Re: Cloudbusting

[Peter Byrne Manchester <PMANCHESTER@ccmail.sunysb.edu>]

Ishir got the ball rolling:

> Could someone tell me what the song "Cloudbusting" is about?

Ulrich added important detail:

> Now the song 'Cloudbusting' is about the moment when Wilhelm
got arrested.
> He just had 'made rain' together with Peter, went home, Peter
saw the
> car with the men going to arrest Wilhelm coming and tried to
warn Wilhelm
> but didn't succeed.

The key observation here is about "the moment."  In _A Book of
Dreams_, Peter Reich narrates how he had been stationed alone at
the guardhouse at the entrance to Orgonon, at a point in Wilhelm
Reich's story when his dispute with the FDA over advertizing the
Orgone Boxes as having "medicinal" properties (across State lines
yet!!) looked like it was going to lead to a bust.  
Sure enough, some G-men in a big black car arrived at the gate,
and Peter held them while he went into the guardhouse to call
ahead and see if they were permitted entrance.

To his dismay, they simply drove ahead in, before he could even
call.  In his agony and dereliction over having failed to protect
Orgonon, Peter set off running to the main house to warn his
father.  It is quite detailed in the book that he had to run *up
that hill* to get there.

In pages before this episode, Peter had mentioned that sometimes,
as he picked his way home across the grey of late winter with its
frozen ponds, "I just knew that something bad was going to
happen."  The arrival of the men in the big black car was That
Moment.

Kate's song and lyric accomplish a number of important reversals.
First of all, in the video the kid's discovery of the G-men's
power is dramatized as a tumble *down the hill*, not the gasping,
failing effort *up* the hill in the book.  And then, in a scene
unique to the video, as the father is trucked away, his departing
gesture is for the kid to be running UP that hill, back to the
Cloudbuster, back to where it had all been happening.  In the
end, the kid (as played by Kate) turns THAT knob, and the video
ends with the sky itself weeping for joy.  Effort is now invested
in the premise "I just know that something _good_ is going to
happen. "

Ulrich also pointed out:

> Another passage in the lyrics that may be difficult to
understand without
> further hints is the yo-yo: In the fifties (when the whole
story took place) 
> there were yo-yo's "That glowed in the dark". Wilhelm believed
(and told
> Peter) that the glowing stuff was 'Deadly Orgone Energy', and
shouldn't be
> used/played with/etc. Peter liked his yo-yo, and so he buried
it to dig
> it out when he wasn't observed.

The glow-in-the-dark technology of the fifties involved radium. 
Peter Reich had a glow-in-the-dark yo-yo, my brothers and I had
glow-in-the-dark crucifixes (they made great warplanes under the
covers at night).  The most dangerous product of the period was
radium-based glow-in-the-dark paint.  Workers who worked with
such paint, licking the brushes into points for fine work for
example, later died in large numbers from cancers of the mouth
and related soft tissues.  This was one instance where Wilhelm
Reich's concern to be attentive to the invisible dimensions of
physical reality was on target.

.................................................................
...........
                                                            Peter
Manchester
"C'mon, we all sing!"                         
pmanchester@ccmail.sunysb.edu
                                                    
72020.366@compuserv.com