock and jazz-rock fusion. Then, to make rhythm even more irregular, we can have constantly changing time signatures, as we hear in The Rite of Spring. Now, instead of being hypnotized by the beat, we have to think about it and figure out all of the changes in order to follow and understand the music. Unconscious listening has thus changed to conscious listening.

Matters get even more complicated when we throw in irregular subdivisions of the beat, beyond triplets and going into quintuplets, septuplets, etc. An extreme example can be heard in that opening set of seventeen rising diatonic notes played at extreme speed on the clarinet from Gershwin‘s Rhapsody in Blue. The legato notes are played so fast that they sound like a glissando. We pay no attention to the rhythmic values of these notes, because quite simply, we can’t.

Then there’s the serialism of rhythm, or ‘modalizing’ of it, as heard in pieces like Messiaen’s “Mode des valeurs et intensités,” the second of his Quatre Etudes de rythme, for piano. The accents and durations of the notes are completely divorced from conventional notions of ‘expressivity,’ but they must be played exactly and figured out by the listener (following the music with the score in hand, no doubt!) in order to understand what is being heard. The same basic understanding of how to hear the accents, durations, etc., of total serialist compositions is to be kept in mind when listening to such music by Boulez, Stockhausen, etc.

Rhythmic irregularity, though precisely planned, as noted in the above-mentioned music by Messiaen, Boulez, and Stockhausen (as well as in the player piano music of Nancarrow), next shifts to a total lack of perceived rhythmic pulse, as in free jazz and the avant-garde experiments of Cecil Taylor. Taylor’s Units would play seemingly endless flurries of atonal phrases backed by drum rolls and arhythmic licks (notably by Andrew Cyrille). One doesn’t tap one’s foot to this music, yet perhaps one will sway one’s head and shoulders in circles to it.

As a result of these extremes, one goes back, from consciously working out a planned but extremely complex rhythm, to unconsciously listening to arrhytmicality. The ouroboros of music has come full circle once again.

Historical Cycles of Simplicity and Complexity

We can find these cyclical moments in the history of Western music at a number of times, especially in the modern era, but I’ll point out a few, when music rose in complexity to an extreme that was eventually felt to be excessive (the biting head of the ouroboros), and then there was a reaction against it, a return to simplicity (the serpent’s bitten tail).

In early Western music, we had monophony, as has mostly been the case in traditional forms of music in the rest of the world. From the monophonic singing of the old Church modes in Gregorian Chant (which used melisma to add sophistication and musical interest), complexity began in the use of organum (perfect fourths and fifths sung parallel to the original melody), which was the beginning stage leading to polyphony. When parallel melody was felt to be rather ‘primitive’ sounding, an interest in creating independent, but harmonious, melodic lines began.

Now, the fascination with experimenting with polyphony, which included polyphonic settings of sacred texts, led to increasingly complex music. Consider the wildly experimental, expressive, and chromatic music of Gesualdo in the late Renaissance period as a noteworthy example.

The Church became concerned with all of this growing complexity in its sacred music, since it became difficult to make out the religious texts sung in all of those intricate vocal lines. (The fact that secular tunes were being mixed into religious music didn’t ease the minds of Church authorities, either.) So there was an urge, at the time of the Counter-reformation and the Council of Trent, to simplify sacred music and tone down all of the tangled vocal polyphony. Such composers as Palestrina were considered ideal in the simplicity of their sacred music.

Homophony, beginning in sacred music, came to replace polyphony as the dominant form in European art music, the simplicity of one melody over a chordal accompaniment being preferred over the complexity of many independent melodic lines heard all at once. Small wonder JS Bach’s music, with its contrapuntal intricacy, wasn’t appreciated during his life, but rather the homophonic music of his sons, Johann Christian Bach and CPE Bach, was preferred back then.

By the Romantic period, the strict adherence to classical forms, such as the sonata form, binary form, minuet and trio, and rondo was beginning to be felt to be too limiting, and so 19th century composers were using these forms in looser and looser ways. Combining this growing freedom with more emotional expressivity and chromaticism, Romantic-era music was getting more complex.

By the 20th century, these movements towards more and more freedom, expressivity, and chromaticism was making music so eccentric, complex, and dissonant that it was beginning to alienate audiences. Some composers, like Stravinsky and Hindemith, were already toning down their modernism by resorting to neoclassicism, finding musical inspiration in the more remote past, though still presenting it with a quirky, modernist slant.

Postwar avant-garde classical music, such as the aforementioned total serialism and aleatoric music of the 1950s, as well as such developments as the micropolyphony of Ligeti, was also alienating listeners with what was perceived as its excessive complexity. And so by the 1960s, a new kind of music began: minimalism, with its simple, repetitive melodies as composed by such musicians as Steve Reich, Philip Glass, and Terry Riley.

In jazz, the complicated riffs of jazz-rock fusion in the early-to-mid 1970s were soon replaced by such leanings as simple, often Latin American, styles. One might think of how the jazz-fusion of groups like the Mahavishnu Orchestra and Return to Forever, with their flashy, virtuosic solos and tricky time changes, was a hot thing in the beginning, but then got simplified by the late 70s. Similarly, the popular Latin American simplicity of mid-to-late 70s Weather Report replaced the band’s originally intense experimentation early in the decade.

The peak of progressive rock experimentation had come by the mid-70s; then punk rock and new wave came along, and their popularity forced the prog dinosaurs to simplify their sound by the late 70s, as can be heard in the shift in musical style by bands like Genesis, Gentle Giant, Jethro Tull, and even UK (consider the difference between their first and second studio albums, from original drummer Bill Bruford‘s subtle use of dauntingly tricky meters to Terry Bozzio‘s more extroverted, but simpler, harder-hitting style). Yes’s 90125 was also essentially a pop album (as was Big Generator), with only the instrumental passage at the beginning of “Changes,” written by Alan White, sounding like prog, with its shifting from a bar each of 4/4 to 6/8, then from a bar of 4/4 to two bars of 6/8.

Asia, though being a prog supergroup with members like John Wetton, Steve Howe, and Carl Palmer, were essentially known for playing pop songs, such as their hit single, “Heat of the Moment.” The 80s King Crimson, like JS Bach in his own day, were a band born too late, as it were: the complexity of their music required too much intelligence for the average listener to appreciate, so they could only be a short-lived cult band. Still, even they wrote a few songs that could be deemed more or less radio-friendly, like the funky “Elephant Talk” and “Sleepless,” and the pop-oriented “Heartbeat.” King Crimson were the exception that proved the rule, as far as 80s pop was concerned.

Since the simplification of 80s pop and rock, some examples of a return to complexity (to an extent) have existed, i.e., the odd time signatures that Soundgarden liked to play in the 1990s, among other examples. But mainstream rock since then has simplified again, with a few exceptions here and there, along with the hybrid prog/metal of groups like Dream Theater.

Conclusion

I hope the examples I’ve shown have demonstrated how the dialectical relationship between opposites, as I symbolize with the ouroboros, can be applied to a number of aspects of music and music history: consonance vs dissonance, loudness vs softness, rhythm vs non-rhythm, and simplicity vs complexity in music history.

The wave-like, or serpentine, motion between opposites is, I believe, one of the keys to understanding all of life…rather like listening to…the music of the spheres, if you will.

Analysis of ‘My Dinner with Andre’

My Dinner with Andre is a 1981 film directed by Louis Malle. It was written by André Gregory and Wallace (‘Wally’) Shawn, who also star in it, playing fictionalized versions of themselves having a discussion at dinner in Café des Artistes in Manhattan, the topics including experimental theatre, the nature of theatre and of life, and Andre’s spiritual experiences.

Just as Andre and Wally are based on the actors who play them, Andre’s experiences as described in the movie are based on the real-life experiences of Gregory from the mid- to late 1970s: his growing misgivings about the theatre, the fear of a trend towards fascism in the US (he and Shawn are Jews), his trip to Poland to work with Jerzy Grotowski on experimental theatre before private audiences, and his years spent with spiritual communities like Findhorn.

The film has received universal acclaim, with a 92% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes, based on 25 reviews. Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert praised it highly on Sneak Previews, which kept the film in theaters for a year.

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

A fascinating irony about this film, brilliantly made fun of at the end of Waiting for Guffman, with Corky’s “My Dinner with Andre action figures” [!], is that the bulk of the film is just these two men sitting at a table in a restaurant chatting…and yet Andre is discussing these out-of-this-world experiences in remote places like Poland, Tibet, India, the Sahara, and Scotland. Andre is advocating going out there and experiencing real life in all of its mystical ecstasy, hallucinatory madness, and tear-inducing trauma…yet he and Wally are just sitting in a restaurant in New York, chatting the whole time, never leaving the city.

Since both men are playwrights and actors, in real life as well as in the film, we see a blurred distinction between the acting world and the real world, reminding us of Jacques‘s famous speech in As You Like It: “All the world’s a stage…” Andre’s ‘sermon,’ if you will, spoken during this ‘last supper’ with Wally, is that we need to break free of the phoniness, the ‘theatre,’ of our boring routines and experience real life. Andre’s dropping out of the New York theatrical scene to travel the world is thus symbolic of such a break with the numbing routine of ordinary life.

Wally, his dialectical opposite, defends this routine, though. The film begins with him on his way to meet Andre at the restaurant, walking the streets of New York, getting on a graffiti-covered subway, and thinking about all of his day-to-day troubles as a struggling playwright, barely making ends meet. He only reluctantly is going to meet Andre, having not seen his old colleague in years, and having heard dauntingly bizarre stories of what the theatre drop-out has been doing.

Wally lived an easy life as a kid in a rich family, always thinking about art; but now, he’s 36, and only thinking about money. As the pragmatic realist of the two men, Wally is preoccupied with the material issues of life. Andre, having much more money and thus able to travel the world, is more preoccupied with abstract, idealistic things.

Wally would rather his girlfriend, Debbie, cook his dinner than eat with Andre. Instead, she has to be a breadwinner for them, as a waitress, rather than ‘play the role’ of housewife. In the dull routine of his life, the phony existence of his that’s symbolized by his work as a dramatist, he’s so conformist as to have his girlfriend cook for him instead of him cooking for himself.

In his private thoughts, a soliloquy given in voiceover as he’s on the subway, he remembers Andre’s “amazing work…with his company, the Manhattan Project (the actual name of the real André Gregory’s theatrical company). When we consider Andre’s misgivings about the role of theatre in modern life, how he, in his discussion at dinner with Wally, talks about how fake our interactions are with others, how like actors pretending and not living real life, we can see how fitting it is that Andre named his company after the research undertaking that resulted in the first of those very weapons that can wipe out all life on the Earth.

The notion of Andre suddenly dropping out of the theatre, traveling the world, and ‘talking with trees,’ when he never used to want to leave his home and family, suggests to Wally that “something terrible had happened to Andre,” as opposed to what Andre will insist were deep, mystical, enlightening experiences.

Just before entering the restaurant, Wally puts on a tie: all actors must put on their costumes before walking onstage. Given Andre’s problems, Wally wonders if he is supposed to play the role of doctor, of psychiatrist, for his apparently ill former colleague.

It’s interesting that the chosen restaurant is called the Café des Artistes, where two men of the theatre will engage in a theatrical dialogue of their own, with Wally doing an acting job of pretending to be interested in whatever Andre has to say. Wally waits for him to arrive at the bar.

Wally has heard a recent story of Andre being seen sobbing because he’d seen a scene from Autumn Sonata, in which Ingrid Bergman‘s character says, “I could always live in my art, but never in my life.” These words touched Andre so keenly because this has precisely been his problem as a dramatist: his whole life has been only fakery, acting, pretending; it has never been a real life. All the world’s a stage…

Andre arrives, sees Wally, and gives him a warm hug and a big smile. Wally, the actor, puts on his fake smile for Andre, says Andre looks “terrific,” though Andre insists that he feels terrible. (Falsely saying an ailing or profoundly unhappy person looks “terrific,” a phoniness that infuriates Andre, will be dealt with again later.) Fittingly, Wally notes that he’s “really in the theatre” at this moment.

Early on in their conversation, Andre mentions Grotowski, his old theatrical mentor who’d also dropped out of the theatre. Their table is ready, and they can go sit down: the rest of the film, minus Wally’s taxi ride home at the end, is just them sitting at their table chatting, for about an hour and forty minutes out of the total hour and fifty-one minutes.) Kids, get out Corky’s action figures and have some fun!

Since Wally is feeling very nervous about having to socialize with Andre for the whole duration of this dinner, he figures the best way he can get through it all is to ask him questions. He’s sometimes thought of himself as a private investigator, as a detective: once again, Wally is finding himself an actor playing roles instead of just being himself. He still has that fittingly fake smile on his face. They order their meals, Wally hardly understanding the French on the menu, while Andre orders expertly…even though Wally has always known Andre to be quite ascetic in his eating habits. Maybe Andre is being a bit of an actor here, too.

Though at first reluctant to talk about what he’s been doing for the past five years, Andre finally opens up about it. First, he discusses going to Poland to be with Grotowski and a group of Polish actors in a forest there. None of these actors could speak English.

As the leader of a group of people who couldn’t understand a word he was saying, and vice versa, Andre had no frame of reference by which he could communicate with them or organize the improvisational theatrical events. Out in a forest, they were far away from modern civilization and all of the things that Andre had been coming to dislike. The actors would act on impulse, doing anything that came to mind…but they, as improvisors, weren’t trying to embody any kind of character from a play. They were being themselves.

They weren’t speaking from a script. They weren’t pretending to be someone else. They weren’t being fake, or following a plan. They were being real, as natural as their green setting. Andre was seeing real life in action, a breaking-free from the routines of New York.

Andre speaks of Grotowski’s “beehives,” paratheatrical events that involved simple interactive exchanges and unstructured work that Andre was fascinated with. Grotowski made Andre lead a beehive, which made Andre very nervous, since he didn’t know what to do to organize an event with a huge number of Polish strangers. But that was the point: there was to be no organization at all. The group of people ended up singing a beautiful song of St. Francis, a song these people didn’t even know how to sing.

Now, Grotowski’s beehives–in real life, that is–generally weren’t successful as attempts to blur the line between performer and audience, to bring about genuine creative spontaneity; the participants mostly gave stock emotional reactions, causing stereotypical, clichéd performances. Andre’s beehive, however, seems to have been a glorious success with this St. Francis song, sung over and over again.

There were no costumes or makeup for the performance, but it was a performance all the same. The beehive was, as it were, a sublation of the opposites of performance and non-performed, spontaneous, natural action. People were singing the song and dancing an impromptu dance; it built into a group trance, something Andre compares to one of Hitler’s Nuremberg rallies (this being one of a number of references in the film to Naziism), so we see how trance can be heavenly or hellish.

Nonetheless, all of this improvisational work in Poland has been like an enlightening, mystical experience for Andre, a discovery that theatrical performances can still be genuinely felt, as long as they maintain this level of spontaneity. Life, like drama, can be real if unscripted, free of routine.

An example of one of the wonderful experiences he had with the Polish improvisers was seeing two of them fall in love. This, during an improvisation about being on an airplane with a bad motor, and therefore fear among the passengers that they might die. Here, we see the heaven and the hell of the mystical state felt in trance-like improvisation, the fusion of acting with real life.

These two lovers, having left the group to be alone in the forest, understood the real meaning of these unstructured improvisations: it was all about really living.

On the last day of the improvisations in the forest in Poland, the group arranged a christening, a baptism for Andre. It was a simple ceremony, with flowers, candles and torches set up all over a castle in “a miracle of light.” Again, this was a spontaneous act, yet also a ceremony, a fusion of the planned with the impulsive act, a dialectic of theatre and life. A man and a woman played the roles of Andre’s godfather and godmother. He was named Yendrosh, and it really felt like a new name for him; it could be said that Andre felt reborn.

He says that this experience in the forest was the first time in his life that he’d ever felt truly alive. Again, such a mystical experience has both a heavenly and a hellish aspect to it; such spiritual feelings are not a mere sentimental removal of all of one’s pain. In Andre’s feeling of being truly alive, there’s also the frightening realization of the opposite of that state…death. He will later discuss an experience he had during Halloween of almost dying that is the dialectical opposite of this experience in the Polish forest. The mystical feeling of being connected to everything means also being connected to death.

Andre’s next major topic of discussion is The Little Prince, and certain feelings of synchronicity associated with Antoine de Saint-Exupéry‘s book. Andre discusses a trip to the Sahara with a Japanese monk (whom Andre imagines to embody the little prince) to work on a play based on the book. Analogous to Andre’s travels around the world, the little prince also leaves his tiny planet to visit a number of other planets, including Earth, where he meets a pilot who’s crash-landed in the Sahara, far from civilization…rather like the Polish forest. So if Kozan, the Japanese monk, is the little prince, in this context, does this make Andre the pilot?

A recurring criticism in The Little Prince is that of adults; the little prince considers them to be very strange. Andre’s experience in the Polish forest, with the unstructured improvisations, was that it made everyone like children at play again, something he found to be wonderful. The little prince’s nobility is in his childlike state: he’s a prince because he’s little. Andre and the improvisers were truly alive because they were children again.

Other parallels between My Dinner with Andre and The Little Prince can be found, thus further justifying Andre’s discussion of the book in the movie. Both stories involve two males, the one telling the other about his travels to many places, meeting interesting and even strange people. Wally thus is the pilot, and Andre in this context is the little prince. Wally at first dreads having to have dinner with Andre, worrying about his own personal, financial problems; the pilot is at first annoyed with the little prince wanting him to draw a sheep for him, when he urgently needs to repair his plane. Just as the little prince cares for the flower that he’s left behind on his little planet, and is fearful of her dying, so does Andre care about his wife, Chiquita, and his two kids, Nicolas and Marina, and he grieves bitterly over his mother’s death.

One major difference between the two stories, though, is that while in The Little Prince, the two friends meet in a desert, the pilot having a limited supply of drinking water, in My Dinner with Andre, the two friends are eating in a fine restaurant, with Andre ultimately treating Wally. This opposition of famine and feast, however, can be interpreted dialectically, as can the film’s other oppositions: theatre vs life, routine vs spontaneity, ecstasy vs agony, staying in the same place vs going out there into the world.

Andre’s noting of the oft-repeated word “tame” in The Little Prince is also worthy of commentary. The little prince tames his flower, the fox, and by implication, the pilot, making them all his friends. Andre tamed his Polish improvisers, making them all his friends, too. We all need taming, so we can be each other’s friends. In the act of spontaneously experiencing real life in those improvisations, the group of people collectively experiences a mystical, ecstatic oneness, inspiring mutual love.

In any case, nothing productive came from the trip to the Sahara with Kozan, so Andre, still acting on impulse (a habit he no doubt picked up from the Polish improvisations), brought the Japanese monk with him to New York to stay with him and his family. Kozan ended up staying with them for six months, taking over, since Andre, always wanting to travel to places like Tibet and India, wasn’t being much of a father.

It was as though Kozan and Andre were trading places. The monk taught the family about meditation, Asia, and his monastery, but he also began wearing Gucci shoes under his robes, as well as eating beef. Just as Andre had been neglecting his children, Kozan came off as not liking them, either. His taking over was like him being the new father…the implication being that Andre, wanting to go to Tibet, getting into meditation, and having these mystical experiences, was turning into a kind of Buddhist. In these two men we see another instance of the unity of all things, the blurred boundary between self and other.

Andre speaks of a hallucination he had in a Catholic Church on Christmas Eve: he saw a six-foot-eight apparition, half-man, half-bull, with blue skin and violets coming out of its eyelids! It remained for the whole Mass. Andre couldn’t erase the monster’s presence from his mind. With enlightenment also comes madness, paradoxically–that mixture of heaven and hell. And indeed, he did feel some enlightenment with this madness that wouldn’t go away, for Andre felt that the creature was there to comfort him, that even though he wasn’t being productive as a dramatist, all was okay, just a part of the journey. Hang in there, Andre, for the bad luck would soon change to good.

Around when Kozan left, Andre got this odd idea of getting a flag, and he ended up getting one with a Tibetan swastika on it. Though, of course, it was nothing at all like the Nazi swastika, one cannot help making the association, and so when he took the flag home, his wife and daughter found it intolerable to look at. Again, we see in this flag associations of extreme opposites: the ancient, Tibetan meaning of the swastika, a symbol of divinity and spirituality; and the Nazi meaning, linked with virulent racial hatred.

After this, he went to India in the hopes of finding great spiritual enlightenment, but he left the place disappointed, feeling his experiences were no better than those of a tourist. After that, he went to Findhorn in Scotland, and found far better spiritual inspiration among the people there and their plants. He tells Wally of having run in the forest there, in a state “where laughter and tears seem to merge.” He was also having lots of wild hallucinations at the time: once again, enlightenment meets madness, heaven meets hell in the realm of mysticism. Indeed, Andre alludes to William Blake, who wrote The Marriage of Heaven and Hell.

In the fall, after these experiences, he had his last wild one, on Long Island. This was the hellish one to contrast with the heavenly one he had in the Polish forest. It was during Halloween. He and the other participants were made to write out their last will and testament. After this, he had to wear a blindfold and run through a field. Then he was taken to a basement and made to get naked. He was so scared, he was thinking about Nazi death camps and secret police.

The participants of this Halloween event took photos of him, naked and blindfolded; he was made to run naked in a forest, still blindfolded, and taken on a stretcher through forests and lowered into the ground. It was one of six graves, each eight feet deep! Wood and dirt were put on him, and a sheet was put over his head, all to make him feel buried alive. He was left in there for about a half-hour, though he didn’t know how long he’d been left there…then he was “resurrected,” as it were.

The blindfold was taken off, and they had him run through fields until he came to “a great circle of fire” with music and wine, “and everyone danced until dawn.” So his first experience in the Polish forest was the ecstatic, nirvana-like one that he wanted in some way to relive as best he could in places like the Sahara, India, Findhorn, and this Halloween event…but this last one was so traumatizing that Andre didn’t want to do these things anymore. Still, in all of it, he was really living.

