A Mother’s Eyes

Part II

The Baby Marie.

by

Dr. Anton Polarion

     Well, yes.  What is this Baby Marie you ask.  I’m going to tell you even though it’s a story I’m sure you won’t be able to understand.  It is perhaps the most real story ever told but it’s reality will probably be too transparent for meager intellects.  I almost said, like yours, but I didn’t because I want to retain your sympathy at least to the end of the story; after that you’re on your own and I don’t care.

     You think that’s just a little bit too truculent do you?  Well, maybe it is but I have my reasons which I am not going to divulge to people like you.  Not least is the way I was treated as a child.  Not only by strangers like you but by my own mother.  I had enough problems with those others all my life.  They gave me psychological complexes that it took me a long time to resolve.  But then the unkindest cut of all was my mother.

page 1.

     You say, oh pshaw, everyone has those kinds of problems.  I’ll grant you that but you’ve got them in spades and haven’t resolved a single one.  I’ve got a clean slate having resolved them all.  Stick that in your pipe and smoke it.  Well, so maybe everyone does have those sorts of problems, what’s that got to do with me?  Let everyone else live their own life; I’ve got me to worry about.  Besides if this generalized public you talk about is any kind of example look at the world these mutants have made.  I’d laugh if I weren’t terrified. 

     I’ll take my own problems any day.  Besides all my problems, psychological that is, have been solved since the Baby Marie came to live with me.  Since then I’ve known only peace.  Before the Baby Marie I only had problems with my mother’s memory and my eyes.

     Yes, that old fraud Freud was right about one thing.  The mother is the most important influence in a man’s life.  Yes, I know, I should  have said person’s but here’s a fact for you to digest, I’m a man not a woman.  Let the little girls work out their own problems with their mothers.  All that politically correct crap doesn’t have anything to do with my own mind so leave me alone and let me get on with my story as happened to me.  I’m not going to acknowledge any more interruptions.

     Speaking of fraud Freud this story doesn’t have much to do with him.  All he ever did was take eggs out of other bird’s nests and sit on them himself like he was the one who laid them.  If you know your sources you can write the whole substance of Depth Psychology without having to mention his name.  It was all there, all the Fraud did was gather it into his own nest.  He didn’t even do a good job of that.  His notion of the mind is just a big joke.

page 2.

     Well, no matter, you have to start somewhere and Freud did at least succeed in imprinting his ridiculous notions on the mind of more than one generation.  He got the ball rolling now we have to get it moving in the right direction.

     No, you’re wrong.  I’m not writing this from inside an insane asylum.  I’m saner than you are or ever will be or even could be.  If you must know I write from the lap of comfort with a beautiful sylvan view out of my window.  No Landor’s cottage but then that nineteenth century quality of perfection is lost for the next thousand years.

     I’d say I’ve got a tall cool one in my hand but since the Baby Marie came to live with me I’ve had no desire to drink.  In fact, if I do she’ll leave.  I don’t want that.

     So, my mother.  She rejected and abandoned me when I was five.  This is where Freud comes in.   Freud didn’t understand how the mind works.  More specifically he didn’t know how it was organized.  Not his fault really; there wasn’t that much information available at the time.  He was only a pioneer.  Still, he shouldn’t have let on that he knew more than he did.

     Let’s skip this nonsense.  Suffice it to say that the brain is divided into right and left lobes and a conscious and subconscious mind.  When the brain is presented with a Challenge which it cannot successfully handle the failure becomes a fixation in the subconscious.  For every mental fixation there is a physical affect.  The mind automatically converts its mental failure into a physical consequence.  You see, that’s where the talking cure comes in.  When you identify, recognize and express the fixation it and its’ physical affect are exorcised.

     Real simple, not as easy as it looks for the central childhood fixation, but simple.  The talking cure is one of those eggs Freud plucked from another’s nest; in this case his benefactor and friend, Breuer.  Oh well, Breuer didn’t know what to do with it anyway.  He could never have hatched that egg if he’d sat on it till he was a hundred or as old as Methuselah or possibly the hills.

     Now, you see, these other people gave me a number of Challenges my mind couldn’t resolve and a whole bunch of fixations with detestable physical affects.  As the affects all emanate from the mind you may include mental afflictions also.

     OK.  So I found my fixations and exorcised them.  Straightened myself out in body and mind.  Got rid of my constipation, post-nasal drip, everything.  There were dozens.  I felt great afterwards.  But after a while you forget how great it is and concentrate on other problems.  The amazing thing is after you get rid of the major ones the least significant fixations demand attention thereby assuming a significance they never had.  They’re easy to understand and get rid of though.  After exorcising the central childhood fixation all the other stuff is an anthill compared to the mountain of the central childhood fixation.

page 3.

     So, now I think I’m home free but then I discover I’ve got another problem.  My mother.  But she isn’t anywhere in my conscious or sub-conscious mind.  So where is she?

Aha!

     I found her way down deep below both the levels of consciousness and subconsciousness.  The brain stem.  There’s one Freud missed.  An obvious one, too.  The Brainstem.  The first brain in the evolutionary scheme of things.  First you have the brain stem then the midbrain and finally the pre-frontal lobe evolves.  So then Man can sneer as he looks down on the other vertebrates who have a lot more sense that he does.

     Now all we have to do is rise to our scientific knowledge and get rid of that miserable attitude of the bible.  There is no longer any reason to enshrine that immature consciousness with its primitive monotheism.

     Here’s an obvious thing you probably never thought of before.  Since the brain stem came first the sensory organs are associated with it.  That’s right.  The optic nerves are associated with the brain stem.  When you get that REM, Rapid Eye Movement, when you’re dreaming?  That comes from the brain stem.

     What’s as old as the brain stem?  Yo’ mama.

     That’s right.  Freud was right on that one.  That’s a main reason why your mother is the most important influence in your life.  Your mother’s eyes.  Never thought of that one, huh?  Well, plenty of song writers have.  As an infant your mother’s eyes drilling into your own as you looked up from your breast feeding established that connection to the brain stem and your own eyes.

page 4.

     So here’s what I found out.  That connection between your mother’s eyes and your own is paramount.  When your mother rejects or abandons you that connection between your mother’s eyes and your own is broken.  That fires a lightening bolt right through your brain stem down below the subconscious part of the mind.  At some time in your life you’re going to have trouble with your eyes.

     The circumstances of the break will dictate the nature of your problem.  If a scientific survey were conducted some sort of general rules could be drawn up.  Heck, someone could catalog fixations and their affects.  They will be the same with everyone.  Nobody’s that unique.  The exact form may vary but the affect will be same.  We’re closer to mental health than most people think.  It’s just that you people prefer to be crazy.

     My mother remarried and reclaimed me when I was ten so I didn’t have any real trouble with my eyes until I was after forty.  I’m younger than that now but that needs no explanation.  I’ll die soon anyway.

     I had to have these operations on my eyes a few years ago.  I thought I would have to go blind.  While I was waiting I read Sybille Bedford’s biography of Aldous Huxley.  He was rejected and abandoned by his mother also, she died when he was fourteen.  Then his eye problems started when he was sixteen.  I realized immediately that my eye problems were connected to my mother too.

page 5.

     My problem was that I knew my subconscious had been cleared out long before so that my problem with my mother couldn’t be in my subconscious.

     The answer was revealed as answers of that type are, in one’s dreams.

     I dreamt that I went down to the deepest spot known to man and there I knelt before a well.  The well was dry; there was no water in it.  It might be romantic to say I filled it with my tears but that’s not what happened.  You know, science fails when you refuse to observe its tenets.  That’s one of the big things wrong with world now, you want override obvious truths for emotional reasons.  Think about it.

     Since I had identified the ‘fixation’ and expressed it, by all the rules of Depth Psychology it should have disappeared, but it didn’t.  The brain stem is different than the upper brain.  Returning to the surface by the way I came I woke up.

     Now I did have a dilemma.  I thought I had the solution to my problem but I didn’t know how to apply it.

     For a couple months I could only worry about it.  Which is to say that by applying auto-suggestion I hoped to have my mind show me the answer.  Naturally, it did.

     The Baby Marie came to me.  The Baby Marie is real but she’s just not flesh and blood.  She came to me as all balms do, in dreams.  I almost didn’t recognize her.  It was close.  I might have lost her with terrible consequences for myself.

     I was at a party, in my dream, strange enough in itself as I never go to parties, wouldn’t know how to act at one; didn’t know how to act at this one.  Fact is for some reason I never get invited.  Who’d want to go anyway?  There was much hilarity and boisterousness, two qualities I lack.  I began to wonder why I went.  Then a man, who while he may have been an alter ego, I still don’t know, asked me to come into the other room where they were delivering a Baby Marie for me.

     I’d never heard of Baby Maries so I was really annoyed; so annoyed that I could hardly relate to the situation.

     This dream is related to another dream I had once and is actually a fulfillment but why interrupt this story.  If you want I can send you the other one, just ask.  Well, they brought in this big barrel or keg.  The barrel came apart in the middle so the upper part was slid aside.  I have never seen a stranger sight.  The barrel was half filled with the clearest water you ever saw.  Sight for the blind you might say.  I couldn’t believe my eyes.  Floating, not so much in, but under the water was the head of a little infant with these large loving eyes that met mine.

     I can tell you I was nonplused.  ‘What’s this?’ I asked truculently enough.  ‘It’s for you.  We got this Baby Marie for you.’  Said my alter ego in his Hawaiian shirt.  ‘It’s a Baby Marie.’

     I was disgusted.  The idea, putting a baby in a barrel of water and shipping it from god knows where.  The poor thing would drown, should have already drowned.  I almost missed my connection over past grievances and meaningless technicalities.  Then I realized that if the Baby Marie was still alive she must be floating in living water.  That must be why she hadn’t drowned.  I knew the value of living water if I didn’t understand the importance of a Baby Marie.

page 6.

     More for the sake of the living water than the Baby Marie I accepted the gift.  The water and the Baby Marie were then poured into the dry well in my brain stem down below where the sea monsters go.  The eyes of the Baby Marie which were so loving replaced those of my mother who had rejected me.  The connection was restored.

     Unable to reach the problem through conscious Depth Psychology my mind had nevertheless found a way to resolve the dilemma.  Or, perhaps problems of the brain stem function independently of the methods of Depth Psychology.

     That’s how the Baby Marie came to live me completely changing my life.   That’s why I don’t and won’t drink alcohol again.

     The details of the dream are not clear to me but perhaps this crowd of people at the party are the people who laid my central childhood fixation on me and are offering me compensation for their crime.  I certainly can’t be sure.

     I suppose it right to speculate some on who or what the Baby Marie might be.  Since she is a construction of my own mind that may not be as hard as it may seem.

     Obviously with the Baby Marie I am born again.  In fact, I had been reading Jung and I was struck by his analysis of the bapismal font and the idea of the infant being born again in that holy or living water.

     I had also read of a dream of Bob Hunter’s, the song writer for the Grateful Dead, you know.  He had a recurrent dream that terrified him for days after.  In his dream he went down to the lowest place in the world where he stood before a black muddy river.  I had no trouble recognizing this river as a symbol for his relationship with his mother.  I also knew that it would take more than a box of rain to unsully those waters, but if he knew how to use the box of rain it would be a good start especially if the rain was living water.  You see, he had the problem and the solution in his mind all along.

page 7.

     Last and perhaps most important is a song that had been playing in my memory for over fifty years.  It was a song about a man trying to reach a person over the phone known only as Marie.

     He knows neither her phone number nor her address.  He pleads desperately with the operator to help him get in touch with his Marie.  The operator cannot help him even though the man explains quite explicitly that Marie lives only half a mile from the Mississippi Bridge in Memphis, Tennessee.  As it turned out Marie was merely an infant.

     I had fixated on Marie, the Mississippi Bridge, the Mississippi River and Memphis, Tennessee all my life without realizing why.  Why I should have done so is not clear to me.  How I might have associated my unrealized problem with an inexplicable answer is a mystery of the mind, yet both problem and answer were ever present in my mind just as they were in Bob Hunter’s.

     It took several decades to cross that bridge over the river but at last I have gotten in touch with my Marie.

     This is a true story.  You may believe it or not as you choose, but if you heed it you will find it a major contribution to the understanding of human psychology as well as your own.

     That’s all I have to say.  I bid you goodnight.  Don’t call me, I’ll call you.  Don’t wait up.

Afterword.

     Dr. Polarion can be cantankerous at times.  Don’t let his attitude in this relation fool you.  He’s actually a nice guy, not as cranky as he allowed himself to sound.  He’s a pretty deep psychologist, kind of look through and behind his narration.  I mean, you know, he’s got literary ambitions.   Wants to be another Freud.  Get the Nobel prize for literature.

     As a more gradual transition to Part III let me lead you through the art gallery of the mind to the Salvador Dali Room.  Over on this wall here, look at this picture called ‘The Temptation Of Saint Anthony.’  This was done in 1946.  I’m not sure of Dali’s sources.  For all I know he may have been reading Poe.

