The American Meaning of
Charley Manson
- David R.
Williams
Thirty years later, the Sixties remain
shrouded in myth, demonology, and nostalgia. To young Generation Xers, that decade
is a stumbling block; to Republican conservatives, foolishness; but to aging
baby boomers who once felt themselves called to respond, that era still recalls
something dimly remembered of an
expedition into the heart of consciousness. Something happened still not
understood. A wave broke in August 1969 when the followers of Charley Manson
slaughtered Sharon Tate, her unborn child, her house guests, and the next night
repeated the bloody ritual by killing a prominent couple named the La Biancas.
Today, Manson is in solitary confinement in
a maximum security fortress in
Terror manifests itself in many forms,
most of them coming not from outside ourselves but from within. The external
objects and events that scare us merely awaken fears slumbering in what Emily
Dickinson called the cellars of the mind. The beasts under the bed, the
monsters in the night shadows moving behind the trees are the projections of
our own internal fears onto the landscape of the world. Enough real evil does
exist to sustain our projections, but in the end even the projections are
rationalizations, lies we tell ourselves to prevent having to face the real
fear within ourselves. We need external demons to keep the demons in our souls
at bay.
By the end of the sixties, for the baby
boomers the beliefs of the old military/industrial combine had unraveled. The
protective shell had been shattered and thrown away. With our protective social
constructs crumbling, all that was left was the state of nature waiting to
reveal itself as either friend or fiend. The idyllic suburbia of “Leave it to
Beaver” had become a bad joke. John Wayne was no longer there to protect us
from the Indians or lead the way to the next watering hole.... and the hot sun
was climbing over the rim of the desert. Out of that desert emerged the very
apparition that had always been there coiled up in the heart of the culture.
Indians, wolves, monsters under the bed. Commies coming to get us, the Viet
Cong, “Victor Charley”, and finally that other Charlie, Charlie Manson.
Joan Didion remembers that in
"I am the man in the mirror,"
says Charles Manson. And in that at least he may be right. “Anything you see in
me is in you…. I am you…. And when you can admit that you will be free. I am
just a mirror.” Nor is that the least that he is right about. And because he
was and has since become even more of a symbol, not just of the end of the
sixties, but of the terror that lies at the heart of the darkest cave in
consciousness, he compels a more careful study.
Why then is Charlie Manson, as Geraldo
Rivera said, “the stuff of a nation’s nightmares?” Not for what he did, nor
even for what he said. Others have killed more people more brutally. It is because,
as Didion foretold, we found in him an icon upon which to project our own
latent fears. No one was surprised because everyone knew the potential was
there, in each and all of us. So Manson became a living metaphor of Abaddon,
the God of the bottomless pit. We, as a collective culture, looked into
Manson’s eyes and saw in those dark caves what we most feared within ourselves,
the paranoia of what might happen if you go too far. He was the monster in the
wilderness, the shadow in the night forest, the beast said to lurk in the Terra
Incognita beyond the edges of the map. By projecting our monsters onto Manson,
and then locking him up for life, we imagined we had put the beast back in its
cage.
Charlie Manson was exactly what the feudal
European establishment foresaw and feared in 1517 when Martin Luther had first
dared to suggest that truth lay not in the rationalizations of the scholastics
but in the subjectivities of the spirit. Such philosophical abstractions are
fine for the educated who converse with each other in Latin and, in the final
analysis, know what social codes sustain them. But to preach such things to
peasants invites anarchy of the wildest sort and leads to such events as the
anabaptist rebellion at Muenster. Even Luther recoiled in horror at the
extremes to which those radical Protestants took his ideas. He never imagined
that Faith would be achieved here, on earth, in the literal realm of time and
space.
The antinomian strain which runs through
American culture began with the radical Reformation’s declaration of Sola
Fides, Faith Alone, superior to logic, and with the Priesthood of all
believers, the belief that anyone might experience the subjective authority of
Godliness in the soul. Luther rejected the radicals application of this to the
political worldly realm and blessed the soldiers who slaughtered the anabaptist
peasants who had declared Muenster a liberated city. But John Calvin, in
In 1636, the Puritan Governor of
Political and social structures exist to
back up mental structures, and in return the collective consciousness of the
people helps to sustain the institutions of the state. They need each other:
“no Pope, no king.” The state backs up the church, and the church provides the
beliefs which give us meaning. Once you start taking apart the structures that
sustain us, there is no telling what else will fall. There is no telling to what extremes the
human mind, convinced that it is in touch with the truth, will go. At Ann
Hutchinson’s trial,
These disturbances
that have come among the Germans have been all grounded on revelations, and so
they that have vented them have stirred up their hearers to … cut the throats
one of another, and these have been the fruits of them, and whether the devil
may inspire the same into their hearts I know not. For I am fully persuaded
that Mrs. Hutchinson is deluded by the devil.
Manson, too, following his own
revelations, stirred up his hearers, and as a result throats were cut. As
Solomon said, “There is nothing new under the sun.”
Ann Hutchinson was banished from
Romantic periods breed such antinomian
excess. The command to follow ones heart wherever it might go very well might
lead off the deep end. Camille Paglia has argued that romanticism almost always
leads to decadence, that Rousseau with his noble savages was followed by the
Marquis de Sade:
The
continuum of empathy and emotion leads to sex. Failure to realize that was the
Christian error. The continuum of sex leads to sadomasochism. Failure to
realize that was the error of the Dionysian Sixties. Dionysus expands identity
but crushes individuals. There is no liberal dignity of the person in the
Dionysian. The god gives latitude but no civil rights.
The American romantic Ralph Waldo Emerson
urged his readers to trust their own intuitions regardless of social
conventions or the moral code. “Truth,” he wrote, “is handsomer than the
affectation of love.” Love itself must be rejected “when it pules and whines.”
At the execution of the antinomian fanatic John Brown, who had lead a raid on
Harper’s Ferry after God told him to stir up a slave rebellion, Emerson said he
had made the gallows “as glorious as the cross.” The somewhat less romantic
Nathaniel Hawthorne muttered that no man was ever more justly hanged.
