Everyone was.
Forever, since the beginning of time.
And that presents a slight problem for authors of historic novels. Their main character will be stuck in his/her class, so their perspective limited. Very few people, relatively speaking, go upward or down. So the novelist's view of the world he describes is circumscribed by the class of his narrator. Good writers break out of this in some fashion, Great Gatsby is an example. Norman Mailer surveys the various classes of Egypt in the most obscenely imaginative way possible. His method of breaking out of this shows he was quite mad. The problem itself presented a challenge that allowed his imagination to devise something magical. Something amazing. Something nearly too rude to print.
Egypt was all about magic. The book of the dead is a list of spells. Their writing is magic to them. Their symbols have life. That's why the threatening symbols are damaged, to mar their potential for mischief and evil and destruction. The hippopotamus is marred in tombs and on caskets, the Seth symbol is damaged. They just couldn't die with those symbols around causing them trouble yet they needed them to express so they messed them up.
Mailer invents his own version of reincarnation, one based on magic, a brilliantly specific Egyptian form. It's so brilliant it actually pisses me off. As I read it I kept thinking over and over, how can Mailer be this smart? How can he be this perceptive? I pushed through with no small amount of jealousy, and a huge amount of admiration because I was imagining Mailer researching for his book, I could see evidence of his research, I could actually visualize his files as he researched, because he put it all out there, and I burned with admiration of Mailer's ability to study a subject to write a book and show what he learned, and understand more than I do thorough a lifetime of study and application. Some people are just brilliant.
Mailer's reincarnation had to do with a lower class merchant gaining success through business and also being obsessed with magic. In his first life he decided he'd choose his own mother for his next lifetime by sexing it up with her in his present life. His trick, and it's a real trick, is to perish as he ejaculates and impregnates her so that his spirit flows out of his body through his sperm into her wherein she brings him back to life, nurtures him and upgrades him. And that's how he changed his status from one life to the next, moving up in status each time. His first life he upgraded through military. The second trick is to remember what he did in his new life. So readers see life at the bottom in mud huts during the flood, where it's mud and slop and filth and animal excrement, smell and mosquitos, all around houses on tiny hills. The military recruitment is basically kidnapping eligible young men. He was a good soldier so that put him in propinquity with nobles. One of his lives is among the scribes. In that one he's sexing it up with the queen who's a raunchy woman. "You smell like horse."
"Indeed I did. I had just ridden bareback from the royal stables."
The scene where they're having sex is one of Mailers research file dumps. A file such as you keep on your laptop as you do research. Every time you encounter an object that could be vaguely referred to as phallic symbol, then jot it down and drop it into the file. But how to use such a file? You dump it all in one place. The queen talks dirty to the main character such that she spends 20 pages straight speaking first in Egyptian then in English, paragraph for paragraph, so the reader gets the rhythm and the sexy sounds of it, with emphasis on "ach" and "ich" sounds that pervade that language group, the percussion of it, the drive of it, then English so we comprehend how uninhibited she is, how dominating she is, how demanding, how ruthless. Mailer's entire file of ancient phallic symbols, and there are hundreds of them not mere dozens, this is the genius of Mailer. The man is insane. I laughed like a loon as I read Mailers,very very insane book. He captured the feel of the ancients with perfection. The man understands people. Mailer understood the basic depravity of people.
I saw that before a couple of times. The Sun in Splendor has just such research file dump. Jean Plaidy needed a character to spew all the medieval curses she encountered during her research. They're too precious to ignore. But she cannot have her upper crust characters swearing all through her pages. It would ruin the style of her writing. So she introduces a character, a beggar on the road, a knight rides by and kicks him to the side, sending him spinning off the road, and the beggar gets up and raises his fist and curses the knight as he rides off down the road, "A pox on your house! Let the plague take you. Have your skin covered with boils and pus," and so on, mostly having to do with the black death, foremost on their minds. Then the whole rest of the book, nobody swears. And that character is not heard of again. He was needed to deliver Plaidy's research file. Because the thought of leaving those out was unbearable.
The queen's son busts his mom having sex with the lower class priest. Angry and untouchable legally, with legal impunity he drives a knife into the back of the main character, killing him as he's having sex with his mother, just as he is ejaculating. So his spirit follows his sperm into the queen. That lifetime transfer was accident. His murderer, a prince, is now his older brother. And that's how he advanced to the royal family. And readers are sitting there thinking, Jesus Christ, Mailer, you are insane. You actually thought of this. Mailer imagined this whole thing. Fascinating. But I'm certain that I'd never care to meet him. And if I did ever meet Mailer, say, at Aspen where that would be likely as meeting Leon Uris.
It could h-a-a-a-p-pen.
If they were still alive it could happen.
And if it did happen I'd be outta there like, ping. "Hey! Where ya going?"
"I'm outta here!
"Why so fast?"
"Because I read your book, you freak."
The second maxim says pretty much the same as the first. If you find yourself with an equal who's having an argumentative moment, let him go. Restrain yourself and don't respond. Then people who witness the episode will form a bad opinion about the other guy and a good opinion about you.
Rising to every challenge isn't always a good idea.
This is what gets people about Trump. They believe it's unpresidential to punch people back after his detractors keep punching upward. But the people who voted for Trump are really enjoying observing their president refusing to be everyone's hapless punching bag above all the ruckus like all previous Republican presidents. Reliably so. Trump messes up the reliable formula.
It okay for a Democrat to advise to "get in their faces" and "punch back twice as hard" but not a Republican. That's out of character.
Would Washington have punched back? Would Lincoln? I don't know. All that I know is for now the media's impunity has ended. Now they collude openly against Trump, by the hundreds, and we laugh at them, because that's what they've been doing all along. And they're so easily ignored.
The video is short.
This time I'm showing the transliteration, the divisions between words and phrases. Then the experts' translation in English. That's a lot of help right there. Then what I find when I look at the symbols as they've been divided. And we can see it's a writing form that's like racing wearing cinderblock shoes.
2 comments:
Great review. I'm pretty much with on Mailer... get the hell out of there... "I read your book". He certainly draws you in. As I read at first there was a curtain of unbelieveabilty (i don't think that's a word), in the sense of how the hell could someone imagine such dialog. He made it all very real, more like a painting than a textural construct the picture he drew in my mind.
"Rising to every challenge isn't always a good idea."
Especially if you're married.
Would Washington or Lincoln punch back? Maybe not, but Jackson would. When he died, he still had a lead ball in his chest from a long previous duel.
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