     Look down here in the corner at the naked Saint Anthony recoiling on the ground from the horse figure, holding out his cross to exorcise the demon.  See that skull of death on the ground between his legs.  Look at the rearing mare or the Mother Archetype, you can tell it’s a mare, look back between the legs, look at those horse shoes all askew on those enormous front feet.  See those teeth showing between the parted lips, look on these baleful eyes.  What could be more clear?

     Then see, coming behind the Mare are the pack elephants of memory on their precarious spindly legs.  Memory is like that but the bulk of the elephants is such that you know the memories must be important.  The first bears a female figure on the pedestal.  The Mother Archetype.  See her holding up her breasts like some antique figure of Mother Earth promising all and delivering nothing.   Give her a baby, that ‘s all she wants.

     Behind her comes a symbol I can’t really understand.  Perhaps a triangular cenotaph.  I don’t know what Dali means.

     Finally comes the elephant bearing the house or symbol of the self.  Now, let us turn to Part III, ‘Cow Eyed Hera And Edgar Allan Poe.’

    

A Mother’s Eyes

April 27, 2007

A Mother’s Eyes

by

R.E. Prindle

Part I: The Remarkable Case Of Aldous Huxley’s Eyes 30 pages

Part II:  The Baby Marie: 10 pages

Part III: Cow Eyed Hera And Edgar Allan Poe: 21 pages

Part IV: The Hand That Rocks The Cradle: 9 pages

Part I

The Remarkable Case Of Aldous Huxley’s Eyes

     This essay will deal with certain unconscious relationships between the Indo-European male and the Mother Archetype.  This essay is retricted to the Indo-European sub-species because the author is not convinced that all Homo Sapiens sub-species are identical in intellectual makeup nor are they subjected to the same cultural influences which would produce a uniform effect across all sub-species of mankind.  What Jung calls the Collective Unconscious of Man does not use the same symbolism in every period of time, every place and with all sub-species.  While the Horse will be a central focus of the Indo-European after minus 2000, for instance, prior to its introduction to the Middle East the beast could not have figured in the Collective Unconscious of either the Indo-Europeans or Semitic Mesopotamians.  Thus the Black, Semitic and Mongolid sub-species may be subject to the same relationship with the Mother Archetype but may express the same issue in different symbolism.

page 1.

     The female of the Indo-European or other sub-species is structurally different from the male hence subject to different responses to the same issue in different symbolism.  I will touch on that briefly in Part IV.

     Further, one ought not to confuse the role of female with the role of mother.  The female is a different person until she becomes a mother.  Once a mother her response to the role will depend on female societal desires which will control her attitude to motherhood.  The intelligence and intellectuality of the female person is in conflict with the Structural Psychology of the Mother.  Not all females are intellectually adapted to become mothers although most do become mothers.

     The topic will be approached from the point of view of Depth Psychology based more on the approach of Carl G. Jung than that of Sigmund Freud.  Freud’s approach was based on the personal psychology of the upper brain while Jung approached the subject more from a Special angle hence his notion of the Collective Unconscious with a universal heritable symbolism regardless of education or sub-species.

     Because he was dealing with a more homogeneous population unlike the heterogeneous population of the United States he was able to believe that all people are subjected to identical influences even though he had the obvious sub-special differences of the Jewish Semitics before him.

page 2.

     There can of course be no such thing as a collective mind hence no Collective Unconscious.  Neither can this Collective Unconscious be inherited.  There can only be a shared sub-special understanding of phenomena.  This shared understanding will express itself in certain common symbols induced by a universal field of education depending on one’s level of consciousness.

     Specifically I wish to examine the relationship between the mother and the eyes of the Indo-European male as well as the mother’s identification with the Horse by the male.  All three are intimately related. 

     The difference between Jung’s Collective Unconscious and the individual unconscious or, rather, sub-conscious, is that Jung without having actually differentiated the two was referring to Structural Psychology by his notion of the Collective Unconscious.

      Before the human organism can be subject to personal psychology there must first be an organism.  The construction of that organism will then determine its psychological potential.

     Thus while all the higher vertebrates share the same Structural Psychology the addition of the upper brain separates man from the beasts while causing a conflict between the Structural Psychology and Personal or Intellectual Pyschology.

     While a human entity appears to be an organic whole it is actually a construction of component parts.  The nature of those parts determine the psychological potential of the completed construction.

page 3.

     Not enough attention has been paid to how a human is constructed or the signficance of that construction.  The basic organism seems to be taken for granted.

     The human is a combination of two different components which are then integrated.  On the one hand there is the passive ovum which is provided by the female of the species; on the other hand is the active sperm provided by the male.  Passivity and activity are important and should not be passed over lightly.  The ovum provides one half of the structural elements as well as all the mitochondrial DNA.  These are significant facts and not merely incidental.

     The ovum is always female or an X chromosome.  Thus the male always has this female X chromosome component which Jung and Freud using the imperfect data of their time referred to as a man’s ‘feminine side.’  Jung called it the Anima in the male, the corresponding role in the female the Animus.

     The presence of an X chromosome in the male in no way affects his sexual identity as a male.  It is not a cause of homosexuality or effeminacy.  Using the imperfect data of his time Jung acted on the notion that sexuality was caused by a ‘preponderance’ of male or female genes.  This would of course distort his vision of sexuality creating non-existent possibilities.

     An unfertilized ovum is, of course, of no value.  The male provides the fertilizing element in the form of the sperm.  The sperm contains the other half of the structure which when joined with the ovum completes the structure.

page 4.

     The sperm can be either X or y.  There must be a difference in nature between the ovate and spermatic X chromosomes.  If X the completed structure is a female.  But the spermatic X contributes the gene pool of the mother of the male which is part of the Anima so that the female has two female components.  Without the X chromosome the male could not provide X sperm.

     It must also be true that the spermatic side of the female provides a set of genes received from the father while the ovate side provides a set of genes from the mother, so that not all of the female’s ovum are the same.

     In the case of either an X or y sperm the ovate or female mitochondrial DNA is always and solely the source of mitochondrial DNA in the resulting construction whether male or female.  The Spermatic mitochondrial DNA is always expelled from the united ovum.

     Thus the Mother Archetype establishes itself in a much more intimate connection with the male than the Father Archetype.  This is a physiological fact with real consequences and not a matter for sexual pride.

     When the ovate and spermatic parts combine the ovate X chromosome assumes the left side of the structure while the spermatic X or y forms the right.

     Many organs which can function independently are therefore duplicated such as kidneys, lungs, gonads or ovaries.  Those which can only function as a unit are formed of two separate lobes which are seamed such as the heart, liver, penis or clitoris.

     Now, this may be controversial but the gonads or ovaries, the spinal cords and brain from an integrated unit like the power train of the automobile.  All three are parts of consciousness.

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     The ends of the spinal cords, it follows that one each must be provided by the ovum and sperm, anchored in the gonads or ovaries intertwine up the spine until they cross over at the brain stem so that the passive ovate left side of the body becomes the passive right side of the brain while the active spermatic right side of the body crosses over to become the active left side of the brain.

     The two cords, spermatic and ovate anchored in the gonads or ovaries pass up the spine to emerge from the brain stem as ‘loose wires.’  To give them a name we will use Jung’s terminology but assert that male and female have both an Animus and Anima rather than as Jung has it, the male an Anima and the female an Animus.

     Now, as man evolved he began with what is referred to as the serpent’s brain or the brain stem followed by mid- brain, parietal lobes, upper brain and pre-frontal lobe.

     Thus structurally to the point of the brain stem all vertebrates function more or less identically.  By which I mean to say that to that point the psychology of say, sub-species five of the lion is identical to man.  If this isn’t true than evolution is bunk.

     Of necessity the optical nerves are associated with this very primitive organ of the brain stem.  This fact must have some relation to the association of the Mother with the eyes.

     Such a psychological association must operate independently of personal psychology as Structural Psychology or, as Jung would have it, the Collective Unconscious.

page 6.

     There are then tree levels of consciousness: the autonomic system, the brain stem and the upper brain.

     In fact the as the brain stem is not intellectual as in personal psychology, it may function independently of the upper brain and require a different technique for therapy.

     At any rate the symbolism Jung discusses is related to Structural Psychology and not the neuroses and psychoses of personal psychology.

     When the male Indo-European experiences rejection or abandonment by the mother this rejection may be evidenced by eye problems associated with a horse symbolism.

     Having laid the frame for my discussion I wish to begin with the case of Aldous Huxley, his relationship to his mother and his celebrated eye problems.  Aldous Huxley is, of course, the important literary figure who wrote ‘Brave New World’, ‘Eyeless In Gaza’, ‘Point Counter Point’ and other intriguing and important novels.

     All his adult life from the age of sixteen on Huxley endured terrible problems with his eyes.  He was frequently able to improve his vision remarkably only to suffer setbacks.  He first suffered maternal rejection when his mother opened a girl’s school relegating Huxley to an inferior status in both his and her eyes to her female students.  This alone had a permanent effect on his character and his adult relationship with women.  Then, when Huxley was fourteen his mother died abandoning him completely as it were.

page 7.

     No matter how natural or unavoidable death may be, those affected are under no obligation to react rationally.  While on a conscious or even sub-conscious level Huxley seemed to handle his mother’s death well he was devastated on the structural level.  First rejected and then abandoned by his mother, Huxley, at the age of sixteen was attacked in his eyes.  Actually the reaction could have been predicted although how and when would have had to await manifestation.

     Huxley developed an inflammation of the cornea called Keratitis Punctata.  Thus his reaction to his mother’s rejection and abandonment was of the most serious sort.  In the days before modern medicine he would have successfully blinded himself in both eyes.  Given the medicine of the day he might have been cured with minimal or no loss of vision.  As it was he was misdiagnosed allowing the disease to take almost full course.  By the time he was treated he had lost his vision in his right  or ovate eye while being as good as blind in his left  or spermatic eye.

     The nature of Keratitis Punctata is such that it damages or scars the surface of the cornea while the internal functions of the eye remain intact.  The effect of the scar tissue allowed his vision to fluctuate.

     I think that if a survey were taken it would be found that the right or ovate eye is always affected the worst.  This would strengthen my contention that certain eye problems are due to relationships with the mother or ovate side.

     It may be argued that Keratitis Punctata is a physical problem and not subject to psycho-somatic influence.  It is my contention that Huxley’s psyche in search of a satisfactory ailment subconsciously sought the affliction out.

page 8.

     Over the years Huxley was able by an act of will to improve his vision dramatically but he always suffered relapses as his structural need for the infirmity overcame his conscious will.  While had he been diagnosed and treated promptly he would not have lost his vision still his Structural need was such that he would have had a continuing series of eye problems over his lifetime.

     Medical science poses problems to psychotic needs by being able to overcome psych-somatic reactions; the sub-conscious must search for new ways to gratify its need for affliction.

     I too suffered abandonment by my mother beginning when I was five and ending when I was ten when she remarried.  I was first put into two foster homes and then placed in an orphanage.  The orphanage was critical.  While I had very acute vision until I was forty a variety of eye problems have plagued me since.

     While all the problems were quite natural therefore seeming to be of a strictly physical nature yet I had been plagued  by fears of going blind since I was ten when my mother remarried.  I therefore left myself open to attack in the appropriate time and place.  Finally at sixty-four I had a cataract operation on my right or ovate eye followed by one on the left.  I realized the psycho-somaic source of the problem while I was reading Sybille Bedford’s biography of Aldous Huxley.

page 9.

     Prompted by the reading I had a dream of a horse.  This is the only horse dream I can remember ever having.

     The horse clearly represented my mother staring at me with large guilty eyes not unlike the description of the Greek goddess Hera who was styled ‘cow-eyed.’

     Sometime in the near past, two or more years ago, I had seen a TV show about a horse trainer who I can remember only by the name of the Horse Whisperer.  He had developed a new technique of gentling a horse rather than breaking it.  In my dream I was using his technique to gentle a mare.  She seemed to want to be affectionate to me but I kept pushing her away or she shied away in my attempt to gentle her.

     By that time I had already developed my ideas of Structural Psychology.  I had also integrated my personality clearing all fixations from my subconscious.  As I expressed it then, all the way down to my brain stem.  Now I realized I was dealing with the brain stem itself having spoken more truly than I knew.

     While I had made progress in rectifying my Animus I cannot say for certain that the process was complete.  In all probability I have reconciled my Anima and Animus.  I have never had trouble with my Anima although my Animus was seriously blunted as a child affecting my ability to express my manhood.

     However, contrary to Depth Pschology, having recognized and spoken this apparent fixation caused by my mother’s abandonment the fixation did not respond by immediately being exorcised as had my fixations of the upper brain.  Thus the problem of Structural traumas obviously requires a different technique for treatment.

page 10.

     The appearance of a horse figure in my dream was startling to me.  I have never liked horses.  All my life I have had an irrational hatred of them even to the point of verbally abusing them at sight.

     Aldous Huxley, characteristically of the trauma, expressed his own reaction through horse imagery.  Huxley wrote his first novel ‘Crome Yellow’ in 1921 followed by ‘Antic Hay’ in 1923 and ‘Those Barren Leaves’ in 1925.  Those three novels lead up to 1928’s  ‘Point Counter Point’ in which his problem with his mother finds expression in varied symbolism.  In this last novel Huxley portrays himself in the character of Philip Quarles.  He has a wife, Elinor, as a mother substitute and a son called signficantly, Little Phil, in other words a doppelganger.

