Dune III The Wyrd of the Atreides and the Planet Arrakis

 

'God created Arrakis to train the faithful.'

'We live on sufferance down here....Arrakis is our enemy.'

III The Wyrd of the Atreides & the Planet Arrakis

Camelot

     Nobility of purpose, then, is something largely lacking in the Dune Imperium, but it is to be found within the House of Atreides (from the Greek: 'The Sons of Atreus'), being embodied in the person of Duke Leto. There is mention of the 'Code of the Atreides', but - alas -  we only see the Ducal Household at a moment of dissolution.  These early chapters are all too peremptory, and I would have liked to have a bit more of that household and its whole cultural and political context. Perhaps that is a criticism that can be levelled at 'Dune' in general: Herbert is in a hurry to tell his story. We do however meet four members of the Ducal court and that is enough, one supposes, to establish something of the dynamic of court life of the Atreides and its (necessarily) military culture.  Of the four it is only necessary in this extended essay/post to make note of the charismatic paladin Duncan Idaho - 'Duncan the Moral', the swordmaster of the Ginaz. And I think that this is where the Arthurian element rests - and from there it is a quick and easy thing to do to make parallels between Leto and Arthur, Jessica and Guinevere, Duncan and Lancelot and the Mentat Thurfit Hawat and Merlin. Like Arthur, Leto is fated to be betrayed.

     As with The Lord of the Rings, the opening chapters of Dune are somehow out of rhythm, a little awkward. They don't quite convince. They are not quite 'other' enough. In addition I found the staccato rhythms of Herbert's prose style difficult to adjust. The imaginative creation falters just a little at times and the court life of the Atreides is perhaps too much like Middle Class Suburban America of the early 1960s translated into space - I'm particularly thinking here of the dinner party scene on Arrakis. But then maybe that dinner party is an attempt to maintain standards in the face of overwhelming odds, rather like characters in a Conrad novel miles up-river dressing for dinner every night. There is, perhaps, also an attempt to draw a strong contrast between Paul's early comfortable life and his messianic destiny, which takes place not on the planet of his birth, Caladan, but on the implacably hostile desert planet Arrakis, colloquially known as 'Dune', the governance of which the Emperor, in collusion with House Harkonnen, has 'bestowed' upon the House of Atreides. It is, of course, a plot against the Atreides Duke, an offer that cannot be refused, but like an Heroic Age warrior chief and his war-band, such as you might find described in the epic poems 'Y Gododdin', or 'Beowulf', the Duke, his family & household, and his army go forth 'with solemn face to meet the darkness on the deep'.

There be dragons

     Crucial to the plot and Paul's political, cultural and religious revolution are the interaction between the politics of the Imperium and the ecology of Dune.  Arrakis is a frontier world, by which I don't mean that it stands at the very edge of the Imperium, but that humanity has a very limited and precarious position there; large areas of the planet are apparently uninhabited, barren and waterless.  It is a place of mystery, a place of secrets and immense dangers -  is often referred to as 'Hell' - where the majority of the population is huddled together in the mountainous terrain surrounding the N pole, while the southern hemisphere is a true Terra Incognita; which, for climatic and economic reasons is barely ever visited, let alone surveyed. An abandoned place. A Terra Nullius. Though things on Arrakis, and indeed everything in this book, are never quite what they seem.
      Arrakis however has one major (its only?) export: Spice aka Melange. A drug. It occurs naturally in the limitless dune seas of the northern hemisphere of the planet - 'an ocean in which no oar has dipped' - requiring little processing, though the harvesting is fraught with dangers - not only the implacably hostile environment, but the desert is home to the giant sandworm, which - rather like the monster in a B movie 'Creature Feature' - consumes everything in its path. The southern hemisphere appears is not so blessed, for spice mining does not occur there.
     Both the Spice, and its derivatives, are apparently consumed in vast quantities across the Known Universe, and it could be said to be the engine of the Imperial economy. All that said it appears not to have been consumed in the Ducal Court of Caladan.  Apart from turning the eyes of heavy users dark blue, Spice has geriatric properties, and there are other uses too, some ethnogenic, some purely utilitarian, that only become apparent as the novel progresses. The licence to harvest the spice is highly lucrative thing to possess, and House Atreides as a result would wax in wealth and power. But this, alas, is not to be.   

     Excluding the small groups of smugglers based on the planet, there are two settler communities on Arrakis 'village and seitch'; the smaller group 'the people of the garben, the sink and the pan' live in the far north of planet and are essentially there to service the spice mining industry. The larger group are a tribal society called the Fremen, the Freemen - that is they are outside the overarching Imperial class system. The relationship between both groups is complex, sometimes strained, sometimes intimate. There is some evidence that the Fremen have influenced the religious life of the northern communities. And there is inter-marriage, and some Fremen leave the desert and join the 'graben' like the 'Shadout Mapes', the housekeeper of the Ducal residence in Arrakeen who acts as a sort of contact between the Fremen of the desert - well, some of them at least - and the Atreides. And Dune, like the Lord of the Rings, only takes off when the main protagonists, Paul and Jessica fleeing into the dessert to escape their enemies, are fully immersed in a different, intense and spiritualised culture, that of the Fremen.

