The Wall and Other Things

 

I have a friend, real not FB, Bryan Womack, who dates back to the original Boomer Bible website, where he posted under the sobriquet Winston_Sith, an obvious reference to Orwell’s 1984. We’ve never met in person, but I have done this in his honor…

The accompanying post is here…

He was and is, out there somewhere, a mathematician in search of the truth about prime numbers, which I also follow under his leadership but with differing results. We both think they’re the key to the universe, but our surmises are discrepant. 

Okay. That’s a lot. What does it have to do with The Wall, Pink Floyd’s much glossed over masterpiece and musical legacy, despite the vicious antisemitism of Roger Waters?

There’s this lady, a classical musicologist who has never been to a Stones concert, or any other rock concert I can discern, who is obsessed with Pink Floyd’s The Wall. And she fills me with envy.

Everything is connected. Anybody who knows me at all knows this is my cardinal tenet. Back in my Mercersburg days there was a formal debate between two masters, Jay Ferguson and Paul Suerken. Guess what? It was well attended, in a basement room of the classroom building. Ferguson was arguing that you couldn’t understand literature without in-depth knowledge of the biographies of the authors. Suerken was taking the counter position that the works stood for themselves. They both made good points. The debate was civil, and I believe Suerken won on the merits. He took his stand on Mozart vs. Haydn. We love Mozart for the narrative. He played Haydn for us. Also very beautiful music. Of Haydn the man we know nothing. And to tell the truth, we all knew Ferguson was right. We just liked Suerken better than Ferguson.

You have to know the man behind the work. You can hear it, or not, in his music. 

Why Bryan Womack’s odd post today is a kind of breakthrough. She’s taking the Suerken line. She can figure out what Pink Floyd is doing without knowing anything else about them. 

No. Seriously. Listen to the whole thing. 

She’s actually right about a lot of things.

She’s just lacking context. Like she has no apparent experience of this:

Better than Waters ever sang it. And she doesn’t even know it exists…

And this. I wrote this about that way back when (2005).

Did I use the word ‘envy’? I did. I want what she’s doing. Looking at the work, not the author. That’s not the whole story but it’s the first step. Time for digging into personal motivations later on.

I like that she’s tentative. But she knows her music, her tones, her instruments, her intuitive responses to the sound of things.

What I want for myself. At the first level. The work does speak for itself. Suerken was right about that. I lit up the sky with The Boomer Bible and nobody noticed. 

Nobody has ever noticed that it is a completely oral work. That the Intercolumn Reference is voices talking underneath the purported text, layer after layer of them, and you can hear all the voices, all the stories, all the movies, all the glorious beauty of mankind talking to itself.

What I want people to do after I die. I’ve asked Kirk to rescue my files. What happens after is not his job. It’s everyone else’s. 

Truth truth truth. Nobody has ever done what I have done as a writer. Fact. I know I am, regardless of what my 80 yo wife proclaims, that I am dying, day by day.

I can’t give you more than I already have. Please go to my YouTube page. Where I talk as if I’m not dying. Look for Insect Brain. Where I was on South Street.

Maybe it’s time for someone like the woman up top to take a closer look…

All the links from one verse. (Not really. It keeps going and going and going…)

Just imagine if you could hear all the layers of voices underneath what you’re reading on the page. Where’s the musicologist who could make esthetic sense of that experience for you?

And please don’t forget Pink Floyd is just an also ran, like so many others. Pink Floyd doesn’t even have the Best Song of the Sixties.