     In the novel Quarles has a limp rather than bad eyes.  Huxley, through Quarles, expresses his mother’s abandonment and his attack of Kertitis Punctata this way:

     Quote:

     ‘…Philip…was remembering that immense black horse kicking, plunging, TEETH bared and ears laid back; and how it suddenly leaped forward, dragging the carter along with it: and the rumble of the wheels; and ‘Aie!’ his own screams; and how he shrank back against the steep bank, how he tried to climb, slipped, fell; and the appalling rush and trampling of the giant; and ‘Aie, aie!’ the huge shape between him and the sun, the great hoofs and suddenly an annihilating pain.’

page 11.

     Note expecially the teeth which will appear more prominently in Part III.

     This very vivid picture is done so well that one might actually believe such an event really occurred.  It didn’t.  Here Huxley transforms his mother into a huge black horse.  The steep bank I interpret as the brain stem which appeared in my own imagery as a deep dry well.  There was a huge shape between Huxley/Quarles and the sun which must represent both the loss of his mother, when the sun went out of his life, and the onset of Kerititis Punctata.

     In the novel Quarles had his leg crushed by the cart but in this version it is not clear where he received the injury while it was definitely caused by the huge black horse.  There was only the annihilating pain.  One assumes that the pain was the loss of Huxley’s mother.

     Huxley gives his hurt a full scale treatment here.  Quarles and his wife live in a mews in London.  A mews is a converted stable.  Horses had formerly been kept there.  Now the ‘huge machines’ or cars of a hundred horse power or more are kept there.  The arch at the end of the mews through which the horses were led stands as a constant reminder to Huxley/Quarles of his tragedy.

     Not content to retell his own pain, Huxley then goes on to punish his mother in his imagination as he feels she punished him by dying.  Remember a man in Huxley’s situation uses a woman as a surrogate to avenge himself on his mother who is beyond retaliation.  In ‘Point Counter Point’ Quarles’ mother is still alive.  It is she who has care of Little Phil when he is stricken with meningitis so the guilt remains with her.

page 13.

     On the eve of the meningitis attack Elinor Quarles, Little Phil’s mother, was about to commence a dalliance with another man.  Quarles’ mother’s telegram reached Elinor in time to prevent her beginning the affair.  Elinor believes that Little Phil’s meningitis was caused by her intended infidelity and suffers accordingly.

     Elinor’s intended infidelity corresponds with Huxley’s mother’s betrayal of her love for him by relegating him to a secondary role while she lavished attention on her girl students.

     Huxley’s descriptions of Little Phil’s suffering are quite gruesome.

     Quote:

     ‘…she found the child already awake.  One eyeball was wide open and the eye, all pupil, was looking straight up at the ceiling; the other was half shut in a permanent wink that imparted to the thin and shrunken little face an expression of ghastly facetiousness.

     ‘He can’t open it,’ the nurse explained.  ‘It’s paralyzed.”

     Unquote.

     Thus the crux of Point Counter Point is the punishment of Elinor Quarles qua Huxley’s mother for the crime of rejecting him in favor of her female students and later dying.  Huxley quite rightly associates eye disease with his mother through his wifely surrogate and the symbol of the giant black horse with giant hooves and teeth bared rearing in the brain stem.  He obviously had no clear idea of what this imagery meant to him personally.  No doors of perception were opened for him there.

page 13.

     While this horse imagery is clear in ‘Point Counter Point’ Bedford also quotes Huxley as noting emphatically the remarkable deeds of horses in Homer’s Iliad.  I think the horse symbol is replaced in a man’s active life by his relationship with women.

     I now intend to devote a few pages to the relationship of mothers and women to horses and eyes in Greek mythology leading back to the present time.

     My two lines of argument will concentrate on the nature of the God of Waters, Poseidon and the relationship of that greatest of all mama’s boys, Achilles, with his mother, the sea nymph, Thetis.

     I follow the Jungian concept of attempting to penetrate the symbolism by this narrative of action.

     In the divine dispensation of spoils in Greek mythology the preeminent god, Zeus, was awarded the sky, Poseidon preeminence in the oceans and rivers, Hades possession of the underworld.  Obviously Hades got skunked  which made him a sour sort of guy.

     The surface of Mother Earth was common to all three.

     The significant fact here is that the three gods are male while the Earth named Ge, Gaia or Demeter was female.  Thus you have three men with equal claims to the same woman, Mother Earth.

     In ancient Greek sourcs as well as in Biblical story Man realized that there was a time before consciousness.  Thus the story of the creation of the universe is less a story of creation than one of the crystallization of consciousness.

page 14.

     In the creation myth all objective reality is confused; all is seen as one.  In other words, there was only an animal consciousness.  Then a divine wind blows across the plane of consciousness separating the upper and lower spheres; the conscious and subconscious.  Thus the upper sphere of consciousness became heaven  and was allotted to the mind of infinite power, Zeus.  The subconscious was given to the Father of Waters, Poseidon while the underworld of the brain stem went to Hades.  The plane of consciousness was shared by mankind and the gods.  This is as it should be.

     Poseidon’s dominion is the seas, oceans and rivers.  The waters of oblivion are associated with the subconscious and irrational  which is to say the female or matriarchal consciousness.  The subconscious and irrational are therefore equated with the matriarchal order.  Thus Poseidon, who must actually predate Zeus as a carryover from the Matriarchal consciousness has relations with a number of domineering women who are very hard on men.

     The question of why Poseidon is also closely related to horses is very difficult to answer, especially as Poseidon was early on the scene while horses arrived later.  I offer only a working hypothesis.

     It has been suggested that the rollers of the sea are reminiscent of horses’ heads.  It has also been suggested that rivers as they dash down mountain slopes and race to the sea are quite similar to the flight of the horse.  There may be truth in both suggestions as when the horse arrived it had to be associated with some god; in association with Poseidon that may possibly explain how horses came to be associated with the Mother Archetype.  Their association with the Mother can only have begun after the Indo-Europeans brought horses to the Aegean world which was after the year minus 2000.

page 15.

     Of the mean flesh eating mares or mothers with whom Poseidon is associated it is only necessary to give two examples.  The most important of the two by far is the Medusa and her Gorgon sisters, the other is the enchantress, Circe.

     The Medusa is a very important study.  She apparently dates back to an early period of the Matriarchate.  While in the Patriarchic myth of Perseus and the Gorgon she is a hideous evil witch whose mere glance can turn a man to stone there is evidence to point to a time before the rise of the Patriarchate when she was a belle ideal; a tower of strength.  Shields with the Medusa head continued to be used in classical times as a magical charm to repel the enemy.  The snakes which form her hair were once a symbol of her authority rather than hideous emblems of hatred.  She was then one of Poseidon’s wives or , more probably, he was her consort.

     When the Patriarchate displaced the Matriarchate Perseus was chosen to destroy the Medusa or, in other words, the symbol of the Matriarchate.  This he did by decapitation.  Decapitation or the separation of the head from the body is a powerful symbol in itself which should have destroyed the Medusa’s power to lithicize men with her EYES.  Even in death, which is to say after the power of the Matriarchate was broken, the mere sight of her now dead eyes continued to turn men to stone.

page 16.

     The myth of Perseus is a keystone story that tells of the birth of the new order of the Patriarchate.  When the old order of the Matriachate was beheaded a remarkable thing happened; two beings that correspond to the male Anima and Animus emerged from her neck or, shall we say, brain stem.

     The Animus of the liberated Patriarchate was represented by the Golden Knight named Chrysaor.  As the Animus he had no concrete identity.  He represented the mind of infinite power and rationality possessed by Zeus and shared by men but not by women.  He consequently fades from view.

     The Anima that sprang from Medusa’s severed brain stem was the great winged horse or mare, Pegasus.  The great mare allowed man’s imagination to soar as though godlike, above the earth’s plane that was the dominion of the Matriarchate.

     Further having now passed through the dawn of consciousness as represented by the creation myth the male had now reached the level of consciousness where he could begin to attack and destroy his subconscious demons.  Thus Perseus finds the maiden Andromeda chained to a rock awaiting destruction by the monster of the sea depths of the subconscious.

     Soaring above the Leviathan on his Anima, Pegasus, in the conscious sphere, Perseus is able to destroy the monster of the subconscious and liberate Andromeda, or the female, from destruction by the subconscious.  In his arms, under his protection Andromeda, or the female, was freed from animalism.  She too was released to find her full potential under men’s guidance and protection.

page 17.

     As decapitation wasn’t totally effective there was more than one way to handle the attempted suppression of the Matriarchate.  It has been truly said that you can kill men but you can’t kill ideas.  Perhaps because of the Iliad with its gathering of the tribes at Troy one thinks of Greek mythology as an indissoluble whole.  This is not the case.  There are many strands and traditions to Greek mythology.

     It is highly probable that when the Greeks invaded the Peninsula that their route bypassed Athens which was shielded from above by the Boeotian Semites.  Thus the Greeks were shunted West where they fell on the Pelopponesus bypassing Attica.

     While the Athenians avoided military invasion they were yet unable to resist the Patriarchal tide.

     The myth of Perseus and the Gorgon which belongs to the Argive or Pelopponesian cycle gives only one view of the suppression of the Matriarchate.  That was how it happened West of Attica.  In Athens itself the transition from the Matriarchate to the Patriarchate was more evolutionary.  This would be the result of being bypassed by the Greek invasion.

     Perseus on his way back to Argos from Palestine gave the Medusa’s head to Athene who then wore it as an emblem on her bosom.  This would be another way of saying that Perseus influenced the Athenians to convert to Patriarchalism.

page 18.

     I would suggest that, even though the Iliad lists a contingent of Athenian ships present at Troy, there were no Athenians there.  As the Greek heroes for the most part are from the Pelopponese or other Greek locations and the quarrel is between them and Troy while none of the Greek heroes was Athenian.  I would suggest that the Athenian contingent is an interpolation.  Agamemnon and the Argives as invaders would have had no influence over  non-Greek Athens such as they had over Odysseus in Ithaca.

     The Athenians always claimed to be an autocthonous people, that is that they sprang from the soil or, in other words, were there before the Greek invasion.  Of necessity that would mean that they were not Greek per se.

     Their early heroes are half snake, half human, which I understand to mean that on the one hand as snakes emerge from the soil the Athenians were autocthonous; on the other hand that they were half Matriarchal and half Patriarchal.  In other words, there was an evolutionary transition.  This idea is borne out by subsequent Athenian mythology.

     If this is true then it must follow that the gods of Athens had formerly been Medusa and Poseidon- the Queen and her consort.

     Imagine Perseus handing the head of Medusa to Athene.  Athene must have neutralized the power of Medusa because as of the handing of the head to Athene it was still capable of turning men to stone at a glance.  As Athene’s emblem displayed on her breast where all men must see it, it could no longer do so.

     As the Athenians told the story of the suppression of the Matriarchate, Zeus swallowed a matriarchal goddess known as Metis.  This is a normal method of disposing of one’s enemies.  As the Africans down to the present day say when they intend to destroy an enemy- We will eat you up.

page 19.

     When you eat someone up you obtain their qualities.  Metis was the goddess of Wisdom.  Whether she was one of the Gorgons I don’t believe is recorded but I suspect so.  Perseus and the more primitive Argives believed that destruction was simply a matter of cutting off a head, the Gordian knot approach.  The Athenians thought differently.

     Having eaten up the Matriarchy Zeus found that it gave him a serious case of indigestion.  His eyes were bigger than his stomach.  The Matriarchy would not stay suppressed.

     As it was necessary that some other expedient be employed the Matriarchy was allowed to exist but only as subordinate to the Patriarchy.  While not abolished, the Patriarchy attempted to reform it in an acceptable way.  The attempt was made to replace the uncontrollable Matriarchal figures as represented by Ares and Aphrodite with a more rational goddess embracing both.

     Thus the indigestion of Zeus gave him a headache.  In other words, he had to give the problem some serious thought.  He had an idea, as why wouldn’t the mind of infinite power have an idea.  He transformed the old wild undisciplined Matriarchal god and goddess into the superbly rational and controlled Athene.  Her idea formed in the Patriarchal brain then sprang fully formed and armed from Zeus’ forehead.  Actually she didn’t spring but was chiseled out by Hermes and Hephaestus who are both gods of resource.

     Thus when Perseus handed the head of Medusa to Athene he was passing the torch for the application of Patriarchy in Athens.  The destruction of Poseidon’s consort in Athens left that god without a female counterpart and that’s the way he stays throughout the Patriarchate.  Athene was a chaste virgin who would have nothing to do with men.  As a goddess with a technological sideline she came into conflict with the Matriarchal technological god Hephaestus.  He attempted to rape her or in other words reimpose an aspect of the matriarchy on her which she successfully resisted.  Instead he spurted on her leg in a pre-mature ejaculation which she, as the goddess of weaving, wiped off with a piece of wool.

page 20.