The extremes of these experiences, going to heaven and back, and later to hell and back, are rather like going all the way along the coiled body of the ouroboros, as I’ve described it and used as a symbol of the dialectical relationship of opposites, something I’ve written about in so many other blog posts. The biting head represents one extreme, and the bitten tail represents the opposite extreme, them both meeting at the bite, of course, while the rest of the serpent’s coiled body symbolizes all the intermediate points on a circular continuum.

When Andre, so disillusioned as he was with the state of the theatre in New York in the mid-1970s, left it to experience the blissful spontaneity of the beehives in the Polish forest, he moved up the serpent’s coiled body from the back half, near the tail, to the biting head. He loved it, like a cocaine high, and he tried to sustain that high, tried to stay as close to the serpent’s biting head (if you’ll indulge me in my mixed metaphor, Dear Reader!) as he could.

It is a reality in life, though, that the initial ecstasy of the ‘religious experience’ will wear off over time, and one will come back down to a middling experience, one around the halfway point between the head and the tail. Still, Andre felt the urge to return to that point of extremity, but he went the other way during the Halloween event…he went to the bitten tail, where a kind of harrowing of hell led back to the biting head, the circle of fire, the wine and the dancing–heaven.

This going all the way around the circular continuum that I’d have the ouroboros symbolize is the essence of what Andre would deem living real life. It isn’t a sentimental place where one never feels pain again…on the contrary, one can feel torturous pain as well as profound joy. All of it, all the same, is experiencing life to the fullest.

Wally, on the other hand, prefers life in the comfortable, safe area in the middle of the coiled body of the ouroboros–not too happy, but not too scary, either. Hence, towards the end of the movie, he vehemently defends his enjoyment of simple pleasures: coffee, an electric blanket to keep himself warm in winter, writing his plays, and being satisfied with just staying in New York.

The extremes that Andre has gone through have made him feel as though he’s guilty of some kind of delusion of grandeur, and thus he’s a terrible person, as bad as someone like Albert Speer, the Nazi architect and Minister of Armaments and War Production. Andre compares himself to the man because he imagines himself, like Speer, to be guilty of narcissistically thinking himself above the normal rules of human conduct, that they don’t apply to him.

Since Andre has seen a lot of death around him over the past several years, he knows that when you die, you do it alone. None of your life’s achievements matter anymore. Dying alone feels like facing judgement before God, as it were; so Andre is feeling guilt over the excesses he’s been experiencing. Were they any less theatre than the plays he’s done? Were those events he participated in any less phony than his plays? The trauma of the live burial, combined with the deaths and hospitalizations in his family (a family he left behind, he abandoned, to travel the world) must have gotten to him.

His mother died, other family members have had medical problems…and he had left these important people in his life in a Buddha-like quest for enlightenment in India, Tibet, etc. Far from attaining his desired spiritual growth, Andre was indulging in some kind of self-absorbed solipsism–if anything, a spiritual degeneration…or so he feels, at least.

In his feeling that he was fooling himself in this spiritual quest, we see another example of the dialectical relationship between good and evil, heaven and hell, saint and (Nazi-like) sinner. He starts complaining about some talkative Norwegian director, telling story after story, and sounding pompous. Yet what has Andre been doing this whole time, if not talking and talking endlessly, telling story after story, while Wally patiently listens? Just as with Kozan, this Norwegian is another double for Andre, another case of the blurred boundary between self and other, further proof of the oneness of everything.

The Norwegian gabbed about his mother constantly, and Andre found him so intolerable that he politely asked his garrulous guest to leave. Recall that, around this time, Andre’s mother died. He wept, since this guest had been a good friend of his for some time. Then after the man left, Andre saw a man on the TV win at some sporting event, “smiling malevolently at his friends,” and Andre judged the guy harshly…then he realized he was projecting his own bad qualities onto him.

Just as he’d projected his own chattiness onto the Norwegian.

At a show on Billie Holliday, Andre was similarly judgmental of some businessmen-types, then again realized he was no better–just projecting his own vices onto them. When Andre’s speaking at this point in his discussion with Wally, his words are all shot out rapid-fire, like bullets from a machine gun. He is in quite an extreme, turbulent emotional state. He hates the theatrical phoniness of the world, yet he feels himself to be no less theatrical or phony!

And Wally, the whole time, is just listening to Andre pouring out his thoughts in an endless torrent, listening as if he was Andre’s psychoanalyst, making the occasional comment or interpretation, trying to figure out just what is troubling him.

Andre, in his highly emotional state, feels the world is getting worse and worse. Few people seem aware of how bad things are. He recently met a number of people who said he looked ‘wonderful’ (i.e., his physical appearance), when he really felt awful; recall that Wally, when he first saw Andre in the restaurant, said he looked “terrific,” yet he’s really been feeling awful.

Only when Andre met a woman, whose aging, beloved aunt was in hospital for a cataract and was crippled from a fall from her poorly-prepared bed (therefore the woman was very upset for her aunt), did he find in her someone who, in her own pain, could clearly see how awful he felt! Only those of us in deep pain, roused from the torpor of our comfort zones, can see “with complete clarity.” The rest of the complacent world cannot, because they’re living in a kind of insane dream world.

Andre’s observations here tie in with what he was talking about before, with the Halloween event, and how I interpreted it above, in terms of my ouroboros symbolism. His having gone to hell and back, from the trauma of the serpent’s bitten tail to the enlightenment of its biting head, is like this woman’s pain for her aunt’s sake giving her the empathic insight to see Andre’s pain for what it really is.

Wally can empathize with Andre, too, for he can understand that those who thought Andre looked “wonderful” couldn’t see the real him–they only saw what they wanted to see, being in their insane dream world. Andre discusses his dying mother in the hospital, and how infuriated he felt with a doctor who saw her and said it was so “wonderful how she’s coming along.” Andre felt she looked as awful as any survivor of Auschwitz or Dachau. Again, this doctor was in a complacent dream world.

This idea of Andre’s, that most people are in some kind of fog, in a trance, a dream world, also ties in with the idea explored above about how life is like theatre, a display of false emotions and scripted words, planned routine, lacking spontaneity and genuine creativity. As Wally is growing more sympathetic with what Andre is saying, we can see Wally going from just politely agreeing with him, acting out a role of his own, waking from his own dream world, to offering some experiences of his own of this kind of inappropriate communication, from friends whose words are ultimately hostile to him.

Social convention, Wally observes, requires one to express oneself indirectly, resulting in awkward, inappropriate word choices. This is the phony theatre of life that Andre has been trying to escape from. In fact, the hostile words of Wally’s friends were in the context of a theatrical performance in which there were serious problems with Wally’s costuming, a cat suit he’d be uncomfortable wearing onstage, making him hear everything wrong. His friends, colleagues in the performance, were pointing these problems out in a taunting way, as if to laugh at him and make him feel humiliated onstage in front of a presumably large audience. Here is an example of how My Dinner with Andre uses theatre as a metaphor for life.

Wally, in his having not yet woken from his own torpor from the societal dream world, hadn’t known what to think about his colleagues’ taunting words. Over the course of his listening to Andre’s recounting of his extreme experiences, though, Wally is beginning to wake up to the kind of world we’re all living in.

Andre and Wally continue to discuss how bizarre people’s topics of conversation can be, such as the death of Mary Jo Kopechne–and laughing about it. This joking about macabre things is a reflection of social alienation and a lack of consciousness…it’s also another example of people performing, in the theatre of life, rather than being themselves. Hence, Grotowski left the theatre, as Andre attempted to.

People, in these public performances, know exactly how they ought to act and present themselves, yet privately, they don’t know who they are or what they should be doing, what Marx called alienation from one’s species essence. We focus on goals and plans, the structure of the performance of the theatre of life, but none of those goals and plans have anything to do with reality. Life becomes habitual, dream-like, and meaningless.

Very rarely do things happen in a spontaneous way anymore, since if they did, people would be too disoriented by the shock to deal with it, as happened when Brando rejected his Godfather Oscar, having Sacheen Littlefeather decline it on his behalf as a protest against Hollywood’s negative portrayal of Native Americans. Andre insists that if we’re always living by habit, those planned performances in the theatre of life, then we’re not really living.

In Sanskrit, he says, the root of their verb for “to be” is the same as “to grow,” or “to make grow.” To exist in a meaningful sense, we must grow and help other people and things grow.

Andre then discusses a mathematician associated with Findhorn who refused to have any kind of imaginary or dream life, yet who saw, in the gardens of Edinburgh, a faun! A man who insisted on having only a direct perception of reality, apparently saw a mythological creature! Again, the boundary between fantasy and reality has been blurred. All is one. The extreme insistence on experiencing only direct reality, the serpent’s biting head, can lead to the experience of fantasy, the bitten tail.

We’re so stuck in our states of habit that we lose consciousness of what we’re doing or saying, ignoring such things as the taste of our food or the macabre things we laugh about, and thus we enter that dream world that Andre dreads so much. Wally, enjoying the comfort of his electric blanket or the taste of the food he’s eating in the restaurant, has far less of such a dread.

Andre, not liking such technological advances as electric blankets, feels that the comforts provided by these things lull us into a dangerous comfort that blinds us to direct perception of reality. When, lacking the electric blanket, you feel the discomfort of the cold of winter, not only are you aware of your own discomfort, you’re also aware of the discomfort of your cold partner lying beside you, and you feel compassion for him or her. Schopenhauer noted how the hell of suffering leads to the heaven of compassionate love, as I observed here.

Andre complains about how we treat one another in our semi-conscious state, and Wally agrees that this is a problem. Some of this alienation is due to class differences, and some of it, as Wally observes, is based on being focused only on our experiences in our own part of the world, ignoring what’s outside of it.

Though Wally admits that he ignores large parts of the world, like Africa, which are not relevant to his immediate place in it, he enjoys writing plays that he feels connect him with some sense of reality. He agrees with Andre that the theatre (a metaphor for real life, remember) is in terrible shape, yet at least a few years ago, people acknowledged what bad shape it was in. Now, it’s so bad that people can’t even see what’s wrong with it.

Andre, too, understands that the theatre, if done well, can bring the audience face to face with reality. He tells Wally about a production he did of The Bacchae when, at the point of the dismemberment of Pentheus, he’d wanted to have a head…a real one…passed around the audience. The actress playing Agave, for obvious reasons, refused to do this. Andre wants a kind of theatre that shocks people out of their dream-state, but contemporary theatre lulls people further to sleep by just presenting things all too close to everyday life, so close to it that people don’t notice what’s wrong.

Still, Wally, who is becoming more and more engaged in the conversation, insists that one shouldn’t need to escape all the way to Mount Everest to experience the fullness of life. Surely, one can experience that fullness just from a trip to the local cigar store, provided one’s consciousness is sufficiently sharpened. Surely one can still write meaningful, realistic plays today, too! All of reality, human experience, is uniform on a deeper, mystical level…all is one, so where one experiences it is irrelevant.

Andre agrees with Wally’s argument in principle, but most people are blind to this uniformity of truth. Most cannot see that nirvana and samsara are the same, as the Mahayana Buddhists see these opposite states of being. This blindness of most people has become more and more serious in recent years, as Andre has come to understand.

Now, Andre comes to an extremely important point, perhaps the most important one of the entire film. This inability of most people to see the nirvana in samsara, the hidden Mount Everest, so to speak, inside the ordinary cigar store, comes from a boredom, an apathy to life that in turn comes from a self-perpetuating kind of brainwashing.

…and with this brainwashing, things start to get scary.

This self-induced brainwashing, this conditioning not to care about what’s going on around us, was started “by a world totalitarian government based on money.” Now, I suspect that most people who hear Andre’s words at this point focus on “world totalitarian government” (which it surely is), but pay far less attention to “based on money” (a.k.a. capitalism).

So many people in recent years have been lulled into believing in the popular NWO conspiracy theory, which tends to be a far-right-wing conspiracy theory (though admittedly, some leftists believe in a version of it). They imagine that its centre of evil is in the government-as-such, rather than in the love of money, and the power that comes from owning billions of US dollars.

The far-right ideologues that believe in the coming totalitarian ‘One-World-Government’ also think it is a kind of socialism, since, apparently socialism is ‘anything a government does,’ rather than how I explained it here and here. But Andre isn’t talking about a left-wing world government; he’s talking about fascism (recall all of his references to Naziism in the movie). Our current world government is in Washington, DC, NATO is an extension of it, and American military bases can be found all over the world.

The totalitarianism we need to fear isn’t communism; it’s capitalist imperialism, which has plundered the Third World for resources in a big way since at least the years of the Scramble for Africa. Meanwhile, those of us living in the imperial core, like Wally, have wandered about apathetic to the problem, because if we did wake up to it, and began to care, the powers-that-be would feel threatened. Those powers have an investment in keeping us all asleep.

Andre tells Wally of a man who no longer reads newspapers or watches TV, to escape the brainwashing. He speaks of another, a man from Findhorn in his eighties who’s trying to save the trees, who goes everywhere with a backpack because he could end up anywhere tomorrow. This old man told Andre that New Yorkers never leave the city, even if they say they really want to. He told Andre that the reason for this staying in New York is because they’re psychologically imprisoned there; the Big Apple has become a kind of concentration camp that the inmates have built for themselves. Their pride in what they’ve built (symbolic of nationalism?) keeps them imprisoned in the city.

Andre says that he and Chiquita have had the same, growing fear that they need to get out of this Auschwitz that they’re living in…except that every city, in every country around the world, is growing into its own Auschwitz. There’s nowhere to escape to anymore. In this predicament, we see the sublation of the dialectic of Andre’s wanderlust and globetrotting on the one hand, and Wally’s preference to stay in New York on the other, all encapsulated in a film the bulk of which is just two men chatting at a dinner table, going nowhere else.

Andre then states his belief that the 1960s were the last decade “of the human being, before he was extinguished.” For him, this moment being 1981, when the movie was made, is the beginning of “the rest of the future, that from now on, they [the people, that is] will simply be all these robots walking around, feeling nothing, thinking nothing, and there’ll be nothing left almost to remind them that there once was a species called a human being, with feelings and thoughts…”

It’s significant that this beginning of “the rest of the future,” especially now, understood by us in hindsight, should be the early 1980s, with the beginning of the ‘Reagan Revolution.’ Recall that this “world totalitarian government” is “based on money,” that is, it’s a capitalist government…and Reagan and Thatcher were the ones who inaugurated the neoliberal, “free market” version of capitalism in the 1980s.

As I’ve argued many times, right-wing libertarian ‘small government’ is a con game, which, by cutting taxes for the rich and deregulating businesses so capitalists can maximize profits, allows the wealthy to become super-wealthy and thus buy all the political parties in order to control them better. When the common people try to resist, this capitalist government becomes more authoritarian…fascist, even.

Back in the 1960s, political leftism was still a formidable force, pushing liberals to the left, if only relatively so. Now, after all the ill effects of Reaganite neoliberalism have set in, liberals are so far to the right, without even realizing it, that they’re banging the war drums against Russia and supporting Ukrainian Nazis!

Technology has numbed us with smartphones, tablets, and social media to the point where we scroll and scroll while ignoring those sitting next to us. Andre is being prophetic about these social ills we now have, and his fears of a resurgence of fascism, way back in the 1980s, when the ideology was still latent, were also foretold by Frank Zappa, who was scoffed at for it…and yet what Reagan began has become much more apparent in the 2020s, with such things as the overturning of Roe vs Wade and the authoritarian measures used to deal with the pandemic.

Now, Andre has some hope that we can “preserve the light” through these new dark ages. Pockets of resistance are popping up here and there with organizations like Findhorn, the kind of thing Andre was trying to do with his spontaneous beehives. He wants a new language, one of the heart, as there was in the Polish forest, where language wasn’t needed. He wants us all to have a “sense of being united to all things,” because all is one.

After hearing all these wacky things that Andre has been going on and on about, Wally offers his thoughts about it all. As Andre’s dialectical opposite, Wally isn’t concerned with deep, spiritual issues or political conspiracies; he’s just trying to survive. He is living on the plain, ordinary, surface level of material existence.

Accordingly, Wally derives happiness from simple things: being with his girlfriend, Debbie, drinking coffee, and reading Charleton Heston’s autobiography. He gains intellectual satisfaction from writing plays and reading those of other playwrights, as well as reading reviews of those plays. Simple stuff.

He has a notebook with lists of errands and everyday responsibilities–his routine to which he adheres, all antithetical stuff to Andre’s hyper-spontaneous philosophy of life. Wally can’t imagine there being anything more than his simple, hum-drum life. Why can’t we just be happy with what we have? he wonders.

The dialectical opposition between Andre and Wally is that the former is hovering–to use my ouroboros symbolism again–around where the serpent is biting its tail, at the extremes, while the latter is in the moderate middle of the serpent’s coiled body. Ironically, both Andre and Wally are, each in his own way, experiencing a verson of both opposites together: Andre has had heaven and hell thrust in his face in a vivid, shocking way, while Wally has had both in the sense of being in the middle of them, a dull experience of half of the one and half of the other. This is the unity of their opposition to each other, further proof that all is one.

Wally also rejects Andre’s synchronicity, affirming modern science over a belief in heavenly-ordained coincidences. Wally can understand the temptation to believe in synchronicity, but his rational mind cannot accept a belief in omens or portents of the future.

Now, Andre and Wally don’t completely disagree: Andre acknowledges that total belief in omens can be abused in order to avoid responsibility for one’s own actions. The occasional agreement of dialectical opposites is their sublation, a manifestation of their unity in opposition. Such unity is a further example of how My Dinner with Andre uses dialectical opposites to show how all is one.

Andre acknowledges that the kind of spirituality he’s been exploring can grow authoritarian, even fascistic; but science, too, if held in too high an esteem, can also be perceived as a kind of “magical force” capable of solving anything. He sees a destructiveness in science that people are reacting against.

The two men agree that both religious feeling and a credulous acceptance of science, taken to excesses, can be equally bad for humanity. So again, we see the dialectical opposites in Andre and Wally being sublated.

Wally observes that the whole purpose of Andre’s workshops was to strip away all purposefulness in order to experience “pure being,” which seems Zen-like. Not doing any particular thing, a state of ‘no-thing-ness.’ Wally objects to such a project, feeling instead that one shouldn’t have moments of not trying to do anything. It’s in our basic human nature to have purpose, he argues.

Andre notes that the idea of doing nothing, of just being, seems to frighten Wally, to make him nervous, which Wally deems a perfectly understandable emotion to have in such a situation. Andre considers it equally absurd, and deadening, to find oneself always needing to have something to do, a neurotic need that, incidentally, has only grown exponentially worse in our neoliberal era.

One should only do things if one really feels the passion to do them; but if one does things mechanically, as Andre says, one isn’t really living. One is just acting out roles in the phony theatre of life. In relationships, in marriage, this can be a problem, too; we often only play the roles of partner, husband, wife…the love is gone.

An irony about Andre’s own relationship with his wife and kids, after a day of being annoyed with them, was that a contemplation of what it would be like to leave them all, to abandon them, led to the realization that he all the more wanted to stay with them. However one chooses to do it, by going to the Sahara or just staying at home, Andre insists that we must, at some point in our lives, “cut out the noise,” stop performing, and listen to what’s inside ourselves, the silence.

Wally admits to disliking “those quiet moments”: they scare him. Perhaps they’re like doing Shadow Work, “the fear of unconscious impulses.” He’d feel exposed and vulnerable to failure. Andre can understand Wally’s fears: feeling emotions as intensely as Andre’s been feeling them can be overwhelming…but one can also be filled with overjoyed enthusiasm, a true lust for life.

All the patrons except Andre and Wally have left. The restaurant is about to close. Andre pays for the whole meal, so Wally can treat himself to a cab ride home.

The first of Satie‘s Trois Gymnopédies is heard on the piano. It’s a fitting piece of music to end the movie with, firstly because the title means “three nude dances,” symbolic of how Andre threw himself into the world ‘naked,’ as it were, vulnerable and unprotected from the abrasiveness of his surroundings; secondly, because the opening back-and-forth of the G-major 7th and D-major 7th chords suggests a symbolism of that unity-in-opposition as personified in Andre and Wally.

As Wally’s going home in the cab, he looks out the window and remembers all the places he’s been to at some point in his life. He’s feeling a mystical union with New York. Andre’s words have touched him. He knows that all is one.

…and he didn’t even need to leave the city to realize that unity.

Fascism Has Two Wings (There, I Fixed It)

I’m not leaving a link for my original article, Fascism Has Two Wings, because frankly, I’d rather you didn’t read it. I wrote it during my early anarchist phase, lo those many years ago, and it’s really naïve politically. The only reason I won’t delete it, like all my early political posts (most if not all of which are badly written, except for the Shakespeare analyses and synopses), is because occasionally I like to look back at them and see how my thinking has changed and grown over the years. But my looking at them still makes me blush that other readers are ever looking at them.

Anyway, my idea for that article was to argue that, essentially, fascism has both a right wing and a left wing, though I presented the idea most clumsily, saying that some on the left may start there, then when in power, shift over to the right. This idea may be vaguely true of some liberals in, say, the Democratic Party (but were they ever truly left?), or of Nazbols and Strasserists, as well as some in the SA, who were later purged from the NSDAP when Hitler, having come to power, moved the party unequivocally to the far right, to please his new big business backers (and even the idea of ‘left-wing Nazis’ stinks of the libertarian agenda).

Well, now that I’ve transitioned fully from anarchism to Marxism-Leninism, I can see not only the wobbly aspects of those early arguments, but also the worst idea that I put forth in the article: namely, that the Bolshevik shift to authoritarian thinking was a move to the right. I now cringe whenever I read that misinterpretation of what happened back in the early 1920s. There, now you know all that you need to know of what I wrote in the original article, and you can spare yourself the pain of reading those oh, so poorly-conceived ideas!

Let us now move on to my more refined way of thinking about both left-wing and right-wing fascism. Now that I have a dialectical grasp on things, I can explain what I mean by ‘left-wing fascism.’ I speak in contrast to Marxist-Leninists when I call out the anarchists, Trotskyists, and other ultra-leftists.

Now, it’s not necessarily that they are fascistic in nature. They are generally sincere in their wish to make progressive change in the world, to establish socialism. The problem is their naïve utopianism, their wish to have pretty much everything all at once or as soon as they imagine is possible; and the danger of pushing for too much, too soon is that–taking dialectics into account–it can backfire and result in a swing to the far-right.

