“Nietzsche’s Blond Barbarians, the Apes of Wagner!” I exclaimed, and I felt the ground giving away. The naked music, pulsatile and opium-charged, turned hysterical as Zarathustra-Strauss waved on his myrmidons with frenzied philosophical motions. Music was become vertiginous, a mad vortex wherein whirled mad atoms madly embracing. Dancing, the dissonant corybantes of the Dionysiac evangel scarce touched earth, thus outvying the bacchantes. The roar of enemy cannon pursued them as the last Superman yielded his ghost to the Time-Spirit....
Then there gravely marched a group of men of cold cerebral expression. They carried steel hammers with which they beat upon their anvils the whole-tone scale. Near by hovered Arnold Schoenberg with Claude Debussy, but they put their fingers into their pained ears as the Neo-Scythians, Scriabine, Stravinsky, Ornstein and Prokofieff hammered with excruciating dynamics hell itself into icy enharmonic splinters. With thunderous peals of ironic laughter the Sphinx sank into the sand, yawning as it vanished and mumbling: “No longer are there dissonances. Nothing is true. All is permitted!” By a mighty effort to escape the nipping arctic air and the harsh grindings of impending icebergs, I fled.
And that is my Masque of Music.
PART II
IDOLS AND AMBERGRIS
“Idols and ambergris and rare inlays....”
—Ezra Pound.
I
THE SUPREME SIN
“Et Diabolus incarnatus est. Et homo factus est.”
—From the Litany of the Damnéd Saints.
“Shall no new sin be born for men’s trouble?”