Post 3: A Review: The Chessmen Of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs
January 21, 2009
Post 3
Edgar Rice Burroughs On Mars
A Review:
The Chessmen Of Mars
by
R.E. Prindle
Nobody Gets Out Of Bantoom Alive!
Tara descends in the land of Bantoom ruled by the Kaldanes. I think the Kaldanes can be traced to Baum’s Emerald City Of Oz. In that title Baum writes of a queen who when she wished to change her hair style selected one from a number of heads, removed the head she’s wearing and places a new head on her shoulders.
Unlike the queen the heads of the Kaldanes and the bodies of the Rykors are separate entities.
The Kaldanes exist independently of the Rykors but mount their shoulders to use them essentially as slaves. When their purpose is satisfied they abandon the Rykors or bodies that then, without directing intelligence, just lie or flop around like the proverbial chicken.
The picture ERB presents of them through the first vision of them by Tara is fairly repulsive. It would by itself explain why the Post and the other slicks rejected the story.
Either I’m reading things into the story or ERB is making some very subtle examinations of certain problems troubling society. The three issues I have noted concern labor, sex and evolution.
To take the first.
In the world there are many forms of disagreeable labor that people would rather not do. Much of the industrial labor is hot, dirty and heavy with a lot of unpleasant bending and stooping. Still the job has to get done.
In England once the so-called Industrial Revolution ethos first took place a very large percentage of the work force was essentially bestialized to work the mines and factories, especially the women and children. This is an unightly and unpleasant situation.
In the US and colonial areas African slaves were imported to do the stoop labor. It should be noted as Michael Hoffman points out in his studies that White slavery preceded that of Black slavery. Even at the time of the American Revolution Hoffman found many White slaves still existing the US. A White man was sold to a Negro in Chicago in the 1840s for tweny-five cents.. Africans only gradually replaced the Whites. Thus just preceding Eli Whitney’s invention of the cotton gin after which African slavery exploded there were White slaves in the US.
Slavery is inseparable from Burroughs’ works. He can’t imagine a society without slaves. Chessmen opens explaining the relationship between Tara and her personal slave girl.
Slavery was abandoned in the US at about the same time serfdom was abolished in Europe. The Russian serfs which you can read as slaves were liberated only as the US’ own civil war was being fought. While industrial slavery is too distant in the past for us to imagine it slavery was a very recent phenomenon to Burroughs. He read. He must have been aware of Russia in which the vast majority of the population were slaves as serfs, hence Russia was up to 1861 a vast slaveocracy no different than the US South.
The question then was how to get the hard work done without slaves. The industrial system of the time merely left the population nominally free while paying very low wages making the bulk of the population actual wage slaves.
The hard labor was definitely nothing anyone who could avoid it wanted to do so the industrialists imported vast numbers of laborers at a liguistic disadvantage who then had no choice but to become wage slaves. Burroughs, very sensitive to social issues then, may have thought he was only reflecting the existing situation in his stories. After all this is the period of the horrors of the sweat shops.
This problem preoccupied society so that in 1931 a mere ten years after Chessmen Aldous Huxley wrote Brave New World that presents a different solution than ERB’s. Huxley presents a world of test tube babies in which certain poisons are placed in tubes to create chemically altered humans. The least intelligent of these were the Gammas who were given the least desirable jobs on that basis that they wouldn’t have the brains to complain.
Burroughs solution is somewhat different. The Rykors are essentially slaves; as Greek mythology put it the Rykors were mere bellies with arms and legs, lacking any intelligence whatever they were unable to complain and being deaf, dumb and blind couldn’t revolt.
The slave driver was the Kaldane on their shoulder who directed the Rykor in the unpleasant tasks without consequences to himself. When the Kaldanes came back from the fields at night they abandoned their Rykors and went about their business of thinking, fresh and without fatigue.
Thus ERB has very cleverly solved the problem of stoop labor- the labor the Kaldanes wouldn’t do.
2.
ERB also gives himself room to toy with the idea of sex. He models Bantoom after a beehive which was a common device at the time. He changes the sexual primacy by making Luud a kingbee rather than a queen bee. All the Kaldanes have been hatched from eggs laid by King Bee Luud so Luud is truly the ‘father of his country.’ The jokes are there. Whether ERB was a sly old dog or whether he just wrote this stuff with no humor prepense is up to the reader to decide. Either he was intending humor or else he was naturally one of the funniest men alive.
It seems that all Kaldanes were male while the Rykors were either male or female. Thus any Kaldane could choose to be a man or woman for the day. This may possibly refer back to Greek mythology where Teiresias was the only person who had been both a man and a woman. He was then called on to say who got more sexual pleasure men or women. He thought women definitely. Any Kaldane could have answered as well.
ERB plays with the idea briefly but doesn’t take it too far. As far as the slicks were probably concerned he had so many strikes against him they didn’t even want to look at him. Given their attitude it even seems remarkable that the pulps paid good money for the story. This is really pretty strange stuff and it keeps getting stranger. ERB just skirts the accusation of a deranged mind in this story. Times have changed, of course.
3.
Then there is the matter of the evolution of intelligence. This is a perennial topic in science fiction. At the presentt time the ultimate intellect is usually portrayed a as giant head on a spindly unathletic body incapable of much but feeding itself.
At the time it was thought that the mind and body were two separate things. In the fifties when I grew up wrestling with the idea Burroughs’ key Martian novels were available from G&D but I never read them. I was scandalized that Burroughs would write anything but Tarzan novels. It didn’t seem right to me that he would write anything else.
So, Burroughs tackles the mind/body relationship by completely separating brain and body. These brains were anaerobic, they could exist without oxygen. This was by design because when the oxygen plant will have failed and Mars changed from a dying planet to a dead one the Kaldanes were going to retire deep into the mars and live out their existence thinking. Bye bye Rykors.
ERB explains this quite succinctly. Evolution on Mars:
You do not understand…It is too big for you to grasp, but I will try to explain it. Barssom, the moons, the sun, the stars were created for a single purpose. From the beginning of time Nature has labored arduously toward the consummation of this purpose. At the very beginning things existed with life, but no brain. Gradually rudimentary nervous systems and miniscule brains evolved. Evolution proceeded. The brains became larger and more powerful. In us you see the highest development; but there are those of us who believe that there is yet another step- that some time in the far future our race shall develop into the super thing- just brain. The incubus of legs and chelae and vital organs will be removed. The future Kaldane will be nothing but a great brain. Deaf, dumb and blind it will be sealed in a great, wonderful, beautiful brain with nothing to distract it from eternal thought.
Right. I saw the movie. It was called Hitler’s Brain and it was a great one. Burroughs always seems to have figured out the entire B movie and sci-fi catalog. If I didn’t know better, and I don’t, I’d think his writings have been cribbed for the movies from his day to this. Burroughs is surely one of the most influential intellects from his time to the present. He is a baffling phenomenon, no one wants to give him credit but theyuse his ideas constantly.
The passage quoted is a fair synopsis of the course of evolution while dealing with a debating topic of his day and ours.
It’s quite clear ERB put everything he had into this effort.
4.
Having landed in a Bantoom that might be compared to Baum’s Land of the Munchkins, although a rather disquieting comparison. Baum is actually a very strange writer. the Shaggy Man Of Oz left me very uneasy. I remember as a child a woman lamenting the book because she thought it would make it easy for weird old men to lure little girls away. The book was weird as was The Emeral City Of Oz. Burroughs takes weirdness a stride or two beyond those books. There’s always this uneasy quasi-pornographic feel behind his stories.
Tara is baffled by the overseer Kaldanes and slave Rykors working in the field. She waits until nightfall to go in search of food coming very close to the hive. Burroughs will develop this image shortly in Tarzan And The Ant Men. Night falls and the Banths come out. Tara can’t understand why these Martian lions are so plentiful in the valley. Shortly she will learn the reason is that the Kaldanes throw the dead and worn out Rykors into the fields for the Banths. It’s just gruesome little details like this that probably got ERB his reputation for being too far on the edge. Doesn’t bother us though, does it?
Now, a Banth steals up on Tara but God is on her side, she’s got a head start for the ubiquitous tree. Here we have two ambivalent images in Burroughs. Tree and lions are symbols of both safety or danger.
On the one hand Burroughs finds comfort and safety in trees, most conspicuously in the Tarzan stories. There all Africa with the exception of some lands deep in the Sahara is covered by one giant forest with conviently low branches unlike the picture we see of Baobobs and whatever. Tarzan is at home in the trees moving faster and with more ease than you and I trudging along on the ground.
If there’s danger in the lower terrace Tarzan moves up to the middle terrace or even the upper terraces where the little monkeys play. If he has a quarrel with Jane he has favorite trees in which to spend the night. He is sometimes treed as he was in Tarzan At The Earth’s Core. Here Tara is treed in a close replica to the treeing of Schneider in Tarzan The Untamed.
In that story Tarzan took Schneider to an enclosed natural bowl with a creek trickling into a cave. In the center was lone tree and a hungry lion. Tarzan viciously placed Schneider in the tree. It was up to Schneider to evade the cat when thirsty finding his way back up the tree in a game of cat and mouse.
Burroughs replicates the scene here. Tara drinks from the stream then being chased up the tree by the Banth who keeps watch till morning before stalking away.
So here the tree is both safety and a trap. Perhaps as ERB’s financial troubles developed he felt like Schneider so he replicated the situation with Tara as himself.
Martian rosy fingered Dawn appears. In trying to get back to her flier Tara is captured by the Kaldanes. The episode of her capture is well done as she discovers the secret of the Kaldanes and Rykors. Her captor is a Kaldane named Ghek who is to become a principal actor in the story.
Tara’s descent into the hive gives Burroughs time to philosophize and ruminate before Tara is taken up to her near brush with a fate worse than death at the hands of the Rykor of Luud.
At the beginning of Chapter VI ERB ruminates on the rough treatment given him by the literary mavens:
What the creature had told her gave Tara of Helium food for thought. She had been taught that every created thing fulfilled some useful purpose and she tried conscientiously to discover just what was the rightful place of the kaldanes in the universal scheme of things. She knew it must have its place but what that place was it was beyond her to conceive. She had to give it up. They recalled to her mind a little group of people in Helium who had foresworn the pleasures of life in the pursuit of knowledge. They were rather patronizing in their relations with those whom they thought not so intellectual. They considered themselves quite superior. She smiled at the recollections of a remark her father had once made concerning them, to the effect that if one of them ever dropped his egotism and broke it it would take a week to fumigate Helium.
It appears that ERB is smarting from the rejection of the literary types even though he longed for their approval. ERB himself chose not to parade his knowledge as literary types are wont to do, not that I would ever do that myself, while ERB can claim to be well read while profound enough in his writing and observations.
Eugenics, for instance, was under attack from its origins although widely accepted at this time. There is something offensive about it to the human spirit while the notion would certainly be socially abused if given free rein. ERB cleverly skirts the issue here while affirming the benefical results that could be achieved. Following the above quote he notes the superb physical condition of the Rykors and says that they had been bred to perfection. In other words they are the product of eugenics the same as thoroughbred horses or pedigreed cats and dogs. Being bodies without minds, in other words not complete humans, anyone who caught it probably took no offense. The closer you get the better ERB looks.
In the descent into the hive Tara idly hums an air which completely charms Ghek who asks what the noise is that Tara is making. She then sings for him which overwhelms Ghek’s senses thereby definitely preserving her life. Impervious to female beauty Ghek is transported by music. Universal language you know.
This will figure into the story soon. Tara is expected to fatten up to make a good meal for the Kaldanes who fatten up certain Rykors to make a good lunch. Thus ERB interjects the ever present theme of cannibalism. Away from the air and sunshine Tara is pining away so she pleads to be allowed to go outside. Luud grants this. Tara tries to escape, is caught and taken to Luud to meet her fate which encounter follows shortly.
Gahan in his pursuit of Tara had fallen from his flier into the arms of the storm. This is interesting. Always heroic he was trying to rescue a companion who was caught in mooring lines flapping beneath the flier. In the effort the wind catches a line with a heavy buckle at the end giving Gahan/Burroughs the obligatory bash between the eyes. He loses his hold but rather than plunging directly to mars the wind catches him like a leaf carrying him along with it. Then after a series of ups and downs gently deposits him on the crimson sward.
Impossible you say? No, it is not. ERB refers to a story he had read somewhere at sometime in which a baby caught up by tornado had been carried miles from its home and deposited gently on the ground unhurt where it was found. These things all sound preposterous; they have happened.
In a clever handling of time differentials while Tara was going through her travails that lasted weeks Gahan at almost the same time Tara landed in Bantoom picked himself up from the sward hundreds of miles away and began walking in the direction he hoped was toward Gathol. Thus weeks later he arrives in Bantoom at the precise moment to observe Tara’s escape attempt. Not bad.
Not only that but having decided to rescue the Red Woman he didn’t then recognize he discovers the flier, kills a Banth or two and drifts, no propeller, directly over the wall of Luud encountering Ghek who fretting for his life agrees to take him to Tara on condition that he can leave with them. No problem.
As they are making this deal Tara is struggling to preserve her…oh…integrity. Luud has set his headless but magnificently built Rykor on her while always a voyeur, he watches.
