Looking For A Miracle

The Sixties And Its Religion

 by

 R.E. Prindle

Sigmund Freud

Sigmund Freud

The deliberate pursuit of whatever type of sex is considered deviant by one’s own culture is part of the program of spiritual seekers as far removed from each other in time and space as Tantric Hindu, California Satanists, Daoist sorcerers,  Siberian shamans, and paunchy English “witches”, with their scourges and “sky-clad” retreats in the New Forest.  To break tabu is a necessary stage in vama marg tantric ceremonies, for instance, in which dietary and sexual tabus are deliberately broken one after another.  It is recognized by these technologists of the spirit that deviation from socially accepted mores is a powerful tool for awakening the sleeping powers within us, provided that this deviation takes place within the occult engines they have designed.

Peter Levenda- Sinister Forces, Book III, pp. 211-12

     The key to the Sixties is Sigmund Freud.  The Sixties was when Freud’s schemes came to fruition.  He turned Aryan civilization on its head.

As unpleasant as it may be to recognize Freud was Jewish and his activities were based on his Jewishness and the age old prophecies that govern Jewish activities.  Freud’s father came from the Galicia that was a stronghold of Hasidic magical Judaism.  Freud himself was a student of the magical Zohar and Kabbalah.

Along with them he acquired the Jewish hatred of the Other, specifically Europeans or Aryans.  He identified his psyche with the Semite Hannibal who attacked Rome- Freud’s symbol for Europe.  In actuality Hannibal defeated Rome in the field.  The Romans retreated within their walls refusing to come out and fight.  Unable to sustain his army Hannibal was forced to vacate Italy.  Thus, although he had won all the battles he couldn’t win the war.  This was a real dilemma Freud had to solve and he did.

Freud began his career as a biologic researcher looking for eel gonads.  Seeing no route to universal fame from that research he became interested in psychology.  Here was some room to move.

Freud was born in 1856 in the midst of the great unfolding of the Aryan mind.  He became associated with a fellow Jewish doctor, Joseph Breuer, who had become involved in researches into hysteria.  This led Freud to the center of research in hysteria at the Salpetriere hospital run by Jean-Martin Charcot in Paris when Freud was about thirty years old.  He could only afford Paris for a few months but they were eye opening months.  He learned the nature of hypnotism and its control element- suggestion.  This would be the stratum on which he built psychoanalysis.

Following Charcot Freud’s first book is an analysis of hysteria.  The book caused no stir.  Turning to associate Breuer and his proto-psychoanalysis Freud studied the nature of dreams.  He characterized dreams as the ‘royal road to the unconscious.’  Following Sherlock’s advice Freud carefully studied the literature on dreams which was fairly extensive.  His dream book flopped failing to make Freud a household word.

While issuing a steady stream of articles he contributed his greatest work in the form of The Psychopathology of Everyday Life in 1901. In 1905 he contributed the useful Jokes And Their Relation to the Unconscious and another significant work that gave a clear indication of Freud’s direction Three Essays On The Theory Of Sexuality. This small volume finally created the fire storm he had been trying for. At the time the book was considered close to or actual pornography. At any rate it attacked prevailing European or Aryan morality breaking all sexual tabus.

While one may argue that Freud’s was a scholarly approach there is undeniable smut to it.  Freud in general reveled in smuttiness.  He always leaves you with a slightly sickened feeling.  There was controversy then as well as now as to his intent.

D.H. Lawrence who was no stranger to sexual theory and controversy denounced Freud in The Plumed Serpent for wishing to destroy prevailing European morality let alone reforming it.  In this opinion he was correct.  Both Sexual Theory and his Theory of the Unconscious and mass hypnosis would be his primary weapons.

Freud, contrary to popular opinion was not the originator or the discoverer of the unconscious nor even an early investigator.  The unconscious had been a hot topic in European thought ever since Anton Mesmer arrived in Paris in mid-eighteenth century.  There were many different ideas concerning the nature of the unconscious but by 1915 Freud had swept them off the board so that by the end of The Great War his perverted version stood alone.  The question was how to use this tool he designed to destroy the conscious mind and manipulate the unconscious to attain his and Jewish ends.

In the nineteenth century the only mass media that could be used to manipulate public opinion, the unconscious, was the newspaper, but the newspaper requires consciousness making access to the unconscious difficult.  It was only in the twentieth century that the great media capable of manipulating the unconscious directed arrived.  Perhaps the most important of these was modern advertising that arose alongside the movies to be followed by radio, talkies and television.  Color photo magazines are not to be overlooked either.  Photographic images go directly into the unconscious.

Of these media the most overlooked is the power of advertising to quickly change mores, for it was mores that Freud had to alter or modify, the way of looking at and thinking about things.

Freud had a nephew in the US by the name of Edward Bernays.  Bernays being Freud’s wife’s maiden name.  Eddie Bernays became a publicist with George Creel and the Committee on Public Information during WWI turning to publicity as a vocation after the war.  Thus he became a premier advertising consultant.  His influence today is greatly overlooked.

The CPI was a tremendous propaganda, indoctrination and conditioning machine.  The Wilson administration bludgeoned the American public into its party line.  Bernay’s would use those techniques to change the mores of the American people post-war following Freud’s ideas.  First he visited his Uncle Sigmund in Vienna where they had long summer walks and quiet talks.  What was said isn’t known but can be inferred from Bernay’s subsequent career.

According to Wikipedia quoting his daughter Anne Bernays felt that the public’s democratic judgment was ‘not to be relied upon,’ and he feared that [the American public] could very easily vote for the wrong man or want the wrong thing, so that they had ‘to be guided from above.’

Of course, who is to judge who is the wrong man and on what basis as well as the wrong or right thing.  Who is the infallible ‘above’  who is going to force his candidate on the erring people?

In other words, Bernays wanted a dictatorship of virtue.  Unable to disturb the political system in one fell swoop it would to be don incrementally.  Using techniques imbibed from his uncle’s political agenda Bernays did just that experimenting first through the commercial field.

Old fashioned advertising in print, as radio and TV hadn’t come into existence as yet, consisted of long prose pleas trying to persuade the conscious mind.  When color printing came into common use an attractive image coupled with product ID and snappy slogan, or propaganda,  would prove to be more effective.  Thus to promote Lucky Strike cigarettes there was an incredibly attractive slender woman smoking a Lucky with the slogan ‘Reach for a Lucky instead of a sweet.’  The ad then carried a number of subliminal  messages as well as the plea.

When Bernays began his work the Aryan female ideal was the Arthurian conception portrayed most notably in the Pre-Raphaelite paintings.  Virginal and desirable as a wife.  Freud’s sexual goal was to invert that image to turn Aryan women into sluts.  Smoking in women was considered sluttish at the time just as cosmetics were symbolic of the prostitute or painted woman.  Good girls didn’t wear lipstick.  Bernays through his advertising techniques was to change all this.

Meanwhile back in Vienna, Freud was developing techniques to change the mind.  As always an avid student of literature Freud latched onto a small book by the Frenchman Gustav Le Bon titled:  The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind.  Freud incorporated Le Bon’s studies into his own Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego.  By ego he meant group ego not the individual ego.

The analysis of Le Bon meshed with the advertising propagandistic ideas of his nephew.  Freud then combined their work with his understanding of sexuality, drugs and his version of the unconscious  to undermine Aryan civilization.  Remember he was successful in imposing his vision of the unconscious as the only version of the unconscious on the entire psychological and psychiatric discipline, hence society as a whole.

Aiding the effort was the triumph of  Adolf Hitler in 1933 in Germany.  Hitler’s anti-Jewish stance drove the whole horde of Freud’s disciples out of Europe to the United States.  While Freud knew what he knew the other members of his psychoanalytic order didn’t.  I don’t mean to be unkind to Freud’s personal lumpenproletariat but they just didn’t grasp what he was talking about.  Nevertheless they were accepted at face value becoming not only influential but directors of US culture during the fifties and sixties after which their prestige began to wane.

Most of them settled in the two culture capitols of the US, NYC and LA so that the media took their lead from them.  While few, if any, understood Freud his vision of the unconscious as a discrete entity extraneous to the mind and actually the body while controlling one’s actions to the exclusion of the conscious mind was readily accepted and adopted as was his notion of repression in a completely distorted form.

The reality of Freud’s vision of the unconscious was quickly picked up by sci-fi writers who turned out a stream of such novels as  Jack Schaefer’s I Am Legend, Jack Finney’s Invasion Of The Body Snatchers and Heinlein’s The Puppet Masters.  Not that we consciously understood at the time.

The State of Israel had come into existence in 1948 setting the Middle East ablaze in a series of wars.  The 1956 war was a turning  point for the Jews.  They had been shamed by their non-resistance to the death camps so the ‘56 war allowed them to assert their manhood and become fierce warriors driving US tanks and jet fighters.  The war also had intellectual consequences.

Aryan Europe and America had astounded the world by its astonishing scientific discoveries and intellectual development unshared by the rest of the world including the Jews.  Emboldened by their military success they set out to reassert their pre-scientific religious dominance they felt they had enjoyed throughout history until the nineteenth century.   Indeed a Jewish woman named Barbara Spectre has established the Paideia Foundation in Europe to claim a parity between what she calls Jewish Knowledge and Aryan Knowledge.  She specifically says that the future will not be like the nineteenth century when science wrested the crown from the Jews.

This is apparently not the first such crisis of the Jewish mind.  A site called Jewniverse published a short piece credited to Daniel M. Bronstein on 7/19/13.  I reproduce it here in full:

Quote:

Talmudic lore offers many episodes of rabbinic sages intellectually defeating the luminaries of the Hellenistic world.  Far less common are instances of rabbis dismembering their pagan nemeses.  So 2nd-century Rabbi Joshua Ben Hananiah really stands apart.

Acting on Roman Emperor Hadrian’s dare to abduct Athens’ top philosophers, Ben Hananiah traveled all the way to the celebrated city-state and coerced a local into revealing the secret location of the philosophical academy.

Upon reaching the heavily defended abode, the esteemed rabbi tricked the academy’s elders into killing the guards.

In a match of wits, Ben Hananiah demonstrated his intellectual superiority while exposing the vapidity of Greek wisdom.  After kidnapping 60 of Athen’s best, he brought the scholars before Hadrian, who placed their fate in the sage’s hands.

Using what can only be called magic, Ben Hananiah caused the philosophers’  shoulders to be violently wrenched from their bodies.  All of them were killed.  Other sages, like Hillel the Elder, have been praised for almost superhuman patience.  But Ben Hananiah’s actions present another view of the sages: as people who were extraordinary, but flawed.

Unquote.

Of course Plato’s academy had neither a secret location nor was it heavily guarded but it makes a good story that flatters Jewish sensibilities, apparently of a highly bloodthirsty order.  Thank god he didn’t pull Moses, trick and send ten plagues on the poor nitwit, stupid Platonic academicians.  How Barbara Spectre is going to replicate Rabbi Hananiah remains to be seen.  Let’s hope she doesn’t operate in the same realm of fantasy as the good rabbi.

Just as Moses through Yahweh destroyed Pharaoh, as Rabbi Hananiah demolished the hated Platonic Academy so Freud had calculated the destruction of nineteenth century Aryan science.

Nineteen-sixty was the critical year.  Western American society reached its apex in that year, but the demands of the scientific attitude exceeded the ability of the body politic to rise to it.  The people slipped back to a pre-scientific mentality.  Whether we saw it or not the crash of Western society that resulted in the Manson murders and the Rolling Stones at Altamont began in 1960.  Actually the much celebrated Woodstock concert of ‘69 was evidence of the intellectual retreat also, a premonition of Altamont.

By 1960 TV had reached a certain level of maturity.  During the fifties when programming was developing most locales had only one or two networks while there was some concern TV wouldn’t make it commercially.  By 1960 the three networks and independent system was in place.  The sitcom and drama setup was well organized.  Hollywood had learned the Freudian formula of using the medium for indoctrination and conditioning.

The fifties had been the great creative period for science fiction both in literature and movies.  This whole body of outstanding material  was now mined by TV.  Rod Serling’s Twilight Zone successfully invaded the minds of millions while the gold standard was probably Gene Roddenberry’s Star Trek.  Both producers were Jewish.

It is impossible now to recount the propaganda, indoctrination and conditioning of the many, many series and thousands of episodes representing tens of thousands of hours of viewing that made war on established beliefs gradually weaning the multitudes from old mores to new.  Mostly the old mores with different content much as new religions build their religious edifices on the old religion’s sites.

The new religion was Saturnic or in another word, Satanic and the hallmark of Satanism is violence.  Few people now remember the TV series, Bus Stop, but that show was a direct assault on established beliefs and attitudes toward violence.  Incredible gratuitous mindless violence for the time far surpassed today when sadistic pornographic violence with nudity or nakedness perhaps a better word, thrown in.

One of the Twilight Zone episodes was a depiction of Charles Beaumont’s short story The Howling Man, the script also written by him, in which Monks somewhere in Ruritania had captured Satan and had him safely locked in a cell where he howled incessantly all night long.  A passing traveler asks for a night’s lodging.  Against their own strict rules forbidding it the Monks weakened and allowed him in carefully explaining to him to pay no attention to the howling man in the cell.  No good deed shall go unpunished.  The traveler naturally listens to the Howling Man’s pleas releasing him.  Satan laughing maniacally shouts Fool and rushes out the door.

Beaumont had divined the situation and put it into symbolic story form.  In the TV episode the sorry Fool spends his life searching for Satan to put him back in his cell.

It is prescient that Beaumont wrote the story in 1959.  By 1966 Ira Levin would develop the theme further when he wrote Rosemary’s Baby about the birth of the son of Satan who replaced Jesus that was made into a very influential movie a year later by that evil presence Roman Polanski.  We’ll get to that.

As is well known Sigmund Freud was a cokehead, a drug addict.  He well knew the deleterious effect of drugs on the mind and morality.  Dreams may be the royal road to the unconscious but drugs are the destroyer of morality.  The Unconscious corrupted by drugs is the end of all law and order.

As Freud, the old cokehead, said there are no coincidences so it follows that the drug explosion of the Sixties is the effect of a premeditated cause.  After all, Arnold Rothstein, a Jew, did organize the drug distribution network of the US in the 1920s.  It can also be no coincidence then that Dr. Feelgood, Max Jacobson, latched onto amphetamines as the great corrupter of society.  Jacobson also claims to have conferred with Freud in Vienna.  Getting underway in the US in post-war NYC in the forties, by 1960 Max was dispensing amphetamines by the gallon.  Imitators sprang up who poured their own gallons of amphetamine into the veins of New Yorkers.  This is fact, now  it should come as no surprise then that by 1966 NYC was overrun by criminal behavior, that seemed to explode in that year.  Or shall we say lack of morality caused by drugs.  In essence New Yorkers could no longer tell right from wrong.  Satanism ruled.  It should be needless to add that Dr. Feelgood was a Jew.  There were many factors causing the erosion of morality in the Sixties not all pertaining to religious developments that are our interest here.

The rise of science caused the intellectual disenfranchisement of all religions but more particularly within the Aryan ranks in which science developed, hence Aryan’s became disenchanted with Christianity while Jews and Moslems reinforced their belief systems against science.

Aided and abetted by Einstein’s Theory of Relativity the notion of moral equivalence took hold.  This was, one might say, cemented by the movie Mondo Cane of 1962.  While moral equivalence should have applied to all religions or moral systems it was turned exclusively against Aryan belief systems.  Movies and advertising reflected the animus against Christianity, Aryans and what Negroes called White Supremacy, that is, White rule and knowledge- science or in Negro terms, Acting White.

With all systems supposedly equal or morally equivalent while consciousness, that is objectivity was suppressed in favor of complete subjectivity or the Unconscious was endorsed, it became an easy matter to inject voodoo, witch craft and Satanism into Aryan belief systems.  Now, the transition to a satanic sensitivity was fully supported by movies and advertising as well as print media.  In 1966 the cover of Time Magazine proclaimed the message ‘God IS Dead’ in black. To the informed that was not a revelation as old gods do die while history is littered with the remains of old gods as epitomized by Shelley’s Ode to Ozymandias.  To the religious Time’s announcement was a huge blasphemy but then, the jury was still out concerning on which side the Luce’s were.

As if in celebration of the Luce’s announcement the Jew Ira Levin published his novel Rosemary’s Baby that concerns the birth of the Son of Satan although definitely by maculate means.  The novel was a commercial success bringing  the little Satan Roman Polanski on the scene who turned the novel into his equally successful movie in the year of revolution, 1968.

The impact of Polanski’s movie was quite extraordinary.  Certainly in the aftermath of the movie Satanism had been, one might say, popularized.  Of course Levin and Polanski didn’t create modern Satanism but they contributed to its manifestation.  The voo doo Saturnian cult had taken root on the East Coast being prominent in NYC.  Santeria as well all the Negro voodoo cults in the New World, of course, derived from Yoruba practices in Nigeria.  The Yoruba people combined aspects of Christianity with their own Yoruba beliefs themselves derived from Greco-Roman religious practices to create a very hybrid religion based completely in magic which through slavery passed into the New World.

Scientology, created by Ron Hubbard, one of those called UFO religions, in the forties somehow gets mixed up in this.  Certain disaffected members established their own church in England in ‘63 called the Process Church of the Final Judgment.  This outfit tried to combine Satan, Lucifer and Jesus into one religion.  No science involved here.  Charles Manson at the end of the decade would be influenced by both Scientology and the Process.

The idea was that Jesus said, Love your enemy.  Satan was the enemy of Jesus so Jesus was compelled to love Satan.  So the two along with Lucifer combined to share humanity so that virtue and evil were morally equal bringing in relativism, so right and wrong are irrelevant because what one calls right another calls wrong and vice versa.  So the law was that ‘it’s all good.’  Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law.  Everything is permitted.  A recipe for disaster no doubt.  A state of social confusion had been created, almost a state of sustained hysteria.

After 1966 LSD became significant reifying whatever beliefs one had into stone.  The fact is that nothing can be gotten out of a mind other than what is in it.  Education is everything.  To really expand one’s consciousness one has to develop it.  With drugs learning stops, especially with LSD.  If anything one only reifies one’s existing opinions.  One may think one is talking to God but notice that God isn’t saying anything back.  You’re only having a dialogue with yourself.   You don’t need LSD to do that.

A biker by the name of John Griggs dropped a tab, saw God, changed his ways and began his own religion based on LSD called The Brotherhood of Eternal Love.  Begun in the LA coastal town of Laguna Beach the cult, or more aptly perhaps, commercial enterprise expanded up and down California and into Oregon where it was especially prominent in Josephine County of Southern Oregon.  It is said the BEL dominated or controlled the marijuana, hash and LSD supply of the West Coast but rather strangely none of the authors concerning themselves with the Process Church or Manson’s Family have heard of it.  These authors seem to think that the Process had a monopoly on that drug trade although dealing with biker groups.  Perhaps the role of the biker BEL wasn’t apparent to them.  All three ‘religious’ groups mentioned above were seriously involved in drugs and hence lead a Freudian unconscious life.

The Process Church founded by Robert and Maryanne DeGrimston in London in 1963 as an offshoot of Scientology soon moved to the sinister sounding site of Xtul on the Yucatan Peninsula of Mexico.  There its Satanic, Luciferian and Jesusite form took shape.  As one can see, under the influence of Freudian psychology and the rejection of the conscious mind science had been discarded while consciousness has regressed some thousand years more or in some cases less.  Magic and superstition have once again taken center stage.  Behind the magic cults lay the teaching of one Aleister Crowley of the Golden Dawn and the infamous OTO (Ordo Templi Orientis) with its emphasis on sex magic(k).  The K Crowley added to distinguish his magick from stage magic.  May not look like much of a distinction but it is significant.

So, in 1967 we have Charles Manson being released from prison just as the Hippie thing with its legions of underage runaway girls took shape in the Haight-Ashbury district of the city of San Francisco.  The Haight was a hustler’s paradise and Manson was the man to mine that particular mountain.

More than anything the Hippie phenomenon was a symptom  of the rejection of science, or objectivity and the conscious mind in favor of superstition, subjectivity and the unconscious mind of Freud.  In connection with Freud it should be remembered that the motto of his 1900 book The Interpretation Of Dreams in his Latin quotation from Dante’s Inferno was Flectere si nequeo Superos,  Acheronta movebo which translated means:  If I cannot move heaven, I will stir up the underworld.

Freud had failed at the conscious level of science, which he attributed to anti-Semitism, so when he became aware of the unconscious through Breuer and Charcot he had found his underworld.  But that hell was part and parcel of his upbringing as Judaism is pure subjectivity hence rampant egoism capable only of creating a hell on Earth- hence Hollywood.

The Unconscious in Freud’s vision was the source of Satanic magic.  Hence it can be little wondered that at the very least per the Process Church the world was shared by Jesus and Satan with the Jesusites compelled to love their enemies and presumably turn the other cheek which is to say that Satan Rules.  In his own way the great Satanist Aleister Crowley had won the battle sharing the triumph with Freud.

By the way, the Process Trinity mirrors Greek mythology in which Zeus is the god of Heaven, Poseidon the God of the waters and Hades the god of the underworld.  Earth was the common property of all three.  So the Process reflects old age beliefs.

Because of the horrific nature of his Satanic practices all the attention has been focused on Charles Manson who identified himself as both Jesus and Satan.  Half or better of the biker groups derived their identity from Satan- Hell’s Angels, Straight Satans, Satan’s Disciples, etc.

In point of fact Manson was not doing anything his betters , i.e. Roman Polanski et al., weren’t.  The whole of Hollywood film was involved in Satanic practices.  Nor were Satanic practices new to the LA basin.  All of this cult stuff, snuffings and all was common knowledge in the fifties when I was there in the Navy.  I have no doubt it dated back through the forties and thirties.  Read Raymond Chandler and let your imagination go.  Watch the movies closely.