But the antinomian strain is so strong in
American culture that despite every return to structure, it survives to rise
again. For every attempt to build a Constitution that will contain the excesses
of the mob, there is the insistence that a Bill of Rights be included which
insures that individualism is allowed to flourish. After all, hadn’t the
leading Conservative, Barry Goldwater himself, said in 1964, “Extremism in the
defense of liberty is no vice?” The Republican party today remains torn between
a moralistic wing which would pass laws controlling everyone’s behavior and a
libertarian wing which would abolish many of our laws. Pro-life crusaders
torching abortion clinics, Oliver North refusing to obey the laws of Congress,
and Timothy McVeigh’s bombing the federal building in Oklahoma City are as much
in the antinomian tradition as Henry David Thoreau and Martin Luther King, Jr.
Paul Hill, the Presbyterian minister who murdered a doctor who performed
abortions, quoted the abolitionist John Brown at his trial. Ted Kazynski and
Timothy McVeigh were two sides of the same coin. In
Charles Manson, then, is in good company.
And what makes him an antinomian rather than simply a lawless thug and “mass
murdering dog” is that his deeds and words are buttressed by an implicitly
antinomian philosophy. He constructed a belief system and believed it and
preached it. Another con-man could be easily ignored, but Manson has proven
himself faithful to his beliefs. He is not faking them to get out; instead, his
refusal to abandon them keeps him locked up tightly in jail.
ii
To begin with, and to take care of one of
the most persistent misunderstandings about Manson, he was never convicted of
killing Sharon Tate or the LaBiancas. He was never even charged much less
convicted of any of the murders that occurred that August night in
But the problem was, as Bugliosi admits,
“Manson rarely gave direct orders.” Indeed, Manson rarely speaks in direct or
clear statements. Instead , he is, said Rolling Stone’s David Felton, “a super acid
rap - symbols, parables, gestures, nothing literal, everything enigmatic,
resting nowhere, stopping briefly to overturn an idea, stand it on its head,
then exploit the paradox.” He may never have actually told anyone to commit any
of the murders. Bugliosi argued instead that Manson implied what he wanted done
and that his followers inferred that intention. The command was never
explicitly stated, and to this day Manson insists that his followers
misunderstood and took literally what had been only another of his mind games.
Though this mind game ended up in deadly
reality, it was not the only such game played at the group’s desert hideout.
Asked what they did every day at the ranch, Manson told Tom Snyder in a 1981
interview, “We played games, - forgot who we were, - went off into other
dimensions.” They even had a name for such game-playing, “The Magical Mystery
Tour.” But not everyone understood it as just a game. As Manson explained it:
We
speed down the highway in a 1958 automobile that won’t go but fifty, and an XKE
Jaguar goes by, and I state to Clem, “Catch him, Clem, and we’ll rob him or
steal all of his money,” you know. And he says, “What shall we do?” I say, “Hit
him on the head with a hammer.” We Magical Mystery Tour it.
Then Linda Kasabian gets on the stand and
says: “They were going to kill a man, they were going to kill a man in an
automobile.
To you it seems serious. But like Larry Kramer
and I would get on a horse and we would ride over to
The particular game that ended up in brutal
murder has been described many times, but it bears repeating. That it was
believable, even to these uneducated drop-outs from society, tells us as much
about where the country was at in 1969 as it does about the particular
consciousness of these individuals.
It begins with the Beatles, and with the
Beatles’ celebrated White Album that came out in 1968. In it, while tripping on
acid, Manson heard the message that put it all together for him. There would be
a war between blacks and whites; whites would lose. Manson and his followers
would hide out in the desert when the slaughter took place. When it was over
they would emerge from their hiding places and somehow convince the blacks that
they should be made the leaders of this new world.
He got all this not just from the Beatles
but also from the Bible. Perhaps his most fascinating connection was to put
side by side the Beatles song “Revolution 9” with Revelations 9 from the Bible.
Revelations, the final book of the New Testament, has always been the favorite
of mystics because its wild apocalyptic imagery is so bluntly addressed not to
the literal but to symbolic consciousness. For those who read scripture not as
a moral code of social behavior nor as a literal history book but as a symbolic
rendering of a reality out of time and out of mind, the book of Revelations is
the proof text. No one can read John’s visions of the beasts with the seven
heads and seven horns and believe that it is a rational, literal narrative.
This is mysticism.
Nevertheless, Manson seems to have taken the
literal descriptions and compared them, as so many mystics have done so often
in the past, to literal events and persons in his own world. This lead him to
imagine that the predictions of Scripture were indeed addressed to his times.
Revelations 9 begins with the fifth angel being given the key to the bottomless
pit. Out of that pit comes, among other things, locusts “and unto them was given
power, as the scorpions of the earth have power.” These locusts, Manson reasoned, were insects,
bugs. This was a hidden reference to the Beatles. They were ordered not to hurt
the grass nor any people “who had not the seal of God on their foreheads.” The
shapes of these locusts “were like unto horses prepared unto battle.” They were
the four horsemen of the apocalypse out to wage the battle of armageddon. And
though they had faces of men, says scripture, “they had hair as the hair of
women.” Hard as it may be to believe now, the length of the Beatles’ hair was a
scandal when they first arrived in the
This and more convinced Manson that the
message was being sent from the Universe to him through the Beatles. So he
turned from scripture to interpret the text of the lyrics of the album itself.
There he found a consistent theme lurking between the otherwise cryptic lines
and apparently random songs. Only on the surface was it all meaningless and
random. Like life itself, it only appeared random to those who had not eyes to
see. To Manson, the message was clear:
What do
you think it means? It’s the battle of Armageddon. It’s the end of the world.
It was the Beatles’ Revolution 9 that turned me on to it. It predicts the
overthrow of the establishment. The pit will be opened and that’s when it will
all come down. A third of all mankind will die.
“Rocky Raccoon” was the song that made the
implicit connection to the black revolution. “Coon. You know. That’s a word
they use for black people” Manson explained to Rolling Stone while he was still in jail waiting to be tried.
“Blackbird” was a song calling on black people to “rise.” “Piggies” was a
description of the rich establishment which would be overthrown. And “Helter
Skelter” was a description of the battle of Armageddon itself, pure chaos and
confusion. But “Revolution 9” was the song that Manson listened to and talked
about most. It’s a good 6 minutes of disorganized, disconnected noise, babies
crying, machine guns going off, church hymns, car horns, whispered words,
football yells, and the repeated chant of “number nine, number nine, number
nine.” Even more than Revelations 9, it is so freefloating as to allow itself
to be interpreted in almost any way the listener wants - or fears. As such, it
serves the purpose of much great art, that it bypasses the logical mind and
zaps straight into the subliminal, allowing a direct flow of associations from
the subconscious. Listening to it, Manson was inspired.
