V--2nd, Chap 9 sferics

[alice wellintown]

What souls haunt these stones of musical science?
see  "The Fall of the House of Usher" or The Art of Duplication
Claudine Herrmann and Nicholas Kostis
SubStance
Vol. 9, No. 1, Issue 26 (1980), pp. 36-42


I have just spoken of that morbid condition of the auditory nerve
which rendered all music intolerable to the sufferer, with the
exception of certain effects of stringed instruments. It was, perhaps,
the narrow limits to which he thus confined himself upon the guitar,
which gave birth, in great measure, to the fantastic character of his
performances. But the fervid facility of his impromptus could not be
so accounted for. They must have been, and were, in the notes, as well
as in the words of his wild fantasias (for he not unfrequently
accompanied himself with rhymed verbal improvisations), the result of
that intense mental collectedness and concentration to which I have
previously alluded as observable only in particular moments of the
highest artificial excitement. The words of one of these rhapsodies I
have easily remembered. I was, perhaps, the more forcibly impressed
with it, as he gave it, because, in the under or mystic current of its
meaning, I fancied that I perceived, and for the first time, a full
consciousness on the part of Usher, of the tottering of his lofty
reason upon her throne. The verses, which were entitled "The Haunted
Palace," ran very nearly, if not accurately, thus:


I.


In the greenest of our valleys,
   By good angels tenanted,
Once a fair and stately palace --
   Radiant palace -- reared its head.
In the monarch Thought's dominion --
   It stood there!
Never seraph spread a pinion
   Over fabric half so fair.

II.


Banners yellow, glorious, golden,
   On its roof did float and flow;
(This -- all this -- was in the olden
   Time long ago)
And every gentle air that dallied,
   In that sweet day,
Along the ramparts plumed and pallid,
   A winged odour went away.

III.


Wanderers in that happy valley
   Through two luminous windows saw
Spirits moving musically
    To a lute's well-tunèd law,
Round about a throne, where sitting
   (Porphyrogene!)
In state his glory well befitting,
    The ruler of the realm was seen.

IV.


And all with pearl and ruby glowing
   Was the fair palace door,
Through which came flowing, flowing, flowing,
   And sparkling evermore,
A troop of Echoes whose sweet duty
   Was but to sing,
In voices of surpassing beauty,
   The wit and wisdom of their king.

V.


But evil things, in robes of sorrow,
   Assailed the monarch's high estate;
(Ah, let us mourn, for never morrow
   Shall dawn upon him, desolate!)
And, round about his home, the glory
    That blushed and bloomed
Is but a dim-remembered story
    Of the old time entombed.

VI.


And travellers now within that valley,
   Through the red-litten windows, see
Vast forms that move fantastically
   To a discordant melody;
While, like a rapid ghastly river,
   Through the pale door,
A hideous throng rush out forever,
    And laugh -- but smile no more.

I well remember that suggestions arising from this ballad led us into
a train of thought wherein there became manifest an opinion of Usher's
which I mention not so much on account of its novelty, (for other men
have thought thus,) as on account of the pertinacity with which he
maintained it. This opinion, in its general form, was that of the
sentience of all vegetable things. But, in his disordered fancy, the
idea had assumed a more daring character, and trespassed, under
certain conditions, upon the kingdom of inorganization. I lack words
to express the full extent, or the earnest abandon of his persuasion.
The belief, however, was connected (as I have previously hinted) with
the gray stones of the home of his forefathers. The conditions of the
sentience had been here, he imagined, fulfilled in the method of
collocation of these stones -- in the order of their arrangement, as
well as in that of the many fungi which overspread them, and of the
decayed trees which stood around -- above all, in the long undisturbed
endurance of this arrangement, and in its reduplication in the still
waters of the tarn. Its evidence --the evidence of the sentience --was
to be seen, he said, (and I here started as he spoke,) in the gradual
yet certain condensation of an atmosphere of their own about the
waters and the walls. The result was discoverable, he added, in that
silent, yet importunate and terrible influence which for centuries had
moulded the destinies of his family, and which made him what I now saw
him -- what he was. Such opinions need no comment, and I will make
none.

On Mon, Oct 11, 2010 at 2:58 PM, alice wellintown
<alicewellintown at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> At the same time that the center of Western Music's core values were
>> abrading against the creative impulses of the best and brightest, science,
>> ever moving forward, manages to elicit sounds never heard by sober white
>> people before.
>
> Again, Poe's story, "The Mask of the Red Death" is always mentioned
> with this cjapter in _V._, and Poe's only novel, _Pym_ as the
> influential whiteness of the pale beyond, but it is "The Fall of the
> House of Usher" that influences the music themes here.
>