Luud has a powerful mind. He has not hypnotized Tara but is able to control his brainless Rykor while not being attached. This means that by remote control he is able to connect to the spinal nerve ending of the Rykor. Good stunt.
Gahan and Ghek enter just as the Rykor is poised for the downward thrust. ERB comes close here.
Gahan is warned to avoid eye contact but fails to do so becoming hypnotized. Hypnosis is a significant theme in Burroughs’ work. In this case he seems to be influenced by George Du Maurier’s novel Trilby with its great character Svengali. In that story the heroine has no musical talent but Svengali is able to hypnotize her into becoming a second Jenny Lind. The key point is that while Trilby is singing Svengali must make eye contact from his theatre box. When contact was broken Trilby immediately began croaking not knowing a note from a hat box.
ERB does a reverse variation here. It become apparent that Gahan is entranced by Luud and all is lost. But in holding Gahan Luud had to relax his hold on his Rykor who went limp (no pun intended) releasing Tara. The quick minded Tara knowing the hold her singing had on Ghek immediately bursts into full throated song trilling out that wonderful old Martian standard- The Song Of Love.
Thus ERB reverses the Trilby/Svengali scenario. Tara’s singing dissolves Luud’s hold on Gahan and it’s all over for Luud.
An exciting chase scene and battle and the three comaradoes are drifting off to meet another fate in another freak city. This one is called Manator.
The Bantoom story thus becomes a preliminary tale to the main story.
Bob Dylan: Dark As A Dungeon Way Down In A Mind
January 15, 2009
Bob Dylan:
Dark As Dungeon Way Down In A Mind
by
R.E. Prindle
We’re on a bad motorcycle with the devil in the seat
Going ninety miles an hour down a dead end street.
Hank Snow
My correspondent replied to my post Bob Dylan The Reactionary. An excerpt:
Poetry is a funny thing: it bypasses the cerebral when it is best IMHO…Poetry is nonsense, making the nonsense of mortality a bit more bearable for a moment in time.
I suppose that’s a valid reflection. There has been some debate as to whether song lyrics are poetry. In a lyric’s effort to condense experience into the fewest possible words my own thinking is that they are of the essence of poetry whether or not one considers them ‘true poetry.’
I certainly carry innumerable song lyrics around in my head while very little ‘true poetry’ has had the same effect on me. A great many of the lyrics are Country and Western and what passed for Folk. I find references in Dylan of the same importance of favorites that I have.
I recently ran Hank Snow’s Ninety Miles An Hour Down A Dead End Street on Rhapsody and was surprised to discover that Dylan had actually recorded a heavily edited version as a religious gospel dirge. Don’t get the connection but if Dylan says so…
The part of the lyric that has always struck me the most forcefully is the line: We’re on a bad motorcycle with the devil in the seat going ninety miles an hour down a dead end street. I apply the line to all kinds of situations including the present political quagmire. Dylan seems to emphasize the illicit love affair. Doesn’t really matter, the point is that that little piece of ephemera had a profound influence on us. Dylan resurrected the song fifty years on while I use the image that appealed to me in my writing frequently. Poetry? Well, I think maybe.
There are a couple of other country classics that live in my mind by Merle Travis: Dark As A Dungeon Way Down In A Mine and Nine Pound Hammer. I always imagined those were folk songs dating back to the 1880s or something but Travis wrote as late as 1947. The relevant quotes for me:
It’s dark as a dungeon way down in a mine
Where the wind never blows, and the sun never shines,
Where the dangers are double and the pleasures are few.
———————–
Roll on buddy, don’t you roll so slow,
Tell me, how can I roll when the wheels won’t go.
This nine pound hammer is a little too heavy
For my size, boys, for my size.
The first quote is from Dungeon, the latter from Nine Pound Hammer.
For myself I always gave the lyrics a psychological twist saying ‘mind’ for mine. Roll on buddy referred to my habitual procrastination, psychological blockage preventing action. Had problems. Solved ’em. Are these songs poetry? They are in my mind. I make all kinds of things out of them even the innocuous line:
It’s a long way to Harlan,
It’s a long way to Hazard,
Just to get a little brew. boys,
Just to get a little brew.
I’m not thinking of booze either as in ‘My Buckets Got A Hole In It.’ Can’t buy no beer.
I’m sure Dylan cherishes both those songs. They’re the classics that people in the know know. They don’t call us cognoscenti for nothing. Roll on buddy…
As a last example before I get to the gist of this thing is the song ‘Grand Coulee Dam written by Woody Guthrie a man I really despise- damn it. But talent will out and while I have my prejudices I’m no bigot. For me this lyric is as poetic as you can get.
Well, the world holds seven wonders that the travelers always tell,
Some gardens and some towers, I guess you know them well,
But now the greatest wonder is in Uncle Sam’s fair land,
It’s the great Columbia River and the big Grand Coulee Dam.
She heads up the Canadian Rockies where the rippling waters glide,
Comes a-roaring down the canyon to meet the salty tide,
Of the wide Pacific Ocean where the sun sets in the West
And the big Grand Coulee country in the land I love the best.
Uncle Sam took up the challenge in the year of thirty-three,
For the farmer and the factory hand and for all of you and me,
He said, “Roll along, Columbia, you can ramble to the sea,
But river, while you’re rambling, you can do some work for me.”
Now in Washington and Oregon you can hear the factories hum,
Making chrome and making manganese and bright aluminum,
And there roars the Flying Fortress now to fight for Uncle Sam,
Spawned upon the King Columbia past the Big Grand Coulee Dam.
In the misty crystal glitter of that wild and windward spray,
Men have fought the pounding waters and met a watery grave,
Well she tore their boats to splinters but she gave men dreams to dream
Of the day the Coulee Dam would cross that wild and wasted stream.
Nice stuff from my point of view. Doesn’t get any better than that. The song gave me dreams to dream. If you want to hear the best rendition ever by Lonnie Donegan click this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Jc2efqj5Js
My verdict is that good lyrics are good poetry while bad poetry doesn’t necessarily make a good lyric.
2.
Now as to the lyrics to Highwater by Dylan that my correspondent referred me to that I discussed in the post: Bob Dylan The Reactionary.
As the lyric touched my correspondent’s psychology I tackled the lyric from a different angle as the way I was interpreting it may not have reflected his. For all I know this doesn’t either but I think it’s interesting.
The lyric in question:
Well, George Lewis told the Englishman, the Italian and the Jew
You can’t open up your mind, boys, to
every conceivable point of view
They got Charles Darwin trapped out on Highway 5
Judge says to the high sheriff, I want him dead or alive
Either one, I don’t care
Highwater everywhere.
The format Dylan uses here is that of the genre of old jokes that begins something like this: A Protestant, a Catholic and a Jew… then moves on to the punchline. Dylan’s presentation can be interpreted as flip so he is probably thinking of the verse as a joke.
As I said in my previous post George Lewis represents a Black, the Englishman as Science or Darwin, the Italian Catholicism or Christianity and the Jew Judaism. Four different conceivable views that can’t be held simultaneously no matter how open you think your mind is.
These are four crucial irreconcilable conflicts in Dylan’s mind while they probably represent the major psychological dilemma of most White or Jewish people.
The problem is especially acute for Dylan who was indoctrinated into Jewish Lubavitcher beliefs for his Bar Mitzvah while having
been brought up from infancy on Hillbilly music, Country if you prefer, which is quintessential Christian music whether sung in church or honky-tonk. Those good old boys live with their religion even when they’re robbing banks so even with0ut going to church Dylan has a strong Christian background. He did sing a sexual anthem like Ninety Miles An Hour as a hymn. Ponder that for a minute.
So Dylan has had to reconcile his dual religious beliefs seeming to have come down on the side of his Lubavitcher Judaism which is no surprise. He then has to do something about his religious vs. scientific or evolutionary beliefs. Darwin doesn’t go with Judaism. He centers the problem on Darwin as Science. Here he has made the decision to imprison or kill Evolutionary beliefs. Dead or Alive, either way, Judge says, he don’t care. Having eliminated Science and Christianity we have Judasim and the Blacks on the racial issue. Dylan has subordinated himself to the Blacks on the racial issue and is willing to take the inferior position. While he believes he has resolved these for him difficult problems they still trouble him or he wouldn’t be talking about them. Strange.
Why did my correspondent associate me with the verse? He says: Just thought of you and the line(s) for some reason. My correspondent seems to be wrestling with Dylan’s problem himself. As I have written on all four topics fairly extensively and I know the correspondent has read lots of my stuff I suppose the lines suggested me. The song isn’t good poetry and not even good lyrics but if it succeeded at least on my correspondent’s level one would have to concede that lyrics are poetry. The better the lyric the better the poetry. And now for a little circular logic: The better the poetry the better the lyric.
Post II: The Chessmen Of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs
January 13, 2009
A Review
Edgar Rice Burroughs On Mars
The Chessmen Of Mars
Post II
Part I
The Dance Of Barsoom
See Post I for Intro.
The twenties were a difficult financial period for ERB, indeed, as was the rest of his life to be. The substantial sums he had made in Chicago were spent before he left. ERB had saved nothing. He arrived in LA with no other resources than his current income. That income was very substantial by any measure but unequal to ERB’s massive spending capabilities so that at the time he wrote Chessmen he was already strapped for cash and headed for deep debt.
Always envious of the fabulous sums paid Zane Grey by the slick magazines ERB wanted to sell this story for ten thousand dollars to one of the big slicks. There were no takers so that the story went to the pulps for thirty-five hundred. Adding insult to injury he was told that the stories were too preposterous to be considered.
Part of ERB’s literary problem was that genre categories were not yet well developed. H.G. Wells’ early sci-fi efforts were labeled Fantasias, a term that could be understood by the literary arbiters, while still considered what we would call today, literary fiction. Even George Du Maurier’s trilogy of essentially science fiction novels- Peter Ibbetson, Trilby and The Martian have never been considered anything but literary fiction. They are three terrific stories of psychological dissociation while it would seem certain that Burroughs read them and was probably influenced by them. I can heartily recommend them. Very choice.
So the genres were taking shape at the period but had not yet evolved as they would during the thirties, forties and fifties until today fantasy, horror and sci-fi dominate the fiction best seller lists. If Chessmen was thought preposterous in 1920 one wonders what his critics would have thought of such movies as The Exterminator or The Predator. God, those people were so awkward and unevolved. Well, it’s the price you pay for being an innovator. Remember what the Pope told Galileo.
So, ERB was stuck in the pulps. Perhaps smarting from this rejection ERB would try to break out of his pulp rate with several realistic novels. the first was The Girl From Hollywood, a very decent attempt at a literary novel, that ERB’s long time publisher refused to publish. Following in the burro tracks of Zane Grey ERB wrote a couple of Westerns only one of which he could get published at the time. I read a lot of Westerns in the fifties while a kid. I thought ERB’s efforts were as good as what I read then. They’re all potboilers, even the so-called classics.
He even attempted a couple of Indian epics that I found so-so but I know other people who liked them a lot. Not so critical as myself, I guess. Oh, right, he couldn’t get Marcia Of The Doorstep published either. So he was type cast as a sci-fi/fantasy writer. At least he knew he could do that very well.
Zane Grey wrote some pretty strange Westerns. He himself was quite a womanizer and his novels pander quite successfully to the distaff side. He knew women well. Probably that was why he was paid those great prices by the Saturday Evening Post et al. Oh heck, ERB was just too outre for the Post.
In Chessmen ERB gives feminine appeal his best shot. I would imagine he was trying to reach the ladies when he describes Tara’s fabulous bath. Either that or he was trying to titillate us boys. Worked with me. But let’s assume he was trying to broaden his appeal as the title was offered to the slicks.
Chessmen was based on his three favorite novels as are all his books- The Viginian, Prince And The Pauper and Little Lord Fauntleroy.
Thus Tara teases Papa John as her ‘Virginian.’ We are then introduced to Gahan of far Gathol. ERB presents him first in his princely guise as, indeed, he is a prince of Gathol. ERB chooses to present him as a fop dressed all in diamonds and platinum. Tara forms an ill impression of him as she thinks no real fighting man would dress in such a fashion. Shortly Gahan will exchange his dress duds for the plain leather gear of the Martian mercenary thus changing from prince to pauper. Of course he will resume his role of Prince by novel’s end.
Fauntleroy was born to the manor in England but spent his youth learning what it meant to be a real American boy before reassuming his English title. Ah, American dreaming.
Recalling his battle for Emma’s favors with Frank Martin Tara has been betrothed since at least young girlhood to Djor Kantos whose father is friends with the family. So like ERB Gahan has to overcome this parental resistance. Speaking of Frank Martin Chessmen is the only novel I can recall in which the hero doesn’t get bashed on the head two or three times.
At the ball being given Djor Kantos fails to claim Tara in time for the first dance so that Gahan leads Tara in the Dance Of Barsoom. Some sort of Grand March. ERB explains that before Barsoomian youths can attend balls they have to first have learned three formal dances- The Dance Of Barsoom, that of their country and that of their city. After that they can take up stuff like the Martian equivalents of the Grizzly Bear, Bunny Hug, Charleston and Black Bottom. Kids being kids on Barsoom the same as on Jasoom.