Manson’s crime, thus, was an act of
imaginative literary criticism. Had he been a professor at
But does it even matter whether Manson knew
this? Symbols are always both their literal selves and the things they
symbolize. The existence of a literal object does not by itself discredit any
symbolic meanings that might be attached to it. Perhaps Manson was thinking
along the lines of James Baldwin with his argument that blacks represent the
subconscious and whites conscious rationality. Perhaps Manson’s race war
between blacks and whites was itself a symbol of the war of the subconscious rising
up to take over consciousness as Norman O. Brown said it must. Manson was asked
if he thought the Beatles’ intended the meanings which he found in their texts.
His answer speaks to this very problem of authorial intention:
I think
it’s a subconscious thing. I don’t know whether they did or not. But it’s
there. It’s an association in the subconscious. This music is bringing on the
revolution, the unorganized overthrow of the establishment. The Beatles know in
the sense that the subconscious knows.
Nor is it clear how Manson’s
followers understood him. Perhaps, as he claimed, they took him more literally
than he intended. Perhaps they heard things spoken through him which he never intended
to say? It is clear that at least one of his followers, a girl named Ouish, saw
that both interpretations were possible. She told her friend Barbara Hoyt, “We
all have to go through Helter Skelter. If we don’t do it in our heads, we will
have to do it physically. If you don’t die in your head, you’ll die when it comes
down.” Here, the literal and the
metaphysical meanings run on parallel tracks.
Manson’s main defense is that his followers,
sensing some frustration that his predicted Armageddon still had not occurred,
set out on their own to get it started, to show the blacks how to do it, and to
show the world their leader. According to Manson, they did it as if to say,
“Here, we want you to see this guy, but I didn’t want to be seen.” Just as Lenin, unwilling to wait for history
to achieve its inevitable Marxist end, had jump-started the world-wide
proletariat revolution in pre-capitalist Russia, these zealots, utterly taken
by Manson’s vision, wanted to bring their revolution quickly to life. After the
Tate killings, when Susan Atkins proudly told him that they had just given him
the world, Manson claims to have shouted, “You dumb fucking cunt, I already had
the world. You just put me back in jail again.”
Just as Luther was astonished and then
horrified at the literal way in which the Anabaptists of Muenster tried to put
the “Priesthood of all believers” into practice in the world, so others have been amused and amazed
at the extent to which we Americans’ willingness to believe in a literal and
material Kingdom Come remains part of our culture. Here too we Americans are
the descendants not of the Lutheran but of the Calvinist Reformation heavily
tainted by Anabaptist enthusiasm for the Coming Kingdom of Zion here in this
world literally in the flesh. If Luther came up with the idea of a door, Calvin
pushed it open just a crack, a crack through which poured many of the zealots
who had been looking for a way to break out of the structures in
The Dream can be real when you see it, and
when you live it. And that’s what the Beatles are singing about. They’re
singing it’s all a dream, life passes by on a screen. They’re singing it, but
they’re still asleep singing it. They haven’t woken up to the fact that what
they’re singing about is more than a song. They could be living it….
Give
up everything and follow me, Christ said, and we have given up a lot to follow
our dream. There are other communes, but everyone has their old lady and their
old man. It’s just the same old song in different costumes.
There are no couples here. We are all just
one woman and one man. “All you need is love.” We were the only ones gullible
enough to take the Beatles seriously. We were the only people stupid enough to
believe every word of it.
Gypsy uses the word “stupid” but
she doesn’t mean it in a negative sense. She means it in the sense of being
innocent as babies, as being, to use a line from another Beatles song, “the
fool on the hill” whom everyone laughs at but who sees it all.
Here we have a 20th
century American, like her predecessors, trying to convince worldly skeptics
that in America the mystic promise really can be made flesh.
It must be said that if Manson did not
really want his followers to initiate the race war he called “Helter Skelter,”
he had the responsibility to make that perfectly clear, but he didn’t. Instead,
he allowed ambiguity and uncertainty to proliferate. He stayed within his own
circle and did not take responsibility for the influence he was having on what
was going on in other people’s circles. Like the cagey ex-con that he is, he
played his cards close to his own chest. In the world of prison, that ethic
works. In the outside world, there is a broader definition of responsibility.
If Manson is to be held responsible for his
ambiguous creation of a scenario which others then went and brought to life,
what is to be said of anyone who writes a book or a movie or sings a song which
then inspires others to go out and live its message? Is Marx to be held
personally responsible for Stalin’s massacres? Should Orson Wells have been
tried for the deaths of those people who killed themselves mistakenly thinking
his “War of the Worlds” was a real alien invasion? Should the creators of
violent television shows be jailed if a kid picks up a gun and imitates what he
sees on TV? And what then of the Beatles themselves? Don’t they have some
responsibility for what Manson heard in their music?
If metaphorical obscurity combined with a
violent suggestiveness are criminal activities, then the Old Testament itself
deserves to be banned. The bloody account of the Children of Israel’s
re-conquest of
There is
no necessity in supposing that the word death, or the Hebrew word so translated, if used in the manner that has
been supposed, to have been figurative at all. It does not appear but that this
word, in its true and proper meaning might signify perfect misery and sensible
destruction, though the word was also applied to signify something more external and visible. There are many
words in our language … which are applied to signify external things,… yet these
words do as truly and properly signify other things of a more spiritual,
internal nature.
Death, in this typological,
symbolic reading of scripture, thus becomes a signifier of spiritual or ego
death, the experience which was said to be a precursor of conversion. Jonah’s
“death” in the belly of the whale and Christ’s death on the cross thus can be
read metaphorically as well as literally. Those who misunderstood the spiritual
reading and took the words literally have been responsible for millions of
deaths over the 2000 years of Christian history. Perhaps this is why Plato
wanted to banish all poets from his perfect Republic? The Beatles were poets
too, creating images and messages which had repercussions.
