Herschberg

31e

Author's Notes for Chapter 31

In order to achieve the grail, Chretien's Parcival learns that he was supposed to ask of its guardians a question.

That question was: "Whom does the Grail serve?"

•

This was supposed to be my "Very Special Holiday Episode" of the Herschberg serial, full of warmth and fluffiness and mercy and sappiness and hope for mankind. You know the sort. One of those episodes, in which all of the people who quite properly ought to be bitter enemies wind up as frieeeeeeeeeends, and everyone is really pretty decent when it comes right down to it; reconciliation is the word of the day, everyone finds redemption, and it all ends on a tone of Peace on Earth and Good Will Towards Men, with lots of pretty snow falling down in the final shot.

It, um, didn't quite get there, though, I don't think. Probably nothing that takes the Book of Job as one of its central motifs could ever really hope to get there. All the same, I do think that there is quite a good deal of...well, of "Up, Up With People" sentiment in this chapter (I even ended it on a songfic!). Whether others will agree or not I could not say.

•

For the relationship (in my mind, at any rate) between this chapter and Chapter 26 ("The Lessons of History"), Levi-Strauss on the Parsival legend may be instructive. Some excerpts:

"A spell has disrupted communication between these two worlds, which are distinct—although for the Celtic mind, it is possible to pass from one to the other. Since that break in communication, King Arthur's court ... has been on the move constantly, waiting for news. In fact, King Arthur never holds court until someone has announced an event to him. Thus, this terrestrial court is in quest of answers to questions that are perpetually posed by its anxious agitation. In symmetrical fashion, the court of the Grail, whose immobility is symbolized by the paralysis of the king's lower limbs, offers, likewise perpetually, an answer to questions that no one asks it."

"In this sense, we can say that there exists a model, which may be universal, of Percevalian myths. It is the reverse of another, equally universal model—that of the Oedipal myths¹, whose problematical structure is symmetrical though inverted. For the Oedipal myths pose the problem of a communication that is at first exceptionally effective (the solving of the riddle), but then leads to excess in the form of incest—the sexual union of people who ought to be distant from one another—and of plague, which ravages Thebes by accelerating and disrupting the great natural cycles. On the other hand, the Percevalian myths deal with communication interrupted in three ways: the answer offered to an unanswered question (which is the opposite of a riddle); the chastity required of one or more heroes (contrary to incestuous behaviour); and the wasteland—that is, the halting of the natural cycles that ensure the fertility of plants, animals and human beings."

"As we know, Wagner rejected the motif of the unasked question and replaced it with a motif that somewhat reverses it while performing the same function. Communication is assured or re-established not by an intellectual operation but by an emotional identification. Parsifal does not understand the riddle of the Grail and remains unable to solve it until he relives the catastrophe at its source..."

"Thus, the problem, in mythological terms, would be to establish an equilibrium between the two opposite worlds. To do so, one should probably, like Parsifal, go into and come out of the one world and be excluded from and re-enter the other world. Above all, however (and this is Wagner's contribution to universal mythology), one must know and not know. In other words, one must know what one does not know, "Durch Mitleid wissend" ("knowing through compassion")—not through an act of communication but through a surge of pity, which provides mythical thinking with a way out of the dilemma in which its long unrecognised intellectualism has risked imprisoning it."

•

So...uh...does that help to clear things up at all?

No?

Heh. Oh well.

I am, at any rate, deeply indebted to Kip for introducing the entire notion of the Grail Quest to Herschberg, not least of which because it enabled me to round off my T.S. Eliot fixation by basing Brittany's Passion on The Waste Land. As, of course, it absolutely had to be.

Part Seven of this chapter is really far more strictly based on The Waste Land than Chapter 18 was on Prufrock, or Chapter 26 on Gerontion. To be perfectly frank, I'm not even sure if it makes any sense without at least some familiarity with the poem, the full text of which can be found here.

"The sea is calm tonight" is the first line of Matthew Arnold's Dover Beach, a poem that Brittany would have far preferred to hear Christian read to her, for reasons that I should hope would be obvious.

T.S. Eliot himself claimed The Waste Land to be a retelling of the legend of the Fisher King and the Grail Quest, thus leading to a massive upsurge in popular interest in such tales back in the 1920s, when people actually read poetry and Eliot himself was a figure of some celebrity. Later in his life, Eliot would confess to feeling a bit of guilt over the entire affair, as while the poem certainly does have quite a lot of Grail Quest imagery and allusion in it, much of what Eliot had claimed about its Quote True Meaning Unquote was really just...well, you know. Him talking out his ass.

