The darkness drops again; but now I know
that twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches toward Bethlehem to be born?
W.B. Yeats, "The Second Coming”
On the road to Bethlehem, Alabama
December, 1988
Something about Beethoven’s symphony seven burned a hole through rural Alabama. There was no way his lead foot could pass the red clay of the afternoon in a usual haste. It was the Southern mosey, a neurological toxin that infects you when you see a running tractor, or a mile of tobacco crop. It was the gentle urging of something beautiful and forgotten, the clamor of something sinister and confined by distance; it was the old, deaf conductor at his best.
Passing two burnt-orange bulls on Highway 58 South left him pondering the irony of it all. Reaching past the open map in his seat, the reporter fiddled for another station on the rental car radio. The damn thing scanned for what felt like two miles of corn before it landed. It was Opus 18, number 2: a string quartet in G major. Not particularly a favorite.
Hitting scan again, J.C. Ransom began to wonder what a back-wood hick would ever need with someone so sophisticated as Beethoven anyway. Maybe in the shadowy world of private lynching and public prayer, a man finds the most uncouth form of himself in a world gone-by: a world of culture hovering slightly beyond his ability to comprehend, but so alluring as to appear on two separate radio stations.
The third hit on the tuner brought him a mixture of trepidation and curiosity, as Piano Sonata number 12 in A Flat major churned like musical cud, paradoxically bovine and spectacular. It would be these three stations to which his last twenty minute descent to Bethlehem would accompany an endless crescendo of questions, mirrored by the awkward glances tossed at him as he passed the tiny gas stations and country farms.
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