I’ve discussed in other posts my conception of the ouroboros as a symbol for the dialectical relationship between opposites. The serpent’s biting head and its bitten tail represent the meeting of extreme opposites on a circular continuum, which is symbolized by the serpent’s coiled body, along which every intermediary point of the continuum has its corresponding spot on the snake’s body. I feel that the image of the ouroboros makes it easier to conceive how the excessive, impatient demands of the anarchists, Trotskyists, and other ultras–their far-too-left leanings–slip over to the serpent’s bitten tail, then slide over to the biting teeth of fascism, even though this may not be the ultras’ conscious intention.

Lenin had to deal with the impracticality of the ultras, and he wrote of the problem in his “Left-wing” Communism: an Infantile Disorder. They were unwilling to make necessary compromises, such as cooperating with parliamentary or reformist socialists. They were overly preoccupied with doctrinal ‘purity.’ These people were stirring up needless trouble at a time when the new socialist state was in dire need of stability, in the middle of the Russian Civil War. This kind of petty squabbling was the last thing Lenin needed as the invaders were trying to re-establish capitalism.

While Trotsky was useful at the time leading the Red Army against the invading White Army, after Lenin’s death, the power struggle between him and Stalin over who would succeed Lenin was, for Trotsky, less about what was right for the USSR than about his wish to lead the country and have power. In his book, The Revolution Betrayed, he went on and on about the perceived faults of the Soviet Union under Stalin, with the sole solution offered of overthrowing his rival for power, rather than simply suggesting ways to remedy those faults. After his exile, he was even willing to cut a deal with the Nazis and Imperial Japan if they’d help him oust Stalin! This sort of thing is what I mean when I talk about a fascist ‘left wing.’

To paraphrase something Michael Parenti once said, these anti-communist leftists love any kind of revolution except a successful one. After that, they only want to find fault with the new socialist system. Now, constructive criticism of the new system is a perfectly worthy thing to engage in, since it aims to make the system better; but the ultras’ fault-finding is generally meant to tear down the system for not being perfect enough.

These people will carp at you for ‘not being left-wing enough,’ for not being ‘politically correct’ enough. This sort of bickering only causes resentment and increases alienation; it can even make some want to give up on the left and switch to the right. The CIA appreciates this kind of bickering–it’s a kind of left-wing fascism.

We can often tell the difference between, on the one side, Marxist-Leninists, and on the other, the ultras, with the issue of the war between Russia and Ukraine. This is a very sensitive issue, since I don’t like war at all, yet the Russian people must be defended against an enemy that isn’t made up solely of Ukrainians, but also their US/NATO backers.

Many on the left, addled by the dubious reporting of the liberal mainstream media, think that the Russian invasion of late February 2022 was “unprovoked,” and that Putin is the bad guy behind the war. Now, to be sure, Putin is far from being my political ideal: he’s a bourgeois, reactionary politician; his stance on LGBT issues is far too conservative for my tastes. Still, we have to play the hand we’ve been dealt, and he’s the one who, with Xi Jinping, is leading the resistance to US/NATO world hegemony.

This left opposition to Putin is another example of the impracticality of the ultras. They want to oppose all bourgeois states at the same time, treating them all as equally oppressive, rather than considering the reality of primary vs secondary contradictions. No, the Russian Federation isn’t the Soviet Union, regrettably; but Russian communists have pushed Putin to do something about the ethnic cleansing of Russians in Ukraine for the eight years between the CIA-backed coup d’état in 2014 and the Russian intervention in 2022.

The ultras tend to want everything all at once, instead of being pragmatic and realizing that achieving our goals must be done in stages. The first priority is to deal with the primary contradiction I mentioned above, to wipe out US/NATO hegemony, which has had its boot on the head of the rest of the world especially for the past thirty years. Once that wiping out has been achieved, then we can think about such problems as reinstating a socialist government in Russia, dealing with income inequality in China, etc.

Rainer Shea recently wrote an article in support of the Russian operation in Ukraine; I shared it on Facebook, and I got a snarky comment from a “leftist” who’s all preoccupied with Russian “imperialism,” yet apparently oblivious to US/NATO imperialism. Here’s a quote of her comment:

‘Ukraine has a Nazi problem like the United States has a Nazi problem like Russia has a Nazi problem.
‘I don’t wish death on all of them because a small percentage of them are Nazis.
‘Putin is a fascist imperialist. I hope both the Russian and Ukrainian working classes come together and overthrow BOTH of their corrupt countries.
‘It isn’t very “Leftist” to support imperialism either.’

Note how the first two lines of her comment trivialize the Nazi problem in Ukraine by implying it is a mundane problem of fringe minorities in countries around the world. While it is, of course, true that militaries in all countries attract at least a few fascist sympathizers (I saw a few when I was a reservist in the Canadian army in the early 1990s), such a smug generalization blinds one to the well-documented history of Ukrainian Nazi sympathizers that goes back even before WWII and Stepan Bandera. (The mainstream media even used to acknowledge the truth of this sort of thing.)

These people, though a minority of Ukrainians, nonetheless have great influence over the Ukrainian government and military. The Banderites back in WWII helped Nazi Germany kill thousands of Jews and Poles, and today’s Ukrainian Nazi sympathizers, euphemistically called ‘nationalists,’ revere Bandera; they also like to tie Russian collaborators to lampposts. In their eight-year ethnic cleansing of Russians, about fourteen thousand people have died. No, Ukraine’s Nazi problem is far worse than that of most other countries; similarly, the American Nazi problem that my commenter mentions so briefly in passing has also been far worse, as seen in such issues as its helping of Ukrainian Nazis (link above), Operation Paperclip. and the employment of ex-Nazis in West Germany, NASA, and NATO after WWII.

To get to the second line of her comment, I see the most heinous straw man. I have never expressed a wish of death on all Ukrainians, nor did Shea in his article, regardless of whether the Nazi sympathizers in that country make up a small percentage or a somewhat larger percentage (something I highly suspect). Actually, whenever we hear the Western slogan “…to the last Ukrainian,” we can get a good idea as to who would actually like to see all the Ukrainians die. Since she has more sympathy for the West’s side in this conflict than for the Russian side, I suspect a little projection in her attitude about how wrong it is to want all Ukrainians killed.

Next, we have the ridiculous “Putler” argument in the third line. As I said above, Putin is not my political hero. I won’t put up Russian flags or pictures of him on my social media profiles, as a number of my Facebook friends have done. Still, while as I said, I don’t approve of his conservative stance on LGBT issues, calling him a ‘fascist’ on the basis of that is a bit much (fascists have treated LGBT people far worse than his laws have, and there’s much more to being a fascist than discriminating against that community), and to call him an imperialist, while making no mention at all of the Anglo-American/NATO globe-spanning empire, with US military bases all over the world, is an obscene misuse of the word.

While the Russian oligarchs probably do have some ulterior motives for waging this war (ulterior motives whose significance must be qualified with an understanding that Putin tried everything to secure peace, through the Minsk Accords with people who were hardly cooperative in the negotiations), any ‘Russian imperialism’ is minuscule compared to that of the US and NATO, who have had threatening troops along the Russian border for years, and while the US military has been occupying a third of Syria (stealing their oil and wheat), and surrounding China with military bases and navy in the South China Sea..

Indeed, with the reunification of Germany came a promise from the West that NATO, never a friend to Russia, wouldn’t move an inch to the East. Now, several former SSRs are NATO members, and they’re working on getting Sweden and Finland (the latter of which shares a long border with Russia!) to join. This Western imperialist aggression against Russia is the context needed to understand the Russian intervention in Ukraine.

Ever since the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the US imperialists have worked in the hopes of never allowing any other country to grow in power and thus be a threat to American global hegemony. This is why the PNAC was founded.

The Western imperialists are fond of using the word “dictator” to describe the head of state of any country that challenges or defies the US and the “rules-based international order.” Calling Putin, who has clearly been one of these challengers and defiers, a “fascist imperialist” is just another way of saying “dictator,” which is used as a rationalization to bully a defiant country into submission to US imperialism.

Such a bullying into submission has been done to Russia before, back in the 1990s, with the forcing of “free market” capitalism on a Russian people who, contrary to popular belief, mostly wanted to keep the Soviet system. The Western imposition of capitalism on Russia all but destroyed their economy; attempts to bring back socialism were frustrated by the West’s puppet, Yeltsin. Putin’s real crime was making Russia strong again. People like the woman who commented on my Rainer Shea post clearly either haven’t studied the history, or are lying.

Let’s examine this ‘Russian fascism’ claim a bit more closely. Apart from what I said above, on the one hand, about there always being at least a small percentage of fascist sympathizers in the armies of any country in the world, including Russia, and how, on the other hand, accusing Russians of fascism is a slap in the face to the roughly 27 million Russians who died fighting Nazis (with whom Ukraine collaborated, remember) in WWII, I must react to a video an anarchist Facebook friend of mine once shared, a man who hates Putin with similar virulence; this video (one of many, I’m sure, that exist in the mainstream liberal media) dismisses, without any contrary evidence to justify the dismissal, the significance of Ukrainian Nazis while propagandizing about Russian fascist organizations, tempting me to do a similar dismissal.

How can I confidently dismiss this video’s claim of a hornet’s nest, if you will, of Russian fascist organizations as, in all likelihood, a wildly exaggerated misrepresentation of a few fringe groups, for the purpose of vilifying Putin and manufacturing consent for an increasingly dangerous confrontation? For starters, consider Russia’s 2014 Law Against Rehabilitation of Nazism, something the neoliberal, Russophobic Western media would naturally try to invalidate. If the Russian government wants to criminalize any historic denial of Nazi atrocities, they’ll probably want to criminalize Nazism in general, I imagine, thus making the fascist groups in the video far more marginal that it suggests.

Yet even if this speculation of mine proves to be untrue, something else must be considered, something that should make you take this anti-Russian video with a generous dose of salt. While we’re always hearing about how we shouldn’t let ourselves be duped by “Russian propaganda,” so many of us naïvely assume that the news we receive on CNN, the CBC, the BBC, MSNBC, Fox News, etc., is all objective reporting, ‘the straight facts.’ Funny how it’s always only other countries that propagandize, but never our own!

The fact is, a crucial part of Western empire management is control over media narratives, because the only way the masses in the West would ever go along with war after war these past twenty to thirty years is to keep us all believing that we are ‘the good guys,’ that Putin, Xi Jinping, Saddam, Gaddafi, Assad, Milosevic, etc., are and were ‘the bad guys,’ and therefore all of our wars against them were, are, and will be justified and necessary.

The fact that we realized the media lied to us about Saddam’s “WMDs,” and therefore the Iraq invasion was a cruel, unjustified act of US imperialism should have been enough to give us pause about any subsequent American accusations of ‘cruel dictators’ and insistence on the ‘need’ for regime change. We should have demanded proof instead of propaganda; skepticism about the real motives of the US government should have been our default position.

Instead, over the 2010s and 2020s, most of us have become all the more gullible, uncritically believing lie after lie about Gaddafi, Assad, and now Putin and Xi Jinping. None of this propaganda has made the world safer: in fact, we’re now in a new Cold War that has needlessly brought us to the brink of a very possibly nuclear WWIII.

It shouldn’t be surprising to find all of this media mendacity, especially over the past thirty to forty years. Beyond Operation Mockingbird (which could still be going on), first there was the abolishing of the FCC fairness doctrine in 1987, meaning the news no longer had to present all sides of a controversial issue. Then, the Clinton administration enacted the Telecommunications Act of 1996, allowing mergers and acquisitions in American media, which has led to 90% of American media being controlled by only six corporations; this means that the super-wealthy capitalist class controls most people’s access to information in the US! And in today’s late stage capitalism, this control is applied in an imperialist context–hence, the media vilification of anyone (Putin, Xi, Assad, Maduro, etc.) who dares defy the American empire.

Now, this media consolidation isn’t limited to the US. As the Swiss Policy Research website has noted, we can see a media consensus among other Western countries, including European ones. It makes sense, given these countries are NATO members, and therefore have the same agendas.

But the worst, most blatant example in recent years of Western media bias has been the decision, from the beginning of the Russian/Ukraine war, to blot out and censor all Russian media, so people in the West can gain no access to it. You can complain all you want about the pro-Putin bias in media sources like RT (the former Western reporters of which, incidentally, will tell you they were never told what and what not to report): a truly free media will allow all sides of a story to be told (recall the abolishing of the FCC fairness doctrine). The fact that Russia’s side of the story isn’t allowed to be told in the West is the essence of real propaganda.

People complain about how authoritarian Russia and China are…and of course they are, to quite an extent. But are the Western, NATO-allied countries really any less authoritarian, with so strictly-controlled a media that gets so much money and influence from right-wing billionaires? The way Covid was dealt with in the West can only be described as authoritarian. People running for the heads of state of these countries must be given bourgeois approval, hence “liberal democracy” is really just a euphemism for dictatorship of the bourgeoisie. Indeed, the worst kind of dictatorship is the one that fools people into thinking it isn’t one…and in a society where the rich keep getting richer, and the poor keep getting poorer, many in the West are being fooled.

My commenter’s next point was about her wish that the people of Ukraine and Russia would all rise up and overthrow their corrupt governments…dream on. We won’t solve the problems of the world by wishing for solutions; we’ll solve them through action. The idea of ordinary Ukrainians spontaneously rising up against their government, in the middle of a war zone, with their Nazi soldiers forcibly conscripting untrained men to fight and die, is beyond ludicrous. As for Russia, Putin’s approval rating has generally been high, so I’d say an uprising against him is unlikely, too.

Now, what has Putin been doing? Not only is he standing up to the real empire, the Western one, he’s also helping with the de-dollarization of the world, which will be a major move in putting that empire to an end. This will replace the current unipolar world with a multipolar one, which should in turn move us in the direction of world peace, with its balance of power. The multipolar world will be far from ideal, but it will put us in a position to make socialist agitation far more doable, with an at least greatly weakened American government far less likely to interfere.

But again, this kind of wishful thinking of hers is typical of a lot of the ultras, who want all social problems remedied at once instead of proper organizing and waiting for a revolutionary situation. But worse than all of this is how, in vilifying Putin while either ignoring or giving short shrift to what should be the obvious evils of US/NATO imperialism, these ultras are helping, either tacitly or actively, the fascist elements in Ukraine that are destabilizing the country and pushing us all closer to WWIII.

This support of US/NATO/Ukrainian aggression against Russia, forcing Putin to respond in kind, is what I mean by a left-wing form of fascism (it’s also what Shea was referring to in his article, though by social fascism, he was talking about left-of-centre social democracy, which Stalin called “objectively the moderate wing of fascism”), an idealistic insistence on pushing for so extreme a ‘pure’ form of leftism that it pushes us past the bitten tail of the ouroboros to its biting head, from extreme left to extreme right.

So I’ll say to my commenter that yes, she’s right to say it’s hardly leftist to support imperialism. She’s only wrong in where she attributes the actual imperialist aggression in the world. She is either egregiously ignorant of recent history, or she’s being most dishonest about it, rather like the mainstream Western media now.

Either way, her projection of guilt is remarkably shameless.

So anyway, when all is taken into account, mine is a moderate support of the Russian operation (hoping the horrible war will end as soon as possible), a support that far from idealizes Putin or his bourgeois government, and has no illusions about its hidden agendas. Nonetheless, the US/NATO imperialists are the far greater global threat, and we have no one else at the moment to repel them, so it looks as though it will have to be Putin’s government and military, as well as those of Xi Jinping, to lead the struggle against them. Once the Western empire is decisively defeated, then we can work on fixing the imperfections and genuine faults in Russia, China, and elsewhere, however great or small those faults may be.

Criticism of Russia and China are valid to a certain point, but it mustn’t be done to the point of brushing aside the far greater evils of the Western imperialists. To do so would be to aid those evils, however tacitly that aid might be given. And in a world in which fascism is coming back in style, it’s the far more blatant fascism that must first be fought…not helped by the ‘left’ anymore than by the right. .

Analysis of ‘The Sacrifice’

The Sacrifice (Offret) is a 1986 Swedish film written and directed by Andrei Tarkovsky. It stars Erland Josephson, with Susan Fleetwood, Allan Edwall, Sven Wollter, and Valérie Mairesse. Many of the crew had worked in Ingmar Bergman films.

The Sacrifice was Tarkovsky’s last film, and his third film as an expatriate from the Soviet Union, after Nostalghia and the documentary, Voyage in Time. He died of cancer shortly after filming it; in fact, he was too ill to attend its presentation at the Cannes Film Festival in 1986. It won the Grand Prix there, as 1972’s Solaris had.

The film also won Tarkovsky his third FIPRESCI Prize at Cannes, and his third Palme D’Or nomination. It won the BAFTA Award for Best Foreign Language Film in 1988. It was considered as a nominee for the Best Foreign Language Film at the 59th Academy Awards, but it didn’t get the nomination.

As was a problem with Stalker, the shooting of The Sacrifice included a failed attempt to capture something important on film: this time, the climactic burning down of the house of Alexander (Josephson), because the only camera used to film the burning jammed, thus ruining the footage. The house had to be reconstructed at great expense in two weeks, and the burning was more prudently re-filmed with two cameras.

Here is a link to quotes, in English translation, from the film; and here is a link to the complete film, with English subtitles.

The film begins with a shot of a detail from Leonardo da Vinci’s unfinished painting, Adoration of the Magi. The detail from the painting shows the baby Jesus receiving a gift from one of the Magi. As we look at this detail, we see the credits and hear the aria “Erbarme mich, mein Gott” (“Have mercy, my God”), from JS Bach’s St. Matthew Passion.

When the credits have all been shown, the camera shot slowly moves upwards, so we see the palm tree in the top centre of the painting. From this, we go to a distant shot of a tree that Alexander is planting near the shore at Närsholmen, on the island of Gotland. The tree is Alexander’s gift to the land there, just as Jesus received gifts with a tree in the background, one associated with the Virgin Mary (partly from the verse, “You are stately as a palm tree,” from the Song of Songs—7:7). A movie called The Sacrifice fittingly has gift-giving as a major theme.

Just as we see a celebration of Christ’s birth in the painting, with a tree in the background, so is it Alexander’s birthday, with him planting a tree, and he’s soon to receive gifts. Also, just as Christianity is a fusion of Biblical and pagan elements (as I argued here), so is The Sacrifice a combination of Christian and pagan elements, as we’ll soon see.

Trees have been sacred in both paganism and Christianity, and Leonardo’s painting, with its ruin of a pagan building in the background (not that we’ll see this part during the credits), shows the supplanting of paganism by Christianity.

Alexander asks “Little Man” (a boy played by Tommy Kjellqvist), his son, to help with the tree. Alexander speaks of an orthodox monk planting a barren tree on a mountainside. The tree was to be watered every day until it came to life; after three years of this constant work, the tree was finally covered with blossoms! In this story, we learn the value of systemic work.

This notion of constantly doing something would be contrasted with constantly talking, something Alexander has a problem with, and even admits to himself. A former actor turned journalist, critic, and lecturer of aesthetics, he will later quote Hamlet: “Words, words, words,” sharing the Dane’s opinion that words are useless, and action is needed (while also doing plenty of the former and not enough of the latter).

In this connection, we should remember that, for the great majority of the film, Little Man doesn’t say a word, because of a throat operation he’s recently undergone. Only at the very end of the film does he say anything, which is, “In the beginning was the Word. Why is that, Papa?” As a mute for almost all of the film, this innocent child is almost as Christ-like as the baby in Leonardo’s painting, who also would have been without a word to say.

Action without speech would thus seem to be the moral ideal of the film…and yet Jesus–committing the ultimate salvific act, his self-sacrifice on the Cross–is called “the Word” at the beginning of the Gospel of John. This Jesus had many important words to say in all four Gospels, too, of course, including his parables. Tarkovsky in fact called this last film of his a “parable,” according to his book, Sculpting in Time: Reflections on the Cinema (1985).

On the other side of the coin, one may question the moral validity of Alexander’s actions to save the world from a nuclear holocaust. Salvation by adultery? Salvation by arson? Do such actions really appease an angry god, be he Christian or pagan?

As a result of such considerations of works vs. words, one can see a dialectical relationship between these in terms of their worth. Both words and actions have their share of validity vs. worthlessness.

A similar dialectical relationship can be seen in theism vs. atheism in the film, as I also noted in my analysis of 2001: A Space Odyssey. Otto (Edwall) arrives on his bike as a postman to give Alexander a telegram wishing him a happy birthday, with jocular allusions to Richard III and The Idiot (Alexander has played both King Richard III and Prince Myshkin on the stage, back in his acting days.)

Otto asks Alexander about his relationship with God, to which the latter answers, “nonexistent.” This attitude is soon to change, though, when he learns from the news of the threat of WWIII. There are no atheists in fallout shelters, apparently.

Otto discusses his interest in Nietzsche‘s Thus Spoke Zarathustra, in which it is famously declared, “God is dead!” Yet later, Otto will discuss his belief in witches, angels, and the bizarre idea that Alexander can prevent nuclear war through having a sexual union with Maria (played by Guðrún Gísladóttir), one of his house servants, who is also, according to Otto, a witch “in the best possible sense.”

We can see a dialectical relationship even between that English king and Russian prince whom Alexander once played on the stage: the former is clever, but as ugly morally as he is physically deformed; the latter is simple and naïve, yet has a good heart. Such ambiguities and equivocations can be found throughout The Sacrifice, for spirituality here is at one moment portrayed as the highest good, and the next moment, the highest foolishness.

Speaking of foolishness, while he has Little Man sitting on his lap among trees further away from the shore and closer to his house, Alexander tells the little boy about what a difficult thing the fear of death is. It sometimes makes us do things we ought not to do…and yet it is this very fear of death, in a nuclear holocaust, that drives Alexander not only to sleep with Maria, but also to burn his house down, in some superstitious hope that these acts will save humanity from destruction.

At home, Alexander has received a gift from Victor (Wollter), the family doctor who did Little Man’s throat operation, as well as a close friend of Alexander’s family. The gift is a book of pre-Renaissance art depicting Christian saints; Alexander is most pleased with it, since though his relationship with God is “non-existent,” he has aspirations to bring it into existence. There’s a sense he’s been waiting for a catalyst to make this happen–it’s coming soon.