     Unable to seduce Athene and reestablish his supremacy in Athens on his part, Poseidon then had a contest with Athene to see who should be the tutelary deity of Athens.  In other words, should Athens be Patriarchally or Matriarchally inclined.  Should it be named Athens or Poseidonia?

     Poseidon peformed the seemingly impossible task of making water spring from the rocky high crown of the Acropolis.  Athene countered by making an olive tree grow on Rocky Top.

     The Athenians opted for the olive tree but it was not a clean cut victory for the modified Patriarchy.  The Athenians ever after nurtured several snakes on the Acropolis along with both the olive tree and Poseidon’s spring.  Thus the Matriarchal past was not forgotten.

     Further Athene retained some attributes of the Matriarchy.  She was sometimes theriomorphically represented with a horse’s head while her attribute of the owl is represented in statuary and she is referred to as owl eyed, undoubtedly a reference to the wise Metis.  A snake was also shown coiled on the ground in the shelter of Athene’s shield as she leaned on it.

page 21.

     In point of fact all Greek heroes were symbolically horse headed by virtue of the horse hair crests on their helmets.  They were always under the protection of the Mother Archetype while sharing in the qualities of her symbol the horse.

     The wearing of lion and leopard skins is also an aspect of theriomorphism.  Obviously one hopes to share in the prowess of the lion or leopard by wearing its skin.  Thus Heracles armored himself in the skin of the Nemean Lion which, in itself, was a symbol of the Matriarchy.

     I hope this exposition established the nature of the relationship between the Mother, horse, eyes and the brain stem to the Son in ancient Greek thought.  These are not irrelevant details of myths but important symbols when understood in the Jungian sense.  The Ancients were not just amusing themselves with strange tales.  The message for the initiate is different for that of the hoi polloi.

     The myth of Circe explains what happened under the Matriarchate when men allowed themselves to be dominated by their carnal desires.  It is only when one controls one’s sexual needs that one escapes domination by the female to dominate the female.  In that way one rises from the level of the beast to that of a man.  Nor is this ‘repression’ in the Freudian sense.

     Before attacking the issue of Achilles and Thetis let me point out the significance of Oedipus.  Oedipus was abandoned as an infant by his mother Queen Jocasta of Thebes.  On his way to Thebes as a young man he was jostled out of the road by a chariot and a team of horses.  Enraged he killed the driver who he later learned was his father.  By killing this man, who was king of Thebes, he made the widowed queen his wife.  He then learned that she was his mother.  Horrified at the thought of having married his mother he gouged his EYES out using the clasp of a woman’s dress.  Thus one has son, mother’s abandonment, horses and eyes.

     Achilles, on the contrary, had an excellent relationship with his mother, too good.  He remained tied to her apron strings all his short life.

     His mother, Thetis, is one of the more interesting mythological characters.  Zeus had it mind to make Thetis his own but backed away when he learned that she would bear a son who would be greater than his father.  No god would then touch her so she was married to the mortal, Peleus, to whom she bore Achilles.

     Thetis and Peleus lived apart.  As she was a Nereid or sea nymph, closely related to Poseidon or the subconscious, she lived at the bottom of the sea whence she always made sure that Achilles had a superior team of horses, fabulous armor and an incredible shield.  Thus while Achilles was a formidable warrior his success depended as much on his doting mother as it did his own prowess.

     It was fated that Achilles could have a short life if sought glory on the field of battle or a long life as sort of an effeminate mama’s boy.  You see, the relationship to the mother.  This was his and his mother’s dilemma in the Iliad.

     To protect her boy as long as she could Thetis had him reared among the girls in the girl’s quarters in girl’s clothes.  He was so good at female impersonation that when the Greeks sought him out to serve in the war it was impossible to identify this giant amongst men among the girls.

     Think about this.

page 23.

     Still it was reputed that he was a mighty warrior who was destined to defeat the Trojans.  He should have had such a physique that he stood out head and shoulders above the girls.

     When the Trojan War began his mother desperately wanted to keep him out of harm’s way among the girls.  Odysseus, surnamed the Wily, smoked him out by raising an alarm.  While the girls ran screaming Achilles true to his heroic nature seized his arms to meet the threat thus betraying his identity.  Abandoning his transvestism Achilles is conscripted into Agamemnon’s Folly.

     Quite frankly the Greeks have been coerced into a war for the sole benefit of the Brothers Atrides.  What did Achilles care if Paris abducted Menelaus’ wife.  She went with him willingly anyway.  Menelaus behaved like a fool in leaving the guest Paris in his house with Helen while he left on a business trip.  Would you do that?  I wouldn’t.

     Nevertheless Agamemnon was the sole representative of Zeus on Earth; he ruled by divine right.  Zeus had given him the nod to assure victory.  In point of fact he couldn’t lose.  One wonders what would have happened if he had refused to help himself.  How would Zeus have affected victory as the gods help only those who help themselves?

     Homer in his brilliance depicts a very detailed picture of this society.  Agamemnon is especially suited to command although he is not the greatest of the heroes nor a totally admirable man.  In fact, his pettiness injures Achilles to the point where the latter must make a retort.

page 24.

     Achilles’ first thought is to take arms against the slings and arrows of outrageous Agamemnon but Athene counsels him to suffer that particular sea of troubles in his mind.  Achilles heeds her advice and goes into a pout befitting this greatest of mama’s boys.  He self-centeredly withdraws himself and his troops from the war.

     This act is very serious as he is the greatest of all Greek warriors while it is a known fact that the Greek’s can’t win without him.  Now, Achilles has some serious mental problems.  After his alter ego, Patroclus, is killed Achilles opines:

…O Zeus and Athena and Apollo

If only death would take every Trojan

And all the Achaeans except for us two,

So we alone might win that Sacred City…

     That’s a prayer he hopes will be anwered.  In his anger and spite he even wants his own side to be defeated and destroyed so long as he and his friend alone find salvation in that Sacred City.  The City Of God?

     After being robbed of his prize by Agamemnon he goes to the seashore to summon his mom from the deeps.  Arising from the sea of the subconscious she comes to him.  The result of this interview between a doting mother and a spoiled rotten son defies all concepts of morality both in Achilles’ request and his mother’s response.

page 25.

     Achilles asks his mother to intervene for him with Zeus to cause the slaughter of the Greeks until they are fighting the Trojans among their ships in the camp.  There is nothing that Thetis won’t do for her boy no matter how criminal.  She is willing that the Greeks be destroyed if that is what her son wants.  Thetis and Ma Barker would have gotten along just fine.

     Not only did Zeus have a soft spot for Thetis but in a past time when the gods rebelled and had overpowered Zeus in an attempt to depose him Thetis had come to his rescue.  Zeus owed her one.

     Zeus and the gods are away in Ethiopia for twelve days but she promises her son to visit him him as soon as he returns.  On his return she implored Zeus by grasping his knees with her left arm, Homer is explicit, thereby immobilizing him with her feminine side, with her right hand she grasps his chin arresting his attention.  She implores him to smite the Greeks unto death to appease her son’s sense of affront.

     Understand the enormity of Achilles’ request to his mother.  She does not reprove him in the least instead she rushes off to Zeus for his complicity which Zeus in his profundity of mind grants.

     Nor is this an easy thing to fit into his schedule.  He has already given the nod to Agamemnon which must be fulfulled while he can refuse nothing to his Grecophile daughter Athene and also while he is being badgered by his wife Hera to favor the Greeks.

     In the face of all these conflicting demands even though he has given the nod of victory to Agamemnon and once his nod has been given his decision cannot be altered he agrees to at least hurt the Greeks for the benefit of Thetis’ son with no possible reward for himself from Thetis as her sexual favors would cost him Olympus.  Now you know what a mind of infinite power is capable of.

page 26.

     Zeus then unleashes Hector and his Trojans until they breach the Greek walls firing a number of ships.

     Still unrelenting, Achilles refuses  to help but does allow his faggot, Patroclus, to don his armor frightening the Trojans into thinking Achilles has entered the fray.  Patroclus exceeds his authority being killed by Hector who appropriates the splendid armor of Achilles as well as those great horses.

     Now horseless, armorless, shieldless and friendless, in other words completely defenseless and emasculated, Achilles runs once again to mom.  Mama is always there for her boy.  Now, for those of us whose moms have not always been there for us this is a cause of deep envy and anguish.  She promises to have the technological god, Hephaestus, make him a new shield and armor to be ready the NEXT DAY.  Even Hephaestus is not too busy for this paragon of mothers; he sets aside all else and gets down to it.  You see what a good relationship between mother and son is worth.

     Aldous Huxley thought about such matters deeply.  He never consciously associated his mother with his eyes although his attachment was such that he said that if you wanted to know how polite educated people of his mother’s time spoke his speech was a living example.  In other words he thought that he emulated his mother down to her speech patterns.  In essence he had become his mother.

page 27.

     He had been unable to penetrate his ‘unconscious’ but he had studied the subject carefully.  Sybille Bedford quotes his thoughts on the unconscious in which Huxley says that, obviously, Freud did not invent psychology or even the ‘unconscious.’  Huxley discusses a book by one F.W.H. Myers who laid out a theory of the unconscious in a book titled ‘Human Personality’ in 1886.

     Myers dealth with the Homeric concepts of the unconscious qualities of Ate and Menos.  Ate was the destructive or dark side or the unconscious while Menos was the creative or positive side.

     Freud appropriated the concept of the unconscious but only the dark or destructive aspect appealed to him so he went no further than that.

     Obviously Huxley realized subconsciously that with his mother’s eyes he was in a constant struggle between Ate and Menos, darkness and light.

     It has always troubled me as to why Hephaestus, or Menos, was married to Aphrodite, or Ate and why the goddess of love and god of technology should live at the bottom of the sea.

     If you remember Aphrodite arose from the sea as a sea foam riding on the half shell.  Obviously love has all the substance of foam while seeing only one half of the truth.  This is a form of Ate.

     She and her husband live at the bottom of the sea because they represent Ate and Menos which reside in the subconscious.

page 28.

     Aphrodite as Ate is so thoughtless and self-indulgent that she causes pain to everyone in her willfulness.  Hephaestus was not too pleased to be awarded Aphrodite as his wife by the council of the gods.  No sooner were the two married than, while Hephaestus was off on business, Aphrodite invited her natural complementary aspect of the subconscious Ate, Ares, to bed.

     Aphrodite and Ares  are the two parts of destructive Ate.  When they are caught by Hephaestus in union they form the ‘beast with two backs’ or, in other words, they hatched from the same egg.  As unreasoning hatred and love they are Ate in its complete form or aspect of the subconscious that Freud chose to exploit with much less subtlety.

     Hephaestos is Menos, the god of invention and technology, also seems to send his good ideas up from the subconscious.  Ideas just seem to occur to us.  Hephaestus as Menos therefore resides at the bottom of the sea where he is in close contact with the Mother Archetype in the brain stem in union with Aphrodite and Ares as Ate.

     It should be remembered that the mother of Hephaestus is Hera who give birth to him parthenogenously.  Hephaestus has no connection with the Father Archetype.  In fact, he was thrown out of heaven by Zeus.  Thus Achilles’ mother is able to obtain from him whatever she wishes at a moment’s  notice.

     Being in close contact with the Father of Waters, Poseidon, Thetis is able to procure the finest horses for her boy.  Achilles has a team that is the envy of both Greece and Troy.  It goes without saying that he has no trouble with his eyes.

page 29.

     The imagery of mother, horse and eyes has persisted in the Indo-European male down to the present.  Let us give two examples here with more to follow in Parts III and IV.  Bear in mind that the imagery is subconscious so that it is not necessary for an author to knowingly select his imagery.

     In Rudyard Kipling’s novel ‘The Light That Failed; the hero, Dick, was an orphan who was placed in a foster home with an orphan girl, Maisie.  There were very close as children, one might say that she became Dick’s mother surrogate, but they became separated going about their careers apart.

     They met again as adults in London where Dick has his attachment to Maisie renewed although in an irrational manner while she only reluctantly acknowledges him ultimately rejecting his attentions at which point Dick loses his sight.

     Kipling doesn’t make the connection between mother’s abandonment, Maisie’s rejection and Dick’s eyes but it must be there in his subconscious.

     Dick, a war correspondent, returns to a war in the Sudan as a blind newspaper correspondent.  Traveling through hostile territory, just as he reaches the safety of the British camp he is shot dead off, not a horse, but a camel.

     The second example is the play and movie Equus by Peter Shaffer.  I saw only the movie.  The plot centers around the psycho-analysis of the male figure.  The story concerns a stable boy who blinds the mares under his care by slicing their eyes.  Whether based on a true analysis or not Shaffer has a very confused presentation of his ideas which he probaby does not understand.

page 30.

     As the protagonist is a stable boy it follows that he was drawn subconsciously to the job to be around horses indicating a weak mother relationship.  That he sought a job in a stable to be around horses is a subconscious indication of his pain.  We have seen what a doting mother, Thetis did for her boy Achilles and conversely what happened to Oedipus.