     It is never stated when the Fremen arrived on Arrakis, though with the establishment of the Imperial Botanical Testing Stations 'before the discovery of the Spice' there has been a human presence on the planet for at least ten thousand years, perhaps even from some time before the Butlerian Jihad. There is mention of a 'Botanical Testing Station period' in the history of the planet. The Dune Encyclopaedia (of disputed canonical status) gives the date of the Fremen arrival some seven millennia after the foundation of the Spacing Guild. When, by then, one presumes the 'people of the graben and sink' were firmly established. These secretive people see themselves as the descendants of an 'ancient' and persecuted religious sect.¹ 

 They are a people who unwilling to escape their bitter 'history' (I see that history as essentially mythological) and are caught in a cycle of victimhood and revenge. "Never forget, never forgive." A people eternally sojourning in the wilderness, consuming - well, not manna, but that other divinely attributed nutriment, the Spice. Exiles among a universe of exiles. Waiting. 
     All that said the Fremen have a remarkable and complex material and spiritual culture (more of that in a later post). They have successfully colonised a uniquely hostile environment, but in doing so have had to adapt their social structures to survive. The result of this evolutionary change is a society that we would find harsh, perhaps even barbaric. It is structured to resemble, say, ancient Sparta or Republican Rome, where the individual is subsumed (and the ego, perhaps, destroyed) into the collective endeavour of a society organised along military lines, a society demanding, and receiving in turn, a high level of social conformity.²

  To give an example: a Fremen who has become blind is expelled from the community and thrust out into the desert to die; and from that it might be possible to surmise that the Fremen also practice exposure of infants.  A society that is distrustful of outsiders; 'offworld strangers' found in the deep desert are killed for their water. 'An entire culture trained to military order', as the Lady Jessica noted. The trade-off the for all this being survival of the individual in an environment that is objectively, quantifiably hostile, a place of complete existential threat.

     On the internet there is quite a debate about how Islamic/Arabic the Fremen are. In the case of the status of women it is definitely not. The Fremen faith is decidedly syncretistic, and what ever the faith was which they brought with them to Arrakis it has undergone substantial alteration at the hands of the harsh conditions of the planet and through contact with the Bene Gesserit. Neither do the Fremen speak Arabic, but a variant of Galach³, and the 'Hunting Language' Chakobsa. The exception to this being liturgical, and then, it could be argued, without any real understanding of the language (more of that later). Perhaps the use of Arabic among the Fremen is best thought as equivalent to the use of Latin in Western Europe during the Middle Ages. At this point it is enough to note also that some of the Arabic terms used among the Fremen, such as 'Lisan al-gaib' have a particular relationship with Sufism and the Greater Iranian cultural area. 

     Neither are the Fremen, as is widely said on-line & in the msm, nomadic. Fremen live in settled, troglodytic communities called sietch - some of which, such as Sietch Tabr, are really small towns with thousands of inhabitants. The Tau of the tribe or the sietch is help maintained via the Tau Orgy, which cements the unity of the tribe/sietch and allows for the dissipation of potential disruptive energy.  Fremen pattern of settlement and land holding is structured around a reliable water supply, for Dune is not entirely desert: there are small polar ice caps and when the geology allows there are springs and oases. In geological basins that are (important point this) disconnected from the open desert plants grow. Plants, that is, that have been introduced from elsewhere, off-planet. Terranic plants (i.e. from the Earth) do particularly well. As becomes clear in the novel there is water on the planet but is mainly trapped in the underlying strata. Though it is never overtly stated the Fremen must practice some form of cultivation. Otherwise how could the isolated sietch communities possibly survive? Perhaps surprisingly these communities possess a skilled manufacturing base, producing those items, such as stillsuits and stilltents, that are essential to desert living. And they are not so alienated that they don't trade with the other inhabitants of Dune, or with the wider Imperium, but how, one is entitled to ask, do the Fremen source raw materials or machinery, and yet maintain their secrecy? The smugglers, I guess. I mention this because it strikes me as an example of a number of ambiguities if not contradictions in the plot, that I can't quite explain to my satisfaction.

  

A short discursion: Arrakis and the Golden Flower 

     In the decades prior to Paul's arrival on Arrakis, the Fremen embarked on a remarkable undertaking: the greening of large areas of the planet, a multi-generational task. This however was not the first time this was attempted. As I showed above some time before the 'discovery of the Spice' Terranic desert species were introduced into the ecology of Arrakis. This attempt was subsequently abandoned pushing the terraforming of the planet into the realm of 'indefinitely postponed parousia'. All this changed with appointment of Pardot Kynes as Imperial Ecologist, in doing so probably making some form of future conflict inevitable on Arrakis.

     The arrival of the Atreides merely realigned Fremen priorities, for Paul's adventus on the planet immediately opened the way to violent Jihad - that is a parousia achieved by conflict. Not that this utopian greening of the Arrakis was abandoned - it was too late for that, for the process had already been imprinted on the ritual and spiritual life of the Fremen. This is how it was explained years later by Farok, himself a former Jihadi, in 'Dune Messiah';

      'The Atreides came [....] the one we named Usul in our seitch, his private name among us. Our Maud'dib, our Mahdi! And when he called for the Jihad, I was one of those who asked: 'Why should I go to fight there? I have no relatives there.' But the other men went - young men, friends, companions of my childhood. When they returned, they spoke of wizardry, of the power of this Atreides saviour. He fought our enemy the Harkonnens. Liet-Kynes who promised us paradise upon our planet, blessed him. It was said this Atreides came to change our world and the our universe, that he was the man to make the golden flower blossom in the night.'

     An interesting term that. Golden Flower. It is a Taoist term occurring in 'The Secret of the Golden Flower' the classic Neidan text. Neidan, I should explain here, is a Chinese form of meditation and inner alchemy that derives ultimately from Indian Tantric thought. For Jung the Golden Flower represented the state of being a fully integrated person. The promise of the Atreides is that by following him into Jihad the Fremen can, as individuals first, transcend their ancestral trauma, expanding their scope of cognition and reality. Herbert by using this vegetative analogy implies that Leit-Kynes offers the same thing but over a much longer time scale; one in pace with the societal changes in Fremen culture that the greening would entail. A process in which the Fremen would cease to be.

1 In the Appendices and Glossary they are referred to as the 'Zensunni Wanderers'. However in the narrative the term is never used either by the Fremen or others.  Some critics have suggested the Fremen use 'Misr' when referring to themselves. The evidence for that is ambiguous. The 'Terminology' at the back of the book says that the Fremen call themselves the 'Misr' meaning 'the people'.  However in the text it is used once - by the Reverend Mother Ramallo, who declares; 'We are the people of Misr.' i.e. a place. The term is the Arabic for 'Egypt' (deriving from the Semitic for 'border') and refers to their supposed origins.