Like so many others in the Sixties, the
four Beatles followed a familiar progression from innocence to romanticism to
decadence and back again. In the innocent early sixties, they sang naïve
teeny-bopper love songs like “I want to hold your hand.” As they and the decade
aged, they toked deeper into dope, let their hair grow longer, and played music
further and further out there. They remained enormously popular because their
audience was undergoing the same transitions they were. They evolved along with
the baby boomer population they were playing for. “Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely
Heart’s Club band” with its
If
this is so, then Manson's crime was that he was believed, that he never clearly
designated the line between reality and imagination, between the fantasy and
the deed, the literal and the symbolic. In that ambiguous realm, he moved from
what we consider rational to the irrational. He abandoned all civilized
self-control and became the complete antinomian, outside the structures of the legal and the mental law.
At the trial, Manson’s followers
certainly claimed they were doing his bidding. He had said to them, “Just do
what you have to,” and they had had a pretty good idea what they thought he
meant. Manson’s proven presence at the LaBianca’s residence, having driven the
killers there, undercuts whatever claim he continues to make that he was an
innocent whose followers took it upon themselves entirely on their own to begin
the slaughter.
But Manson’s repeated claim that he “broke
no law of man or God” is not entirely without basis either. For in the prison
world in which he grew up and lived most of his life, people are responsible
for their own deeds - Period! The act of murder is what is punished, not some
vague indirect suggestion by a third party. “I take responsibility for my
acts,” he insists. “Every man must take responsibility for his acts. We each
live within our own circles.” To this day, Manson still does not understand how
the law can hold him responsible for murders that other people actually
committed. His stubborn refusal to confess his guilt, as misguided as it may
be, is at the very least an honest statement of his beliefs and not an artful
dodge. He really believed it relevant that, as he shouted at Diane Sawyer,“I
wasn’t directing traffic, lady.”
Indeed, that is the heart of the enigma of
Manson. That is why back in 1969 and still today, so many people find something
to admire in him. Bugliosi and other spokesmen for society have tried at times
to say that Manson is little more than another two-bit thug, a thief, a pimp, a
hustler out for himself, a murderous con filled with uncontrollable rage. It is
too neat and too well-known a box. There is more going on.
Manson’s true crime, and the reason he
will remain in jail until his death, is that he didn’t just blur, he erased the
line between reality and imagination. He crossed over to the other side,
completely outside society. Most of us are like the little boy crying at the
corner because, he sobs, “I want to run away from home, but my parents won’t
let me cross the street.” Manson demonstrated that the street could be crossed,
that society’s rules and moral codes, even its prohibitions against murder, are
artificial constructs and not to be idolized. Once the human mind is finally
liberated from the rituals and traditions, the taboos and inhibitions, which
have bound the web of human culture together, anything becomes possible. To
some this is the meaning of insanity, to believe things outside the circle of
what society allows. “Crazy” becomes a label applied to those who don’t agree
with the consensus.
But the need to break the bonds of the
society’s programming requires that occasionally people step outside the bounds
of what is allowed and dare the wilderness, at whatever risk. Says Manson,
“It’s so abstract that someone has to carry insanity. Someone’s got to be
insane. Some one’s got to be the bad guy.”
Looking at the world around him, Manson was not always convinced that he
was the only one. Acknowledging the disintegration of the old paradigm and the
resulting confusion since the sixties, he recently remarked, “A long time ago
being crazy meant something. Nowadays everybody’s crazy.”
Individuals have crossed that line
before, many times, but what Manson also did, and what he was convicted for,
was, like Socrates, corruption of the innocent. He spun the tales that they
believed. His imagination created the constructions which they then acted upon.
There is no evidence that Manson ever said directly that his followers should
actually kill anyone. What he claims, and what seems believable, is that they
believed he wanted them to kill and, freed from the usual inhibitions which
would keep middle-class American kids from slaughtering strangers, that they
acted out his fantasy and did not need his direct command.
iii
Setting aside as much as possible the horror
of the Tate/LaBianca murders, it is instructive to look into Manson’s belief
system for evidence of why he was believed. According to Bugliosi, part of
Manson's charismatic appeal was "his ability to utter basic truisms to the
right person at the right time." What were these truisms? Why did they
work?
What we find when we do take Manson’s own
words seriously is that he had managed to absorb much of the developing
philosophy of the sixties. In some way, he was the final extension of the
mind’s true liberation, of the ideas of the Civil Rights movement, of the white
radicals of SDS, of the acid twins Timothy Leary and Baba Ram Das, of the
classical philosopher and author of Love’s
Body Norman O. Brown. What he said seemed to make sense to so many
innocents because these same ideas were running all around them. Manson is no
intellectual in the conventional sense. He is at best self-educated but not at
all bookish, having spent his entire life, from childhood up, behind bars. He
has a sharp mind and has paid attention to the world around him. But he never
had much opportunity to compare notes or to talk with others about ideas. He
was like someone who learned French entirely out of books but never heard the
language spoken. When he emerged from prison in 1967, in the summer of love,
his language and his approach were just bizarre enough to seem to be a part of
the multi-faceted counter-culture. And his beliefs seemed like the culmination
of a decade of antinomianism, the logical extension of what had been going
down, not just in the Sixties, but throughout American history.
We can see here why so many people in the
counter-culture at first embraced Manson as one of their own, why the
underground press treated him as a martyr to the cause. By taking on so much of
the many strains of the sixties, “Manson” became a symbol of the hippyfreak
fighting back against the machine. And the immediate assumption was, as it was
when a black man was accused of rape, that this was an obvious frame, that
Manson was being made a scapegoat by a crumbling establishment terrified that
it was losing control over its children. There were even a few, who had already
gone over the edge, who assumed that he was indeed the perpetrator of the crime
and congratulated him for striking a blow in a revolutionary war. Bernadine
Dohrn of SDS, when she heard the news, said “Offing those rich pigs with their
own forks and knives, and then eating a meal in the same room. Far out! The Weathermen dig Charles Manson.”
“Yippee” Jerry Rubin, who had rejected his parents’ liberal rationalism for the
spontaneous emotions of the crowd, said, “I fell in love with Manson the first
time I saw his cherub face and sparkling eyes on TV.”
In the romantic revolt of the
nineteenth-century, Ralph Waldo Emerson had proclaimed the superiority of
individual intuition over the corpse-cold tea of rationality and logic, and he
had urged himself and others to be totally self-reliant, to trust the self.