Manson said the reasons for the Tate-La Bianca killings were not what was thought but that he was no snitch.  It also means likely that these unknown forces were doing their best to help him once arrested as evidence disappeared, police bungled the process so that Manson and the Family might have beaten the rap except for the persistence of Bugliosi.

Manson appears to have been associated with the Polanski clique involving a large selection of A-list Hollywood.  They were involved in drug related Sado-masochistic practices and filmed themselves doing them.  Not surprisingly Manson was doing the same with his group.  Perhaps under the influence of hallucinogenics the significance  of a filmic trail didn’t seem so important.  In any event the police confiscated hours of Sado-masochistic  films from the Polanski residence.  Not unusually these have disappeared although they were offered for sale by the police.

In addition there were huge dope deals on the table that if Polanski wasn’t involved in he was well aware of.  His close friend Frykowski, a Pole from Red Poland, was involved in a scheme to distribute the amphetamine MDA and that would have been through the Polanski residence.    Shortly before the murders a dealer accused of burning them in a dope deal was brought to the residence where in the course of a large party he was strung up and tortured.

A few days later when Polanski was out of town Manson instructed his devotees to strike.  The result was horrific.  While it is said that the dope dealer Frykowski was the actual target it was the horrific death of Polanski’s pregnant wife, Sharon Tate, that garnered the headlines.

We have an interesting thing happening here that seems to have gone unnoticed.  It was a transition of consciousness that affected every member of society though few actively participated.  As an example to illustrate what was happening from 1967 through 1969 I quote from an online publication by an anonymous author concerning the transition from the Weimar Republic to the Nazi Government of Germany.    (    hppt://thespawnofthesphinx.com ) chap.17, p. 4:

Quote:

In his book, “In The Garden Of The Beast”, Erik Larson relates first hand accounts of what it was like to be an outsider (in particular the American Ambassador and his daughter) observing Hitler’s rise from Chancellor to tyrant in 1933.  It was during that year that Germany became absolutely transformed.  “It was like watching a dear friend go insane.” as one outside observer put it.  After the great transition and assimilation, German’s collective mind was “coordinated.”

Larson quoted:

“Beneath the surface, however, Germany had undergone a rapid and sweeping revolution that reached deep into the fabric of daily life.  It had occurred quietly and largely out of easy view.  At the core was a government campaign called Gleichshaltung- meaning ‘Coordination’- to bring citizens, government ministries, universities, and cultural and social institutions in line with National Socialist beliefs and attitudes.

‘Coordination’ occurred with astonishing speed, even in sectors of life not directly targeted by specific laws, as Germans willingly placed themselves under the sway of Nazi rule, a phenomenon that became known as Selbstgleichschaltung, or ‘self-coordination.’  Change came to Germany so quickly and  across such a wide front that German citizens who left the country for business or travel returned to find everything around them altered, as if they were characters in a horror movie who come back to find that people who once were their friends, clients, patients, and customers have become different in ways hard to discern.  Gerda Laufer, a socialist wrote that she felt ‘deeply shaken that people whom one regarded as friends, who were known for a long time, from one hour to the next transformed themselves.”

Unquote, unquote.

The same thing happened in the US in the fifties as Jack Finney recorded in his Body Snatchers, is happening again here at the end of the sixties and is happening now as Obama/Hitler transforms the Aryan mind.  We now have a call for a ‘meaningful dialogue’ on race which means ‘accept our views or be punished.’  There is no dialogue just an order from headquarters.

On a longer wave than Germany one entered the fun house in 1960 and through a bizarre series of dioramas one exited into an entirely different world in 1970.  On the shorter wave the rapid transition took place from 1968’s Rosemary’s Baby to the Rolling Stones fiasco at Altamont in December 1969 which had been scheduled for December 7, the anniversary of Pearl Harbor, but was delayed by a day to December 8th.

As Dylan sang, there was something happening here but few if any knew what it was.  There was no way for anyone to gain sufficient facts to interpret the whole but those with certain roles observing specific parts knew what to do.

Thus the public had no idea what Manson was doing before or after the Tate-La Bianca killings.  The killings themselves obscured everything.  Manson based his attitudes on Robert Heinlein’s  novel of 1961 Stranger In A Strange Land.  Stranger was one of the formative novels of the 60s fitting right in with the psychedelic revolution even though Heinlein had a forties-fifties mentality while adding numerous terms to the vocabulary such as ‘grokking’ and ‘water brother’.

One can imagine Manson reading it in his cell.  Then when he was released actually being a stranger in the very strange land of Haight-Ashbury.  At the same time he realized it was a parallel universe designed with him in mind.  He combined aspects of the two lead characters, the human Valentine Michael Smith raised on Mars and his terrestrial guru Jubal Harshaw.  Jubal means father of all, a role Manson assumed.  He also named his son Valentine Michael.  Smith transformed terrestrial culture as so in his way did Manson.

While on Mars Smith learned the Martian method of mind and body control which Manson adopted and extended to his disciples.  After the killings Manson began living out some desert fantasy in Death Valley.  It was there he really overstepped the bounds bringing the Park Department down on his head which then led to his charge of the murders, but it’s the desert adventure that interests us here.  While the vast majority was unaware of the Death Valley escapade detailed in Ed Sanders, The Family, (make sure you read the first edition) Mansonites saw and learned.  In the desert Manson nearly created his own country living by his own laws.  Unfortunately his prison mentality kept him from grasping his full opportunity .  He was too much the outlaw.

While I didn’t realize it at the time his influence spread up the coast to Eugene, Oregon where I was living at the time.  Those were rough and rowdy times.  There were many crimes, frequently using shotguns.  An especially outlaw area was called Fall Creek.  At one time a truck with a light rack pulled up before a camp site turning the light rack on the campers from the road.  They stood like deer staring into the lights.  The occupants turned rifles on the campers man, woman and children and mowed them down.

As far as I know the police chose not to apprehend them.  It would have been easy.  A brown pick up with a light rack in a small town?  I knew the truck while finding a brown pick up with a light rack should have been easy.  Couldn’t have been more than one in the county.

I was lured out to the area once with my wife by a couple posing as friends.  All of a sudden at eleven o’clock at night they shooed us out of their house.  As one neared the highway a narrow stone bridge crossed Fall Creek, almost a ditch at that point.  As we approached a guy came up from under the bridge, stood in the middle of the roadway waving his arms.  I wasn’t going to stop and there was room to drive around him.  No sooner had I crossed the bridge than another guy came up from under it bearing an automatic with what looked like a silencer on it.  Both began calling me names.  So, I at least, would have been murdered on the spot.

As a footnote Diane Downs of the famous murder case in the same area said she was stopped by a guy waving his arms in the middle of the road.  She was disbelieved subsequently spending her life in prison.  I know she was stopped and I believe her story.  What the DA’s problem with her was I don’t know but she was sure railroaded.

The revolutionaries flooded into the hills above Fall Creek building concrete bunkers a la Manson that they stocked with food and weapons in preparation for the Day.  Strange robberies and shootings happened fairly frequently.  There were Manson cultists around for several years.  They may still be there, or here, actually, but I no longer have reason to be in contact with them.

Of course, Manson combined Heinlein with the various Satanic cults, the writer of the Spawn Of The Sphinx calls them UFO cults, to create his unique mixture.

Manson has taken the rap for what was going on but as I have indicated Polanski and a large part of Hollywood were as deeply connected to Satanism as he was.  Remember actually billions of tablets of prescription amphetamines and barbiturates were being sold annually in addition to the hundreds of millions of hits of illegal LSD, marijuana and God only knows what.  Frykowski was negotiating to become a large distributor of the amphetamine MDA.

Drugs were not solely a Hippie phenomenon; drugs were endemic.

Polanski, who can possibly be seen as a successful Manson, continued his nefarious career being arrested in 1977 on charges of child porn or statutory rape.  While it is said that the girl’s mother rented her out for the purpose the charge was still statutory rape.  Remember Manson said that the Tate-La Bianca victims were into kiddie porn.  Polanski believing he would be sentenced to hard time, possibly even being in the same prison as Manson, who knows, took it on the lam.  Today he is a fugitive from justice living in Europe where he has powerful protection.  Still makes movies though.

The Manson trial was docked in December being very much in the news at the time of Altamont, as was the Zodiac killer, so there was a certain atmosphere surrounding the concert.

The last half of ‘69 was in some ways the apex of Aryan consciousness while at the same time its nadir.  Even as powerful rockets were propelling a manned vehicle to land on the moon carrying an astronaut to leave a footprint three inches deep in the lunar dust the unconscious was burying the conscious mind on Earth.  A giant step forward for mankind on the moon while a two thousand year regression on Earth.

Almost simultaneously as the lunar module blasted down on the moon a half million of what used to be the hope for America’s future gathered in a muddy field in New York to show a level of culture not seen since the Anabaptists four hundred years ago.

While my generation celebrates Woodstock as the high point of Sixties culture I can see it only as an embarrassment.  Not wishing to go into detail I will only mention one thing.  Columbia Records released an album call Beautiful People, an ironic insult to the Woodstock Nation as Hippies called themselves in mockery of the Jetset beautiful people.  But, if you look at the album cover closely, in the upper lower quadrant you will see some guy standing up haveing sexual intercourse with a sheep.  Beastiality as well as NAMBLA maybe endorsed by some but damned if I’ll join in.

I know I’d never be forgiven for saying so but I consider Woodstock to be the penultimate nadir of the Sixties.  The nadir was, of course, Altamont, Satan’s triumph.

While the Rolling Stones, under whose auspices the event occurred refused to take responsibility for it, the Stones were as responsible as Levin, Polanski, the Process Church and Manson for the rise of Satanism.

The Manson trial was about to commence.  Manson to a large extent incorporated Rock into his philosophy although basing his notions more on the Beatles Double Album than the Stones.  Also bear in mind that Heinlein’s Stranger In A Strange Land was his bedrock.  One could only hope that he had been captivated by the bible of evildoers, The Catcher In The Rye.

The character of society changed greatly after 1968 almost like Nazi Germany.  Sixty-eight was the year of Mao’s Cultural Revolution, the horrors of which in China are still unlearnt in Europe and the US.  The Cultural Revolution was global.  Sixty-eight was the year of Mao’s Little Red Book and his red and gold portrait pins.  Sixty-eight was the year SDS exploded and the formation of the idiot Bomber Billy Ayers’ Weathermen organization as well as the Jewish Defense League, its offshoot The Jewish Defense Organization and the criminal activities of Rabbi Meyer Kahane.  Over the period of a couple years there were thousands of bombings in US cities.  So many that very few were ever publicized.

While the Tate-La Bianca killings dominated the headlines organizations like the Brotherhood of Eternal Love, the Black Panthers and numerous cults such as The Process Church were stirring up the folk.  One was practically dizzy.  In action at the same time as Manson the Zodiac killingts of the Bay Area where Altamont would be held were going on.  There was just way way too much for people to absorb or begin to understand.    As most people were busy trying to live their lives all this crazy activity had remarkably little effect.  It was just ‘news.’

Apropos of Altamont the Stones were relatively heavily involved in Sastanic matters, that, if I am right came to a head at Altamont.

Marianne Faithfull and Jagger had been familiar with Satanism before the Redlands bust.  Anita Pallenberg, formerly with Brian Jones and then Keith Richards, was deep into Satanism.  At one time she had Brian and herself dress in Nazi uniforms.  The Nazis were a fascination of the Process Church so rather than being an innocent lark she may have been showing the Church she was in a position to influence the Stones.  Indeed, they were in awe of her.

Through the art dealer and man about Hippiedom, Robert Fraser, Marianne and Jagger had met the arch American free lance Satanist Kenneth Anger, with whom they were deeply involved, and who was associated with the arech US Satanist, Anton La Vey.  La Vey would play Satan in Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby.  That would imply that Polanski was involved in Satanism leading back to the Tate-La Bianca killings.

Post Redlands, Mick was thrown into a frenzy of hatred of society probably having thought he was a notch or two above the law immune to arrest.  Indeed he thought the enforcement of the law against him was a violation of his ‘freedom.’  Marianne had been a bit of an innocent, too naïve for her own good.  Mick now enraged turned to Satanism posing as Satan himself in his song Sympathy For The Devil of 1968.  He allowed the Stones to be featured in Jean Luc Godard’s bizarre revolutionary movie titled One+One subsequently changed to the title of Jagger’s song.  Marianne would let herself be exploited  in a couple of French films while becoming involved with the Process Church itself while starring in a Satanic film of Anger’s.

It is said now that Satanism was a minor flirtation on their parts but the indications are that the involvement was much deeper and more serious, especially on the part of Marianne that was reflected in her persona and activities in the first two years of her parting with Jagger.

It was perhaps the Process that alerted Marianne to the publication of a Soviet Satanic novel The Master And Margarita published in early 1968.  The novel has since attained a high cult status in the US and GB while becoming an industry in the former USSR.  A number of films of the novel have been produced in Europe.  A much overrated literary effort, in my opinion but a key Satanic document.

Marianne pressed Jagger to read the novel as he was about to begin production of Donald Cammel’s movie Performance, also a Satanic film, shot in the summer of ‘68, that revolutionary year.  The movie would not be released until 1971 so has no effect on the period.

Whether or not Jagger or Marianne took their Satanism as more than a hallucinogenic lark the effect of their Satanism on their fan base was intense.  Jagger was viewed as the Great Satan or, at least, a wannabe.

So the aura surrounding Altamont was imbued with Satanism.  Haight-Ashbury was Satanic.  Satanic was.

The Altamont was an almost perfect Satanic location.  The Altamont is a pass over the hills surrounding the East side of the San Francisco Bay, the East Bay.  To the North of the pass lies Contra Costa County; to the East is Stockton, Sacramento, Modesto,  and the Central Valley.  To the South are barren hillsides, desert for miles all the way to San Jose and beyond.

The pass is only a thousand feet but very windy while when the pacific fog comes in at night cold and dewy.  Today, they’ve covered the area with wind turbines, must be more spooky than ever at night.

When I was in the Navy in the late fifties I used to hitchhike back and forth from San Diego and Oakland every weekend.  I would have a friend  drop me off at the thousand foot level to begin the return trip.  Gloomy place but a quick place to pick up perhaps a very decent ride.  The demolition derby grounds were off on the right side going down, maybe at 900 feet.  Real desert.

So, through a series of misadventures, given only a couple days to set up this site straight out of hell, cold enough to freeze a witch’s tit the Stones held a free concert.  There was no parking, cars strung out along the side of Highway 40 for miles.

Everything was jerry built.  The stage was so low and surrounded by so many Hell’s Angels that few could even see the stage in the dark.  The sound was terrible.  Out into the darkness stretched a couple hundred thousand drugged shivering people.  I mean it gets cold and damp there any time of the year and this was December.

So, picture the symbolism.  The chief Droog, the Great Satan himself  is going to take the stage surrounded by Hell’s Angels and begin shouting out ‘Let me introduce myself…’  OK.  Hello, Satan.

Well, now.  Jagger and the Stones had been positioned as the bad boys of rock n’ roll by their first manager, Andrew Loog Oldham back in ‘64.  Their reputation kept getting worse and now they have improved this rep to being the house band of Hell, Satan’s own rock n’ rollers.  Huzzah!  ‘I’m a man of wealth and taste…’

There’s a Negro in a green suit who has pushed himself stage side, right behind the not so straight Satans, the Hell’s Angels.  I mean, these guys had a worse reputation in the Bay Area than Satan himself.  They used to have their club house just down the street from me.  We will never know the Negro’s motives but he does have something on his mind and he has a pistol in his pocket.  Are we looking for trouble, do you think?  He’s apparently been waiting for the moment Jagger opens his mouth to introduce himself.  Jagger begins belting it out and at that moment Meredith Hunter, for that is the Negro’s name, whips out his pistol.  Waving it in the air he begins a charge through the Hell’s Angels for the stage.  There’s a few Angels between himself and Mick who cut short Meredith’s pilgrim’s progress.

No one can say for certain that he didn’t want to put a bullet between the Great Satan’s eyes but I am positive his intent was not to take out six Hell’s Angels and then run like hell.  I’m not a gambling man but I would wager on that.

The Angels were cranked out on drugs, pot, LSD, crank or something while getting high on being tapped for the very important function of furnishing security for The Greatest Rock And Roll Band On The Entire Planet and, perhaps.- the Universe.

Wham!  Bang! Oh God!  Meredith today rests for all eternity on the Altamont or for however long it takes Time to wear down those hills to sea level.  If not Meredith, then his shade.

As Jagger made a dash for the helicopter somewhat reminiscent of the last evacuees from Saigon he was heard to mutter, ‘Something weird always happens when we play that song.  Could have a clue, Mick.  A Clockwork Orange wasn’t released for another couple years but that was the popular impression of you up on the screen, Mick.  Bad boy, bad boy, the bad boy of rock n’ roll.

Nor did Jagger abandon the persona after that disastrous experience.  He developed his ambi-sexual persona further appearing on stage as a sadistic agitator lashing the stage with his studded belt.   The Chief Droog.

Thus by the end of the sixties the suppression of the conscious rational mind had been accomplished  in favor of the vision of the unconscious as a satanic separate being whose external control of the individual  was irresistible.  Sex and drugs were used to place a generation beyond redemption.

In support of sex and drugs, TV and movies pounded out the message that rage and violence were the proper responses to one’s inability to realize one’s fantasies.

While some may pooh pooh the advancing Satanism of the Sixties and on to the present time TV and movies did advance the agenda into the present.  As incredible as it would have been to a person of the fifties when the mention of leg for lower limb was still frowned upon, copulation, not simulated even, but actual, is shown commonly on TV and in movies.  Murder as an occupation or even pastime has openly been promoted on TV shows such as Dexter that celebrates a serial killer and portrays him sympathetically, even as a hero to emulate.

In the series Breaking Bad a mild mannered high school chemistry teacher gets into manufacturing meth and slowly turn into a Death Dealer not unlike Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.

The Dexter TV series is a very special case as it seem to have been designed around the philosophy of the Process Church and that of Manson.

Dexter develops around the career of serial killer, a Death Dealer in the Process term.  It is nothing less than  a series of snuff films recording many, many ritual killings.  The ritual theme is highly developed.  The ritualistic aspects are quite startling while many of the settings are quite Satanic.

The question of incest is raised as Dexter and his sister are quite close and as the series develops they become romantically in love.  Then Dexter involves Deb, the sister,  in his ritual killings.  This cause a moral conflict in her character against her love for her brother.  After an attempt to resolve the conflict by an attempted suicide and killing of Dexter by driving the car they are riding in off the road into a lake.  She is rescued by a convenient observer then goes back to save her brother.

Both are under the care of a female psychologist who his fully aware of Dexter’s career because she analyzed Dexter’s father who had trained his son but then committed suicide when Dexter’s avidity for the kill disappointed him.  The series is really astonishing.  The psychologist is then converted into an accomplice of Dexter.

In a touching scene reminiscent of the Egyptian statue of Isis beholding her son as the father stands behind her throne, one watches as the sister/wife psychologically accepts the role of serial killer, justifying it in her mind, very well acted, now Dexter’s full accomplice.  The psychologists nods her assent as Deb wonderingly says:  The family that kills together stays together.

Thus the whole philosophy for which Manson has spent his life in prison is legitimized for public emulation.  Charles Manson told his Family: You can’t kill kill.  And there on your television screen in an incredible reversal of morality in the short space of 60 years from 1960 to the present you have the rejection of God for Satan.  If in the Sixties only 2% of the population according to Scientology could be cold blooded killers the entire population of the United States, potentially,  has been indoctrinated and conditioned to kill.  It only remains for Dexter, his sister and their psychologist to become cannibals.

Thus, through the efforts of Time Magazine, Ira Levin, Roman Polanski, The Process Church and numerous other Satanic cults aided by the Sado-masochists of Hollywood Satanism has slowly displaced Godliness.  Satan has murdered Jesus.  The unconscious of Freud has displaced the conscious mind of the Aryan past.

The road to chaos has been paved.  Can the momentum be stopped?

A Review

 THE PRAGUE CEMETERY

 By

 Umbert Eco

 Review by R.E. Prindle

 Eco, Umberto: The Prague Cemetery, A Novel, 2010, Houghton Mifflin, NYC

Part I: Prologue

 Little Bags Of Memory

 

Umberto Eco As Atlas

In this novel Eco attacks the dark subconscious mind of nineteenth century Europe. It was the moment when Europeans discovered the difference between their conscious and subconscious minds. As a historical novel Eco mines his fifty thousand volume private library to construct his story. His sources range from Dumas and Eugene Sue at one end to George Du Maurier and J.K. Huysmans at the other. At this point in history, other than Dumas I presume the other authors are virtually unread if not unknown. Fortunately I have read most of Eco’s sources with my more modest five thousand volume library.

Eco seems to have a very fond spot in his heart for George Du Maurier and I found his treatment of the author most interesting.. Du Maurier was a long time contributor to the English humor magazine, Punch in both text and artworks through the heart of the nineteenth century. The illustrations Eco uses in his novel are very reminiscent in style to those of Du Maurier. Indeed, Du Maurier is very seductive both artistically and literarily. When he was turned down for the editorship of Punch he was crushed, turning away to write and illustrate his subtly fantastic three novels Peter Ibbetson, Trilby and The Martian, the last finished just before his death in 1896.

Like Eco Du Maurier lugged a lifetime of memories, literary and personal through his novels. I’m still working my way through his sources, or favorites at least. Du Maurier was a Bohemian artist in Paris at about the same time as Henri Murger who wrote his fabulous description of Bohemian life, The Bohemians Of The Latin Quarter that was turned into Puccini’s opera, La Boheme. DuMaurier found Murger’s description of Bohemian life repellent to his own sensibilities so he romanticized the nearly same story into the lovely fairy tale of his own version, Trilby. Trilby was a sensation of its time and remains a classic.

