V-2 - Chapter 9 - Sferic Music

[Robin Landseadel]

	I was thinking of a series of dreams
	Where nothing comes up to the top
	Everything stays down where it’s wounded
	And comes to a permanent stop
	Wasn’t thinking of anything specific
	Like in a dream, when someone wakes up and screams
	Nothing too very scientific
	Just thinking of a series of dreams


		"Kurt, why do you never kiss me any more?"

		"How long have I been sleeping," he wanted to
	know.

		Heavy blue drapes had at some point been drawn
	across the window.

		"It's night."

		He grew aware of an absence in the room: located
	this eventually as an absence of background noise from
	the loudspeaker, and was off the bed and tottering toward
	his receivers before realizing he'd recovered enough to be
	walking at all. His mouth tasted vile but his joints no
	longer ached, gums no longer felt as sore or spongy. The
	purple spots on his legs had gone.

		Hedwig giggled. "They made you look like a hyena."

And the little boy fell out of bed, and the nightmare was finally over.

Or was it?

		The mirror had nothing encouraging to show him. He
	batted his eyes at himself and the lashes of the left one
	promptly stuck together.

Well, you know you can't believe half of what you see . . .

		"Don't squint, darling." She had a toe pointed toward
	the ceiling and was adjusting. a stocking. Mondaugen
	leered at her crookedly and began trouble-shooting his
	equipment. Behind him he heard someone enter the room
	and Hedwig begin to moan. Chains tinkled in the heavy
	sickroom air, something whistled and impacted with a
	loud report against what might have been flesh. Satin
	tore, silk hissed, French heels beat a tattoo against the
	parquetry. Had the scurvy changed him from voyeur
	to écouteur, . . .

Daddy? What's an écouteur?

First off, it's a Pynchonian flavour of alliteration/pun -- rhymes  
with voyeur, also French. But what it is is an "earbud" or earphone.  
So now it's sound, not sight that's Kurt's big turn-on. And that's not  
too surprising, considering all the Sferic music that Kurt's been  
listening to, even in his fever dreams, as he plays Firelilly to  
Hedwig the Mad.

	. . . or was it deeper and part of a general change of
	heart? The trouble was a burned-out tube in the power
	amplifier. He replaced it with a spare and turned and saw
	that Hedwig had vanished.

	V., 291/292 HPMC

I guess that makes Hedwig Voglesang a distortion by-product of a  
failing tube?

	Thinking of a series of dreams
	Where the time and the tempo fly
	And there’s no exit in any direction
	’Cept the one that you can’t see with your eyes
	Wasn’t making any great connection
	Wasn’t falling for any intricate scheme
	Nothing that would pass inspection
	Just thinking of a series of dreams

	Dreams where the umbrella is folded
	Into the path you are hurled
	And the cards are no good that you’re holding
	Unless they’re from another world



So I know these thoughts are not directly related, perhaps you might  
indulge me in thinking of them as an Anarchist Miracle of some sorts  
intruding into this discussion of Mondaugen's Story, but all this talk  
about sferics and the needs of technology, technology's needs of  
forward motion into the deserts of the rational—it all makes me want  
to talk about German-based broadcast tapes made during the end stages  
of World War Two. I've been listening to Wilhelm Furtwängler's  
recordings of the music of Anton Bruckner for over thirty-five years.  
There is a power and a strangeness to this music and one can't help  
but feel that Furtwängler was channeling much of the angst, the  
Rilkean desire for annihilation and revelation floating around during  
the final years of the V-2, the first large-scale Arial bombardment of  
civilians. There is a strange quality to the sound in my copy of  
Furtwängler's Bruckner. To start with, these are among the first  
magnetic tape/condenser microphone recordings, this is birth of Hi-Fi  
as we know it.

Right now, very quiet in the background, overshadowed by the train in  
the distance, the Eighth  Symphony is playing, in a recording  
featuring the Vienna Philharmonic from a October 17, 1944 performance.  
This transfer was was made in 2008, using a technique that shifts the  
relative equalization of frequency response digitally, using modeling  
derived from comparison to high quality modern recordings. The overall  
effect is to amplify that sound associated with the modulation of an  
AM broadcast by atmospheric disturbance, that washy/phasey quality one  
associates with late-night listening to AM frequencies thousands of  
miles away.

Furtwängler should have been in Gravity's Rainbow, he would have fit  
in so perfectly. He thought somehow that there was an essential  
Greatness in the German spirit that communicates via the Greatest  
music the world has ever heard. Furtwängler was mesmerized by  
grandiosity as much as Furtwängler hypnotized via the grandiosity of  
the music he loved. As far as Furtwängler was concerned, that music  
was Beethoven, Wagner and above all Bruckner, who just happened to be  
a favorite of Adolf Hitler. Betcha that saved Willie's ass. And all  
the music that Furtwängler really loved contains that spirit that  
Säure Bummer complains about when he states his preference for  
Rossini. There's nothing more warlike in all of Classical music than  
Bruckner's distended finales, full of old Nordic battle-cries,  
switching between fff & ppp 'til we arrive at an ending where the  
heavens open up and all is resolved. It's as if the urge to fight and  
win is memetically passed along in this music, in one of those odd  
conspiracies of history.

I've listened to Furtwängler's wartime Bruckner a lot, in particular  
his October 7, 1944 taping of the Ninth, Bruckner's final, incomplete  
symphony. Bruckner's Ninth has no finale -- the score of the sketches  
for the finale we handed out as souvenirs at his funeral.   
Fortunately,  Bruckner's Ninth ends on a beautiful note of  
transcendence, a vision of the heavens opening up in his "Farewell to  
Life."

I recall speaking to an older gentleman who worked at a fine used book  
store in Glendale California. This was back back in 1983, I was  
becoming active with Reclaiming folks in the anti-nuclear movement. I  
really can't recall why the subject came up, but he told me that  
survived the Holocaust and he mentioned that those incredible  
Furtwängler Bruckner recordings were piped into the showers at  
Auschwitz along with the Zyklon B.

	In one, numbers were burning
	In another, I witnessed a crime
	In one, I was running, and in another
	All I seemed to be doing was climb
	Wasn’t looking for any special assistance
	Not going to any great extremes
	I’d already gone the distance
	Just thinking of a series of dreams

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	I say that when religion outlives its usefulness,

	then opium…will be human…