What if this spirit you trust is from the Devil, not from God, asked his
orthodox aunt, Mary Moody Emerson? “I do not believe it is,” he replied, “but
if so I will live then from the devil.” What is in the self is paramount. It
and not the combine must be allowed to direct traffic. He proclaimed that
reality exists as consciousness and not as matter, and thus truth is to be
sought not in science but in the subjective intuition of each mind. Each of us,
he said, if we dig down through the layers of culture and belief that has been
accumulating over the millennia will find a universal consciousness we all
share and from which we all come. Therefore, he called on every free person to
“speak your latent conviction and it shall be the universal sense.”
Walt Whitman read Emerson and was inspired
to believe that his heart’s truth was indeed this universal truth, that when he
said “I” he was both “Walt Whitman, a kosmos,” and “of
The 1960s have been called
neo-transcendental because in many ways the ideology of the era was an echo of
the transcendentalism of Emerson and Whitman’s day. Martin Luther King, Jr., a
Baptist minister, opened the door a crack when he stood up in the name of
righteousness against the laws that defended segregation. He was willing to
proclaim in the name of God that these laws were immoral. How did he know? He
felt it in his heart. But he denied that he was an antinomian. He was after
all, a Baptist, in the historic tradition of his namesake, Martin Luther. He
spoke from within a historic tradition tied to the morality of the Bible and
his Protestant faith. He may have been outside the circle of American law, but
he was still well within the circle of Western cultural beliefs. Calvin had
once before opened that door a crack and the result was the Puritan peopling of
Into all this, Charles Manson emerged in
1967 and soaked up the ideas then prevalent and articulated them with a voice which
commanded attention. One of his followers tried to explain that he wasn’t
brainwashed by Manson but impressed by him: “The words that would come from
Manson’s mouth would not come from inside him, [they] would come from what I
call the Infinite.”
Just
like Walt Whitman, Manson believes that his “I” was more than the limited ego
of one particular small time hoodlum. When he says “I” he means the same thing
that Whitman meant when he began his “Song of Myself,” with “I celebrate
myself, and sing myself.” The initial reaction of most people first reading
this is, “what a conceited, egocentric ass!” But further reading reveals that
his celebration is not of Walt Whitman of
You hear this same conceit in much of
Manson’s rhetoric and behavior. Where does your music come from, he is asked?
His response is to stand up, say “It comes from this,” and then go into a dance
of flinging arms and swinging legs, a whirling dervish of energy. His spirit,
he is saying, is the basic spirit from which all life emanates. He taps into
that spirit. “I respect the will of God, son,” he says to Geraldo Rivera.
“What will is that?”
“The will of God.” And then he goes into
his dance again humming and chanting along with it. “Whatever you want to call
it, Call it Jesus. Call it Mohammed. Call it Nuclear Mind. Call it Blow the
World up. Call it your heart. Call it whatever you want to call it. It’s still
music to me. It’s there. It’s the will of life.”
That this will is also his will is implicit
in what follows: “They crowd me in,” he tells Rivera, “and I’ve got this little
space. I live in the desert. I live in the mountains, man. I’m big. My mind is
big, but everyone’s trying to crowd me down and push me down and make me
something they need me to be. But that’s not me.”
Manson calls himself Jesus Christ, but,
like Emerson, he also says that every man is Jesus Christ. Every man has the
original energy within him. “I am everything, man,” he says, and he means it.
But he does not bother to explain when the “I” of his discourse is the person,
Charles Manson, or the Universal eye that is the will of God. Thus he tells
Rivera, “If I could kill about fifty million of you I might save my trees and
my air and my water and my wildlife.”
Taking him literally, and hoping for a good
violent soundbite, Rivera responds, “You’re going to kill fifty million
people?”
Manson’s answer is instructive. It shows both
what he is trying to say and his inability to communicate it. “I didn’t say I
would kill anything,” he protests. “I’m reaping the head in thought. I’m Jesus
Christ whether you want to accept it or not… I’m reaping it in thought. It’s a
thought, a thought,” He taps his fingers on his head to emphasize his point.
“Do you see what I’m saying? In other words, the whole world is a thought, and
I am in the thought of Peace-on-Earth.”
The point is not simply that Manson is
speaking metaphorically. He is doing that, but he is also saying that
everything is a metaphor, that our very lives, our bodies, our surroundings,
are metaphor; that we live in an illusion if we think this material reality is
real. Like Emerson and the earlier romantics, he is a philosophical idealist.
He believes that what is ultimately real is not matter but consciousness. This
whole thing we call reality, or the universe, is an illusion, a dream. What we
call God is the dreamer. And our bodies are no more real than are the strange beings
that flit through our dreams at night. The whole world is a thought, and each
person’s perceptions are but a series of thought within the framework of the
larger thought. As Manson once put it, “everyone’s playing a different game
with the thought.” All of the many perceptions of this existence are but dreams
within a larger dream. This is where Manson is coming from when he says to the
court and the straight world, “I don’t live in your dream.” This is why he says
“You’ve got my body in a cell… but I’m walking in forever, man.” He is freer,
he claims, to wander among the mountain in his jail cell than if he were
struggling to survive in the day-to-day realities of the outside world. From
his perspective, to believe that this physical world is the ultimate reality is
to be trapped in the illusion; to be aware of the cosmic mind is to be
liberated from the illusion.
That is where all the emphasis on life as
game-playing becomes important. It is not a question of being brainwashed by
the Capitalists’ game, as the Marxists imagine, but of being brainwashed by any
game, Capitalist, Marxist, Buddhist, scientific, you name it. All of rational
human consciousness is a walking dream from which people need to be awakened.
We are all, as writers in the Sxities kept saying, in a movie, trapped in a
movie. And the first thing we need is to realize it so we might try to break
out of the movie or, perhaps, enjoy it more fully, more consciously, more
completely and honestly.