Eco has read and thoughtfully considered Du Maurier and while Du Maurier tended to romanticize painful or repellant memories into order to create a fairy tale existence for himself all that sunshine seems to cover a bitter undergrowth. Eco who astutely perceives this was led to parody him in Eco’s own fabulous first chapter of Prague that is a hilarious stand up comedy routine worthy of the mordant, sick humor of Lenny Bruce. Eco then makes his character Dr. Du Maurier the chief of an insane asylum parodying Du Maurier’s Peter Ibbetson while reversing the roles of Ibbetson and the Duchess of Towers in the character of Diana Vaughan. Very nice bit of inside humor on the part of Eco.

While I make it a rule to not recommend books, a rule I often violate, if you’re reading this I presume you’re simpatico. I heartily recommend any of these sources of Eco if you haven’t already read them.

Obviously Du Maurier’s novels holds a special place in Eco’s heart and a well merited place both in his and mine. However, Eco gives precedence to two of the greatest French novelists of the nineteenth century, Alexander Dumas and Eugene Sue. As it happens I revere both authors as much as Eco. Dumas’ most famous titles are still widely read while Sue’s much less so or, perhaps, not at all.

Eco mentions Dumas’ The Three Musketeers and The Count Of Monte Cristo and the French Revolution novels centered around the magician Cagliostro or by his other name, Joseph Balsamo. I first read The Three Musketeers as a youth while I have reread it again along with first time readings of Monte Cristo and the Cagliostro series within the last ten years.

What Eco is doing in the Prague Cemetery is writing his version of a Dumas novel. While a good novel Prague falls far short of Dumas. What Eco lacked that Dumas had was a collaborator of the quality of Auguste Maquet who researched and worked up the material in outline so that Dumas could concentrate on composing the dramatic touches of the story. This allowed Dumas a much wider scope and deeper detail that brought out the fabulous myth of Three Musketeers or the huge scope and depth of Monte Cristo and the Revolution novels.

I’ve read reviews of Prague where Cagliostro is apparently thought of as a Dumas creation. Oh no, Dumas could write historical novels to place alongside his role model, the great Walter Scott, or as a model here for Eco. While novels, Dumas’ Revolution stories are accurate as history. Cagliostro was a real person. Such a collaborator as Maquet might have given Eco room to expand his horizon and widen the scope of his novel to include for instance the rise of psychology and the discovery of the European unconscious while introducing some of the stage hypnotists and magicians such Robert Houdin, the model for the subsequent Houdini who used his name.

Eco’s novel is OK but he could have made it much better. The Simonini dual personality touch is a surface probe of the unconscious that had real potential perhaps bringing in the Society for Psychic Research but I think the execution of Simonini was weak and not properly developed. Still the character was a nice stab at Dumas’ and more especially the unbelievably fantastic Eugene Sue. What a madman. One could think him insane but I choose to believe he was touched by the divine afflatus. Sue, if mad, had the madness of the gods. If Dumas was more than human, Sue far exceeded Dumas. I have never read anything that comes near Sue’s The Wandering Jew or The Mysteries Of Paris, especially the latter which probes the outer limits of sanity.

The unfortunately named Wandering Jew will drive off most American readers who have been conditioned to avoid anything concerning Jews lest they be considered anti-Semitic. Although as Eco points out the hidden hand of the Jesuit priest Rodin that haunts the novel from beginning to end is one of the most terrifying apparitions in all literature and Sue was the master of terrifying images.

Both he and Dumas were obsessed shall we say by the historical memory. Eco himself is obsessed by memory as am I. I have that in common with these writers. I have explored my personal memories in several novels I have post the internet and most of my essays here on I, Dynamo are concerned with ordering the historical memory. Eco sought to recapture the memories of his youth in his previous novel The Mysterious Flame Of Queen Loana. Both Eco’s and my own efforts are much after the fashion of George Du Maurier. I would recommend Du Maurier highly except that it takes some dedication to understand the luxuriant beauty of his work; his three novels have to be read several times to acquire his intense longing to never lose his memories, taking them with into the Great Beyond. But, if you are of a like mind and feel up to it, have at it.

So, Dumas proposed to novelize the whole of French history, the racial memory and had a magnificent go at it. The guy is really spectacular. Eco mentions also the last novel of Eugene Sue, The Mysteres Du Peuple which is has yet to be translated; as Eco says he labored through the French. Apparently Sue took the task he set for himself quite seriously as Eco says the story is quite complex and I imagine very long. Mysteries Of Paris itself is three volumes or about fifteen hundred pages.

The title translates as I see it, The Mysteries Of The Folk. As Eco says Sue begins his story with the Frankish invasions of the fourth to sixth centuries, then tells his story along two family lines one Frankish, one Gallic. This would be a prodigious feat of historical and racial memory, an explosion of Sue’s past educational imprinting in both society and school. This would be especially important to him as both he and Dumas were of the first post-Revolution generation of which they very likely heard many first hand reminiscences growing up while reading reams of memoirs. As the Revolution was primarily racial in character, Gauls versus Franks, this would give added poignancy to Sue’s search to retrieve the history of the two races.

So, what Eco seems to be doing in the Prague Cemetery is carrying the personal, racial and historical European memory forward from the work of Dumas and Sue. How well I think he did it will be in the concluding part of the review. First we have to take a huge memory detour in order to bring the historical and racial memories from the beginning back up to Dumas, Sue, and Eco and late nineteenth century history. When I say huge detour, let us begin our magical memory tour at the beginning, Pangaea.

Part II will follow.

 

 

A Review

Woman

by

Alan Clayson

Yoko Ono And The Men Who Influenced Her

Review by R.E. Prindle

Clayson, Alan: Woman: The Incredible Life Of Yoko Ono, Chrome Dreams, 2004.

 

Girlish Yoko- Warhol School by Richard Bernstein

     Yoko Ono involved herself with several of the most influential men in the arts during the sixties, seventies and eighties of the twentieth century.  She drew her inspiration from them patterning her own efforts after them.  At the same time she was one of the leading feminists of the day having her share in shaping and furthering the movement.  The mantra was female liberation, equality between men and women.  In fact women were equal to men in the West but only by acknowledging the biological differences between men and women.  The fact is the differences are real and not social constructs as women would have us believe.  The fact is women are women and men are men.   So, in seeking ‘female liberation’ feminists were seeking much more than ‘equality’ however the term may be defined.

     The fact is that in the Ages old war between the sexes feminists are seeking to restore the Matriarchy and destroy the Patriarchy.  That is why many men favor feminism, they prefer the Matriarchy.  Thus the feminists are atavistic.  Yoko and her cohorts wished, in her words, to restore ‘heart’ as she viewed the Matriarchy and eliminate ‘reason’ as she viewed quite rightly the basis of  Patriarchalism.  Nevermind that bilogical science has invalidated the concepts of Matriarachy and Patriarchy.  This is a post Matriarchy and Patriarchy world.

     Circa -2000 in the West men revolted against the mind stifling Matriarchy and the vaginal swamp of the ‘heart’ seeking to establish

Smilin' Jack Cage

the authority of the infinite power of the mind of Zeus on ethereal Olympus.  This is the story of Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey and the Greek myths in general recording the struggle.

     The Western male was able to impose the ascendency of reason over the heart for 3000 years until the disestablishment of the old order by science about mid-nineteenth century.  The center could not hold during this period of extreme change as W.B. Yeats put it as the rearrangement of the intellectual order moved into the twentieth century.

     Yoko Ono sought with her feminist fellows to return to the biological innocence of 2000 BC.  She herself had no talent.  Filled with audacity she pitted her ‘heart’ against the reason of John Cage, Andy Warhol and John Lennon.  I’m sure she had a mentor for her so-called performance art but I am as yet unaware of who he may be.  Perhaps Maciunas and the Fluxus group.

     Thus her first manifestation as an artist was based on the musical ideas of John Cage while her artistic efforts were at least based in the avant garde ideas of the Fluxus group.  Her first assault on the NYC art world failed so in 1961 she returned in defeat to Japan.  When she returned to NYC in 1964 she found an entirely different art scene.  On the musical side the focus was on Bobby Dylan and the Beatles while on the artistic side Andy Warhol and his Factory had destroyed the Abstract Expressionists and the old avant garde.  Dylan, the Beatles and Warhol had in fact usurped the avant garde which now had little meaning.  From my point of view held at the time the avant garde had ceased to exist.  Of course I didn’t understand exactly why or how.

     From 1964 when Yoko returned to NYC until 1966 when she left for London I’m sure Yoko was at a loss.  She developed her silly

The Bag Yoko And Tony Are In

notion of Bagism at this time even having a black bag on a stand in Max’s Kansas City that some one or ones were supposed to slide into.  This seems to have been thought a lame idea at the time as it seems now.

      At this time while retaining allegiance to John Cage’s musical ideas she was falling under the influence of Andy Warhol’s artistic notions.  Warhol’s intent had been to destroy the idea of ‘fine art’.  In this he pretty well succeeded.  As Yoko expressed it you didn’t need any talent to be an artist.  She seems to demonstrate this notion in her own artistic efforts.  Warhol had also redefined the notion of film with his static studies.  He then sought to combine his film ideas with live music, probably in competition with Bob Dylan who was also attempting to move in that direction.   Warhol adopted Lou Reed and his band the Velvet Underground as the Factory house band while creating a multi-media show called the Exploding Plastic Inevitable, innovative for its time.  Thus a concert at his hall, the Dom, was an ‘experience.’

     While Yoko makes no mention about how this, actually, incredible development affected her there can be no doubt that she was well aware of Dylan, the Beatles and the Warhol Experience and was affected by it.  Indeed, the first manifestation was the making of her Warhol style films such as Bottoms.

     The second manifestation was her removal to London to seduce either Lennon or McCartney of the Beatles, thus in the manner of Warhol’s adoption of the Velvet Underground she sought to co-opt the Beatles, the premier rock group in the world.  Real chutzpah and more than one upping Warhol.  I think it would be nonsense to think she had any other goal in mind.

     She undoubteldy learned that Paul McCartney was actively involved with John Dunbar and his Indica Gallery that opened in 1965. 

Psychedelic Dylan

Some say she first set her sights on McCartney but the more vulnerable Lennon showed up and the Spider Woman spread her web.

     She was still married to her second husband, Tony Cox, but, regardless of what she says she very aggressively pursued, or attacked, Lennon.  Lennon was emotionally under water unable to handle his success while drugging himself out of his mind.  He was unwillingly married to his wife Cynthia.  It appears that he married Cynthia out of duty when she became pregnant.  He doesn’t seem to have been happy in his virtue.  Yoko had no difficulty in capturing his affections.

      Now, just as Warhol had adopted the Velvets and imposed his female singer, Nico, on the band Yoko sought to imp[ose herself on the Beatles through Lennon.  At this time she was still musically completely in thrall to John Cage understanding nothing about Rock music.  She and Lennon had made a ridiculous LP called Two Virgins in 1968.  She combined her cagian screechings while using an avant garde ‘performance’ notion of the couple posing nude on the cover; full frontal on the obverse, full posterior on the reverse.  As no store would carry the cover the couple reverted to Yoko’s idea of Bagism placing the cover inside a plain manila envelope or bag.  While it didn’t sell the record this form of Bagism was actually a successful artistic statement.  The nude cover given an outer garment so to speak.

     Well, the public was prepared to forgive the Beatles anything but the other three Beatles weren’t prepared to forgive Yoko for forcing herself on them thus she broke up the most successful act of the sixties.  Still, she had succeeded according to her wildest dream.  Lennon and his wonderful reputation and fortune were hers.  She had gone from a neglected, nondescript ‘performance’ artist to center stage, not on her own womanly talents but by attaching herself to a talented man.   Yoko’s ‘heart’ was useless without the male intellect.   Yoko was now the most influencial feminist in the world.  She knew what to do with that.

     After several ‘performance’ acts such as the ‘Bed In For Peace’ the couple left England to return to the place Yoko wished to subjugate artistically, New York City.  She had raised herself to a par with Andy Warhol.  She now had to meld her musical and artistic goals through Lennon and Warhol.

     On the musical side she began to develop her rock n’ roll skills under  the tutelage of Lennon.  While not abandoning the avant garde notions of John Cage she now emasculated her husband.  Always semi-delusional or perhaps completely so, she fantasized that she was not only equal to Lennon in skill and popularity but superior to him.   She imagined herself more popular than Lennon.  Thus one has such travesties as the LP Double Fantasy.  It was only after Lennon’s death that she was forced to recognize than Lennon’s fans did not appreciate her efforts.  So she failed as a musician.

     She quickly tired of being Mrs. Lennon.  Thus she and Lennon separated for eighteen months or so during the years 1973-75.  She then realized that her financial well being and musical acceptance depended on Lennon.  In 1975 she called him back resuming their relationship until his death in 1980.  But, things had changed.

     She began to adopt Warhol’s life style on her return to NYC.  While she propagated the notion that she was some sort of business whiz Iam having difficulties discovering any such skills.  It appears that with the enormous income of Lennon she emulated Warhol in

Andy the Demon

spending her way to prosperity.

     She was in a position to not only match Warhol’s spending but exceeding it by many times.  Through the seventies and eighties Warhol came into his own as an artist while reaping a fortune doing portraits.  There appears to have been no effort on his part to invest in income producing vehicles.  Rather he bought stuff.  He purchased buildings in NYC and elsewhere while acquring undeveloped acreage in places like Aspen.  He shopped nearly every day buying antiques from furniture to objets d’ art by the bushel almost as though he were trying to excel the incredible W.R. Hearst.

     He usually didn’t even look at the stuff once he bought it merely filling rooms with his shopping bags.  At his death all this junk was auctioned off for 25 million dollars, a nice appreciation in value.

      Yoko followed the exact pattern buying apartments and houses as well as an extensive dairy farm with a herd of prize cows.  She not only had but has five apartments in her principal dwelling, the Dakota apartment building and many other houses scattered around.

     Like Warhol the Dakota apartments are stuffed with junk.  Valuable, but, you know, stuff.  She bought at good prices.  Her extensive collection of Egyptian antiquities was mostly purchased before a steep rise in value.

     Like the Rothschilds of old Yoko didn’t do all her own shopping but employed agents to search things out.  Chief among these was an associate of Warhol’s, Sam Green, and an Hungarian immigrant by the name of Sam Havadtoy.

Buddies- Yoko, John, Andy

     There should be no surprise then that she now has an extensive collection of  Warhol’s artwork as well as his portraits of Lennon.  The Warhols would have been purchased for form 25 to 50K while now being listed on her assets at tens of millions.  She also has been said to have a good collection of Magrittes as well as one assumes other artists.  So, much of her net worth is tied up in artwork purchased through Sam Green.

     Sam Havadtoy was an antiques dealer as well as an interior designer.  He appears to have been a somewhat shady character.  It is very difficult to find much about him, however there is a sharp portrait available from the notorious A.J. Weberman ( http://www.acid-trip.org/lennon/ )

     …(the Lennons) hired a sleazy Eastern European bisexual to renovate the pad. (Dakota)  I had heard of this dude, whose name escapes me, from an asswipe named BRUCE KIRSH, who worked for him.   KIRSH told me that the dude, who worked for the King of Morocco, would form a dummy renovation company, hire employees like Kirsch who were willing to work under false names, then, when it came time to pay taxes, everyone would disappear.  I learned of him long before he was hired by John and Yoko, and I was taken aback when Yoko took up with him after John’s death.

     I know that Weberman is not particularly well thought of by fandom but this is because of his harassment of Dylan who did, after all, misrepresent himself to the revolutionaries like Weberman.  A.J. himself is an intelligent observer who was wading through it when it was deep.  I do believe he knows what he’s talking about although his interpretations of Dylan’s lyrics seem absurd.

     I would have to question Yoko’s judgment in taking him in.  Both he and Sam Green were candidates as successors to Lennon with

Lennon by Warhol

whom she consorted in front of  Lennon before he died while Yoko chose Havadtoy as his successor the day he died.

     Perhaps she selected Havadtoy over Green because he was more rough trade.  With Lennon while managing to reconcile revolution with peace and love with Havadtoy she discarded peace and love in favor of strong arm methods against her former employee Fred Seaman when it was totally unnecessary.

     Havadtoy was living in a homosexual arrangement with his business partner when Yoko beckoned him to switch to her.  Apparently an able switch hitter he was lured by the money to this much older woman.  The arrangement did last for twenty years before Havadtoy removed to his native Hungary taking a nice cash settlement and several of the Warhols.

     Thus, just as Warhol had his live-in homosexual arrangement so after Lennon’s death Yoko adopted the exact arrrangement.  Today she apparently lives alone, a seventy-eight year old woman.

     After Lennon’s death there was an accession of from 30 million to a possible 100 million dollars as their last album, Double Fantasy, sold into the millions while the rest of Lennon’s catalog and one assumes the Beatles’ catalog was reinvigorated while all things Lennon sold.   This is, of course, no reflection on Yoko but the inevitable result  with intellectual properties when the maker dies.

     Post-Lennon, then, Yoko realized that her recording and art careers were nil.  Heart without intellect is worthless.  She then became the caretaker of the Lennon legacy.  His recordings, of course, continued to sell, but even his artwork eclipsed that of Yoko.  So she suffered the humiliation of being a mere appendage to a man.  The feminine dismal swamp was eclipsed by the Olympian heights of the male intellect.   As in ancient times the God had trumped the Goddess.  And yet as with Hera and Zeus the Goddess gets her way.   Yoko came up with the money and goods while Lennon’s spirit was wafted into the stratosphere.

     As any reader of mythology knows Hera ruled the Lernean swamps of Argolis while Zeus ruled the gods on ethereal Olympus.  Thus one has the symbolism of the biological difference between the male and female.

     In ancient times the female had her share in magic.  She knew herbs and plants, was familiar with poisons and cures as with the arch witch of the ancient world, Medea.  The reputation of the female witch even as a consort of Satan persisted down through medieval and post-medieval times, indeed, even up to the dawn of the scientific enlightenment.  One would have thought that magic and witchery were a thing of the past in the 1960s and yet Yoko embodied the whole female swamp mentality.

     She established something called the Spirit Foundation attributing the direction to Lennon who in fact knew nothing of these matters but followed her lead.  The Spirit Foundation celebrated the ancient art of the Shaman or witch doctor.  Shamanism itself even preceded the Matriarchal swamps of Argolis.  It was a rich repository of magical tradition.  Further the Foundation was feminist in that it was dedicated to preserving the magical traditions of the women of the Pacific islands still living in such archaic societies.  The wealth generated by the male intellect was appropriated by the female vagina or ‘heart.’

     In her own life and that of Lennon’s Yoko was addicted to a variety of magical practices- astrology, numerology, Tarot readings, and indeed she traveled to the Caribbean to sell her soul to Satan through the offices of a female curandera.  Her Tarot reader, John Green, was a priest in the shamanistic, magical, Yoruban African cult of Santeria.

     Her feminism was more a magical effort to restory Matriarchal supremacy over the Patriarchy thus reversing the Patriarchal victory of three thousand years previously.  Indeed, what has been called the movement for female equality is nothing more than a covert campaign to restore the Matriarchy.

      Thus while Yoko o9riginatd nothing she usurped the abilities of the reason of men- Cage, Warhol, Lennon and male magicians such as John Green.  Indeed the Trojan War itself was a war of men in service of  women.

     In her associations with men she preferrred to deal with emasculated types such as homosexuals like Cage, Warhol, Sam Green and Sam Havadtoy.  Lennon claimed to have always been dependent of women for comfort and guidance while Yoko caught him at his most confused and vulnerable. 

     While she received direction from Cage and Warhol she was able to manipulate Lennon out of his talent somewhat as Vivian did that of Merlin of the Arthurian saga.  When Vivian had usurped Merlin’s magical knowledge she buried him deep much as Lennon was put out of the way.  Yoko  then appropriated his wealth and residual income after his death.   It was this constant inflow of cash that allowed her to propagate the notion that she was a financial genius.

      Then as the female of the ‘heart’ or vaginal swamp she managed and appropriated the reason of Olympus through Cage, Warhol and Lennon.  What she got from Havadtoy other than brute strength is not clear to me.

     As such Yoko is Woman.  In her case a seeming reversion to the archetypal Shaman of the most ancient times.

 

 

Tarzan Over Africa

February 23, 2009

 

Tarzan Over Africa

The Psychological Roots Of Tarzan In The Western Psyche

by

R.E. Prindle

As the strong man exhibits in his physical ability, delighting in such exercises as call the muscles into action, so glories the analyst in that moral activity which disentagles.  He derives pleasure from even the most trivial occupations bringing his intellect into play.  He is fond of enigmas, conundrums, hieroglypics; exhibiting in his solutions of each a degree of  acumen which appears to the ordinary apprehension as praeternatural.  His results brought about by the very soul and essence of method, have in truth, the whole air of intuition.

Edgar Allen Poe- The Murders In The Rue Morgue

…he dreams of the sight

of Zulu impis

breaking on the foe

like surf upon the rocks

and his heart rises in rebellion

against the strict limits

of civilized life.

H. Rider Haggard- Allan Quatermain

Yes!  I noticed this dichotomy in the Western soul myself at least two thirds of a lifetime ago.  I was always puzzled by it.  Why in the midst of plenty and seeming perfection should the Western psyche be so discontented with its lot.

     Well, time has passed.  Two thirds of a lifetime in fact.  After much mental lucubration and travail I now find myself in a position not only to understand it myself but to be able, perhaps, to make it clear to others;  perhaps hopefully to you who are looking at this screen.

     The problem began we are told, by people who ought to know, about one hundred fifty thousand years ago when our species, Homo Sapiens, evolved  from its predecessor hominid, which has never been traced being the famous Missing Link, to begin its odyssey through time and space.

     We are told that Homo Sapiens originated in Africa and that Black Africans, or what Tarzan would call savages, were the first Homo Sapiens.  We are told, once again, that White people mutated from this original Black stock.  This may or may not be so.  I am in no position to affirm or deny the fact myself but, if so, there was a qualitative difference as well as a quantitative difference that then occurred.  In fact, if one were to judge solely from appearances two sub-species of Homo Sapiens came into existence when the White evolved from the Black.  This qualitative difference between the sub-species or what we have been taught to consider races, was noticed by all the early explorers with differing interpretations.

