{"id":5286,"date":"2014-05-13T14:30:52","date_gmt":"2014-05-13T22:30:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/?p=5286"},"modified":"2014-12-08T15:39:45","modified_gmt":"2014-12-08T23:39:45","slug":"rucker-songs-by-roy-whelden-karen-clark-all-the-visions-rant","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/2014\/05\/13\/rucker-songs-by-roy-whelden-karen-clark-all-the-visions-rant\/","title":{"rendered":"\u201cRucker Songs\u201d\u009d by Roy Whelden & Karen Clark. “All the Visions” Rant."},"content":{"rendered":"

In 1994, the composer and musician Roy Whelden made a beautiful album called Like a Passing River<\/em>. The tracks includes several sections of me reading from All the Visions<\/em>. Roy mixed my voice with performances by the American Baroque ensemble, and with the singing of soprano Karen Clark. The result is wonderful; it is kind of a transcendentalized operatic version of All the Visions<\/em>. You can buy the Like a Passing River <\/em>album, or individual tracks from it, via iTunes<\/a>, via Amazon<\/a>, and in other places. Meanwhile, Roy and his music publisher, New Albion Records, have agreed that I can post a few of the tracks from the album as podcasts. You can play the songs without leaving this page, just by clicking on the play bars where they appear in the post below.<\/p>\n

Rucker Songs<\/b>
\n

\"Play\"<\/a><\/div>\n
\n\u201cRucker Songs\u201d\u009d is the most amazing cut on the album. It\u2019s about my notion of God as a white light, and includes a line I really like, which Karen begins with.<\/p>\n

\u201cOh man we are in heaven, for sure for sure.\u201d\u009d<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

In composing “Rucker Songs,” Roy built a hauntingly lovely operatic oratorio onto on that, followed by a bridge of wondrous sine-wave-humming, leading to a sprachgesang <\/em>or spoken-song passage including my line, \u201cWhat\u2019s the point, can\u2019t somebody tell me,\u201d\u009d and then goes into my vision of flying \u201cinto the light\u201d\u009d and reaching a zone with \u201cno space, no time.\u201d\u009d<\/p>\n

\u201cGive us this day our daily rush, on the nod as thou art in heaven.\u201d\u009d<\/p>\n

I actually wrote that line. Words to live by. And we get to hear Karen Clark\u2019s great lush opera voice singing it. I\u2019ve always kind of wanted to hear lines like these when I listen to religious songs. Karen caresses and burnishes the words. <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

I Was At the New Year\u2019s Eve Dance, or, I\u2019m Going To Die<\/b>
\n

\"Play\"<\/a><\/div>\n
\n\u201cI Was At the New Year\u2019s Eve Dance,\u201d\u009d which might also be called \u201cI\u2019m Going To Die,\u201d\u009d is a recording of me reading a passage describing my my teenage realization of the inevitability of death\u2014which took place at a party at the Riverview Valley Country Club in Louisville, Kentucky, 1962.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt first hit me when I was sixteen: you\u2019re going to die.\u201d\u009d<\/p>\n

In setting up this song, Roy uses a few bars of \u201cTeenager in Love\u201d\u009d by Dion and the Belmonts, which fits, as I myself sampled this song in my line: \u201cI know the answer: sometimes I\u2019m happy sometimes I\u2019m blue.\u201d\u009d<\/p>\n

Surf it, bro.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

What\u2019s the Point?<\/b>
\n

\"Play\"<\/a><\/div>\n
\n\u201cWhat\u2019s the Point?\u201d\u009d isn\u2019t really a song, it\u2019s more just a recording of my voice, wondering what\u2019s the point of existence\u2014this is near the end of the novel, it comes from the long passage that I\u2019m reprinting below, yes, I\u2019m running the final long passage of All the Visions<\/em> here. You might want to listen to \u201cRucker Songs\u201d\u009d again after you read it.<\/p>\n

By the way, you can also access these three podcast songs via by clicking the icon below. <\/p>\n

As most of you probably know, I\u2019m running a Kickstarter project, Transreal Trilogy + All the Visions<\/a>. I want to reprint three of my SF novels plus a scrolly Kerouac-like novel All the Visions<\/em>. You might think of today\u2019s post as providing you with a musical and spoken word material relating to All the Visions<\/em>, as well as this mammoth reprint of the book\u2019s closing rant:<\/p>\n