     The mother substitute appears in a girl who seduces him in full sight of the horses.  Unable to perform sexually in full sight of the horses, or Mother Archetype, he revenges himself on his mother by blinding the horses.

     It is only speculation but I infer that the stable boy had been rejected, abandoned psychologically or both by his mother causing a deep abiding anger.  It is forbidden to retaliate one’s rage on the mother so he vented his anger on both a young woman and the mother symbol, the horse.  He disappointed the girl while putting out the horse’s eyes.

     The flesh eating mares of Greek mythology is a difficult image to understand but perhaps they represent filiophagus mothers who victimize their sons knowingly or unknowingly.  The opposite of Thetis.

      The subsequent relationship of the rejected or abandoned son to women is important.  In the stable boy’s case he was impotent with women.  Dick needed to affirm his relationship to a childhood mother surrogate to avoid the consequences of abandonment.  In Huxley’s case he was very fortunate in recognizing a woman who would serve him as he felt his mother should have served him and in finding a woman who realized the exact need for unconditional love of a man in her own makeup.

page 31.

     One hesitates to say that Huxley created conditions by which his wife would predecease him but she did.  After a marriage of nearly forty years Huxley quickly married a self-sufficient woman while apprearing to be relieved at the loss of his mother surrogate.

     I hope I have made the connection between mothers, horses and eyes clearly.  As the problem is not in the upper brain but the brain stem the fixation cannot be voided by the normal means of identification and expression.

     In my own case in attempting to resolve the matter I have taken the approach of trying to reconcile my mother’s actions with my feelings about it but I haven’t been too successful.

     Obviously the primitive brain stem presents different obstacles than the mid-, upper and pre-frontal brain.

End of Part I.  Go to Part II, The Baby Marie. 

 

    

 

    

 

    

 

A Review

The Lad And The Lion

by

Edgar Rice Burroughs

Edgar Rice Burroughs

Review by R.E. Prindle

30 pages,

     Now were moving into the twenties.  The trans-Atlantic cable was laid in 1859 so telegraphic communications have bridged the Atlantic.  Wireless is becoming a reality about to create the great radio networks.  Primitive commercial air routes were still a decade or so in the future while the great passenger ships could cross the Atlantic safely in a week.

     The Atlantic would be flown within a few years but as of the early twenties the speed and ease of our travel had not yet commenced.  Still, it was now possible to closely coordinate activities as was done by the American Communists and their handlers from the Soviet Union.

     By 1923 Freudian sex notions, Marxist political fantasies and the pseudo-science of Einstein’s relativity were melded into one intellectual approach by what is known as the Frankfurt school, also known as critical theory.

[ http://.marxists.org/subject/frankfurt-school/index.htm ]

     The Institut For Sozialforschung…was the creation of Felix Weil, who was able to use money from his father’s grain busines to finance the Institut. Weil was a young Marxist who had written his Phd on the practical problems of implementing socialism.

—–

     Weil negotiated with the Ministry of Education [German] that the Director of the Institut would be a professor from the state system, so that the Institut would have the status of a University.

  The school staffed entirely by Jews was also known as the Institute for Social Research.  As you can see the sectarian nature of the school was concealed behind fine sounding screen names like Social and Research after the Freudian manner when it was a plan to implement the Jewish Revolution itself disguised as Communism.

     In a system of freedom of expression and conscience the School was no problem.  But the Jewish Culture at the same time that it claimed the rights and benefits of freedom of expression and conscience for itself denied them to the very creators of the concepts and this denial was made in terms of Orwellian doublespeak.

     Thus the so-called ‘Critical Theory’ was used to cast a pall of disrepute over the Other or the non-Jews while sanctifying the mores of the in group.  Decontruction went on in both Europe and America.

     During the Nazi era the school would be relocated first to Switzerland in 1932 from which it could operate in Germany, then in 1935 the entire school was transferred to NYC.  In 1941 the school was moved to Hollywood.

     For decades with their control of expression it was virtually impossible to examine problems from any other point of view than the Critical Theory.  I was just at Reed College.  Going through the book store it was clear that the curriculum was based on the Frankfurt School and Critical Theory.

     With the coming of the internet it became possible for opinions that had been savagely repressed to find expression.  The current bugaboo of the Semites is a professor from Long Beach State by the name of Kevin MacDonald.  He began a research into the methods by which the Jewish Culture established itself in the twentieth century as the dominant culture.  That work was titled The Culture Of Critique which has since become the bible of the Right.

     A full scale attempt to marginalize MacDonald is now in progress.  Needless to say the attack as always is ad hominem with the attempt to defame Mr. MacDonald’s scientific researches as ‘anti-Semitic.’ Nevertheless the door is open a crack, at least temporarily.

     The Jewish Culture through Freud established the concept of Multi-culturalism which states that each culture is distanct in identity with a set of objectives that it wishes to implement for itself.  We didn’t need the concept of Multi-culturalism to be aware of that but there you have it. 

     MacDonald’s title the Culture of Critique defines the Jewish cultural technique through the ages as well as that of the Frankfurt School in the twentieth century.  The Culture enters another culture immediately beginning to find fault with what up to then had been a successful effort at dealing with problems of civilization.  Whatever the response and no matter how successful the Jewish Culture criticized it, tore it down and insisted that the Jewish way replace it.

     All of the ancient cultures were grappling with nature through a system of polytheism.  Polytheism was the forerunner of science in that it identified and separated the processes of nature attempting to understand each in isolation.  As with the rise of Science in the nineteenth century there was no way for the Jewish Culture to establish supremacy.  Any argument they had to offer was just another opinion.

     So the Culture countered with monotheism which was supposed to be superior to polytheism in some way they couldn’t explain.  They just asserted it.  Once I slipped from under the conditioning of my religious upbringing that enforced monotheism without an adequate justification I came to the realization that there was nothing superior in monotheism in fact the approach negates scientific inquiry in favor of an inviolable dispensation from ‘G-d’  or, in other words, a projection of the Jewish Weltanschauung.

[ http://deoxy.org/bom.htm ]

     Having subdued polytheism with monotheism when science broke its bonds from the seventeenth to the nineteenth the Jewish Culture had to come up with an approach to contain and negate science.  Hence a number of pseudo-sciences were created to confuse and obfuscate so that these scientific sounding ‘sciences’ that nevertheless served to impose Jewish Culture could be established.

     Foremost among these attempts incorporating Marx, Freud and Einstein as aforementioned was the Institute for Social Research.  I was aware of most of the leading figures of the school such as Wilhelm Reich, Marcuse, Adorno and Fromm from my college days but I wasn’t aware of their association in the Frankfurt School although I was aware of that name. 

     Following Freud’s lead, such as in Lang’s Testament Of Dr. Mabuse the members continued the attacks Freud had launched.  Central to their issues was sexual theory.

     In order to reconstruct society along Jewish Cultural lines they had to deconstruct the existing society.  That is to say by the use of Critical Theory they had to subvert existing customs and mores.  A first step was to belittle existing beliefs attempting the substitution of ‘superior’ Jewish beliefs.  Thus beginning in the twenties a systematic debunking of American heroes and customs began.

     The world was turned upside down.  Everything that previously had been thought good was now bad which means that everything bad was good.  It was all relative; nothing is good or bad but thinking makes it so.  But the maxim only cut one way in the hands of critical theory.  What you believed was bad; what they believed was good.  No one ever thought to ask: Compared to what?  And they got away with this too.  Still don’t know how it worked that way but it did.

     And then they went back and changed the past.  A sort of inverted nostalgia.  The way they wanted it to have been when managed by the other.  John Dos Passos began to turn out his USA trilogy that many people think is one of the top ten books of the twentieth century.  It’s flashy.  Even flashier if you don’t know the historical background.  The first time I read it, much younger then of course, I was bowled over.  Of course my state of mind was perhaps a little more depressed than Dos Passos’ story which is pretty depressed.  Second time I read it I began to waver.  Seemed awfully one sided.  Then I integrated my personality and like the character in Gradiva my projection began to dissolve.  My windshield got clearer and I could see more clearly.  The third time I read the trilogy I was repulsed by the complete and total negativity, the general nastiness of Dos Passos’ mind.  Well, nothing’s good or bad but thinking makes it so.  I thought the trilogy was good when I first read it, neutral the second time and terrible the last.  It’s all relative, of course, but now my opinion is that the trilogy is absolutely bad and as thinking makes it so it must be bad.  Fifty years later or so Greil Marcus’ reinforcing the USA tilogy came out with a book he titled Bad Old America.  That could have been the title of Dos Passos’ USA trilogy.  So who you going to believe novelists and memoirists who speak of the good old America or those like Dos Passos and Marcus who believed it was a bad old America.  Compared to what?  It’s all relative.  Well nothing is good or bad but thinking makes it so so people like Dos Passos and Marcus can get behind their push carts and trundle off into oblivion.

     Well, that was flip and satisfying but ignores the tragedy of the people who lived through that era yet were mystified by what they saw going on around them because they were living by rules formulated thirty or forty years in the past but which didn’t work very well anymore because another culture, actually a couple cultures were changing the game before their eyes by disregarding those very rules.  There you have a multi-cultural society: if you’re not busy setting the rules you’re busy following those who are.  Quite frankly any culture that doesn’t want to set the rules is a culture of saps.  Unfortunately I belong to that sappy culture but I’m doing my best to set them on their feet and point them in the right direction.

     It was too late for Edgar Rice Burroughs back then but he was a game old bird.  This essay started in 1912 with Burroughs scribbling away at a strange story entitled Tarzan Of The Apes.  Well, from a jack to a king.  From a financial and emotional bankrupt Burroughs’ story of Tarzan improbably caught the imagination of not only the United States but pretty much the whole darn world.

     Apart from being an amusing but fantastic story that given your frame of mind is a very difficult tale to take, one is astounded at the influence of Tarzan on the world stage.  The literate were absolutely repulsed by the story and I’m not so starry eyed I can’t see why.  A certain type of mind can only see the ridiculous aspect of Tarzan.  I don’t have any good arguments to convince those who believe so, I see the reason for their revulsion but I don’t share it.

page 5.

     My first introduction to Tarzan was of course the movies.  I was entranced by Johnny Weissmuller, although watching the movies now I’m not sure why.  From there I bought what was available from Grosset and Dunlap.  I found the books better than the movies.  There was that about Burroughs, the man himself, telling his stories of Tarzan that made the stories seem very significant so that not only me but thousands of others accept Tarzan as, what shall I say, their savior, their role model, their leader, their intellectual ideal?

     Whatever it is it is the very antithesis of the Judaeo-Communist-Liberal school.  Tarzan is self-sufficient; he is his own man.  He is the very antithesis of the Liberal ideal which is, in the words of Vance Packard, an organization man, a member of the collective, subordinated completely to the ideology.  Buzzing around in the hive.

     There are many, even among his fans, who think of Burroughs as a simple minded boob who had the skill for escapist literature.  I can see how they form their attitude too but, once again, I don’t share it.

     I think it just as obvious that Burroughs was deeply interested in the social, psychological, political, religious and scientific concerns of his time.  Wisely, he decided to employ such details in a casual way without emphasizing his opinions because to call attention to them would have been beyond the scope of entertainment.  He believed the sole purpose of fiction was entertainment however he construed the word.  Still the serious reflections come through to the perceptive reader.  For instance the Oakdale Affair is a wonderful little study packed full of perceptive and fairly profound observations.

page 6.

     Burroughs had a large public who were devoted to Tarzan. the impact of the character seems to go far beyond the book sales.  Of course book sales were amplified by the movies that became the established form of fictional entertainment as Tarzan’s popularity grew from 1912 to 1920 or so.  In the late teens several very popular movies of Tarzan were made.

     Regardless of what the critics thought of Tarzan the Liberal/Communist faction perceived a threat to their collective mindset.  The ideals Burroughs infused into Tarzan that educated his public were in opposition to the Liberal collectivity.  One good Tarzan novel combined with a movie could more than offset the influence of the whole Frankfurt School plus.

     Before the October Revolution there was no political opposition to Burroughs but as the war ended and the twenties began attention was directed toward Tarzan and Burroughs.  It seems quite obvious that the Jews recognized the importance of the movies for influencing culture from the beginning.  One may argue that they took control of the movies because it was a new industry and it was open to them.  It’s a good argument but not necessarily the real one.  As the technological age dawned all industries were new and open to anybody.  The argument might equally apply to the auto industry in 1908 yet Jews shunned the formative years of the industry.

     The newspaper and publishing industries were dominated by goys yet Jews gained access to the industries and shouldered them aside.  The same may be said of department stores.  Yet Jews seized on movies and as radio became a business that industry and then television.  So there seems to be another reason for Jews seeking control of such culture forming areas as stage, screen, radio and publishing.  One hates to state the obvious.

     After the October Revolution Jews worldwide were in a position to control culture.  Thus, as in the US, they could issue volume after volume debunking older cultural heroes and national customs.  The Liberal/Judaeo/Communist coalition could control the images of current cultural figures like Edgar Rice Burroughs also.  While Burroughs always had publishing difficulties for other reasons, after 1920 it got worse until in 1930 he was forced into self-publishing.

page 7.