The key to this notion is the same as the
key to most poetry; it is the idea of symbolic consciousness. To realize, as
Emerson said, that “we are symbols and we inhabit symbols,” is to take the
first step out of the common sense perception of reality into a transcendent
consciousness. Here, Manson sounds eerily like Norman O. Brown, whom he may
have never read. But Brown’s words were abroad in the sixties; he could have
picked them up anywhere. Rolling Stone’s article on Manson, written in 1969 and
reprinted in Mindfuckers, puts quotes
by Brown and Manson back to back. “Words are symbols,” Manson told Rolling
Stone, “All I’m doing is jumbling the symbols in your brain. Everything is
symbolic. Symbols are just connections in your brain. Even your body is a
symbol.” In Love’s Body, Brown writes,
“The body is not to be understood literally. Everything is symbolic, everything
including the human body.” And elsewhere in the book he writes, “To make in
ourselves a new consciousness, an erotic sense of reality, is to become
conscious of symbolism. Symbolism is mind making connections (correspondences)
rather than distinctions (separations).”
Manson saw the world as a symbolic
manifestation, not a literal reality. It is an illusion, a mask, and the things
within this illusion point beyond themselves to some transcendent presence.
Everything from scripture to sex is a symbolic message from the divine trying
to tell us something. We are surrounded by messages we cannot read and locked
into game-playing roles we do not understand, all at the mercy of some cosmic
game player.
So in
Throughout the sixties, this same message
was repeated again and again. We are all playing games. We are all stuck in a
movie. We are all conditioned to believe in things which are not true. We are
all socially constructed, not essential, not in control. Some would replace the
old conditioning with new conditioning, a better jail with a kinder jailer. The
true Children of the Sixties, however, unlike the Marxists in SDS, did not
embrace some new Egypt but kept on sojourning toward the Promised land outside
of the cages, outside of any jail.
This is who Manson said he was, a Christ, the person who had broken
through, who was free. Like Ken Kesey’s Randle P. McMurphy, another Christ, he
had never been under the control of society. Ironically, being in jail, where they
did not bother to educate or socialize him, he remained free of all the
institutions by which the state brainwashes its other children. He received, as
did McMurphy, another kind of conditioning, for sure. But it was different, so
he came out different and knew it. He knew it was all a sham and roles we
pretend to play, and he believed this insight set him apart, put him on a higher plane.
Rationality, he said, is a false god. It is
part of the game playing of the world. The whole rational logical structure of
the world is false and the people who play its games without realizing it are
fools. So he had little respect for the law, for the courts, for the lawyers,
for any representative of the establishment. His attack on the law had its
parallel in Love’s Body:
Reik,
in a moment of apocalyptic optimism, declares that ‘The enormous importance
attached by criminal justice to the deed as such derives from a cultural phase
which is approaching its end.’ A social order based on the reality principle, a
social order which draws the distinction between the wish and the deed, between
the criminal and the righteous, is still the kingdom of darkness.
The interconnectedness of all
things in the realm behind the veil means that everything is dependent upon all,
that there is no individual consciousness, hence no individual freedom, and
therefore no individual responsibility. To be, as romantics imagine, in the
divine consciousness, to participate in the godhead, is to be as Manson said,
“inside of you. I’m inside every one of you. It’s beyond good and evil.”
To be romantic is to imagine that one exists
in a realm of perfect Oneness in the garden, not in the fallen world of
alienation, duality, and separateness. The fall, original sin, dualism, and all
that belonged to the orthodox and neo-orthodox, the over-30s who thought
themselves still in
To find that one mind behind the dualities
of life, to find that cosmic center, that essence that LSD advocates like Tim
Leary and Baba Ram Das also thought they found, was to find a place beyond good
and evil. Manson believed he had found that one mind, tripping away on acid,
and hence he had turned his back on all of the false constructs of the language
of the world, all of the artificially constructed binaries.
Manson’s message then to the hippies he
picked up along the road was one they were ready to hear, that the rational
world they had dropped out of was false and that new possibilities existed once
they broke free of that mindset. “People only love each other in books,” he
said, “you can’t love each other in reality because you’re all trapped in
books, locked up in wars. You are all locked up in the second world war…. I’m
trying to unlock that war.” As the war raged in
Manson’s
songs are perhaps the best example of this message. “Look at your game
girl,” the song that Axl Rose made infamous, is Manson trying to convince a
young girl that it is all “a mad delusion,/ living in that
confusion./Frustration and doubt./Can you ever live without your game?” So
everything she is is a game, and she needs to realize that “You can tell those
lies baby, but you’re only fooling you.” Every adolescent, every human being,
has doubts which reach far into the soul. In the Sixties, a whole generation
going through an intense identity crisis, faced doubts about the game we had
all been taught. Manson’s message was not unique, but communicated one on one
to young, uneducated drop outs it came across as cosmically original.
One other song, “Ego is a too much thing,”
also brings down to a basic level a complex idea which was very much part of
the mindset of the era. They have placed rationality, your reason, in control,
and shoved all the love into the
back, ”And they call it your
subconscious.” The computer up front demands to be in control; it demands to be
accepted as you. It “makes you want to jump on a band and fight,/And you can’t
stand not to be right.” It makes you “afraid you are gonna act like a clown/And
you get made when somebody puts you down.” The answer to the problem of ego
being a “too much thing”, is to lose your ego: “Your certainty turns to
doubt/And then you start flipping out,/And then you ease on out of your mind.”
To lose one’s ego is to lose one’s common
sense view of the world, to leave
rationality behind. Included in all that is whatever social construct one was
brought up to believe, be it Mormon Republicanism or Jewish liberalism or Roman
Catholicism or scientific atheism. It does not matter. Each and every world
view, conservative or radical, is just another world view, just another game.
This anti-rationality therefore lends itself very easily to relativism, to the
idea that all belief systems are equally valid, or invalid, but equally
whatever value systems are. They are all “just games.” Or as Manson once
succinctly summed up the spirit of relativism, “Shit’s like sugar to flies.”
And the games all take place in an illusion
of which even the concept of time plays a role. It is part of Manson’s whole
conception that the normal cause and effect relationships in which we all
believe, including time, are themselves part of the illusion, part of the
fallen world, not the Godhead from which it springs. There is only, he keeps
saying, an eternal NOW. In this, he is saying nothing that mystics haven’t said
since the beginning of time. But in his mouth, the idea has important legal
implications. If there is no time, there is no cause and effect; if there is no
cause and effect, what ever he might have said was in a separate sphere from
whatever his followers might have done. The circumstantial cause and effect
connections that Bugliosi carefully put together have no meaning. “The idea,”
says follower Leslie Van Houghton in a recent cellblock interview, “was to let
time disappear. There was no time.” Asked by Diane Sawyer what he expected
would happen after he told the girls “you know what to do,” Manson answered, “I
don’t live in anticipation, woman. I live in now.”