Final Section of All The Visions<\/em><\/h2>\n

So what\u2019s the point? I mean, it ought to add up to something, shouldn\u2019t it? A guy telling his life story, at length, but it doesn\u2019t really come to anything. Well\u2026I guess I would have been glad to read it, glad to see the footprints in the sands of time, yes, glad to know there was once someone vaguely like me, and will be again, no doubt, we are a hive, us humans, no individual death really matters, like when we were at the beach last year and Conrad Jr. caught a lot of crabs\u2014crabs are so stupid that all you do is lower a fish-head or chicken-neck down in the water and the crab grabs it and won\u2019t let go and you pull up the string and net him and put him in a bucket with the other crabs you caught, unless you haven\u2019t caught any crabs yet, in which case the bucket is empty\u2014and we cooked them for supper, they screamed when I threw them into the boiling water, but screamed so high that it was hard to hear, but not quite so high a scream as lobsters do, we cooked the crabs for supper and poor Conrad started crying, because, you understand, these crabs and him had been out on the dock for several hours, doing a number <\/em>together, biped catching crustacean, and now the poor crabs were dead, but the consoling factor was that, after all, there are still a whole lot more crabs in the ocean, the race of crab not one whit diminished by these individual deaths,<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

no man is an island, if you think of it the right way, \u201cno man is an island,\u201d\u009d means that in fact an individual death doesn\u2019t matter, it\u2019s the whole thing, the gestalt that matters, so that, as old Bill suggests, our best way for space colonization would be to send out probes full of bacteria or viruses, just so they have that buddy-buddy double-strand of DNA, ribonucleic acid, the genes, if you think about it, the genes are sitting down deep in us\u2014we are in fact big space probes for the genes, we are meat robots that the genes build in order to reproduce themselves, the other form of immortality being, yeah, software backups, but the final is the realization that even these stabs at immortality are relative, try like 10-to-the-30th years from now, man, when most of the protons have broke down, or 10-to-the-100th years away, and, really if you think about it, what difference would it make if the world lasted forever, and would it even matter if you yourself didn\u2019t have to die, oh, it would get too old, but still, something in one\u2019s soul does kind of leap up at the thought of immortality, but it\u2019s a con, we have to learn not to fall for it, not get sucked in, because mortality is an essential part of the human condition,<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

like in Gravity\u2019s Rainbow<\/em>, Pynchon writes about the angels looking down, \u201call unaware of the dark beauty of the death-sentence we labor under,\u201d\u009d the dark beauty, take me now Jesus, well, give me 35 more years, I wanna be 72 when I croak, and I\u2019m past the midpoint, up here in real time real time real time, auughh<\/em>, it\u2019s not real for you anymore, my time, or for me, it\u2019s ripped back from me by the current, the flow, I\u2019m going to die, oh so what, who cares, it\u2019ll be a relief for sure for sure, though there\u2019s no rush is there , but still\u2026as I thought once, \u201cDeath is the only thing that makes life bearable,\u201d\u009d I mean how awful it would be to stand forever on a cloud, all stiff, strumming it, listening to hymns, nasty God walking past to pee on the floor, a chance of a peek up the bluesky folds of Mary\u2019s skirt to her skin more whiter than a harp of gold, strum it, baby, there must be some way out of here, <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

I\u2019m a desperate man, but why bother to be desperate, why do anything when you can groove, though grooving gets so boring, well, not boring, really, it\u2019s the hangovers and the stoneover dissociation that\u2019s hard to take, year after year, \u201cAnd do your folks say you are a stranger \/ do your friends think you be too weird \/ it\u2019s hard to learn to live with so much danger, bay-bih \/ year after year after year after year,\u201d\u009d psycho rant stifflegged dead pig axe cross the stage, making everyone feel better they aren\u2019t up there, scraping it right down to the rind, what\u2019s the point, what\u2019s the fucking point, man, why are you alive, why is there something instead of nothing, what\u2019s the answer, \u201cThe answer,\u201d\u009d sez Wittgenstein, \u201cis experienced as the vanishing of the questions,\u201d\u009d right<\/em>, I kin dig it, but hey, the questions come back don\u2019t they, you have to come down and make some money, baby, the questions come back later, you get the answer fine, <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