While the concept is quite charming one wonders of the source. Burroughs himself was no slouch concerning the hit parade.
I think we can trace the rigamarole back to the patron saint of old timey music, Henry Ford.
Amongst all his many other enterprises Henry was revolted by the music and dances of the Jazz Age as the twenties are sometimes known. Even though his very own flivver is billed as being responsible for some new objectionable habits and traditions Henry clung stubbornly to the old. Thus in full revolt against the Jazz Age Henry was promoting the dances and music of his youthof around, oh say, 1880 or so.
Ford had begun his publication of the Dearborn Independent in 1920 making him a newspaper man also. It seems clear from internal references in Marcia Of The Doorstep that ERB was following developments in the Independent. He would then certainly have learned of the evils of the new music and the virtues of the old.
Just as Henry Ford was trying to rivive the old dances on Jasoom, on conservative, behind the times Barsoom Jazz has never even been given a chance. The Dance Of Barsoom is just as fresh and lovely as the first time it was danced millennia before. Martian kids didn’t mess with tradition so much so Gahan led Tara in that lovely old relic of Mars- The Dance Of Barsoom.
Pledging his love during the dance Gahan was sternly rebuffed by Tara.
The preliminaries finished the story begins in earnest.
The following day Tara is fascinated by a cloudy stormy sky which is such a rare occurrence on Mars that she had never seen one before. As I mentioned in the intro ERB borrows the next sequence from Baum whose Dorothy was wafted to Oz on a tornado. Tara ascends into this tornado like storm where her flier is caught by the winds and she is driven before them. When she lands she had been driven like Dorothy to Oz to a far land that has been all but forgotten if it had ever been thought of.
The hero and heroine of Chessmen are Tara of Helium and Gahan of far Gathol, or rather, they are the Anima and Animus of ERB. ERB always writes Anima and Animus novels. As dreamers will he may have recognized the X chromosome or Anima in the green pastures of his sleep or, it is quite possible that as a Latin scholar at Chicago’s Harvard School he was required to read the myth of Psyche and Eros from Apuleius’ The Golden Ass. I only mention a couple of possibilities. He may or may not have been familiar with Psyche and Eros but he was certainly familiar with the fairy tales derived from it such as Cinderella and Sleeping Beauty.
While Apuleius is given credit for the story his version is certainly only a redaction of the tale or philosophical speculation dating much further back in history. The Ancients were well familiar with the concept of both the male and female versions of the Anima and Animus. In popular mythology the male chromosome is represented by the Goddess as X chromosome and the Bull as the y. The female is represented by the two snakes as in the pictorial representations of Crete. It will also be remembered that the Greeks imported Cretan priests to manage the Apollonian shrine at Delphi.
The myth is that the two aspects were once united then driven apart wandering the world in search of each other. Duly at long last they do find each other are reconciled and allowed by the Goddess of Love to reunite. Thus the stories of Cinderella and Sleeping Beauty evolved from Psyche and Eros and who knows how many other stories besides those of Burroughs.
The question is was Burroughs only following a plot line, a pattern he had absorbed or was he consciously aware of what he was doing? Had he thought the problem out? Just as Tarzan and Jane were apparently mismatched in Burroughs’ dreamscapes so were ERB and Emma in real life. In Tarzan And The Golden Lion Tarzan and Jane had no sooner returned home from Pal-ul-don than Tarzan fled to his Anima in far off dreamland Opar leaving Jane/Emma to more or less shift for herself in a very dangerous world. Misfortune usually hit her too.
In ERB’s dream couple of John Carter and Dejah Thoris the Anima and Animus seem to be united although we see little of Dejah Thoris in the series and not at all in this novel. Even their son who may represent ERB is not present at all. Even with Carter and Dejah Thoris the classic separation and reuniting form a major part of the Martian Trilogy.
In this dream tale with Tara and Gahan ERB follows the classic formula- separation, the long pursuit and final reconciliation. He appears to know what he is talking about but since he never discussed his ideas on the subject we can only infer that he did or doubt or deny that he did. The psychological motifs he expresses throughout Chessmen leads me to believe he did.
What are dreams and what is a dream story? Freud originated the rational approach to dream interpretation. ERB gave some thought to the problem. Once can’t be sure he had read Freud’s Interpretations Of Dreams although in his short story Tarzan’s First Nightmare ERB used elements contained in Freud’s theory to explain the causes of Tarzan’s nightmare. At the very least we can say that dreams and nightmares from which ERB suffered all his life were of great interest to him. In the thirties he would buy at least one book on scientific dream interpretation.
What is the basis of dreams? It can only be experiences combined with memory. That’s it. Think about it. You don’t have to look any further. Nothing mysterious about them. The basic problem can be expressed in the question of what is the unconscious or subconscious. Is it some ultra mysterious process of the mind that can’t be penetrated, understood or accurately located? Is it as Freud believed an organ independent of the body and mind yet which somehow controls the actions of the individual from outside him? Or, once again, is it merely a combination of experience and memory, a faculty for interpeting the experiences of the day?
Freud touched on a key concept when he realized that the mind, which never rests, processes the incidents of the previous day in the sleeping and dreaming state. Burroughs also takes this approach in Tarzan’s nightmare whether he picked it up from Freud, Sweetser or realized it himself.
In point of fact experience happens to us so rapidly and from so many angles at the same time that it is impossible for the conscious mind to process it all as it is happening. Can’t be done. So, it follows that the subconscious or back up mind retains, as it were, photographs of the day’s activities that it reviews in sleep for either discarding, repression or action. How many times have you awakened with possible solutions to problems facing you?
The problem with the subconscious mind is that analysis of situations is affected by fixations, more expecially by the central childhood fixation. Childhood is that perilous time of life when the inexperienced mind is subject to being presented with challenges for which it has no programmed or immediately adequate response. Defeated in analysis the challenge is encrypted and encysted in the subconscious where it interprets all similar challenges through the lens of the defeated challenge and response. Thus all those strange compulsive behaviors we have.
As it chances we know Burroughs’ central childhood fixation. That was when he was eight or nine and he was challenged on a street corner on the way to school by a twelve year old Irish bully. Terrified ERB broke and ran apparently thereafter branded as a coward. Thus the central theme of his work is fight or flight and the state of cowardice. He examines the matter endlessly throughout the entire body of his work. These elements are all especially prominent in Chessmen.
We know that ERB was stressed to the breaking point as he wrote in 1921. Whenever he was stressed his personality fragmented, splitting at least once. In Chessmen the Kaldanes are two separate entities, the physical Rykors and the mental Kaldanes. Tara and Gahan, the ritual Burroughs’ surrogates are driven apart by the terrific storm.
This is a dream story abounding in dream images. One can provide an analysis of the storm scene based on the incidents occurring in ERB’s life at the time.
The image presented to us is of this very rare Martian storm of very high winds as in a tornado. Tara although warned against it takes her flier up. Perhaps ERB was warned against buying Tarzana, I would certainly think that Emma was at the least apprehensive. Tara navigates well beneath the clouds but wants to be in a cloud where she has never been before, i.e. Burroughs buys Tarzana. Here she is buffeted about so to escape she rises above the cloud or storm where the winds abate. But she has to get back down so she must reenter the storm. She is then taken by the winds tumbled head over heels by their extreme violence arriving half dead in the land of the Kaldanes.
Now, how does this represnet ERB’s actual situation in dream images.
ERB left Chicago under one presumes, sunny skies. His original intent was to buy twenty acres to raise hogs. Instead he bought over five hundred acres. He then began a massive building and improvement program with what appears to have been a substantial payroll and a not very well thought out plan. He overspent his income so that by 1921 his bills must have been greater than his income forcing him to borrow. He found he had neither the skills nor the talent bo be a ‘Gentleman Farmer’ so that he was forced to auction off most of his tools, implements and livestock in an effort to raise money and cut expenses. Also at this time his sources of income came under attack as the movies refused to film his intellectual properties while his royalties also came under attack.
In what I consider a purely defensive move he was forced to incorporate himself assigning all his income, copyrights and what not to the corporation in an effort to secure the means of his livelihood by putting his income beyond the reach of his creditors. In what I consider a questionable move he subsequently transferred a portion of Tarzana to the corporation. So, shortly after this storm broke on his head he became merely an employee of his corporation.
At the time he wrote Chessmen then he was caught in the turbulence of this storm he had created. Unable to get back down as with Tara he tried to rise above it in some way but was forced back into the problem where he was being blown along head over heels no longer in control of his affairs.
In the relative calm of 1924 he wrote Marcia Of The Doorstep that chronicles and looks back at this period.
Tara’s flight then is ERB’s day to day situation presented in dream images.
The rest of the book deals with past and present in a series of dream images to which we proceed.
A Review: The Chessmen Of Mars By Edgar Rice Burroughs
January 7, 2009
Edgar Rice Burroughs On Mars
A Review
The Chessman Of Mars
by
R.E. Prindle
Introduction
Porges speaks quite highly of this story and I think him right. The story is a quite complex one with many highlights and as many or more undertones. Burroughs manages to unite his past with his present while mildly projecting a future.
The story was his only effort of 1921 while falling between Tarzan The Terrible and The Girl From Hollywood the first of two books for 1922. the other being Tarzan And The Golden Lion. Thus this book falls between the recovery of Jane and their return to the Estate and Tarzan’s subsequent return to Opar. These two Tarzan novels undoubtedly reflect discord in the marriage of ERB and Emma.
It would seem that the move to California disrupted ERB’s concentration as the effort to udjust to Tarzana must have consumed his time somewhat in contradiction of his opinion in Tarzan The Invincible that man has been given all the time he can use, no more, no less. Well, there’s limits to everything, probably even infinity.
Whether Burroughs’ tremendous building efforts of the first couple years were pinching his finances at this time there does seem to be an element of panic in the story. The pictures of his new three car garage shows two Packards and a Hudson so that the unbridled spending of Marcus Sackett in Marcia Of The Doorstep of 1924 seems to be directly based on ERB’s own wastrel habits.
The Hudson is interesting as ERB may have bought his first Hudson in 1914 in emulation of his hero L. Frank Baum who he visited in Hollywood in 1913 and was friendly with again in 1916. In that connection the opening of Chessmen is a variation on The Wizard Of Oz in which Dorothy, her house and dog are transported from Kansas to Oz by a tornado. In Chessmen Tara of Helium is caught in her flier by a furious windstorm that deposits her in the all but forgotten outpost of the Kaldanes. So far out that it might in fact have been the Martian Oz.
Thus in a sense, ERB returns to the scenes of his childhood or, at least, his young manhood. This is very likely the result of stress, whether from looming financial difficulties or the responsibilities of managing his estate of Tarzana.
That he was under extreme stress is made evident by the appearance of John Carter who only appears to a stressed out Burroughs. At such times Burroughs psychologically returns to the comfort and security of Mars where he is beyond the travails of earthly existence. This in turn connects this story to the trials and tribs ERB was facing when he wrote Tarzan And The Lion Man. As I hope to show there is more than one similarity to that story.
This apprearance of Carter is interesting. Carter appears after sunset while leaving just before sunrise. ERB cannot be sure whether he was dreaming or the visit was real. ERB has said that his stories came from his dreams and this story bears all the marks of being a dream story.
ERB had the remarkable faculty of turning his problems into metaphors and symbols of his daily problems. While I don’t believe the stories were concocted in REM type dreaming I’m sure tha as he lay dozing weighing his daily problems he was able to weave them into a creditable story that he was able to elaborate when awake.
Plus, while we can’t be sure how much psychology he knew or how he understood it he had been aware of psychological concepts while still a boy. He learned much of this at the knee of Lew Sweetser on the Idaho ranch. One presumes he remembered, considered and developed his psychological ideas over the years. Sweetser, even as ERB was writing the story was giving public lectures on psychology. Chessmen is replete with psychological images not least the appearance of Carter himself.
Whether Carter was quasi real to Burroughs or not he wants us to believe that Carter was real. It is quite possible that Carter is not actually there but is merely a phantom of himself much as Helen of Troy was said to be a phantom in Rider Haggard’s The World’s Desire. Just as Carter explains his appearance to the dreaming ERB, Burroughs admits he was in a dreaming or trance state as he blew smoke at the head of his defeated king when Carter appears. That’s quite an image. His king or himself had been defeated on the chess board as perhaps in real life calling up the need for a visit from the omnipotent Carter.
And now as to your natural question as to what brought me to Earth again and this, to earthly eyes, strange habiliment. We may thank Kar Kormak, the bowman of Lothar. It was he who gave me the idea upon which I have been experimenting until at last I have achieved success. As you know I have long possessed the power to cross the void in spirit, but never before have I been able to impart to inanimate things a similar power. Now, however, you see me for the first time precisely as my Martian fellows see me- you see the very short sword that has tasted the blood of many a savage foeman; the harness with the devices of Helium and the insignia of my rank; the pistol that was presented to me by Tars Tarkdus, Jeddak of Thark.