2 As Paul himself noted (quoting from the Orange Catholic Bible):  'Law and duty are one; so be it.  But remember these limitations - Thus you are never fully conscious.  Thus do you remain immersed in the communal Tau.  Thus are you always less than an individual.'

3 One variant word is given in the novel; 'cielago' for 'bat'. It is derived from Spanish. Interestingly, as the Lady Jessica notes, '....this was the language of Ilm and Fiqh....' It opens up the possibility that the Ilm and Fiqh, which are either written or oral and form part of Fremen religious culture are written in an unnamed language.

Dune II The Context: Empire and Jihad

    'A beginning is a time for taking the most delicate care that the balances are correct. [] To begin your study of the life of Muad'dib, then, take care that you first place him in his time; born in the 57th year of the reign of the Padishah Emperor Shaddam IV.'

II The Context: Empire and Jihad

   Dune is a book that has to come to us from the future, possibly from a time hundreds, if not thousands, of years later than the events it describes. It is a history of sorts, an attempt, as it were, to fill in the gaps left in the religious texts and official histories, fragments of which introduce each chapter. An intimate history and perhaps a corrective, with very few grand scenes; most events occur in small private spaces such as a bedroom or a cave, or even inside a tent. In addition any number of these scenes occur at night or in the dark. Each scene usually contains a limited number of characters, to whose thought processes the reader has access.  The sort of scenes where the only witnesses are the protagonists themselves. (We witness no battles in space, or indeed experience space travel.) It all adds up to a world of secrecy, but more of that later. This constricted viewpoint makes for a paradox in a novel that is so concerned with such vast existential and metaphysical concerns and some critics have likened to an opera. It carries echoes of 'The Secret History' of Procopius.

    It might be interesting, then, to investigate which events are given a full literary treatment, which are given a passing mention and which are omitted, and why that is.  At times, reading this novel is like a journey through a darkened landscape with only flashes of illumination. We see through a glass darkly. 

     Although a 'campus novel' of the late 1960s - like, indeed, the Lord of the Rings - the work of Herbert does not, it seems from my limited vantage point, have that same sort of fan-base as Tolkein. It does not inspire that same devotion. And is there any wonder? Dune is not an easy book. As I have outlined above it is violent and harsh, depicting a society where all too often human life is cheap. And although the narrative can be said to follow an archetypal arc in the manner of Jung and Campbell there are, with one notable exception, no heroes.

The Empire

     To set the scene. It is some 20,000 years into the future. Mankind, (there are no alien species), has spread across the universe and is given a resemblance of unity in a vast Universal Empire - the 'Padishah Empire', a finely balanced construction of sometimes opposing forces. Although seemingly stable - after all it has lasted some 10,000 years - the Empire is a place of distrust, of simmering resentments, feuds. Motivation is often clouded, confused and cynical. Secrecy often prevails with plot weaving with plot. It feels as though even close personal relationships are marred by this general dis-ease.

    There are any number of technological devices in advance of our own: 'glowglobes', 'suspensors', 'cones of silence', 'stoneburners'. Some, in the later books, are quite extraordinary. However progress, beyond that narrow technological sense, is lacking: democracy is apparently universally absent; feudalism rules; there is a rigid social hierarchy (there may even be sumptuary laws) and there is slavery; and those planets that somehow have retained their highly advanced technical and computational base during the Butlerian Jihad, such as Ix and Richesse, are highly stratified technocratic societies resembling the 'World State' depicted in Huxley's 'Brave New World'. In many ways humanity as returned to a pre-modern state: there is, for instance, no mass media.

     What is more, the Known Universe is a domain of exiles, a people without a home; for the Earth, previously itself the subject of a cataclysmic event (it was hit by an asteroid), has been lost in the depths of time. It has become a mythological place. Humanity has been permanently cast out of Eden. Everyone is a colonist.

The Jihad

     Mid point between then and now, in the years preceding the foundation of the Empire, there occurred a seismic cultural and technological event the effects of which are still being felt at the time of the novel: The Butlerian Jihad. That is the destruction of all thinking machines across the entire Known Universe; 'Thou shall not make a machine in the image of man,' pronounces the Orange Catholic Bible. Subsequently all political, scientific and cultural spheres have had to adjust to the new reality, forging new technologies and organisations such as the Spacing Guild and the Bene Gesserit in order to cope. Humans are trained, and perhaps genetically manipulated, to replace computers. They are also subject to a covert breeding programme by one of these new organisations, or 'schools', the quasi-messianic Bene Gesserit. This shadowy, secretive sisterhood, which manages to infiltrate every corner of Imperial society, has spent millennia carefully pursuing the goal of the 'Kwisazt Haderach' (from the Hebrew 'Kefitzat Haderach'), a man who is capable of working with higher order dimensions, who has access to all the memories of both his male and female ancestors and most importantly has prescience - that is almost divine attributes. Think the next evolutionary stage for the humanity, but one which would give inordinate power to the Bene Gesserit enabling them through the semi-divine person of the Kwisatz to control all the pillars of the post-Jihad Imperial settlement.* This breeding plan has almost come to fruition. Only for, at this late stage, for all of it to go sideways, for the Bene Gesserit Jessica Atreides under instruction to bear the Duke, Leto I, a daughter gave birth, some fifteen years previous to opening of the novel a son, Paul. (Paul: from the Latin for 'small, 'humble'. Paul after all is described as short for his years.) Dune is the story of Paul's rise to ultimate secular and spiritual power in the Known Universe, Herbert drawing on the lives of both the Islamic prophet Muhammad and the British WWI Army officer Lawrence of Arabia amongst others. Echoes, for instance, of Alexander the Great (both the historical Macedonian king and the Alexander of the 'Alexander Romance', particularly as described in the 'Shahnameh' of Ferdowsi) and the Patriarch Moses. I've noticed several internet commentators picking up on the influence of a now little-known book 'The Sabres of Paradise', by the British author and traveller Lesley Branch (1904-2007). It is a fictionalized account of Imam Shamil, third Imam of the 'Caucasian Imamate' and his doomed attempt to resist Russian expansion into the Caucasus. Important thing, the title 'Imam' in this context and one I want to return to its implications in a later post. Anyway, Branch's book is the source of all sorts stuff in Dune. One final source, in an already heady mix, before I finish this post: in one interview Herbert said he had been influenced by the Arthurian legends - not an influence I readily picked up upon on first reading.  

