Read Medusa Frequency for Free Online

Distress’:
    Aus tiefer Not schrei ich zu dir,
Herr Gott, erhör mein Rufen.

From deep distress cry I to thee,
Lord God, hear thou my calling.
    This is Psalm 130, ‘De profundis’, and the
Book of Common Prayer
renders it:
    Out of the deep have I called unto thee, O Lord:
Lord, hear my voice.
    She sang it in German of course, in a deep and distant Thirty Years’ War soprano while the accordion marched on in a minor key like a troop of pikemen with dinted helmets. Luise’s mother had bought her the accordion and paid for the lessons; her father had died in the Ardennes in 1944.
    She farted like a woman who carries a spear and drives a chariot. ‘What kind of piety is that?’ I said. ‘With your upper part you’re singing hymns and with your lower part you’re making
Götterdämmerung.
You’re making
tiefe Not
for the rest of the world.’
    ‘They can cry out to God the same as I do. The airwaves are free, it costs them nothing.’
    ‘Tell me more about your deep distress.’
    ‘With you everything comes out; with me it stays in, it’s deep, it’s nothing to talk about. Also it’s not uncomfortable, it’s like a mountain of stone and on top of it grows a little blue flower. Don’t worry about it.’
    ‘The mountain stays in but the bad air comes out.’
    ‘Inside I’m pure,’ she said.
    ‘Is there something else you wanted to talk about?’ I said to the head. ‘Or is fidelity the only thing on your mind at the moment?’
    ‘Do you want to hear my story?’ said the head.
    ‘Yes, I want to hear your story.’
    ‘I ask you for the second time: do you want to hear my story?’
    ‘Yes, please tell it.’
    ‘I’ll ask you three times: for the third time, do you want to hear my story?’
    ‘Yes, yes, yes. Three times yes. Now tell it.’
    ‘Once begun, the story must be finished.’
    ‘Well of course I want to hear the whole thing.’
    ‘You have to take it on you then, you have to say, “Once begun, the story must be finished; I take it on me.’”
    ‘Once begun, the story must be finished; I take it on me.’
    ‘Now I’ll begin,’ said the head. ‘I’m not very sure of anything; I may be lying or I may even be making it up as I go along. I was a good musician but I’m not reliable in any other way. Sometimes I can’t make the distinction between how things seemed and how they actually were.’
    ‘Who can?’
    The head of Orpheus gave a little cough and seemed to pull itself together. ‘I don’t really want to tell my story,’ it said, ‘but I have to do it if I ask three times and you say yes each time. I’m not even sure what the story is. Have you ever, perhaps while walking, found the world coming towards you in all its detail and then receding behind you and nothing has any more significance than anything else: a stone in the road or the sun in your eyes or the black shape of a bird in the blue sky, you don’t know whether one thing matters more than another?’
    ‘Yes, it’s often like that with me.’
    ‘My mother’s name was Calliope. Sometimes she sang a little song:
    “Hermes the maybe, Hermes the sending –
in the day a road, in the night a wending.”’
    ‘“Who is Hermes?” I asked her.
    ‘“Hermes is your father.”
    ‘“Where is he?”
    ‘My mother pointed to the road. “Here and gone.”
    ‘“Where’s Hermes?” I said to the shepherds.
    ‘They showed me a heap of stones by the roadside. “There’s Hermes,” they said.
    ‘“How can a heap of stones be Hermes?”
    ‘“Every man who tupped your mother put a stone on that heap in the name of Hermes,” they said.
    ‘I put my ear to the stones, I listened to the dance in them, listened to the music of Hermes-in-the-stone. I looked at the road that was the place of Hermes. Without moving it ran through the valley and over the mountains, at the same time running and standing still, at the same time here and gone.
    ‘That night I went to the road. There was no moon, only thenight and the dim