The majority of Brittany's Passion is taken from the last segment of the poem, "What the Thunder Said," in which the parched and arid lands of the Fisher King merge with those of the pre-monsoon jungle of the River Ganges and with the purely apocalyptic visions of the Unreal City—all desperate for water, all waiting for the rain to come. All listening for the sound of thunder.

I made quite a bit of play with What The Thunder Said in this chapter, so perhaps that could use a bit of explanation as well. The fable of the meaning of the thunder comes from one of the Upanishads, and it goes something like this:

Prajapati has three types of offspring: men, demons and gods. All three approach their father to ask what their duty is. What they each hear is nothing more than the sound of thunder—"DA." Each group interprets the sound differently. The men understand the meaning of the thunder to have been datta, which means "Give!" The demons understand it to have meant dayadhvam, which means "Sympathize!" The gods understand the thunder to have said damyata, which means "Control!" Prajapati tells them that they are each correct, and seals this pronouncement with a final rumble of thunder: Da Da Da.

"Shantih shantih shantih," the formal ending to an Upanishad, is also, of course, the rather infamous last line of The Waste Land. Eliot himself claimed that it could best be translated as "The Peace Which passeth understanding." Others have disagreed with his translation.

•

Amnesty International's "Stop Torture Week" is real, although it does not fall in November. I was generous in giving Allison a sense of humour about the affair. The members of Oberlin College's AI chapter had none—just one of the many factors which led the author to abandon her involvement with that organization by the end of her own freshman year of college.

The unfortunate Mr. Washington is a work of fiction, as the author was too damned lazy to do even the minimal research required to find out who really was on AI's death-watch in November of 1990. Not that it matters. There's always someone. Always. (I fucking hated death watches. Even more than I fucking hated Stop Torture Week.)

Allison's snark to the author aside, it is actually extremely common for professional torturers to be subjected to an initiatory taste of their own medicine—and in some cases, a very heavy taste indeed. (In Chile in the early 1980s, the training program had a 75% survival rate. No. I am not making that up.)

Brittany's experience of trying first to vomit up, and then to pull out her own swollen tongue under the misapprehension that it must be some foreign object is swiped more or less directly from an Argentine torturer's first-hand account of his own initiation into the profession. Sri's terribly vivid memory of the drop of condensation on the outside of the first glass of water he was given at the end of his ordeal, and his habit of always thereafter keeping just such a heavily-condensed glass beside his bed at night, was also shamelessly swiped from a first-hand account—although I do feel obscurely compelled to mention that it comes from the real life experience of one of the Belfast Fourteen, a victim of torture who did not then go on to become one of its practitioners.

I could have been far more gruesome in my description of Brittany's physical state had I wished; in the end, I decided to spare us all that. Her medical condition as described is consistent with that of people who really have been subjected to the (appallingly popular) combination of light beatings, sleep deprivation, and thirst. While Sri and Ghopal's methodology might be par for the course, however, the severity of their application of these techniques, as it was established in Chapter 25, falls strictly into the realms of the impossible: even a human being at the very peak of physical condition would die if caned (even relatively lightly) every two hours around the clock for five days straight. The combination of sleep deprivation and beating is extremely dangerous, which is the reason that in places where it is actually used, there is always a doctor on hand to monitor the subject's blood pressure and general condition; and torturers beat their victims no more frequently than once every six hours or so. Doing so every couple of hours for five days and four nights would almost certainly prove lethal, due to the synergistic effects of sleep deprivation and beating on the body's ability to regulate its pulse rate, blood pressure, and electrolyte balance.

The author does not believe that the fact that she happens to know far too much about this sort of thing is necessarily unrelated to the fact that she also suffers from recurring nightmares. She does not recommend active participation with Amnesty International, or any similar organization, for those of sensitive or nervous dispositions.

•

The provenance of the PMD-80 has been floating about implicit in this serial for some time now. I made it explicit here partly because someone had to do it eventually, but also largely because I wished to establish that the precise methodology of its extraction was (a) not something that Alastair already knew, and (b) not what his scientists in Utah are up to with Runs With Nightmares. The rather sad secretions of a shape-shifter tormented beyond the limits of its endurance, no matter how holographic or hallucinogenic they may be, really do seem rather small quarry for someone like Alastair. Me, I think he's after more elusive prey: the arcane secrets of the True Manitou Blood, that Mercurial mirrorized shimmerstuff itself.