     It may be a coincidence that after 1922 no more Tarzan movies were made until 1928 or not.  But it was about this same time that Burroughs began having troubles everywhere.  His English publishers began to neglect him.  His Tarzan novels which were very popular in Germany came under attack because Burroughs’ novels written during he war were considered Germanophobic.  As the campaign was successful it had to be led by Communists.

     And in Russia Burroughs aroused the ire of the Communist government because the proletariat preferred Tarzan novels to Communist doctrine. So, in the period 1920 to 1924 a concerted worldwide attack was carried on against this poor fantasy writer.

     The Soviet government enlisted the services of a writer of great fame to denigrate Burroughs discreetly in print.  That writer was no less than H.G. Wells.  His opening shot across the bow was Men Like Gods which was so discreet I may be the only person who ever saw it other than Burroughs.  However Men Like Gods was followed in 1928 by a work clearly referring to Burroughs entitled Mr. Blettsworthy On Rampole Island.  As his point of departure Wells chose a 1914 novelette entitled The Lad And The Lion.  In Blettsworthy he postulated that Burroughs was insane.  That is a pretty heavy defamation of a living author if anyone read Wells’ book.  Not many did.  After 1920 Wells had a very limited appeal as a novelist.  His attack had an influence on the publishing history of the The Lad And The Lion that will require some detailed attention.

page 8.

      The original of Lad was written in February-March of 1914  immediately followed by Beasts Of Tarzan while The Girl From Farris’s begun in 1913 was finished at the same time.  The three novels then were written at the height of Burroughs recovery from the despair of his earlier failure.  They represent a response to his success as he tried to find a new footing.

     Burroughs’ father had died on February 13th, 1913.  In September, at the time of his birthday, ERB left for an extended stay in California.  All three novels were written or finished in California in the final three months of the stay.  That Lad and Girl were both completed in March indicates their close connection in his mind.  Lad being concerned with his Animus and Girl undoubtedly with his Anima.

     Wells’ analysis of Lad convinced him that Burroughs was insane as he said in his ad hominem attack in Blettsworthy.  Even if Burroughs were ‘insane’ at the time he wrote Lad that would have no effect on the influence of Tarzan.

     While Burroughs suffered from mental distress from the time the events of Lad took place, which I put as his entry into the Michigan Military Academy, to what I would call his emergence and recovery here in 1914, that is far from insanity and I might add no  worse than the symptoms of distress Wells showed in his In The Days Of The Comet.  Even Men Like Gods in 1923 is a lttle bonkers.  Nevertheless his analysis of the state of mind Burroughs displays in Lad seems to me to be fairly accurate.  That Burroughs passed through such a stage of suffering is normal, which Wells if he weren’t in a partisan attack would or should have recognized.

page 9.

     At any rate the story Wells read has to be separated from the book edition that was rewritten and published twenty-four years later.  Every other chapter has to be removed, those concerning the events in Moscow- or at least an imaginary Eastern European city.

     That leaves you with the story of Michael adrift off the Atlantic coast of Africa and his subsequent landing.  The manner in which the story relates to Burroughs’ life and state of mind is fairly transparent if one knows his life and psychology.

     George T., Burroughs father, had transferred him from one school to another jerking him out at the critical moment.  Anyone who has experienced this knows how difficult it is.  It makes you a little bit buggy.  The final straw came when George T. sent him away to the MMA.  Burroughs tried to escape but his father sent him back.  We don’t know what he said to the boy but it must have had a terrific effect on him.

     It was the feeling of rejection from this inident that lay behind the story of the Lad And The Lion.  The MMA completely declassed Burroughs so that he was able to fit in nowhere.  He characterized this feeling as one of shipwreck.  The shipwreck figures into several of his novels not least of which are Tarzan Of The Apes and Son Of Tarzan.

     So, in the story of Lad.  As usual Burroughs weaves in several literary influences.  Underlying the story is that of Mark Twain’s Prince And The Pauper that so influenced Burroughs.  In a 1923 newspaper article the writer declared that he had read Prince approximately six times.  One doesn’t read such a light weight fantasy six times unless it closely relates to one’s own experience.  Thus until the MMA one can conclude that Burroughs thought of himself as a little Prince.  In the same article he said he also had read Little Lord Fauntleroy six times.  After the MMA he lost the feeling of being a Prince and Lord to become a pauper.  In Lad then, the hero (a version of himself) is a prince who after the shipwreck becomes a pauper.

page 10.

     The shipwreck itself was influenced by the sinking of the Titanic in 1912.  Several tales of the Titanic are retold.  The young Prince Michael who because of his age was entitled to a place in a lifeboat generously and manly gives up his place to a woman.

     When the great ship rolled over we are led to believe that Michael was catapulted some distance away.  His guardian had thoughtfully put a life jacket on him so he doesn’t drown.  But just as the shipwreck repesented the second of Burroughs’ great fixations as he is in the water a life raft descending a wave crashes down on his head ‘in a glancing blow’ knocking him unconscious causing a total loss of memory that lasts for over five years.

     When he comes to an empty lifeboat is floating by him.  Not recognizing it as a boat as he has total- and Burroughs means total- memory loss yet Michael reasons that it will be more comfortable than the water.  Clever kid.

     The shipwreck and lifeboat are prominent themes taking several different forms in Burroughs’ work.  Tarzan’s parents are marooned in the opening novel of the series put ashore in a lifeboat while the ship they were sailing on was subsequently wrecked and sunk.  There were several such incidents in the sequel, The Return Of Tarzan, all of them occurring within a few miles of each other and close to where Tarzan’s parents were marooned, which is to say Burroughs himself.  These are one or two too many coincidences for most readers.  If this were a traditional adventure series perhaps that would be true, but in the psychological sense in which Burroughs is writing there is a logical imperative controlled by Burroughs’ fixations.

     Waldo Emerson Smith-Jones is a castaway in 1913’s Cave Girl while the first large scale run through of the theme is in the later novel of 1913 The Mucker.  These two novels were conceived before the father, George T. died.

     His death shifted Burroughs mind back a decade or two so that the shipwreck of Lad is psychologically the first in the sequence.

page 11.

     Discarding Freud’s interpretation of the unconscious let us view Burroughs’ shipwreck through the version of the subconscious I have outlined which is truer than that of Freud.  Now, the events of Burroughs life were filtered through his three great fixations.  Certainly up to 1914 he had been unable to relax their hold at all.  He was subject to terrifying nightmares because of the fixations and why not.  The daily happenings thus would be constellated around these fixations and distorted to meet the experience of their horrific traumas.

     Over the years as his circumstances changed even though he was apparently unable to exorcise these fixations his new circumstances were powerful enough to alter the consequences  of the experiential fixations.  Since he dwelt on these central symbols in which his traumas cast his dreams he uses the same situation over and over which causes some readers to accuse him of repitition.  While the situations do repeat the same symbolism they do not do so in a deadening manner but are variations on the theme that evolve with Burroughs’ evolving consciousness.

     Thus in Lad he is in the lifeboat alone, no Anima figure.  In the Mucker all the survivors of the shipwreck end up in one boat with the Anima figure Barbara Harding.  It must be true as this is dream material that the figures in the boat represent real people that were associated with Burroughs in these traumas.  Later in 1924 when Burroughs has edged back to a prince from a pauper there are two lifeboats, one for the gentlefolks and one for the criminal class.  Chase III, the Burroughs Animus figure was supposed to have been with the gentlefolk but in the confusion he is thrown in with the criminal class.  This undoubtedly represents the MMA.  Marcia, the Anima figure is also taken in that boat by mistake.  Thus we have another variation on the MMA fixation.

page 12.

     It must be true that these differences were reflected in Burroughs’ dreams as his fixations and his reality drew apart and conflicted.  Apparently troubled all his life by this conflict Burroughs even bought a book on scientific dream interpretation in 1932.

    Drifting along in his life boat, breathing being the only thing he can remember, he is spotted from a drifting derelict by its sole human inhabitant, a crazy epileptic deaf mute.  Add to his infirmities the fact that Michael has no memory and one has quite a combination. The old loony draws him from the lifeboat to a four or five year life on this drifting derelict.  Michael drifts thus until the old loon is killed upon which being released from his control or enchantment Michael lands on the coast of North Africa having no memory of land whatsoever.

     The dream ship was adequately provided with all the necessities for this interminable drifting about as a dream ship would.

     As they drift up and down the coast of Africa one is compelled to ask why.  Very likely Africa had taken on a mythic quality for Burroughs from the works of Stanley, Livingstone, Du Chaillu, Buel and others.  Africa was a world where the White man was supreme and unfettered much as was Tarzan.  Thus the Africa of the Tarzan novels should be considered a dream or fantasy Africa that bears little resemblance to the real geographical Africa.  Burroughs’ Africa was a place inhabited by lions and tigers and deer.  More’s the pity for the psychological reality of the continent that his fans wouldn’t allow him to populate the place with tigers and deer.  Psychologically these things were essential to the story he was telling.

     As in all dreams the most improbable coincidences have to be accepted.  Thus as unbelievable as it may be to a rational mind, this old epileptic deaf mute insano  had a very young lion cub in a cage on deck.  It is impossible for him to be there rationally but there you have it.  Psychologically he belongs there.  It is noteworthy that over five years the ship encountered no storms so the lion didn’t wash overboard as he must otherwise have.

page 13.

     The old guy is cruel and sadistic.  He beats the Lad, who no longer has any other identity which must be why he’s called the Lad, on a daily basis as well as torturing the lion.  As a lion is Burroughs’ Anima figure he naturally forms a close friendship with the cub.  Both Lad and cub grow huge with the result that the Lad challenges the old coot who never has a name.  The old coot knocks the Lad senseless with an iron bar.  That’s two blows to the head within twenty pages.  Seeing his friend threatened the lion bursts from his cage grown rickety over the years despatching the coot in one chomp as he tears the old bastard’s face away.  Thus Lad and Lion are delivered from the mastery or enchantment of the old crazy.

     Now, who in Burroughs aching life could this old monster be?  Well, his father died about a year earlier.  His father did rush him from school to school finally placing him with what Burroughs considered the juvenile delinquents of MMA.  Burroughs always professed the greatest love for his father, celebrated his birthday annually; yet on his dad’s hundreth anniversary he created the zany loony mad Doctor, ‘God’ who bears some similarity to this crazy old coot of Lad.  I don’t think there’s any doubt that Burroughs had ambiguous feelings about George T.   It is even quite probable that he didn’t recognize the crazy old coot as his father so he would suffer no guilt from ripping the old loony’s face off.  Indeed, removing his face was removing his identity.

     The Lad and Lion did not land immediately but continued to drift for a period of several months.  From that one might reason that Burroughs and his Anima figure while released from subjugation by George T.’s death took several months to move from beneath the father’s shadow.  Indeed this novel was written approximately nine months after his father’s death.

     If one construes the period from 1891 the year Burroughs entered the MMA to his father’s death as symbolic of the years of drifting under the domination of the old weirdo one might interpret Burroughs situation in this way.

page 14.

      His father had humiliated and shamed him so thoroughly that the boy was psychologically barred from following in his father’s footsteps as a businessman.  Hence from 1891 to 1911 or 12 Burroughs drifted from job to fairly disreputable job a complete failure.  Realizing he could never be a success as his father had Burroughs in desperation was forced to take another tack outside the business world.  Thus he took up pen and began to write.  Here he was successful.  It is significant that he used materials, old letterheads and pencils, from his own failed enterprises.  His father died just as Burroughs was receiving the first fruits of his new career which was probably just as well.  But now he had to get away from the proximity of the man so he packed wife, kids, car and all his belongings fleeing to the West Coast.  At the end of this voluntary exile and just before returning he completed The Lad And The Lion.  Having made the attempt to exorcise the demon he could return to Chicago which he did.

     I haven’t read the magazine version which may differ a little or quite a bit but the above story is the crux of  The Lad And The Lion.  The above must have been what convinced H.G. Wells that Burroughs was insane.

     Dream symbolism is not however an indication of insanity but the problem of the interactions of the conscious and subconscious  trying to make sense of experience it finds difficult to understand.  Contrary to Freud’s belief that dreams are a product solely of the unconscious  it is impossible for consciousness to abandon itself completely to the subconscious.

     Burroughs relation of his dream is no more a sign of insanity than Freud’s dream of Irma’s Injection.  In fact Burroughs, as one aspect of his story may very well have been dealing with his own interpretation of dreams.  As this story was modified in 1938 long after psychoanalysis had entered the popular domain the story that Wells read c. 1920 may be significantly different than the altered 1938 version.  Burroughs may very well have developed his psychological theories significantly since 1914.  This version would also have been written after he had had time to digest the scientific dream book he bought in 1932.

page 15.

     As Burroughs acquired his initial interest in psychology from Lew Sweetser in 1891 which is evidenced from his earliest works there is no reason not to believe that by 1938 he had definite ideas of dream psychology.

