CYCLE THIRTY-TWO

1. CHRISTIAN PERCUSSION. If drums are broadly Heathen, then it seems to me that 'Christian percussion', as relevant to a Catholic tradition, will take the forms of bells with regard to the objective selflessness of the Virgin Mary, bodhrans with regard to the subjective selfishness of the Christ Child, and maracas with regard to the subjective selfishness of the Holy Ghost, so that one proceeds from the Hell of church bells, with their vacuous interiors, to the Heaven of maracas via a bodhran middle-ground. Doubtless, the fact that bells tend to be situated high up in the belfry of churches makes it seem as though they are heavenly instruments. But, there again, the Church has a paradoxical tendency to elevate Hell at the expense of Heaven, and all because the objective selflessness of the subfeminine Virgin can be superimposed upon the objective selflessness of the superfeminine Clear Light, and thus regarded, no matter how erroneously, in a similar supernatural light. Yet bells, no matter how selfless, are a far cry, in musical terms, from the sorts of claypot (ghatam) one would associate with primal being, just as the subjective selfishness of bodhran-playing is a far cry from the primal doing whose objective selfishness is probably best exemplified, if not through tambourines, then almost certainly through gongs, which are even more sun-like. However, if the bodhran, with its small finger stick, is a merciful retort to the bell-clapper, then it seems to me that seeds encased inside shaking maracas take subjective selfishness to a near visionary level of transcendence which, while still personal, is arguably the most heavenly mode of percussion within a Christian, and therefore phenomenal, context. If bodhran-playing corresponds to the Christ Child, then it is only with musical instruments like maracas that the Holy Ghost achieves anything approaching a percussive exemplification.

2. SUPERCHRISTIAN PERCUSSION. As to the Superchristian context of percussion, which is no less noumenal than the Superheathen context, albeit noumenal in a centripetal and thus contrary way, I should like to advance the theory that tubular bells correspond to the subjective selflessness of the Mary Child; that electronic drums and/or pads correspond to the objective selfishness of the Second Coming; and that, above this, the higher and truer objective selfishness of the Holy Spirit of Heaven finds its percussive analogy in drum machines, which stand to electronic percussion, it seems to me, as maracas to the bodhran in the phenomenal context of 'Christian percussion', as discussed above. Thus from the hellish vacuousness of tubular bells to the heavenly interiorization ... of drum machines via the intermediate objectivity of electronic percussion - a Superchristian triad whose trinitarian bias is no less at variance with the triangular basis of 'Superheathen percussion' than that of the Christian triad vis-à-vis its Heathen counterpart in what is, by contrast, a phenomenal realm. Thus whereas the alpha of percussion would seem to be a claypot, its omega is a drum machine, an instrument which, in its internalization of rhythm, is as supercultural as the claypot would appear to be supernatural