His English wife, Adelaide (Fleetwood), also an actress and fluent in Swedish, appears in the house with her daughter, Marta (played by Filippa Franzén). House servants Maria and Julia (Mairesse) are preparing the birthday dinner, and Otto will soon arrive with his own gift for Alexander, a huge, framed, old map of Europe.

“Every gift involves a sacrifice,” Otto says.

Is adultery with one’s maid a gift to God? Otto seems to think so, in spite of Exodus 20:14.

Is burning down one’s house a gift to God? Alexander seems to think so, as we’ll see.

There’s a sense of coolness not only between Otto, the postman, and bourgeois Victor, but also between Maria and bourgeois Adelaide, who finds the odd Icelandic servant frightening; bourgeois Alexander also finds her a bit “odd.” Otto, Maria’s neighbour, is more acquainted with her, and thus thinks better of her. It shouldn’t be surprising to find fellow proletarians warmer with each other, but alienated among the bourgeoisie.

Studying the map, Alexander imagines it to depict a much happier Europe than that of the modern world, just as he was idealizing in his mind the book’s pictures of ancient saints. He prefers the world of the past to that of the disillusioning present.

He discusses his having given up on acting due to a feeling that his identity dissolves in his roles. He came to be ashamed of impersonating other people. Adelaide preferred him as an actor, fell in love with him then; but she has grown disenchanted with him as a mere bookish, loquacious intellectual now.

Her disenchantment with him seems to have led to alienation in the family, an aloofness between him on the one side, and her and Marta on the other, while he is trying hard to be close with his son, to compensate for that alienation.

These issues lead to a suspicion that Adelaide has been having an affair with Victor. In fact, given that pretty Marta is barely of the age of consent, and that we see Victor touching her in a creepy way later on, I suspect that our good doctor has been in bed with both mother and daughter! Could this be why he wants to take a job in Australia, to escape the guilt of his tangled sexual indiscretions? I’ll discuss these issues in more detail later on.

After discussing his hobby of collecting evidence of the paranormal, Otto suddenly collapses on the living room floor. When the other guests check on him, he insists that he is alright; apparently, an evil angel has passed by and touched him.

Almost immediately after that, the guests hear jet fighters flying low, just above the house, and causing such a shaking that a large jar of milk falls off a shelf and breaks on the floor. All of the guests are disturbed by the jets except Otto, who remains still on the chair he’s gone to after his fall. It’s as if he knew the jets were coming, and he is equating them with the angel that touched him.

Alexander has been outside, looking at a miniature model of his house, something Little Man and Otto have made for him as a birthday gift. Upon beholding the model, Alexander quotes Macbeth in the original English: “Which of you have done this?”, which originally was the Scottish King’s frightened response to seeing the ghost of Banquo, whom he’s just had murdered. It’s as though Alexander, seeing himself in the future and seeing the ‘ghost’ of the house he is to burn, is feeling a similar guilt and looking for someone else to blame it on, to project it onto.

He goes back into the house to find all the guests listening to a news report about what seems to be the beginning of WWIII and a possible nuclear holocaust. Everyone is in a state of shock, but Adelaide reacts in the most extreme way, having a complete mental breakdown and needing a sedative from Victor.

A few interesting things should be noted about Adelaide in connection with what used to be called ‘female hysteria.’ Her hairstyle and dress remind one of the fashions of the 19th century, the last in which diagnoses of ‘hysteria’ in women were common. She calls out to the men to “do something,” to come to the rescue of the Victorian-minded woman. A prominent symptom of ‘hysteria’ was hypersexuality; now, while Adelaide is flipping out, and Victor is embracing her from behind in an effort to restrain her (holding her almost like a lover), her legs are spread out on the floor, revealing sensuous hosiery and high heels.

I’m not at all trying to revive bizarre, antiquated, and indeed sexist theories of mental illness in women (Freud himself, not exactly one to be called a feminist, was one of the first people to acknowledge symptoms associated with ‘hysteria’ in men, thus contributing to the decline in the diagnosis of this spurious medical condition.). I’m merely making links here between Adelaide’s mental state, her sexuality, and foolish old world thinking. After all, Alexander is about to engage in some hysteria of his own.

The needle that Victor sticks into Adelaide’s arm, to sedate her, can be seen as a phallic symbol. Some in the 19th century believed that genital stimulation could treat women’s ‘hysteria,’ including the use of the first electric vibrators [!]. My point in bringing all of this up is to show how it’s hinted, in symbolic and literal form, that Victor and Adelaide are lovers.

As Victor is embracing her, Alexander is further off, looking out a window: shouldn’t her husband be holding her? In this we can see the family dysfunction hiding behind a birthday party.

Victor asks Julia if she wants a phallic shot of sedation, she who’s shown no signs of mental breakdown, but who is as pretty as Adelaide. The maid walks away without a word, as if disgusted by the doctor’s apparent lechery. Then he goes over to pretty Marta to give her a shot. She says she doesn’t need the shot, but he insists, with a lecherous smirk and that creepy touching of her face that I mentioned above, that “it’s absolutely necessary.” That shot is symbolic Rohypnol…isn’t it?

Alexander would rather have drinks than the doctor’s offered shot. Otto doesn’t want a shot, either. (Perhaps by sedating the two men, Victor would have a chance to get at Mother and daughter, with Julia being discreet enough not to say anything.) Marta offers to go upstairs with Victor, while Julia watches over Mama [!]. A little later, we’ll see Marta get naked in her bedroom, knowing that Victor is still around, and Otto has left.

The phones are dead, and the electricity is out. Julia refuses to wake Little Man and have him traumatized with knowledge of humanity’s impending doom.

Alone in a room near sleeping Little Man, the Leonardo painting hanging on the wall, Alexander takes a look at it, then says the Lord’s Prayer. Teary-eyed, he is now entering his own version of ‘hysteria,’ behaving foolishly in a state of fear. Terrified of nuclear war, he has come to what he has been waiting for all of his life: to bring back into existence his relationship with God.

Note how contradictory his prayer is. After finishing his recital of the Lord’s Prayer, he on the one hand offers all he has to God, including his son (as mad as Abraham must have been), then he begs God to restore everything to what it was before the news report. In this prolix prayer, he offers to be mute for the rest of his life. His ‘brevity’ is like that of Polonius–the soul of folly.

His prayer thus demonstrates a paradoxical attitude towards faith and spirituality in this film: it’s illuminating and comforting, yet foolish. The terror of nuclear war urgently needs an escape, yet the opium of the people is no more than that–an escape. Fittingly, after his prayer, Alexander gets on a couch and sleeps to escape his fears.

Before we see his dream, though, we see an example of one of the family problems that he must at least be suspicious of: that scene I mentioned above, of Marta getting naked in her bedroom, happens now. She calls for Victor, saying she needs him [!]. Alexander hopes to save the world, and he can’t even set his own family issues right!

Alexander’s dream, in black and white, begins with melancholy Japanese flute music and dripping water for a soundtrack. It depicts him looking out of a window from a dark room to see snow on the grass. Since he has fears of WWIII, this snow could be seen as symbolic of a nuclear winter. Outside now, he’s stepping in the mud and puddles of melted snow, symbolic of a return to formless, primordial Chaos after the destruction of the world.

He bends down and moves some leaves and trash aside to reveal a number of coins. So much of the motive behind Cold War hostilities, leading to the danger of nuclear war, is money: either the greedy love of it, or the urge to transform society so that it can be shared by all or be eliminated altogether.

He walks in the snow, looking around. More of those coins are seen in the snow, among the puddles, mud, and trash. He sees the bare feet of Little Man in the snow, so vulnerable in the danger of WWIII, and he speaks fearfully for the boy, who then runs away. We hear the sound of approaching fighter jets, which blow aside everything on the ground as they fly by.

He wakes from his dream with a jolt.

Otto returns, to tell Alexander what, apparently, he needs to do to save the world from nuclear war. He must make love with Maria, one of his house servants! Since Otto, as we know, has an interest in the paranormal, and Maria is “the best” kind of witch, such rationalizing is all we need, it seems, to be convinced of this “last hope” as a viable solution.

Alexander sneaks out of his house while Adelaide and Victor are sitting together at a table outside [!], and he uses Otto’s bicycle to ride over to Maria’s home. All of this subterfuge just reinforces the sense of alienation in Alexander’s marriage.

When he arrives at Maria’s home, then begins what must be the most bizarre seduction in human history. Seriously: how does a man convince a woman (his employee) to have sex with him, saying that their tumble in bed is the only way nuclear armageddon can be prevented?

He starts by discussing a time when he was a boy and his mother was ill, and he wanted to tidy up an unweeded garden, so it would be more pleasing to her eyes. After doing so with the utmost diligence, he regrets his gardening efforts, preferring the unruly beauty of the original garden. The story seems to be teaching us not to tamper with nature, not to change anything from its original state, for it may have beauty despite its messy imperfections.

Il ne faut pas cultiver notre jardin.

When he’s come to the point of asking to lie with Maria, he points to his temple a pistol he’s taken from home, implying he’ll kill himself if she doesn’t consent to the sex. One is reminded of when Richard Gloucester, a role Alexander has played, remember, threatens to stab himself if Lady Anne won’t accept the evil hunchback’s hand in marriage. So Maria gives herself to Alexander. Indeed,…

Was ever woman in this humour woo’d?
Was ever woman in this humour won?

The fact that, when the lovemaking happens, we don’t see it done the usual way, but rather Tarkovsky has us see the two lovers floating, turning together in a circle over her bed, emphasizes that it isn’t the sex act per se that matters, but what their physical union symbolizes.

And when we see the sex in a symbolic sense, we can see how it finally makes sense. Consider who Alexander and Maria are in relation to each other. He is her employer. He is an affluent bourgeois, she is a worker. Their sexual union symbolizes the removal of class differences. Their lovemaking represents the sublation of the material contradiction between the upper and lower classes, which is vital in ending nuclear brinksmanship between the US and the USSR, as I’ll explain in more detail later.

Now, many will object to my interpretation on the grounds that the oh, so spiritual Tarkovsky wasn’t exactly a card-carrying Marxist-Leninist. There was friction between him and his mystic visions, on the one hand, and the atheistic Soviet authorities, on the other hand. After all, he left the Soviet Union to make his last movies, like The Sacrifice, for the sake of pursuing artistic freedom, did he not?

That friction between him and the Soviet government was there, but it’s been exaggerated by bourgeois, imperialist propagandists (as one can see in liberal Wikipedia). The fact is that Soviet censorship had been softening little by little over the years, ever since the death of Stalin in 1953, three years before Tarkovsky’s first student film and nine years before Ivan’s Childhood, his first feature film. Though the Soviet censors would have been sensitive to anything even remotely, subtly critical of communism, they would have also recognized Tarkovsky’s obvious genius, and would have known that promoting that genius would have been good for the USSR’s global reputation; so a balance between censorship and indulgence was sought.

Recall, also, that Tarkovsky’s son insisted that his father was no political dissident. While Tarkovsky was surely no doctrinaire supporter of the Soviet system, being someone born, raised, and educated in the USSR, he would have at least unconsciously absorbed some basic socialist values, like closing up the gap between the rich and the poor, something this sex scene can be seen to symbolize.

There is a dream sequence seen while Alexander and Maria are making love, in which we see her in the hairstyle and clothing of Adelaide; this shot suggests a wish-fulfillment of Maria being his true soulmate. This vision, along with one–immediately after another brief shot of Leonardo’s painting–of naked Marta chasing after chickens (representing cowardly Victor, who’s running off to Australia after his sexual misconduct?), reinforces our understanding of the failure of Alexander’s married life, his own unconscious acknowledging of that failure.

As they make love, we can hear Maria’s voice, comforting Alexander, trying to soothe his pain and ease his fears. It’s easy to see how he’d prefer her to his emotionally volatile wife, whom, indeed, we see lurking in the darkness immediately after we see naked Marta.

He wakes up on his sofa, back at home. The power and telephones are back. His beloved Japanese flute music is playing on his stereo. He later puts on a Japanese robe, as if about to perform some kind of Shinto ritual.

The electricity having come back, right after the supposedly salvific lovemaking, implies that all is back to normal, that God, satisfied with Alexander’s ‘gift,’ has prevented nuclear war. Still, Alexander is not assured of the world’s safety, of this Nietzschean eternal recurrence (i.e., from the end of the world to its new beginning) that Otto had promised, so Alexander–in his ongoing religious hysteria–feels he must make the ultimate sacrifice: burn his house to the ground.

Further evidence of his family’s dysfunction is seen when, as he’s sneaking around behind them in his frenzy, Adelaide and Marta are upset to have heard of Victor’s plan to leave them and go to Australia. The women complain of Alexander losing his ‘friend,’ but they’re really just jealously upset about losing a lover. Victor, of course, just wants to run away from facing the responsibilities of his own sexual misconduct.

Alexander must be aware that he’s been made a cuckold: he’d be overhearing their conversation as he’s sneaking around, and he must have seen and heard previous hints of their fooling around behind his back. Part of his reason for burning down the house, rendering Adelaide and Marta homeless, must be out of spite; yet with no consideration for Little Man, whom he deeply loves, Alexander is still being irrational.

And again, I must ask, especially if the lovemaking with Maria (also Alexander’s unconscious revenge against his adulteress wife) is enough to save the world: why would burning down his house appease God? Didn’t He prefer His Son’s crucifixion?

My answer to this, as with the lovemaking with Maria, is that its meaning is symbolic. Alexander’s house, where his maids work, is his property. Private property, which we socialists wish to abolish, is places: farmland, factories, office buildings, apartment buildings–the means of production.

The acquisition and accumulation of capital (which must ever expand), along with the ruthless and jealous wish to protect ownership of it, have led to the export of capital into other countries, as well as competition over who will exploit the most of those countries. This has resulted in two imperialist world wars, and with the American invention of the atomic bomb, fears of nuclear war.

So, to avert nuclear war, Alexander’s burning down of his house can be seen to symbolize a bourgeois sacrifice of private property. (This message is especially relevant to us today, in our current Cold War with Russia and China–hence my urgent recommendation of this film.) Class war is the inevitable result of rich landowners leaving very little for the poor to live with. Bourgeois exploitation of the proletariat, being so intolerable for the poor, necessitates class antagonisms and socialist revolution.

In the modern world, imperialism as the highest stage of capitalism makes war inevitable, as a competition for land and resources. The Manhattan Project brought in the nuclear age, resulting in the necessity of the USSR, China, and the DPRK to develop their own nuclear weapons programs, to prevent the US from bombing them as Japan had been bombed. To prevent nuclear war, then, the class antagonisms of capitalism and imperialism must be ended–hence, the abolition of private property, as Alexander’s arson symbolizes.

It’s fitting in this connection that, as the house is burning down to the ground and his family, Julia, and Victor return from their walk to watch the fire in horror, Maria arrives on her bicycle and Alexander runs up to her, falls to his knees, and kisses her hands. This is symbolic of the bourgeois ceding power to the worker, as linked with the burning down of the house as representing the abolishing of private property.

Bourgeois Adelaide and Victor take him away from Maria, he runs back to her, and they take him away again, Adelaide growling at Maria, “Don’t touch him!” This symbolizes capitalist attempts at counterrevolution. As a bourgeois himself, Alexander can thus be seen as like Engels.

Now, the above is my allegoric interpretation of Tarkovsky’s “parable.” On the literal level, however, it’s obvious that Alexander, driven to hysteria by the fear of nuclear annihilation, has simply gone mad in his religious ecstasy. Just as Tarkovsky was, as I speculate, ambivalent about socialism, so was he ambivalent about spirituality and religion, seeing both the good and bad sides in it. Spirituality can give comfort, and it can cause one to go mad. Tarkovsky’s genius allowed him to have just as nuanced an attitude towards religion as he had towards socialism.

It’s safe to assume that the paramedics, presumably answering a call from a neighbour about the arson, will drive Alexander to a mental hospital. His family has fallen apart just as he has mentally. There is no spiritual edification to be found in this scene, except for the allegory I provided.

With the end of this family’s world achieved in his arson, the eternal recurrence brings us back to the beginning with Little Man tending the tree. Finally, he can speak, and he quotes the opening of the Gospel of John as mentioned above. His question, “Why is that, Papa?”, seems to be another example of Tarkovsky’s ambivalence towards religion. The quote from John affirms it, while the boy’s question challenges its validity.

The lesson that the parable of The Sacrifice seems to be teaching us is that spirituality has its good and bad sides, and that we must be forever mindful of both. It’s a wavelike dialectic, going up and down and up and down.

‘Resurrecting Ptah,’ an Erotic Horror Short Story

I: Dedication

This short story is dedicated to my Facebook friend, she who goes by the intriguing pseudonym of Dorian Grey (I must do an analysis of that novel one of these days; in the meantime, there’s this one, which has lots of allusions to the novel.), and she whose AI art is full of black cats, witches, mushrooms, cat-women, nuns, etc., which have inspired this story as well as my other one, “Sister Sorceress.” This story is also dedicated to her “old familiar,” Peta, and a friend of hers, Cain Helsson. I hope they like what I wrote.

II: Loss

Clara Jefferson bawled as she held the dead body of Ptah, her beloved black cat named after an Egyptian god, in her arms. The loss of this pet, her only friend in this whole rotten, cruel, uncaring, stinking world, was unbearable to her.

The one thing that gave her the hope to carry on was that she had been practicing sorcery for so long. The shelves on her walls were filled with books on such topics as ceremonial magic, how to contact the spirit world, various spells, world mythologies and religions, and the like. At the age of forty-five, Clara had been studying these books for almost thirty years. She was a master, and now she was about to work out a master plan to resurrect her cat.

It was either resurrect Ptah, or kill herself, for she knew she could never live without him. She hadn’t become a master of the spiritual and magical arts just to commit suicide, though.

She already knew, from memory, a number of rituals and spells she could use in aid of bringing Ptah back to life; but this would be such a difficult and complex act of sorcery that she would have to study hard, in the minutest detail, to get this done right. She put the cat’s body on the floor and immediately reached for a few books on her shelves.

She spent hours perusing these and many other books, jotting down notes, ignoring her hunger and fatigue. After reading enough, for the moment, she decided it was time to summon the spirits to give her aid and counsel.

…and which spirits were those that she confided in?

Trusting few, if any, people in this world of liars, cheaters, abusers, rapists, and corrupt politicians and clergy, Clara had sought the rarest, most obscure religious traditions she could find, searching for one untainted by the lure of money and power. She learned of the ancient pagan traditions of the Liput, an old tribe living on a small island off the west coast of what is now Finland. Over two thousand years ago, the Liput practiced animism and a kind of polytheism that phased into pantheism, or a spiritual oneness of all things. Such ideas appealed to Clara.

III: Summoning Divine Aid

Deep in a state of meditation, she was beginning to hear the soft, inarticulate moans of Talas, the Liput goddess of the sea. Soon, those moans became intelligible speech, the ancient language of the tribe, in which Clara had become fluent after years of rigorous study.

I know what you want, the goddess said in Clara’s mind. Are you aware of the great price you will have to pay to get Ptah back?

Yes, I’m aware, Clara said in her thoughts to Talas. Tears were rolling down her cheeks. I still want my cat back.

It is not natural to move the energy, which has left your cat, back to its body, the goddess warned. All life comes and goes, Clara. You must accept that. You should allow the energy of Ptah to flow where it will in the universe, wherever that may be, as far away from you as it may be. Give up your attachment to your dead cat, and your suffering will end.

I want my cat back! Clara insisted in her thoughts. She was moaning and sobbing. I’ll do anything to get him back!

Very well, Talas answered. There is a way to bring Ptah back, but you will need the aid of Lechi, the Liput god of mischief. In your studies of us gods, you’ll know his ways. He can be outright evil if he wants to be. However you negotiate your way into getting his aid, you will have to be extremely watchful of his tricks. Ensuring that you have come the closest you can to having your genuine cat back, in body and spirit, while also ensuring that he can do as little wickedness to you, in body and spirit, as possible, will demand the subtlest and cleverest use of spells and ritual magic that you can possibly muster.

I’m aware of the complications and dangers, Clara told Talas. To work with Lechi, while making my ritual flawless, will be like navigating a mine field. Still, I want to do this.

I will summon Lechi for you tomorrow morning. For now, study your books thoroughly. Take no detail for granted. Think of every possible obstacle, for he will find ways to get through your protective walls. Good luck, Clara.

Thank you, Talas.

Remember that the cat you resurrect, even through the best and most careful of rituals, won’t be absolutely the same as Ptah was. It may be the most ingenious of facsimiles, but it can never be exactly the same cat, however close it may come to such sameness.

I’m prepared to accept that.

Also know that as tight as your security is against Lechi, he will find some way to get at you, however slight that way may be for him. What he does to you will be, at the very least, something unsettling, something disturbing. Your safety against him may be impressively close to perfect, but never absolutely perfect. He is a god, after all, and you are just a mortal. You will have to accept whatever he demands from you in return for his aid, however you may circumscribe it.

I understand, Clara told Talas before the goddess vanished.

IV: Fear of Violation

After reading through all of the relevant passages in her books, anticipating what to expect from Lechi, Clara got out all of her tools and magical weapons, laying them out all over the floor of the red room where the ritual was to be done. These weapons were all daggers and swords, and the tools included several wands. A large magic circle was drawn on the floor, with a pentacle inside.

So many daggers and swords were needed to repel Lechi’s advances, since Clara knew, from her extensive reading, of how lewd and lascivious the god was. His sexual proclivities, being often quite perverse, triggered the most sensitive of feelings in her, for Clara was first raped by her father when she was a teen. In fact, she got into magic in order to learn how to protect herself from his lust.

Her mother had ignored her cries for help when he was preying on her, conniving at it, even, so Clara would satisfy his desire so her mother wouldn’t have to. It was for reasons such as these that Clara eventually used her magic to kill both of them in a car accident, then collect their vast amount of money and property so she could live self-sufficiently without need of a job.

She’d feed herself through gardening and a vegetarian diet; her garden was also where she collected various magical properties and drugs from her herbs and many mushrooms. Having no job was a blessing: no need to deal with so may people in whom she had no trust.

