Dr Jacques COULARDEAU

JONATHAN HULS – AYAHUASCA - 2016

This second attempt at exploring the world beyond its supposedly sane surface is more than gory and horrible (the real meaning according to Stephen King, inspiring horror) but in fact terrible in the very meaning Stephen King gives to that word: it terrorizes the reader, and terrorized I was and you will be. Let terror grasp and squeeze your consciousness into mashed pureed goo that has no name in no language in no world, cosmic or otherwise.

The main two male characters are just monstrous re-embodiments of two serial killers who have been raised by absent parents of the upper top middle class. Like any land abandoned to the care of absent landlords, the two kids were invaded by brambles, stinging nettle, ivy and all kinds of other life consuming natural regenerators: they were, the two kids, regenerated into what man has managed to evolve out of, barbaric animality but with the enhancement and improvement of some good education that enables them to fly planes, run cars, and devise all kinds of slow torturing pleasures and annihilating action, annihilating people around them of course, starting like the Dexter of fame and his brother with small animals like cats and dogs and moving as fast as they could to babies and then longing for human beings and finally reaching triple digit figures.

But man is the strangest animal you can imagine. In this case this man is social so he has to partake in and share his pleasure with and offer pleasure to the other who is also partaking in and sharing his own pleasure with and offering pleasure to the first one, etc.: vicious circle in the form of a syllogism or a snake biting its tail. In fact this is love at first kill and I am a fool to have any relation with them. But they are such a barbaric attraction and fascinating flame in the night of humdrum everyday and every night boredom that is boring through our minds as if we were clay and it were a tunnel borer.

And just as the two boys or young men find their pleasure, I mean their bliss, I want to say their hormonal excitement and jubilation in inflicting some suffering to anyone they meet, we are surprised to find it also pleasurable in our skulls, and strangely enough in our pants. But don’t wet yourselves please, men and women who are reading this book.

When I have said this, I have little more to add on this line of ranting. So I shift to raving and then it becomes the most hypnotic mesmerizing fascination with what normal people should not show and should not consider, let alone look at. Nude bodies described as if they were still-lifes with firm cucumbers, peeled onions, cored apples and quartered pears, and in-between a pair of zucchinis and a school of berries of all types. But no meat whatsoever, just fruit and vegetables that you can if you want consume raw, and the two boys, or is it young men, want to salivate on them raw and juicy.

So why do they go to Peru to commit their serial killing spree in an isolated village up the Amazon? Why don’t they do the same in an isolated hamlet along the Sacramento River or some bayou or some meander of the everglades? Because they are cowards! They could enlist in the marines and go to Iraq or Afghanistan: they would have there more than three digit opportunities to kill men, women and children. But no they are not even patriotic cowards: they are plain cowards and probably proud of it. So they go to Peru and do what the Spaniards did before them, but six centuries ago or so: they kill everyone in a village, absolutely everyone. Yet they are pitiful colonizers because the Spaniards cut the arms and legs of all males over puberty, leaving them on the ground bleeding to death, then they kept the women and girls and they threw the boys under puberty to their dogs. Then they brought some black slaves and forced them to “marry” the surviving Indian women and they procreated a brand new species of people ready to be enslaved and worked to death and with as short a life expectancy as necessary for the colonizers to make a profit out of it.

In other words they are plain inhuman and un-human. They are beasts with some human literate intellect. And one of the two falls in love with one of his potential victims so that he has to take her back home after killing her parents, not so much to enjoy her but to feed her to a colony of fire ants. He does not even know that you cannot love those you kill, you can only abuse them and rape them but you have to put them to death or let them bleed to death in about two hours if you want, dangling from a  tree head down with some kind of a slash on the side of the throat. Obviously it is no love, it is infatuation. It is fetish attachment based on feral and lethal attraction.

And lethal this attraction is of course and the end is the death of the two boys in a way that is far from what they deserve, and then the slow death of the girl in some inflatable life raft going through the slow process of self-mutilation known as trichotillomania. Don’t misunderstand me: this “disease” is accompanied by a high level of consumption of ayahuasca, a hallucinating drug that negates pain and makes the consumer able to cut himself into slices one eighth of an inch thick starting with the toes and up to as far as he/she can go and as slowly as possible for the pleasure, the feeling of security and the absence of anxiety to last as long as possible.

The author must be mixing his champagne with powdered red chili peppers and a lot of harissa or pilipili. The description is so high in colors that we seem to be in some kind of opera, even if it is dancing on its head and standing upside down in the most perverse and definitely twisted way like this song that comes back to the poor Cecita, lost as she is in the necessity of her cecity:

Hey! rub-a-dub, ho! rub-a-dub, three maids in a tub,

And who do you think were there?

The butcher, the baker, the candlestick-maker,

And all of them gone to the fair.

What are these three males doing in that tub? Where did that poor blind girl saw three maidens? But that’s what life is at times when it is slowly moving towards death. And sure enough a tub has to come in the shape of a Flying Hollander of a ship bringing ghosts of dead people and the main character of this raving tale, death himself, or in fact since the butcher, the baker and the candlestick maker are maidens, death might very well be a woman, like a transvestite Ancient Mariner of the Romantic tale. Viva la Muerte, indeed. And that is no passage to India. That is plainly a passage to the immaterial world of virtual unreality.

