Prolegomenon to a Tragedy
The Baron Shadowmancer
And The Wild Witch Dancer
Infect like ritual
Or a growing cancer
Bonfires sprout elemental architecture
Great towers of licking flames
A phantasmagoric orgy
Of shadows and light
She dazzles the eye
A hypnotic beast of brightness
He subverts the mind
A mesmerizing demon of darkness
Lowdown and dirty is the night
Punctuated by conflagrations
The Witch’s Sabbat
Encircled by the Baron’s Madness
***
“The inspiration in a sense is my entire spiritual upbringing. Once you have a meditative life you start to see that the world is really far different than what it appears to be. What appears to be finite is really couched in the infinite, and the infinite imbues everything in our lives.”
~ Bruce Joel Rubin on the film “Jacob’s Ladder”
***
“10 Jacob left Beersheba and set out for Harran. 11 When he reached a certain place, he stopped for the night because the sun had set. Taking one of the stones there, he put it under his head and lay down to sleep. 12 He had a dream in which he saw a stairway resting on the earth, with its top reaching to heaven, and the angels of God were ascending and descending on it. 13 There above it stood the Lord, and he said: ‘I am the Lord, the God of your father Abraham and the God of Isaac. I will give you and your descendants the land on which you are lying. 14 Your descendants will be like the dust of the earth, and you will spread out to the west and to the east, to the north and to the south. All peoples on earth will be blessed through you and your offspring. 15 I am with you and will watch over you wherever you go, and I will bring you back to this land. I will not leave you until I have done what I have promised you.’ 16 When Jacob awoke from his sleep, he thought, ‘Surely the Lord is in this place, and I was not aware of it.’ 17 He was afraid and said, ‘How awesome is this place! This is none other than the house of God; this is the gate of heaven.’ 18 Early the next morning Jacob took the stone he had placed under his head and set it up as a pillar and poured oil on top of it. 19 He called that place Bethel, though the city used to be called Luz.”
~ Genesis 28: 10-19
***
“Coronation Chair—the Coronation Chair was made for Edward I to enclose the famous Stone of Scone, which he seized in 1296 and brought from Scotland to the Abbey … Legends abound concerning this mysterious object and tradition identifies this stone with the one upon which Jacob rested his head at Bethel”
***
“Once I had a little game
I liked to crawl back in my brain
I think you know the game I mean
I mean the game called ‘Go Insane’
Now you should try this little game
Just close your eyes, forget your name
Forget the world, forget the people
And we’ll erect a different steeple
This little game is fun to do
Just close your eyes, no way to lose
And I’m right there, I’m going too
Release control, we’re breaking through”
~ Jim Morrison, The Doors
***
“According to my thinking, they were the universal, archetypal, psychologically based symbolic themes and motifs of all traditional mythologies; and now from this paper of Dr. Perry I was learning that the same symbolic figures arise spontaneously from the broken-off, tortured state of mind of modern individuals suffering from a complete schizophrenic breakdown: the condition of one who has lost touch with the life and thought of his community and is compulsively fantasizing out of his own completely cut-off base. Very briefly: The usual pattern is, first, of a break away or departure from the local social order and context: next, a long, deep retreat inward and backward, as it were, in time, and inward, deep into the psyche; a chaotic series of encounters there, darkly terrifying experiences . . .”
~ Joseph Campbell
***
Though this were madness, was there yet method in’t?
Madness
Madness and music
The artists of music, whether they be musician, composer, singer, songwriter, poet or performer
There are those among those ranks who skirt the threshold of genius and madness
The Curse of the Ninth
The 27 Club
But none more so than the ones who write their madness into their music
With Death looking over their shoulder
***
“Savage fancy, curiosity and credulity illustrated in nature myths– In these all phenomena are explained by belief in the general animation of everything, combined with belief in metamorphosis–Sun myths, Asian, Australian, African, Melanesian, Indian, Californian, Brazilian, Maori, Samoan–Moon myths, Australian, Muysca, Mexican, Zulu, Macassar, Greenland, Piute, Malay–Thunder myths–Greek and Aryan sun and moon myths–Star myths–Myths, savage and civilised, of animals, accounting for their marks and habits–Examples of custom of claiming blood kinship with lower animals–Myths of various plants and trees–Myths of stones, and of metamorphosis into stones . . .”