She did her rituals in the nude, and sometimes peeping Toms would watch her through her windows at night. Though forty-five now, she used her magic to ensure she’d always have the shapely, buxom figure of a twenty-year-old. Nine lecherous men in her neighbourhood liked her for her beauty, though through her magic, she made sure they’d never get their filthy hands on her!

She shuddered every time she realized any of those nine men were looking in her window during her rituals, often feeling PTSD flashbacks of what her father had done to her. This was why she needed so many consecrated daggers and swords, all fanned out in a circle surrounding her: they were a crucial part of her magical, protective wall, ensuring that no one could ever get inside her house, already protected with an electronic security system to be extra sure, or get at her body.

In fact, she was so sure of the efficacy of her daggers and swords that she found it amusing to think that those voyeurs/potential rapists all wanted the lovely naked body they saw, but could never have it. Her tantalizing of those men was her torturous punishment for all rapists.

Still, dealing with Lechi would be far more difficult. She’d need more than her daggers and swords to keep him away from her. They would be necessary, but not sufficient; and sure enough, having her delicious body would be one of his demands in exchange for his help in resurrecting Ptah. Clara would have to be extra subtle in tricking him into thinking he’d get what he wanted, while ensuring he’d never actually get it.

V: Lechi

The next morning, nude and meditating in the red room, sitting in the middle of her magic circle and pentacle, she summoned Lechi.

You are lovely, he told her mentally, in what felt to her like a grunt of lust, as he studied every inch of her body. I already know what I will want in return for helping you get your cat back.

Talas told you? Clara asked him in her thoughts.

No, I read your mind just now, my pretty.

She shuddered, knowing how difficult it would be to stop a mind-reader from knowing of her plan to cheat him out of having her. She would have to bury her thoughts and feelings deep down in her unconscious if she was to have any hope of him not detecting them.

I know what you want from me, she told him. I know your reputation as an incubus. Please spare me the filthy details. Just tell me what I have to do to get Ptah back, and I’ll do whatever you want.

One detail I must share, he insisted. I want to have you in a physical form, not just as a spirit. I want to enjoy you sensually.

Very well, she told him while a tear ran down her cheek. What must I do in the ritual to bring my cat back from the dead?

One thing crucial to the success of your ritual will be the collection of nine human skulls, he said.

May I dig them up from a graveyard? she asked.

No! You must have nine people decapitated. Have someone else do it for you, to deflect the bad karma away from you. Your killing of your mother and father is already a bad enough karmic burden for you. Find a young, strong, but naïve man who is in love with you; such a man would be willing to do anything for your love, and your magic and mushroom drugs should make him all the more obedient to your will. Gordon Marsh, from your neighbourhood, would be a good choice.

She trembled again at the realization of how thorough Lechi’s knowledge was of her private thoughts–to know of her killing of her parents–and of her neighbours. He’d only just come here, and already he knew of Gordon, one of the peeping Toms! Outwitting this god would be a formidable task. Still, she wanted Ptah back, and would do anything to have him again.

Why must it be nine skulls, specifically? she asked Lechi.

Come, come, Clara! A sorceress who has practiced for as many years as you have should already know of the symbolism of nine. Three symbolizes completion, so three times three reinforces that completion. Also, cats have nine lives, don’t they? Not literally, of course, but my point is that not only can I help you get Ptah back, but I can also allow you two potentially to live forever together…would you not like that? That is what the ‘nine lives’ will symbolize. Finally, I am aware that there are nine people in this neighbourhood whom you would like to see dead, are there not?

Yes, there are, she answered, remembering not only the eight peeping Toms other than Gordon, but also the woman she suspected of poisoning her cat for always trespassing in her garden, Ms. Bellows…that bitch! Still, such killings would be dangerous to her in terms of karma, as desirable as they were to her, so her next question to Lechi (though she already knew the answer to it) was this: and why must I have nine people die so Ptah can live?

Oh, Clara, I am disappointed in you! You surely know the religion of the Liput better than that! You’ve read of the unity of opposites as a central feature of the tribe’s belief system. There is also the unity of life and death. To have the one, you must allow its opposite. To bring about Ptah’s life, you will have to bring about someone’s death.

Yes, I suppose so, she acknowledged.

And with my willingness not only to help you bring your cat back, but also to let you and him live potentially forever in love and happiness, surely you will be willing to let me enjoy you while I am in physical form? he asked. She could feel his lewd smirk. Not only do I assure you that I will not hurt you at all, but I will also make it most pleasurable for you, even more than for myself.

His promises reminded her of her father’s words before raping her: “Don’t worry, honey,” Dad would say while unzipping his fly. “I’ll be gentle. In fact, I’ll make it better for you than it is for me.”

She cringed at the recollection, but she couldn’t let on to Lechi that she was unwilling to indulge the god in his disgusting desires. Very well, she told him. As you wish.

Good, he replied. Go find that young man, Gordon Marsh. Get him to hack off the nine heads. He, as one of your peeping Toms, could be incited to do the violence with a combination of you promising him he can enjoy your charms with a spell you can put on him to make him more obedient.

Yes, Lechi, I’ll do all of these things. Just help me get my cat back, she begged.

I will keep my promises if you keep yours, Clara.

He vanished.

VI: Preparations

Resurrecting Ptah would test her skills at magic to the maximum. Could she outwit a god? Could she ensure that Lechi kept his promise to her while she failed to keep her promise to satisfy his lust? She would have to set up powerful spells to keep him bound to his promises, while also sufficiently augmenting her sword-and-dagger protection against his every attempt to ravish her.

Also, she’d have to ensure, through her own spells and the structure of her ritual, that the resurrected cat really was Ptah, in body and spirit. Though Talas was right to remind her that the resurrected cat could never be 100% Ptah, Clara had to try to bring him as close to that 100% as possible–97%, 98%, at least.

She certainly didn’t want the new cat to be anything like “Church,” from that old Stephen King novel. She wanted a cat to cuddle, not one to recoil from.

She immediately went to work at preparing her spells and ritual for defence, for restoring Ptah as faithfully as she could, for deflecting away from herself the bad karma for the killings, and for charming Gordon into committing them.

Her extensive study of the ancient Liput language, a ritually powerful one, allowed her to remember certain ambiguities of meaning that she could use to her advantage. She could remember them without need of consciously thinking about them, which mind-reading Lechi might pick up on and thus thwart her plans.

One such ambiguity was in the meaning of the Liput word zvarge, which could mean “container” or “cage.” She could use this word in her ritual when putting Lechi’s spirit in the body of her cat. Ptah’s body would contain his spirit, yet also cage it, that is, trap it. The nuances of zvarge could be used to trick him into thinking he’d be put into a body–pita in Liput–when really he’d be trapped in her cat…forever able only to see and hear her, and to receive Clara’s touch, but never able to control Ptah’s body.

Lechi would thus be like John Cusack’s character at the end of Being John Malkovich: trapped in a girl’s body, forced to see, hear, and sense only what the girl wants to, and never able to control her body. Clara planned to do the exact same thing to the souls of the nine decapitated people, as well as with Gordon when she was finished with him. She’d sense the longing of all of them in Ptah’s eyes, while only receiving the affection of her cat. She considered such a punishment–such an imprisonment–fitting for all those potential rapists, as she saw them.

She would be sure to say the words zvarge and pita (this second word with the accent on the second syllable, making its pronunciation identical with that of Ptah) nine times, to reinforce the completeness of the imprisonment of all those lechers, to ensure her safety…and revenge.

The nine skulls would be used to augment the protective power of her swords and daggers, making it sufficient to keep Lechi away. She’d have the spirits of the nine decapitated to act as eunuch guards, so to speak, of her body, to ensure no violation of her.

Another convenient ambiguity in meaning was that of the Liput word slivu, which literally meant “decapitated,” but which metaphorically meant “castrated,” “emasculated,” or “impotent.” Her saying of this word nine times in her ritual would also ensure no danger of rape.

Clara would say these words with no especial emphasis on them, to suggest no alternative meanings to the basic ones, while allowing the ambiguities to slip by, undetected by Lechi. She felt she was safe.

VII: Gordon

Now that everything was planned, she had to find Gordon. He seemed a rather simple soul, easily manipulated. He was easy to find, too, for all she had to do was look out her front window and there he was, standing before her house on the sidewalk, looking in, obsessively hoping to see her.

Trembling and reluctant, she nonetheless put on her best smile, went over to her front door, and opened it.

“Hi, Gordon,” she said. “Come here. I wanna talk to you.”

“Oh, hi, Clara,” he said, amazed that she finally noticed him. Smiling back, he hurried over to her. Now standing on her porch two feet in front of her, he was trembling and excited. “What can I do for you?”

“Actually, it’s what I can do for you,” she purred, “if you do something for me, that’s what matters.”

“Oh?” he asked stupidly, his erection pushing painfully against his pants.

“Yes,” she said, still smiling. “Did you know I’m a witch?”

“A witch?“

“Yes.” she dropped her black dress, revealing her frontal nakedness to his amazed eyes.

He was overcome with the sight of all of that lovely, creamy flesh. Unable to resist, he reached over with one had to grab one of her large breasts, and with the other to stroke her shaved vulva.

“Uksha leida binko!” she shouted at him, the Liput words shooting at him like bullets from a machine gun, and the magic causing an electric force field to form, protecting her body from his intrusive fingers, giving them a shock.

“Oww!” he shouted, sheepishly pulling his hands back.

“You may look, but not touch!” she said angrily. “Only when you have done what I want you to do will I let you touch me. For now, enjoy only looking, to motivate you to do my will.” She turned around to give him a view of her curves and her callipygian behind. He gazed at her milky skin, stunned at its flawlessness.

“W-what would you have me do, goddess?”

“Robaya kinestro koubra,” she said, making her dress rise up and go back on her body. “You’ve seen enough, and as you can see, I really am a witch. How old do you think I am?”

“I dunno. Early twenties?”

“I’m forty-five. I look so young because of my magic. That should be enough to convince you that my magic is real. Do you believe I’m a witch now?”

“Not the ugly kind, that’s for sure,” he said. “I’d say you’re a goddess, with your beauty.”

“Aww, you’re so sweet,” she said, smiling and caressing his cheek, which made him sigh and moan. “Are you ready to do what I need you to do, Gordon?”

“Yes, Goddess! I’ll do anything for your love!”

“Anything? Even decapitate nine people with one of my consecrated swords, remove all the flesh, hair, and innards, and give me the skulls for a ritual I need to do?”

He stood speechless and motionless for about ten seconds.

Finally, he asked, “H-how w-will I avoid jail?”

“My magic will protect you from the police,” she assured him.

“What if these people a-are too strong for m-me to overpower them?”

“My magic will give you the strength you need.”

“What if I can’t…I m-mean, what if I don’t have the…stomach to do a-all this bloody business? Cleaning o-off skulls, a-and everything?”

“My magic will give you the ability, physical and emotional, to do all of that.”

“L-look, I’m really crazy about you, Clara, but I-I don’t know if I’m u-up to killing a…”

“Shadzock abba ultika!” she said while looking dead straight into his eyes. He felt a line of energy go straight from her eyes into his.

He was shaking, his eyes and mouth wide open.

“You will do what I need you to do, Gordon. You will not flinch. You will not question it. You will obey me from the beginning to the end.” She kept her steely eyes fixed on his the whole time. “Do you understand, Gordon?”

“Yes, I understand, Clara. I will obey you.” He stood there in a trance.

“Good. I’ll go and get the sword you will use to kill the nine people.” She went back into the red room, got the sword, and returned to him. “Here it is. You will kill these nine people from our neighbourhood: Kurt Davies, Ron Sweeney, Bill Wynn, Shaun Holmes, Jim Fredricks, Phil Sulikowsky, Chris Culig, Jon Schmidt, and Ms. Adrianna Bellows. You know all of them, right?”

“Yes, I know them all. Those eight guys are all big and strong. Your magic will help me win in fights with them all? I hate them all for always watching you, knowing they’d probably have a better chance with you than I could ever have; so I’ll be glad to get rid of them…with your help, of course. But why Ms. Bellows? What did she do to you?”

“She killed my cat, which I want to bring back to life.”

“Oh, you have enough power to do that, eh?”

“Yes, I do.”

“Then, you’ll have enough power to help me kill those guys?”

“Of course I will,” she said with perfect confidence.

He smiled.

“Those guys bully you a lot, don’t they?”

He sighed and frowned, then said, “Yes.”

“Then you have all the more motive to kill them. Go.“

VIII: The Killings

That night, Jon Schmidt was parking his car in his garage. After he got out and closed the door, he heard a shuffling noise in the shadowy corner behind a stack of boxes near the door into the house. He stepped forward.

“Is that you, Ginger?” he asked, thinking it was his cat.

As he got closer, he saw a human figure in the shadows.

“Hey, who are you?” he said defensively.

Gordon emerged from the boxes with the sword.

Jon laughed. “What? That’s you, Scrotum Breath? WIth a sword? You’re gonna kill me with that? You’re so weak, I bet you can’t even lift it.” He continued laughing.

Gordon felt a surge of magical energy buzzing in his arms. That warm tingling was his cue to action. He raised the sword effortlessly to the level of Jon’s neck.

Jon was impressed. “Wow, you can lift it.”

Gordon swung the blade in a graceful arc, cutting off Jon’s head in a smooth stroke.

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

About a half hour later, Jim Fredericks was sitting on a chair in his backyard patio enjoying a beer and listening to music on his iPod. He’d had his eyes closed for much of the time, so Gordon was able to sneak in with his sword and a large bag holding Jon’s head.

When Jim opened his eyes to reach for his beer, though, he saw a black silhouette moving in the bushes by his fence. “Who is that?” he whispered, then removed his earplugs and got up.

He stepped off the patio and walked across the grass with caution, as tipsy as he was. That human silhouette in the bushes remained unmoving.

“What are you doing on my property, whoever you are?” he said, squinting and failing to make out any details that might have identified the intruder.

Gordon remained silent and still as Jim came closer.

“This isn’t funny. Get off my property, or I’ll pick you up and throw you out.”

Jim was now right in front of the bushes.

“Come out of there!” He brushed a few leaves aside and saw a familiar face. “Scrotum Breath?”

The sword went through his gut before he could laugh his first “Ha.”

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

Twenty minutes after that, Gordon slipped through the unlocked back door of Jim’s next door neighbour, Ron Sweeney, whom Gordon saw lying fast asleep on the living room sofa. The TV was left on, at a low volume, but enough to mask any sounds of Gordon entering and approaching.

By the time Gordon was standing right in front of the sofa, though, with the sword raised up high and ready to come down, slicing into Ron’s neck, his eyes were half open, just making out the black outline of Gordon’s figure.

Ron whined and trembled at first, then switched on the nearby lamp. “Scrotum…?”

The sword had already sliced through before he could say “Breath.” His head fell on the floor and rolled a few times in the direction of the TV.

***********

Carrying a bag with three heads, our swordsman got to the house of Chris Culig about a half hour later. He was taking out the garbage, at the side of his house.

Chris reached for the lid of one of the garbage cans. Gordon was in it, his sword coming up and stabbing Chris in the chest before he could say that hateful nickname.

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

Shaun Holmes lived two doors down from Chris, so Gordon could get there and ready to kill in about ten minutes. Clara’s magic was working like a dream, for though he could hear the screams of neighbours and police car sirens, he felt a kind of force field surrounding him, assuring him that, no matter how sloppy and careless he was being with these killings, he was easily eluding the cops.

Again, the door was left unlocked, thanks to Clara’s magical influence, so Gordon was able to slip inside. Sensing, again, through her magical guidance, that Shaun was coming down from the bedroom to get a bite from the fridge, Gordon waited by the kitchen.

Shaun went in the kitchen with the light left off. He opened the fridge door and focused on all the food he saw there: chicken, a half-finished cherry pie, three quarters of a chocolate cake, etc. He licked his lips as he thought about which food to choose. Finally, after ten seconds of consideration, he chose the pie.

He took the plate of pie out, then looked up from the fridge. The light from the opened door alerted him to the presence of his killer, who hacked his head off after he gave a gasp.

The clanging of the sword against the freezer door, and the smashing of the plate on the floor, were noisy enough to rouse his wife from their bed; but Clara’s magic muted the sounds.

***********

Kurt Davies lived several blocks down the road from Shaun, but Gordon was able to get to him within about ten minutes, because he saw a drunken Kurt staggering on the sidewalk just a few houses from Shaun’s. Gordon tiptoed a few feet behind his next victim.

He particularly hated Kurt for, among many other reasons, inventing the “Scrotum Breath” nickname. Now that he had confidence in his skill at wielding the sword (with Clara’s magical guidance, of course, since normally Gordon was rather spastic), he wanted Kurt to see who his killer was.

“Hey, Kurt,” he whispered from just by Kurt’s right ear.

“Huh?” the drunk said while turning his head.

“This is for you, courtesy of Scrotum Breath,” Gordon said while swinging the sword. Kurt was only able to say the “Sc” before the blade slashed through his neck.

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

Killing a woman would be hard for Gordon to do, even with Clara’s magic pushing him to do it.

Ms. Bellows’s house was just a few houses down the street from where Gordon had put Kurt’s head in the bag. Though slowed down with reluctance, he knew he had to get it over with, and her house’s proximity made now the sensible time to do it.

He went up to her porch and put his hand on the doorknob. When he turned it, he was relieved to find it locked at first…then he heard a click, unlocking it. Clara’s magic, for sure.

He gulped and stepped inside. She had to be in bed asleep by now. He found the stairs and went up them, as slowly and quietly as he could.

Ms. Bellows was an unpleasant woman, to be sure: cranky, often crabbing at people for some petty reason or another. She once growled at Gordon for walking on her front lawn. But did she deserve to die, and in such a bloody way?

At the top of the stairs, he was now walking down the hall to where he could hear her snoring in her bedroom. At the door and about to turn the knob, he was hesitating: killing those guys for Clara was fine, even enjoyable, but decapitating Ms. Bellows was too much.

Just then, he heard Clara’s voice whispering in his ear: She killed my cat, whom I loved dearly and who deserves to be avenged. Kill Ms. Bellows, and you can have me forever, Gordon.

He turned the doorknob as carefully as he could, not that she’d hear it over her snoring. He walked over to the bed. He raised the sword over his head.

He heard police sirens outside. His hands were shaking. He felt that force field around himself, giving assurance that the cops wouldn’t get him, but he still felt pangs of guilt over killing a defenceless, middle-aged widow in her sleep, all just over a cat.

He looked back from the window and down at her.

Her eyes opened.

She saw his dark silhouette standing over her.

She gasped, shook, and clutched her weak heart.

He brought the sword down, silencing her forever.

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

As he lugged the heavy bag of heads out of Ms. Bellows’s house and back to the sidewalk, amazed that the cops taking Kurt’s headless body away on a stretcher found him invisible, Gordon was shaking and nauseous over this last killing. At least there were only two left to kill now, and they were guys he didn’t like at all.

Phil Sulikowsky’s house was on the other side of the block from Ms. Bellows’s, so Gordon had to lug that big, heavy bag all the way around. When he got there, he saw Phil walking his dog, returning from the park.

They were facing each other. “What’re you doing out with that bag, Scrotum Breath?” Phil asked, then chuckled. “Hey, I got some chocolate for you.” He gestured with the plastic bag of his dog’s shit.

Gordon was so angry that he raised the sword and rushed at Phil, even screaming, knowing Clara’s magic would make everyone else deaf to it.

“Hey, what are you…?” Phil said, eyes agape. “No!”

His head spun a few times in the air, blood spraying everywhere.

***********

One more man to kill: Bill Wynn, Phil’s neighbour from across the road.

Baggy-eyed, exhausted, and emotionally drained, Gordon plodded over to the house like one of the undead.

He stood by the porch, with the sword hidden behind him, looking through the front window and seeing Bill in his living room. Bill looked back, saw Gordon, and went over to his front door.

He opened the door and said, “What the fuck are you doing on my lawn, Scrotum Breath? Get out of here.”

“Come out here and make me,” Gordon hissed.

“You telling me what to do? Oh, you’re gonna get it now.”

Bill went out on the porch with a balled fist. He went down the steps and on the grass where Gordon was. Before he could swing, though, the sword suddenly appeared and went through Bill’s gut and out the other side. Gordon’s bloody work was finished.

IX: The Ritual

Everything was now ready. Gordon had brought the bag of heads to Clara’s house. She had him run bath water over all of them, and as the water poured from the shower nozzle onto each head, she said a magical formula in Liput and waved a magic wand in the shape of a pentacle, making all the skin, hair, eyes, ears, and everything inside each head dissolve and disintegrate, and leaving only nine skulls.

Since Gordon had blood all over him, she even used her magic to clean him and his clothes. She needed all traces of the violence removed from her ritual, to ensure that no bad karma would contaminate it.

Everything was laid out as planned in the red room, around the magic circle and pentacle. The swords and daggers were fanned out in all directions, with the nine skulls at the tips of the swords (including the one Gordon had used), all along the periphery of the circle and facing outwards, to keep out any unwelcome spirits, including Lechi’s, most especially, for the moment at least.

Clara, nude, was sitting in the middle of the circle with Ptah’s body in her lap; she’d used magic to keep the corpse from decomposing and putrefying. Gordon was standing in the circle, facing her, but also in a magically-induced trance, to ensure that he couldn’t interfere with the ritual in any way.

Indeed, she was worried that the magic she had used on him wasn’t as effective as she’d hoped it would be. During the killings, he’d showed signs of reluctance and hesitation that shouldn’t have been there at all. She would have to use stronger formulas and incantations to keep him fully under her control.

After all, she had no intention whatsoever of keeping her promise to satisfy his desires in bed, any more than she did with Lechi. Their souls were to be trapped forever in Ptah’s body, able only to see, hear, and feel her passively; the cat alone would retain control of his body.

When Gordon and Lechi were to realize that they were being double-crossed, they were naturally going to try to get out of their prison in Ptah’s brain. Clara was going to have to ensure the prevention of such a danger. She knew some incantations that surely would work to stop these two would-be lovers.

Just before the ritual began, she gave Gordon a cup of hot tea she’d prepared. “Here, Gordon. Drink this.”