Read all the pages, all the lines and all the words and you might be salvaged and saved and given your epiphany, at least if you are good readers and you keep in line and you don’t ask faulty and impertinent questions like: “But why on earth such beings exist among us in human-looking semblances that we dislike and likenesses that we can’t like?

Dr Jacques COULARDEAU

JONATHAN HULS – THE Nth DAY - 2015

The title of this novel is all based on old medieval or even older Christian lore and on a simple abbreviation used now and then, nth being the abbreviation of sev’nth or even t’nth. In The Oxford Handbook of Early Christian Apocrypha, edited by Andrew Gregory & Christopher Tuckett, Oxford University Press, 2015, page 133, in the presentation and discussion of The Apocalypse of Thomas, the author of that chapter refers the seven days of Genesis to the Apocalypse of Ezra that connects this sev’nth day with the end, the reversal of time, Doomsday and the Last Judgment.

Apocalypse of Ezra (2 Esdras/4 Ezra) Chapter 7 

30-31 “And the world shall be turned back to primeval silence for seven days, as it was at the first beginnings; so that no one shall be left. And after seven days the world, which is not yet awake, shall be roused, and that which is corruptible shall perish.”

http://www.john-uebersax.com/plato/4Ezra7.htm

Jonathan Huls takes us on the road to the Second Coming, and that is no road to Damascus, when there come “an old black man, a young girl, and a young boy. It was Justin who was born on the 8th day, but no man knows the length of a day nor what will occur on the 9th as time, to God, happens over nth days.” (page 153 of the PDF version). The Second Coming is eight which is only a standing up omega, the end of time, or nearly, because after that eighth day there is the coming of the Beast, the Dragon 666 = 18 = 2 x 9 or 999, that has to be the 9th day reminding us that jesus died on the 9th hour, and the tenth day must be the end of what is perishable and the eternal salvation of the non-perishable, the non corruptible who will go to God’s house, to the Messianic Jerusalem presented to John by one of the seven angels carrying the seven bowls of the seven last plagues, the heavenly Jerusalem with its twelve doors, three on each of the four sides of the square wall built on twelve foundations of precious gems. After this 9th or 10th days there is only duration and hence days do not have a rank any more: every on of them is nth.

This very pattern that is behind the novel is of course essential for the readers who want to see it, not necessarily believe in it, but can be neglected by the people who just do not have the culture necessary to enjoy that heritage.

The novel is then a plain action utopian fantasy that turns frankly dystopian. Three main characters: the old man, Theodore, the name of God himself, the fatherly figure, black over 60; then Justin who is born somewhere but is from another planet especially since he saves from death (rat poison) the third character Cassie, a girl. Justin, do not necessarily think of Jesus, and Cassie, do not necessarily think of any Mary you may choose, are just very young teenagers, if even that old, ten-eleven-twelve at the most and on the outside. Justin and Cassie will manage to cross the whole USA to end up in Atlanta, Georgia, where Theodore, one of the richest men in the USA is living the incognito life of a homeless street person, will manage to recuperate them from a crazy popular upheaval severely repressed by military personnel. This end is simple cataclysmic and apocalyptic. But what led to that carnage?

Justin in his flight east from foster homes meets with a family of monstrous social exploiters in the middle of nowhere in some quasi desert region along a main highway in Nevada or New Mexico, but who cares anyway. Justin who had saved Cassie from death when they were two at the most, leading to the total crazy derangement of her mother, gets through but destroys the trove of these gas, kerosene and human flesh vendors by destroying the den utterly with fire, that he sets himself. Before in that store he decided to punish the vendor who was utterly unfriendly, hostile by making all banknotes blank. But his talent gets out of hand slightly and this spreads all over the world, ignoring that at least 90% of our monetary exchanges are done with virtual electronic digital money circulating in the cloud. But let’s suspend our disbelief.

Then Havoc is the rest of that novel, more than a good hefty half.

I won’t say more otherwise they are going to kill me for spoiling their suspension of their disbelieving.

This novel is a typical reflection of and on the modern world, right now, globalizing and globalized, terrorizing and terrorized, exploitative and exploited, alienating and alienated, fearful and frightening, frightened and fear-mongering. Just enjoy this recomposed trinity of an older man, a young second coming Jesus and a young resurrected Mary. Son and daughter are no longer the stake of today. It’s only a question of generations and this book preaches as hard and loud as possible that the older generation has nothing to lose any more but they have everything to give to the younger generation, the children, the teenagers. It preaches intergenerational love but without any blood relation, though without any exclusion of it either, though the only blood related clan is nothing but a band of wolf-like hyenas. Blood relations? Thanks very much. Family relations? Nothing but foster raising farm-like chicken coops. Thank you very much. Enjoy the last image: the world of tomorrow of three errant beings who will look like a new version of the three sisters, the three furies, the three harpies who will descend onto the world in a tornado of locusts and in a tempest of calamities. That sure is not the dream some have of a peaceful and luminous ending, a closure in happiness.

You can of course consider the author is a heretic, a monster, a diabolic spirit that has to be exterminated, an unbeliever if you prefer. But if you exterminated this author you would not even dilute the fear and the anger that is behind that vision with one drop of water that would be one trillionth of a cubic millimeter in a sea of blood, vomit and feces. And my words are delicate when compared with Jonathan’s.

Dr Jacques COULARDEAU