Indeed. And I do see what Burroughs suggests, one presumes that the reader sees in his own mind’s eye, the habiliment and weapons on which John Carter, the bronze giant, speaks. We’ve been hypnotized into projecting into our own reality what isn’t there.
Yes, Carter speaks of Kar Kormak as though he really existed when we, having read the novel Thuvia, Maid Of Mars, know that the fantastic Bowmen Of Lothar were mental projections without substance who hypnotized others into seeing them and making them believe that they were real.
So what has Burroughs done here? We know that he is very familiar with the principles of hypnosis. At this very time many forms of mass hypnosis were being practised or about to be practiced. Freud was publishing his mass hypnosis lessons; Fritz Lang had or was making the first of his incredible Dr. Mabuse movies- Mabuse, The Gambler, in which mass hypnotism figures so prominently while Hitler, himself a master hypnotist, was making his bid for power.
Was Burroughs laughing up his sleeve at us as he knew we were actually visualizing in our own way what he suggested to us. I don’t know whether he was laughing but I’m sure he was confident that he had succeeded. So, having hypnotized us into believing the strange appearance of Carter who appears only in the same manner as the phantom bowmen of Lothar to Burroughs although as Carter says he has been successful in projecting the appearance of inanimate matter ERB then begins to weave his incredible story arranging the details so that all can be seen as reality to our minds having once accepted the appearance of Carter as reality who then narrates the story in his own voice.
Another interesting detail is that Carter now addresses ERB as his son. When ERB created Carter he was the man’s nephew his father being still alive. Then as he finished The Warlord Of Mars his father died thus Carter’s son dominates Thuvia, the next Martian novel. Now, while under stress, ERB’s father reappears to him to dictate this story to his son.
Carter, then, must always have been ERB’s projection of his idea of the perfect father.
Finally in this introduction I would like to note that both the city of Helium and the ruins of Opar were colored red and gold. ERB’s Hudson automobile then, a bit of memorabilia of Baum, links the Emerand Cityof Oz and the red and gold cities of Helium and Opar. Both cities are retreats under stress. As we will see a key strain of Chessmen is ERB’s fond memories of Baum and the Oz series. Indeed, Tarzana itself was a grander version of Baum’s own Ozcot while being at the same time an attempt to realize a terrestrial Opar and Helium.
A Review: Kevin MacDonald: Psychoanalysis In Its Death Throes
December 18, 2008
A Review
Kevin MacDonald:
Psychoanalysis In Its Death Throes
by
R.E. Prindle
MacDonald, Kevin: http://www.csulb.edu/~kmacd/paper-CrewsFreud.html
This is a review or commentary of Kevin MacDonald’s paper of 1996: Freud’s Follies: Psychoanalysis As Religion, Cult And Political Movement.
The paper has apparently been retitled here as Psychoanalysis In Its Death Throes: The Moral And Intellectual Legacy Of A Pseudoscience.
I don’t know Kevin but I have had some correspondence with him over the internet so I hope he won’t find me presumptuous by referring to him as Kevin. As a Professor at California State University At Long Beach Kevin MacDonald has a distinguished record adding to the luster of the faculty.
His book Culture of Critique is a valuable addition to the literature. Generally speaking I endorse all his conclusions in this paper with the exception of his condemnation of psychoanalysis. I do not believe the discipline to be a pseudo-science. The problem is with Freud and not psychoanalysis. The investigation of the mind was in its elementary stages at the time Freud entered the picture. Indeed people had a horror at the very notion of almost any psychological concept and still do. To my mind Freud’s most valuable contribution was the The Psychopathology Of Everyday Life. Even the study of simple everyday psychologically revealing traits was derided. The thought that a ‘Freudian slip’ could give away one’s inner thoughts was too horrifying to contemplate.
But there it was in bold relief- the subconscious, or unconscious as Freud called it. Freud neither invented nor discovered the unconscious as many people still believe. The unconscious had been a topic of investigation for some time. It was a mystery then, a mystery to most now, many people disbelieved the concept then, many still do.
The trouble with Freud’s vision of the unconscious is that he believed it was inherently evil, uncontrollable and actually a separate entity of the mind but connected somehow.
His error was pointed out to him at the time but as Kevin points out Freud had insulated his vision of psychoanalysis by making an Order of it. He thus separated his thoughts from scientific criticism building a wall around them just as his Jews built a wall around Torah. As Kevin points out:
The apex of the authoritarian, anti-scientific institutional structure was the Secret Committee of hand-picked loyalsits sworn to uphold psychoanalytic orthodoxy, described by Phyllis Grosskurth in ‘The Secret Ring: Freud’s Inner Circle And The Politics of Pyschoanalysis. By insisting the Committee must be absolutely secret, Freud enshrined the principle of confidentiality. The various psychoanalytic societies that emerged from the Committee were like Communist cells, in which the members vowed eternal obedience to their leader. Psycholanalysis became institutionalized by the founding of journals and the training of candidates; in short an extraordinarly effective political society.
Thus Freud was able to separate his doctrine from scientific scrutiny while creating a terrific mystique about himself and his ‘science.’
In fact while his doctrine was based on sound, for the state of learning at the time, factual research he fashioned the facts into a tool or weapon for a specific purpose for which any changes to the doctrine would weaken its effectiveness. It was essential that it stay the same.
As Kevin points out Freud was a politician first, researcher secondly and a scientist thirdly. While more scientific outsiders were critical Freud’s fellow Jewish insiders picked up the ball and ran with it.
Freud was a member of the International Order of B’nai B’rith. He attended meetings regularly in Vienna while lecturing on psychological matters frequently. Can it be a coincidence that the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith was created in the United States in 1913? Does anyone believe that the subtle psychological methods weren’t worked out in Vienna?
When the Frankfurt School Of Social Research was organized in Germany in 1923 incorporating Freudian psychology does anyone believe that was a coincidence? The Marxists embraced a Freudian agenda. You may be sure that Franz Boas applied Freudian doctrines to Anthropology.
There was a good deal of natural reisistance to Freudian doctrines in Europe but the Nazi disaster played into Freudian hands completely. After Hitler’s election in 1933 droves of Freudian analysts and the whole Frankfurt School fled Germany most choosing to settle in the United States in the cultural capitols of NYC and Hollywood.
While psychoanalysis was all the rage through the fifties the reaction set in during the sixties. There was much to disagree with in what was essentially an unchanging doctrine that was hostile to the non-Jewish world. Freud’s reputation has gradually been demolished among the goyim since the sixties. However this is irrelevant. It doesn’t matter what the goyim think. The tool, the wapon is in the hands of Freud’s fellow Jews where it has been and is being wielded effectively.
So, while Kevin MacDonald’s critque and condemnation is accurate and effective among the goyim it is of no consquence to the effective application of the doctrine by Freud’s fellow Jews. It’s like Machiavelli. Just because you’re appalled by his doctrines doesn’t mean they don’t work and aren’t being used.
One would do better to educate people to defend themselves against this pernicious doctrine than to merely condemn it.
While I agree with Kevin’s analysis I do disagree with his condemnation of the effectiveness of a psychoanalytic approach.
The key to Freud’s misuse of psychological analysis is his description of the unconscious. As a scientist it is diffiicult for me to believe that he actually perceived the unconscious in such a way. I have to believe that his private understanding was quite different then his public description. It is possible that his understanding is purely religious based on Kabbalah and Talmud and having nothing to do with science. The notion that the unconscious exists independently of both mind and body is absurd on the face of it.
One thing to bear in mind is that Freud was well informed on the subject of hypnosis. He studied (for a couple months) under the Frenchman Jean-Martin Charcot who associated hypnotism quite correctly with hysteria. Freud also visited Bernstein of the Nancy hypnotic school. He must have had a reasonable understanding of hypnosis and its active agent, suggestion.
When he says that he abandoned hypnosis for subliminal recall which he says he found just as effective he is betraying a profound knowledge of the relationship of the un- or subconscious mind and conscious actions. He actually discovered that he no longer needed to put people into a trance to obtain the same results. Contrary to his statement I’m sure he was very effective as a hypnotist.
In point of fact in the interchange between the conscious and the unconscious he had discovered the true nature of the subconscious. That is what the interior dialogue is- a discussion between the clear conscious mind and the fixated subconscious which distorts reality to conform with its mistaken understanding.
Further, I would be surprised if Freud didn’t understand that fixation was merely hypnotic suggestion. By suggestion I dont limit the notion of spoken suggestions by others but to suggestion by circumstances. For instance if one is defeated at a game by another this may suggest a lack of manliness on one’s own part. In retreating into a hypnoid state the suggestion of unmanliness may be translated into a fixation of emasculation that renders one effeminate in relation to other men. This is done unawares to oneself but the fixation controls all future responses unless exorcised. It is possible that an exorcism may occur spontaneously in relation to another event later in life but otherwise the fixation has to be recognized and rectified by analysis.
The inadequacy is a diminution of ego. Such a diminution of ego always takes a response of a sexual nature.
In fact, Freud’s work centers on hypnosis and suggestion, emasculation and sex. He himself was severely emasculated and sexually repressed. So there you have the core of Freudian psychology. This understanding is then used to further the Jewish cause in the warfare with European ‘Christian’ society. I exclude America because Freud was too European to extend his interest further.
Freud then devised a plan to mass hypnotize, confuse and psychologically conquer Europe and by extension the West. Running his special knowledge as an Order, as Kevin indicates, he was under no compunction to share his knowledge in a scientific manner. In other words he sought to control his knowledge uninfluenced by outside contributions that would render his intent ineffective. Even inside the Order as Kevin points out Freud strictly controlled psychoanalysis by the use of his Secret Committee and strict disciplining of what he considered deviant thought.
Both facets were absolutely necessary if his plan of subversion was to work. So far the plan has functioned perfectly.
There is no reason to throw the baby out with the bath water however.
Freud and Freud’s doctrine should be repudiated.
Psychoanalysis however is a valid psychological approach. However administration of it take great skill. Once a correct understanding of suggestion and hypnosis is adopted as the basis of psychology and its relationship to fixation in a subconscious having an active relationship with the conscious, fixations can be located and exorcised freeing the mind from compulsive behavior.
The individual with a proper understanding can then be put on guard to prevent new fixations. I think it may require a certain amount of intelligence.
Freud’s system completely negates the role of intelligence and the conscious mind in favor of compulsive behavior. Thus by emphasizing the individual’s ability to control both his conscious and subconscious minds he will be able to master his own will and act without interference from fixations.
Those are the key factors. While I second Kevin MacDonald in his analysis of Freud and Freudianism I affirm the scientific nature of psychoanalysis itself. Just because Freud used his knowledge dishonestly doesn’t mean he wasn’t onto something.
Exhuming Bob XVII: Bob Dylan, A Napoleon In Rags
December 1, 2008
Exhuming Bob XVII
A Napoleon In Rags
by
R.E. Prindle
Hoffman, Michael, Judaism Discovered, 2008
Jay Michaelson: http://www.nextbook.org/cultural/feature.html?id=1725
Cornyn, Sean: http://www.rightwingbob.com/weblog/archives/1850
Hartley, Mick: http://www.mickhartley.typepad.com/blog/2008/10/dylans-true-message.html
Prindle, R.E. https://idynamo.wordpress.com/2008/06/25/exhuming-b0b-x-lubavitcher-bob/
How does the ‘Napoleon in rags’, Bob Dylan, conceive himself in his role as a reformer of Judaism because that is what Messianic Judaism is. What does this believer in the Bible as the literal word of God see as his mission? One should note that as Dylan places the Bible above the Talmud he is a Rabbinical Judaic outlaw as Michaelson says. Did Dylan really just wake up one morning and say: ‘Oh L-ordy, I have crashed. I need the crutch of Jesus’ as Michaelson, Cornyn and Hartley suggest or was there an ulterior motive? Perhaps a conceptual idea if not a well thought out program.
Jay Michaelson, claiming to be a ‘secular’ Jew takes exception to ‘Messianic’ Judaism. What exactly is Messianic Judaism? The notion may take many readers by surprise; those who are only familiar with mainstream Judaism and Christianity. Most non-Jews don’t realize that Judaism has as many sects as Christianity.
For instance Dylan’s stance smacks of Karaitism. the Karaites are a Jewish sect that denies the authority of the oral law or Talmud and hence the Rabbis. They are outlawed as a cult. Messianic Jews accepting Jesus as the Jewish Messiah and hence the New Dispensation are and always have been by definition Outlaws, being outside THE LAW.
The Rabbi David M. Hargis of The Messianic Bureau International is quoted by Michael Hoffman in his Judaism Discovered p. 844:
“Messianic Judaism” is a means for subverting Christianity by incorporated reverence for the rabbis who are heirs to the religion and customs of the ancient Pharisees as recorded in the Talmud. The claim of Messianic Judaism is that historic Christianity is “pagan” and imbued with “gentile culture” needlessly alienating and offending Judaics who might otherwise convert to Jesus Christ. Their “solution” is to fashion a supposedly pagan-free form of Judaism that allegedly believes in Jesus. ‘We believe it would be the best and is ultiamtely necessary for all Jewish people to know their Messiah Yeshua, but we do not believe that God has called any Jewish person to become Gentile or Western Christian in custom. Rather, we believe it would be best and is ultimately necessary for Christianity to remove its pagan influences and return to the roots of Judaism, that is, to return to the way of Yeshua as He walked by example and set forth in His entire Word….However this does not mean that Modern Rabbinical Judaism does not have truth within it.”- Rabbi David M. Hargis & Messianic Bureau International, “Basics of Messianic Judaism.” www.messianic.com/articles/basics.htm (as of Feb. 25, 2008; it may be altered after that date.)
