Re: FW: Talk to me about the Ninth Wave

[jimbob@mis.ca (Robert Matthews)]

In article <3219F484@msmail.acgs.qld.edu.au>, BIRCK@msmail.acgs.qld.edu.au
("Birch, Keith") wrote:

>      Waking the Witch    ----  Wakes up, finding herself sinking
> KFB - another stream-of-consciousness thought association, where her mind 
> flashes back to the treatment of witches, which includes drowing them.

     I'm listening to "Hounds of Love" *at this very moment* (with the
headphones on, 'cause it's not even 6 a.m. yet).

     "Waking the witch" is an actual term that was used during the witch
terrors in Europe. It referred to keeping a suspected witch awake for
long, long periods of time (like a week or two). You know what you're like
after a thirty-six-hour bout with a term paper or whatever? Imagine how
fucked-up and hallucinating you get after a week of being prodded,
grilled, shouted at, and kept from sleeping. You'll confess to anything.

     And that, I think, is what the song is trying to get at. The song
sounds very hallucinatory to me, with voices coming at the woman from all
angles, the voice of a stern judge telling her she'll pay, and the woman
herself begging her child to somehow exonerate her (the irony being that,
as in "The Crucible", it might well have been the child herself who
pointed the finger).

     Of course, what any of this has to do with drowning is beyond me,
apart from the obvious reference to the ducking stool, another technique
used by witch-hunters; if the victim floated, she was obviously a witch,
and if she sank (and therefore drowned), then she was innocent--talk about
a lose-lose situation.

Robert Matthews
-- 
jimbob@mis.ca

"[Even] the dullest person, after all, has gleaned from mere observation that
highly intelligent parents often produce offspring so stupid that they can
barely breathe. (And, much more interesting from the eugenic point of view,
that the opposite is also true.)"                             --Christopher Hitchens