“Thank you,” he said, taking the cup and saucer from her. “What is it?”

“Just tea,” she said with a smile. “It’ll help you to relax during the ritual. Drink up.”

As he sipped it, she watched him, noting how he was–in spite of the trance she’d put him in–still shaken up after having killed those people. She needed him to be totally calm, relaxed, in a meditative, suggestible state of mind.

…and magic mushroom tea would do the trick.

He gulped it all down, suspecting nothing, even as he saw her lips moving, whispering a secret incantation to make the drugged tea take effect faster.

Within ten minutes of his having drunk all of it, she was ready to begin, for she could see that his trance-like state was now complete with the aid of the tea. She began the ritual by summoning Lechi, and having the god’s spirit enter Gordon’s body, feeling all of his physicality.

What is this? Lechi thought. Gordon is…under the influence…of mushroom tea. I can feel his…euphoria, and his dazedness. I told Clara…to have him…ingest her mushroom drugs…so she could better…control him…while he was killing…the nine people…not during…this ritual.

She then used this incantation–“Ud Lechi eek zvarge im atta dis Gordon”–to ensure Lechi’s caging, or containment, in Gordon’s soul, or self. There was yet another useful ambiguity in the Liput language: atta could mean self, or soul.

Lechi, already addled by the high from the mushroom tea, wouldn’t notice the ambiguous meaning of atta. The god would think that his spirit was being contained in Gordon’s self, his person, his body, rather than caged in Gordon’s soul. Lechi would think he was merely being put in Gordon’s body so he could enjoy sex with her, rather than being eternally imprisoned in Gordon’s soul. This spiritual incarceration would ensure her safety against ever being sexually assaulted.

To be sure of this safety, Clara of course said this incantation nine times, each time pointing herself in the direction of one of the nine protective swords. Her next incantation would be this: “Ud Lechi ed Gordon ed nuna hashan dis atta zvarge im pita sola chi!” That is, “May Lechi and Gordon and the nine victims’ souls be safely contained in the body [of Ptah]!” Again, she chanted this nine times in the direction of each sword.

Finally, she intoned the following: “Ud Lechi ed Gordon ed nuna hashan slivu its im pita atta zvarge solachi!” Or, “May Lechi and Gordon and the nine victims beheaded/castrated be, safely in the body/soul/self of Ptah!” Again, there was ambiguity in the meaning of these words, beyond the ambiguities already explained. Did her words mean, “the decapitated nine victims,” or did they mean, “May Lechi, Gordon, and the nine victims be emasculated, made impotent, in Ptah’s body”? Clara was hoping to slip this meaning by drugged Lechi without his suspecting; and she chanted this last incantation nine times, in the direction of each sword.

At the end of this chanting, she noticed, as expected, that Gordon was getting sluggish, enervated. He was having difficulty staying on his feet. Now Clara chanted, “Ptah, vivoka! Schlink bur ta tenki!” Or, “Ptah, come to life! Embrace the souls entering you!” And this was said nine times in the same way as before.

She looked down and saw Ptah’s body beginning to stir, ever so slightly. A tear of joy ran down her cheek. She was shaking with expectation.

Gordon fell to the floor, motionless, but with his eyes looking straight at hers, accusing her. She shuddered, knowing that not only was Gordon looking at his betrayer, but also Lechi was. Still, that same look of anger and heartbreak seemed to reassure her that those souls would truly be trapped in Ptah’s body forever.

Outside, there was the sound of the sirens of approaching police cars. Then, Gordon did something unexpected.

He got up.

With hate in his eyes, he plodded like a zombie towards her.

She gasped.

Lechi won’t be contained? she wondered.

Then, Gordon tripped, she used her magic to raise up a sword under him (the same one he’d used to kill the nine victims with, fortuitously), and he fell on it.

Now he would stay motionless.

She could hear the cops barging into her house, so she quickly wrapped a nearby black blanket around her nakedness.

“Oh, God, please help me!” she screamed as the cops came into the red room and saw Gordon lying on the floor in a widening pool of blood. “He just barged in here and tried to rape me and kill me with my sword!”

“Then why has he been stabbed with it?” a cop asked.

“He got clumsy, tripped, and fell on it,” Clara said in sobs. “Earlier today, he barged in here, stole my sword, and ran off with it. I normally use it with all these others for my rituals, but he had this crazy look in his eyes, always yelling, ‘Revenge!’.”

“That’s plausible,” a second cop said. “That’s Gordon Marsh lying there dead. I knew him. You should’ve seen how clumsy he was. All those guys whose heads were cut off, they used to pick on him. I don’t know why he killed Ms. Bellows, but the rest of the girl’s story makes sense to me.”

“Nine decapitated victims,” a policewoman said, “with one of her swords, and nine skulls lying here. The swords are for your rituals, are they? Satanic rituals, by chance?”

“Of course not,” Clara said, then lied, “they aren’t real skulls. They’re all made of plastic.”

“They sure look real to me,” the policewoman said, reaching down and about to pick up a skull.

“Ni tchah!” Clara shouted, suddenly making all the police oblivious to the skulls.

“Well, we’re going to need to borrow your sword for evidence,” the first cop said. “You’ll get it back when we’ve finished the investigation. Apart from that, I’d say the girl’s story fits in with everything else we’ve seen. We’ll need a full testimony from you as we put together the rest of our investigation here.”

“OK,” Clara said, thinking, I’ve finished the ritual. The cops’ taking away my sword shouldn’t negatively affect my magic. The souls are all safely trapped in Ptah’s body. Speaking of which…

She looked over at her cat. The body was stirring a little more. Her heart was beating faster with hopefulness.

X: The Cat Came Back

Clara had to get dressed and go to the police station to give her full testimony and help the cops finish their investigation. It took hours! Thankfully, they didn’t think any more about her magical practices than those of the harmlessly eccentric behaviour of a kook loner.

By the time she finally got back home, though, the sun was already up. She was exhausted, and just wanted to strip and fall down naked on her bed.

As she climbed the stairs to her bedroom, though, she heard something that gave her a sudden burst of adrenaline, making her run the rest of the way.

She heard a meow.

She ran into her bedroom and saw Ptah lying on the bed, licking himself and purring.

“Ptah!” she screamed with tears of joy running down her cheeks. “You’re back! I’ve got you back!” She got on the bed, picked him up, put him on her lap, and stroked him. She couldn’t stop weeping. She was shaking with happiness.

Then, just to make sure, she picked him up and looked all over his body to see if anything at all was different about him. She knew, as Talas had told her, that the cat wouldn’t be 100% the same as before, but he seemed amazingly close to that 100%, for she saw absolutely nothing different.

All of his fur was black, he had his claws, though he knew to keep them in whenever she held him, for she’d used her magic to teach him never to scratch her, even by accident. She abhorred declawing.

The only thing that seemed different, and even this, ever so slightly so, was the even greater love she saw in his eyes, obviously the result of the trapped souls of all of those in Ptah’s consciousness, those of the men–and Lechi–who lusted after her.

XI: Nodding Off

Looking into Ptah’s loving, longing eyes with soaking wet, teary eyes of her own, she whispered, “I love you so much.” Then she kissed him on the top of his head, put him at the foot of her bed, and began undressing.

She giggled as she saw the cat staring at her as she got naked, thinking, This is all you boys in there will ever have of me. When fully nude, she turned around for the cat and giggled some more. See me fulfilling my promise to you, Lechi and Gordon? The cat just sat there looking, with that caged desire in his eyes.

She lay on her back on the bed with her legs apart at about a forty-five-degree angle, with her right foot touching Ptah. She closed her eyes for a few seconds, taking a deep breath and relaxing.

When she opened them, she looked down and saw, of all the bizarre things, Michelle Pfeiffer’s Catwoman licking her between her legs! It felt so good: Clara was getting wet, her labia were beginning to swell, and her clitoris was hardening. Oddly, Pfeiffer’s tongue felt much smaller than a human tongue, but it was still effective. Clara closed her eyes, sighed, and moaned softly.

She opened her eyes again and looked down, but now she saw Julie Newmar’s Catwoman licking her! The tongue’s size felt the same, but so was its deliciously tickling skill as good as ever. Clara was getting wetter, sighing more and more, and moaning louder.

Newmar put two fingers inside Clara, gently and slowly moving them back and forth while tickling her vaginal walls. A third finger was rubbing against her hardening clitoris. While she felt all of these thrills, Clara found that those fingers inside her felt more like one thick finger–in fact, it felt hairy, even fuzzy.

She closed her eyes again and decided not to wonder about the oddity of the sensations; she’d rather just have enjoyed them. She was fidgeting on the bed and letting out little yelps of pleasure.

She opened her eyes and looked down again. Instead of seeing another actress as Catwoman again, though, this time she saw Sister Rosalie Mason, her old grade ten teacher of religion class. This nun, with her pretty face and kindness to Clara (as she’d been enduring her father’s abuse), caused her to have a lesbian crush on her back then in her teen years; so seeing her in her habit, licking her, was just all the more enjoyable. She was soaking wet between her legs, her clitoris fully engorged, and her labia swelling.

She closed her eyes for a few seconds, anticipating an even better lover on opening them. When she did open them, though, she looked to her left and saw Ms. Bellows, standing by the foot of her bed and grinning maliciously.

Then she looked straight up and saw Gordon. He was also looking at her with a malevolent smile. Instead of tongues and fingers, she now felt a phallus moving in and out of her…a furry one, but nonetheless a phallus.

Gordon said, in the panting voice of Lechi, “You actually thought…that your feeble skills…at magic…would be a match…for my power? You did need…that ninth sword…to lie in position…with all the others…to ensure…the efficacy…of your spell. Now all of us..will enjoy you…every time you sleep!”

Clara now felt phalli entering her anus and her mouth. She sensed in them the presence of Bill Wynn and Ron Sweeney. Soon after, she felt a phallus between her breasts, with invisible hands pushing them together and wrapping them around the invisible phallus. This, she sensed, was Jon Schmidt.

The fact that these were all incubi is what kept if from being physically impossible. Next, she sensed the phalli of Kurt Davies and Shaun Holmes respectively in her left and right hands. After beginning to masturbate these invisible masses of meat, she felt two more, those of Phil Sulikowsky and Jim Fredericks, pushing against her left and right armpits respectively. Finally, the invisible hands of Chris Culig took her feet, put them on either side of his invisible phallus, and had them rub it.

None of this probing hurt; in fact, her arousal was soaring. She was sweating and moaning a high-pitched “Mmm!” with every thrust she received, them all being perfectly synchronized. Finally, after another minute, she climaxed with a scream, then they all sprayed bukkake, soaking her with come from head to toe.

The incubi all disappeared. Her eyes were closed, and her mouth wide open, the sides of her lips curled up in a smirk. She let out a long sigh. Then she opened her eyes.

Instead of seeing Gordon on top of her, she saw her father.

“I told you I’d make it good for you,” he said in Lechi’s voice.

Clara woke up screaming. Shaking all over, she needed a few minutes to calm down and feel her heart rate slow down to normal. She whispered over and over, “It was just a dream. It wasn’t real. They never had me.”

Finally calm, she looked down to the foot of the bed. A puddle of come had soaked the sheets between her legs. Ptah was sitting just behind it, with his tongue sticking out.

“A wet dream?” she whispered. “I haven’t had…one of those…since I was…in high school.”

Then she looked at Ptah again. His right front leg was soaked in her gushing. He was looking at her with those loving, longing eyes. He was purring.

“Oh, my God!” she yelled, then, “No, no. That could not have happened. Not my Ptah, no. H-he just…he dipped his leg in the puddle, that’s all! Yeah, I gushed quite a lot, and that’s how he g-got so much of his leg wet with it. That explains it! I just had a dream about those men. They’re all trapped in Ptah’s consciousness; my ritual was c-complete, perfect! There’s no way they could have got out of the mental prison I put ’em in.”

She picked up her cat and hugged him.

“I got you back, Ptah! That’s what matters. I’ve had bad dreams before. They just reflect my unconscious traumas, that’s all. I have you back, and that’s what’s important, even if you did put your foot in my–no, that couldn’t have happened! My life is complete again with you. I’m so happy to have you back, Ptah! I love you so much.”

She would spend her whole day petting, feeding, playing with, and cuddling her cat. That look of longing and love in his eyes never stopped, not even for a second. She was in an ecstasy with him right until sundown, when she would go to bed with him at the foot of it. She would fall asleep smiling from ear to ear.

To sleep, perchance to dream.

Ay, there’s the rub.

Analysis of ‘Stalker’

Stalker (Russian: Сталкер) is a 1979 Soviet science fiction film directed by Andrei Tarkovsky and written by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, based loosely on their 1972 novel, Roadside Picnic. The film stars Alexander Kaidanovsky (in the title role), Anatoly Solonitsyn, and Nikolai Grinko, with Alisa Freindlich and Natasha Abramova.

The premise of the novel is that after an alien “Visitation,” various items of the aliens were left behind in “Zones” in six places around the world. These alien artifacts have properties not understood by humanity, as are all the strange and dangerous phenomena experienced in the Zones. Still, some people, known as “stalkers,” illegally sneak into the Zones, risking apprehension by the police who guard the dangerous areas, and hoping to take some of the items out and sell them.

In the novel, Dr. Valentine Pilman compares this leaving-behind of alien artifacts to garbage left behind after a picnic on the side of the road, hence the name of the novel. According to Pilman’s analogy, the aliens are the picnickers, we humans are like the animals living where the picnic took place, exploring all the items left behind, not understanding what they are, things that may even be dangerous to the animals.

The novel is divided into four sections (preceded by an introduction involving an interview with Pilman) of which the last is the basis of Tarkovsky’s film, and even this section of the novel is radically reworked. An alien “Visitation” is considered a possible reason for the existence of the “Zone” in the film, though it may have been caused by a meteorite hitting the Earth. Redrick “Red” Schuhart of the novel is simply known as the “Stalker.” Instead of going into the Zone with young Arthur Burbridge, who dies in the “meatgrinder” of the novel, the Stalker goes in with two middle-aged men, known as the “Writer” (Solonitsyn) and the “Professor” (Grinko), neither of whom dies in the meatgrinder. In the novel, they seek the wish-granting “Golden Sphere” (or Golden Ball, depending on the translation); in the film, the three men seek a room that grants one’s deepest desires.

The making of the film was fraught with difficulties. It was originally filmed with film stock that was unusable, so Tarkovsky had to reshoot it almost entirely with the help of new cinematographer Alexander Knyazhinsky. Stalker initially got mixed reviews, but it has since been regarded as a classic of world cinema. The British Film Institute ranked it #29 on its list of the “100 Greatest Films of All Time.”

Here is a link to quotes from the film in English translation. Here’s a link to the full movie with English subtitles. And here is a link to Antonina W. Bouis‘s English translation of Roadside Picnic.

During the credits of the film, we see a black-and-white shot of a bar (which, in the novel, is called “the Borscht”). Next, we get a shot, still in bleak black and white, of the Stalker’s home, through half-way open doors leading into his bedroom. He, his wife (Freindlich–Guta in the novel), and their daughter, “Monkey” (deformed because of the Stalker’s exposure to the Zone, and played by Abramova in the film) are all lying in the same bed.

As they’re sleeping, we hear a train going by outside, shaking up the room. The Stalker is already awake, ready to get up and sneak out, to meet with the Writer and Professor, to take them into the Zone and find the desire-granting Room. His wife wakes up soon after, noticing he’s taken her watch; she begs him not to go and risk being put in jail again.

She fears his going back to jail, this time for ten years instead of five, as he did last time (in the novel, Redrick is incarcerated for a time for having been in the Zone); but the Stalker insists that he’s “imprisoned everywhere.” This ‘imprisonment’ is what the black-and-white filming is supposed to represent: the bleakness of their everyday existence, from which the Room in the Zone is supposed to be an escape.

He won’t be dissuaded from going, and he leaves her. She falls to the floor, weeping after having cursed at him for ruining her life. What we notice here is the close relationship between the nirvana of the Room and the suffering caused by desire for that Room, the heaven of the Room and the hell that surrounds it.

As we’ll learn soon enough, heaven and hell, nirvana and samsara, are even closer together than that.

He meets with the Writer near some train tracks (indeed, as his wife was weeping, we heard another train going by their home). The Writer has been drinking and chatting with a pretty young woman about how “boring” life is (i.e., black and white), and therefore there are no flying saucers, ghosts, or God to make it interesting. There isn’t even a Bermuda Triangle, according to the Writer…yet, there’s a wish-granting Room in the Zone that he’s risking going in to find?

The two men meet with the Professor in the bar. It’s fitting that they’d all meet here, with the Writer drinking in particular; for alcohol is as much an escape from pain for him as the Zone, and the Room, are an escape from pain for the Stalker, as we’ll see.

The Professor is in the sciences, physics in particular, though he alludes enigmatically to an interest in chemistry as part of his reason for seeking the Room, a reason he’d not have the other two know about until they find the place. The Writer claims he’s going there to regain his lost inspiration.

The Stalker tells them that their train has arrived, so they must go. He tells Luger, the bartender (named Ernest in the novel), to call on his wife if he doesn’t come back. Those trains we keep hearing and seeing represent that wish to go out there to find happiness…as opposed to being content with the happiness we have here, but don’t appreciate; and this is precisely what Stalker is all about.

(Though “stalker” in the novel and film has no relation to our notion of a disturbed fan or rejected lover following around a celebrity or other object of desire, one can in a way see a connection between the two uses of the word…someone obsessively chasing a desire or form of happiness that isn’t his to have.)

They drive to the entry to the Zone, dodging and hiding from the police who patrol the area on their motorbikes. Since the Zone is, for the Stalker in particular, a kind of Eden away from his miserable world, those police are like the cherubim and the flaming sword that forbid re-entry into paradise, to get at the Tree of Life (Genesis 3:24).

Now, how should one think of the ‘happiness’ as promised by the Room in the Zone? Since Stalker is a Soviet film (i.e., one approved by the Soviet government), one might think that one’s deepest desire is for the establishment of full communism: a classless society with such an abundance of commodities as pure use-values that one can obtain without need of money, and therefore no state is needed, either, to protect the interests of one class against those of the other. Police preventing entry into the Zone can thus represent capitalist encirclement–imperialism.

Now, while Tarkovsky, as his son would later insist, was no political dissident with regards to the ideology of the USSR (i.e., he didn’t leave the USSR during his last years for political reasons; and it should be noted in this regard how George Lucas once said that one had greater artistic freedom as a filmmaker there than in Hollywood, as long as one didn’t criticize the government), it would be too simplistic to reduce the meaning of wish-fulfillment and ultimate happiness to the socialist goals of the Soviet Union. No: Tarkovsky was far too spiritual for dialectical materialism.

The point is that happiness, having what one wants most deeply in one’s soul, in the true, spiritual sense, is elusive, and there is much pain that one must go through to find that deeper happiness, not just having one’s wishes granted.

And in the end, one often finds that what one truly wants is not what one thought one wanted. The Writer admits, early on, that he isn’t really seeking inspiration from the Room, and that one often doesn’t know what one does or doesn’t want. He acknowledges this unknowing before even entering the Zone.

Still, the three men risk apprehension by the police at the entry to the Zone, then risk all the booby traps in the Zone that surround the Room…all to attain a most enigmatic happiness. Such is the seductive allure of nirvana, the desire to end the desire that causes suffering.

The Stalker drives their car on a train track among the patrol guards, who shoot at them. When one has seen the filthy urban sprawl that they live in, blanketed in pollution, one can begin to understand the lengths they’ll go to in their quest for a better life.

Having gotten past the cops, the three find a railcar to go on to get into the Zone. We see in this transport the connection between the trains and the going out there to find happiness. We hear the clanking of the railcar against the tracks as the three men go forward into the Zone, thus reinforcing the thematic connection between the sound of trains and the search for happiness…out there.

The police won’t follow the three into the Zone because they’re scared to death of what’s inside, as the Stalker explains to the Writer, who asks him what it is that’s inside. The Stalker says nothing to answer the Writer’s question, because nothing is precisely the answer to the question–a nothingness of nirvana, Wilfred Bion‘s O, Lacan‘s Real Order, a paradox of heaven and hell, Rudolph Otto‘s notion of the numinous, a mysterium tremendum et fascinans.

As the three men are going along the track, we hear the clanking of the railcar and other twanging noises as a fitting soundtrack to the sights of industrial clutter all over the land, a reminder of the bleakness of their world. And finally, the black and white of that bleakness changes to colour, and the railcar stops.

We see mostly the green beauty of nature, with trees, bushes, and grass…but still some urban clutter to remind us that the world isn’t as perfect as it may seem. The Stalker nonetheless joyfully says that they’re “home at last,” for in spite of the dangers of the Zone, the three have arrived at his conception of happiness, hence, the change to colour. He loves how still and quiet the place is, a stillness and quiet of peace, without the hell of other people…apart from the three of them, though, of course.

To navigate the Zone and avoid its booby-traps, the Stalker will use a kind of slingshot, throwing metal nuts here and there, rather like David’s way of defeating the danger of the Philistines (this flinging of nuts from a slingshot is also done by Redrick in the novel).

They have to proceed through the Zone in a very roundabout way, to avoid the dangers therein. In the novel, there’s even a reference to minesweepers that were used by stalkers in the Zone, and how two stalkers were “killed by underground explosions.” This is the sort of thing that I mean when I refer to booby-traps in the Zone. Indeed, in keeping with the socialist interpretation of the heavenly aspect of the Zone and the Room, one might associate these mines and other booby-traps with the mines and other bombs that the imperialists left in places like Laos during the Vietnam War.

On a deeper level, we can see in the heaven/hell paradox of the Zone a symbolic association between the meteorite/aliens and humans, on the one hand, and the sons of God mating with the daughters of men, on the other (Genesis 6:1-4). The offspring from the Biblical mating were the Nephilim; in the case of the Zone, the offspring of stalkers, who have been exposed to the alien presence, are children like the deformed “Monkey”–unable to walk, but possessing telekinetic powers, as we discover at the end of the film.