So it would appear that Messianic Jews want a return to pre-Pauline Jesusism deleting all non-Jewish influences in Christianity. These would include Platonic influences, the Dionysian Kyrios Christos, the Persian influences, Gnostic influences and the Egyptian influence that made Mary the Mother of God as patterned after Isis. In other words the Messianic Jewish Jesus would be one that Christians would scarcely recognize.
As can be seen by the title of Rabbi Hargis’ organization that it is an international one; indeed, Dylan’s outfit Jews For Jesus is international in scope. You can call that a conspiracy if you like as Cronyn and Hartley do.
It would be fair to assume that Mitch Glaser’s and Al Kasha’s organization, Jews For Jesus, also an international organization, is affiliated to, or at least is associated with the Messianic Bueau International in some way or other as like minded organizations. We know for certain that Dylan was and is associated with Jews For Jesus. A purpose of Messianic Judaism is to strip Western, that is to say “pagan” influences from the figure of Jesus returning him to the status of ‘pure’ Semite.
That is to say that the Greek cult of Kyrios Christos is to be abstracted so that Jesus is no longer The Christ. So the purpose of Messianic Judaism is to take back Jesus from the Christians while reuniting Messianic and Rabbinical Judaism. The messianics are willing to concede that there is some ‘truth’ in Rabbinical Judaism.
Dylan was not merely preaching Messianic Judaism to Jews but whiffing it past Christians also. It is true that he thinned out his audience rather quickly having apparently misjudged the religiosity of his following. As a Jew of Orthodox sensibiities Dylan, in his mission as Messiah, or King of the Jews as Michaelson styles him, would have to learn something of Christian beliefs and sensibilities. It would seem likely then that he approached Dwyer of the Vineyard Fellowship to pick his brains. The question then was Dylan exploited by the Christians as Michaelson believes or was Dylan exploiting the Christians?
A question then arises as to whether Dylan wasn’t ‘speaking falsely now’ when he said ‘he never wanted to be the voice of his generation, and he certainly never asked to be ‘King of the Jews’ or a vessel for our hopes and dreams.’ Can we believe the denial of this self-styled ‘Napoleon in rags?’ If Napoleon wasn’t a ‘leader’ who demanded following who has ever been? How mistaken could his contemporaries have been in taking this ‘Napoleon in rags’ as their spokesman. Can Dylan have changed direction in 1979 when he wanted to become a great Messianic spokesman leading his people to some Promised Land? What else could have been his intent in becoming a Jim Jones style religious preacher? ‘There’s something happening here and you don’t know what is, do you Mr. Jones?’
Dylan definitely confuses Michaelson who opines ‘his latest incarnation, as a mustachioed journeyman musician, is made of equal parts of authenticity and con’ and ‘Dylan, who always seems to be in on the con when he’s not perpetrating one himself.’ Indeed. Dylan does project a duplicitous character; speaks out of both sides of his mouth at once. Or once again as Michaelson understands it: ‘…like him, I think I can understand the appeal of authentic religious experience in the context of superficiality and doublespeak.’ Uh huh!
Thus Dylan’s double edged mission was and is to strip ‘Christians’ of their ‘pagan’ sensibilities- i.e. Western culture- while converting Rabbinical Jews to Messianism or Jesus. So, whether Cornyn and Hartley believe it or not, yes, there is a ‘Great Bob Dylan Conspiracy.’
It is embarrassing that at this late date in the evolution of human consciousness that Bob Dylan believes the Bible to be the literal word of God. Consciousness has evolved to that level that the sham of the Religious Consciousness should be apparent to all. Both Science and Communism have been proclaiming the falsity of the religion and extreme Jewish nationalism that Dylan affects for a hundred years or more.
I certainly have to reject the Religious Consciousness. As such I feel defrauded by Dylan’s early career and my attachment to it. Dylan willfully misrepresented himself, doublespeak, and cheated me as well as all his fans who thought he was enlightened. I was misled.
Sorry Bob, but you’re a fraud.
Exhuming Bob XVI: Bob Dylan’s Dream..Or Nightmare?
November 27, 2008
Exhuming Bob XVI
Bob Dylan’s Dream or…Nightmare?
by
R.E. Prindle
I’ll let you be in my dream if you’ll let me be in yours.
-Bob Dylan
http://www.nextbook.org/cultural/print.html?id=1725
When Dylan wrote those words, was he sincere or was it just part of the con? I was recently asked not ot contribute anymore to expectingrain.com by person or persons unknown. The webmaster refuses to identify he or them to me. Too ashamed to let their names by known, I guess. Or chicken. I know I’d rather not be known as a rasty, nasty censor.
I was ejected for voicing pretty much the same sentiments as Jay Michaelson does in the above referenced review of Joel Gilbert’s The Jesus Years. Maybe the difference between Jay and me is that I don’t think Dylan is such a mysterious elusive guy. Anybody with a little Freud under his belt has got Dylan pinned.
He suffers from a fairly severe depression while being very emasculated. He is so emasculated he can’t even fix on an identity for himself. His natal Bobby Zimmerman failed him so he apparently attempted to become Elston Gunn which he wasn’t able to sustain so he then became Bob Dylan which also became too much of a burden to him so he threw that identity up for grabs saying anybody can be Bob Dylan who wants it, then he became Masked and Anonymous eschewing any identity whatever. An empty suit.
If that isn’t clear to you then there is no reason for you to tackle Freud or psychology now.
So, what was the conflict? Duh. Could it have been that between his Jewish upbringing and his Christian milieu? Gosh, I don’t know, do you? Is there anything in his subsequent history that would suggest such a conflict? Let me think. I think there is, therefore I am.
Is there a conflict in the minds of Dylan’s disciples. Well, now there we’re on firm gound. Just listen to Jay:
There’s a telling moment in Joel Gilbert’s new (?) documentary Inside Bob Dylan’s Jesus Years: an interviewee says that when Dylan became a born again Christian, he went, in two short years, from being an American Jewish hero to the “greatest apostate of the twentieth century”… But worse, because Dylan embodied a specific kind of liberal American Jewish hope that someone would speak truth to power, and that the world would listen. These were very Jewish dreams, and Dylan fulfilled them for awhile.
Damn, then it wasn’t anything I said as the messenger. I guess it was just not being Jewish that I shouldn’t have attempted to deliver the message. Right message, wrong face. Gee, I guess I can’t be in Dylan’s dream because I’m not Jewish. Whatever happened to One World, One Dream? Everybody being brothers? The Global Village? They didn’t think there wouldn’t be variations on the theme I hope. Well, no matter Dylan and his People can still be in my dream. I’m inclusive.
But Jay and his People themselves apparently feel excluded from Dylan’s dream also. Jay says:
Dylan never wanted to be the voice of his generation, and he certainly never asked to be King of the Jews or vessel for our hopes and dreams. (My italics.)
Wow! King of the Jews, Jesus Christ. I may have thought it but I didn’t have the cojones (My italics), Jay does and actually says it. Jesus, I’d be running for my life let alone being kicked off expectingrain.com.
Jay and his People just can’t seem to get it. Dylan never became a Christian, he became a Jew For Jesus. Jay even has the answer before him but his religious bigotry won’t let him see it: “Why did Dylan…record two religious albums proclaiming the word of G-d?” There you have it Jay. Dylan was conflating Jesus and God into one and then substituting G-d for Jes-s. Jesus is Christian, God is Jewish. Duh. For Christ’s sake, c’mon Jay.
Well enough of that. I’m sure you can’t stop laughing. Jay is supposed to be reviewing Gilbert’s documentary. Michaelson; is not either well read on his subject of Dylan or well researched. Maybe he smoked enough dope that he thinks he automatically knows everything about Dylan. I’ve seen it happen.
As far as the film goes, it may not be a particularly good movie but then it is a documentary and has to judged differently. As documentaries go I found it more than satisfactory. The clip art was an unusual special effect but I actually found some of them humorous. I wouldn’t have done it that way myself but Gilbert can do as he pleases and did.
Gilbert doesn’t mysteriously look like Dylan as Jay says. There is no mystery involved. Gilbert is trying to clone himself as Dylan; does a good job. He has a good understanding of his subject, after all he’s trying to be Dylan. His selection of subjects provided enough penetrating information that I have to think they were well chosen. Perhaps they were all that Gilbert could get, in which case the film maker drew them out well. Rob Stoner was the key. He was intelligent, understanding, and well informed- he knew what he was talking about. Kasha and Glaser gave you all the information you needed to understand the Christian-Jews For Jesus scam. Come on Jay, open your eyes.
Weberman has been saying that Dylan was a heroin addict since Christ was a baby. At least from 1964. It may have been true, I don’t know, but it didn’t have anything to do with Dylan’s crash. If Jay knew anything about his subject he would realize that the divorce was the key. Dylan had finally, after a life time of trying, become so defiled that he had to turn to God/Jesus to lead him back. I hope he found the way. Freud again.
For Michaelson who can’t separate his Jewishness from Dylan the problem is a paramount betrayal because ‘We’re (Jews) scarred and traumatized by two thousand years of Christian hegemony… So, there you have it, the cat’s out of the bag, couldn’t have said it better myself. Jay and his People thought Dylan was the Messiach who was going to establish a Jewish hegemony over ‘Christians,’ ‘speak the truth to power.’
I’m not so sure Dylan won’t still try but that has little to do with the documentary. The con and exploitation was not that of Dwyer on Dylan but Dylan over the Vineyard Fellowship. Dylan was using them to try to reach his fellow Jews in his faith of Jews For Jesus. As we are never tired of being told: Jes-s was a J-w. Case closed. Forget hegemony.
In summation Gilbert, in my estimation, did an excellent job for what he set out to do. I was properly instructed and…I got it. But, I was still kicked out of Dylan’s dream. He conned me too. What a nightmare!
A Review: Ian Whitcomb: Rock Odyssey
November 26, 2008
A Review
You Really Turn Me On
Rock Odyssey
by
Ian Whitcomb
Review by R.E. Prindle
Whitcomb, Ian: Rock Odyssey, 1973
I don’t suppose too many people today remember Ian Whitcomb. He surfaced in 1965 with his hit song
‘You Really Turn Me On. In 1965 I was a very old twenty-seven but getting younger every day. I saw Whitcomb once while visiting my wife’s relatives. Her young cousin was watching the Lloyd Thaxton show out of LA. I’d never heard of Lloyd Thaxton either but according to the cousin he was the hottest thing on TV. If I remember correctly the Kinks had just sung Dedicated Follower Of Fashion that I thought was very OK. The Ian came on and did his breathy falsetto androgynous song: You Really Turn Me On. At one point after suggestively fondling the microphone stand he shot down out of sight like a tower from the World Trade Center resurfacing moments later. Pretty startling stuff at a time when nearly every new group was an actual mind blower- The Rolling Stones, Animals, Dave Clark Five and this was just the beginning. More and even stranger and stronger stuff was to follow quickly only to begin a slow fizzle even as it peaked ending in the Rap and stuff that passes for music today. A very old Bob Dylan trying to bring light into the heart of his growing darkness. After the startling sixties came the sedentary seventies. But then Whitcomb disappeared like his fall from the microphone stand and I never saw or heard of him again. A true one hit wonder.
Years later I came across his LP Under A Ragtime Moon. Then I knew why he had disappeared. He was into that English music hall stuff. But then, I didn’t mind that. He sounded quite a bit like one of my personal favorites The Bonzo Dog Doo Wah Band. Of course they didn’t really get that far with that stuff either. You have to be a member of the cult to really dig it. In order to like the Bonzos you have to have a fairly eccentric side to your musical taste. A little out of the mainstream which is where I preferred to live my life. I thought the Bonzos were wonderful, still do. But I was pretty much all alone out there. I liked and like, Neil Innes and the late great Viv Stanshall, two of the Bonzo stalwarts. ‘Legs’ Larry Smith. Ragtime Moon lacked the modern rock foundation the Bonzos infused into their music but to this day I couldn’t tell you whose version of Jollity Farm I’m familiar with. Anyway I have a soft spot for this sort of thing so over the years I’ve played a side of the Bonzos fairly often and dusted off my copy of Ragtime Moon occasionally.
You Really Turn Me On always stuck in my mind, great song. Kinda struck my lost chord and made it gong into the distance. If you’re only going to have one hit you might as well make it a good one. And then for some reason, I don’t know, I googled Whitcomb and saw that he’d written a few books, including this autobiographical sketch cum pop history so, as it was cheap on alibris, I sent for a copy. I was delighted with the volume as I read it through. As biographies go this is one of the better ones, right up there with Wolfman Jack’s not to mention that of that phony Jean-Jacques Rousseau although I stop short at Casanova. Casanova is one hard one to top. As a history of the period it is more balanced and beats the hell out of that crap from the Boys Of ’64.