     As the English novelist, H. Rider Haggard, who as a man of considerable experience and acumen, put it:

I say that as the savage is, so is the white man, only this latter is more inventive, and possesses a faculty of combination…

     Rider Haggard was quite right, both sub-species evolved from the same stock, both had the same emotional makeup, but what Haggard dismisses as only ‘more inventive’ and ‘a faculty of combination’ is precisely that which separates the White sub-species from the Black sub-species and makes it evolutionarily more advanced.  In conventional terms invention and a faculty of combination is called the scientific method.

     The scientific method is not to be dismissed lightly.  It is a faculty of mind that is an evolutionary step in advance of the White sub-species’ evolutionary predecessor, the Black sub-species.

     This may be a startling interpretation to you, however if one is to follow the scientific logic adduced by scientists of Evolution the facts follow as day follows night.  They cannot be avoided nor can they be explained away.   They must be dealt with head on, just as our Attorney General Eric Holder has stated.

     The evolutionary step within the Homo Sapiens species is almost tentative to our White minds, not so clear cut as to separate, say, the Chimpanzee species from the Gorilla species.  The transition is however in that direction.

     In the nineteenth century the cleavage between the scientific mind and that of  the savage or first Homo Sapiens mind was beginning to become felt in the Western psyche.  A malaise of spirit was created which troubled the soul of Western man.  The ‘strict limits’ of scientific civilization versus the seeming naturalness and open simplicity of the African became a dichotomy in the Western psyche.

     Haggard was not the first to confront the problem but before I begin at the beginning with who I consider to be the first let me elucidate the problem further by another quote from Rider Haggard.

     Ah!  this civilization what does it all come to?  Full forty years and more I spent among savages, and studied them and their ways, and now for several years I have lived here in England and in my own stupid manner have done my best to learn the ways of the children of light; and what do I find?  A great gulf fixed? No, only a very little one, that a plain man’s thought may spring across.

     Haggard was quite correct as far as he went.  What he failed to understand, ‘in his own stupid way’, was that there was a small gulf over which civilized man thinks he could spring backward without difficulty but from the other side that small gulf appears a great chasm which the completed mind of the first Homo Sapiens can never find a way across.

        Edgar Rice Burroughs who read Haggard and was also struck by this really important introductory chapter to  ‘Allan Quatermain’  pondered the issue long and hard and resolved the issue in his own mind when he said that the savage mind could never grasp science while only one in a hundred of the White species could, with perhaps one in a thousand being able to advance science.  ERB intuited what modern genetics would prove.

     This dichotomy between the primitive and scientific mind does not become truly prominent until the mid-nineteenth century.  It wasn’t observable to the naked eye before then and only begins to establish itself in literature with the apperance in 1841 of Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘Murders In The Rue Morgue.’

     Poe created a whole new genre of literature, not only of the detective story, but of the conflict between what Freud would later identify in his system as the Unconscious and the Conscious mind.  Prior to Poe reason, or the forebrain, was the sole approach to knowledge; after Poe awareness of the Unconscious element began its long rise until today it is dominant.

     When dissatisfaction with Haggard’s strict limits of civilization began to forcibly intrude into White consciousness, causing the split identity, is not clear to me although it may well have been the introduction of the Age of Steam.  Certainly by 1841 the intrusion of the steam railroad was going a long way to condition man’s mind to a rigid one way view of reality as laborers spun out the long steel ribbons along which the great unyielding iron locomotives ran.

     The science of steam was unforgiving, with a low level of tolerance for human error, and making no allowance for individual idiosyncracies.

     In the days of the great steamboat races on the Mississippi boiler pressure was controlled by a little governor.  Greater speed could be attained if the governor was removed allowing boiler pressure to increase.  Of course, the inevitable result was the explosion of the boiler and destruction of the steamboat and crew.  Even knowing the scientific consequences of removing the governor operators time after time did  it in hopes of defeating physics and winning the race.

     Thus science seemed ‘unfair’ and the White man’s limited undeveloped understanding began to rebel.

     When evolution gave man access to science he reached the limits of what human exertion alone could do.  Thus the forebrain was frustrated, driving it back toward the brain stem and the Unconscious.  A new scientific frontier was opened thereby- the study of the human mind.

     Edgar Allan Poe grasped this significance expressing it in poetic language.  ‘Murders In The Rue Morgue’ posits the problem in the form of C. Auguste Dupin who, while using rigorous scientific method is mistaken for being intuitive.  The Conscious mind versus the Unconscious.

     The Unconscious is always disreputable.  It is there that little understood sexual urges and primitive egoistic rituals reside.  It  is there that the primitive man resides; the savage of Rider Haggard, the Negro of the present day.  It is there that the Western psyche rebels, seeking to emerge triumphant over science and understanding.  That is the little leap backwards that Rider Haggard saw.  In academic writers of the nineteenth century it was called ‘the thin veneer of civilization.’

     Thus the initials of C. Auguste Dupin spell CAD, or a slightly disreputable man.  A man who thinks only of himself.  If Poe doesn’t introduce the notion of the doppel ganger, he certainly defines the role and purpose.  Dupin and the narrator are two halves of the same person.  They are in fact one personality.

     This notion would be further developed in Conan Doyle with his creation of Sherlock Holmes and his doppelganger,  Dr. Watson.  The notion would be brought to horrifying fruition in the classic tale of the split between the conscious and unconscious minds, Robert Louis Stevenson’s ‘Dr. Jekyll And Mr. Hyde.’

     Poe’s narrator being of greater means than Dupin who is seedy and down at the heels rents an old dilapidated house in the Faubourg St. Germain which creaks as lustily as the House of Usher.  The house is a symbol of psychological decay. The Faubourg St. Germain is itself a symbol of decay. Formerly the home of the pre-revolutionary elite, since the French Revolution it is the home of shattered fortunes.

     The two men, who are inseparable, lock themselves up in this mansion by day with all the curtains drawn, sure sign of intense depression, going out only after dark into what the narrator calls the ‘real night’ as opposed to the night of the soul; the dark Freudian unconscious.

     And then two women are murdered in mysterious circumstances.  Using all his scientific method  Dupin divines the murderer to be an Orang-outang, which was no small feat whether scientific or intuitive.  Thus the highest mental powers were symbolically pitted against man’s animal nature.

     Poe thus states the central problem of the Western psyche which is still unresolved at this time while still being discussed as much.  While Rider Haggard was wrestling with the problem Conan Doyle was writing his Sherlock Holmes stories.  Holmes like Dupin is a bit of a cad; not entirely an admirable person.  He has placed himself above the law, being quite capable of executing summary judgment on one who might  in his sole opinion escape the toils of the law.  Holmes companion, Dr. Watson, is a sturdy unimaginative burgher who serves as the example of the unconscious to Holmes’ conscious but scientifically unfeeling mind.

     Robert Louis Stevenson takes matters to an even more intense level at roughly the same time.  Jekyll and Hyde are in fact one man.  Jekyll is the example of what Freud would call the repressed man but one which society calls a disciplined and respectable man.  He is in total control of himself but he suspects there is another side to his character which he would like to discover.

     Unable to find access to this other side by psychological or rational means, he uses his scientific acumen to invent a potion which releases this demon, Mr. Hyde, concealed inside his unconscious.  Hyde is a very destructive character and having been once released he proves impossible to put back in the bottle.  He returns unsummoned.  Eventually he suppresses Jekyll becoming the sole personality.  The jump only works one way.

     Thus Stevenson predicted the evolution of the twentieth century.  This little cluster of writers bridging the nineteenth and twentieth centuries is very interesting.

     In the intervening near fifty years between ‘Murders In The Rue Morge’ and ‘Dr. Jekyll And Mr. Hyde’ science had been revealing nature at a galloping pace placing even greater stress on the Western psyche.  Central to the further deteriorization of the psyche was Charles Darwin’s ‘Origin Of Species’ which appeared in 1859 just on the eve of the exploration of Central Africa when the stressed scientific Western psyche confronted its dark unconscious in the form of the African Black man.  Thus Africa became the Heart Of Darkness for the White man just as Hyde was the heart of darkness to Jekyll.  That little gulf across which he thought he might leap appeared as a gigantic chasm.

     The notion of evolution versus Biblical creation not only caused a tremendous social dislocation but the notion of evolution from a lower to a higher, from Ape to White man, placed the Black man or Negro in an intermediary state of development just as Burroughs would later depict the role of Tarzan Of The Apes.

     Beginning c. 1860 with the expedition of Capt. Richard Francis Burton into the lake regions of Central Africa the problem began to take a concrete form.

     What the White Man found in the interior of Africa startled him.  For here the dichotomy between his unconscious and conscious was juxtaposed in reality between himself and the Black African.  The Black African seemed to represent unchanged what man had been one hundred fifty thousand years before when he evolved from the hominid predecessor.

     For Burton and Henry Morton Stanley who followed him as an explorer the superiority of the White was apparent.  In the Negro they saw only the child of nature;  men without alphabets, physics, chemistry, astronomy or intellectual attainments of any kind.  The Negro was to be pitied, treated paternalistically as a little brother or as the Negro would later be known:  The White Man’s Burden, Idi Amin notwithstanding.

     The main period of exploration and discovery was ending when Rider Haggard began publishing his great African adventure trilogy from 1885 to 1888.

     While Burton and Stanley felt an easy superiority over the Blacks, Rider Haggard took a more disquieted attitude.  He was troubled when he noted that for all the White man’s scientific attainments there was no difference in the emotional development of the two sub-species.

     And what did he find?  A way forward?  A great gulf fixed?  No.  ‘Only a little one, that a plain man’s thought might spring across.  I say,’ he said, ‘that as the savage is, so is the white man, only the latter is more inventive, and possesses a faculty of combination…’

     Well, indeed.  But wasn’t Haggard undervaluing the quality of being more inventive and possessing a faculty of combination?  Those two qualities, after all, comprise the scientific faculty which cannot be attained by effort but is evolutionarily ingrained.  It is forever beyond the reach of the first Homo Sapiens.  Haggard and all other writers recognized that this faculty is what the Africans lacked.

     Consider then in one hundred fifty thousand years the Africas were so incurious that they had never observed the heavens.  They had no astronomy!  When the White split off probably one hundred thousand years ago this is the first science they established.  Think about it.

     Is this scientific faculty such a small thing?  If, in fact, a White man of plain understanding can make the leap backward to a natural state can the Black or natural man leap the chasm to a scientific state of consciousness?

     Darwin’s theory of evolution is based on natural selection, actually a form of eugenics, by which he believed new species were evolved.  It would appear, however that evolution is caused by genetic mutations and when a species has mutated into the complete expression of itself evolution stops for that species which then becomes, as it were, a living fossil.

     Rather than natural selection there is perhaps natural rejection.  When a new sub-speices forms with its differences it is more likely that the predecessor recognizes the differences and ejects the new comer rather than the new species recognizing itself and banding together.  Consider Tarzan among the apes.

     When the White sub-species came into existence perhaps one hundred thousand years ago it is more than probable that the sub-species was rejected by its Black predecessors and forcibly ejected from sub-Saharan Africa.

     Thus  in the two closest known predecessors of Homo Sapiens, the Great Mountain Ape and the Chimpanzee both species are completed and now await extinction as they are unable to compete with their successor hominids.

     Scientists tell us, I have no way of disputing their conclusion only interpreting them, that Homo Sapiens evolved from a predecessor about a hundred fifty thousand years ago.  They further tell us that the first Homo Sapiens was the Negro sub-species.

     The predecessor, who has disappeared without a trace, unless he is the Bushman, was a completed species; he was incapable of further evolution himself but from him the Negro sub-species of Homo Sapiens evolved.

     Now comes the hard part to accept.  Science is science; one must either follow its facts or abandon the pretence of being scientific man.

     As the first Homo Sapiens was the Negro sub-species, is the Negro sub-species complete as an example of evolutionary development?  If the Negro was the first Homo Sapiens then the White sub-species must be evolved from the Negro and as nature is ever groping toward higher intelligence the White must be an intellectual improvement on its Black predecessor.   The apparent facts indicate this.

     Evolution appears to be always toward a form of higher intelligence.  Thus the qualities of combination and inventiveness may be completely beyond the reach of the Black sub-species.  The Black may stand in relation to the White as the Great Mountain Ape stands to the Chimp.

     Further, if one assumes, as one must, that evolution has not stopped either with the development of Homo Sapiens or its sub-species the White man, then the White man must carry the genetic makeup for the mutation to the next step of evolution.  As only fifty thousand years intervened between the evolution of the first Homo Sapiens and its White successor than the next evolutionary sub-species or species may already be among us.   This is what H.G. Wells novel The Food Of The Gods is about.  Apparently the evolutionary bud, like a swelling on a tree, may only blossom once and then the sub-species or species is incapable of budding again becoming fixed in form

     The question then arises will the next step be to a new species that will make Homo Sapiens a completely inferior species such as now exists between Homo Sapiens and the Chimpanzee or a new sub-species that will merely increase the distance between it and the first sub-species.

     If the new mutation increases its intellectual capabilities will it also be able to evolve a new emotional organization that will separate it from Homo Sapiens and its animal nature completely?  Or is it possible that the dichotomy between the two under which Western man suffers will increase involving some sort of evolutionary insanity  or suicide?

     Well, as the nineteenth century drew to a close vitamins hadn’t even been discovered let alone genetics so people muddled along in a dissatisified condition.

     The unconscious aspects of man began to predominate over the conscious as Western man confronted with his natural state in Africa began to slip back across the little gulf in admiration of the seeming ‘natural ‘ state of the ‘noble savage.’  This slip backward was aided and abetted by Sigmund Freud’s vision of the unconscious.

     Late in the century Thomas Alva Edison invented the movie camiera.  This invention was to have a major effect on the rise of the Unconscious or retrogression to the primitive as the dominating factor in the Western psyche.  At approximately the same time as the film industry was becoming important Sigmund Freud published his seminal work:  The Interpretation Of Dreams.  Thus a scientific vocabulary  began to come into existence by which the workings of the mind could be analyzed and discussed.  the Unconscious became an established entity.

      Now, writing is work of the forebrain or in other words, a scientific pursuit, while movie making is a function of the Unconscious.  A good story is more important in writing while subliminal drives are the stuff of movies.  It is only required that movies make emotional but not rational sense. They follow a different logic.

     Edgar Rice Burroughs was to be confused by this difference when he tried to translate his books to the screen.  While the early Tarzan films were not unsuccessful they were not all that satisfying; it was not until MGM invented the Tarzan of primal desires impersonated by Johnny Weismuller that the movie Tarzan became potent.  However in that guise Tarzan was entirely another creation.  His being had become independent of ERB’s mind.

     One movie is capable of finding more viewers than a thousand books can find readers.   Thus the subconscious began to dominate over the conscious Tarzan.

     I am of the opinion that Freud was already aware of the effect of the emergence of the Unconscious as a formative factor in society before he codified the phenomenon in scientific language.  After all Freud was subject to the same influences as Poe, Haggard, Doyle, Stevenson and Burroughs.

     Freud himself came from an earlier school which delighted in the unrestrained indulgence of the unconscious or passions.  In English terms the attitude took form as the Hell Fire Club to which the American Benjamin Franklin belonged.  Its motto was:  Do What Thou Wilt.  Its bible on the continent was ‘Gargantua and Pantagruel’ by Rabelais, while in Jewish circles the credo had been established by Jacob Frank and his descendants.  Frank’s position was that man will never be good until he commits evil to his heart’s content.  Freud being Jewish was of this school.

     These groups of people were quite extreme.  Their credo was startlingly expressed in the eighteenth century by Tobias Smollet when his hero, Roderick Random, is introduced into a woman’s home who wrote the following:

Thus have I sent the simple king to hell

Without or coffin, shroud or passing bell.

To me what are divine or human laws?

I court no sanction but my own applause!

Rapes, robb’ries, treasons, yield my soul delight;

And human carnage gratifies my sight;

I drag the parent by the hoary hair,

And toss the sprawling infant on my spear,

While the fond mother’s cries regale my ear.

I fight, I vanquish, murder friends and foes;

Nor dare the Immortal gods my rage oppose.

       The above pretty much defines Freud’s intent in his psychology.  So long as such sentiments were consciously expressed in print they horrified a rational thinker while remaining strictly an underground movement.  But now Freud combined the attitude with the malaise of soul which had been called into existence by the dichotomy of the scientific and unconscious minds.

     Freud reduced the mind, including the Unconscious, into scientific terms by which such Rabelaisan attitudes could be discussed and disseminated into polite society as scientific thought rather than eccentric opinion.

     Freud despised what he called the morality of the day or in other words, Christian morality.  He determined that the main cause of mental illness was the repression of disorderly or anti-social desires.  He glorified these base desires as the Ego and proclaimed that where the Unconscious was Ego shall be.  This is another way of saying:  Do What Thou Wilt.

      Thus in the decades following Freud the whole notion of self control and a disciplined mind fell into disrepute as Western man began to revel in his most criminal desires; for the Unconscious which always disregards the rights of others is alway criminal.

     So it was that the terrible figure of Dracula who began his rise in the 1890s  became the dominant psychological projection of the twentieth century.  Dracula is the Unconscious incarnate.  Completely despising the rights of others, even their right to life; he sucks anyone’s life blood so that he alone may live.

     Like Dupin and the narrator of ‘Murders In The Rue Morgue’ Dracula only comes out in the ‘real night’. In fact, one ray of the sun, in other words, consciousness, will turn him to dust.  Light is anathema to him; he must shun the day.

     Alongside Dracula the cult of the Phantom Of The Opera has grown into huge proportions being disseminated to polite society by Andrew Lloyd Weber’s opera of the same name.

     Talk about conscious and unconscious, the Phantom lives in a sewer, the very home of the Unconscious, where he has installed a huge organ on which he plays the most glorious conscious creations of Johann Sebastian Bach.

     Deformed in soul, the deformation has been extended to his exterior in the form of a burned face which he covers with a mask just as one masks one’s interior motives from others.  Attracted to the higher things from the depths of his sewer he haunts an opera house directly above where, spying from secret passages, he falls in love with the beautiful opera singer who, initially repulsed by the soul shown on his face gradually succumbs to the lure of the unconscious.

     Edgar Rice Burroughs was born into this strange social milieu, as we know, in 1875.  Seemingly failing in every thing he did, he had scant prospects in life until at the age of 37 in 1912 his education jelled into the creation of his life, Tarzan the Magnificent.

     Tarzan is extraordinary in that he runs counter to the other expressions of the Western malaise.  Tarzan is whole and entire.  In Freudian terms, where Unconscious was, now Ego reigned and it was good Ego, not the criminal model of Freud.

     As Tarzan was, so must have been Burroughs, although I have no idea how he achieved this.  It appears, nevertheless, to be true.  In fact, whatever Burroughs read or was thinking about he seems to have resolved in Tarzan the mental dilemma which was first formulated by Poe.  Further, he acknlowledges Poe’s influence.

     We know that Burroughs read and revered the African adventure novels of Rider Haggard.  It can be stated certainly that he read the African explorers Capt. Richard Burton and Henry Morton Stanley.  Whether he read the other seekers of the source of the Nile, Speke and Baker, I don’t know, as I cannot so state with certainty.  It is not impossible that Baker’s wife was a model for Jane.

     It is certain nevertheless that the great age of African exploration thrilled him while occupying a prominent place in his daily thoughts.

     Being scientifically inclined, he applied his reading in evolution, exploration, geology, psychology  and other subjects to the formation of his great creation, Tarzan.  As he says, he wrote to amuse and entertain (read: make money) so that he expressed the results of his deepest study in seemingly frivolous tales.  Then, while he captured the imagination of the reading public, he offended the critics of ‘serious’ literature who refused to take him seriously.  He even found it difficult to find a book publisher even though he was a proven popular success.

     Yet he pondered deeply the dilemma propounded by Poe while apparently puzzling out the deeper meaning of Haggard’s introductory chapter to ‘Allan Quatermain.’ Stevenson’s Jekyll and Hyde filled his thoughts.

     There is little doubt that Haggard’s hero, Sir Henry Curtis, is a progenitor of Tarzan.  One can see Tarzan in the great White English warrior standing tall in a sea of Black soldiers.  Sir Henry Curtis leads the Black Kukuana into battle against their foes.  The first Big Bwana had come into existence.

     Burroughs wants his hero Tarzan to be born in Africa so in 1888 the year ‘Allan Quatermain’ was published and Sir Henry Curtis sealed himself in his valley high in the Mountains Of The Moon, Lord Greystoke and his wife, the Lady Alice Greystoke are abandoned on the West Coast of Africa where, as we know, they both lost their lives but not before Lady Alice gave birth to a son who was then adopted by the great she ape, Kala.

     In The Return Of Tarzan the putative successor to Lord John Greystoke is voyaging through the Suez Canal around Africa in his yacht, the Lady Alice, when he is shipwrecked near the exact spot where his father and mother built their tree house in Africa.

     To understand fully this sequence in Burroughs’ imagination one has to examine the other source for his creation, Tarzan- Henry Morton Stanley.

     There can be no question that before Burroughs wrote Tarzan he had read if not studied the books of H.M. Stanley.  And, why not?  Stanley’s most important titles are: How I Found Livingstone In Central Africa, Through The Dark Continent and In Darkest Africa.

     ‘Through The Dark Continent’ is one of the great adventure stories of all time.  The conscious living out of Stanley’s unconscious needs and desires is remarkable reading.