The point is that, in the Zone, there is, symbolically speaking, a taboo mixture of the human and divine worlds, giving rise to the heaven/hell paradox of the place. Wishes may come true, it’s divinely beautiful in its greenery, but people die here. I discussed, in my analysis of the primeval history in Genesis, how any mixture of the human and divine worlds resulted in evil (i.e., man trying to be like God in having knowledge–expulsion from Eden; man trying to be like God in deciding when another will die–Cain’s punishment; and the mating of the sons of God with the daughters of men–the sinful world leading to the Flood).

The Stalker describes the Zone as a complex maze of death traps where “everything begins to move” when people are there. The Zone is an alien land, altered by divine, celestial beings, as it were, and when man enters it, we have that mix of divine and human that brings with it the danger of a deluge of evil.

This is why, though the three men have quickly found the building where the Room is, they cannot risk death by directly walking into it. They must follow the deliberately circuitous path directed by the Stalker. “Former traps disappear; new ones appear,” he says. Safe paths become dangerous, and vice versa: a dialectical shift between the opposites of good and evil, shifting up and down like the waves of an ocean…or a flood.

The Stalker speaks of the Zone in almost religious language, as though it’s a God-like presence that will punish you with death if you don’t behave properly. Still, he thinks that it isn’t the good or evil who either make it to the Room or perish. It’s the wretched, those who’ve lost all hope, who go thus from the lowest low up to the highest heaven. Yet even the wretched may perish if they misbehave here.

So, instead of going into the building, they will get there indirectly by first going into a dark wood where the Stalker has tossed one of his slingshot nuts. Thus we come to Part Two of the film. “Long is the way/And hard, that out of hell leads up to light.” (Milton, Paradise Lost, Book Two, lines 432-433)

The Stalker hopes, again in that quasi-religious attitude of his, that the other two men will believe (i.e., in the truth of the Zone), believe in themselves, and “become as helpless as children.” (Mark 10:14-15)

Another paradox in the film is the Stalker’s belief that it is in softness that there is life, and in death we find hardness. Strength and hardness kill, in his view; in softness and flexibility are life, rather like the notion that the meek are blessed, for they shall inherit the earth (Matthew 5:5).

The Professor, not realizing that the Stalker has been continuously guiding him and the Writer to the Room, however circuitously, but incorrectly thinking he has just been showing them something, has left his backpack and wants to go back to retrieve it. The Stalker insists that he mustn’t, for fear of the death traps, but the Professor won’t be dissuaded, because he has something in that backpack that he needs when reaching the Room.

The Stalker and Writer come to a place of rushing water that the former calls “the dry tunnel,” as a joke. Since the Professor is no longer with them, they assume correctly that he’s gone back for his backpack, and that they must go on without him. They go through the soaking wet of the “dry tunnel,” and after we see a close-up shot of rippling, shallow water with such various forms of leftover trash as used needles and pieces of paper, the two men are surprised to find the Professor on the other side, with his backpack and calmly eating and drinking from his thermos.

They’ve managed to get through an area the Stalker deemed dangerous, a watery area the Professor has navigated with no help (and the Writer has alluded to Peter almost drowning, a reference to Matthew 14:22-32); here, we see the Stalker, the most ‘religious’ of the three, being the one “of little faith,” while the Professor hasn’t needed any faith.

The three men lie down and have a rest.

Since this place is, on the one hand, a wish-fulfilling paradise, and paradoxically on the other hand, a place of death, a heavenly Hades, if you will, the appearance of a dog–whose howling we heard when the three men arrived on the railcar–is fitting. This dog is symbolic of Cerberus, guarding, as it were, the underworld of ultimate fulfillment.

We see a brief black-and-white shot of the water, close up, leading to the Stalker, who is lying prone on the ground by that water, his head on his hand in an attitude of exasperation. Meanwhile, the other two have been chatting about whatever wishes they may hope will be granted them. Inspiration for the Writer? A Nobel Prize for the Professor? The latter taunts the former about his talentless, vain writing, but the Writer, spitting on humanity, is interested only in himself. The Stalker’s exasperation must come from his secret knowledge that the granting of one’s wishes is a truly empty pursuit.

Still, taking people into the Zone is extremely important to him, as a kind of act of religious faith, as we’ll see towards the end of the film.

“Truth is born in arguments,” we hear. Indeed: dialectical thinking is the basis of all the paradoxes of Stalker.

We return to colour, with the Stalker now lying supine on the grass. He seems more at ease now. He brings as many people as he can into the Zone, wishing to bring in more…to find happiness. He agrees that one has never found a single happy person in the world, a reminder of the first of the Buddha‘s Four Noble Truths…yet the Stalker still wants to bring people here.

One seeks happiness like a dog chasing its tail, never catching it. Still, one chases after it.

When asked if he’s ever used the Room, the Stalker says that he’s happy as he is…with no smile on his face.

…and we briefly return to black and white, with the dog running up to him. His whole world is just as bleak in the Zone as it is outside. Deep down, the Stalker knows that the Room’s promises of happiness are empty, so he only brings other people here to give them that hope. He is, in essence, a kind of religious charlatan, selling bliss, and he knows it.

He’s lying on a tiny island, as it were, of land, just big enough to include his body, and he’s surrounded by shallow water. Sometimes Brahman is compared to an ocean (as I have done), with Atman compared to a drop in this ocean. But here, this water is shallow, like the shallow hope of happiness the Stalker is selling. Sometimes, nirvana is compared to an island, but his ‘island’ is so small as to be insignificant.

The Writer acknowledges the emptiness of his desire to gain inspiration from the Room. After all, the whole point of being a writer, for him at least, is to prove his worth, as such to himself and to others. This need to prove himself is fueled by his own self-doubt. If the Room grants him his wish of genius, he has no more need to prove himself; then, what need has he anymore to write?

What we can see here, therefore, is a kind of ouroboros of wish-fulfillment. I’ve discussed, in many other articles, my use of the serpent biting its tail as a symbol of the dialectical relationship between opposites. The ouroboros, coiled in a circle. represents for me a circular continuum; extreme opposites meet and phase into each other where the head bites the tail, and every point in between has its correspondence on every intermediate point on the serpent’s coiled body.

So, for the Writer to achieve his wish of inspiration is to lose his whole motivation and meaning for writing. The talent of writing kills the writer. The Stalker knows, deep down, that the granting of wishes, the giving of happiness, kills it; therefore, he’ll never use the Room. The Professor knows of the potential danger of misuse of the wish-granting of the heaven-hell Room, so he has special plans for it, which necessitate his bringing along of his backpack.

One can conceive of an ouroboros of the Zone, too. When the three men arrive, having come from the black-and-white bleakness of their ordinary world and the danger of being shot by the patrol guards, we come upon a colourful world of beautiful trees, grass, and bushes. What’s more, the Room has been discovered to be quite close.

They can’t go in directly, so they’ve had to travel from the heavenly biting head, as it were, of the ouroboros of the Zone, down the coiled length of its body in the direction of its bitten tail, where the deadly meatgrinder is, just before the Room. As can be expected, this move along the coiled length of the serpent’s body, so to speak, has meant an experience of less and less bliss, more and more pain. The Stalker has to guide them through the increasing intensity of danger. Hence, these black-and-white moments, indicating a decrease in heavenly bliss; hence also the increasing lack of civility in the men’s discussions.

We see a shot of what looks like a stretch of muddy land, yet it moves in waves…at once like that Brahman-ocean metaphor I discussed above, yet also like a field of diarrhea. Such is the heaven/hell paradox of the Zone.

We hear a voiceover recitation of Revelation 6:12-17 begin as the Stalker, still lying on his little island, stares in front of himself in a wide-eyed daze. The film switches to black and white again, with a slowly moving close-up shot of the shallow water with random pieces of trash in it: a needle, coins, a picture of a saint, a gun, etc., and muddy tiles on the bottom. The shot ends with the Stalker’s hand.

With what is heard and seen, we again have juxtapositions of the holy and the horrifying: a description of the terror of Armageddon from the Bible, and the oceanic Brahman of water, but shallow water with things that hurt (the needle and gun); a holy man’s picture, but that which, if we love it too much, is the root of all evil (1 Timothy 6:10).

We return to colour, with a shot of the dog. The Stalker rises from his resting place, and he contemplates the two disciples going to Emmaus and seeing the risen Christ (Luke 24:13-18). This narrative, of course, brings us from the despair of the disciples, over Christ‘s crucifixion, to the joyful realization of His resurrection…only the Stalker stops his recitation just before that moment of realization. Instead, as the Stalker discusses music, we see a shot of a beautiful lake, surrounded by trees. Renewed hope and joy can come in surprising forms.

Recall the presence of the dog…for the next scene shows the entrance to a tunnel leading ultimately to the Room. This is the place of death, a kind of Hades, that one has to go through before reaching the heaven of the Zone. This is the bitten tail of the ouroboros that I mentioned above. It’s a harrowing of hell, the meatgrinder one must risk death going through if one is to reach the nirvana known as the Room, the serpent’s biting head.

In the novel, Redrick simply plans, from the beginning, to sacrifice Arthur to the meatgrinder, so the former can gain access to the Golden Ball. In the film, the Stalker has all three men draw straws to see who will go first into the meatgrinder and risk death. The Writer is the unlucky one.

Like Arthur, the Writer is the Christ figure who must suffer so the others get the benefits of the Room. Unlike Arthur, though, the Writer won’t die; he’ll just have to endure the stress of thinking he could die. He’ll have to go through this dark, filthy, polluted tunnel that curves like the inside of the coiled ouroboros. The Writer, before drawing straws, says he doesn’t think he should go in first, rather like Jesus, praying in Gethsemane, hoping God would let this cup pass from him (Matthew 26:39).

The Writer goes through the tunnel, the Stalker and Professor following from far behind. The Writer reaches a door, through which he must go. Before opening the door, though, he takes a pistol out of his coat pocket; the Stalker forbids him to use it, for it would seal their doom. Christ, during His Passion, of which the Writer’s current ordeal is the representation, never used a weapon–neither must the Writer.

He opens the door, goes into a passageway flooded with water, and must descend stairs to get chest deep in it to reach the other side. Of course, the other two must follow. The gun must be left in the water.

The Writer has gone ahead into an area with wavy hills of sand on the floor, reminding us of that stretch of muddy land outside that undulated. The Stalker warns the Writer to go no further. Those waves of sand again remind us of the oceanic nature of the Absolute, which is both heaven and hell. The Writer is lying on his side in a puddle, in exasperation, as the Stalker was before.

The Writer gets up, then speaks of this place as someone’s “idiotic invention.” The Zone, like religion, is just an invention to him. He’s furious with the Stalker, believing he cheated him into taking the wrong straw.

The Stalker is amazed at the Writer’s good luck in having survived, since so many have died in the meatgrinder. The Writer’s survival, allowing the other two to get through alive, is thus symbolic of Christ’s redemptive sacrifice and resurrection. Later, we will even see the Writer put on his head a wreath of branches like the crown of thorns.

Finally, they’re in the Room. What’s fascinating about the shot Tarkovsky takes of the Room is that we see it from outside, from the entranceway, just like his opening shot of the Stalker’s home, with the doorway leading into the bedroom. A similar shot has been given of the way in the bar. The implication is that these similarities show that the way to true happiness is not somewhere out there, a place we have to find, but right here at home, if only we had the eyes to see it. The problems is that we are, so to speak, colourblind–hence, the black-and-white shots.

A telephone rings in the Room. The call is from a clinic, the Professor’s place of work, and he phones back to talk to the caller, a colleague he has contempt for. The Professor proudly admits to what the caller knows that he intends to do to the Room. In a sense, the Professor is having his deepest, secret wish come true right here, for he has found the courage to tell the caller that he is defying the wishes of the institution of his employment, from which he expects to be fired.

…and what does the Professor want to do, and why does he need that backpack so badly? In it, he’s been carrying a bomb he’s meant to use to destroy the Room, so no one can misuse it to grant wishes of power, or to do other forms of evil.

The Stalker struggles with the Professor to take the bomb away and to prevent him from destroying the Room, but the Writer stops the Stalker, still mad at him for cheating him into making him go first into the meatgrinder. In any case, the Professor will change his mind, take his bomb apart, and toss the pieces into a large puddle. What we truly want is often a surprise to us, for we don’t really know what it is.

The three men look out at a large opening where a wall would have been, as if this were the entrance to the Room. We never see what’s on the other side, as if to preserve the mystery of the Room; but I don’t think that this opening leads there, however much it is implied that it does. The light coming out from it suggests that it’s the way back outside, rather than the way into the Room. (When we saw the building earlier from the outside, when the three men had just arrived and the Writer was approaching it, we saw a huge hole in it, a wall removed, and a door to a small room to the right; what we see now corresponds perfectly to this earlier sight.)

I believe the little room with the telephone and a glowing ball of a ceiling light (corresponding to the novel’s Golden Sphere?) is the actual Room, though Tarkovsky may have been teasing us with ambiguity as to which area was the real Room (i.e., which way is the real way to heaven?). The men have just stepped out of the Room for a moment, having not yet decided on what their wishes will be; then they’ll go back in.

The little room has a telephone, electricity, even sleeping pills…all odd things to find in one of so many abandoned buildings of junk and filth, if this isn’t the wish-granting Room. Still, what we want is so often not what we really want, hence the ambiguity as to which place is the real Room.

And in spite of how ambiguous this Room is in terms of its wish-fulfilling properties, and its paradoxical heaven/hell status, the Stalker still wants his Room to continue existing, not just so he can continue making money taking people here, but because he sees in it the importance of maintaining a sense of hope in life, a faith in some kind of religious feeling. He is, as the Writer observes, “one of God’s fools.”

When the Stalker talks about making one’s wish, now that the time has finally come, he is nervous and dripping with sweat, as though getting one’s wish is a terrifying thing. Heaven is hell.

So what the men end up doing is sitting outside between the Room and the open space, in quiet contemplation, instead of making wishes. All this effort…for nothing.

Yet, the Stalker mentions again, as he did when they’d first arrived in the Zone, how still the place is.

They return to the bar, and we return to black and white. The Stalker’s wife is there, with Monkey. We see the two of them outside, through the window of a door, in a shot reminding us of those of the Room, of the way in the bar, and of the way into the Stalker’s home’s bedroom. The place of our wishes is here with us, with family and friends, all in its dull black and white, with all of its troubles and miseries.

The dog has come with them, further demonstrating the unity of the Zone and what’s outside it. When the Stalker goes home with his family and the dog, we return to colour, with the Stalker carrying Monkey on his shoulders.

Back in his home, the Stalker, not feeling well, is complaining of the lack of respect and appreciation the Writer and Professor have for the Zone and Room, like a religious person complaining of atheists. Fittingly, we see black and white again, to reflect his own lack of appreciation for all that he has, in his own home. He ends up back in bed, as he was at the beginning of the film, which has thus come full circle.

His wife, in a monologue that breaks the fourth wall, speaks of never once regretting marrying him, in contrast to her cursing of him at the film’s beginning. She, too, calls him “one of God’s fools.”

She concludes that, in spite of all the sorrows she’s had with the Stalker, she has no regrets because, as the film has pointed out so many times with all of its symbolism, without pain, there’s no happiness or hope, either.

…and who is her hope, and his hope? Monkey, of course!

And this is how the film ends, in colour, with Monkey seen reading a book. A golden shawl is wrapped around her head and draped on her shoulders, presumably to hide her deformities. She is mute throughout the film. We hear the Stalker’s wife, in voiceover, reciting a poem as the child, having put the book down, sits there staring into space.

The film ends with her using telekinesis to move two glasses across a table, making one of them fall off of it. Here we see the true meaning of wish-fulfillment: using one’s mind to make happen what one wishes to happen. As a deformed child of the Stalker, and therefore of the Zone, Monkey is clearly his wish-fulfillment personified, even if he doesn’t realize it. As the offspring resulting from the symbolic mating of one of the sons of God and the daughters of men, she isn’t literally one of the Nephilim, but she is a giant hope for her parents.

The fulfillment of wishes, the finding of happiness, isn’t supposed to be selfish–it’s to be shared with others. This is why we see colour now in the Stalker’s home: his happiness is here because his wife and daughter are here. They are his happiness. Happiness is a collective one, not an individual one…which is actually the goal of socialism, incidentally.

A similar conclusion is made in the novel when Redrick shouts out, in imitation of Arthur, who has first shouted it before being killed by the meatgrinder: “HAPPINESS FOR EVERYBODY, FREE, AND NO ONE WILL GO AWAY UNSATISFIED!”

Nonetheless, we hear the rattling of that train again, the wish to find happiness out there. The temptation to go astray is ever present. As the camera does a closeup on Monkey, though, with her head lying on its side on the table, her like a reclining Buddha, we hear a chorus singing Beethoven’s Ode to Joy.

How fitting.

‘The Targeter,’ a Surreal Novel, Chapter Fifteen

I look around at all of the water that surrounds me and is me, and just as I expected, some of it is concentrating, congealing, coagulating, swirling into the shape of my body so that I’m returning to my human form.

In fact, instead of seeing nothing but endless water in all directions, I’m beginning to see the front yard of my apartment building again. I look up and down, and I see the tree above me, the tree I saw that wise old man meditating under so peacefully, and I see myself seated under it, having finished peacefully meditating myself.

I look ahead and, just as I predicted!…my five followers have returned. Surely, they want to hear me tell them my new insights. Along with my enlightenment, I seem to have acquired clairvoyance into the future!

I’ve become a saint!

I see the five of them crouching before me in a semicircle. eager to learn the Way. They’re looking at me with loving, attentive, concerned eyes.

I hear an explosion from up in the sky, with a flashing light. Then I hear some machine gun fire.

Meh. I’ll ignore it. I have much more important things to do than worry about that right now.

“I will now teach you the Three Unities,” I begin in a slurred voice. (My ketamine high is still strong; I hope it won’t impair my ability to impart my message.) “These are the Unities of Space, Time, and Action.”

I see confusion on all five faces. Surely what I’m saying isn’t so abstract, is it? And my speech, as slurred as it is, isn’t so unclear that my words are unintelligible, is it?

Oh, wait: yeah, I’m in East Asia. These five people are Asians, and in all likelihood, none of them understands a word of English, or certainly not well enough to follow what I’m trying to say.

I’ll repeat what I just said, but in Mandarin. Surely I’m not too drunk and stoned to be able to speak intelligibly in Chinese, am I? I’ve lived on this island for many years, having achieved a reasonable level of fluency in the local language, so I’ll try again…

…After having said in Chinese what I said before in English, I see them still sneering at me, not seeming to understand a word I’m saying.

I close my eyes, open them, and try again.

Now I see myself in ancient Asian robes, as are all five of my followers, who look at me with smiles of love. We’re inside what seems to be a palace, all ornately designed like one of the old Chinese emperors’, with gold on the walls. Rapt, my five followers eagerly await to hear what I have to say.

In broken Chinese, I say again, “I teach you of the Three Unities, those of Space, Time, and Action. Mastering these ideas in meditation, you’ll gain wisdom, end all of your suffering, and lead the world in a quest for peace and justice.”

The five of them are looking at me with glowing eyes and toothy grins, hungrily digesting my message.

I continue, in the best Chinese my wasted ass can muster: “Everywhere within us and around us, up above, down below, behind us, in front of us, and to our left and right, is all one. The ego is an illusion. When we fully understand this, selfishness vanishes, replaced by selflessness and compassion for everyone and every living thing.”

I look in their eyes and listen to their responses. In my continuing drug trip, I can’t make out their every word, but can hear only distinct fragments of what they’re saying–words like “crazy,” “love,” and “talk.”

I think for a minute, trying to put these pieces together. I know! They said, “I’m crazy about his message! I love to hear him talk!” That’s it!

“All of time is in cycles of beginning, middle, and end,” I continue, looking in the eyes of my captive quintet of an audience. “But the only time that matters is NOW, for NOW is the only time that is real. The past and future are just mental constructs with no real meaning.”

I listen for their responses. “What’s he talking about?” I think one of them has said with a sneer. Did one of them just call me “crazy”? I think I just heard the words “on drugs.” Well, they’re right about that.

BOOM! Wow, I just heard another loud explosion, with a blinding flash of light. The machine gun fire is louder, too.

The golden palace walls just disappeared, and we’re all outside again, in front of my apartment, in our modern clothes.

I’ll just have to keep on trying to explain, and maybe my five listeners will understand. I must be as clear as I can with my ungrammatical Mandarin.

“All action, all phenomena in the world,” I resume, “are examples of yin and yang, of unified opposites.” I’m trying my best to get these ideas across with the limitations of my Chinese vocabulary. Maybe they can relate to what I’m saying by my comparing it to Taoist concepts. We’ll see.

I’m straining my ears, with all the noise of war around us, to make out their comments. I’m hearing only fragments. I hear “loves,” “hear,” “himself,” and “talk.” I need a moment to put it all together…”I love…to hear…him talk”…that’s it! How encouraging! I’m getting through to them! The golden palace walls have returned, as have our ancient clothes.

“We must see people…and the world,” I carry on, “in a way…that’s not too far to one extreme…or the other. Don’t over-idealize people and things, and don’t hate or be too rejecting…of them.”

Are they smiling at me…or sneering? It’s hard to see in the dark, when you’re high on K. The golden walls are gone.

“We must be open with each other,” I tell them. “To heal, we must express ourselves, in speech, writing, and art. We must also help others…to express themselves…by giving them our ears.”

They’re giving me their ears, but their sneering must mean I still haven’t made myself clear. It sure is hard to communicate when you’re stoned. We’re in our modern clothes again.

BOOM! Another, even louder, explosion has lit up the sky with an even brighter flash of light. I know! It must be the light of understanding coming to my followers, for I see we’re all flying in the air, about to spread the word of the Way.

Yes, we’ve flown out the windows of the golden palace, our flowing Asian robes fluttering in the night sky, as we travel long distances to spread the word.

What’s that noise? No, it can’t be more machine gun fire, not with the light of liberation glowing all around. That must have been fireworks and firecrackers: my followers and I are celebrating the coming of enlightenment to the world!

Analysis of ‘A Farewell to Kings’

A Farewell to Kings is the fifth studio album by Rush, released in 1977. The album demonstrates remarkable musical growth in the band, with their shifting away from their original, Led Zeppelin-inspired hard rock sound and into the realm of progressive rock.

