In the Beginning was the Word ~ Night Sounds

- Chapter Ten -

IN THE BEGINNING WAS THE WORD
~ In the Court of the Crimson King ~

- chapter index -
pg. 1 - Intro: The Schizoid Man | pg. 2 - Night Sounds
pg. 3 - Welcome to the Machine | pg. 4 - The Laboratory
pg. 5 - Agamemnon | pg. 6 - Prometheus
pg. 7 - Paranoia's Poison Door | pg. 8 - Projective Identification
pg. 9 - The Promethean Rebel | pg. 10 - Aries and the Emperor
pg. 11 - Mirrors | pg. 12 - In the Beginning was the Word
pg. 13 - Death Seed | pg. 14 - I Talk to the Wind
pg. 15 - Said the Straight Man to the Late Man | pg. 16 - Epitaph
pg. 17 - Apollo | pg. 18 - The Fate of All Mankind
pg. 19 - Malkuth

site index

s a means of illustrating humanity's deepening spiritual disconnection, in Twenty First Century Schizoid Man , Peter Sinfield borrows from Orwell, depicting a near-future even the over-stimulated / desensitized inhabitants of the 20th century could recognize as horrifying. The song may appear to only be a futuristic/technological nightmare, but it is much more.

Night Sounds

If you recall from chapter three, the low rumbling "night sounds" that introduce Twenty First Century Schizoid Man represent the idea of the earth as a sheltering womb of rebirth, the trigram called "The Receptive" (K'un).

The child has no categories

"In the beginning, the child has no language, and no images, and so knows no concepts or distinctions. There is no difference felt between child and environment, and in particular between the child and the source of nourishment, the bottle or the breast. The world has no categories for the young child: it is not divided. It is as if the baby is still in the womb. The sense of self in the child is absolutely synonymous with and completely identified with his or her universe."

- Lacan Lecture 2

"Primordial uncarved block, sole worshipful monster, inert &
spontaneous, more ultraviolet than any mythology (like the shadows before
Babylon), the original undifferentiated oneness-of-being still radiates serene as
the black pennants of Assassins, random & perpetually intoxicated.

Chaos comes before all principles of order & entropy, it's neither a god nor a
maggot, its idiotic desires encompass & define every possible choreography, all
meaningless aethers & phlogistons: its masks are crystallizations of its own
facelessness, like clouds."

- Chaos: The Broadsheets of Ontological Anarchism

Haydn, The Creation

"The Earth was unformed and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep."

- Genesis 1:2

"Against the Word the unstilled world still whirled
About the center of the silent Word.
O my people, what have I done unto thee.
Where shall the word be found, where will the word
Resound? Not here, there is not enough silence."

- T. S. Eliot

"In numerous stories of creation and various myths, in fairy tales and legends dealing with the beginning and end of time, the threatening element of chaos appears again and again, a chaos whose etymological meaning is described by the Duden dictionary as "unformed, shapeless primal cosmic mass, dissolution of all values, confusion." Duden refers to the Greek, Hesiod (ca. 700 B.C.), who described chaos as the yawning, dark abyss which opened up between heaven and earth after the creation of the cosmos. And in an interpretation of Franz Josef Haydn's oratorio "The Creation" (1798) the author points out that chaos must first be overcome by life. "The instrumental introduction contains two basic motifs, a monotonous, gloomy tone and a cry echoing the struggle for life - chaos before the creation. In radiant C major, to the sound of the full orchestra, one hears the words "Let there be light!" The first day of creation is dawning. The demons of the deep vanish."

- On Chaos and Order

"Neumann has pointed out that in all peoples and religions creation is understood as a manifestation of light. For Neumann "the coming of consciousness, manifesting itself as light in contrast to the darkness of the unconscious," is the real "object" of creation mythology.

Erich Neumann has commented that the original question about the origin of the world is at the same time the question about the origin of man, the origin of consciousness and of the ego."
(Erich Neumann, The origins and history of consciousness. Princeton University Press. 1954, p. 6 - 7).

- The Lurianic Kabbalah: An Archetypal Interpretaion
Sanford L. Drob, Ph.D.

"Womb symbolism is linked in a spiritually positive way, as described by Cooper, or a pathological way, as described by Guntrip (1989), who says that "womb fantasies and/or the passive wish to die represent the extreme schizoid reaction, the ultimate regression, and it is the more common, mild characteristics which show the extraordinary prevalence of schizoid, i.e., detached or withdrawn, states of mind" (p. 58).
What was one in the beginning shatters into three and finally four or the quaternity and represents, as Jung (1954/1946 says,

'the pluralistic state of the man who has not yet attained inner unity, hence the state of bondage and disunion, of disintegration, and of being torn in different directions--an agonizing, unredeemed state which longs for union, reconciliation, redemption, healing, and wholeness.' (p. 46)

Jung calls this the state of the man, but I think one could readily see that it could also describe the human infant, crying and demanding to be loved, or the infant in the human adult, suffering from the same need.'

In a discussion of schizoid withdrawal and reasons for this action, Guntrip (1989) names one reason for the regression to a symbolic womb in the following way:

'Since this regressed ego is the basis of the most dangerous and undermining psychopathological developments, it is as well to reflect on the fact that it is in itself a necessary, reasonable, and healthy reaction to danger. Something is wrong primarily not with the infant but with the environment. (p. 75)"

- The Genesis Model by Gerry Anne Lenhart

Both the newly born infant and the adult narrator of Twenty First Century Schizoid Man experience the world as a harsh and disturbing place. The unforgettable opening blast of Twenty First Century Schizoid Man is the newborn human, at any age, screaming out the realization of his predicament. This is the same moment so powerfully portrayed on the album cover by Barry Godber's painting . Peter Sinfield and Barry Godber's schizoid man can no longer pretend he is healthy and all is right with the world.

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