Eldridge vs. The Ogre

So I found Eldridge Cleaver's Soul on Ice on archive.org and started reading it.

I had very little prior knowledge of Cleaver. The entry in my mental database was pretty much just "Cleaver, Eldridge: prominent Black Panther, convert to Mormonism." The initial reason for my current interest in him was just that he was a Black man whose name sounded like eldritch, thus synching with the Anglin story about Blacks awakening an eldritch horror in the Antarctic. For my post, I wanted a picture that had both his face and his name, so I ended up posting (in "Skybax 64, and Eldritch Souls on Ice") the cover of Soul on Ice, a book I hadn't really been aware of. I soon saw how the title fit into the sync-stream, though, and realized that I would probably have to read the book.

The synchronistic relevance of that particular book was reinforced by a comment from Wade McKenzie. The night before reading my post with the Soul on Ice cover, he had watched an old Perry Mason TV show that had a character named Richard Gilman in it. The Soul on Ice cover I posted prominently features a blurb from a literary critic also named Richard Gilman.

This reference to person named Mason was another sync for me. Last night I had been thinking about the Nazi dolphins article in the Bee, which was in part a reference to recent news stories about people putting swastikas on Teslas as a protest against Elon Musk. Musk has of course made the letter X his personal symbol, but now there is an effort to associate him instead with the swastika. This made me think of Charles Manson, who first carved an X into his forehead and later modified it into a swastika. Searching for the story behind Manson's forehead marking, I ended up skimming an Independent article called "Charles Manson: Neo-Nazis hail serial killer [sic] a visionary and try to resurrect fascist movement created on his orders." I did a double take when I read that "Mr Mason had faded into obscurity [until] earlier this year." Surely Charles Manson has been a household name ever since the murders he supposedly ordered and has never yet "faded into obscurity." Then I realized that I had misread the sentence, and that it actually says Mason, not Manson -- referring to James Mason, a neo-Nazi from the '80s who corresponded with Manson and with Manson girls Sandra Good and Lynette Fromme.

Anyway, coming back to Soul on Ice, I found this on page 6, where Cleaver is recounting his early nihilism and his decision to embark on a career as a rapist:

I attacked all forms of piety, loyalty, and sentiment: marriage, love, God, patriotism, the Constitution, the founding fathers, concepts of right-wrong-good-evil, all forms of ritualized and conventional behavior. As I pranced about, club in hand, seeking new idols to smash, I encountered really for the first time in my life, with any seriousness, The Ogre, rising up before me in a mist. I discovered, with alarm, that The Ogre possessed a tremendous and dreadful power over me, and I didn't understand this power or why I was at its mercy. I tried to repudiate The Ogre, to root it out of my heart as I had done God, Constitution, principles, morals, values -- but The Ogre had its claws buried in the core of my being and refused to let go. I fought frantically to be free, but The Ogre only mocked me and sank its claws deeper into my soul. I knew then that I had found an important key, that if I conquered The Ogre and broke its power over me I would be free. But I also knew that it was a race against time and that if I did not win I would certainly be broken and destroyed. I, a black man, confronted The Ogre -- the white woman.

The problem with white women, as Cleaver goes on to explain, is that he lusts after them. Never in my life have I seen the word ogre used to refer to an object of desire, not even a dangerous one. Of all the personifications he could have chosen -- siren, witch, demon, devil, vampire -- Cleaver decided on one that typically refers to, in Wikipedia's words, "a large, hideous, man-like being." Ain't nobody want to rape an ogre.

I've bolded the word smash in the above quotation because Smash the Ogre is the main character of the Piers Anthony novel Ogre, Ogre. I used to have a cat named Ogre who was named after that novel. Ogre now lives in a friend's house, the reason for his expulsion from my own being his inability to get along with our resident black male, a big black tomcat named Scipio.

Incidentally, Cleaver's language about how he "pranced about, club in hand," made me think of a dream I had back in 2018, in which I had a large wooden club (carved to look like an enormous Chinese calligraphy brush) and "pictured myself prancing around sort of brandishing it like a Maenad’s thyrsus." This dream is recorded in my post "The Rider-Waite Magician" on my Tarot blog.

Cleaver explains that his rapes were motivated not only by sexual lust but by a desire to victimize Whites:

Rape was an insurrectionary act. It delighted me that I was defying and trampling upon the white man's law, upon his system of values, and that I was defiling his women . . . . I wanted to send waves of consternation throughout the white race. . . . I know that if I had not been apprehended I would have slit some white throats.

This ties in with another book cover I included in the same post as Soul on Ice: the D&D manual Eldritch Wizardry, which shows a naked White woman lying on an altar as if about to be sacrificed. In a comment there, Bill associates this woman with the Daymon Smith character Izilba:

Interestingly, in Doug's story, Izilba (who is Eowyn-Ilmare) was to be among the first, if not the first, sacrificed in that temple. It was said they were going to kill her and bleed her out over the fires of Nimloth. Izilba-Eowyn has often been depicted as naked, both in Doug's writings (going completely naked except for a swarm of bees covering her) and in symbols that have appeared even on your blog, as well as her association with Eve (also well known for being naked originally). And here we have a naked woman with all the symbols of that sacrifice, even lying on what would appear to be an altar made of wood, like a tree.

Bill is referring to this line from Words of the Faithful, quoted in my 2023 post "When life gives you lemons, make le monde":

Grey Izilba would often drape herself naked in a cloak of honey bees, sweet and yet full of sting.

I'm not really sure what is meant by calling her "Grey" here, but in Soul on Ice, the same adjective is applied to the White woman as object of Negro lust:

"All you niggers are sick!" Butterfly spat out. "I don't like no stinking white woman. My grandma is a white woman and I don't even like her!"

But it just so happened that Butterfly's crime partner was in the crowd, and after Butterfly had his say, his crime partner said, "Aw, sit down and quit that lying, lil o' chump. What about that gray girl in San Jose who had your nose wide open? Did you like her, or were you just running after her with your tongue hanging out of your head because you hated her?"

. . .

I ate dinner with Butterfly that evening and questioned him sharply about his attitude toward white women. And after an initial evasiveness he admitted that the white woman bugged him too. "It's a sickness," he said. "All our lives we've had the white woman dangled before our eyes like a carrot on a stick before a donkey: look but don't touch."

If the White woman is The Ogre, that donkey reference seems relevant. Shrek is an ogre, and his sidekick is a donkey named Donkey, voiced by a Black man (Eddie Murphy). According to Wikipedia, Donkey was modeled after a real donkey named Perry -- so another link to the name Perry Mason.

Update: Just after posting this, I checked Anglin’s site and found him making essentially the same joke as the Nazi dolphin article, except that the astronaut herself was the one being vandalized — with a swastika on her forehead, just like Charles Manson:

On the same site, I found this in the latest meme dump:

That’s H. P. Lovecraft on the bottom left, and on the right he, too, has become what he hates. (Lovecraft was a notorious racist and wrote a poem called “On the Creation of Niggers,” in which the nigger is an intermediate creation between man and beast.)

Further update: After writing about Elon's X and the swastika, I remembered a Seallion video on the theme: "Elon X Bowie X Norton." In it, he mentions David Bowie's fascist "Thin White Duke" persona, which seemed like a possible link to Lovecraft, who has a distinctly "thin" physiognomy. I went to the Wikipedia article on the Thin White Duke, where the "Controversy" section ends with this sentence:

Eventually, he began to see the Thin White Duke as "a nasty character indeed", and later, "an ogre".