     I would add, 14.02.2025, 'Lord Jim' by the incomparable Joseph Conrad; the relationship of the natives and Lord Jim in Patusan and Lord Jim bears comparison to the relationship between the Fremen and Paul. One of them even carries a Kris knife.

* 10.8.23 This morning I watched a video on Youtube made by Esoterica on the little known British artist and occultist Austin Osman Spare and his theory of magic. I really can't go into it here but there seemed a real parallel between what Spare was trying to do and the Bene Gesserit, particularly in regards to the accessing of ancestral memories. I think it's likely to be just coincidental, unless Spare's writings were available to Herbert through various New Age groups on the West Coast. 

An afternoon of 'Folk Horror'

     Well, the warm, rosy glow of the exhibition has faded over the intervening weeks and I'm back to unhappy. Work is hardly progressing. Thursday afternoon I ended up watching two BBC dramas with occult/paranormal themes: 'The Beast', 1981, and part of the 'West Country Tales' series and the remarkable 'The Stone Tape' of 1972.

    'The Beast' is a tale of haunting - of sorts. The agent is not spiritual but something quite physical and quite, quite ancient. A survival. A wildman, occupying the space between the human and the bestial. A cryptid, but also, simultaneously, a creature from out of the depths of English and European folklore. A Wodewose. Perhaps even from the dark corners of our own collective sub-conscious. The story is set on a farm deep in the Cornish countryside. The first encounter with the creature occurs within the wild wood, leading one to think that perhaps the wildman was merely the genius loci of the woods, a pan-like creature; however the second encounter takes place in the domesticity of the farm itself several years later. 

     And on to the main feature, the confrontational and quite disturbing 'The Stone Tape' written by Nigel Kneale who also, and famously, wrote the Quatermass series and the controversial, but prophetic  'The Year of the Sex Olympics'. 'The Stone Tape' is something that has come down to us therefore from the Golden Age of British broadcasting. Like 'Quatermass and the Pit' before it 'The Stone Tape' attempts to provide a rational explanation for paranormal activity. 

     The setting is a nineteenth century Gothic country house. Quite an outlandish place. (The decidedly wilful Horsley Towers in Surrey) The place has stood empty for years and has been recently bought by an electronics company. The action centres on the R & D department, which is under the gimlet eye of the demanding, maddening, driven Peter, played by the admirable Michael Bryant. A rare appearance on the small screen too for which we should be grateful. He was a great actor but worked almost exclusively on the stage. And there is Jill Greeley, played by Jane Asher, she is a sensitive - 'the type that hurts easily'. But then they are both characters on the edge. Around them is an excellent ensemble of actors including Ian Cuthbertson, Michael Bates and James Cosmo.

     Almost immediately things begin to go wrong. Cuthbertson's character, Roy Collinson who has been on site for months, it is soon apparent knows a lot and guesses the rest but is 'economical with the actualite'. Events follow events in rapid succession. There is a relentlessness, a constant intensity, to this drama that must have been exhausting work for the actors. The paranormal activity centres in a single room in the house - part cellar, abandoned. An ancient space. The builders working on the restoration of the house refuse to work there. Both Peter and Jill become obsessed with what it contains. Peter's attitude is purely utilitarian, all surface; he quickly assesses (correctly) that the room acts as some sort of recording device. He thinks it might be of some commercial value. And unhappily it is as much Peter's attitude, as it is the paranormal activity, that drives his team members to madness even death.  With possible exception of Jill, Peter and his team fail to recognize the 'recordings' represent some sort of trauma, that they are not merely chance events but are caused by another, as yet unseen, agency.

     It is perhaps unsurprising that 'The Stone Tape' shares certain themes with another of Kneale's work 'Quatermass and the Pit' of 1958/9; the abandoned property; the sensitive, slightly neurotic, female assistant; the decent into madness of individuals and groups; the intrusion of the deep past into contemporary (post-war) Britain. Both films do indeed find a logical explanation for the horrendous events, but fourteen years is a long time and the narrative of progress has collapsed; in the end 'The Stone Tape' can only offer a partial explanation. Certainly no rational explanation, because the boundary of science has been reached and beyond lies the realm of the spirit.

'Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds' - Dune Messiah

     I don't usually issue a 'spoiler alert', as I make an effort when writing a review not to disclose too much plot information, but just enough to intrigue. However this book cannot really be discussed without revealing more than usual. You have been warned.

     Apologies for this post having taken so long: firstly lockdown has really taken it out of me and although I am functioning and not just slumped in a heap in a corner with depression motivation is something I have lost. Secondly this post, like the 'Dune' post, has been subject to endless editing as I have been trying to get to grips with what is an extraordinary piece of literary imagination. 

     'We saw our parents' nakedness; Rivers of blood will be required to cover them. Rivers of blood.'

     I've been re-reading 'Dune Messiah' by Frank Herbert, the second novel in his 'Dune' sequence - a slim intermezzo of a book between the behemoths of 'Dune' and 'Children of Dune'. Not that I would want to suggest that 'Dune Messiah' is in anyway 'light' or frivolous. It is certainly neither. This re-reading, I have to admit, has been prompted partly by the growing excitement on social media over Denis Villeneuve's new film adaptation of 'Dune' but also by a loss of direction in my reading. It was there at my bedside and I just picked it up for want of something better. I suspect 'Dune Messiah' gets called a sequel for convenience sake - I certainly did in my post about 'Dune'. However we would be wrong to do so: Herbert originally conceived the first three novels (of what would eventually be six novel cycle) as one. It was his agent who got Herbert spilt them into three worried that they would make too hefty a tome for easy reading. (Herbert speaking at UCLA 17.04.85) Certainly there are parts of 'Dune Messiah' that were written at the same time 'Dune'.