And of metamorphosis into stones!
~ Andrew Lang
***
We wear the mask that grins and lies,
It hides our cheeks and shades our eyes,—
This debt we pay to human guile;
With torn and bleeding hearts we smile,
And mouth with myriad subtleties.
Why should the world be over-wise,
In counting all our tears and sighs?
Nay, let them only see us, while
We wear the mask.
We smile, but, O great Christ, our cries
To thee from tortured souls arise.
We sing, but oh the clay is vile
Beneath our feet, and long the mile;
But let the world dream otherwise,
We wear the mask!
~ Paul Laurence Dunbar (afflicted with depression and died of TB at age 33)
***
I fell down from Grace
And my world was shattered shut
All those dreams of crystal youth
Were strewn about like dust
I fell down from Grace
And all hope was abandoned here
Soul turned gray and withered
Yet no one shed a tear
I fell down from Grace
And my mind became my cell
But I did hear someone laughing
On that journey when I fell
I fell down from Grace
About my neck I wore my sin
And so far all eternity
Until the Baron, he walked in
***
“Paganini was considered a genius, a god, a devil worshiper, anything but that of reality. There was a rumor, for instance, that when Niccolo was only six, his mother made a pact with the Devil and is said to have traded his soul for a career as the greatest violinist in the world.
Paganini was a legend. In fact, he was so amazing no audience could succumb to any type of disturbance during the trance he created through his musical renditions. After borrowing a Guarnerius violin for a single concert, the lender begged him to keep it for fear of coming under Paganini’s supernatural powers. He also won a Stradivarius violin in a similar manner by playing a technical piece by sight which was insisted that nobody could perform even after preparation.
Besides his superb technical ability, his cadaverous appearance led to myths of all sorts. He was tall and thin, had a long nose, a pale and long-drawn face with hollow cheeks, thin lips that seemed to curl into a sardonic smile, and piercing eyes like flaming coals. The rumor was spread that he was the son of the Devil. It was difficult to think much otherwise as Paganini dressed in black, played weaving and flailing, with skinny fingers cavorting over the strings, and contorted shoulders giving him the appearance of a giant flapping bat. Paganini’s every movement and every tone emanating from his violin seemed to support the 300-year-old myth that the violin was the “Devil’s consort” and that the violinist himself was the Devil. Some people, when in his presence, would actually make the sign of the cross to rid themselves of what they believed were his evil powers. He was once forced to publish letters from his mother to prove he had human parents.
For five years the Church, disturbed as to his orthodoxy, refused his body interment in consecrated ground, and so it was laid to rest in a village graveyard on his own estate. The people in nearby towns use to say that every night they heard the sounds of a ghostly violin emanating from that coffin. The legend of Paganini’s life lasted until the very end.”
***
Beethoven once contemplated suicide
Berlioz was afflicted by depression
Tchaikovsky was manic-depressive and may have died by suicide
Mahler was a manic-depressive
Rachmaninoff was afflicted with depression and dedicated his Second Piano Concerto to his Psychiatrist
Schumann suffered terribly from depression and once tried to commit suicide by jumping into the Rhine. He died in an insane asylum
***
“He has made himself a new ideal world in which he moves almost as he wills.”
~ Franz Grillparzer (the man who wrote Beethoven’s eulogy) on Robert Schumann
***
“The Berlioz centenary, which occurs this year, is being quite generally celebrated. There has been one Berlioz festival in England, and there are yet to be Berlioz concerts there. There will also be concerts in France, his native land, which did not appreciate him while alive, and in Germany, which discovered him. In Chicago this week Mr. Thomas will conduct a Berlioz program.