     One might think that Burroughs’  yacht ‘Lady Alice’ was named after Clayton’s mother, Lady Alice Greystoke.  Not so.  Burroughs is full of subtle jokes and elaborate circumlocutions.  If not Clayton’s mother then how did Burroughs come up with the name ‘Lady Alice’ for the yacht?  Well, if you read Stanley’s ‘Through The Dark Continent’ you will find that he carried for thousands of miles through Africa a boat in sections that could be broken down and rebuilt.  With this boat Stanley circumnavigated Lake Victoria as well as Lake Tanganyika, then sailed the boat down the entire length of the mighty Congo River.  That boat was named the Lady Alice.  Thus Tarzan like Stanley was carried by the Lady Alice.  That’s a very subtle joke, Son.  Stanley himself had named the boat after his Cincinnati fiancee, Alice.  During his sail down the Congo she ditched him for another man.  In weird synchronicity Stanley ditched the Lady Alice on a bluff overlooking the Atlantic nearly at the end of his journey.  What a true coincidence.

     As an aside, the psychology of it is very interesting.  Psychologically a vessel represents a woman.  the Holy Grail which is a chalice represents woman while the blood it contains represents man.  Thus you have the man, Stanley in the boat, woman.  Stanley’s mother abandoned him as a child.  He saw her only once thereafter.  Thus, his mother, the most important woman in any man’s life abandoned him.  In the Lady Alice, Stanley was obviously carried once again by his mother although I don’t know if her name was Alice also.  He then abandoned his boat the Lady Alice.

     Stanley didn’t follow the Congo to the sea as is popularly believed but abandoned the river after traversing an incredible series of rapids when he came to an identified rapids at Stanley Pool where, completely exhausted and having reached an explored point, he considered his job done.  He had the Lady Alice carried to a hill top where he left it to the elements.  Now, in Burroughs mind he may have landed the Lady Alice at the approximate place he thought Stanley had abandoned his Lady Alice.  So, Tarzan’s house may have been intended to be on the coast directly below the Lady Alice.  That would also make the location in Gabon.  In that sense Tarzan was the successor of H.M. Stanley.

      One may therefore assume that the Greystokes were put ashore near the mouth of  the Congo where the fictional yacht Lady Alice ws shipwrecked within sight, as it were, of the real Lady Alice.  That’s how the mind of Edgar Rice Burroughs worked.

     On his way from England on the Emin Relief Expedition which forms the content of ‘In Darkest Africa’  just like Lord Greystoke Stanley sailed from England through the Suez to Zanzibar where he collected his porters, sailed with them to Capetown and from thence to the mouth of the Congo.  Then Stanley began his incredible journey up the Congo across Africa from West to East into the Northern lake regions where on this trip he located and identified the fabled and thought mythical, snow capped on the equator, Mountains Of The Moon.

     Anyone who doesn’t admire Henry Morton Stanley has the heart of a dullard.  What a man!  What terrific incredible adventures.  I’d rather read about them than live them myself but what a story.  So thought Edgar Rice Burroughs who never tried to live such adventures either.

     Very important to Tarzan is Stanley’s dealings with the various African tribes.  Stanley is virtually a single White man leading a faithful band of Negroes just like Tarzan and his faithful Waziri.

     Africa was virtually Stanley’s province as it was for Tarzan.  Tarzan’s reputation was far famed throughout Africa or at least the areas of Africa through which Stanley traveled.   Tarzan doesn’t have much to do with South Africa which has no association with Stanley although Tarzan does travel in North Africa of which Samuel Baker wrote.

     Stanley, whose three major expeditions covered a period of about fifteen years must also have become legendary amongst the Blacks.  The exploration of Lakes Victoria and Tanganyika coupled with the journey down the Congo must have been the subject of astonished conversation in every village in Central Africa.  The more so because Stanley was on scientific expeditions to map geographical features like lakes and rivers which reason no African could ever comprehend.

     They could comprehend slaving and ivory buying but they couldn’t comprehend scientific endeavors.

     Stanley’s situation in Uganda near the Ripon Falls, the outlet of the Nile from Lake Victoria, with its emperor Mtessa is the stuff of legend for either Blacks or Whites.  Stanley, virtually singlehandedly at the head of a band of African natives successfully negotiated months at the court of Mtessa and lived to the tell the tale which I believe few could have accomplished.  Then traveling South through areas that had never seen a White man he successully negotiated the circumnavigation of Lake Tanganyika.  Both Victoria and Tanganyika are among the largest bodies of fresh water on earth, huge lakes.  Then transporting the Lady Alice to the Congo he made the extraordinarily hazardous descent of that enormous and hostile river.  This is really mind boggling stuff.

     There are too many allusions in Burroughs to the adventures of Stanley to believe that he wasn’t a source for Tarzan.

     As more or less an aside there is even a possible allusion to a scene in Burton’s ‘Travels In The Lake Regions Of  Central Africa.’  Burton describes in particularly vivid detail an apparition he had while suffering from fever.  In a fairly remarkable psychological projection he experienced himself as two different people, not unlike Jekyll and Hyde, who were at war with each other; the one attempting to defeat the best efforts of the other.

     In 1857 this psychic manifestation could not be understood.  Today it can be interpreted.  It would seem that Burton was consciously aware that he seemed to thwart his own projects.  He undoubtedly worried about this a great deal but as an unresolved subconscious controls the conscious mind he couldn’t penetrate the mystery.

      Under the influence of malarial fever the psychic barriers of the subconscious broke down and his desire was shown to him symbolically by his unconscious mind.  Had Burton been psychologically capable of pursuing this insight to its logical conclusion unearthing the fixation on which it was based then he would have resolved his problem and integrated his personality becoming a single unit or whole person.  His legs wouldn’t have given out on him as he came close to his goal.  Depth psychology was unknown in 1857 so the psychological manifestation remained a mystery to him.

     It seems clear that Burroughs was equally impressed by this incident which he later used to create an alter ego for Tarzan called Esteban Miranda.  If you recall,  Miranda’s inept activities were bringing Tarzan into disrepute.  Africa began to wonder.

     As the evolution of Tarzan, as I mentioned in my earlier essay, the idea of Tarzan entered the back of Burroughs’ mind bearing a candle which in a pitch black cave is a pretty strong light.  This idea was probably an identification with Sir Henry Curtis of Rider Haggard but Burroughs was unable to develop the train of thought when he came to the water barrier in the vaults of Opar.

     Tarzan successfully leaped the barrier but Burroughs lost his train of thought when the candle symbolically blew out leaving the idea of Tarzan to gestate in his subconscious.  There Curtis slowly combined with Henry Morton Stanley to erupt from Burroughs’ forehead fully formed in 1912 as Tarzan.

     Burroughs probably read Stanley in the nineties.  His creative juices would have been jogged when Stanley died in 1905.  Stanley’s devoted wife gathered several chapters of Stanley’s autobiography of his childhood, composed by himself, then cobbled together the rest of his life from diaries, news clippings and the like.

     Stanley’s autobiography was released in 1909.  The first Tarzan book was written in 1912.  I don’t know when Stanley’s autobiography came to Burroughs’ attention but sometime before 1912 he read it completing the idea of Tarzan in his mind.  As Burroughs’ prospectus to All Story Magazine indicates, Burroughs was struggling to combine a number of ideas into the entity that was to become Tarzan.

     The publication of Stanley’s autobiography plus the pressure at age 37 of having to so something to merit his high opinion of himself probably forced the jelling of the idea of Tarzan which erupted from his forehead bearing gold ingots like Tarzan emerging from the rock of Opar above the gold vaults.

     Burroughs now had the ideal vehicle to give expression to all his social theories.  Critics may see Burroughs as a mere shallow entertainer but I don’t.  I bought my first Tarzan book the year Burroughs died in 1950 with I was twelve.  I continued to buy them until 1954 when I was sixteen.  I was totally absorbed in them; not as mere entertainment.  I thought Burroughs was writing some pretty heavy stuff even if I missed the much I picked up later when my interests were subconsciously directed to the same social problems that concerned Burroughs.  I found to my surprise that Tarzan having entered the back of my mind had formed much if not most of my social thought.  I give you the results of my education by Burroughs here.

     I find myself amazed by the depth and profundity of Burroughs’ thinking.  The ease with which he handled these complex problems without directly identifying them or preaching is fairly amazing.  I pointed out in my earlier essay how Burroughs addressed the problem of eugenics in the males and females of Opar.

     So he took on the problem of psychic dislocation in the White sub-species in the very nature of his creation, Tarzan.

     We know he was heavily influenced by Poe’s ‘Murders In The Rue Morgue’ because he retells the story in the ‘Return Of Tarzan’ in Chaper 3, ‘What happened In The Rue Maule.’  Now this retelling is close enough to be considered borrowing if not plagiarism if his purpose hadn’t been to develop Poe’s theory.  Poe was positing the problem; Burroughs was offering the solution.

     Just by way of reference; my copies of Tarzan are those of Grosset and Dunlap from the late forties and early fifties.  They also have what I consider the finest artwork on Tarzan, a matter of taste, I know.

     Where in Poe, Dupin is a human while the Orang-outang a beast, Burroughs combines the two in one.   The sub-conscious and the conscious are integrated.  Tarzan is at once the most charming and civilized of men but once aroused he quickly reverts to animal ferocity.  But he is able to pass back and forth at will, unlike Jekyll and Hyde, and at a moments notice; he is in control of both his animal and human nature.

     He even escapes by leaping from the window to a telephone pole, which had appeared since Poe’s time, shinnying up the pole, having had the good sense, or science, to look down first to see a policeman standing guard, he then makes a fairly daring leap, the result of his jungle training, to the roof of the building scampering across numerous rooftops.  Tarzan then descends to earth down another telephone pole.  There were telephone poles in Chicago but I don’t know whether Burroughs checked to see if there were telephone poles in Paris.

     Running wildly for a few blocks he then enters a cafe, successfully cleaning himself up to a gentlemanly appearance in the rest room.  Now fully human again he ‘saunters’ down the avenue where he meets the countess as his charming urbane self.

     These two stories of Poe and Burroughs are fairly remarkable; one posits the problem which the other resolves.  Was either conscious of what the problem was that they were dealing with?  The results would indicate yes but in the chapter on the Rue Maule Burroughs has this to say:

     ‘Tarzan spent the two following weeks reviewing his former brief acquaintace with Paris.  In the daytime he haunted the libraries and picture galleries.  He had become an omnivorous  reader and the world of possibilities that were opened to him in this seat of culture and learning fairly appalled him when he contemplated the very infinitesimal crust of the sum total of human knowledge that a single individual might hope to acquire even after a lifetime of study and research, but he learned what he could.

     Surely Burroughs is here reflecting on his own study and research with becoming modesty.  His thirty-seven years have not been wasted in idleness.  As an omnivorous reader he has acquired some small store of knowledge which he has considered deeply.  He does think about the problems of his times.  The conflict between the split conscious and unconscious mind of the White man which was commonly discussed as we have seen interested him.  Tarzan is simply the result of his cogitations.

     Tarzan, born in Africa, the seat of the primitive, reared by Kala a she ape as a pure animal, then progressing straight from his animal nature to the civilized pursuits of study and absinthe he returns to the jungle to experience the intermediate Black nature as chief of his faithful Waziri.  This pretty well describes the historical reality of Western man.  Then Tarzan rules over Africa as an avatar of science.

     Sometime after 1915 when Freud’s body of work began to develop in translation Burroughs must have done a quick study finding, apparently, no difficulty in understanding what Freud was talking about.  Further, I think he quickly went beyond Freud’s own understanding, or at least, he applied Depth psychology in a positive way while Freud chose the negative way.  Thus Tarzan integrates his personality while Freud exacerbates the separation of conscious and unconscious.

     Both Freud’s and Tarzan’s influence grew during the period between the wars.  However when MGM preempted the influence of the books in the thirties withe the invention of the movie Tarzan, the great jungle hero began to be lost in the Freudian miasma.  The movies turned him into part of the unconscious.

     At the same time Africa became a known quantity and while not losing its charm for the Western dichotomy it lost its mystery becoming more commonplace as the Black African absorbed the forms of Western culture.  A Black African in a shirt, pants and shoes is just an ordinary Black man.  He is no longer the ‘noble savage.’

     Then, too, Black resentment at White dominance came to the fore and resistance to the White began along with an offensive for not only equality but superiority.

     Thus Marcus Garvey appeared with his Universal Negro Improvement Association.  While he was ridiculed in America and had his credibility destroyed he nevertheless laid the ground work for what has followed.  His UNIA was truly universal organziaing Blacks in Africa, the West Indies, Brazil and the United States.

     At the same time White scholars like Lothrop Stoddard were proposing the innate superiority of the White man.  As the science of the time posited one species of Homo Sapiens composed of three separate ‘races’ there were slight grounds to suppose that there were any other than superficial differences between the ‘races.’  There was no basis to differentiate substantial qualities as between two sub-species of different developmental stages.  Stoddard and the ‘racists’ were discredited and ridiculed as much as Marcus Garvey had been.

     The Second World War intervened suspending discussion for a few years.  After the war Freudian thought had taken hold of the psychological community.  The founder’s ideas were revered rather than questioned or tested.  Freud’s ridiculous map of the mind took on concrete form as students struggled to understand such nonsense as the Id, Libido and Super-ego.  Really laughable stuff.

     His notions of the unconscious were embraced by the people at large.  The ideas of self-discipline and mental training were rejected in favor of avoiding ‘repression.’  The criminal aspects of the unconscious gained the ascendance furthered along by the avatars of the unconscious- movies and movie makers.

     As 1960 dawned the Whites began a precipitous slide back across that narrow little gulf, which Haggard saw, toward savagery.

      However as there was a difference in the quality of the mind of the White it became apparent that it was not so possible as it seemed to abandon their scientific nature.  While the Black without the scientific ‘gene’ could be relatively comfortable in a scientific milieu supported by Whites, the scientific White could not be comfortable in a savage world,  He was troubled either way.

     Freud had thus injured the sub-species greatly by insisting on the ego occupying the unconscious rather than melding the two halves of the mind by eliminating the destructive elements of the subconscious.

     I had taken my Tarzan in subconsciously so that in 1960 when the challenges to White intellectuality became confusing I was able to hold on to my standards if not undisturbed then at least securely.  When I later integrated my personality I became proof against the destructive elements of Freudiansim.

     Through Burroughs then I identified with his hero Tarzan to save my soul.  When I say that Tarzan lives I mean that he was my sheet anchor on the stormiest of seas.  It was because of ERB’s creation of Tarzan that I have survived whole and entire.  May Tarzan ever prosper and never die.  May he have discovered the fountain of youth.  Look to the future and keep you eye on the bouncing ball.

 

Edgar Rice Burroughs On Mars

A Review

The Chessmen Of Mars

Part 5

by

R.E. Prindle

 

The Taxidermist Of Mars Part 2

     To return to the arrival of Gahan, Tara and Ghek at Manator.  The three have been drifting before the wind for days as they have no propeller to move them.  Tara is in dire straits  badly needing water and food.  Landing some disntace from Mantor Gahan decides to enter the city in search of food and water.  He is espied on his approach and a trap set.

     I am assuming that Manator represents LA and Burroughs is decribing his arrival there in 1919.

     Porges was the ERB trailblazer while to my knowledge he is the only researcher allowed in the archives to this date.  Robert Barrett seems to have had a close relationship with Danton Burroughs, ERB’s grandson,  and Danton released snippets to him from time to time but there is no evidence in Barrett’s wrtings in the Burroughs Bulletin that he has spent any time in the archives.

     Not even Bill Hillman who has done so much for Danton and ERB, Inc. has been allowed to work int he archives.  Danton promised HIllman documentation  for some time but never found the time to send it.  I once talked to Danton by phone and he indicated he was withholding access for ‘effect.’  I didn’t ask what effect.   He did release a valuable snippet to me though.  So, to a very large extent one is forced to combine Porges’ seminal but fairly meager information with what was happening in Burroughs’ life as reflected in his novels.

     One of the areas that have troubled me is the relationship of ERB’s rival with Emma, Frank Martin, both before and after their marriage.

     Martin was disgusted with Burroughs who he thought, correctly I believe, didn’t actually want Emma but didn’t want anyone else to have her either.  I think it probable that ERB wanted to keep Emma on the shelf indefinitely as the result of the confrontation with John the Bully.

     Driven to desperate measures Martin drew ERB to New York on his father’s private rail car and attempted to have him murdered in Toronto.

     That attempt failed.  ERB in defiance married Emma against her family’s wishes a few months after the attack.  Now, what was Frank Martin’s reaction to the wedding?  Did he resign himself to the reality or did he interfere in the marriage any way he could?

     We have a couple facts that indicate that at the very least he kept an eye on the couple.  Hard facts.  Martin’s associate or stooge was a man called R.S. Patchin.  He was on the trip to New York and present at the assassination attempt in Toronto.  In 1934 aftr ERB divorced Emma Patchin showed up in LA and sought ERB out for what appears to be the first time since 1899.  Did he just happen to be in town at that moment or was he acting as Frank Martin’s agent? 

     Before we answer that let us consider Patchin’s next appearance in ERB’s history.When ERB died in 1950 Patchin sent a condolence letter to the family specifically recalling ERB’s bashing in Toronto.  That is why we have a good record of the event.  Sometime between 1934 and 1950 Martin died so Patchin was operating on his own.  In his note he reminded the family of the Toronto incident that might be considered as even gloating perhaps.

     The interest of Martin and Patchin then appears to be malevolent.  If Martin and Patchin appeared at one of these unpleasant occurrences  then it follows that perhaps Martin was working against ERB’s interests from 1900 at the the time of the wedding on.

     Martin may have driven ERB and Emma out of Chicago in 1903.  In 1907 and ’08 when ERB impregnated Emma twice in close succession that may have been a defensive move against Martin.  The angry ex-suitor very likely then continued his machinations behind the scenes after ERB’s literary success finally driving ERB from Chicago for good in 1919.

     Now, Chicago was a movie making center before the rise of Hollywood.  Many of the important  movie people in LA originated in the Windy City.  It is not improbable that the son of a railroad magnate who owned his own private rail car knew some of them.  As starlets were starlets then as now it is not inconceivable that Martin spent time in LA part of each year.  Thus, when ERB moved to LA which Martin would have known in advance it is conceivable that he planned his revenge.  The trap was laid so innocuously  that as in his entry into Mantor Gahan/ERB wasn’t aware of the trap until he was completely in its meshes with little chance of escape left.

     That ERB was an impetuous lad given to snap decisions must have been known to anyone who observed him as closely as Martin must have.  ERB left Chicago to seek twenty acres 0n which to raise his hogs.  Instead he was shown the 540 acre estate of General Otis of the LA Times.  As I understand it ERB did not seek the estate but that notice of it was brought to him.  There was the bait.  The bait was too attractive.  ERB bought the estate  and was hooked.  The trap was sprung.

     ERB went on a spending spree of magnificent proportions without realizing what the costs were and how vulnerable his income was.  Now saddled with care he had to struggle to find time to keep up his writing.  Publishing became more difficult for him while his movie revenues came to a halt in 1922, the year after Chessmen.  Whether you look at it like the impetuous Burroughs, who acted first and thought later, merely mad a very bad decision or whether he was lured into  buying the estate he either was trapped or trapped himself.  Chessmen would indicate that he believed he had been trapped.

     In any event he was moving with the big boys in LA according to the big guys’ rules.  That is a very difficult transition to make.  The big boys play rough.

     Let us see how ERB portrays Gahan’s entry into Manator.  His entry is noted by a sinister unknown figure from the walls.  We never hear of this figure again.  He just disappears from the story.  Gahan’s entry into the city is unopposed.  He merely enters the unguarded gate and begins walking down a street.  There the three figures dogging him split up.  The figure who spotted him follows him from a distance, another runs ahead so that Gahan is caught in the jaws of the vise.  The third figure parallels him keeping him in sight.

     When they wish him to enter a building the man ahead creates the sound of a patrol approaching from the front.  A door stands conveniently open.  Gahan ducks in.  This door may represent his buying the Otis estate.  As the patrol draws closer Gahan retreats around a corner into a hall.  someone of the patrol enters the door forcing Gahan farther along the corridor.  The figure retreats closing the door behind him.  Gahan now finds the door locked.  He is trapped in the corridor. He must go forward.  Thus ERB having bought Tarzana has no choice but to live with his mistake.

     He proceeds down the hall in this charade of doors that is part and parcel of ERB’s psyche.  Gahan is directed on his way  by being compelled to enter the only unlocked door.  Finally he approaches a bank of doors all locked except door number 3 that is standing open.  Yes, this scene was repeated in 1934’s Tarzan And The Lion Man but more of that later.  Gahan enters hearing the door click shut leaving him absoltuely no exit.  His course has been downward.  He is now in the pits of Manator.

     He is now directed to a room with a table parallel with the wall.  He sits down.  Gas is emitted from holes in the wall sedating Gahan.  He passes out.  How clever, Gahan ruminates when he comes to, I have been good and roundly caught and not a hand was laid on me.    We too marvel at the masterful description of Gahan’s capture.  In real life ERB is saddled with an estate too large for his income and spending habits and which is slowly consuming him.  Thus when he awakes from the sedation he finds a giant ulsio, the Martian Rat knawing on his arm.  One assumes that if Gahan hadn’t wakened when he did he might have had his limbs consumed.  Had ERB just become aware of his predicament?  Was the game now on?

     Nicely done, great atmosphere and from we readers’ perspective a great story.  But now let’s backtrack a little before we move on.  This is really quite a story.

2.

      While the Jetan game is the most fascinating aspect of this novel for perhaps most people the game itself may be the game within the game, so to speak, the story within the story.  The whole Manator story may be considered as a game of chess in which each episode is a move in the game.  Remember in the framing story ERB had finished a game of chess with Shea.  The Secretary turned in leaving ERB ruminating about his loss and blowing smoke at the head of his king- the head.  As he does so John Carter walks in.  He tells ERB, in the latter’s own persona, that Chess is similar to Jetan on Mars.  So, smoking the head of his king very likely gave ERB the hint to construct the story along the lines of Chess.  Thus the opening gambit, the first move is Gahan’s entry into the city countered by the mysterious figure who engineers his capture.

     As ERB comtemplated how he had gotten into his Tarzana dilemma he may very well have compared his situation to a game of chess that must be played well if he were to extricate himself unharmed.