•

I had been imagining both Old Dan Gunner and Norbert Ajax to be absolutely correct in their suspicions about Saturday night's snowstorms. They are not of natural origin. This would explain how they manage to pass overhead so quickly: at a quarter after two on Sunday morning, Janis, Brittany and the Martian will all be able to look out of their respective windows to contemplate the stars (cf Chapter 26).

•

Waitling's preferred assurance of secrecy is taken direct from the Hippocratic Oath. Hoover's, on the other hand, is formulaic phrasing common to lodge societies which claim descent from the Knights Templar.

•

In case anyone is wondering why the closing paragraph seems to be a riff on the ending of James Joyce's "The Dead..." No. You aren't imagining that. It was written that way because I had originally planned to include a scene in this chapter in which two characters discuss Joyce's Dubliners (the penultimate story in which is, of course, entitled "Grace").

So, uh, that's why there's a mysterious Joyce riff there. Now you know. I still hope to be able to stick the Joyce scene into a later chapter, but it just didn't make the final cut this time around.

•

As for the compulsory play list. In addition to Velvet Underground's "I'll Be Your Mirror," we also have Trio's '80s Eurotrash hit "Da Da Da (You Don't Love Me I Don't Love You)" and—of course!—Shriekback's "Hammerheads." Roger Water's album "Amused to Death," while it had not yet been released in 1990, is nonetheless unwittingly echoed by Brittany during her Passion, likely in part because it was what I was listening to while writing this chapter.

31d

“Buying the Vowel”(chapters/ch31c.html">continued from part three) • • (continued)

31c

“Buying the Vowel”(chapters/ch31b.html">continued from part two) • • (continued)

31b

“Buying the Vowel”(chapters/ch31a.html">continued from part one) • (continued)

31a

Tentatively Edging Xto Thanksgiving presents... • (continued)

30

Presented by Totally Excellent Tibetans....

29e

Author's Notes for Chapter 29

The reader should be aware that each “movement” is placed according to the structure of Bernstein’s Mass, and not to any more simple-minded schemes of strictly chronological sequence. And anyway, linear causality has always been overrated. Though this is less of a problem than it might first appear: I compressed the action severely from its intended length of almost a week, once it became clear that none of the rest of you was advancing the timeline nearly so much as you all claimed to be considering. So there.

I have taken the liberty of transferring H.P. Blavatsky’s arrival at chez Eddy to the evening of Wednesday 14 October, shortly before Gyorg’s; in reality, she was already there at noon, when Olcott himself arrived, and Gyorg was never there at all, nor Annalise. I also gave the Religio-Philosophical Journal’s headline re: the brothers Eddy to the Daily Graphic; as Olcott himself wrote both pieces, I don’t think he’d mind. But I took no liberties at all in reconstructing the dialogue exchanged upon the first meeting of those two pioneers of the New Age. Well—almost none. Thanks humbly offered to the only slightly credulous Marion Meade for her invaluable biography, Madame Blavatsky, though I do wish the medium H.A. Phillips, of Michigan, hadn’t been both Mr. and Mrs. on the same page, the only appearance he/she makes in the book. Bad copy editor. I rather wish we could assume H.A. Phillips were a Mr., if only for the symmetry it would provide—but the ramifications of a male medium having a female Indian spirit guide are many, and all of them thorny; I decided it best not to go there. (Not that I was there all that long, mind.) (I also rather wish the action of the séance itself had been more clear; Meade—though the fault, perhaps, is ultimately that of Olcott, et al.—variously writes as if the apparitions were shadows cast upon the curtain and actual figures having stepped forth from the cabinet—sometimes within the same manifestation. While this might, perhaps, enhance an essential theme re: subjectivity of experience—or at least séances—it does so sloppily; my sense of æsthetic responsibility—or perhaps it’s just my own cynical nature regarding such things—insisted that all such apparitions be confined to shadows and projections [excepting those hands, the prosaic explanation of which is left as an exercise for the student].) The song Gyorg thought he heard is—for no particular reason; I can’t translate French—one of le Comte de St. Germain’s alchemical sonnets, which I lifted from “Polly Charms, the Sleeping Woman” (not, by the way, the Dr. Eszterhazy story from which the opening lines are pastiched) by the divine Avram Davidson, who, in turn, swiped it from Isabel Cooper-Ashley’s The Count of Saint Germain, who (in turn) snagged it from Poemes Philosophiques sur l’Homme, a pamphlet published in Paris in 1795. And while the great Temmael can make his words known through the time-honored glossolaly of “Sanctus! Sanctus! Sanctus!” (one imagines it’s snappier in the original), Menelik, it would appear, prefers to draw from a text, original author unknown (though claimed to be a “W.B. Tyler”), that Edgar Allen Poe hid with a truly fiendish code (only cracked a few short months ago) in an issue of a magazine he edited in 1841. (And yes: Menelik did, indeed, say “yould.”)