     Wells himself was read in Freudian psychology as his analysis of Burroughs in Blettsworthy indicates.  The depth of his undertanding appears to be somewhat superficial but, still, informed.  His attack on Burroughs is ad hominem in the Liberal tradition.  As a writer Wells should have known better than to take Lad at face value, especially as several of his own stories vary into paranoia and other mental disorders or, rather, states of mind.  One might even say that the interest of the stories rise from these projected states of mind.  Two of Wells finest novels reflect disordered states of mind.  The magnificently portrayed paranoia of ‘When The Sleeper Wakes’ is unparalled unless it be by his own ‘In The Days Of The Comet.’  Both can compete with ‘Lad’ in terms of insanity.

     Very likely ‘Blettsworthy’ was a calculated attack motivated by orders from Moscow.  Those orders were probably received about 1921 when Wells visited Lenin and the Soviet Union.  By this time Wells was religiously committed to the Revolution.  Thus, as indicated, during this period the attack on Burroughs was commenced on the international level.  His English publishers inexplicably lost interest in a key commerical product like Tarzan.  The same may be said of his American publishers and movie makers.  His German sales were destroyed on political charges and finally the Soviets ordered Wells to attack him personally to destroy his credibility.  These actions should throw some  light on Burroughs’ financial difficulties of this critical period when he lost control of the Tarzana estate.

     The period from this attack to 1928 and 1930 when Burroughs elected to self-publish has not been examined from this point of view.  Suffice it to say that Burroughs first self-published title, Tarzan The Invincible concerns an actual war between Tarzan and no less than the Soviet dictator, Josef Stalin.  This was continued in the sequel, Tarzan Triumphant, while being continued through 1934 and the release of Tarzan And The Lion Man.

page 16.

     The rewriting of The Lad And The Lion in 1938 may be taken as a heavy salvo in this war.  By 1938 the history of the two Russian Revolutions, 1905 and 1917 would have been known in their broad outlines.  The minor details have been guessed from the very beginning having been recently confirmed by research.  So, his ‘head bloody but unbowed’ Burroughs returned to the battle.

     Aware of Wells’ interpretation of the 1914 magazine version of Lad Burroughs may have altered the details to correspond with his state of mind in 1938 blending the earlier story into the later additions dealing specifically with Wells and his Soviet handlers.

     By 1938 Wells had been abandoned by his Soviet mistress Moura Budberg.  He had met her during his 1921 visit to Russia.  She had then been assigned to him by Stalin from c. 1928 to 1935, the height of the war on Burroughs.  She had abandoned him probably because his usefullness was considered minimal because of his independence and criticism of Stalin.  In 1939’s Holy Terror Wells would actually call for the assassination of Stalin in much the same way he had declared Burroughs insane.  The amazing thing is the casual way in which Wells advocates assassination as a political means.  Wells was an outstanding Liberal who here displays the absolute bigotry of Liberalism.  They denounce capital punishment unless it serves their own purposes.  Once again it is impossible to be religiously  devout without being a bigot.  It make no difference whether it is character assassination, or individual murder, or the genocide of a billion all is justified by religious bigotry, in this case Liberalism.

     Did I see eyebrows raised at the mention of genocide of a billion?  Please to follow the line of argument.

page 17.

     Liberalism began with the French Revolution.  The Liberals began by murdering aristocrats individually or as a group, genocide.  When the aristocrats resisted, revolting in La Vendee, genocidal massacres began.  Barges loaded with the royalist party were towed into the middle of rivers and sunk drowning all aboard.

     These proceedings were justified about seventy years later by the Liberal pundit Victor Hugo in his novel 1793.  He doesn’t mention atrocities like the above but he justified the holocaust in this way:

     These people stand in the way of the New Order.  So long as they live they are a threat to the New Order, therefore it behooves us to kill them all to give birth to the New Utopia.

     This notion has been the guiding principle of Liberals ever since.  At every opportunity they massacre those standing in the way of the New Order.  In the horrific aftermath of the October Revolution Jews massacred millions.  Picking up the baton Stalin engineered a famine in a genocidal attempt to murder independent farmers called Kulaks.  A few years later the Leftist Adolf Hitler attempted to exterminate a number of enemies of his New Order.  Mao added his tens of millions.  But, that’s not a billion you say?  Well, that is a possible if seemingly not probable next step.  It is already in the works.

     I don’t know how many of you have heard of Noel Ignatiev.  He is a Jewish Harvard graduate who has formed an organization called Race Traitor.  In a Winter 1991 article in his magazine called RaceTraitor  [ http://racetraitor.org/abolish.html ]  the lead article was entitled: Abolish The White Race– By Any Means Necessary.  Perhaps wisely, the article is unsigned.  The article is sheer rhetoric with so many logical flaws I can’t begin to go into them here.  The article intends to be divisive.  The intent is to persuade as many White people as possible to renounce their ‘White Skin Privilege’, whatever that might mean.  This will be a step in abolishing the White ‘race’ which Ignatiev perceives as a monolith, perhaps along the lines of his own Jewish culture.  The above notion provides Ignatiev and his Culture an escape clause because, although nominally White, they, we are led to believe, have renounced their White Skin Privilege.

page 18

     As a New Aboloitionist as Ignatiev refers to his organization the Jewish Culture is safely on the side of the colored ‘races’ of the world.  The destruction of a billion Whites still seems improbable but Ignatiev and his fellows have already induced guilt into a very large number of Whites neutralizing them while cadres of White ‘youths’ have been enlisted in the cause.  They are supposed to renounce their Whiteness by breeding with colored people thus losing Whiteness in color.

     At the same time those who seem more aggressively White, refusing to be intimidated have been defamed and castigated as ‘White Supremacists’ being reviled and hated by not only the New Abolitionists and colored peoples but also by all White People who have not been so designated.  So, if you allow for 10% of the Whites to be unrepentant that amounts to about 100 million people spread over hundreds of locations.  As this sub group has now been demonized as sub-human while standing in the way of Ignatiev’s New Order of a world without White people it is historically perfectly permissible to kill them all.

      Now, concentration camps have been set up in the US, you can find pictures of them on the internet, huge tent cities that have ostensibly been set up to house illegal immigrants.  Why anyone would want to house illegal immigrants who no one is interested in arresting anyway remains a mystery.   Then who are these camps on which a vast sum has already been expended for?  I suggest you examine certain legislation before Congress concerning ‘Hate Laws’ and draw your own conclusions.

     So, with the obstructionists of the New Order safely out of the way the next batch of the less than enthusiastic Whites can be safely dealt with by the New Abolitionists.  Diminished, disarmed and defenseless it will be a small matter to finish off a mere half billion or so, if they haven’t already had the sense to blend in with the coloreds.  As I have pointed out before the rule is to keep the women and kill the men so in reality it would only be necessary for a holocaust of a quarter billion.  Get’s easier, doesn’t it?

page 20.

     As a historical process this would complete the Semito-European war that began approximately 6000 years ago with a total victory for the Semites.

     Let us go back to the mano a mano duel between Wells and Burroughs as centered around The Lad And The Lion.  We still have two stories to deal with, one is the desert story when The Lad now known as Aziz is made a member of Arab society and the Moscow story.  Having never read the original  magazine story it still seems reasonable that Burroughs adapted the 1914 story to his 1938 needs.

     When the ship was grounded a new life began for Aziz  and the Lion.  The change was complete.  The ship drifted ashore at high tide, the tide went out so far that the ship left high and dry rolled over on its side allowing the pair to walk ashore over dry land. 

     This is a dream representation of Burroughs own transition from being adrift to realizing success as a writer.  As the old tyrant had died just previously one may believe that the death of his father  coinciding with his success released Burroughs from thrall.

     The situation now is more perfect than Tarzan, indeed this story may be a bridge between the Russian Quartet and the rest of the series.  It falls between Beasts Of Tarzan and Son Of Tarzan prefiguring the latter in many ways, while the lion may be considered the predecessor of the Golden Lion linking the rest of the series.

page 20.

     Naked came Aziz.  Not only naked but illiterate and speechless.  The epileptic deaf mute was unable to teach him anything.  The blow to his head from the raft had obliterated his memory that obviously included the memory of language.  He has learned lion talk however, he has a pretty impressive roar.  Aziz does have remarkable native intelligence however so he learns with an alacrity that is astonishing.

     Actually both he and the lion have no survival skills whatever not even knowing how to hunt.  Contrary to most feral children Aziz is able to evaluate a situation and come up with an appropriate solution.  Thus when he and the lion fail at chasing the prey down Aziz does a quick analysis then places himself above the prey and lion driving the beasts into the jaws of the lion.  Not bad for a complete novice.

     In a scene reminiscent of the Percival story of King Arthur Aziz when he sees his first Arab horsemen is as entranced as Percival was when he first saw the knights.  By 1914 I doubt if Burroughs had read much of the lore of King Arthur but by 1938 he may have, must have.  One odd item that may be coincidence of course is that when Percival is asked his name by the knights in Chretien de Troyes’ Grail he replies that it is ‘darling boy’ which is how his mother referred to him.  When Nakhla names the Lad she calls his Aziz which in Arabic means ‘beloved.’  The French officer’s daughter when she learns his name remarks that he must have been named by his mother or a sweetheart as she explains the meaning of Aziz to him.  Aziz has obviously mastered French within a couple weeks having kicked off his linguistic skills with lion and Arabic.

     Aziz’ romance with Nakhla had been abandoned when he was told she had married.  Thus when with the French woman and a group of French soldiers they visit Nakhla’s Arab camp the young woman is devastated to see Aziz in the company of another woman, dressed as a European soldier.  Burroughs likes the comedy of errors approach.

page 21

     The situation changes rapidly when Aziz overhears the Captain describe himself in an uncomplimentary fashion as unfit for his daughter.  Stripping down to loin cloth Aziz heads back into the desert as the wid beast he is, although by this time he knows lion, Arab and French which places him two languages ahead of most civilized people.  On the way back his two lion friends pounce on him which must have hurt not a little.  Kind of like being embraced by a speeding freight train.

     Burroughs begins to describe Aziz as a lion man.  I think this would be the first reference to a lion man in the corpus unless the reference was only included in the rewrite of ’38.  Tarzan is described as a lion man while at the same time he has parallel indenties as a Monkey Man and an Elephant Man.  In this case Aziz is solely a lion man.  He left the ship with the male lion who has no name and acquired a female lion who was attracted by the male at about the same time Aziz became aware of Nakhla.  As with De Vac of the Outlaw Of Torn the lion seems to be associated with Aziz’ Anima.  With the arrival of the female the Anima shifts to the female with the male moving to the Animus while Aziz makes a ‘real life’ connection to a living female forming the appropriate quaternity.

     Having left the French where he also learned that Nakhla wasn’t married he visits the Sheik’s encampment to make up.  Here the Sheik is indignant at Aziz presumption called him worse names than the Captain did.  Aziz is so crushed that one wonders if Burroughs himself wasn’t grossly insulted by old Mr. Hulbert, Emma’s father.  While he is debating with himself Nakhla is captured by his rival Ben Saada.

     At this point it would be good to have read the magazine version for comparison.  As this story is running parallel with the Moscow story Burroughs may have coordinated the two, changing the orginal version considerably.  If that were the case then the desert story is almost certainly influenced by E.M. Hull’s 1921 novel, The Sheik and the movie of the same year starring Rudolph Valentino.

page 22.

     In any event in the denouement Burroughs does his usual action razzle dazzle but Aziz still has no memory of his origins.  In a battle with the outlaws he gets clubbed with a rifle on the forehead.  He is out of it for a couple days.  There is concern whether he will survive.  His skull is torn open the familiar way.  This is the third major blow Aziz has received in this story and it’s a short one.  When he comes to his head is being bathed on the lap of Nakhla and wonder of wonders his full memory has returned.  He knows who he is: he is no longer a pauper but a Prince.  Little Lord Fauntleroy has come into his own.

     We will leave Aziz at this point and turn to the parallel story of Prince Ferdinand, Hilda de Groot and the Revolution.

     Prince Ferdinand and Hilda is a retelling of George W.M. Reynold’s second series subtitled, Venetia Trelawney.  Hilda is Venetia while Ferdinand represents George IV.  Hilda’s brother Hans probably represents Venetia’s husband, Horace Sackville.  If I am correct in supposing that Burroughs read The Mysteries Of The Court Of London c. 1898 then the memory of the story surfaces here forty years later in 1938.  Not bad.

     Burroughs telling of the story here may be a parody on H.G. Wells.  Like George IV who had rather womanize than pay attention to affairs of State Ferdinand does also.  Unlike George who maintained the throne Ferdinand is caught in the Revolution being murdered, perhaps a reference to Nicholas II.

     I am sure the story is replete with references and insults I am not getting or they are tenuous enough to prevent certainty.  The first revolutionary chieftain for instance is named Meyer which is not too far from Mayer perhaps referring to Louis B. Mayer of MGM.

page 23.

     Burroughs is writing this in 1938 after he has been under attack for twenty years.  This book is addressed to Wells who began his literary attack in 1923.  There is no reason to doubt the major battles took place from 1930 to 1934.  In 1931 MGM whose President was the highest paid executive in the US, Louis B. Mayer, filched control of Tarzan’s image from Burroughs.  By 1934  when the second MGM Tarzan was released Burroughs was thoroughly beaten.

