My Bellow

"68. IN South Africa, "tradition always places the power of making rain as the fundamental glory of ancient chiefs and heroes, and it seems probable that it may have been the origin of chieftainship. The man who made the rain would naturally become the chief." -The Golden Bough, The Magic of Kings, Sir James Frazer, pg. 56

"88. There is no word in the Siamese language by which any creature of higher rank or greater dignity that a monarch can be described; and the missionaries, when they speak of God, are forced to use the native word for king." -The Golden Bough, The Magic of Kings, Sir James Frazer, pg 67

"190. If the high gods, who dwell remote from the fret and fever of this earthly life, are yet believed to die at last, it is not to be expected that a god who lodges in a frail tabernacle of flesh should escape the same fate. The danger is a formidable one; for if the course of nature is dependent on the man-god's life, what catastrophes may not be expected from the gradual enfeeblement of his powers and their final extinction in death? There is only one way of averting these dangers. The man-god must be killed as soon as he shews symptoms that his powers are beginning to fail, and his soul must be transferred to a vigorous successor before it has been seriously impaired by the threatened decay." -The Golden Bough, Death and Resurrection, Sir James Frazer, pg. 224-5

 "199. The explanation here given of the custom of Killing divine persons assumes, or at least is readily combined with, the idea that the soul of the slain divinity is transmitted to his successor."-The Golden Bough, Death and Resurrection, Sir James Frazer, pg 247

"There is probably no element of The Golden Bough that has become so familiar, or been so much exploited, as Frazer's theory of the Dying and Reviving God, or deposed and re-instated genius of fertility." -The Golden Bough, Dying and Reviving Gods, Additional Notes, pg 390.

The Egocentric man; that thing that believes he is the center from which things sprout, forgets that he is merely a portal through which all things may flow. 

IV.
Time and the bell have buried the day,
The black cloud carries the sun away.
Will the sunflower turn to us, will the clematis
Stray down, bend to us; tendril and spray
Clutch and cling?
Chill
Fingers of yew be curled
Down on us? After the kingfisher's wing
Has answered light to light, and is silent, the light is still
At the still point of the turning world.
-The Four Quartets, Burnt Norton, T.S. Eliot.

 Henderson and the Rain King in any mythological sense has been passed down to me by one "Rob Tatum." His name inscribed in red ink at the top of the promotional page on the inside of the novel at first gives nothing away. And as I'm going through with my green pen (I use colored pens religiously) I find that Mr. Tatum also has been using a green pen to underline key notes in the text; lines and notes I myself would have made. Thinking nothing of it I had set the book down (and pen) and gave myself up to dreams. Upon my next return to the novel I found Mr. Tatum was underlying in red. And how odd it seemed when peering up from the lines to my fist clenching the borders of the paperpack I myself also was holding a red pen.....

The Front artistry itself gives one the idea that Saul was supposed to write this novel with his last name "BELLOW" hanging over the top of a Lion and Henderson doing just that.

And I'd think that with the lines following that Bellow was stealing (as Thomas would have wanted) his idea of the desert directly from T.S. Eliot's Chorus's from the Rock:

                                                               "What have I done?"
"Shall I run back into the desert," I thought, "and stay there until the devil has passed out of me and I am fit to meet human kind again without driving it to despair at the first look? I haven't had enough desert yet. Let me throw away my gun and my helmet and the lighter and all this stuff and maybe I can get rid of my fierceness to and live out there on worms. On locusts. Until all the bad is burned out of me. Oh, the bad! Oh, the wrong, the wrong! What can I do about it? What can I do about all the damage? My character! God help me, I've made a mess of everything, and there's no getting away from the results. One look at me must tell the whole story."- Henderson and the Rain King, Saul Bellows, pg 49


"I say to you: Make perfect your will.
I say: take no thought of the harvest,
But only of proper sowing.
The world turns and the world changes,
But one thing does not change. In all of my years, one thing does not change.
However you disguise it, this thing does not change:
The perpetual struggle of Good and Evil.
Forgetful, you neglect your shrines and churches;
The men you are in these times deride
What has been done of good, you find explanations
To satisfy the rational and enlightened mind.
Second, you neglect and belittle the desert.
The desert is not remote in southern tropics,
The desert is not only around the corner,
The desert is squeezed in the tube-train next to you,
The desert is in the heart of your brother." -Choruses from "The Rock", T.S. Eliot

 All in all the likeness between the two and what one preaches and the other laments aren't uncanny. They are the same. Christ himself suffers the temptation of Satan in the Desert for fourty days. Desert, in the largest sense, represents Temptation (a word that owns banks for how much it says).