If you want an amusing hour or two, enter “anthropic principle” into a search engine and skim through the results, which will range from marginally readable Christian physics to the decidedly odd determinism of Frank J. Tipler, who thinks he’s come up with a technologically plausible Heaven. Which is what I found when I went looking for words to put into Nicholas Whatsisname’s mouth. But I couldn’t find it phrased any better than Lee Smolin did in his lovely little book which grinds the anthropic principle (among other silly fallacies) into the ground: The Life of the Cosmos. Lucia rather off-handedly puts forth the idea behind his refutation; wild though it may seem, it makes sense, and he has evidence using equations with no numbers at all to prove it. Sort of. I suppose. Taking it on faith, really, I am. —Though I must say: Smolin ought to learn that the sentences he’s trying to construct could really use some semicolons to hold them together.

Jens counts to himself in Russian, by the way, and Brielle (or Voel) is indeed speaking Enochian to Old Dan Gunner, or at least as close as I can manage to get to the true language of angels, which is fiendishly if stupidly complex. I gleaned what little I could from the sketchy description in David Alan Hulse’s The Key of it All (Book Two), and it reads, basically: “Gather unto yourself the Powers. The Powers have risen, and are exalted. Your servant the flame everlasting says unto you: The Powers have risen.” (The only thing, it must be said, more tangentially amusing than attempting to construct a meaningful sentence from Enochian is, perhaps, reading Colin Wilson’s cheeky argument that Enochian must be a true metalanguage, as its grammar is complex and internally consistent, and it is beyond his comprehension how anyone could believe Ned Kelly—no, not that Ned Kelly—could have made this acrostic code up all by his lonesome; thus it must have been dictated to him by the very angels, and this somehow proves the Necronomicon was dictated to Lovecraft in his dreams...) But any connection between hubard, the “living lanterns,” and Uriel, fire of God, patron of alchemy and ruler of the month of September, reprobated by the Church Council of Rome in 745 CE, is purely of my own invention.

Brittany’s medication is based on a psychopharmacopoeia prescribed for folks whose general diagnosis might, perhaps, be said to match hers—bipolar, with stress disorders. But keep in mind that I am not a psychiatrist or psychologist by any stretch of the imagination. Nor am I a pharmacist. Also: it should be noted that psychopharmacopoeiae are as subject to the winds of fad and whim as anything in our popular culture. Drugs and dosages are, unfortunately, circa 2000; researching those in vogue in 1990 proved too much like work. So.

Dubai, the largest city within the United Arab Emirates, and on the far end of the Persian Gulf from Iraq, is properly spelled “Dubayy,” but our armed forces, which have used it as a staging area for any of a number of operations, do not do so, and so I did not. —The residents of Dubai recently named a tiger after Tiger Woods, which seems somehow redundant. But they do seem to like their golf. Working Class Faggot is an utterly fictional band name, of course, as are Pimp Magnet, Spastic Plaid and Gimpy McPhee. The latter two were stolen from Jenn Moore, to give credit where credit is due.

Those familiar with the oeuvre of the Waterboys might note which album contains the song “Spirit,” which is what’s playing on Lisa Morowitz’ stereo, then listen to the song just before, and thereby gain some insight as to the inspiration for Shelby’s brief—hallucination? Or, at the very least, you’ll be listening to the same thing I was the moment the idea for this scene occurred to me. (Some passing familiarity with Colin Wilson’s “full moon” theory of the wider personality—he claims it is his, at any rate—might also prove useful. Might. Feel free to ignore his ruminations on “Faculty X,” though.) —And there is, perhaps, room for some discussion of—explicitness? explication? prurience? I have gathered from a number of conversations that a certain amount of self-censorship has gone on, with regard to details of a potentially salacious nature. And while I don’t think any of the—sex, shall we say, throughout this chapter is in any way prurient or, well, salacious, I do admit that—especially at this juncture—it might, perhaps, have crossed a line others had seen quite clearly in the sand. I’ve left it in, after some little reflection, because I trust my intent is clear. And heck, you’re supposed to giggle at words like that. (Which, I assure you, are all in some common currency.) Certainly, it is my belief that Shelby would never admit to anyone that she thought words like that at moments like, well, this. I do wish, then, not so much to apologize as acknowledge, in advance, that it is conceivable our little audience might well be taken aback, and to demonstrate I did consider that eventuality before recklessly plunging ahead anyway.