As a capstone, there is the theory of
language. “The Fall is into language,” said Brown, and Manson echoed that idea
too. He blamed his conviction on the way the prosecutors “had to use catchy
little words to make it into a reality, like hippie cult leader.” In such ways,
the illusions with which we live in the world are created and sustained by
language. Language is the instrument of the illusion, of the fall. Said Manson,
That’s
what Jesus Christ taught us, words kill. They’ve filled every living thing with death. His
disciples betrayed him by writing it down. Once it was written, it was as dead
as a tombstone….They killed him with every word in the new Testament. Every
word is another nail in the cross, another betrayal disguised as love. Every
word is soaked with his blood. He said, “go, do thou likewise.” He didn’t say
write it down.
The
whole fucking system is built on those words - the church, the government, war,
the whole death trip. The original sin was to write it down.
If the fall is into language,
then words are the evil of the world. Words are the tools of deception and
control, the way in which the illusion is maintained. They must be used carefully,
if at all. Or they must be discredited to liberate people from the illusion
that words actually “mean” anything. What, after all, does it even mean to
“mean?” It’s all just words trying to fool us into believing we know not what.
The way, finally, to escape from the
illusion was a surrendering of the letter and the acceptance of some larger vision. This could be achieved by breaking
the hold of language, the letter, which keeps us chained to the illusion of the
rational. Once one realizes that words are just sounds and then passes beyond
the illusion of inherent meaning, escape becomes possible. In the “Bug Letter,”
written from his cell, Manson provided an example of this process:
To write
I must slow my mind down. I’m not human in my ways of thought and I don’t want
to be programmed by schools of thought what man is or what man is not, woman,
etc. “nature” has a balance. I want it like a hunger. I learn a universe in a
look, in a flash. I could slow down and spell the word over and over until it
hangs in my thought pattern and holds little bits and pieces of power. I try to
clear all patterns out of my mind to where I can become a tree or woods, a
mountain, a world, a universe.
The pattern here is one that had been part
of Manson’s Protestant background for centuries, a death and rebirth sequence;
it was to be born again. He himself often told the story of his own death and
rebirth experience in the desert. He even used the scriptural language to
define it. About the kids on his ranch, he said, “I turned ‘em loose. They
became free in their minds. We started a rebirth movement, a rebirth in Jesus
Christ. It’s a Holy War really.” But so ignorant was he of the larger
historical framework and its wider influence over so much of American culture
that he once charged Jimmy Carter and the religious right with stealing his
idea, as if he had thought it up first.
This explains his fixation with death and
the need to die. This is the meaning of the song “Cease to Exist” which he
wrote for Dennis Wilson and the Beach Boys and which they put out as a mere
seduction song, “Cease to Resist.” But as so often throughout the history of
Christian hermeneutics, the question of literal and metaphorical readings is
constantly a problem. To have stated clearly a distinction between the two
would have been to embrace another duality. So Manson talked death to his
followers, some of whom never did understand that there was even a question of
whether he meant literal or spiritual death.
Yet, literal death is important as a way of
talking about spiritual death. They really cannot be divided. The death of
Jesus of Nazereth the incarnate human on the cross is a necessary symbol of the
spiritual death of the soul that is conversion. We humans love ourselves, our
bodies, our existence. We don’t want to die. So this fear of death becomes an
image or shadow of the greater fear of spiritual death, of eternal death - “To
die and know it! This is it. This is the black widow, death.” Fear and paranoia
thus become a part of the package. When the old Adam starts to die, he panics
trying to hold onto the old consciousness as it disintegrates in his mind
leaving him exposed and naked. When the old certainties disintegrate, anything
suddenly becomes possible, absolutely anything. Images of the devil, of hell,
of aliens farming humans for consumption on their home world, you name it.
Manson’s and the Beatles’ message then to “let go and surrender to the void. It
is not dying” was a push into a terrifying experience.
To realize that one is only playing a game,
and then to watch oneself playing that game, and then to watch oneself watching
oneself playing that game, is a terrifying fade back into the infinite upon infinite
layers of consciousness until one’s mind is as Jonathan Edwards said “swallowed
up in God.” Thus all the emphasis on exposing game-playing that one reads
throughout the sixties finally culminated here. We have all been programmed by
the combine. We need to realize that we are programmed, that we dont know why
we believe what we believe or do what we do, and we need to escape from those
illusions. This is true liberation from all of the games that have been laid
down for thousands of years of civilized history.
Growing up in prison, Manson had
experienced a different reality, a different world entirely from that on the
outside. In prison, little tolerance is shown for the pretensions that so often
mark personalities in the outside world. There each individual is forced back
on his or her own final line of defenses, reduced, like the soldiers in
Sure, I
influenced a lot of people unbeknownst to my own understanding of it. I didn’t
understand the fears of people outside. I didn’t understand the insecurities of
people outside. I didn’t understand people outside. And a lot of things I said and did affected a
lot of people in a lot of different directions. It wasn’t intentional. It
wasn’t with malice aforethought.
But a few seconds later when
asked if he also felt “remorse,” which presumes guilt, Manson sat for a long
time in silence before saying, in resignation, “we reach an impasse here, man.”
One of Manson’s proudest boasts is that he
always spoke what he called the “truth”: “I walk a real road. I am a real
person. I’m not a phony. I don’t put on no airs. I say what I think.” What he
meant by this is that he does not lie, that he insists on telling it as he
believes it. In the parole hearing, he knew what the parole officers wanted to
hear. He could have lied; he probably could have even lied successfully. He
didn’t. Asked what he might do if he was let out, would a hustling con have
told the parole board, “I’ll cheat. I’ll steal. I’ll do whatever I have to do
to survive, and that’s a reality”? But even in simple questions, when pressed
for a yes or a no whether he had a family still waiting for him on the outside,
he answered “I can’t explain it to you man. It doesn’t have a yes or no.” All
he has is what is in his mind. For him to give that up, to lie, would be to
surrender the void back to the world, which is what society wants. Instead, he
says to the court, “I showed you some strength. I haven’t surrendered to this
by copping out to yours or telling tales or playing weak…. You’ve done
everything you can to me, and I’m still here.”