Ian took offense at being a one hit wonder; he really wanted to be up there with, say, Jim Morrison of the Doors, Mick Jagger, people of that ilk. I have to believe that stories Ian tells are true although some are stunningly improbable but then those things can and do happen that way, you know. It’s all in how you see what goes on around you. Toward the end of the book he’s pondering on where he went wrong, he’s sunk into a fair depression over this, he flees from his apartment in his pajamas one early morning to take a stool in a coffee shop. That’s depression. But, let Ian tell it in his own inimitable fashion. As improbable as it may seem he took a stool next to Jim Morrison who recognized him first.
When ‘Light My Fire’ had reached number one, Jim had gone out and bought a skintight leather outfit. At the Copper Skillet, it wasn’t so skintight anymore.
“How do you do it?” I asked.
“I never dug Jerry And The Pacemakers. How do I do what?”
I wanted to kick myself for bringing up my obsession with pop success, but I plowed on: “How do you stay intellectual and still be a hit with the kids, the masses?”
“You could have done it. You were into the theater of the absurd. I saw you on ‘Shindig’ and ‘Lloyd Thaxton’ goofing off and telling the audience that rock n’ roll was a big joke. That the whole of existence is a big bad joke. You were too comic. Tragedy’s the thing. Western civilization is ending and we don’t even need an earthquake; we’re performing crumble music for the final dance of death and you know what? Truth lies beyond the grave. I’ll pick up the tab.”
I couldn’t have put it better. Ian’s problem was that he was working from a different ethic. He didn’t understand that the singer and the song was the show, the whole show. Nothing else was needed. We were only there to see the singer sing his song. It’s nice to know that Jim and I were watching the same Thaxton show together. If I hadn’t seen Ian on Thaxton I wouldn’t have been as impressed because on that show singer and song were a single projection.
Due to the wonders of the internet I was recently able to catch several versions of Ian’s song but not the Thaxton one. One had him and a half dozen other guys charging around a series of pianos. Completely missed the point of the singer and his song. Not even good entertainment. Ian considered himself an entertainer bacause of a childhood encounter with a music hall comic named O. Stoppit. Fateful encounter. Because of it Ian wanted to be a comic, ended up a singer and as Morrison noted the two were too dissimilar to work.
Ian was probably headed for depression from the age of five or six or so as he came to terms with bombed out London in ’46 or ’47. His biographical sketch is a wonderful tale of a seemingly cheerful man’s descent into a deep depression. By book’s end Ian is nearly out of his mind.
He quotes a psychoanalyst for his definition of depression:
It was the great Serbian psychoanalyst Josef Vilya who concluded that chronic depression is the result of a head on collision between dream and reality. The patient dreams of becoming King but goes on to become a member of the tax paying public.
That’s probably what Morrison meant by tragedy. Life always fails to meet our expectations so that humanity responds by assuming at least a low grade depression that makes comedy an adjunct to tragedy. Thus in the Greek theatre there was a terrifically depressive tragic trilogy followed by some comic relief. The burlesque of an Aristophanes.
Ian’s problem was as Morrison noted that he saw the absurdity of the human condition but was too jokey about it. Absurdity is a serious thing and has to be so treated. O. Stoppit taught Ian a silliness unmixed with tragedy. A tragedy in itself. When silliness such as You Really Turn Me On met the tragedy of a one hit wonder Ian began his descent into depression as Vilya suggested.
I’ve never been depressed myself, never had the blues, but I have visited the lower depths as a tourist so I have some notion of what Ian’s talking about. Dirty Harry in drag. I just never got off the bus that’s all, except once, to walk through Haight-Ashbury where I saw first hand how horrible true depression could be. Boy, did Ian find out about that. Good thing he never found his Debbie.
In his narrative combining grim humor with his developing depression Ian gets off some rippers. I had a good many uproarious belly floppers. Try these few lines. Two good ones in succession. You do have to have the same sense of humor. The North and South are those of England.
These frightening stories of Southern travelers stranded in woebegone depressed cities and suffering under the rough natives. For example a well known Shakespearean actor, having missed the last train out of Crewe, knocked on the door of a hotel. “Er, do you have special terms for actors?” the traveler asked. “Yes- and here’s one: Fuck off!”
And if they weren’t being aggressive, the Northerners were acting daft. One heard of a Lancashire lad down in London demanding another helping of dressed crab (in the shell): “Give us another of them pies- and don’t make the crust so hard.”
Of course Ian can’t do that on every page but laughs are liberally sprinkled throughout the underlying depression.
Ian’s book opens with his youthful encounter with O. Stoppit and ends with another unifying his theme nicely.
In between Ian enters the world of rock almost serendipitously with his one hit song: You Really Turn Me On. After that his story is a search for a sequel that he can never find but which he pursues somewhat as Alice down the rabbit hole. He loved his one brush with fame so much that the clash between his cherished hopes of finding his sequel and the grim reality of not being able plunges him deeper and deeper into depression. Personally I would have gone out and found a songwriter. There were thousands in LA.
However his odyssey, as he calls it, Brave Ulysses ne Ian, led him through the heart and soul of the Golden Age of Rock And Roll from the Beach Boys and Beatles and Rolling Stones through Morrison and the Doors, Procol Harum, Cream, Pink Floyd, Donovan, you know, like that. After that crescendo followed the diminuendo ending in Rap and the current rather laughable music scene.
Ian has encounters with the aforementioned Morrison, Mick Jagger and others. His observations of the social scene are trenchant. He makes an acute observation do in place of a couple hundred pages of twaddle a la Todd Gitlin and Greil Marcus.
Along the way he sprinkles the little known odd fact:
Procol Harum is Latin for ‘beyond these things.’ Have no idea what that has to do with Procol Harum’s music.
…the name Pink Floyd was taken from a record by two Georgia bluesmen named Pink Anderson and Floyd Council. Amaze your friends with that one.
And in conversation with Bobby Vee he confirmed a question about Bob Dylan that I needed confirming:
The afternoon I taped “Hollywood A Go Go” a syndicated TV rock n’ roll show that’s allegedly seen as far away as Rhodesia and Finland. The set was sparse- cameras, lights and a few rostrums. The empty spaces were filled with boys and girls who danced or gazed. All the acts had to lip synch their records. Chubby Checker (the Twist King) was on the set and, when he heard my record he pronounced it “bitching!” Bobby Vee was a special guest and looked every inch a star in his sheeny silk suit. He really had his hand movements and head turns down to an art. We chatted during a break and I brought up the subject of Bob Dylan and my concern about him. To my amazement, Vee told me that Dylan- before he got into the folk kick and when he was plain Bobby Zimmerman back in Minnesota- had played a few gigs with Vee’s band- as pianist! Vee said Dylan was very good, in the Jerry Lee Lewis sytle, but he could only play in C. He said he knew a lot about country music, too. As it was hard to find pianos at their gigs Dylan didn’t play with Vee very long. But as he has fond memories of him and said he was really well versed in current rock n’ roll at the time of their meeting. He had the impression that Dylan was very hip to whatever was happening. ;I wondered if the young Zimmerman had ever been a Bill Haley fan.
So, that would confirm that Dylan did play with Vee in the summer of ’59 after his graduation.
The book is a great read, a very good book, as Ian struggles and fails to find success. In a fit of depression he returns to the seaside pier on which he had seen O. Stoppit. An old poster is hanging that he secures then finding his model’s address he visits him to present him with the poster. O. Stoppit tells him bluntly to stop living in the past. A fine thing to tell a historian but Mr. Stoppit was apparently a blunt, unfeeling brute. Also well past the sunny side of life.
Has Ian ever adjusted to his being a one hit wonder? I’m afraid not. It still rankles. As late as December 1997 in an essay written for American Heritage Magazine Ian quotes a letter from fan Arlene:
Dear Mr. Whitcomb:
I have watched you several times now and I want to say that sure you have talent and you’re magnetic, but why, oh, why, do you screw it all up by horsing around, being coy, by camping, as if you’re embarrassed by show business? You could be great if you found your potential and saw it through, but that would take guts. Instead you mince, and treat it all as big joke. Come on now!
Well, that was the same thing Morrison told him thirty years earlier; the vaccination didn’t take then either.
I think Ian entered his depression early in life, as many of us do. Then one has to face it. Some become phony chipper optimists in their attempt to overcome the conflict between expectations and reality. Some become goofs and jokers. Something I fought for years. Some like Ian become silly. The most extreme type of this I ever saw was Red Skelton the ‘great’ clown who was painful for me to watch. In fact I couldn’t do it. I saw too much of myself in him and ended up hating the bastard.
If Ian wants that second hit and more he has to master his silliness. Weld the singer and the song like greats like Jagger and Morrison. Be to some extent what his fans want. A good sense of humor on songs done with respect for the song, himself and his audience. Scratch Red Skelton. People want to love Ian, just as Ian wants to be loved, but as the saying goes, he won’t let ’em. I’m not criticizing or demeaning, I know where that’s at too. I am recommending the course of action however. I, Arlene, Jim of blessed memory and others want a sort of closure that has been left hanging.
The book is a great one through Ian’s struggles to come to terms with his times, himself and the future.
Sigmund Freud And His Vision Of The Unconscious
November 22, 2008
Sigmund Freud And His Vision Of The Unconcious
Redefining A False Vision
by
R.E. Prindle
Texts:
Bakan, David, Sigmund Freud And The Jewish Mystical Tradition, Orig. Issued 1965, Dover edition of 2004
Movie: The Testament Of Dr. Mabuse, 1932, Fritz Lang, auteur.
https://idynamo.wordpress.com/2007/10/01/something-of-value-i-2/
Sometime after I wrote the first part of Something Of Value (see above for link) I read David Bakan’s Freud And The Jewish Mystical Tradition. Bakan’s book confirmed my findings while developing Freud’s relationship to his culture’s mystical tradition based on Bakan’s understanding of the Zohar and the Jewish Kabbalah, which I haven’t read or studied; nor do I intend to unless I exhaust my other pursuits which doesn’t seem likely. You never know though.
However a point to consider is how Jewish is the Jewish mystical tradition, that is, what are its antecedents? Are they rooted in Judaism or elsewhere? Bakan seems to believe that the Jewish Kabbalah is derived entirely from Jewish sources independent of the general milieu. I don’t believe this to be true. The Jewish mystical tradition like all others is based on the very ancient Egyptian traditions as is a great deal of ancient Jewish culture. Bakan believes that the Kabbalah arose in the first century AD. This is probably true.
The Hermetic tradition which is equivalent to a European Cabala took form as such in Alexandria during the Ptolemaic period when Greek and Egyptian ideas interreacted. Hemeticism evolved from much earlier doctrines centered around the Egyptian god Thoth. The Zohar and Cabbalah then is Hermetic material adapted for Jewish needs. The whole can be traced back to Alexandria. It will be remembered that there was a large colony of Jews in Alexandria from long before the first century AD.
The Zohar is a mystical book, which is attributed to the first and second century Rabbi, Simeon Bar Yohai, and it was rewritten, edited and whatever in twelfth century Spain in the sixteenth century. Its influence then was transmitted to the seventeenth century Jewish messiah, Sabbatai, Zevi.
According to Mr. Bakan Freud was familiar with the Zohar and Kabbalah. I couldn’t go so far as to claim so myself but Mr. Bakan can quote chapter and verse. While Freud claimed to be scientific Mr. Bakan relates almost all of Freud’s psychology to the Kabbalah showing Freud’s dependence on Sabbatianism and Frankism as I indicated in Something Of Value Part I.
Thus while seeming to be working from a scientific point of view Freud is actually blending a bit of scientific method acquired from European sources, as there is no science in Jewish culture, with his Jewish religious material to subvert the European moral order. While Freud himself was at war with European civilization, the international Jewish organizations of which he was a member extended his field of influence to the United States and Canada. Thus while Freud speaks specifically of Europe he can be taken to mean Euroamerica.
A further background for his psychology, Freud’s central childhood fixation, appears to be the incident in which a European knocked his father’s hat into the gutter which his father meekly, or wisely, depending on your point of view, accepted without a demur. Because of this story Freud wished to avenge himself on all Europeans.
Probably at this point Freud assumed the Moses complex that stayed with him to the end of his life. He, Freud, would lead his people to triumph over the Europeans as Moses had led the People out of Egypt while Pharaoh and his army were drowned in the Red Sea.
However, oddly enough, as he claimed to be wholly Jewish, Freud was conflicted in his attitude toward Europeans. As a child he had a Roman Catholic nurse who introduced him to Christianity by taking him to church. Most probably she also tried to wean him from Judaism. This experience had a great effect on young Freud. In the following anecdote, as with most fixations, he seemed to have lost the exact memory of the situation. From Bakan:
…that my ‘primary originator; (of neuroses) was an ugly, elderly, but clever woman who told me a great deal about God and hell, and gave me a high opinion of my own capacities.
On October 15, 1897 he quotes his mother speaking about the old nurse who took care of him when he was very young:
“Of course,” she said, “an elderly woman, very shrewd indeed. She was always taking you to church. When you came home you used to preach and tell us about how God conducted his affairs.”