At the festival in England the composer’s ‘Symphonie Fantastique’ was played – a composition well known here. To The London Lancet, one of the leading medical surgical journals of the world, it must have been new, as that paper devotes considerable space to the analysis of the story of the composition, and refers to the music as bringing out all the ‘vague aspirations, the longings, the loneliness, and the horrible visions of insanity’. It naively remarks ‘it is not soothing music, but so far as one man can enter into another’s brain and convey his sensations to others Berlioz has certainly made his music a means in so doing. Medical men who have not heard this work should take the first opportunity of repairing this neglect’.
It is not exactly clear what the Lancet means by this, whether it thinks Berlioz was insane when he wrote the composition, or that he was describing the insanity of the musician with ‘the fixed idea’, who is the hero of it, or that the medical gentlemen could have an opportunity of studying the insane persons who go to listen to it.
Whatever it may be, it is gratifying to learn from this expert authority that insanity has to do with it in some form. There has never seemed to be any other satisfactory way of explaining this medley of opium dreams, funeral marches, witches’ Sabbaths, orgies, the dies irae, ‘Idea fixe’, and pandemonium of noise. As the Chicago orchestra will play this composition this week the doctors should follow the Lancet’s suggestion and be on hand for a diagnosis. If it shall turn out to be the work of insanity it may be of value as a curative agent in the lunatic asylums, upon the homeopathic theory of like cures like.”
~ Chicago Tribune, December 6th, 1903
***
Step by step, alone I crept
Step by step by lonely step
And then I felt a brushing touch
A gentle voice that whispered much
About which note and tone of choice
About the timbre and the voice
About the inflection of the string
And how to make the guitar sing
Step by step, together we crept
Step by step by maddening step
***
“The glass armonica’s ghostly notes will cause insanity in its musicians and listeners! At least this is what was thought to be true in the 18th century. People were frightened by the armonica’s sound due to it’s strange interactions with the human brain and ears. Benjamin Franklin invented the glass armonica in 1761 after being profoundly moved by the sounds of the glass harp.
The glass armonica’s sound is perceived by human ears differently than other instruments because its range is between 1,000 and 4,000 hertz, the human brain compares ‘phase differences’ between the left and right ears to triangulate the origin of the sound rather than comparing volumes. This causes hearing disorientation and a ‘not quite sure’ feeling about where the sound is coming from.”
***
“Mesmer treated patients both individually and in groups. With individuals he would sit in front of his patient with his knees touching the patient’s knees, pressing the patient’s thumbs in his hands, looking fixedly into the patient’s eyes. Mesmer made ‘passes’, moving his hands from patients’ shoulders down along their arms. He then pressed his fingers on the patient’s hypochondrium region (the area below the diaphragm), sometimes holding his hands there for hours. Many patients felt peculiar sensations or had convulsions that were regarded as crises and supposed to bring about the cure. Mesmer would often conclude his treatments by playing some music on a glass armonica.”
***
“Mr. Mesmer then seated him near the armonica; he had hardly begun to play when my friend was affected emotionally, trembled, lost his breath, changed color, and felt pulled toward the floor.”
***
“There were accounts of the instrument being banned by physicians who cited possible ill effects including prolonged shaking of the nerves, tremors in the muscles, fainting, cramps, swelling, paralysis of the limbs’ and seeing ghosts.”
***
Fifteen years in this asylum
I cry and cry
I laugh and laugh
Mostly at the exact same things
There’s no distinction between these scenes
Just my particular state of mind
***
“Pennsylvania Hospital was founded in 1751 by Dr. Thomas Bond and Benjamin Franklin ‘to care for the sick-poor and insane who were wandering the streets of Philadelphia.’”
***
“A similar expansion took place in the British American colonies. The Pennsylvania Hospital was founded in 1751 as a result of work begun in 1709 by the Religious Society of Friends. A portion of this hospital was set apart for the mentally ill, and the first patients were admitted in 1752. Virginia is recognized as the first state to establish an institution for the mentally ill.”
***
I want to be a little bird
And fly out of my mind
I want to sing a song of hope
A tune for all mankind
Mostly, I want to be free
Visions of the Dark 