"432. Because it is possible to shift a load of wood, stones, or what not from our own back to the back of another, the primitive fancies that it is equally possible to shift the burden of his pains and sorrows to another who will suffer them in his stead."-The Golden Bough, The Transference of Evil, Sir James Frazer, pg 509

An odd, albeit brilliant idea arise when we taken into account what Eliot, as well as Frazer are saying; The desert, this thematic symbol stands not for an animate thing, but an inanimate thing that flows between us. Henderson's "I Want" drives him into the "desert". And what else is Temptation if not wanting after that which you need not? Henderson himself cries "I haven't had enough desert yet. Let me throw away my gun and my helmet and the lighter and all this stuff and maybe I can get rid of my fierceness to and live out there on worms. On locusts. Until all the bad is burned out of me. Oh, the bad!"

Oh The Bad, The Desert.

In the last 45 minutes of Apocalypse Now, Martin Sheen, the successor king (a Prince Mind you), after traveling through the desert of war to find Kurtz (The King he's sent to kill), he enters the Heart of Darkness to which we are first greeted by the Fool whom just as Shakespeare's character, sprouts out genius through a malnourished lens. Now, a mislead person may tell you the Fool's in Apocalypse Now or (more likely) Shakespeare are seeing pointless things: This is incorrect. Insensible.....partially. In the words of V. Sirin "to gain sense, first, we must go by a way of nonsense." But the fool is not the Prince, as the Journalist tangently expunges in his speech to the caged Martin Sheen; I believe Eliot says it best;

"....I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be;
Am an attendant lord, one that will do
Too swell a progress, start a scene or two,
Advise the prince; no doubt, an easy tool,
Deferential, glad to be of use,
Politic cautious, and meticulous;
Full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse;
At times, indeed, almost ridiculous-
Almost, at times, the Fool."-The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

Eliot is referring to a deveiling (smoke in his poem) upon a gigantic level, something which Apocalypse Now merely treads its feet upon, but what I would like to point out is that Eliot himself has transcended to a mode of thought that likens him very much to the crazy Kurtz creature that we see in the film. Two things are of note; one being that the deveiling is not something sensible, and in not being sensible it presses him outside of the rational (though it is very much reasonable to those who've made such leaps of understanding) and due to the "unsound" methods he is placed outside of society in that he cannot communicate his methods, no matter how sound his results are; and two, his ascendance in knowledge places him where the primitives describe as a "king" or "god" and what the secular culture refers to either an eccentric, genius, savant, or lunatic (depending upon his achievements and social standing).

Inside the Christan Literary culture (do not mistake my for referring to any layperson you see wondering the streets or pews) is the idea that we achieve this level of ascendance not through ourselves but through God, or through the ordinance of the higher being. Eliot describes this idea of our subservience to a higher power that reaches to us first, and not in reverse with the lines

"Will the sunflower turn to us, will the clematis
Stray down, bend to us; tendril and spray
Clutch and cling?
Chill
Fingers of yew be curled
Down on us?"-Burnt Norton, IV, Four Quartets, T.S Eliot

Northrop Frye, A biblical Critic who believes he has unraveled the code to digesting the bible explains that Jacob's Ladder is argumentative proof of this: (remember that we do not dream, but dreams pass through us)

"And he dreamed, and behold, a ladder set up on the earth, and the top of it reached to heaven: and behold, the angels of God ascending and descending on it."

Frye speculates correctly that "The ladder of the dream was a ladder from heaven rather than to it: it was not a human construction but an image of the divine will to reach man." William Blake raps it up more precisely (and if you have the time to read his entire No Natural Religion I insist you do) in his description of the man who see the flow of the universe (Kurtz, Hamlet, Ecclessiastes) compared to him that sees only minutely:

He who see the infinite in all things sees God. He who sees the Ratio only sees himself only---Therefore God becomes as we are, that we may be as he is. -No Natural Religion, William Blake

These arguments collectively assert that this ascendance, or lunacy, this escape out of the desert through the depth of the desert, is only possible through a higher power. There is, of course the other side of the argument: What the Bible refers to in The Tower of Babel in Genesis, and what Harold Bloom describes as the Anxiety of Poetic Influence; Poetic Influence being the higher power which the poet tries to ascend to and the anxiety being parallel to the rabbling of tongues.