His memory had become confused while it does not appear that he ever exorcised his fixation, for fixation it was. He apparently loved this nurse at the time rather than hating her. When she was later accused and convicted of stealing from the Freuds she was dishonored and actually sent to jail. Freud was heartbroken while changing his opinion of her. But, he had had contact with Christian Europeans which left a lasting impression on him that he could not consciously recognize or acknowledge. If I am correct, this impression resurfaced when he came into contact with C.G. Jung who he adopted as a surrogate for this nurse transferring his love and hatred of her to Jung.
Just as he loved this nurse there were apparently strong homosexual overtones in his relationship with Jung. As Freud would have known, the compulsion toward repitition would have been a component in his relationship with Jung through his nurse although he apparently did not recognize this. So much for his self-analysis. He found reasons to break off with Jung or drive him away while bitterly claiming to be betrayed by Jung just as his nurse had been accused and convicted of theft thus betraying the love of the child Freud. Thus once again his contact with a Christian European was brief ending in sorrow for himself.
A third situation occured late in life when he wrote Moses And Monotheism. Rather startlingly he claimed that Moses was not Jewish but was an ethnic Egyptian. This means Freud, who had a Mosaic fixation, split his personality between his Christian longings and his professed Jewish identity. Another result would be that monotheism was not a Jewish invention but actually a goyish invention so that all the evil arising from monotheism was not the fault of the Jews but the goys. A neat job of transference. Thus Freud’s notion of Moses may have been a sort of dream reversal of facts.
Whatever the results of Freud’s self-analysis back before the turn of the century, it is quite clear that he was unable to resolve his fixations nor, one believes, was he aware of their influence on him. He never integrated his personality remaining under the influence of his subconscious fixations. No wonder he ignored the conscious mind.
3.
Like most people Freud had to find his way from adolescence to adulthood and his true ambitions by a
circuitous route.
The editor’s note to 1927’s The Future Of An Illusion says this:
In the ‘Postscript’ which Freud added in 1935 to his Autobiographical Study he remarked that a ‘signficant change’ had come about in his writings during the previous decade. “My interest,” he explained, “after making a long detour through the natural sciences, medicine, and psychotherapy, returned to the cultural problems which fascinated me long before, when I was a youth scarcely old enough for thinking.”
He undoubtedly refers to his experiences in church with his Christian nurse contrasted with the ‘Christian’ who knocked his father’s hat into the gutter. As Freud is very duplicitous in his use of language one should try to be very sensitive to the personal meanings behind the general meaning of his words. Thus I believe his use of the term ‘cultural problems’ can usually be understood as his inner conflict between his Christianity and Judaism.
As Bakan points out, that while Freud rejected Rabbinical religious Judaism he was deeply immersed in the Jewish mystical tradition of the Zohar and Kabbalah. Thus one can discount his claim to be an ‘atheistic’ Jew. Or else atheism has a more specific meaning for him.
I would place the change of emphasis in his writing or, at least the beginning of the change, in 1915. My guess would be that Freud was unaware of the coming Jewish Revolution until he joined B’nai B’rith in 1895. That knowledge would have shaped the direction of his researches. Whatever science was involved would have been subordinated toward achieving the Revolution. At the same time that he was working out the nature of psychoananlysis as Bakan indicates he must also have been studying the Zohar and Kabbalah. I haven’t read or studied either so I have to rely on Bakan’s analysis of their influence. Bakan traces strong mystical influences running side by side with what passed for science in Freud’s mind. As Freud persistently says he’s going to ignore the facts if favor of projections one must assume that there is more mysticism than science in Freud’s construction of psychoanalysis- as he says ‘his creation.’
Bakan points out that Freud transited from the role of physician to that of ‘healer.’ That is analogous to the hands on approach of Christian Fundamentalism. Freud then for all practical purposes abandoned medicine for healing. Then, sometime between 1913, the year of the beginning of the Jewish revolution, and 1915 he abandoned psychoanalytical research for his ‘cultural’ studies.’ In other words, he began to apply his psychological studies to the manipulation of cultures through his developing ideas on Group Psychology.
Just as Freud learned that there were screen memories that transformed more painful memories into something more acceptable to salve those injured feelings so Freud learned that he could develop ‘screen’ language to serve up unpalatable meanings in palatable ways. Thus what he says has a reasonable meaning to the uninitiated but has a totally different meaning to the initiated- those with the key. In many ways it is the same as a criminal argot. Those who understand the argot can discuss topics openly without the uninitiated understanding, while only those with the key can twig it. Ya dig?
The key incident that fixed his mind on ‘cultural interests’ was his father’s story of the guy who knocked his hat into the gutter. Freud then, in attempting to diguise his hatred for ‘Christianity’ while secretly admiring it because of his nurse who gave him an inflated opinion of his importance, and his desire to avenge his father and hence all Jews through his Moses fixation, developed his program. Thus he acted in his own mind altruistically and need feel no guilt.
Freud was very seriusly conflicted, also suffering from depression according to Bakan. Hence his purpose was to knock the whole of European Christianity into a cocked hat in the gutter, which is to say the actual persons of Europe. Compare Freud to Rebbe Schneerson in America.
Thus, the use of terms like ‘Culture’ and ‘Civilization’ should always be placed in the context of Jews and Europeans. In this manner he avoids the appearance of bigotry and hatred while sounding ‘scientific.’
Now, this obsession and extreme form of vengeance for something that, after all, didn’t happen to him nor did he witness it, might certainly be considered a neurosis, probably a psychosis and possibly a degree of insanity. In reading Bakan there is a hint that he believes Freud had a disordered mind. Indeed, Fritz Lang’s movie The Testament Of Dr. Mabuse should be held steadily in mind when reading of Freud’s later career. Lang must have had Freud in mind when he filmed the movie.
Lang also had a hand in the making of The Cabinet Of Dr. Caligari from which film he was dismissed. Lang’s departure from Caligari changed the ending of that movie to the conventional note of the victim, or whistle blower, being declared insane. Lang reversed this by making the perpetrator Caligari/Mabuse insane as in real life with Freud. Further the disciple of Mabuse, the head of the asylum, Dr. Baum was also declared insane. Although the problem appeared to be solved the threat of the conspiracy continuing from Mubuse’s cell, now occupied by Dr. Baum who has assumed Dr. Mabuse’s identity, looms like a spectre over the denouement.
While Freud was never incarcerated as he sould have been, he was imprisoned in his mind no less than Drs. Mabuse and Baum or the character in Gradiva which held such fascination for Freud. It is interesting that Freud had a plaster cast of the relief of Gradiva’s heel on which the story of Gradiva was based that the displayed prominently in his office. The story obviously had greater significance for him than his ‘objective’ analysis of the story would lead one to suspect.
Thus from 1915 to 1935 like Dr. Mabuse he sat imprisoned in his projection of reality churning out page after page, volume after volume of criminal plans for the subversion of civilization which is to say of Euroamerican civilization but not Jewish culture. He makes a definite point of that illusion of whose future he is discussing applies only to Europe and Christianity rather than religion in general which would include his own Judaism. At this point he is not aware of the burgeoning Wahabi Moslemism so that his message is that Jewish beliefs are real while Christian beliefs and Scientific reality are illusory. One has to penetrate the screen language and convert it into the proper psychological intent.
As David Bakan points out Freud lived his whole life in a sort of Jewish ghetto having very little contact with Europeans.
His choice of Jung as the potential heir to his ‘creation’ may have had as much to do with a desperate attempt to reestablish a connection similar to that of his childhood Christian nurse. Thus his overtures to Jung while under extreme stress were driven from his unconscious while he himself was unaware of his true motivations. This would have been an expression of a repetition compulsion. Thus as his nurse disappeared from his life under discreditable circumstances he replicated the situation with Jung. His attempt to convert Moses (hence himself) into an Egyptian may have been a last attempt to replicate and resolve this early contact with Christianity. His view of European civilization then was filtered wholly through a Jewish projection of possibilities. He really had no intimate knowledge of European mores.
From 1915 on, then, his writings were obsessed with hatred for Euroamerica and a desire to wreak vengeance on them by destroying the basis of their civilization. His ideas for the subversion of European civilization were carried to America by the international B’nai B’rith organization to be adopted and employed there. In addition Revolutionary plans executed in Europe in 1917 were financed and organized by the world Jewish government in the US. While functioning according to local conditions the Revolution was conducted on an international scale. Act locally, think globally. Hence Jewish revolutionaries left the US for Russia after 1918 to aid in the consolidation going on there. This is really an incredible repressed story in the Freudian cultural manner. Very Freudian that such phenomenal criminal activity that were best left invisible was repressed into humanity’s unconscious.
At this point I think it mght be well to examine Freud’s vision of the unconscious in more detail. While there can be little doubt that there is a subconscious function to the human mind usually referrred to as the unconscious after Freud that had been an accepted fact amongst scientific researchers for a hundred years Freud has been given the credit for discovering it. The exact nature had not been determined before Freud nor does Freud determine it. His view is merely a projection of his own conscious and subconscious needs.
4.
In David Bakan’s view Freud made a compact with ‘Satan.’
Certainly not in the literal sense but in the figurative sense that Freud would do anything, abandon any
moral precepts, to achieve fame. Bakan points out the supercription to Freud’s Interpretation Of Dreams a quote from Virgil: Flectere si nesqueo, superos, Acheronta movebo. Translated as: If the gods above are no use to me, than I’ll move all hell. Freud further blurred the line between good and evil or amalgamated the two from the influence of Sabbatai Zevi and Jacob Frank who cast off all morality. Since Freud has been successful in altering both Euroamerican and Jewish morality toward these immoral or amoral beliefs by false ‘Satanic’ criminal doctrines it is imperatvie to debunk his personal projection of the ‘unconscious.’
As he ‘made a pact’ with powers below- the unconscious- against the powers above- the conscious- he invested his projection of the unconscious with the attributes of ‘Satan’ or evil. This view of the subconscious is a self-serving fiction not based on any science.
He sets up the unconscious as an autonomous entity with the main function of blighting the conscious. He give the powers of hell supremacy over the powers of heaven. The notion is mere fantasy; it cannot be. There is no possibility that the function of the subconscious doesn’t have a positive function in and of itself and in relation to the conscious. If you actually think abut it for a moment you wil realize this must be true; every part of the body works to the benefit of the whole; there can be no exception for the subconscious.
Now, nature is not flawless. The order that the religious seem to find is not there. Nature functions in a much more imperfect or haphazard way. It takes only one peek through the Hubble to see that.
However the relationship between the conscious and subconscious is delicate and easily disrupted especially in the early years of the organism when it has no experience with which to evaluate the events occurring to it. The Ego and Anima are not part of the subconscious and possibly not of the conscious but functions through the conscious and subconscious minds.
The conscious mind perceives phenomena and acts on them but the terrific inflow of impressions is more than it can deal with so the day’s input is received into the subconscious for further reference. Thus a major function of dreams in the sleeping state is to review and process, organize the information into a coherent whole for future reference. The subconscious then is able to compare incoming information with experience for the appropriate response. When the conscious and subconscious minds are attuned, that is to say, the personality is integrated, the system works properly, otherwise the response is distorted by one’s fixations. This is very easy to see in Freud.
However, especially in youth when experience is scant, the mind may be challenged with some devastating new experience for which there are no reference points. If an appropriate response is made there is no problem. If an inappropriate response is made against which future experience may be in variance, the earlier response which has become fixated will over rule the current response and substitute the fixated inappropriate response. Thus the current response will constellate around these earlier fixations which gives one bizarre symbolic dreams and inappropriate responses.
The inappropriate response will usually result from an insult to the Ego or, in other words, one’s sexual identity. In turn the response to this insult will be expressed in a sexual affect.
The purpose of psychoanalysis, which is real science, although Freud didn’t see that, is to locate and exorcize them allowing the conscious and subconscious aspects of the mind to function properly as a unit. Dreams are actually important because they are an analysis of life’s experience providing responses. None of this, of course takes in intelligence, discipline and other functions of mind and character that Freud dismisses as irrelevant.
Now, in the cultural war between Judaism and Euroamerica, or as the Jews express it, Christianity, Freud infused the Jewish subconscious with a disregard for morality al la Jacob Frank in relation to Sabbatai Zevi. Any evil was excused so long as it seemed to advance the cultural war. While this infusion may not have reached down through the ranks of Jewry- which is to say they behaved in a certain way but didn’t know why- the ideas were thoroughly planted in the minds of what Henry Ford would call the International Jew.
The cold war between Jews and Europeans became a shooting war in the wake of the Great War. Men, money and munitions flowed in a wide steady stream from the United States to Russia. Coordinators established themselves in strategic locations. If one reads restricted, censored literature the impression is made that horrible anti-Semites harassed and hated innocent unresisting Jews. Jews may have been killed but they were not innocent or unresisting. To the contrary freed from guilt, or supposedly so, by Freudian/Sabbatian/Frankist precepts, abattoirs were established throughout Russia where unsuspecting Russians were led in one door and flowed out the other in liquid form. This is not the place to dwell on gruesome details. The literature exists but the collective Jewish mind has repressed the deeds into the collective unconscious. In other words, history has been denied and censored so that the crimes can’t be known. Actually Whittaker Chambers, the Red spy, translated a number of these books concerning the Hungarian atrocities of Bela Kun and Tibor Szmuelly, but those are impossible to come by. All this slaughter was made possible and justified by the doctrines of Freud.