     And I must say I'm glad I did, for although at times, as I mentioned in my previous 'Dune' post, the 'Duniverse' is a very strange place at times - the climax of 'Dune Messiah' is one of the weirdest and saddest things I have yet read - this has been an intense, immersive experience. In fact it has had quite a profound effect on me, causing me not only to re-asses my attitude to the Sci-fi but causing me to loose sleep as its strange and hermetic themes swirled about my head. So much so that I changed by bedtime reading to the much duller world of Margaret Drabble and 'The Ice Age', a state-of-the-nation novel of the mid 70s. What I was really looking for was 'The Great Fortune', the first of Olivia Manning's fabulous Balkan Trilogy. (I have already the third novel in the sequence: 'Friends and Heroes'.) Anyway 'The Ice Age' has turned out to be oddly successful for a novel that is virtual all 'tell' and no 'show', and I would recommend it.

     'He remembered his earliest visions of the jihad-to-be, the terror and revulsion he'd experienced. Now of course he knew visions of greater terror. He had lived with the real violence. He had seen his Fremen charged with mystical strength sweep all before him in the religious war. The jihad gained a new perspective. It was finite, of course, a brief spasm when measured against eternity, but beyond that lay horrors to overshadow anything in the past.'

     'Dune Messiah' is, I suspect, not so much read as 'Dune' and this has allowed the latter to be misinterpreted. David Lynch's film of 1984 certainly did (Why on earth did it rain at the end of the film killing off all the sandworms destroying thereby all spice production and consequently ending space travel?) and I fear that the latest cinematic adaptation directed by Denis Villeneuve may well be found guilty of the same. I really cannot emphasise enough that Paul Muad'dib is not a hero. He is not as Timothee Chalamet said in a 'Vanity Fair' interview 'Think Greta Thunberg, only she's a Jedi with a diploma from Hogwarts'. (Unless, of course, he knows something about la Thunberg that we don't.) It doesn't bode well. And he is certainly not the 'Mightey-Whitey' of Noah Berlatsky's article in escapist.com.* I think it might have helped his case if Mr Berlatsky had actually done some reading in preparation. Otherwise how do you explain such a wilful misreading of the texts? Paul is not the leader of some armed liberation movement, but a mass murderer guilty of genocide on an incomprehensible scale, or else, to exonerate him a little, merely the facilitator of such a gargantuan crime:

     '[]....at a conservative estimate, I've killed sixty-one billion people, sterilised ninety planets, completely demoralised four hundred others. I've wiped out the followers of forty religions [] We'll be a hundred generations recovering from Muad'dib's Jihad.'

     The Fremen jihad was a war for the political and religious domination of the Known Universe - not a war to set themselves free from oppression, but a revenge on the rest of humanity for thousands of years of perceived subjugation. Just a niggle but it is never explained how the Jihad commences, or how the Fremen achieve such cataclysmic results. Yes, we are told that they are fanatics, but still.... Historically, the success of the Islamic/Arab conquests were in part due to the exhaustion of the two great powers of the day, the Eastern Roman Empire and Sassanid Iran, after an apocalyptic war. There is no evidence of any such civilizational fatigue in the Dune Universe, unless one counts the lack of religious belief among the elites of the Empire. My guess is that after the defeat of Shaddam IV and his Sardukar troops on Arrakis the Empire momentarily collapsed into anarchy and the Jihad grew out of Muad'dib's re-assertion of Imperial authority, but it is only speculation.

     'No more terrible disaster could befall your people than for them to fall into the hands of a hero.'

     'Dune Messiah' opens twelve years after the events of 'Dune'; Muad'dib's Jihad - that 'blood-dimmed tide' - has, as we have seen, spread to nearly all the inhabited worlds; the small Arrakid city of Arakeen is now the Imperial capital and the centre of all religious life in the Empire - thousands make the Hajj, the pilgrimage, to its temples and shrines; Muad'dib's promise to 'green' the planet advances. Never has there been an Emperor as powerful as Paul Muad'dib. And yet....and yet....Arakeen still feels empty and provincial - though crammed with vulgar, bombastic monuments and surrounded by ugly monotonous suburbia that is prey to constant intrusion by the desert. And the Fremen are disillusioned (as happens so often after a revolution). There is a sense that things have taken a wrong turn. They have had their revenge on humanity, but now their lives are largely empty, devoid of meaning and direction. The Jihad failed to become the moment of re-integration with the world, as the former jihadi Farok, speaking early in the book, believed Muad'dib offered his followers. And not only Muad'dib, but, as explained in 'Dune', the Bene Gesserit have been there before him inadvertently tilling the ground in preparation for all this violence and failure when all they wanted to do was protect and promote their own. Instead of bringing liberation the jihad only furthered the alienation of the Fremen as it effectively destroyed their past in the process, leaving them suspended between that lost past and a non-existent future. In effect they merely exported Arrakid chaos to the rest of the universe. There is now a desire among the Fremen to return to ways of the desert, and towards the end of the novel we learn that the newly constructed qanats (irrigation canals) and other symbols of the new Arrakis have been sabotaged, the Golden Flower rejected. Ennui envelops and corrupts many. They are ripe for exploitation at the hands of plotters.

     And it is with the plotters, a motley crew if ever there was one, that the real weirdness steps in. In particular we are presented with two products of the Bene Teilaxu: the Guild Steersman Edric, and the face dancer Scytale (both genetically engineered mutations). Connected with the plot are two more products of the Tleilaxu; the human distrans Bijaz, (another piece of genetic manipulation) and most importantly the ghola Hayt. The other conspirators are Helen Gaius Mohaim and the Princes Irulan (both Bene Gesserit). In addition there is Korba, who like Farok we have encountered in 'Dune', a fighter from Seitch Tabr and later a Fedaykin leader and now one of the Qizara Tawfid, the priests of the new religion of Muad'dib. A long term intimate of Muad'dib then, but he and his own separate coterie of plotters are not happy either. 

