What is the connection between the Sandworm and the Spice? This is what the Fremen know. Perhaps the Guild know it as well; but no other group of which we are aware. Of course we, as the readers, also know. But it is overwhelmingly likely that we don’t know what we know. We know it, but we don’t get it.
It’s like love. We know it, but we don’t get it. We don’t know what it is, or what really to do with it. So it is that we become instruments of some biological unfolding, such as presided over by the Bene Gesserit.
Consider this as a metaphor: the Bene Gesserit preside over an interplanetary breeding program in order to create not just an improved human, but a GodMan. They aim to merge the Real Knowledge contained in their Sisterhood – the ecstatic, self-transcending, experience of the Sisterhood itself – with the Conscious Knowledge manifest in the male of the species. The Kwisatz Haderach is ambisexual. In alchemy, this Divine Hermaphrodite was known as REBUS. If we consider the word, we might understand why.
A rebus is the representation of some thing by some combination of other things. Way back in the 1970’s, there was a game show around this sort of spelling things out. It was called Concentration:
The Divine Hermaphrodite is named REBUS because it is a rebus. It is its name. The hermaphrodite is the rebus of Divinity. Hence, there is no Paul Maud’Dib without Chani, and no Deckard without Rachel.
So, the would-be Poet sees in his Muse the missing component of his own transcendent divinity. Like Chani, she is literally the Girl of His Dreams. He dreamed her before he met her. Every true Muse exists both without and within.
That said, in the Desert of the Real, where like Chani, the Muse is hidden away, we are apt to fall victim of mirages. Castles in the air. An oasis in the sand. A lover taken in a raid.
Consider that Paul Atriedes and the Lady Jessica were captured at night by a tribe of Fremen they wandered up to unaware. The scene is filled with reversals. Rather than the hunters following their prey, the prey approaches the hunters. Then the hunters take their prey, but get taken in turn: Paul takes Jamis, disarming him in the process; Jessica takes Stilgar captive, holding his life in her hands; and in time, as a result of this capture, the Fremen get taken by Atriedes.
Paul is the Lisan al-Gaib, the Voice from the Outer world, who has been speaking to the Fremen across the generations in their deepest dreams. And yet within Paul, Chani already exists. This gets us, I think, to the Real Meaning of Russian Dolls, and the Hidden Truth of Russiagate.
The multiplicity of the dolls, the nesting, is – at its deepest – a representation of the infinite regression between Without and Within, Paul and Chani. Russian dolls are a sort of rebus of the INFINITE DYAD humans have referred to as DIVINITY.
Accordingly, DUNE is a story of this DYAD. That’s what it’s about. It’s not just sci-fi, in the sense that technologies exist that are far beyond what we have today. It’s also fantasy, in the sense that human beings are genuinely engaged in manifesting the reality of DIVINITY. You can’t make a God-man without a real dimension of divinity. This “dimension” – within DUNE, and Traditionally Speaking – is the domain of human awareness.
Put more exactly: DIVINITY is a deep, bi-directional, causative interrelationship between awareness and the material world. This DIVINITY – i.e., state of deep, bi-directional, causative interrelationship – is – Traditionally Speaking and in DUNE – the Intelligence Inherent in Life Itself. The Worm Tongue, that can only be known by speaking.
Or as the Shito priest put it to Joseph Campbell:
We don’t have ideology.
We don’t have theology.
We dance.
Trump, Putin and the Deep State
Which brings us to the topical and political: the nested dolls of Trump, Putin and the Deep State.
… this is where this draft ended, some years ago. I wish I’d continued, but I was almost certainly stoned when I wrote it, and I am not really sure what I was on about…