     He has chosen to present his problem in the form of a dream.  Because in dreams as he has a character in Fighting Man Of Mars say, you can’t get hurt.

     In Gahan’s entry ERB creates a bizarre dream image of balconies full of people observing his progress but who seem oblivious of it.  Soon we learn that I-Gos the taxidermist of Mars spends his life stuffing these dead people who populate this strange city.  In dreams of course all the participants have no real life; like the dead past they have no volition.

     Apparently this novel is activating dreams in me.  The other night I dreamt I was walking down a boardwalk as in old Chicago with the crazy ups and downs.  As I mounted a higher part of the boardwalk I was accosted by six thugs.  As they were discussing what to do with me I was paralyzed with fear not unlike ERB before John the Bully.  Then I said to myself:  This is a dream and I can’t get hurt in a dream.  So saying I grabbed the closest thug and threw him through a plate glass window.  Turning quickly I grabbed a second thug and hoisted him over the railing.  The remaining three, there must have been only five, were paralyzed in their turn.  Then I grew bored and woke up.

     So ERB in the same way is examining his dream world but tweaking it from his daytime consciousness.  His real life is being interpreted through his symbolism.

     That in 1921, the time he wrote this story, one knows that he was already in deep trouble is because in 1934 when he was already going through the trauma of battling MGM, the Communists, and divorcing Emma and marrying Florence he replicates his entry into Manator in his entry into London and the City Of God.  The bit with the three doors, the third being open and clicking quietly shut behind him is an exact duplication of Tarzan And The Lion Man.  In that novel he enters a prison where he finds his Anima ideal, Rhonda, already imprisoned.  In this one he is chained beside A-Kor(rock spelled backwards).  In Lion Man the strange creature is God; in this one the Taxidermist Of Mars.  There is no reason not to believe ERB is going through some real stress.

     When the effect of the gas dissipates, first he dispatches an ulsio, The Giant Rat Of Mars (echo of Sherlock Holmes and the Giant Rat Of Sumatra?) he notices that the table that had been parallel to the wall is now vertical to it.  At the far end he notices the key to his manacles.  Here he employs his classical education by recalling the story of Tantalus.  In that story Tantalus was standing in water with fruit trees above him but could neither eat or drink because water and fruit receded before his grasp.

     Thus the solution to ERB’s problem is frustratingly just beyond his grasp as he stretched out manacle biting into his ankle.  I believe this image probably refers to his childhood fixation of John The Bully that he can’t quite consciously recall or resolve.  Part of the story develops around the fixation in the form of Gahan’s contest with O-Tar the Jeddak.  O-Tar represents John the Bully as well as Frank Martin.

     In Gahan’s predicament then ERB represents his own psychological dilemma.

     I will give another example from my own dreams.  Several years ago I had this wonderful dream that I thought was so spectacular that I wrote it up as short story.  Anyone interested can read it at reprindle.wordpress.com.  It’s called The Hole In The Sky. 

http://reprindle.wordpress.com/2008/04/04/pages-lifted-from-the-memoirs-of-far-gresham-92183/

     At the time I was struggling to resolve my own central childhood fixation.  I thought an image my mind employed so amazing that it was the only literary image I had ever had that I thought was completely original.  We’ll see.

     In this dream my fixation appeared as a giant Gordian Knot three or four feet in diameter.  There’s a real fixation for you.  I hadn’t been able to unravel this knot so now Alexander like I was going to cut it.  I had this giant pair of scissors so huge I could lean on the handles like a crutch.  I could see the problem and had the tool in my hands to resolve it but I couldn’t manipulate the huge tool.  Two guys offered to help so instead of of helping me with the scissors they picked up the knot with a rod running through it.

     I didn’t recognize the two but they were obviously the ones who gave me the fixation not unlike ERB and John the Bully.  They stood grinning mockingly at me holding up the fixation.  I struggled with scissors then asked them for help.  In response they laughed and shook the knot at me.  I had to give up.

     Just to show how the dreaming mind works I later discovered that the image that I thought was so original was based on a scene from a 1957 movie I’d seen.  So twenty or twenty-five years later I duplicated a scene from The Incredible Shrinking Man in a dream.  Richard Matheson who wrote the wonderful I, Legend also wrote the equally wonderful, Shrinking Man.

     In the movie the Man had shrunk down to the size where a now giant spider was attacking him.  He was about to fight the spider using a needle but he had to cut the thread with a now giant pair of children’s scissors.  In attempting to manipulate them he knocked the needle over the edge of the table.

     So there you have it.  Just tell your story; don’t worry about being original; it can’t be done.  So ERB employs Greek mythology to creat his image.  I can’t say he was conscious of it anymore than I was in mine but so many of his details fermented in his mind for decades before they spilled out onto the paper.

     Gahan sits back down in exasperation.  then he notices the doors to his prison have been left open.  No matter, he can’t leave chained to the wall.  He marvels at the diabolical cleverness of his captors.  They intend to totally frustrate him. So ERB in real life was caught in a trap where while not in a jail he was effectively imprisoned.

     As Ghek at this point becomes mere foolery in the story I’m going to ignore his doings unless tangential.

     To further the story A-Kor is arrested and chained next to Gahan.  He provides Gahan with the information that will allow the latter  to organize his Jetan team and bring the story to its denouement.  In the meantime Gahan is brought from the pits to be interviewed by O-Tar along with Tara and Ghek who have been captured.  There Ghek  uses his hypnotic powers to allow Gahan and Tara to escape to the pits together.  ERB uses a device that seems to have been a favorite.  There is a curtain over an opening behind the throne they escape through.  Opar has the same arrangement through which Tarzan and La emerge in, I believe, Tarzan The Invincible.

     In the pits the couple encounter I-Gos who explains his grisly business and solves the mystery of the immobile viewers lining the streets.  The scene then follows in which Gahan is locked in the storeroom at the very bottom of the pits of Manator or the equivalent of the brain stem.

     Separated from Tara the interlude of the Jetan game occurs in which Tara was the prize for the winners of the game.  I will deal with Tara and the game in Part 6.  Tara and Gahan return to the pits.  It does seem a bit strange that Tara never recognized Gahan in his panthan guise.  But, there you have it, anything goes in a dream story.

     The couple find their way to the quarters of O-Mai an ancient Jeddak who died five thousand years previously.  His quarters are believed to be haunted so that in 5000 years they are the first to enter with the possible exception of I-Gos.   Now, I’m not going to say that ERB ever read Isis Unveiled by Madame H.P. Blavatsky written in 1877 but consider this passage on page 560 of Vol. I:

…Tcharaka, a Hindu physician, who is said to have lived 5,000 years B.C., in his treatise on the origin of things, called Usa…

     ERB also mentions something called usa.  I thought perhaps it meant United States Of America which, indeed, it may double as but the singular connection of Usa and the 5,000 year old Tcharaka is singular.   ERB was friends with L. Frank Baum and as David Adams points out Baum was into the occult which is clear from his writing so that he may very well have been familiar with Madame B and encouraged ERB to read Isis unveiled which is quite a book.  I merely point out the coincidence.

     It is here in this dismal past of truly ancient history that ERB chooses to attempt to resolve his fixation with John the Bully.  In the character of  O-Tar he has conflated John and Frank Martin so that in eliminating John he hopefully eliminates Martin at the same time.  It would seem that these two psychological facts exist in his mind as closely related or in another word, one.  At this crucial turn in his later life the fear caused by John and the imputation of cowardice ERB endured as a child that conrolled the nature of his response to problems has to be met if he is to successfully meet the challenges of Tarzana.  That Frank Martin may be operating against his interests behind the scenes, he who followed behind Gahan as he entered Manator, is evident because ERB associates his marriage to Emma in this context.  The figure who followed Gahan and disappears from the story now reappears in an aspect of O-Tar.  In ERB’s mind both John and Frank would be rats.  Thus we have both the cowadice issue in O-Mai’s quarters that prove John is a coward and Gahan/ERB isn’t and the marriage scene where Gahan in O-Tar’s disguise steals Tara/Emma away.

     Gahan and Tara explore O-Mai’s quarters that are spooky enough.  A group of warriors playing cards appear as lifelike just as I-Gos arranged them.  Initially taken back Gahan slowly realizes that they are the work of the Great Taxidermist of Mars.

     They discover the mummy of O-Mai lying on the floor where he died with his foot caught in the bedding.  This is a terrific dream image.  We know it is a dream because Tara and Gahan can see in the dark.  In dreams yours eyes are closed hence you are in the dark but you can see clearly with an inner light whether deaming of sunlight or the pits.

     I-Gos becomes aware that they are there.  He informs O-Tar who sends his troops down to get them.  The incredible legends associated with the place have them terrorized.  Thus when they enter spotting the four warriors weird screams fill the chamber.  Panicking they flee.

     Now comes the crucial test of O-Tar/John.  He ridicules his warriors who then challenge him to go.  There’s no backing out so off he goes.  He is given the treatment by Gahan swooning away for over an hour.  He of course invents a story for his delay and returning empty handed which is proven false by I-Gos.  Thus he is a self-convicted coward.  In the way the mind works ERB would have exonerated himself of the charge if this had been real life.  As it wasn’t we can only guess how effective it was.

     While Gahan was concentrating on O-Tar in O-Mai’s quarters I-Gos spirited Tara awaypresenting her to O-Tar/Martin who becomes enamored of her.  She haughtily rejects him so offending him that he makes her the prize of the Jetan game to be shared by the whole winning team.  Gets worse and worse.

     Now comes the piece de resistance of the story; the part everyone concentrates on.  That’s in Part 6.

Edgar Rice Burroughs On Mars

A Review

The Chessmen Of Mars

Part IV

by

R.E. Prindle

The Taxidermist Of Mars

Part I

     While reading through the autobiography of Ian Whitcomb (see my review) who himself was depressed I came across an explanation of the cause of depresseion that explains much of ERB and actually world history, here on Earth and up on the Mars of ERB.

     Whitcomb quotes a psychologist whose name I can’t rembember who explained the cause of depression as the result of the failure of expectations to meet reality.  So, let’s talk about depresseion for a little while.  We’ll feel better for it.

     Somewhere in the first decade of the twentieth century ERB remarked of his life:  It wasn’t supposed to be this way.  How was it supposed to be?  Well, one of three favorite books of ERB was the Prince And The Pauper by Mark Twain.  ERB read it six or seven times by the time he wrote this book.  Twain was himself depressed as is apparent from any of his writings, not least being Huckleberry Finn.  In a wonderful description of failed expectations Twain gave an acurate analysis in his great story Puddinhead Wilson.  Wilson’s life was blasted by one bad joke.  ERB read that story too which made a lasting impression.

     In Prince, of course, the young Prince exchanges places with a Pauper then has a very difficult time reclaiming his place in society.  ERB obviously felt that this too was his story.  He was born into a life of comparative luxury being coddled by his brothers if not his parents then being displaced, probably when his father removed him from Brown School in the sixth grade setting him on an unsettled course of many schools.

     A cardinal sign of  his depression was when on his way to Idaho in 1898 he met an old army buddy in Denver.  The pair got drunk, hired a band and marched behind it down the main street of Denver, a desperate attempt at aggrandizement.   Thus figuratively the Pauper posed as the Prince.  Then in the throes of poverty a few years later in a cri de coeur ERB exclaimed:  It wasn’t meant to be like this.

     Perhaps at that time he hit a low deciding he had better do something about it.  If so, his writing career began to unfold.  Here ERB was a raging success- of sorts.  That is to say that he was a commercial success but a critical failure.  Thus, in a manner of speaking he received the monetary rewards of his success but not the critical substance he craved.

     He was a somebody yet if everyone didn’t shun him neither would they accept him at his own valuation.

     Then, as if to realize his wildest fantasies he migrated to Los Angeles where he bought a fantastic estate- the dream of a lifetime.  It might seem that his expectations had become reality.  Not so easy.  He had bit off more than he could chew.  Tarzana was not only an estate but a country at least the size of San Marino.  Anyone who has collected stamps will recognize that one.  ERB even got it its own post office.  Didn’t issue any Tarzana stamps though.

     Just as through his own mismanagement he was losing the dream of Tarzana he suffered cruel critical rejection because of The Chessmen Of Mars.  Thus all his expectations were crumpled by the juggernaut of reality.  Enough to throw anyone into a deep hole.  And so having abandoned the land of Bantoom Gahan, a Burroughs Animus substitute, Tara, an Anima surrogate and Ghek the Kaldane arrive at the gates of another lost city, that of Manator.

     This novel is essentially a tale of two cities- Bantoom and Manator.  Is it possible that Bantoom represents Chicago and Manator L.A.?  It’s a thought.

     Perhaps Ghek, the all-brain, represents the ERB who uses his brain to become a writer while the Rykor of Ghek represents ERB’s idyllic physical life on the ranch.  This aspect or character as of 1921 properly belongs to Chicago where his writing career began and flowered.  Arriving at Mantor or LA ERB begins another career but as yet his further writing is a thing of the future so it can’t figure into this story, hence Ghek ceases to be a leading character and becomes subsidiary comic relief, something like Nigger Jim in Twains’ Huckleberry Finn.

     ERB might easily have made Ghek a much more central character in this half of the book with his ability to roam Manator at will unseen and unnoticed.  After having created the network of paths leading from the pits to every room in Manator, curiously ERB fails to exploit the opportunities.

     The key to the Manator story becomes I-Gos as would Ras Thavas, The Mastermind O f Mars, another mad scientist figure who would be created in 1925.  Just as Ras Thavas would deal with the living, I-Gos lives among the dead.  Excellent depression image.  What an opportunity ERB missed by not calling the Taxidermist I-Gor.  He would have captured the very essence and reality of the B movie for all time except for one letter.

     I-Gos clearly designates Chessmen a novel of depression.  What a terrible job.  Who wouldn’t be depressed?  I-Gos even works in the lowest depths of the pits of Manator.  So far down that he’s lost in the structural psychology of the brain stem.  The brain stem is where all those horrible fixations reside, that unconscious of Freud that directs and misdirects our conscious acts; that overwhelms our conscious  will and negates our best intentions.

     Now, amazingly, this is just how ERB portrays his story.  It isn’t necessary for ERB to be conscious here of what he is actually portraying.  One can sense a condition without consciously understanding it.  One’s fixations are upper most in our minds and we talk of them constantly not being aware of what we are actually talking about.

     ERB describes the results of his encounter with John the Bully on the street corner on the way to school at the moment when Gahan and Tara are standing in the the lowest protion of the pits with I-Gos surrounded by the corpses the Great Taxidermist is working on.  In memory all is dead among the walking the shadows of the past.

     At this point Anima and Animus, Psyche and Eros, are together.  I-Gos tells Gahan that he wants him to get something from a storeroom.  He lures Gahan into the room then slams the door locking Gahan away.  Psychologically this means that one has been isolated from the rest of the world in one’s fixation.  I-Gos then goes back to violate Tara, or the Anima,  of ERB.  She’s a real tigress in ERB’s dreams unlike in real life.  She slips a little steel between I-Gos’ ribs.  Then fleeing she is captured by the Jeddak O-Tar’s men, that’s Rat spelled backward, and carried off.

      At this point Gahan/ERB is isolated, trapped and out of sight of man and god so to speak.  In other words ERB was psychologically cut off from society.  He could no longer interact with his fellows.  So what choice is left for ERB?  He must break out of his isolation.

     Gahan/ERB finds a heavy axe with which to attack the door made of heavy skeel wood.  Working like a berserker Gahan attacks the door.  Resting frequently to recruit his strength he finally makes an opening only big enough to just squeeze through.  Having done so he finds I-Gos lying on the floor as though dead with no sign of Tara.  So how are we to interpret this?

     Based on the evidence it would appear that in his confrontation with John the Bully something like this may have happened although in real life his Anima had abandoned him passively.  ERB doesn’t relate all the details just the key one’s for his conscious mind.  It can’t be proven that he was with Emma at the time but suppose he was.  We know for a fact that he was confronted by a young Irish thug of twelve who terrorized him.  Three years younger at nine ERB may have been transfixed by terror but Emma kept on walking leaving him to his fate.  Hence he, the Animus was separated from his Anima now represented by Emma with whom he developed a love hate relationship.  This would accoount for his fixation on Emma and possibly hers on him.  This would also give a firm basis for his love-hate relationship that expressed itself as total hatred for her upon her death.

     ERB always writes about his experiences.  So taking my exposition a little out of sequence Gahan is separated from Tara for a period of time.  This might represent the period from sixth grade until ERB and Emma’s marriage.  So now, O-Tar near the end of the novel is enamored of Tara/Emma and proposes to force himself on her.  Thus O-Tar is equivalent to Frank Martin.  Gahan as in real life ERB with Emma, gets Tara/Emma away from O-Tar/Martin and marries Tara/Emma himself.

     So, once again ERB tells the story of A. John the Bully and B. His struggle for Emma with Frank Martin.  Thus ERB’s depression is linked with his marriage.

     ERB terminates the story at this point, his winning of the girl; the reuniting of Pyche and Eros.

     But back in the pits of Manator Gahan/ERB has to struggle with his depression and try to overturn his confrontation with John the Bully.

     So, let us now backtrack and survey the setting of Manator as Gahan, Tara and Ghek land and Gahan enters the city.  At this point the story may represent ERB’s own reception in Los Angeles.

 

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.

Part 2 Tarzan And The Lion Man

 

Themes And Variations

The Tarzan Novels Of Edgar Rice Burroughs

#18 Tarzan And The Lion Man

Part 2 of 10 parts

by R.E. Prindle

Doubles And Insanity

First published on the ezine- ERBzine

 

Sometimes I feel like I’m dreaming.

-Tarzan

Penguin Dictionary Of Symbols p. 306

Doubles:  In every culture artists have depicted double-headed creatures, SERPENTS, DRAGONS, BIRDS, LIONS, BEARS and so on.  This is due neither to mere love of ornamentation nor to some Manichean influence, the creatures so depicted all have a bipolarity, both benign and malign, and this is described in their individual entries in this dictionary.  It is very likely that it is this double aspect of the live creature which is suggested by its depiction with two heads. For example, the lions strength symboizes both sovereign power and a consuming lust, whether it be for justice, or for the exercise of absolute authroity in a bloodthirsty tyrant.  Similarly, ribbons or wreaths depicted round a person’s head may symbolize, if they form a CLOSED circle, confinement in difficulty and misfortune, but if broken, release.

Sometimes duplication serves merely to re enforce and redouble the meaning attached to one of the POLES of the symbol.

Traditonal religions generally thought of the soul as being the double of the living owner, able to leave the body at death, in dreams or through magical practices, and to return to the same or some other body.  Mankind thus provided its own self-portrait in duplicate.  In any case, instances of hysterical or schizophrenic duplication of personality are well known to psychotherapy.

German Romanticism endowed this notion of a person’s double (Doppelganger)  with tragic and fatal overtones….It may sometimes be our complement, but it is more often the foe with whom we are lured to fight….In some ancient traditons, meeting one’s double is an unlucky occurrence, and is sometimes even a presage of death.

—————

 

Edgar Rice Burroughs

Lion Man is overwhelmingly a novel of doubles or duplicity.  The number of things doubled is bewildering.  I deal only with the most obvious here.  The reason Burroughs concentrates on doubling, I believe is because he discovered the double meaning of the terms of the contract he signed with MGM.  He was stunned by the duplicity.

On p. 154 Burroughs comments on duplicity such as he found at MGM.  Remember he names them BO or Stinky studios in the novel.

Tarzan was suspicious.  He saw a trap, he saw duplicity in every thing conceived by the mind of man.

Thus having been betrayed Burroughs is now alert seeing doubling or duplicitness everywhere.

St. John, the illustrator of the book also picked up on the aspect of doubling.  This novel was so extremely important to Burroughs, he even issued it on his birthday, September 1st, 1934, that he asked St. John for something different for a jacket illustration.  St. John concentrated on the Obraoski/Tarzan doubling, producing a Janus like cameo of Tarzan/Obroski facing in opposte directions.  As in the Penguin definition representing both characters of the Lion Men Tarzan and Obroski.

In this case the two faces represent the earlier cowardly Bureroughs who has to die and the strong masterly Tarzan figure Burroughs wishes to be.

Thus, before considering the story it would be fruitful to examine ERB’s use of doubling and confusion of reality, or in other words craziness, madness or insanity.

It is obvious that when ERB is passing rhough a period of extreme stress Tarzan loses his memory and/or doubles- that is to say splits his personality in a hysterical or schizophrenic way.  At this point in his life Burroughs is enduring the stress of sexual conflict – the change in affections from Emma to Florence- as well as the extreme stress of having lost control of his creation and actual alter ego to MGM as representatives of his Judaeo-Communist enemies.  In point of fact, as Burroughs may have realized, the battle, even the war, was lost.  As MGM’s 1936 movie Tarzan Escapes, indicates Tarzan/Burroughs had been captured.  Hence the tenuous grasp on sanity in this book.

In Burroughs’ mind and in fact he had been trapped by duplicity, itself a form of doubling.  When Tarzan, having climbed the Stairway To Heaven finds the front door standing open he scents a trap but as his intention was to enter anyway he enters.  He is now only in the antechamber of fate, he could still back out.  He notices six doors of which Door #3 is standing open.  He does try the other five doors but they are locked.  Entering Door #3 he begins the descent down a dark stairwell.  He encounters another door.  Rather than checking the door first he merely enters to have the door click shut behind him.  The wall is smooth, there is now no way out.

This scene may well be a fictionalized account of his negotiations with MGM.  The Studio, perhaps representing Door #3 was offering him a contract which no other studio, doors 1,2,4,,5,6 was willing to do.  Granted not everyone can spot a sterling opportunity that is staring them in the face but it does seem odd that no other studio was interested in a proven character.  After all Twentieth Century-Fox was working Charlie Chan movies hard and doing well.  But all doors were closed to Burroughs/Tarzan except Door #3, MGM.  Not a bad thing on the surface of it as MGM was far and away the best studio in Hollywood.