     And then there is Paul Muad'dib himself that strangely disengaged prophet, complex and contradictory, conflicted and more isolated than ever: his mother, the Lady Jessica, and Gurney Halleck (one of the few survivors of the Atreides household, of any rank, to have escaped the Harkonen purge) have returned to Caladan. The estrangement between Paul and his wife Irulan has deepened, his relationship with his concubine Chani under increasing strain. He rules by personal fiat - he is a benign autocrat surrounded by a small coterie of counsellors. He refuses both a constitution and to rule as a god. And what is more Paul's prescience has become a curse rather than a gift. He has become its prisoner, unable at times to assert his own autonomy and agency. (It is not as though his prescience is 'all seeing', indeed it is partial, selective; obviously something else is at play here, most likely the unconscious. It is certainly not an objective 'sense'. Similarly I don't view the collective unconscious, as exemplified as the collective memory of the Fremen, as in anyway objective. Perhaps like memory prescience is a creative process. In the case of the Fremen we cannot rule out the influence of the hand of the Missionaria Protectiva either.) Estranged from wider society by his semi-divine powers he draws closer to his younger sister Alia. It is impossible to not feel a deep sympathy when encountering Alia, St Alia-of-the-Knife, Abomination, object of veneration. Merely a teenage girl. Prescient and fully conscious at birth. 

     With all of that established, and bubbling away nicely, we witness the arrival of an embassy from the Spacing Guild headed by steersman Edric. Among the entourage is a gift, Hayt. The ghola. Paul recognises immediately that Hayt is in fact Duncan Idaho - his friend and weapons trainer. Dead Idaho. The Idaho murdered by the Harkonens 15 yrs previously. Restored to life. Re-animated as it were. Re-heated and served. The Bene Tleilax are good at that sort of thing, manufacturing not only humans to order but other even more morally reprehensible things: war, famine, & poverty. Soon we learn that Hayt has been trained as a mentat and in Zensunni philosophy, but importantly, for the plot at least, he has no recollection of his earlier life. The gift is accepted, and a strange relationship develops between Hayt and the Atreides that only serves to further isolate them from the Fremen, who are rightly suspicious of the Tleilaxu and their 'products'. They have a particular aversion to the ghola's eyes which in common with all of his type are metal.

     Slowly the plots converge. Muad'dib looses his sight in a terrorist explosion (A small nuclear device known as a 'stoneburner' is detonated within the Imperial capital) and then his prescience. And at the climactic, melodramatic conclusion of the novel, Paul and Duncan end their exile, their occultation. Their identities restored, they become once again fully integrated human beings. And thus restored Paul walks out alone into the desert. Perhaps we are supposed to have in mind here the death of Alexander the Great at a similar age, and the occultation of T E Lawrence at the end of WWI. Unlike Indra, the slayer of Vritra, who I discussed in my 'Dune' post, Paul rejects his cosmological dharma. It is left to others to fulfil that terrible purpose. (This is for others to explore, but I do wonder if in the relationship between Paul and Duncan there is an echo (and a faint one at that) of that between Arjun and Krishna in the Bhagavad Gita. Just a thought. Be that as it it may, Duncan can be seen as Paul's moral anchor.) 

     'Dune Messiah' has caused me reassess my attitude to Science Fiction and Fantasy writing. I still haven't changed my mind about the literary quality of both genres, but I've come to see that both fulfil important roles within the culture. It works something like this: the Enlightenment with its emphasis on reason degraded the position of myth in Western Culture, echoing both the earlier Protestant Reformation, and its jihad against 'superstition' **, and British Deism. These movements tended toward dis-association, an alienation in humanity. One that industrial, mass society has exacerbated. It helped feed the growing 'Meaning Crisis'. Romanticism 'rediscovered' myth, as a means to heal the breach. Think, for instance of the work of William Blake. It, Romanticism, had perhaps a better understanding of being human than the Enlightenment. However, dis-associative culture remained and continues today in certain sections of elite culture. In the twentieth century Carl Jung attempted to end the crisis in meaning by attempting to re-incorporate myth into what was essentially a new metaphysics. Later other thinkers have attempted the same: Joseph Campbell being a notable example whose cultural influence has been immense. It was Campbell, I believe, who pointed out that myth is the mirror of the self. In our own time both Jordan Peterson and John Vervaeke are attempting the same. I believe that both Sci-fi and fantasy are popular and 'spontaneous' attempts, largely outside elite culture and the academy, to heal that breach, to fill the vacuum created by Modernity. They are not therefore to be dismissed. Specifically I've come to see the 'Dune' sequence, in all it richness and complexity, to be very cultural important. It speaks to our time. I begin to wonder if the sequence is an extended metaphor for the Pax Americana.

*   Berlatsky is not alone in this. See Haifa Mahabir's essay 'Dune and Orientalism' on the 'Munitions of War' website. I'm not entirely sure whether she has read 'Dune' or not. I think not though.

** I've come to take the view that the Reformation in its attack on the sort of customs, such as ashing or the production of religious art, and which are common to other religions, as a form of de-naturing. Sadly attempts to re-nature ourselves, such as Anglo-Catholicism, have largely failed by being largely prescriptive and self-conscious, lacking in spontaneity (being overly concerned with the correct externals).

Dune I: The Discontents of Modernity

'I had this idea that charismatic leaders ought to come with a warning label on the forehead: 'May be dangerous to your health.''

'When religion and politics ride the same cart when that cart is driven by a living holy man, nothing can stand in their path.'

I Introduction: The Discontents of Modernity

     I've been reading around Jung for several weeks now. He is endlessly fascinating. That mix of the intellectual, the spiritual and the artistic. One way of understanding the rise of Jordan Peterson is to see it as part of a larger Jungian revival. Perhaps Jungian thought is a way through the crisis of Liberalism, of Late and Post-Modernity, that is laid upon us.  It is certain that we have culturally, spiritually and possibly politically driven ourselves up a dead end.