you fall asleep, you lose it, lose it totally, gag me with a chain-saw, baby, lose it totally and then start scratching your head, showering lice-eggs across the schizo-scenario and wondering why be working so hard just to get a stiff dick soft, get a stomach full, horrible animal functions, the way that if you really really have to take a shit you can\u2019t think of anything else, just kind of crab-scuttle around, do the limbo under the pay-toilet door, find a guy already in there, flub-gubba-geep, go on outside and \u201clay your load upon the road \/ when toilets weren\u2019t invented,\u201d\u009d all this hassle to keep the system at maintenance level, putting bug spray on yourself, all the work to keep your hair oiled and your butt clean and your fillings in, your socks up, your wounds disinfected and bandaged, your eyesight corrected, your hearing amplified, your behavior modified, reformed-alcoholic radio-evangelist republican-congressman, yes<\/em>!\u2014your fungus damped, your itch scratched, and the piece of food picked out between those two dancey molars, the brain amused with TV paper book magazine drug cigarette booze coffee frisco-speedball organ-music-piped-in-from-the-catacombs-of-Thoth, the frisson<\/a>, my dear, <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

\u201cGive us this day our daily rush, on the nod as thou art in Heaven,\u201d\u009d in heaven, oh man we are in heaven for sure for sure\u2026or maybe it\u2019d be better to be in Hell and limp, instead of forever in Heaven with your tremendous aching stiff salute, with God\u2019s horrible bunion feet the size of mountains and you\u2019re in fact standing on them though you don\u2019t realize it, just singing, and feeling the better for it, soothing the itch the flaw the egg the lurking scream the origin of the species, the way Brits are supposed to always say \u201cD\u201d\u009d instead of \u201cR,\u201d\u009d The Gdeat Pydamids<\/em>, those guys thought they had something going, one would imagine, those Egyptians mounding up those rocks and sand, Chariots of the Gods????????? <\/em>naw, the power of the weak, what man can do<\/em>, Izzy Tuskman used to yell at me, \u201cWhat man can do,\u201d\u009d is, uh, turn other men on, like, \u201cTake this my body which is given for you,\u201d\u009d do you think I\u2019ll go to hell for writing that? Oh what\u2019s the point, can\u2019t somebody tell me please, not that I\u2019d listen, I\u2019ve got it all figured out, I tell you, I know the answer and it\u2019s \u201cSometimes I feel so happy \/ sometimes I feel so blue,\u201d\u009d I mean surf <\/em>it, bro, hang ten, ho-dad, slide in and out of the reckless wash of snit-snit bubbles, each a galaxy in itself, and what can we ever know of the fish who swim below, just be there, why why, just do this, do that, <\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

as a good \u201cbad-attitude\u201d\u009d attitude keep in mind that if enough people believe anything it\u2019s probably wrong, eternally subject to revision, the idea in history, though each time you figure it out you still have to go to sleep and again wake up and again start over\u2014a day is such a very long time, why would anyone want to live forever, throb<\/em>, the Muse getting in bed with him\u2026throb<\/em>, he\u2019s up again, out of bed, around the bend agin, over and over, until, if you\u2019re lucky as John Lennon, some mushroom from West Yakshit blows you away, or if you\u2019re lucky as Aldous Huxley, your wife shoots you up with acid, meanwhile JFK croaking on TV in the nurses\u2019 room, and your old lady\u2019s like shooting you up every time your stroke-twitched big wise forever-talking mouth tries to move, uh uh uh, \u201cyes dear, take another hit of chemicals\u2026and fucking die, man, and shut up,\u201d\u009d into the light now darling, into the light, go now, go peacefully into the light.<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Yeah, baby. Back me if you can. Transreal Trilogy + All the Visions. <\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In 1994, the composer and musician Roy Whelden made a beautiful album called Like a Passing River. The tracks includes several sections of me reading from All the Visions. Roy mixed my voice with performances by the American Baroque ensemble, and with the singing of soprano Karen Clark. The result is wonderful; it is kind […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5286","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5286","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5286"}],"version-history":[{"count":20,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5286\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5313,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5286\/revisions\/5313"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5286"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5286"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5286"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}