To this musical end, the trio expanded from a basic guitar/bass/drums sound to one incorporating not only six- and twelve-string acoustic guitars, but also classical guitar (by Alex Lifeson). Furthermore, singer/bassist Geddy Lee adds a Minimoog, and both he and Lifeson play bass pedal synthesizers; this electronic sound would be further expanded to the use of more synthesizers by the 1980s, this being a dominant aspect of their music throughout that decade.

Drummer Neil Peart adds a wide array of percussion instruments on this album, including glockenspiel, tubular bells, Vibraslap (heard during Lifeson’s solo on “Closer to the Heart“), and Chinese temple blocks. These new musical colours, combined with Peart’s growth from his original Keith Moon-inspired aggressive drumming style to one of prog rock virtuosity, show the newer influence of the crackingly precise chops of Carl Palmer and Bill Bruford.

But just as newer musical ideas are being phased in, so are older ideas being phased out. As I said above, the hard rock sound, though still present to a large degree, is noticeably less here than on previous albums. And although Lee’s soaring head voice (with its grating vibrato) is as evident as ever here (in fact, on “Cygnus X-1,” he hits his highest note ever, a B-flat 5…or 6?), it won’t be long after this album (two albums later, specifically) that he will phase out the use of head voice and limit his highest notes generally to those within mixed voice, and focus on his lower, chest voice.

A Farewell to Kings is an album that Rush were most pleased with: Lee has never found fault with it, and Peart said that the title track “seems to encapsulate everything that we want Rush to represent.” It’s one of my personal favourites of the band’s, if not the favourite–it’s the first of theirs that I’d heard as a little kid, not long after it was released. Apart from all the musical colours I described above, A Farewell to Kings is genuine art rock, not only with long songs divided into sections, but also with a more prominent use of odd time signatures and superb musicianship that had since become synonymous with Rush.

Here is a link to all the song lyrics on the album.

The cover, by Hugh Syme, shows a demolition site in the background as juxtaposed with, in the foreground, a king slumped on a throne and made to look like a marionette. The picture expresses some of the themes of the title track, and by extension, those of the rest of the songs on the album, as I’ll explain below.

Decades ago, I spotted the obvious theme of morality, but a much more important theme is idealism, particularly the idealizing of the past as against the disillusionment felt in the modern world. Also, there’s the theme of the danger of recklessly seeking to attain those ideals, leading to one’s self-destruction.

The title track begins softly, with Lifeson playing a classical guitar melody with one bar in 3/4, then three bars in 4/4 before returning to the 3/4 beginning, and playing the whole cycle all over again. He plays it a third time, but with the first two of the three 4/4 bars, replacing the third with a transitional bar in 5/4, then one in 4/4, to introduce a middle passage with Lee’s Minimoog and Peart’s glockenspiel.

The first theme returns with all three instruments, and with the 5/4 theme played three times. Though this gentle introductory tune includes a synthesizer, the classical guitar’s lute-like sound makes one think of a time hundreds of years ago. The music’s tranquility makes one imagine, correctly or incorrectly, that that old time was a better, more peaceful one.

A sharp contrast is heard when the electric guitar, bass, and drums come crashing in, suggesting the turmoil of the modern world, a sad decline from that (perceived) idyllic opening. We hear two bars of 4/4, then a switch to several bars of 7/4 before returning to 4/4.

Now, the lyrics come in, Lee singing what amounts to be a conservative’s complaint of “Whatever happened to the good old days?” (If one didn’t know any better, one might think of Archie and Edith Bunker singing “Those Were the Days” at the piano.)

Added to this conservative lament is the use of medieval imagery in Peart’s lyric (i.e., references to “castles,” all things “kingly,” and “nobles”). Let me just get this straight: a farewell to kings, that is, to feudalism, is a bad thing? Morality can be upheld only through the absolute power of a monarch, the ‘divine right’ of kings?

Such would be a very strange position for three young, long-haired rockers (who only the previous year sang of the pleasures of dope in “A Passage to Bangkok“) to take. Either Peart was being ironic, or he was being metaphorical in his references to kings and castles as an ideal, or the lyric is in the voice of a reactionary whose political ideals are in sharp contrast with those of the band.

I’d say that a hint to what Peart was really writing about, perhaps by way of a Freudian slip, is in the line “Ancient nobles showering their bitterness on youth.” Does this line not encapsulate what the whole lyric presents to the listener–grumpy old men griping about all these bad kids, with their long hair, loud rock music, and sex and drugs, only it’s expressed with all this medieval imagery, just to reinforce how “ancient” the complainers are?

One thing to remember about Rush, and about Peart in the 1970s in particular, was the influence of right-wing libertarianism, and of “the genius of Ayn Rand” in their reworking of her novella, Anthem, in their side-long suite, “2112” (not to mention their song of the same name as her book, and in the name of Rush’s record label). Surely, these three haters of ‘Big Brother government’ weren’t holding up the monarchy as a fitting alternative. And if the idealizing of monarchy is meant as a metaphor, then for what?

I want to give Rush credit here, and say that this song, however much Peart insisted would “encapsulate everything that [they wanted] Rush to represent,” is meant as an ironic presentation of the views of authoritarian conservatives “showering their bitterness on youth.”

In other words, Rush represents ironic tongue-in-cheek.

Sandwiched in between these verses is a tight instrumental section in alternating 4/4 and 2/4, with Lifeson doing a solo with a delightfully angular tone on his Gibson ES-355 over Lee’s Rickenbacker bass octaves in A, and Peart’s tight drumming. Lifeson stops soloing for a moment and plays an A-chord with Lee’s A octaves and Peart’s drumming of the 4/4 and 2/4 rhythm; then we have just 4/4 and a chord progression of A major, G major, and D major, over which Lifeson resumes soloing before a reprise of the “Cities full of hatred…” verse.

A final verse, to the same music as that of the reprised verse, ends with the hope for a world that’s “closer to the heart,” an allusion to the famous song that acts as a solution to the problem presented in the title track. More on that later, of course.

Though lyrically, “Xanadu” is inspired by Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s classic poem “Kubla Khan,” Peart’s idea originally came from the classic film Citizen Kane, in which the titular character (based in part on William Randolph Hearst) owns a mansion called Xanadu. Just as the title track yearns for an ideal morality in the feudal past (metaphorically, if not literally), so does “Xanadu” involve a quest for the ideal of eternal life.

As with the title track, “Xanadu” begins with birdsong (indeed, Messiaen would have loved it!). We also hear a low E played on the bass pedal synthesizer, along with Lifeson soloing with a volume pedal, and Peart playing the Chinese temple blocks, swiping the chimes, and tapping an E on the tubular bells.

Next, Lifeson plays–no longer with the volume pedal–a seven-note cycle of E–E (octave higher)–A–B–E-flat–A-flat–A, which then brings in the bass and drums. After this passage in 7/8, we return to 4/4, still in E major, with a riff including a whirlwind of notes starting on D, in the E-Mixolydian mode. Then, we’re back to 7/8 (Rush’s favourite odd time), with Lifeson quickly strumming chords of E-major, D-major, B-major, A-major, and G-major, but with an open high E string (he does a lot of this–playing E-shape barre chords, but with the high E-string open, without the barre–at various points in the song). Peart joins in with cowbells of different pitches, and Lee with the bass pedals set at a treble range. The bass and drums soon join Lifeson in this 7/8 passage.

The instrumental opening goes on for about five minutes before Lee finally begins singing, making allusions to Coleridge’s poem. “Drink[ing] the milk of Paradise” is what the speaker hopes will confer immortality onto him, though the milk, combined with honeydew, also suggests the use of narcotics (recall, in this connection, “A Passage to Bangkok,” as well as Coleridge’s own drug use).

The speaker seeks the ideal of eternal life, and hopes to find in Kubla Khan’s “pleasure dome” the ideal abode, paradise. But just as hoping for moral ideals in a romanticized past in “A Farewell to Kings” is foolish, so is the speaker’s hope for happiness in immortality in Xanadu foolish.

A thousand years pass, and the speaker has no hope of dying. He yearns for the end of the world, hoping to be destroyed with it, and thus to be freed of the “prison of the lost Xanadu.” Just as Charles Foster Kane can find no happiness or fulfillment in his wealth and power, the speaker, in his “bitter triumph,” cannot find any in honeydew and the milk of paradise.

Wealth, power, immortality, ideals…these don’t provide happiness. That’s what A Farewell to Kings is all about.

Now, “A Farewell to Kings” may have presented the problem of immorality (just as “Xanadu” explored the problem of immortality), but “Closer to the Heart” presents an attempt at finding solutions. Obviously, “the heart” is meant to indicate that we need a world of love as the solution, though as I’ll later argue, the solution as given isn’t adequate.

From a formal, structural perspective, the song’s lyrics (written by Peart, but inspired by a verse by Peter Talbot, a friend of the band’s) are cleverly written, with parallel structure from verse to verse. Examples of such parallelism include the rhyming last words of the third line of each verse (“reality,” “creativity,” “mentality,” and “destiny”); in the first line of each verse are references to different careers one could have (“men who hold high places,” “the blacksmith and the artist,” “philosophers and ploughmen,” and “captain”); the blacksmith would “forge,” and the artist use his “creativity,” ploughmen “sow” the philosophers’ “new mentality,” and the captain goes “sailing into [the] destiny” of “the chart” that “I will draw.” The most obvious parallelism is the repeat of the song’s title in the last line of each verse.

Now, this all makes for fine rhetoric, which again uses archaic diction, as in the album’s title track, the question song to which “Closer to the Heart” is the proposed answer. Here’s the problem: nothing in the song actually details how we are supposed to move towards a more loving world.

Matters start to get a little disturbing when we consider how the band that’s preaching how we must move “closer to the heart” was only the previous year touting the ‘philosophy’ of an embittered Russian bourgeois expat in the US, she who wrote of The Virtue of Selfishness, which espoused “rational egoism,” or as I would call it, rationalized selfishness.

In all fairness to Rush, and to Peart in particular, when they recorded these 1970s albums, they were young and naïve about the world. Their expertise was in music, not politics. Given the intense anti-communist propaganda of the Cold War, the kind that raised a hack writer like Rand to fame (seriously, I read Anthem when I was young and, being similarly naïve at the time, was more sympathetic to the story’s anti-socialist message, and even then, I was not impressed with her prose), it’s easy to see how Peart could have been seduced by her ideas, as so many have been. And to be even fairer to Peart, in the last decade of his life, he confessed that he’d renounced Rand (who, incidentally, was no libertarian, but rather an advocate for capitalist government) and begun calling himself a “bleeding-heart libertarian“…translation: a liberal. Indeed, it was the individualism of her message, not the pro-capitalist one, that he’d always liked, anyway.

As for those conservative politicians whose Rand influence has stayed with them, look over the past forty years of neoliberalism and ask yourself honestly if their politics have steered the world any “closer to the heart.” Tax cuts for the rich have resulted in their wealth ballooning to the point that they can essentially buy politicians and both American political parties, ensuring that the owners of the big corporations determine the direction the world goes in, which means more for them and less for the rest of us (all of this has given a new, bitter irony to Peart’s complaints of “the seeds that we let grow”). As I’ve explained in other posts, the “free market” dialectically leads to “corporatism,” or the capitalist government that Rand wanted, the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie.

So, with the song’s championing of a more loving world, with its clever rhetoric and a lack of a concrete plan for realizing its goal, “Closer to the Heart” is another example of the album’s theme of idealism. Note that utopian thinking exists on the left and on the right. Everyone has his or her own notion of the ‘perfect world’: there are, for example, the Nazi ideals of Lebensraum and judenrein, though decent people would never espouse such horrors. “Free market” fundamentalists’ notion of unbridled capitalism, through the voodoo of the invisible hand, leading to happiness and harmony is another utopian fantasy: how does unchecked selfishness help the world? It’s easy to see how it results in unaccountable corporate tyranny, though. And leftism isn’t necessarily all idealistic: contrary to popular belief, Marxism is not, as I explained here, utopian socialism, but scientific, grounded in revolutionary theory.

Now, “Closer to the Heart” may have failed to provide a method for achieving the more loving society, but Lee’s lyric for “Cinderella Man” gives us something of an idea. Just as “Xanadu” was inspired (in part) by a classic old black-and-white movie, so was this one: namely, by Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, one of Lee’s favourites.

Longfellow Deeds (played by Gary Cooper) is dubbed the “Cinderella Man” by a newspaper reporter, named Louise “Babe” Bennett (played by Jean Arthur), because of his sudden rags-to-riches inheritance of his late uncle’s $20,000,000 fortune. He’s from a town called Mandrake Falls, and he goes to New York to get the money.

Since Deeds eventually decides to give all of the money to poor, starving farmers (the 1936 film is set during the Great Depression), powerful men scheme to get their hands on his money by having him declared insane, and therefore too mentally incompetent to be trusted with the responsibility of managing and dispensing with so huge a sum of money. His eccentric behavior, which includes suddenly punching men for no apparent reason, walking in the rain, and feeding a horse an excess of donuts, seems to confirm that he’s insane. In fact, a psychiatrist deems him to be a manic depressive. In the end, though, they “just couldn’t beat him.”

So, Lee’s lyric tells the plot of the film in an extremely abbreviated form. The proposed ideal moral solution to the problem of poverty is, essentially, a kind of charity, acts of generosity done of one’s free, individual will, as opposed to the workers’ revolutionary seizing control of the means of production, resulting in a state-planned economy providing free healthcare, education, housing, and full employment.

It’s interesting to note, in light of Rand’s influence on Peart, that Mr. Deeds Goes to Town is a film by Frank Capra, who also did It’s a Wonderful Life, another film about the value of Christian charity, and one despised by the likes of Rand, who have idiotically claimed it is a “communist” film. Capra, a kind of right-wing libertarian in his own right, didn’t even like FDR’s New Deal, which was meant to keep the Depression-era American working class from agitating for a socialist revolution. As I argued in my analysis of this latter film (link above), the notion that altruism of any kind can be airily called “communist” really only displays the mean-spiritedness of the “rational egoists.”

“Madrigal” is a simple love song, with a sweet melody that Lee plays on his Minimoog, and with Peart’s drums recorded in an echo room. Even this love song can be seen as a manifestation of the theme of ideals, for when one is in love, one idealizes the love object, ignoring his or her faults, and exaggerating his or her virtues, especially as a contrasting bulwark against this harsh world we live in, as expressed in Peart’s lyric. That the song is called madrigal is again, as with much of the diction of its lyric, an example of the use of archaic imagery (suggesting associations with courtly love poetry, which idealized the Lady as love object), reinforcing that sense of idealizing a distant past against our troubled modern world.

“Cygnus X-1 Book One: The Voyage” is, in contrast to the previous songs’ settings at different points in the past, a science fiction story about going “across the Milky Way” in a spaceship to reach a black hole “in the constellation of Cygnus.” It’s in four parts, the Prologue opening with an electronically-altered narration by Terry Brown, the producer of A Farewell to Kings and all the other Rush albums from their second, Fly by Night, up to Signals.

1 is very brief, with Lee singing of how entry “through the void” of the black hole leads one “to be destroyed,” or could it be a wormhole into either another part of the universe, or a door to a parallel one? Our protagonist dares to find out.

Lee begins playing broken-up segments of the bass line that, when Lifeson and Peart join in, will comprise a riff in 3/4, 7/8, 3/4, and 4/4. Soon after, a frantic riff comes in with chords of C-sharp minor, E minor, and G-sharp minor, which we’ll hear again at the climactic end of the song. A guitar line of G, A-flat, B, C, D, E-flat, F-sharp, and G leads into a riff in 11/8, 12/8, and 11/8, with chords in C minor, a passing chord of B minor to F-sharp major, E-flat minor, and a passing chord of D minor back to C minor. The Minimoog eventually comes in, largely doubling the chords.

2, narrated by the protagonist, describes the flight on his ship, the Rocinante, which is named after the horse ridden by Don Quixote, a foolish idealist who, having read so many chivalric romances, fancies himself such a hero, a knight-errant in search of adventure. He’s an awkward fool, engaging in a task far beyond his abilities. The protagonist in the spaceship is similarly foolish and idealistic, engaging in a dangerous quest (though, in “Book Two: Hemispheres,” he enters–through a wormhole, presumably–the world of the Apollonian and Dionysian battle of the mind and heart, achieving the ideal of balance between the two).

Beginning this section is an upbeat chord progression of C major, F major, D major, and G major, musically suggesting the rosy optimism of the protagonist. Things don’t stay positive for long, though.

A repeat of the G, A-flat, B, C, D, E-flat, F-sharp, and G leads to a solo by Lifeson with the wah-wah pedal. Next is a quieter section suggesting the traveling of the Rocinante deep into space, with Lifeson playing octaves of C, A-flat, and B. Backed by Peart’s drumming, Lee comes in with his bass soon after, with fragments of his bass line from that frantic, climactic progression heard in the Prologue and soon to be heard again–notes of C-sharp, E and G-sharp…hearing this is a foreshadowing of the protagonist’s doom. Fittingly, the bass line does a bitonal clash with the guitar line, reinforcing the sense of tension building up to the climax. But just before that climax, there’s a louder section in E, in 4/8, 3/8, and 4/8.

3 has the Rocinante spinning out of control as it reaches the black hole, with that frantic chord progression fully developed in the form of C-sharp minor, E minor, G-sharp major, and G major, then C-sharp minor, E minor, and C minor, all in 6/8. The protagonist screams out that his “every nerve is torn apart.” (The tragedy of his self-destruction in his spaceship is paralleled by the farce of Don Quixote charging, on his horse, the windmills.)

The song ends with soft but eerie chords of C minor, E-flat minor, and E minor added ninth, then E minor again, but without the ninth. This fades out, suggesting the fading out of the protagonist’s life.

The protagonist thus goes through the whole Hegelian dialectic of being, nothingness, and in Book Two, the sublation of being and non-being, that of becoming, the balance between the two (as well as that between the Apollonian mind and the Dionysian heart), the achievement of the Hegelian ideal.

But this ideal isn’t to be reached until the next album. Instead, as far as A Farewell to Kings is concerned, our quixotic hero just destroyed himself, as does the drinker of the milk of paradise in the other long song ending Side One of this album. The first hero destroys his mind in madness, and the second destroys his body; the first erases the possibility of his non-existence, the second erases his existence…both heroes doing so in the foolish pursuit of unattainable ideals.

‘The Targeter,’ a Surreal Novel, Chapter Fourteen

I see a tiny, glowing white dot in the middle of the endless black all around me. I’m floating toward that dot of light, which is getting bigger.

Now that I’m close enough to it, I can see that the dot of white light is actually an exit from this void of infinite darkness. I’m approaching it, and instead of glowing light, I see those waves of the endless, universal sea.

I’ve re-entered that sea, and I’m swimming in it, breathing the water as if I had gills instead of nostrils. I feel a soothing peace vibrating all around me and in me.

I’m coming to understand the full extent of how all is one. Everything within and outside of me is one. Everywhere is an eternal here. I am connected to all around me.

All of time is one. The past, the present, and the future are merged in endless cycles. Only now is real: the past and future are just human constructs.

Everything that happens is unified. Opposites flow into and out of each other in dialectical waves. All people, and all of their actions, are a yin and yang mixture of good and evil, wisdom and folly, beauty and ugliness. My own nature and behaviour are equally such mixtures.

With this understanding of oneness also comes an understanding of the universal, eternal fluidity of everything within and without. This is why I see the waves of an ocean everywhere, undulating without end.

I can feel the feelings of other people flowing into me, and my feelings are flowing out to all of them, like water, to be felt by all the other people. As we all share each other’s feelings, I sense my alert, conscious awareness of every second, every wave flowing up and down all around me, soothing me, massaging my skin.

The dialectical relationship between all opposites, their essential unity, feels not only like the up-and-down movement of waves, but also like a continuum coiled into a circle, the extreme opposites meeting and flowing into each other.

I see a large serpent in the water; it’s coiled in a circle, biting its tail. Darker and lighter shades of green are moving along the body of the serpent, either darkening its scales or making them sparkle. These tints and shades of green are moving from the bitten tail, along the length of its coiled body, around to its biting head, then through to the bitten tail again. Those moving tints and shades are all the opposites of the world, eternally flowing into each other.

Seeing these flowing movements instills in my mind the truth that all things shift from good to bad, to good and to bad, and back to good again, around and around in cycles, forever and ever. This is why I should be patient when the bad times come, but I should also keep from being too attached to the evanescent good times.

So the world, just like all the people in it, including myself, should be seen in a middling way: neither too exciting, nor too rejecting. We must see everything and everyone as they truly are, not as we conceive of them in our fantasies and nightmares. We must refrain from exaggerating, seeing all as either too good or too bad.

Pain is healed by feeling it, by confronting it, as I did in that black hole. Pain must also be expressed, in the spoken or written word, in order to heal it. Another way to heal pain is to consider it not only through the Unity of Space, which includes the unity of Self and Other, but also through the Unity of Action, which reveals, through the dialectical relationship between opposites that I saw in that serpent biting its tail, how going overboard with extremes of pain, we can go past the extremes and achieve soothing. By contemplating not only our own suffering, but adding to it the suffering of others, others felt as ourselves, we achieve compassion and empathy, growing thus into better people.

In this way, by listening to others instead of just preaching to them, we self-soothe as well as soothe others. We self-soothe by contemplating not only our own ups and downs, but also those of other people; and in seeing the unity between up and down, good and bad, we know that the bad is never permanent.

In contemplating the Unity of Time, knowing that now is the only real time, and that endless cycles bring good and bad back again and again, we focus on the present instead of worrying about the future and ruminating over past failures. The endless cycles of good and bad phasing in and out of each other mean neither is permanent: don’t be attached to the good, and patiently wait for the bad to drift away.

Wait! Am I melting? Yes! My body is being absorbed into the infinite ocean! Atman is fusing with Brahman. My body is becoming one with the waters I’ve been swimming in! Oh, bliss! Oh, sweet nirvana! I have attained enlightenment, and as soon as my watery form concentrates, bringing me back to human form, I’ll be ready to teach the Way to any with ears to hear. Those five followers will come back, for sure!

Of course, this melting feeling of mine could just be part of my ketamine high.

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