     So discovering that Frank Herbert (1920-1986) had read Jung, as well as Nietzsche, I decided to re-read Dune (which I had first read in the early Eighties when the David Lynch film came out), and - as a long-term project - all the sequels Herbert wrote. From doing a little research into them things get pretty weird. Not that 'Dune' isn't pretty weird of itself. There are some rather strange things going on. I should add here that Science Fiction (and fantasy fiction) is something I don't normally read, perhaps, I have to admit, out of literary snobbery. It is certainly something that serious literary types look down upon. There are a small number of exceptions to this general rule: H G Wells, J G Ballard, George Orwell, for '1984' and Aldous Huxley for 'Brave New World' - but then who reads Huxley's early works now, and who, save the New Agers, the later quasi-mystical works such as 'Island' and 'The Doors of Perception'? I suspect Herbert may have read them, or at least been aware of them and of Huxley himself down the coast in Southern California and a user of mescaline. Both men had various degrees of interest in Vedanta. One feels that Huxley's influence is close in this book, perhaps most obviously in the similarities between the Seitch Tau Orgy and the 'Solidarity Service' in 'Brave New World'.

      (I feel the influence of the Jungian psychologist Erich Neuman (1905-1960) is close at hand too, especially his book 'The Great Mother - An Analysis of the Archetype' of 1955, but more of that later. I would also add, 19.10.22, the French philosopher and mystic Henri Corbin, but I'm not sure how Herbert would have come across Corbin's work as only two of Corbin's books had been published before 1965 when Dune was published, and only one of those in English. Were Corbin's ideas already in circulation in certain proto-New Age Groups on the American West Coast?)

     Dune, then, is an exception to the rule, and I have to admit I find it fascinating. Compelling, even. Perhaps not for the quality of the writing as such (it hasn't changed my opinion about the literary quality of sci-fi to be honest) but for the ideas and imaginative vision. It is the use of Jungian ideas, archetypes and so on, that gives this story its heft, its continuing resonance. Their presence, via Campbell, helps explain why the first Star Wars film succeeded and their absence why the subsequent films waxed in failure until they reached the bathetic 'Rise of Skywalker'.

     The Lord of the Rings, which is without doubt better written, falls into that same category; and having said that I've been struck with a number of similarities between the two works. Not an obvious parallel perhaps, though both authors could be described as conservatives, though of somewhat different stripes - Herbert being a sort of Thoreau-esque frontiersman, doughty and independent. Be that as it may, both books are an attempt to address, and come to terms with, through the use of mythological metaphor, the gargantuan horrors of the twentieth century, depicting societies that are poised at the point of monumental change - a change that is only achieved by the shedding of blood in war, and in the case of the Dune sequence much blood. Untold amounts. In both books the main character undergoes a series of trials and initiations that lead to an altered (higher) consciousness. Being burdened with a power beyond their comprehension, (and that of their companions and the wider society around them), and that makes living in the real, mundane world ultimately unbearable, they are compelled in that process of change to make a bitter renunciation, rather like the knights in the Grail legends. Perhaps you can see the Ring in the LOTR as an inversion of the Grail. Another link between both books is the almost inordinate length of vision; thousands of years are traversed in which the events described are set against a vast panoramic view of history. Both books explore ideas of destiny, fate and agency. Tolkein, Herbert, and Huxley for that matter, were all concerned with where Modernity has gone wrong and in particular with the disenchanting of the world, and its effect on the individual, society and environment as humanity waxes in alienation. 'Dune' however contains themes such as religious and political fanaticism, terrorism and the rise of dictatorship that are alien to Middle Earth. It is a novel, too, saturated with the emerging drugs culture of the 1960s. 

     A novel about the opening of the 'Doors of Perception'. A rich, complex and multi-layered work then, of almost infinite interest, that reflects not only Herbert's wide field of reading but also his autodidactism - for good and ill.

Leicester and the British Silent Film Festival

     Friday and I was off to Leicester to join the bf at the 18th British Silent Film Festival which was being held at the Phoenix, Midland Street.  He had already been there for a full day.  In the end I caught five films.  The bf's experience was immersive, not missing a single one.  I spent my time off (for good behaviour!!) discovering Leicester.  This was my first proper visit and it was a delight.  But more of that in my next post.

     My attendance kicked off with the slightly bizarre experience of watching a British film, 'Three Live Ghosts', in a re-edited, and indeed re-written form for Soviet distribution.  We were watching the Soviet version because the original was lost; its interest lay in the fact that Hitchcock had worked on this film (as title designer), not with the quality of the finished article.  It was a dog's dinner.  The plot had been changed beyond recognition, and the editors in the USSR had shown little knowledge of the setting, London.  The original, produced by the 'Famous-Players Lasky British', had been a screen adaptation of Frederick Isham's 1920 play of the same name; a story of men returning from WWI, fitting in, then, with the theme of the festival: the Heroic man.
   Friday night's main feature followed: 'Michel Strogoff' - a sprawling epic of a film lasting just over three hours!  It was based on Jules Verne's novel 'A Courier of the Czar' and starred the smouldering Ivan Mosjourkine as the eponymous hero.  He is also credited, according to 'wiki', with working on the script with Boris de Fast and the director Viktor Tourjansky.  It was, ostensibly. a French production though a cursory glance through the titles shows a massive presence of Russian emigres before and around the camera.  It is a typical nineteenth century tale of action, set, in this case, in the Russian Empire.  It is a straight forward linear narrative telling the exploits of the Czar's secret courier on a perilous journey east to Irkutsk.  Not so far, in retrospect, it seems to me from James Bond.  Except that miracles do not take place on Her Majesty's secret service.  The scale then suitable for this Russian tale, and it was a lavish spectacle too.  Hard to believe at times that this was shot in France.  And although perhaps over long, it was, in fact, a convincing piece of cinema. The performances were very restrained for such a melodramatic story rich with incident.  Appealing too the small details of Russian life.