 Bloom, a non-conventional Jew, and Frye himself a scholar critic as well as ordained pastor in Christianity both have deep roots on the bible; but as for the new testament, Bloom won't touch the thing, which is his downfall. Bloom's entire essay (the Anxiety of Influence, which is brilliant) hinges on the fact that the poet is leeching from prior poets (Eliot himself says "immature poets imitate, mature poets steal" and is referring to stealing conventions, not re-digesting) to create his own retelling, revision of what's been said. Bloom, who understands that a great poet is on its way decides to in fact disregard (if not slap in the face) Frye's own assertion which we will get to in a moment once I've let Bloom's words speak for him:

    "Poetic Influence--when it involves two strong, authentic poets,--always proceeds by a misreading of the prior poet, an act of creative correction that is actually and necessarily a misinterpretation. The history of fruitful poetic influence, which is to say the main tradition of Western poetry since the Renaissance, is a history of anxiety and self-saving caricature, of distortion, of perverse, willful revisionism without which modern poetry as such could not exist.

     My own Idiot Questioner, happily curled up in the labyrinth of my own being, protests: "What is the use of such a principle, whether the argument it informs be true or not?" Is it useful to be told that poets are not common readers, and particularly are not critics, in the true sense of critics, common readers raised to the highest power? And what is Poetic Influence anyway? Can the study of it really be anything more than the wearisome industry of source-hunting, of allusion-counting, an industry that will soon touch apocalypse anyway when it passes from scholars to computers? Is there not the shibboleth bequeathed us by Eliot, that the good poet steals, while the poor poet betrays an influence, borrows a voice? And are there not all the great Idealists of literary criticism, the deniers of poetic influence, ranging from Emerson with his maxims; "Insist on yourself: never imitate" and "Not possibly will the sou deign to repeat itself" to the recent transformation of Northrop Frye into the Arnold of our day, with his insistence that the Myth of Concern prevents poets from suffering the anxieties of obligation?"-The Anxiety of Influence, Clinamen or Poetic Misprision, Harold Bloom, pg 31, 2nd ed.

Bloom argues, what I've come to speculate, that the reason he has written such a principle, let alone an essay of criticism, is to pave the way for the next great poet. He does this while simultaneously asserting that Northrop Frye's Myth of Concerns (the culmination which we've partially discussed earlier and would be lunacy to explain in its fullest) is not the answer to the next great poet, the next Shakespeare; the poet from which all western anxiety of Poetic Influence extends according to Bloom. He even goes so far as to explain why Frye believes his Myth of Concerns prevents poets from suffering the anxieties of obligation saying

Against such idealism one cheerfully cites Lichtenberg's grand remark: "Yes, I too like to admire great men, but only those whose works I do not understand."-same, Harold Bloom, pg 31, 2nd ed.

This in itself points towards why critics believe Harold to be an arrogant bastard. He implies that Northrop Frye along with these other Idealist do not understand when in fact it is himself that understands not the common ground which Frye and Himself hold.

              I propose that the anxiety of influence with Bloom speaks of is the subservient spirit of these men striving for that which has not divinely manifested itself to them, and through no fault of their own they have tried to whittle from the past poets a mature production of their art which is merely a misprision. Bloom speaks of how "our current and future poets have only the consolation that no certain Titanic figure has risen since Milton and Wordsworth, not even Yeats or Stevens" leaving room for the anti-statement that in fact their will rise a new Titanic Poet. I propose that the Myth of Concerns that Frye speaks of does not "prevent poets form suffering the anxieties of obligation" but that it in fact it CAN prevent a poet, or poets from suffering the anxieties of obligation in that the doors of perception it opens when studied and loved leave not only poets but life itself naked to its eye. I propose that Frye's Myth of Concerns is the anxiety of Bloom's The Anxiety of Influence and that both were small stepping stones, attendant lords to a much greater picture. All this great poet has to do now is kill silent William.