This is part of the voice from the Infinite
which Clem was drawn to. It was a large part of Manson’s appeal for kids trying
to escape from a sham suburban world of lies wrapped around lies wrapped around
lies. “Manson is the only person I ever met who just tells you the truth and
doesn’t even understand someone having bad feelings about it,” said Gypsy.
“It’s hard to live with a person who tells the truth all the time. Why? Because
lots of time we don’t want to hear the truth. Manson knows the truth because he
knows nothing; he knows the power of an empty head.”
But the ultimate irony is that in knowing
the power of an empty head and how to use it, Manson also knew the destructive
force of a whole civilization of empty heads all playing mindless games. He
preached death to liberate his followers from the games of the old culture,
games which were leading to wars, famine, oppression, the destruction of the
planet. But the death of the old game-playing ego was only a prelude to the
rebirth of the new spirit. Manson wasn’t just a tree-shaker; he was also a
jelly maker. And it is in his horrifyingly honest articulation of his solution
to humanity’s dilemma that he fulfills Joan Didion’s darkest paranoid fear,
that out of this army of lost children would arise some fascist leader
appealing to the cosmic mind inside everyone for which he was the
self-appointed spokesman.
“Whoever is going to put order into the world,” Manson tried to explain to Geraldo Rivera, “has to stumble across Hitler.” Order is the answer to disorder. If the planet is to be saved from the rapacious destruction of human civilization, then, according to Manson, someone needs to “put order into the world.” Manson has even set up his own organization, with its own webpage (www.atwa.com) for this purpose. ATWA stands for Air, Trees, Water, Animals, the life which will be saved when he re-organizes our helter-skelter madness. Asked to explain the swastika he has cut into his forehead, Manson said, “How do you have Peace on Earth? How do you communicate to a whole group of people. You stand up and take the worst fear symbol there is and say, there, now I’ve got your fear. And your fear is your power and your power is your control. I’m your king of this whole planet. I’m gonna rule this world through ATWA. I want this world cleaned up.” But the swastika is more than a symbol of fear. It is also a symbol of Hitler’s particular attempt to put order into the world, an order that included each race staying within its own circle. Manson is definitely both anti-semitic and racist, to say nothing of sexist. He freely admits it. His idea of order is in fact more like that of the pre-war generations with which he identifies, than of the flower-children of the sixties. The older generation had experienced the horror of the depression and the world war and wanted security. So did Manson. His ideas of social and political order were very old fashioned. But he also admitted that he preferred the music of Frank Sinatra to the mayhem of Rock and Roll or even the Beatles. He wanted to overcome the chaos around him and restore a sense of order.
Manson once warned his parole board that
“If I’m not paroled, and I don’t get a chance to get back on top of this dream,
you’re gonna lose all your money, your farms aren’t going to be able to
produce. You’re gonna win Helter Skelter. You’re gonna win your reality.” Whether this “I” refers to Manson the man or
the universal “I” locked within each of us in the subconsciousness is, as
usual, not at all clear. And it makes a difference. But in either case, Helter
Skelter is the confusion of a world gone
crazy and in need of order. “This dream” is the consciousness of mainstream
society which is leading humanity into chaos and suicide. According to Manson,
only the liberation of the voice of the unconsciousness collective mind to
organize all the unconscious minds into one big consciousness can change the
dream in such a way as to prevent mankind from destroying the planet.
When Manson argued that his consciousness
came from a deeper place “beyond good and evil,” he at least conjured up in the
minds of more learned people an historic parallel. Nietzche, who used that
phrase in a famous book, was also the product of a romantic movement, the culmination
of nineteenth-century German mysticism. His theory of the Superman who existed
outside of the merely artificially constructed codes of bourgeois culture
inspired the Nazis. Like Nietzche, Manson saw that the codes of society are
artificial, contingent, and unworthy of respect. Like Nietzche, he believed
himself capable of freeing himself from them and living on a higher plane. He
saw the void, but rather than surrender to it, he believed he had what it took
to fill the emptiness with a new and better structure.
Joan Didion was right. At the end of the
antinomian Summer of Love, 1967, a rough beast was slouching toward
In light of all this, for reporters to harp on the literal facts of who did what
when during the murders often seems as absurd as showing “Reefer Madness” to
High School kids to keep them from smoking pot. Once again, the adults haven’t
a clue. Until they address Manson’s issues, they won’t have any credibility
either. Someone needs to address these questions in language which people
understand. Otherwise, kids will turn to the Mansons among us for their
answers. “A lot of the kids,” says Manson, “never met anybody who told them the
truth. They never had anybody who was truthful to them. You know, they never
had anybody that wouldn’t lie or snake or play old fake games. So all I did was
I was honest with a bunch of kids.” That is a powerful indictment of our
society.
However appalled one might be by the
literal reality of Manson, it is almost impossible not to also take him on the
level of symbolic consciousness. “They don’t want to ever let me go,” he
explains, “because they feel secure as long as they’ve got me locked up in that
cell. They feel like, yeah, they’ve got THE MAN locked up right there in a
box.” Perhaps this is only literal; or perhaps Manson has taken over the role
in society that black people used to play, the symbol of the terrors of the
subconscious. We need to keep our rational consciousness safe from the chaos on
the other side. So we lock up the subconscious under what Freud called the
censor. And through the power of
symbolic consciousness we imagine that by segregating black people, or locking
Charlie Manson in a cell, we have the irrational forces of the subconscious
under our rational control. We try to keep the conditioning going. We try to
make the combine run more smoothly by adjusting everyone’s programming so
everyone will think and behave as they should. And yet the secondary meanings
are always there. The literal continues to point to the symbolic for anyone
able to read the text. Even when, perhaps especially when it is least intended,
the ironic meanings bring us up short.
At his last parole hearing, Manson was of
course rejected. The parole board went through a long explanation why and
listed a series of problems. The final Problem, number five, reads as if a line
from Kesey’s Cuckoo’s Nest, “The
prisoner has not completed the necessary programming which is essential to his
adjustment and needs additional time to gain such programming.”
To which Manson has the final word, “Can’t
you see I’m out, man? Can’t you see I’m out? Can’t you see I’m free?”
The light at the end of the tunnel may have
been the metaphor for