   Saturday evening and a further two films.  Things kicked off with a piece of Soviet science-fiction: 'Kosmicheskiy reys; Fantasticheskaya novella' or 'The Cosmic Voyage' of 1936.  Family viewing.  It is the story, set in 1946, of the USSR's first sortie in to space - an ambitious one too for the amazing-looking rocket ship is bound for the moon!  The model of the launch facility, and the subsequent launch sequence were fantastic.  They reminded me of Alexander Korda's 'Shape of Things to Come' in particular the city of tomorrow sequence.  Both displayed a belief that the future would be incredibly clean and ordered.  They both thought too that it would be possible to launch a rocket from inside a major conurbation. The fun was brought by a young stow-away aboard the rocket, played by Vassilli Kopenenko.  There was love interest too.  And a missing cat.
   After dinner we decamped to the Cathedral and a showing of the early British historical epic 'Jane Shore', 1915.  Based loosely on real events, and an adaptation of the play 'The Tragedy of Jane Shore' by Nicholas Rowe, it is the story of Jane Shore, played by Blanche Forsyth, who became the mistress of Edward IV. Unlike the other historical epic, 'Michel Strogoff', the acting was at times lacking in restraint.  There was all too often an element of the histrionic to the proceedings.  Although there were some immense crowd scenes; the dramatic flow, unlike that in 'Michel Strogoff', was staccato and at times confusing.  However any flaw in the action was more than made up for a a marvelous new score by Laura Rossi which was performed live by her and three other musicians. It was an incredibly beautiful and utter compelling piece of music making.  It held me spell bound, giving to 'Jane Shore' a deep undertow of sadness and tragedy.  The shot that remained with me was the execution of Lord Hastings - the event viewed (discreetly) through an open window at which sat, gloating, the Duke of Gloucester.

     Sunday evening and the remarkable film 'Arsenal'.  This was not a film for the faint hearted.  It was intense and visceral cinema.  The story of the 1917 Revolution and beyond as seen from the Ukraine, a succession of brilliant, haunting images heightened by a fantastic dark score by 'Bronnt Industries Kapital' - aka Guy Bartell.  Made in 1928 (released in 1929) at the behest of Stalin himself by Alexander Dovzenko it depicts the hero as revolutionary - as in Semyon Frank's analysis 'Sacrificing himself for the sake of this idea, he does not hesitate to sacrifice other people to it.... the great love of mankind of the future gives birth to a great hatred for people; the passion for organizing an earthly paradise becomes a passion for destruction'.  I can't help but see both 'Arsenal' and 'Michel Strogoff' as relevant to our times.  The terror that the Revolution released, like that of the French Revolution, is the progenitor of the Taliban, Al Qaeda and Isil.  The hero of this film is just as Frank said of the Revolutionaries in general: 'militant monks of the nihilistic religion of earthly contentment'.  He appears to have no family, certainly no love interest.  Not surprisingly then this film failed in its goal of bringing the Ukraine 'on-side'.  It is imagery, although intensely striking, is ambiguous; what are we to make of the image of peasant women standing around dazed in there grief as a horde of Revolutionaries approach with one of their dead, when we have seen something very similar at the beginning of the film but in a different context?  Seeing this film did help me put Tarkovsky's work in context.  That Russian way with the close-up, surely that derives from the icon? A final thought it would help your understanding of 'Arsenal' if you know a little Ukrainian history as the story is told in a series of emblems or tableaus rather than a conventional narrative.  Characters are cyphers, not individuals in the usual cinematic sense.

Three Live Ghosts

1922

Producer:                     
Director:                  George Fitzmaurice
Cinematographer:  Arthur C Miller


Michel Strogoff 

1926

Producer:                Noe Bloch, Gregor Rabinovitch
Director:                  Viktor Tourjansky
Cinematographer:  Fedote Bourgasoff, Leonce-Henri Burel, Nikolai Toporkoff


The Cosmic Voyage

1936

Producer:                Boris Shumyatskiy
Director:                  Vasili Zhuravlov
Cinematographer:   


Jane Shore 

1915

Producer:               Will Barker
Director:                 Bert Haldane, F Martin Thornton
Cinematographer: Will Barker


Arsenal

1929

Producer:               Alexander Dovzhenko
Director:                 Alexander Dovzhenko
Cinematographer: Danilo Demutsky

'Ikarie XB 1'

     I'm staying at the bf's, and consequently I've been subjected to another obscure film.

     In this case 'Ikarie XB 1', a Polish science-fiction of 1963 which we watched over two sessions concluding this lunchtime.  Shot in black and white, it is an at times stylish account of an expedition upon 'Ikarie' from earth to Alpha Centauri to find life, and is based  on the novel 'The Magellenic Cloud'  by Stansilaw Lem.  The director Jindrich Polak also wrote the screenplay with Pavel Juracek.  At times it reminded me of an number of other post war films which the bf has shown me, in particular 'L'annee Dernier a Marienbad' by Alain Resnais, and the films of Michaelangelo Antonioni.  The music, by the Czeck composer Zdenek Liska (1922 - 1983) is particularly striking: Modernist and suitable futuristic.  It's odd to realise how Modernist music was allowed to flourish under the Communist regime then in power in Poland.

    These films come along in quick succession, once or twice a month.  He's got something planned for this evening after the washing-up.  He's even now selecting something with which to torment me.  Heaven knows what.  I don't think they often warrant a full review, so I've introduced this sort of mini-blog to record for my own sake what I've seen as much as to review them.

Ikarie XB 1

1963

Producer:

Director: Jindrich Polak
Cinematography:  Jan Kalis


Addendum 05.05.2015

   Perhaps Ikarie (Polish for Icarus?) can be viewed as a de-sacralised spiritual journey, a materialist equivalent to 'The Pilgrim's Progress' (1678, John Bunyan) - the encounter, for instance, with the Dark Star being a kind of spiritual catharsis, a necessary purgatorium before the adventus at, and participation in the mysteries of, the new planet.  Actually for all its 'art house' qualities the plot is essentially a simple linear narrative.  Oddly those qualities, in particular the sense of remoteness, of a lack of directness in the acting that you find in Antonioni's films such as 'La Notte' where it is used to underline the characters alienation, while contributing initially to a sense of unease in 'Ikarie XB 1', even of doom, mean that at crucial dramatic moments the film is not quite taut enough.