In relation to the 1919 atrocities of the Jews in Hungary and the response which expelled them from power it should be noted that Israeli troops were recently introduced into Hungary to reestablish the tyranny of Kun and Szmuelly. Don’t ever think that historical memories are short. Remember the Amalikites.
Freud sat confortably in Vienna looking on as the carnage occurred. If, as believed, the tenor of his writing changed in 1925 that was probably due to the death of Lenin in 1924. By 1925 it was apparent that the Jewish Revolution in Russia was on shaky grounds as Stalin began his rise to power so that Freud may have renewed his cultural attack or, on the other hand, as 1928 was the terminal projected year of the Jewish Revolution Freud may have been celebrating the death of European Civlilation when he published The Future Of An Illusion. By the illusion he meant European Christianity and he meant European civilization was finished. The Rome of the Popes should have fallen.
In Illusion and Civilization And Its Discontents Freud makes us believe that the malcontents of civilization are synonymous with civilization rather than being a minority that always exists during great revolutionary changes. Freud whose Judaism was challenged by the Scientific Revolution as much as Christianity or Moslemism must have been aware of the reactionary ‘instinct’ as he himself was in reaction to both European Christianity and the Scientific Revolution.
David Bakan closes his volume with these words:
…under the ruse of “playing the devil” (Freud) served Sabbatian interests. In this respect, however, just as Freud may be regarded as having infused Kabbalah into science, so may he be regarded as having incorporated science into Kabbalah. Sabbatian-wise, by closing the gap between Jewish culture and Western Enlightenment he acts as the Messiah not only for Jewish culture but for Western culture as well.
Note that Western Enlightenment is reduced to Western culture putting it on a par with Jewish culture which is a tacit admission that there is no science in Jewish culture and none is wanted in Western ‘culture’. Language as a screen.
Bakan’s is a hefty statement. Under the guise of the Devil Freud becomes the Messiah not only for Jews but for Euroamericans. Truly in this scenario good comes from evil in the Jewish mind, assuming that the Messiah is good. In case you missed it, Freud according to Bakan was the Second Coming. Narrowing the gap between the two cultures means the imposition of Jewish culture as the Chosen or Abelite people over Western or Cainite culture. Thus the age old goal of reversing the Cain and Abel story so that Cain is obligated to give preference to Abel is accomplished.
By infusing Kabbalah into science, science has been subjugated to the unscientific Jewish culture so that the Catholic/Jewish situation of Medieval Europe has been restored. The Enlightenment that invalidated Judaism, Christianity and Moslemism has been obliterated, hence the revival of religion happening today. Thus in Bakan’s eyes and according to Freud’s intent Judaism has deconstructed Euroamerican society so the reconstruction according to Jewish cultural mores can commence.
The result has been accomplished by the destruction of the Scientific Consciousness as there is little of science in Freud’s cultural writings. He just says what he believes and wants you to believe and asserts it as a fact. As always there were some Westerners who resented the encroachment of the strict limits imposed by science. Rider Haggard in his Allan Quatermain made that as clear as possible. The topic is the dominant theme of Edgar Rice Burrough’s Tarzan novels. Henry Ford and his mass production methods was a symbol of that rebellion against the strict limits set by the clock. Some denounced it as Taylorism; but with each passing decade the West became more acclimated to the change as the reactionary mood became acclimated to the new reality.
Freud invents ‘instincts’ and their ‘renunciation’ to give sense to his arguments; the renunciation of instincts’ almost sounds scientific but it isn’t. there are no instincts nor does Freud even attempt to demonstrate their existence. Like the rest or Freud’s psychology the notion is just something Freud made up. As always he notes only the negative societal destructive effects. He says nothing of the ‘instinct’ to be around people which would conflict with his instinct against civilization- the last is a vague enough term the way he uses it. But as Fritz Lang points out the hypnotic spell cast by Mabuse negates criticism so that the head psychologist of the asylum, the objective scientist himself, Dr. Baum, suspends critical judgment falling under the spell of Mabuse to the point of becoming a disciple just as Lang himself did. Indeed, as the West has. Hitler was a blessing in disguise for the Jewish Revolution. The guilt caused by Hitler completely disarmed the West allowing the reconstruction of Western mores to proceed at a faster pace than would have been possible otherwise. Indeed, the Nazi Era drove the entire psychotic Jewish Revolution to the shores of the United States beginning in the early thirties. Thus the deconstruction of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ America was assured.
To return to 1919.
Exhuming Bob 14: The LAW And Bob Dylan
November 17, 2008
Exhuming Bob 14:
The LAW And Bob Dylan
by
R.E. Prindle
https://idynamo.wordpress.com/2008/10/14/exhuming-bob-13-fit-4-bob-as-messiah/
http://www.forward.com/articles/14574
Stephen Hazan Arnoff wrote the aove referenced Forward article titled: Jesus, Bob: To Live Outside The LAW You Must Be Honest: Dylan’s Born Again Years Documented.
Mr. Arnoff is very difficult to follow. Kern writing in the comments to Mr. Arnoff’s article puts it succinctly: Mr. Arnoff you have written a lot of words, but after reading them all, I have no idea what you are saying.
I think part of the problem is cross cultural references. By living outside the LAW Mr. Arnoff means Talmudic Law and not the legal code of the United States of America. Mr. Arnoff is what I suppose he would call a ‘secular’ Jew reviewing ‘messianic’ Jews in the Jewish Forward, a ‘secular’ Jewish web magazine.
I have no idea what Kern is but as a goy I have to read standard English words and try to put them into trans-cultural contexts. If I make a mistake or two I hope I may be forgiven.
I perceive the title To Live Outside The Law You Must Be Honest to mean that Dylan is living his life outside the Jewish Law rather than an outlaw to the US legal code. This is a construction of Dylan’s line I hadn’t made but it may very well be accurate. Depending on whether the line from ‘Absolutely Sweet Marie’, read, possibly, Mary, is addressed to his fellow Jews explaining a seeming dalliance with goyish ways or in some sort of general ‘poetic’ license referring to the US legal code or societal mores, Arnoff’s understanding of the line may be correct. As we are coming to realize Dylan’s religious conflicts appear to dominate his work. After all anyone who believes the Bible is the actual word of God is living a religious delusion. After he had established himself by 1966 his mother proudly informed us that Dylan had an open bible on a stand in his living room, of all places to which he hopped up regularly to check for references. There is a C&W connection here in the song, If Jesus Came To Your House. The rhetorical question was would he find a Bible open on the table or a Playboy Magazine. Dylan could answer affirmitively: The Bible. That’s what his mother proudly announced.
While Mr. Arnoff proudly says that Dylan was busy trashing goy, what he calls Christian, culture he fails to note that Dylan was no less disrepectful of traditional Jewish ways. But that brings us to what Mr. Arnoff’s ostensible intent is, that is, to review Joel Gilbert’s film: The Gospel Years.
As I understand it, Mr. Gilbert, who is Jewish trying to be a Dylan clone, made a four hour film entitled Rolling Thunder And The Gospel Years from which he abstracted the final two hours and has reissued it in the two hour version. Acting on that information I obtained the four hour DVD while I haven’t seen the two hour film, if it is different. I’m assuming that it is identical to the four hour version.
As I am not a Jew my sensibilities are different than Mr. Arnoff’s who is ensconced within the Jewish faith, culture, nation or by whatever name it is going by this week. Mr. Arnoff, ignoring Dylan’s early upbringing, see my above referenced essay Fit 4, Bob As Messiah, and psychology assumes that Dylan abandoned Judaism and turned to Christianity because:
…deep pain drives deep “witnessing” in the realm of born again Christian acolytes; that the tumult of drugs, social and political burnout and the failures of the sexual revolution left many people broken in ways that the Jesus movement- rooted in heady Southern California, where Dylan and many other counterculture heroes lived at the time- exploited to attract vulnerable souls.
One assumes that Mr. Arnoff is characterizing Dylan as a ‘vulnerable soul’ rather than a conscious human being. The question in my mind is who was exploiting whom. My notions of Christianity and Judaism and their relationship to each other is obviously culturally opposed to that of Mr. Arnoff. I believe Dylan was much more calculating, or to put it another way, had an agenda, then might appear at first glance. His vision of Christianity and Judaism was also much different than that of the ‘secular’ Mr. Arnoff.
Life is more complex, as are psychologies, than any of us can possibly express but we must try. Gilbert’s full video, Rolling Thunder And The Gospel Years, seems to be such a serious attempt.
Dylan’s life may be characterized as a downward spiral from, say, 1959 when he left home to his encounter with Jesus in 1979 when as Mr. Arnoff suggests, he hit bottom but for different reasons than Mr. Arnoff suggests. Mr. Arnoff seem oblivious to the fact that Dylan was indoctrinated by a Lubavitcher Rebbe for his Bar Mitzvah.
Gilbert picks up Dylan’s life from 1975 to 1981 the last few years before the singer bumped against the lower depths, and examines it closely. Viewed from one perspective Dylan led a disgusting life from 1955 to 1979 as he groped to ind his way out of his self-confessed confusion. A large part of his confusion was the conflict between his Jewish and Christian milieux.
The few years between the abandonment of the first phase of his career when ‘He Threw It All Away’ and the resumption of his profligate ways with 1975’s Rolling Thunder Review after he had given birth to his brood in fulfillment of the Jewish Law to be fruitful and multiply was his only attempt to quiet his confusion. Those few years were also years in which he studied the Bible evidently trying to reconcile his Orthodox Jewish upbringing with his surrounding Christian milieu.
After this relatively quiet period, having fulfilled the Biblical injunction to be fruitful and multiply, Dylan savaged his marriage so brutally that his wife had no choice but to leave him. Incredibly in view of his behavior this astonished him so much that it caused him to reevaluate his conduct somewhat and thus ‘deep pain’ drove him into the realm of born again Christian acolytes.’
On one level this may be true. However it must be borne in mind that at one time, or perhaps many times, his father told him that a son could become so defiled that his parents would reject him but that God could lead him back to virtue again. This notion seems to have dominated his life from that point on so that when he hit the bottom of the divorce fulfilling his father’s prophecy he began to seek God to bring him ‘home.’ A little analysis might have been more fruitful but Dylan is a ‘true believer.’ Thus on another level it is not improbable that Dylan attempted to resolve his confusion by an attempted amalgamation of Christianity and Judaism into one faith. One faith=no more confusion. Not by converting the one to the other but gently leading them to one confession. Of course, since this would obliterate the distinction between Jews and Christians the idea is as much anathema to the Jews as actual conversion to Christianity. At that point then Dylan contravened Judaic LAW and become an outlaw to Judaism.
Thus it appears that Mr. Arnoff accuses Dylan of both living outside the LAW and being dishonest. This seems to be his complaint. That combined with the review of the film being conducted by the ‘messianic’ Jews For Jesus. The mere mention of the word Jesus throws the ‘secular’ Mr. Arnoff into a frenzy. He excuses Gilbert on the grounds that he is merely trying for exposure for his film but can’t conceal his distaste for Mitch Glaser and Al Kashi of Jews For Jesus.
Mr. Arnoff doesn’t seem to understand what Dylan is doing so that he is conflicted between Dylan’s ‘jewish’ work and his Jesus period. Note I do not use the term ‘Christian.’ That is because I don’t think Dylan ever embraced Christianity but approached Jesus as a Jewish persona from a standpoint similar to Jews For Jesus; Dylan was essentially blowing smoke into the eyes of Christians. Mr. Anrnoff complains:
Most of the time, Dylan embodies a multi-layered approach to his subject- with wordplay, rich cultural allusions, insinuations, irony and clusters of unexplained questions. In his writing and perforning, Dylan grasps at defining themes with ferocity and dynamism that allow renowned critics like Milton scholar Christopher Ricks (who dedicated some 500 pages to Dylan in his 2004 book “Dylan’s Vision Of Sin”) to compare his canon without reservation to that of Shakespeare and Milton. With few exceptions including the aforementioned songs, the Christian (Jesus) period of Dylan’s work remains unconvincingly simplistic, overly literal, humorless and blunt.
Well maybe so. I’ve never listened to it having no interest in what I consider an unlistenable singer after Blonde On Blonde. Whatever happened the muse walked away from Dylan after 1966 and never spoke his again. While as Mr. Arnoff approvingly notes of the Jewish Dylan, Christopher Ricks compares Dylan favorably to Shakespeare and Milton, I can only say that Mr. Ricks is bereft of his senses.
Dylan wrote some nice songs, most of them on Another Side, but that’s just about as far as you can take it. Always highly derivative, after 1966 borrowing became so explicit as to narrowly skirt plagiarism. Indeed not a few of his contemporary folk singers openly accuse him of plagiarism. I’m a little more lenient; hell, they’re only popular songs, not even good Country and Western.