So Burroughs entered into negotiations with MGM in the same manner as Tarzan descended the dark staircase in which he couldn’t see very well, i.e. Burroughs didn’t understand the clauses.  Like Tarzan ERB didn’t exercise caution and while the door snapped shut trapping Tarzan so Burroughs signed the contract which he represented as the prison Tarzan found himself in.

The reader may find the above farfetched but remember the first third of the story is an account of MGM’s Trader Horn expedition that he ridicules.  This book is about MGM.

Before dealing with the main doubles of the story let’s consider the story within the story- a form of doubling itself.  We have God on Earth doubling God in Heaven.  This becomes the source of many jokes.  Stress or no stress Burroughs doesn’t lose his sense of humor.  God’s castle is known as Heaven thus doubling Heaven.  The Stairway to Heaven doubles Jacob’s Ladder thus calling to mind the biblical story.  Tarzan then doubles Jacob.  That’s just part of sly old Burroughs’s humor.

God himself has created a parallel universe doubling England, London and the Thames.  Thus the gorilla plateau is called England while they live in London on the Thames River.  Thus a doubling of Africa and an island off the coast of Europe.

Just as God in Heaven in the biblical story created Man so God in this story has hybridized gorillas into a new species of gorilla men.  The hybrid gorillas are doubles of both gorillas and men while God is a double of man and Gorilla.

In this dizzying array of doubles the gorillas are not just a doubling of men but a doubling of the fifteenth century court of Henry VIII of England.  They have been altered by the use of deathless genes  or, atually, DNA, which was unknown to Burroughs at the time but the nature of which he dimly perceives.  The DNA has been inserted or spliced into the genes of the gorillas, thus the gorilla Henry VIII is actually, Henry VIII.  The Fifteenth century is doubled in the twentieth century while the political scene of the twentieth duplicates that of the fifteenth.  ERB may here be influenced by Mark Twain’s The Mysterious Stanger with his notion of ascending and descending staircases of time.

During this phase of the story within the story Tarzan is actually himself while posing as, or doubling, Stanley Obroski thus actually being self contained twins; in other words the personality formerly split between he and Stanley Obroski is reunited with Tarzan dominant.  Thus Tarzan redeems Burroughs’ former shamed self.  At this moment Stanley is dying of fever and when he does the double disappears leaving Tarzan or Burroughs then undivided.  The dead body of Obroski is shipped back to the States while Tarzan remains in the jungle.

The story within the story is a stunning achievement whose genius has gone unrecognized.

b.

The most obvious examples of doubling is in the main characters.  As incredible as it may seem not only are Tarzan and Stanley Obroski so close they can’t be told apart but so are the female leads Naomi Madison and Rhonda Terry.

I’m sure there are doubles I’m missing here but even Tom Orman, the Dirctor, is a double of himself when he’s under the influence of alcohol.  Drunk he becomes a different Tom Orman than when sober.  Obroski himself is two people.  An errant coward when he has time to think he become ferociously brave when his back is against the wall and there is no time for reflection.

Naomi Madison who has become a prima donna or an artiste was at one time a waitress in a cheap restaurant which role she is forced to assume again which is another form of doubling.  In this joke Naomi is an insult to Irving Thalberg’s wife, Norma Shearer, whose early career is duplicated.

Also this movie Tarzan is a doubling of the literary Tarzan so both Obroski and Tarzan are doubles of Johnny Weissmuller who played the MGM Tarzan.  As Burroughs suggests in this novel he was half out of his mind from the terrific stresses.  The stress did produce however a terrific novel.

It would seem that Burroughs was Tarzan and Obroski as twin aspects of his own Animus while Naomi and Rhonda represented the twin aspects of his Anima.  Naomi obviously represents Emma while Rhonda is an extension of La of Opar combined with Florence.  Naomi disappears from the story apparently replaced by Balza, The Golden Girl, while Burroughs marries Rhonda to Orman.

As regards the doubling of Tarzan who is actually a double of Burroughs himself, Bibliophile David Adams has emphasized that Tarzan usually views from above so that it might be the time to look into this aspect of the character.  In Lion Man Obroski is captured and held prisoner by Rungula, chief of the Bansuto.  this whole scene of Obroski with the Bansuto is one of the numerous variations of the theme of Burroughs humiliation by John the Bully.

Burroughs was plagued with the dream, as he notes the dream frequent among dreamers, of going naked in public.  It is a frequent dream because multitudes of people have suffered similar humiliation as his.

ERB has Obroski stand before Rungula who demands his clothes, in other words his defensive and offensive armor, that without which Obroski is exposed defenseless to the world, he loses his ‘front.’  John had symbolically stripped young ERB.  Burrughs describes his humiliation in excruciating detail as Obroski does a virtual striptease.  First his shirt on down until Burroughs makes a joke of his gaily printed boxer shorts.  While the Bansuto would not have understood the signficance of the shorts ERB takes a certain pleasure in humiliating himself further.  To cover rhis nakedness Obroski pleads for the proverbial fig leaf and is given a skimpy dirty g-string.  Thus when he is led out for torture he fights the Bansuto naked but in a Tarzan guise.  Heck, Tarzan, who is not civilized in the jungle, walks around naked anyway.  Although the natives themselves are naked Obroski is civilized while they are savages.  Having been subdued Obroski is lain before Rungula.  By this time Tarzan is in a tree, apparently planted there for his convenience.  He looks down on Obroski in amazement to see a replica of himself.  p. 104:

In the light of a new day Tarzan of the Apes stood looking down upon the man who resembled him so closely that the ape-man experienced the uncanny sensation of standing apart, like a disembodied spirit, viewing his corporeal self.

What Burroughs is describing here is the splitting of the personality.  He may have the correct psychologically sequence, first the stripping of the armor- i.e. emasculation, and then the disembodiment, the dissociation of the mind and body.  The mind unable to deal with the reality seems to leave the body rising above and looking down on the humiliation of his poor self.  This theme runs all through Burroughs work although this is his most exact and detailed description.

Obroski has been led out to be tortured to death and eaten by Rungula the cannibal chief.  Usually Tarzan is placed in an arena to fight one or more wild beasts.  In a normal confrontation Obroski is a coward which is to say he is unable to defend himself.  In other words his subconscious mind has been conditioned to accept the dominance and authority of hte oppressor.  In still other words in a state of terror his subconscious had been accessed to accept certain hypnotic suggestions.  But, with his back to the wall his instinct of self-preservation overrules the hypnotic suggestion and he fights like the proverbial cornered rat.

In this instance he used his full potential to fell a whole battalion of Rungula’s men, performing authentic Tarzanic feats like lifting men above his head casting them among his foes.  At the time Tarzan is looking down at him he has finally been subdued lying at Rungula’s feet.

You know whre I’m going , don’t you?  Right.  that street corner in Chicago where John the Bully confronted young ERB.  Burroughs didn’t fight like a berserker though, he ran.  (Chief Run-gu-la?) But that was when he split his personality being able to look down on his corporeal self like a disembodied spirit.

As the Penguin Dictionary says:  Instances of hysterical or schizophrenic duplication of personality are well know to psychotherpy.  There are many examples of this phenomenon.  Here are a couple to show how it works.

When a person is enduring an unbearable situation in which he is powerless to resist, rather than believe the situation is happening to him he does split off a psychological projection of himself as a disembodied spirit who sympathetically views his now alter ego’s humiliation.

For instance when Jean Genet, the author and playwright was at the Mettray Reformatory he was caught out by a gang of homosexuals and gang raped.  As the rape progressed, escape being impossible while becoming so unbearable for him, to retain his sanity he split off a projection, a disembodied spirit, if you will, that floated above the scene.  Thus Genet was able to actually observe his rape without participating in it.  As he watched he muttered ‘Poor Jean, poor poor Jean.’  Thus the mind provides a somewhat feeble defense but one that allows one to keep one’s sanity after a fashion.  Of course the hypnotic suggestion  from this terrifically shameful event caused him to relinquish his will to the oppressor, part of the deal to keep one’s sanity.  Genet’s character was changed for life; he became a homosexual who had no will to resist that of men while becoming an active agent in his future degradation.  He was always able to rationalize his actions so that they seemed right.

I will use my own experience as a second example.  In kindergarten the elite group forced a confrontation with me in which they lost and looked bad.  Circumstances removed me to a different school before they had a chance to relaliate on me.   But then in second grade I was returned to that school.  At that point they were waiting for me.  This situation is more analogous to Burroughs than Genet but all three involve a rape of the mind which is what emasculation is.

The general conclusion is that my and Burroughs situations are normal, they happen to everyone.  Perhaps.  And everyone reacts in their individual way but everyone reacts.  A few years later and I would have been able to handle this situation without a problem as would have been true with Burroughs.  Remember with Burroughs however that while John the Bully only threatened him in 1884-85 fifteen years later in a similar to identical situation he had his head broken thus reinforcing the original situation.

In my case the situation formed my central childhood fixation as did Burroughs’.  My subconscious was opened to admit certain hypnotic suggestions which were fixed in my subconscious.  It then closed but refused to allow me to remember which of course is why the situation became a fixation, or suggestion I could not refuse to observe.

At recess in the second grade a group of, shall we say, twelve formed a semi-circle around me.  Like Burroughs I am compelled to make excuses for myself.  For the previous year I had been shuttled between foster homes and thus I had no support or defense.  I was alone.  In kindergarten the boy, the leaderof the pack, had ordered two new kids, the first Negroes in the school, to sit on the sandbox and not move during recess.  I took the Blacks’ side offering to fight the leader.  He, standing at point, declined combat stepping back into the support of his crowd gathered behind him.  That was his mistake.  He and his crowd had realized this.  Now in the second grade the boy still refused to challenge me individually.  Now they formed a semi-circle around me while their leader stood at keystone, still enveloped by his gang so that, I presume, they could fall on me if I resisted.

They all beamed hatred and contempt at me.  I was unable to resist the projected hatred of the boys and girls while at this date having only the vaguest or no notion of what I was guilty of, I was ordered to take a step forward which to my eternal shame I did.  In midstep I was ordered to stop and stay in that suspended step throughout recess.  To my shame, I did.  He said:  You’re going to have to be our nigger now.  The shame killed my personality, my identity, my ego.  I assumed the role of ‘nigger.’  Terror opened the way to the subconscious and the suggestion, you are a nigger, among others was entered.  Like Jean Genet a projection of myself arose above to say something like:  Poor kid, poor poor kid.’

The suggestion was so horrific to me that I immediately forgot it or, perhaps since that ego died the incident was not part of the life of the survivor.  The memory was accepted and encysted in my subconscious what Freud and Jung would call the unconscious.  I not only forgot the situation but I forgot the faces and names of the kids involved.  I could not remember them from that day forward although I could talk to them as though I did know them.

The consequence was that I had to do what I was told to do by nearly anyone.  Much the same as Burroughs who wrote a medieval story, of which he knew nothing, at the suggestion or command of Metcalf and wrote Son Of Tarzan which he later regretted, and Tarzan And The Ant Men at the suggestion or command of Bob Davis.  Buroughs became a variation of the dependent personality as did I.

On the one hand my conscious mind understood the proper means of defense but as I began to do so my subconscious mind overruled or shoved my conscious mind aside and obsequiously obeyed.

This plight was only changed when I succeeded in integrating my personality in the year of around forty-two.  That is to say the subconscious contents of my mind centered around the cyst of my central childhood fixation was made manifest to my conscious mind allowing the subconscious to be integrated into consciousness.  Where the ‘Id’ was ‘Ego’ shall be, as Freud put it.

Burroughs in  Lion Man at fifty-eight is describing the same situation as that experienced by Genet and myself but in a different way.  Like myself and Genet he would have been easy to direct.  So at that age he had not yet exorcised that particular demon.  As ERB kills Obroski off in this novel assuming both identities while discarding that of Obroski, returning the corpse to Hollywood, becoming solely Tarzan of the Apes one wonders if he succeeded in integraing his personality at that point.  That is what he is describing.

His experiences with John The Bully, the splitting of his personality explains why Tarzan observes from above rather than as a participant on the ground. In Lion Man perhaps agitated by the movie duplicate of the literary Tarzan he brought the situation of John the Bully to consciousness. Rungula the Bansuto taking John’s place while the aspect of Tarzan or his split off alter ego watches from above while Obroski fought like a berserker on the ground but was overcome by numbers or in the John situation, size.

Thus Tarzan spies on the safari from the trees by day while walking rhough the camp at night.  Having dealt with his humiliation in some way in Rungula’s village, when Orman and West are threatened by a lion Tarzan plummets from his tree to kill the lion on the ground then without a word vaults back into the tree.  Orman and West mistake him for his lookalike Obroski.  Thus we have the beginning of the reuniting of the split personality which will continue in the Heaven of the gorilla god.

Burroughs was under such extreme stress from both his sexual desires and the MGM betrayal that he must have felt half mad.  While he and Rhonda are captive in Heaven he says:  Sometimes I think I must be dreaming.  A statement that seems to be out of character for the Big Bwana.  The scene might be interpreted as ERB’s Anima and Animus being imprisoned while on one level God might represent MGM.

Tarzan comes into contact with Stanley Obroski which Tarzan finds amusing and lets them do.  Both women pinch tmeselves to see if they are dreaming or mad as well they might.  Tarzan rejects Naomi which must have confused her as she and Obroski were in love with each other.  Having ditched Naomi Tarzan/Obroski goes back for the wise cracking Rhonda.

Then too Burroughs actually describes Tarzan as a madman at one point.  This would be tantamount to describing himself as mad.  Indeed the whole novel centers on mad or insane happenings.

The madness or insanity would be an aspect of Tarzan’s viewing from above as a disembodied spirit.  The splitting off of the aspect from his and ERB’s personality would be the result of the extreme stress of the moment that produced the feeling of dizzying  madness.

Burroughs handling of the stress in what I consider a very extraordinary novel is abolutely masterly.  I can’t think of a finer science fiction story that the story within the story of God’s in his Heaven and all’s wrong with the world.

ADDENDUM

David Adams who had an advance copy of this piece brought up the point that perhaps Tom Orman in his drunken state was a comment on Emma’s drinking problem.  A scenario instantly suggested itself.

Imagine Orman in his drunken state as a personification of John Barleycorn.  Imagine sweet sober Naomi as Emma in her sober state and Obroski as Burroughs in his non-Tarzan, actually Obroski state.

John Barleycorn claimed Emma as his own as Orman claimed Naomi.  Barleycorn is a jealous man and won’t tolerate Burroughs as a lover of Emma.  So the couple have to sneak a moment or two when John Barleycorn isn’t around.  In other words, when Emma is sober.

As Burroughs fictionally represents the situation Obroski/Burroughs is visiting Naomi/Emma in her tent.  they appear to be in love and accord.  Orman is drunk in his tent and isn’t expected to be abroad.  Then Obroski hears the drunken Orman approaching the tent.  Unable to stand up to Orman Obroski obsequiously flees.

So in real life Burroughs and Emma are getting along fine until Emma hits the bottle conjuring up John Barleycorn.  ERB can’t compete with the bottle while Emma becomes verbally abusive under the influence just as Orman used the lash on bearers while drunk.  ERB can’t take it so like the bearers he vanishes into the night.

I think it may be a viable scenario although obviously ERB’s version of the truth.

End of Part II.  Part III, The Source follows.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 Greil Marcus And His Problem Fathers

A Psychological Analysis

by

R.E. Prindle

 Part I

      Greil Marcus has a new article on his old theme in the Spring 2008 Threepenny Review.  The way it is written it appears to have been a talk or lecture at some unidentified place.  His obsession must be intense for while the theme is of an interesting psychological motif I don’t really understand why he thinks the theme  is of such general interest it bears repeating so often.

     If he’s looking for a psychological interpretation I am prepared to offer him one.  It must be understood that I offer an objective analysis of that which M. Marcus has publicly aired.  Whatever I say is based on what he says.  No unkindness is intended.  This version of his obsession is the fullest he has yet offered.  To read the article go to:  http://www.threepennyreview.com/samples/marcus_sp08.html

     The main facts are these:  M. Marcus’ father and mother met in 1944 during WWII.  She had just graduated from Stanford in May or June.  He, Greil Gerstley, came from Philadelphia.  He was an officer in the Navy, apparently a full lieutenant so he may have been in uniform since shortly after hostilities began.  They met in San Francisco which was crawling with Navy in 1944.  M. Marcus either doesn’t know or doesn’t tell us but it would appear that as a wartime romance they met and married within a week or two.  M. Marcus doesn’t tell us what Gerstley’s social status in Philadelphia was but it appears as though he came from an affluent background.  We are left uninformed as to the time of year they met.  I’m guessing September or October.  Shortly after marriage the couple left for Seattle where Gerstley shipped out.  He was subsequently lost at sea six months and a day before M. Marcus was born in the summer of ’45.

     Approximately three years later in 1948 his mother married Mr. Marcus whose first name, I believe is or was Gerald.  He apparently married the mother and adopted the son in one swift movement.

     Thus, and this is crucial, for the first three years of his life of which he says he has only haunting memories, M. Marcus was Greil Gerstley.  Even though he has only faint memories of the period this dual identity has left an indelible impression.

     Now we get into what C.G. Jung calls the collective unconscious.  M. Marcus is not responsible for any of his reactions.  They all emerge from the true unconscious.

     Gerald Marcus and his mother gave him siblings.  M. Marcus’ half-brother Bill looks out for him and runs an internet alert.  I have been in communication with brother Bill.  In 1955 the family moved into a fine new home in Menlo Park, California.  Menlo Park is a very affluent suburb on the San Francisco Peninsula so Gerald Marcus was a good provider.  M. Marcus seems to have no complaints about his step-father.  Indeed as Gerald adopted him on marriage it would appear that he was trying to sidestep unconscious psychological animosities by making another man’s child his own, at least in name.

     Shortly after moving into the house in Menlo Park M. Marcus was toying with the radio and heard an announcement about American GIs fathering babies on Korean mothers and then abandoning them.  M. Marcus immediately related that announcement to his biological father’s marriage to his mother and subsequent death that struck a subliminal chord related to the abandonment of the Korean children.  Now the response is not rational but unconscious and fully explicable on that level.

     At some later time M. Marcus saw David Lynch’s movie  Blue Velvet.  Certain homey scenes struck the subliminal chord of his father’s abandonment making him believe that the idyllic scenes were what he had lost with his father’s death or abandonment.  He subconsciously perceived his father’s death or non-return as abandonment.

     These are the facts for Part I.

     In analysis there seems to be a sense of loss between birth and the age of three when his mother remarried.  A blank spot in his life.  When he questioned his mother (now deceased) about his father she had nothing to tell him as she had only known the man for two months or even less.  Thus M. Marcus virtually knew this man he had never met almost as well as his mother.  Whether he has been able to accept her statement or not he doesn’t make clear but there seems to be some doubt.  Some nagging sense of the need for closure which cannot be obtained.

     Now, M. Marcus carries the genes of Greil Gerstley and not those of Gerald Marcus.  Therefore Gerald and his progeny must always have seemed foreign to him.  M. marcus may have resented Gerald’s  co-habitation with his mother.  For instance my mother divorced my father when I was three although I have plenty of memories of my first three years, remarrying seven years later.  I never thought about it then but I always resented my step-father having access to my father’s woman at the same time,  my mother.  The attitude comes from the collective unconscious and is not a conscious reaction.  There is no defense against it.  Therefore from three to ten M. Marcus probably suffered a degree of alienation from his step-father with some lingering resentment of his mother and that resentment was brought into focus in this new house when he heard of the abandoned Korean children.  Even though his step-father was providing well M. Marcus believed, thought or hoped that his real father would have provided even better.  Once again, the reaction was unconscious and could not be helped.  Still this attitude must have distanced him from his step father a little probably causing some resentment on Gerald’s part.

     When M. Marcus saw Blue Velvet with its idyllic opening scenes the subliminal message was that life would have been like that with Gerstley but that had been irrevocably lost when he ‘abandoned’ M. Marcus in the same way the Korean children were abandoned.  I’m almost surprised that he didn’t change his name back to Greil Gerstley.

     A secondary problem is with his mother.  I suspect that he has a haunting feeling that perhaps Greil Gerstley may not be his father and indeed there is a chance that this is so.

     M. Marcus makes a point of saying he was born exactly six months and a day after his father was lost at sea.  but, he refuses to give us his birth date instead saying that he was born between VE and VJ days which leaves some lattitude.  Nor does he give us the date the couple were married or the date Gerstley shipped out.  His mother destroyed any letters received from Gerstley so that resource is missing.

     Certainly apart from the wartime conditions of romance the hasty marriage might have implications.  No one can now know but I suspect the fear haunts M. Marcus.

     I know that children in his situation have real difficulties with their fathers.  I have known adopted children who went to great lengths to locate a biological parent inevitibly being disappointed.  For myself I never saw my father again but neither have I had real curiosity about him.

     Greil Gerstley is gone from M. Marcus’ life and his is stuck with the frustrating situation of being able to do nothing about it  except possibly accepting the fact that that was the hand fate dealt him.  That’s how I’ve always dealt with this early part of my life.  What can you do but play the cards you were dealt.  Wartime conditions produce wartime results.  What can anyone say or do?

     Then one day M. Marcus almost miraculously learned the details of the day his father’s ship went down.

     That in Part 2.

Exhuming Bob:

The Jewel In The Forehead Of The Toad

By

R.E. Prindle

 

I ride on a mail train; can’t buy a thrill.

-Bob Dylan

 

Bob Dylan. How did this guy get into my life? As someone said of Hank Williams: Bob Dylan sang my life. Up to a point. How he could know so much about me is totally unbelievable. I’m three years older than Bob which is not all that much, especially at this age. Our mental states were quite similar while we were working out our mental problems in somewhat the same way, not that Bob had ever heard of me but one of the hazards of exposing yourself on records or in print is that kindred spirits recognize each other. One of the occupational hazards, I suppose.

