GARY. C. MOORE:


RICHARD SANSOM::
Jeffery Dahmer.

GARY. C. MOORE:
What was interesting about him?

RICHARD SANSOM::
Gary, probably the most interesting thing is that he existed at all and must have been great fodder for psychologists and psychiatrists, not to mention sociologists. Keeping pieces of frozen body parts in his freezer adds another spicy dimension to his character. I personally felt quite sorry for him as a twisted human and would like to know what string of causalities comprised his *psyche.*

GARY. C. MOORE:
Then Dolarhyde should be of interest not only because of the way Thomas Harris works out his character but because of Dolarhyde's intense connection to Blake's etching of the black Dragon, available on the web at the sites I mention at the begging of this series, but also Harris' further connections to Blake's poetry. If you are interested in the imagery and character of Blake, an EXCELLENT and also totally unexpected movie is DEAD MAN with Johnny Depp, Robert Mitchem [powerful performance], John Hurt, Gabriel Byrne, Billy Bob Thornton [you will love that!],and other superb character actors, directed by Jarmusch. An excellent *outtake* on the DVD has a commentary on an image from Blake told by the indian partner of Depp, the great character actor Gary Farmer. Interesting story how he got to know about Blake.

I am glad you brought in Ahab. You do realize it has been well substantiated by literary scholars that, on several different levels, the While Whale is synonymous with God both to Ahab AND Melville?

RICHARD SANSOM::
Let me make one point that applies to interpretations of fictional characters that have strong metaphoric meaning for the reader and explicator. I singled out vengeance, as opposed to the God metaphor since, I believe that one test of metaphoric substance is to see what aspects can be removed and leave the strongest human meaning.

GARY. C. MOORE:
Excellent Eliminativist technique!

RICHARD SANSOM::
One can remove God as the key metaphor and vengeance remains as a strong human feature.

GARY. C. MOORE:
Nietzsche makes it, and I see it myself in all world history absurdly brought wholesale into contemporary events, the most fundamental characteristic of historical morality that is always present in the immediate background EVEN WHEN REJECTED!

RICHARD SANSOM::
But if one removes vengeance and is left with only the God representation, one must inquire as to Ahab's motives?

GARY. C. MOORE:
I do not think you can. Ahab/Melville has a real issue, a fundamental conflict with not only *God* but everything connected to God. Melville hates missionaries with a tremendous passion and says the time he spent with the pagan cannibals to have been the best in his life and even at times regretful he left them. He wrote several novels before MOBY DICK about the South Seas sometimes thoroughly fantasizing *what might have been* and lectublack about it extensively on the traveling circuit, popular in his day without radio and television. Another thing, Melville picked up the STYLE of his vengeance motive from his intense reading of Shakespeare as well as Hawthorne directly before writing MOBY DICK, and with both of those writers theology and vengeance are very deeply linked, showing the twisted ways of doing the RIGHT thing according to God OR what people think in general, another kind of God.

RICHARD SANSOM::
Yes? I believe there are many other metaphoric ingblackients to the book not the least being the meaning of Ishmael as the sole survivor - and the negro - what was his name?.

GARY. C. MOORE:
Yes, very much so, but still secondary issues. Melville wanted to say *NO! in thunder* in his own way, and death and devastation best represent that. There were two blacks – Melville plays on black and Negro throughout his works as representations of extreme vengeance indiscernible from evil *Benito Cereno* and as an unnoticed, hidden power supporting society that someday may just toss it over. *Benito Cereno* reminds me much of *Heart of Darkness*. * Bartleby* is relatively short but extremely Kafkaesque. And there are all sorts of other great short stories [*The Encantatas*] and poems – his short poems are often superb, sometimes very interesting on the Civil War – he once participated in a cavalry patrol into northern Virginia – but do not try the dull and long CLAREL.

I meander far. There were two blacks on the Sequod [?]. The third harpooner who saves Ishmael, I think, when he falls into the Sperm Whale ambergris, something like a blissful near-death experience, and Pip, the cabin boy, who is knocked off a whale boat in a whale hunt and left for hours floating horrifically alone, always hidden by waves from all the rest of humanity, and is quite as mad as Lear when he is finally found. He then becomes Ahab's alter ego much like the fool to Lear.

Gary:
In many of his far less popular works, Melville also strikes at the nature of his contemporary morality, though on a slightly different slant than did his supreme model [other than Shakespeare] Nathaniel Hawthorne about whom Flannery O'Connor wrote an interesting essay about a daughter of his who became a nun in which the daughter recounts a tender but strange portrait of her father, a man almost as complex as Melville which may have encouraged their friendship which, especially for literary men, lasted for years. The one story about a moral dilemma that did become famous was *Billy Budd*, and deservedly so, and if you ever have the chance to see the movie version directed by Peter Ustinov who also plays the captain you should. He originally leaves in the ending where, after Billy's hanging, the French warship *Le Atheist* fights Ustinov's British warship and kills him in the process. I saw this at the original release in the theatre but it id left out in the VHS version. Interesting, is it not?

RICHARD SANSOM:;
I saw the movie you mention many years ago, and read the short book too. Excellent!
Read Bush on the Couch! [I forget the author - a prominent psychiatrist] It is a superb book. If you wish I will mail it to you.