     You know, a man has to think about things.  You have to be pretty slow or psychologically sanguine to think that things just happen.  As we can see from Lad Burroughs was well aware of Wells’ involvement.  The studio heads did not stand in the way of the Red infiltration of Hollywood.  They welcomed the Red movie makers who fled Hitler into the studio system.  They had no trouble blending in the Frankfurt School when it arrived in Hollywood in 1941.  If as John Howard Lawson said that the studio heads approved of every single scene and line in every single movie then while they may have rejected some overt Red inferences it may not have been because they were Red but because they believed the country wasn’t ready for them.

     Even though everyone talks about the Hollywood Black List of HUAC there was always a Hollywood Black List.  After the so-called post-1950 Black List most people who weren’t objected to for other reasons eventually found their way back into movie work.  It didn’t take that long.  This could not have been done if these ultra-authoritarian studio heads hadn’t permitted it.  So while I have never heard that Louis B. Mayer was following a Red agenda yet talking movies have always had a Red tinge becoming more open as the decades wore on.

     Mayer was subservient to the ‘money’ men in New York City.  The actual control of the movies came from that quarter so Mayer in no way was an independent operator.  One would have to examine Loew’s in New York City for Communist influence before one cleared Louis B. Mayer.  I have the feeling that Burroughs may have been telling us something.

page 24.

     In the intervening twenty-four years from the first version of Lad Burroughs was not idle.  Even though not considered a serious writer yet he allows serious topics to creep in that indicate wide reading if not study.  There were two items I found interesting.  The first is a psychological reference.  Even though I was laughed at for suggesting Burroughs had psychological interests consider this:  Lad, p. 56:

     “Meyer was too rabid and too radical,” said Carlyn.  “He wanted to accomplish everything at a single stroke.  I can see now that he was wrong.”

     “Meyer wanted to be dictator,” said Andresy.  “He was mad for power, and too anxious to obtain it quickly.  That came first with Meyer, the welfare of the people second.  It is strange what small, remote things may affect the destiny of a nation.”

     “What do you mean?” asked Carlyn.

     “Because Meyer, as a child, was suppressed and beaten by his father; because on that account, he had a feeling of inferiority, he craved autocratic power that would permit him to strike back in revenge.  Meyer did not realize it himself; but when he struck at government, he was striking at his father.  When he ordered the assassination of the king he was condemning his father to death in revenge for the humiliation and brutalities the father had inflicted on him.  Now the king is dead and Michael and Meyer and Bulvik and hundreds of men and women who believed in Meyer; but Meyer’s father is still alive, basking in the reflected glory of his martyred son.  Life is a strange thing, Carlyn.  Civilization is strange and complex.  The older I grow the more I realize how little any of us know what it is all about.  Why do we strive?  Everything we attain always turns out to be something we do not want, and then we try to change it for something else that will be equally bad.  Oh well, but I suppose that we must keep on.  How do you plan to kill the king?”

page 25.

     Carlyn strarted, as though caught red-handed in a crime.

     “God!” he exclaimed.  “Don’t spring it on me like that.”

     Andresy laughed.  “You have nerves, don’t you?…I shall put it in an emasculated style.”

     In the first place we have a full blown psychoanalysis of Meyer’s motives that demonstrates study and thought.  What is of more interest to me is Carlyn’s reaction to Andresy and the latters unusual joking of let me emasculate my comment for you.  That is a very unusual way of expressing the point.  That would indicate to me that Burroughs has been studying and thinking about emasculation possibly from reading Freud himself or magazine articles discussing Freud’s concept of emasculation.  In any event Burroughs is much deeper into psychology at this point than readers have been willing to acknowledge.  As a response to Wells’ ‘Blettsworthy’ this is turning into a psychology duel to which Burroughs gives the coup de grace in the very short and pointed last chapter.  That chapter would lead me to believe that Burroughs had rewritten the whole of Lad from stem to stern to deal with the Wellsian attack.

     One can imagine Burroughs with Blettsworthy in one hand and the first Lad in the other musing on what course to take.

     Apropos of assassination in general the story of Wesl is a general blueprint.  This gets into a little speculation but in 1937 a year before book publication of Lad Burroughs lived in an apartment building also lived in by the Chicago Outfit mobster Johnny Roselli.  Roselli would later figure in Burroughs’ war novel, Tarzan And The Foreign Legion as Johnny Rosetti.  It would seem more than probable that Roselli would make it a point to get to know the world famous author of Tarzan.  Roselli would wish to impress Burroughs with inside criminal information.  From my study of Burroughs I have come to the conclusion that he borrowed a significant amount of detailing from elsewhere.  I have already mentioned the Venetia Trelawney aspects of th Ferdinand/Hilda story.  If one reads the Wesl story one will notice a general resemblance to Lee Harvey Oswald’s supposed assassination of John F. Kennedy.  There are those who maintain the assassination was a mob hit.  As the assassination fits so well with the Wesl story one is led to believe that the Outfit had a general assassination plan that Roselli related to Burroughs.  I have no proof of this other than the fact that Roselli knew Burroughs and that the latter would probably have borrowed the plan rather than have invented it.

page 26.

     In the story Wesl (pronounce it, Weasel) is told by the revolutionaries to enter the palace grounds at a certain hour and stand in a certain place.  He is told to wear gloves and be unarmed.  He is the Fall Guy.

     The crime involved here is the assassination of King Otto.  Carlyn enters the kings room which was just above Wesl’s post and shoots the King.  Tossing the gun out the window it lands at Wesl’s feet.  While Wesl dithered Carlyn using another gun, different caliber, shot at him.  Wesl began to run.  As he reached the gate Carlyn dropped him.  Thus all the testimony of ‘eye witnesses’ and the circumstantial evidence pointed to Wesl.  Case closed.

     If the outfit were involved in the Kennedy Assassination, which is more than probable, then following the Roselli scenario it is more than probable that Oswald was the Fall Guy as he himself said on television.  He would have realized this as he watched the action in Dealy Plaza from his prime vantage point.  He immediately realized he was the expendable fall guy, threw down his rifle and raced to his apartment to get his hand gun.  Officer Tibbets was on the way to assassinate him but Oswald got the drop on Tibbets first then entered a public place where the hit on him would be obvious.  It therefore follows that like Wesl he had to be eliminated.  It was therefore made easy for Jack Ruby to make the hit on Oswald.  That Ruby was connected to the Outfit makes his ‘patriotic’ story wash ‘thin as piss on a rock’ to use President Nixon’s expression.

page 27.

     While the above proves nothing about the Kennedy Assassination  it should give food for thought.  Johnny Roselli claimed to have risen out of the sewer to deliver the actual shot that did Kennedy in.  I just love this stuff.

     At any rate it is almost certain Burroughs got the assassination plan from somewhere else.  If not from Roselli than from some forgotten short story or elsewhere.  I’m betting on Johnny Roselli.

     So, there we have the Ferdinand/Hilda story adapted from G.W.M. Reynolds and the revolutionary story from events in Russia from 1905 to 1917 and beyond.  A third influence seems to be the Ruritania/Graustark stories of Burroughs first novels which would be constellated around the magazine version of Lad.  The combination with later events gives a nice illusion of continuity.

     The account is very generalized so that there is no obvious reason to retaliate on Burroughs.  There can be no mistaking that Meyer was meant to be a Jew as Meyer is a Jewish name.  That would have been daring enough for Louis B. Mayer to know who Burroughs was referring to.

     The evidence is that this was Burroughs last intended shot in the war as at the very end in reference to Wells he throws in the towel.  It might be well to quote the entire chapter 25 with some commentary.

     Quote:

Chapter Twenty-five.

     Magazines from civilization seep into many far corners of the world.  One such, an illustrated weekly of international renown found its way into the douar of an Arab sheik.  The son-in-law of Ali-Es-Hadji was reading therein an account of happenings in a far-off kingdom.  He read of the assassination of King Ferdinand and Hilda de Groot, and he examined with interest their pictures and pictures of the palace and palace gardens.  There was a full page picture of General Count Sarnya, the new Dictator.  There was also a picture of an elderly, scholarly looking man, named Andresy who had been shot with many others by order of Sarnya because they had attempted to launch a counter-revolution.

     One day General Count Sarnya received a cablegram.  It was from from Sidi Bel Abbes.  All it said was, “Congratulations! You have my sympathy.” and it was signed, “Michael.

That’s a well packed paragraph that might have been expanded to three pages or so.  It weems too compact to me yet I suppose it contains all the information to make its point even if it lacks color and shading.

     The opening sentence is a direct reference to E. M. Hull’s The Sheik.  In that novel the heroine, Diana, is presented in nearly the exact scene.  She was the captive wife of the Sheik; Michael is the husband of the Sheik’s daughter.  So we have a reversal of roles.  I believe Burroughs is an adept at this.

     The question is to whom is the paragraph addressed.  It is obviously meant to be read by someone:  is it Stalin? is it Wells? or is it intended for both?  You may be certain that both men read it.  Let us take Wells first.

     By 1938 Wells had had a definite falling out with Stalin.  As I pointed out, in next year’s Holy Terror He would call for the assassination of Stalin.  Wells had reason to be bitter.  He was definitely in love, even dependent on the Soviet state prostitute, Moura Budberg.  Stalin had sadistically let him see Budberg and Maxim Gorky together when Budberg told him she was somewhere else.  Then Stalin ordered Budberg to break off with Wells.  One can’t be certain but I most certainly believe Burroughs was keeping up on these details of Wells’ life which, while not perhaps common knowledge, were no secret while probably being an item of gossip among the cognoscenti.

page 29.

     Now, Burroughs had recently taken a new young wife so that he was able to flaunt her to a broken hearted Wells.  In Blettsworthy that hero who had been living a fantasy life along the lines of Burroughs’ stories has been under the care of a psychiatrist.  When he regains his sanity he learns he hasn’t been living on Rampole Island but in his imagination in New York City.  New York City?

     As the Lad is an answer to Blettsworthy, consider:  Michael as a child  has a raft fall on his head giving him total amnesia.  Unlike Blettsworthy he is actually living the fantasy at sea and in the African desert.  Than, a la Tarzan, not to mention Burroughs self, he gets his forehead bashed and torn open suffering excruciating head aches, as did Burroughs in real life.  Then Aziz’ collapse.  When he recovers, voila! his memory is completely restored but rather than being in New York City he is still in his exotic location in the desert his head in the lap of his beauteous new wife,  Nakhla.  So we have a probable sneer at Wells who will read the novel.

     To Stalin:  As remote a possibility as it may seem there is every evidence of some kind of duel between Stalin and Burroughs.  There is no other reason for him to introduce Stalin into Invincible and Triumphant by name.  The alternate Russian story of Lad is a fictional account of the two Russian Revolutions.  Count Sarnya is obviously meant to be Stalin.  The execution of Andesy and the counter-revolutionists must refer to the show trials of 1936.

     So here we definitely have a sneer at Stalin.  Burroughs waves both men off as though he’s finished with them.  Burroughs had had enough, he will be content to tend his own garden.

page 30.

     By 1938 Burroughs had been pretty thoroughly plundered in a fight that was not of his own makiing.  MGM had Tarzan, his writing career was effectively over.  If the pulps were inflitrated by Reds giving him trouble the talkies had him on the ropes.  When Burroughs said he no longer read fiction he was still watching many volumes of fiction on the screen.  The fiction laden pulps couldn’t compete with the movies.  That market if not closed was no longer lucrative.  He was out of radio.  The only steady income he had came from the comic strips.  Within a couple years he would be run out of Hollywood.

     All the bright new young writers were Communists, no one else could get their foot in the door.  As one of the old dinosaurs Burroughs had pretty effectively been cut from the tree.

     The America he had known in the nineteenth century was gone.  The last buffalo robe had been sold in the twenties.  Even the America of the first and second decades were gone.  Heck, the twenties were only a fond memory.  The grim Communist politics of FDR had arrived with the Dust Bowl.  Hitler had flushed out all the Freudian Jewish psychoanalysts of Europe into New York and Hollywood.  The Frankfurt School that had fled to Switzerland in 1932 gave up Europe in 1935 fleeing to New York City.  In 1941, probably to escape any danger from a Nazi invasion of New York they fled further West to Hollywood to find Santa Barbara shelled by the Japanese in 1942.

     The extermination camps of Hitler accellerated the success of the Jewish Revolution by more than somewhat.  In 1946 a direct frontal attack on America began with the release of the movie, Gentlemen’s Agreement.

     That tall thin guy watching The Testament Of Dr. Mabuse in 1943 and The Iceman Cometh in 1946 staged his The Death Of A Salesman in 1949.  the play had a curious affect on the nation seeming to undermine its confidence although it is difficult to understand why.  That is the reason Arthur Miller is lauded as a genius not from any ablility as either a thinker, or a playwright.

     From then on the deconstruction of America was a piece of cake.  The reconstruction along Jewish Cultural lines began in earnest in the sixties being nearly complete today except for some counte-revolutionaries in the odd nook and cranny, here and there.