I’m going to use as a starting point Dylan’s record of Mixed Up Confusion. I must confess that I had never heard the song until a couple years ago. I had bought three copies of Biograph when it came out but never opened one. I bought all three copies as an investment and that turned out to be one lousy investment. So after twenty years these sealed copies weren’t listed for much more than I paid for them so I didn’t think I’d be losing much by opening one. It was then I first heard Mixed Up Confusion. Was it a revelation you ask? Hell no. It was just a noisy song. But as I was sitting watching the river flow and reading Greil Marcus’ Lipstick Traces it occurred to me that the book needed some constructive criticism so I gave it. You may have read that criticism right here on this blog. Then having the kind of mind I do I had to read the rest of Marcus so as to make knowing and intelligent comments on the guy. Marcus reopened the subject of Dylan in my mind. I dismissed the guy a few years ago, right after hearing Mixed Up Confusion. I had to start thinking about the Bob again because I couldn’t figure out exactly what I used to see in him.

Bob and I first made extra-sensory contact back in ‘64 and as you are well aware this is ‘08. A lot of water had flowed by in the river and under the bridge while I was sitting and watching it since way back when.

In the interval I had worked out my mental problems even integrating my personality according to the tenets of C.G. Jung. I’ve got the same old face, and getting older, but I’m a different guy.

Here’s the rub. I lived by Dylan for maybe five years from Blonde On Blonde until my life began running so fast I had too many other things to think about. Greil Marcus raised some irritating points about Dylan that made me regret my former adulation. Now, this created a small problem because I love my life and I have the notion that I have perfect taste and that whatever I have ever liked I must still like or I don’t really have perfect taste. You can see how Marcus put me up against the wall. Another one of those extrasensory contacts. And there was Bob getting more ambiguous by the moment as Marcus plodded on.

Damn near threw me into a panic.

So now I had to develop a new perspective for my infatuation of the toad with the jewel in his forehead. That’s how I look at Bob now. Well, you know, I’ve read most of the books on Bob, not so much reviews or interviews so that I have the means to analyze this prime influence on my young manhood.

I’m standing in my library when my hand fell on a Dylan book I bought some time ago. It occurred to me that maybe I hadn’t read this one yet. The book was the Rough Guide To Bob Dylan by Nigel Williamson. English fellow, obviously never been to America. Nigel had a pretty good handle on Bob so my mind focused on the jewel in Bob’s forehead. Mixed Up Confusion. This was where Bob was at in 1962. The rest of his career is the working out of this song. Trying to clear up the confusion. Get Straight. Walk like a man and the words of that tune..

Not enough attention has been devoted to Bob’s boyhood in Hibbing although guys like Howard Sounes in Down The Highway: The Life Of Bob Dylan have made a stab at it. Nobody has touched on the real source of Bob’s malaise though. I mean why was he living in mixed up confusion? His songs give off hints that could be investigated by someone in the right frame of mind but it’s not going to be me. I’ve got other things to think about. I’ve got my own life to live. Bob does generously provide the lyrics on his web site however for anyone interested.

Obviously the early years were not so happy as they could have been. Bob had difficulties with his mother and father; nothing too egregious but one gets the notion that perhaps Bob thought parents and child were mismatched. Should have been born to someone else. I live with that feeling too. Bob and I both knelt at the same altar praying: There must be some way out of here… But just through that door over there and when it closes behind you you can’t get back in. I didn’t design this place I just live here.

How well he got along at school isn’t absolutely clear but it seems that no one felt any compunction to take Bob at his word which should be the finger on the sign pointing: This Way.

That Bob had time on his hands is obvious by his listening habits on the radio and his reading habits. Bob took it all in as did I. Country, Rock, Swing, Folk, Easy Listening. He doesn’t seem to remember the Folk very much but he must have heard those Harry Smith songs before if he crawled all those late night country stations beaming up on a million watts or so from Del Rio, Texas. He must have got Waterloo real clear. One of the great country stations of the Midwest. I don’t know if he could get WCKY in Cincinatti O-ha-o, as the announcer always pronounced it up there in Hibbing or Wheeling West Virginia. Boy Wheeling used to play some unusual items. Came in pretty clear in Michigan where I lived. Carter’s and all that? Old hat.

So I don’t know what blew his mind so much when he got to Dinkytown down at U. Minnesota. Atmosphere I guess. The hip thing was pretty heady. Tickled my fancy.

I’m totally amazed he was blown away by Woody Guthrie. Never had much use for Guthrie myself. This machine kills fascists! Who the hell ever saw a Fascist in America? I never did and I looked. I was curious. I wanted to find one.

Read Bound For Glory too. Left me cold but then that’s a matter of taste or perhaps temperament. Anyway Bob’s got all these musical influences rolling around in his mind and he meant to do something with them. He took off hitchhiking for NYC in the middle of a Minnesota winter. God, what balls. If anything got him into the Hall of Fame that must have been it.

I’ve done it. Not Minnesota but over on the Illinois, Indiana, Michigan side. Must have been out of my mind. Well, just young and dumb, but even that’s no excuse. I bet Bob feels the same way. There I was in three feet of snow with trucks going by at fifty miles an hour. Rearranged my own personal snow bank every time it happened. But this isn’t about me, well, actually it is but only in relation to Bob.

This hitchhike through the winter wonderland must have left an indelible stamp on Bob’s mind. Did mine. Made him cold. Bitter. Put bite into some of his songs. Tears of rage. Hello New York City sayonara Chitown. Boy, there’s two places that’ll give you a vivid impression of mankind. Did me.

Bob was there at the creation of Rock and Roll and it was a life changing experience for him. Some guys like Eddie Cochran and Ricky Nelson could settle into quick and easy imitations but Bob had trouble sorting our his influences and making a sound that was his own. Landing in Greenwich Village and its vibrant Folk scene, if some of those guys can be called vibrant. I’ve got a whole collection of their records and some of ‘em are so dull they make Bobby shine.

So Bob settled in doing things like Talking New York and other folkie stuff as he put his musical roots down coming up with Hank Williams influenced Folk stuff. He was doin’ all right too but he couldn’t forget those Rock and Roll rhythms.

So just as he was drolling out Folk anthems in ‘62 he went into the studio and did this strange Rock and Roll record called Mixed Up Confusion. Tryin’ to be Elvis Presley. Sun years. Hot licks and all that jazz.

So Mixed Up Confusion is not good but it’s not bad either. All his miserable past is focused into that song and all his magnificent rise emanates from it. The song is a knot. It’s like when I first started writing. I could tell my whole life story in three Ernest Hemingway style sentences. Brief and pithy but there couldn’t possibly be that big a demand for a haiku on my life. I’d have to kind of elaborate, get loquacious, a little. That’s what Bob did after Mixed Up Confusion. He began to elaborate. Stretch it out. Separate those musical strands. Mercerize it whatever mercerize means. Seen the world somewhere. Memorized it. This might be the appropriate time to use it; might not.

2.

 

Now, I only heard the song in 2005 but in the way memory works I was able to shift it from here to there so that me and Bob was in two places at the same time together. You know, we went to the same school together at different times. It was a lot easier to do than explain.

Bob and I began to work out our problem in the same way, he singing, me listening. See, I told you it was easy. First though Bob had to dump those Folkies. He was made of stiff stuff though. It was a lot easier for him to do it than it would have been for me. But he was gonna climb that mountain no matter how high. When you get to the top you’ve left everyone behind anyway. I’ll say I know but that wouldn’t be 100% true. Wouldn’t be a 100% lie either though. Kinda half way between the pillar and the post. You could kinda reach out and touch each one with your hands. Have to be kind of a contortionist though. I saw a guy once who could fit himself into a shoe box, big shoes, cowboy boots, size nineteens, but I never wanted to emulate him.

So Bob had been laying this folk stuff on the people pretty thick. They believed in him. They thought he was sincere, didn’t bother to ask. But he got himself a hot electric band and showed ‘em what boogie folk was. That’s when the sh.., uh stuff, hit the fan. It was messy. Got all over everybody. But Bob was kind of a Magic Man. He survived it. Prospered. Took more balls than I got to do it though.

They booed him. Loud. Shouted things at him. Like, Judas and Traitor and Go Home. He said he didn’t believe them but that must have been sheer bravado. They had their point. Well, don’t look back as Farragut said in Mobile Bay. Full speed ahead boys. Let ‘em deal with this.

Bob knew a thing or two about himself, if you know what I mean. He was beginning to sort his Rock and Roll ideas out. Tears of Rage. All the anger and frustration of his youth was finding a vent. The mood was terrific, who in the hell cared what it meant. If you wanted your songs to sound heavy but mean something plain you could borrow the Sound of Silence from Simon and Garfunkle.

He was beginning to be able to project his vision of Rock and Roll. It would appear that he wanted to create an entirely new paradigm as he does manage to sound different but retains similarities to both Presley and Little Richard, two of his major influences. The tentative gropings of Bringing It All Back Home progressed through Highway 61 Revisited to full realization in Blonde On Blonde. Rainy Day Women is a weird and raucous vision of Rock music but in reality is neither fish nor fowl. The general reaction to Blonde On Blonde was one of puzzlement. The music of Rainy Day Women was repellent to most while the lyrics of that summer of ‘66 were impenetrable. Nobody and I mean nobody had any idea of what Sad Eyed Lady Of The Lowlands was about. Still Dylan’s vision of Rock was loose and exciting.

Bob Dylan had also reached a plateau with the release of this his major opus. He had realized or perfected the style. No farther development was possible. The rage and resentment that had fueled the music even perhaps psychotic had reached a culmination.

Thus in the summer of ‘66 Dylan had no place to go. I presume he was out of ideas hence his accident and retirement.

The summer of ‘66 was traumatic for the Dylan, myself and the country. While Bob’s new record lay on the counter waiting to be bought on July 13th Richard Speck committed a horrific crime in Chicago. He ritually murdered a passel of nursing students. At the time the memory of Kennedy’s assassination was still strong. At the time he was shot there were people who thought and said that the assassination would release an epidemic of murder. I don’t know that Speck had any relationship to Kennedy, perhaps his killing was merely a harbinger of the murderous unrest stalking the land.

I had just graduated from Cal State at Hayward that June of ’66. I was taking graduate courses at UC Berkeley. Twenty-eight years old at the time. The Dylan record had hit the stores at the end of June. Now, the record was psychologically disturbing and unsettling by itself. Records were the generation’s means of expressing itself, replacing the movies of the previous generation and books of still earlier generations, so Blonde On Blonde had earth shaking qualities not present in CD s today. Not only did Blonde On Blonde erupt in that memorable summer but Procol Harum, Cream and Canned Heat first emerged. All exhibited a new form of craziness what with Cream’s I Feel Free and Canned Heat being named after a drug substitute. The following June, The Summer Of Love would see the release of the even crazier record Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band by the Beatles.

So we were reeling from Speck’s astounding crime under the influences of the psychotic or near psychotic Blonde On Blonde when two weeks after Speck Charlie Whitman barricaded himself in his tower and opened fire on the world or at least as much of it as he could reach on the University of Texas campus. Whitman killed or wounded dozens.

At the time I was cracking my brain trying to learn a year’s worth of Latin in an intensive six week course while trying to prepare for a move to graduate school at the University of Oregon.

At the same time Bob was working out his rage and hatred in full view of the world with what were actually night thoughts I was privately doing the same under the influence of his lunacy as he exposed himself on records. I was still hurtin’ every single day searching for my own release and the way out of from where I was at. I was strange enough, hair parted in the middle getting longer by the day, to feel some affinity to Speck and Whitman as well as Dylan. Whatever I saw in Dylan I saw aspects of in Speck and Whitman. Dylan did too; at least he said so at an awards ceremony setting his audience on their ears. I know what he was talking about and everyone in that audience should have too. No man is an island, send not for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for thee.

3.

 

In the summer of ‘66 the so-called Free Speech Movement at Berkeley was in the mopping up stage. The new paradigm of ‘Freedom’ was in place at the home of the Golden Bears. The obscene rag The Berkeley Barb was being hawked on the street corners and wherever. The homeless and runaways were throwing down their sleeping bags in doorways creating the new street sitcom of the Brave New America.

The man who dubbed what went before as The Old Weird America had graduated from US Berkeley that very same June of ‘66. He was on his way over to San Francisco to become the reviews editor of the new journalism espoused by The Rolling Stone, the most successful of the generations publishing ventures. The San Francisco Oracle published for a year then disappeared.

I gathered my things together and headed North to the land of perpetual overcast, Oregon.

While I was familiar with Bringing It All Back Home and Highway 61 with the addition of Blonde On Blonde I began to immerse myself in the three records for about three years. I listened to a side a day every morning when I got up. I know that when Bob talks about his hour of darkness he really means his whole life. That’s what I would mean by it. That’s what I meant by it. It wasn’t a question of not dark yet it was a question of when is the sun going to shine. I was trying to stay on the sunny side of the street but I just couldn’t figure out which side was it. It was going to be dark for a while yet.

Those Dylan years were dark years for me. Probably as dark as it has ever been. Let’s hope so because I don’t want to go there again. But I suppose I have to thank Bob for steadying me through the dark period. Apart from the stray line popping up in my memory from time to time I cannot remember the lyrics of a single song or could I quote a whole verse. The titles were terrific though and I remember a lot of them. Whole novels were in those titles. Whole novels were in many of the lines. I responded to the title It Takes A Lot To Laugh, It Takes A Train To Cry. How great. I didn’t need the song that rumbled and loped in the background of the thoughts it released. The tone and mood were the perfect background to the darkness swirling in my mind. Occasionally a line that was another novel in itself would break in like ‘I ride on a mail train, baby, can’t buy a thrill.’ One more line and I would have had a trilogy. Possibly I could have named the trilogy The Weird Old Greil Marcus. I might yet.

4.

 

Here’s Greil Marcus forming this weird extrasensory relationship with Bobby. Marcus gets himself all wrapped up in the lyrics of Like A Rolling Stone; begins to live his life like it’s the fifth gospel right after John. I mean, Dylan’s good, but…

Dylan had an effect on a lot of people not least Greil Marcus. Marcus had seen Dylan in ‘63 in Philly and was blown away. He attended several concerts between ‘63 and ‘66 each apparently a religious epiphany. As just a spectator in the audience he could do nothing but adore his idol. Beginning with his job at Rolling Stone in ‘66 he had an entrée backstage at anyone’s concert including his idol Bob’s. Thus he could get up close and personal with his hero. Ask almost any question; form a relationship. Shape Bob’s thinking and attitude a little even in time display his SI credentials.

Apparently Marcus got as involved with Bobby’s lyrics as much as I did, heck, as much as a multitude did. Marcus has followed Bobby down seemingly owning all the records and CD s having heard all the songs at least once, as indeed has Nigel Williamson who wrote the Rough Guide. I can’t really go much further than John Wesley Harding. I gave up on Bob after that, not necessarily because his stuff wasn’t that good, but wherever he was going I wasn’t following. Our minds and problems slipped out of sync. Most likely he went his way and I went mine.

But Greil Marcus became obsessed with one Dylan song: Like A Rolling Stone. He went so far as to write a long essay on the song published as a single volume. A song has to be in your gene’s to devote that much effort to it.

From this point on I’m going to refer to Marcus as Greil for convenience and because I’m going to get more personal. I hope there are no objections.

Speaking from the ‘bully pulpit’ that Greil has created for himself he has declared Like A Rolling Stone not only the best of Bobby’s extensive canon but the greatest song of all time. As an influential critic he has got the ball rolling in the direction he wants it to go. But, there are dissenters.

Nigel Williamson, who may be considered an authority on Dylan’s entire oeuvre equal to Greil, in his Rough Guide to Dylan lists what he considers Bobby’s Top 50. He lists Like A Rolling Stone no higher than eighteen of Dylan’s best not even considering the whole song corpus of the world. Williamson’s top 18 all come from Bobby’s albums before John Wesley Harding. Further of those songs which I know well I would agree with Williamson with the exceptions of #4 Girl From The North Country, #5 Mixed Up Confusion and #8 Lonesome Death Of Hattie Carroll. I would move To Ramona closer to the top. The Flying Burrito Bros. Version of the song is as good as it gets.

The extravagance of Greil is alarming in a critic. The excess can only be explained by Greil’s relation of the song to some intense personal problem. Now, Greil has not only written several books that almost repeat the same thematic material, John Winthrop- Abraham Lincoln-Mike King Jr., but he has written numerous reviews, essays and been interviewed many times. A great many are available for downloading from the internet so that Greil’s psyche can be searched. In searching through his essays one comes to a remarkably irrelevant and revealing essay. Irrelevant because it has nothing to do with any subject anyone would go to here him lecture about.

On Oct. 13, 2006 Greil read a piece for an audience at the Richard Hugo House. In it he revealed his central childhood fixation.. Because of the death of the inseminator of his mother, a father he never knew by the name of Greil Gerstley, Greil Marcus apparently considers himself an orphan which he is in a manner of speaking in fact.

The incident that catalyzed his feeling he tells thusly:

http://www.hugohouse.org/newwork/marcus_obsessive_memories/ 

     Quote:

It was 1955; I was 10. We had just moved into a new

house in Menlo Park, California. There was a big radio set up, and I’d play with it at night, trying to pull in the drifting signals from across the country; Chicago, Cleveland, Omaha, even New Jersey. One night a few lines came out. I don’t remember the exact words, but the gist is clear: “When American GI s left Korea, they also left behind countless fatherless babies. Once everyone talked about this. Now nobody cares.”

————————–

As I got older I realized it was an echo of something other than what the words from the radio described. I know it was an echo of an absent memory of my own father, whose name was Greil Gerstley, who was lost in a typhoon in the Pacific when his destroyer went down.

———————————

So in times of teenage unhappiness, the fantasy that I might have lived a different life, been a different person with a different name, was more a fact than a fantasy. If my father had lived, both my mother and I would have lived very different lives. But it was the kind of fact that, when you try to hold onto it, slips through your fingers like water.

Unquote.

Alright. Bobby’s song is addressed to a woman while Greil dwells on, delights in the line ‘How does it feel.’ So, what woman does Dylan’s song call to mind in Greil’s experience. I’m afraid it must be his mother. I won’t speculate on whatever lingering fears Greil may have. Suffice it to say that his mother and father in the pressures of war were a dockside romance and marriage. Virtually as the marriage was consummated Greil Gerstner was shipped to his death in a Pacific typhoon.

Greil tells us that he was born six months and a day after his father’s ship went down. Thus as his father sank into the waters of the Pacific Greil was a mass of stem cells evolving into hands, fingers, ears, eyes, nose and…a memory. It is almost eerie the way he dates his memories from this period when he was scarcely recognizable as a human being..

I suspect he considers his mother’s remarriage in 1948 some sort of betrayal of the memory of Greil Gerstner. One wonders if Greil is a Junior. One has the feeling that he was never really comfortable with his adoptive father, Mr. Marcus. I can understand this. There was no genetic affinity to the man. When my mother remarried also in 1948 when I was ten I could never consider my step-father as other than a stranger and an interloper in my mother’s bed. I was furious that he was sleeping with her when my inseminator, my own genetic material, wasn’t.

Both Greil’s reaction and my own were irrational but fully natural and understandable. It matters little that the Gerstners would have undoubtedly been divorced within two years of his father’s return while he would have ended up with a step-father anyway. He can thank his lucky stars his mother remarried as well as she did.

At least his half brother Bill is looking out for him. Thank the Lord for what few favors he bestows.

Greil’s mother is his problem and the source of his admiration for his favorite song and he has become obsessed with his dead father. Then things began to happen. Someone was doing a documentary on the death of the Hull, his father’s ship. Certain stories were told Greil in the course of the documentary that don’t make sense to my experience.

I was in the Navy on a Destroyer Escort, a hundred feet or so shorter than a Destroyer. We were sent through the heart of a typhoon also. I know what the term ‘towering seas’ means. The ship came close to dying several times but we made it through. If the ship had rolled there would have been no survivors. I can’t understand how there were any survivors of the Hull, Gerstner’s ship. In seas like that the ship is tightly sealed to prevent flooding and consequent sinking. The only exit is on the bridge to allow changes of the watch and whatever. When that sucker rolls it is a floating coffin. Nobody gets out. If you happened to be on watch on the bridge you would be thrown into frigid waters with a life expectancy of two minutes at most. To protect myself from the numbing cold I had on so many clothes that they would have saturated and pulled me down before I could come up for air the first time.

I do not understand that there could be survivors of the Hull.

Greil should check his facts more closely, the ship rolls over it doesn’t pitch over. The ship will not right itself at something like a thirty degree roll. Anything more than that and it’s Hello, Davy Jones, goodbye San Francisco.

All that baloney about breaking out of a trough is sheer nonsense. Only a fool would cut the engines. There are so many things happening with the water that survival is sheer luck. At one time the seas were flowing beneath us faster than our headway. That makes the rudders useless. If you don’t have control of the ship you’re sunk. I don’t know how we made it. I really don’t.

So Greil should research his father’s situation more fully and stop blaming everyone. It was just one of those things. Could have happened to anyone. Ask me.

At any rate Greil made the connection of those abandoned Korean children with his own and his father’s. Greil obviously believes that he is as one of those abandoned kids.

The problem then gets back to the woman of Like A Rolling Stone. Only Greil’s mom situation makes Like A Rolling Stone the greatest song ever written. He has to come to terms with his feelings about his mother. That’s all I’ll say. If he rereads Obsessive Memories closely she should be able to find his way out and maybe find another world’s greatest song.

Greil’s obsessions with Like A Rolling Stone soured Bobby beyond redemption for me. However in forcing me to reexamine my own fixation on Bob’s three greatest LP s he has compelled me to come to a truer understanding of what I found in those songs. The use I made of them.

Unfortunately as one door closes another opens. Memories come flooding back of that memorable summer of ‘66. I ride on a mail train, baby, can’t buy a thrill while it takes a lot to laugh, it takes a train to cry. Blonde On Blonde, Richard Speck, Charlie Whitman, there’s a novel or two or a trilogy in there somewhere. Can it be found before I die?