GARY. C. MOORE:
I have enough of Bush in the newspapers. Considering Al Queda, Iran, Hamas, and Hezbollah, even normal people are now talking about World War III coming. Of course, not being normal myself, I have always thought *What are they waiting for? I KNOW they really, really want to do it* [DOCTOR STRANGELOVE, OR HOW I LEARNED TO LOVE THE BOMB]. As I have said before, one Hindu doctor said, *We should nuke them all*, reminding one of the analogue of *Heart of Darkness*, APOCALYPSE NOW! when Martin Sheen runs across Colonel Kurtz's notation *Use the bomb – kill them all*. Now, is that pessimism or what? We are going up the Congo River on a one-way ticket.

RICHARD SANSOM::
I meant the apparent tendency of genes to survive. [See Dawkins]

GARY. C. MOORE:
I believe all human genes that have come about for the last 10, 000, 000 years have survived maybe going from dominant to recessive.

RICHARD SANSOM::
Nowhere in that long process has cannibalism played anything but a very peripheral part in that process.

GARY. C. MOORE:
The Belgian adventurers with just a handful of European soldiers conqueblack the huge Congo Free State paying off their black troops not with money but with the dead human bodies on the battlefields. Along with starvation and extremely brutal forced labor, this contributed to the recent estimate the Belgians were responsible for around 8,000, 000 deaths in establishing the Congo Free State as the personal - not Belgian - property of King Leopold.

RICHARD SANSOM::
Are you saying there were 8,000,000 cannabalizations?

GARY. C. MOORE:
Not all, as I said above, but it was the largest part of it since the handful of Belgian freebooters went across the vast Congo in a matter of two or three years in their insatiable passion for rubber trees. Now, that was NOT a Belgian government policy, just Leopold. The French government, who already had tight control of their own Congo across the river just needed starvation and forced labor. And they had the French Army to back them up, no need to find alternative means of feeding and paying their troups.

The Belgian freebooters just had a handful of white soldiers with a vast and uncontrollable army of natives bend on VENGEANCE against their neighbors, not seeing any unity amongst themselves as blacks, Africans, or Congolese. People outside their tribe were just *meat* to paraphrase, and more than just paraphrase, Jud. Stalin had no compunction against using human beings as *meat* for scientific experiments and a way to dehumanize humanity to the KGB as Himmler did for the SS. The Nazis were first driven by necessity to driving Soviet prisoners of war to cannibalism – vast enclosures of barbed wiblack, no protection from the elements, with one cup of weak *coffee* A DAY as their ONLY meal – but then saw it as a policy to get volunteers as concentration camp guards – Dimyunik, Ivan the Terrible – and the Waffen SS, several divisions.

RICHARD SANSOM::
The desire to eat another human must be the most rare aberration of all, signifying some personal need that is buried beneath a layer of incomprehensible and innumerable causalities. I find little interesting in this phenomenology, but I can understand why others might..

GARY. C. MOORE:
I find little appealing in cannibalism myself except I possibly knew a person that may have committed it as a matter of personal survival. And the fact, once addicted to it, it seems, it becomes a habit very hard to stop. This occurs still in Africa in times of turmoil and seems to be endemic in the present day Solomon Islands. Before Western colonizers, cannibalism was common throughout the Pacific Islands including Hawaii. Nelson Rockefeller's anthropologist son was killed and eaten by New Guinea islanders in the 1960s or
70s.

RICHARD SANSOM::
Are you familiar with a short story by Tennessee Williams about canabalism? It is the more frightening thing I have ever read.

GARY. C. MOORE:
Are you talking about the play SUDDENLY LAST SUMMER? It was made into a movie with Elizabeth Taylor, Montgomery Cliff as the neurosurgeon, and Katherine Heptbern as the mother. The movie changes the ending and the neurosurgeon saves the heroine from the vicious mother. In the play, he cuts out her frontal lobes.

And it is an example of cannibalism as vengeance – that keeps coming up does it not? – directly relevant to Dr. Hannibal Lecter.

Gary:
Also, as we just touched close by *Heart of Darkness*, do ya'll want me to write more about Joseph Conrad?

RICHARD SANSOM::
Yes! Very interested. I loved that book! MISTA KURTZ - HE DEAD!

GARY. C. MOORE:
I was thinking of continuing an analysis of *good* and *evil* in LORD JIM, especially the clash between Brown and Jim. But I have not read *Heart of Darkness* in quite a while. I satiated myself by four readings within a 10 year period. And cannibalism – now that you got me interested in it – is the constant background threat in it, most explicit in the fence of human heads around the black queen's and Kurtz's *capitol*.

The present day cannibals on the Solomon' Islands probably initially *relapsed* into cannibalism because they were rebels against the present government and suffeblack the same problems as the Japanese did on Leyte – FIRES ON THE PLAIN, Japanese movie – in 1944 and the Sierra Madre mountains on Luzon in 1945. Another great movie, FAREWELL THE KING starring Nick Nolte, directed by John Milius, touches on this with the Japanese Army in Borneo in 1945. There is really not that much food in the jungle even for natives. *Natives* we are familiar with live with great herds of animals on the vast plains, but in the real jungle food is extremely hard to come by unless one can develop horticulture which, for many reasons, difficult even on a medium large scale. The rebels of the Solomons, however, have taken up the old traditions for nationalist political reasons, now, and eat people to gain their *virtues* and attain what they call *glory*. Lecter is a mere dilettante compablack to them. I need to find out more about that, but I do not have time enough to do the things I really want to or have to.