All details—well, aside from the ones I made up—of the lives of Buck and Roxy Claflin, and the conception of their daughter, Victoria Woodhull, are extrapolated from Barbara Goldsmith’s enjoyable (thus far) biography of Ms. Woodhull, and of the nexus of Spiritualism and Suffrage in the late 19th c. in general: Other Powers. You may not be aware that the revival in question actually occurred in Homer, Ohio; I moved it to Sinnemahonig (also spelled Sinnamahoning)—where Roxy and Buck did stay, once, briefly—merely because I liked the name. Preacher John Garrett and his curious theology are utterly of mine own invention, though you might have noticed the bits he’s cribbed from Milton. And the djessakid and the tent-shaking ceremony were gleaned from Traditional Ojibwa Religion and Its Historical Changes, by Christopher Vecsey. I’ll trust to the reader’s ability to sort out the rest, and determine for him- or herself where I departed from the mundane record and ascended into the Akashic.

Myself, I have no real attachment as to which “one” the NSA is seeking, through the offices of General Cortlee and Captain McConnell; there are a number of possibilities which suggest themselves, even above and beyond the obvious candidates Shelby and Brittany. I would note, however (beyond explicitly stating the implication made throughout this chapter that it is very, very dangerous to assume the Light—or the Dark—or any of the individual players—is in anyway a monolithic, unilateral force), that it seems, however they managed to compose a census of Dark Mares, that they missed a couple. Make of it what you will, as you like.

An ithaqua is really, I suppose, better termed Ithaqua, one of Lovecraft’s Old Ones, along with Cthulhu, et al. A favorite of Derleth, who liked associating the Old Ones with elemental symbolism; Ithaqua, in his hands, was a being of the air, ice, and cold, worshipped by the Native Americans around and among the Great Lakes, especially Wisconsin. (Like, say, the Ojibwa.) But Derleth also tried to impose a Manichean battle of Good and Evil on Lovecraft’s essentially uncaring mythology, so what does he know? I like imagining ithaquæ as cute, cuddly little creatures of the Dark, like the zzygyx, but capable of whistling up blizzards and ice and a tomorrow that “will be beyond imagining.” They look like Cold Pricklies from the TA for Tots books.

The Weekly Examiner, in my imagination, is not the tabloid it sounds like, but is, instead, the local alternative weekly, like the Willamette Week here, or the Advocate back in the good ol’ Pioneer Valley. A word, while we’re here, about the press—you may find it difficult to countenance, but I didn’t get done everything I wanted. Especially with having to recreate some of this, to the best of my memory, given the untimely meltdown of our beloved iMac. One note I wish to make clear, here, as I couldn’t easily wedge it anywhere in this chapter—this press blackout will not hold. I imagine a press conference of some sort, announcing a civil disaster of some sort in Herschberg with appropriate hand-wringing and look-at-us-go-as-we-protect-and-serve photo ops will be staged shortly.

Beyond that, what did I intend but not get around to writing? Beyond Sleepers, and Iggy, and the Dapper Gent Whose Shit Was Getting Kicked, and Double-D and the Guardsmen, and the Seven Dwarves, and more of the Chapter Two Gang (though perhaps I did quite enough, there), and Janis, and Albert, and Jill (No. One), and Riggs-now-Jill No.-Four? (Or is it Five—?)

Well. The world may never know...

29d

“Mass”(chapters/ch29c.html">continued from part three) • • (continued)

29c

“Mass”(chapters/ch29b.html">continued from part two) • • (continued)

29b

“Mass”(chapters/ch29a.html">continued from part one) • • (continued)

29a

Tychagara Exercitus Theatre presents: • (continued)

28

Tentatively Enlightened Tadpole presents...

27

T E x T presents:

26f

“The Lessons of History”(chapters/ch26e.html">continued from part five) •

26e

The problem with history is that it is always written in the interrogative case. —Richard Rosenblatt In the silence between a question and its answer, That is where the truth lies. The Talmud • “The Lessons of History”(chapters/ch26d.html">continued from part four) • • (continued)