But music does more than just reveal an established order. Since it is, by nature, mathematical, music can also question that order. It can divide it into different intervals. It can find alternate and even emergent themes in notes and values which can shift their narrative structures and tell different stories and simultaneous stories using the same characters and scenes but by changing the perspective can offer two or more endings to the drama. Music, by nature, wants to shift resolutions. It is nearly always iconoclastic and as such the Church kept as tight a fist around its development as they did the gospels. There were rules about what could be suggested thru music. There were canons and forms which had the weight of god’s law. Polyphony followed Plainchant under the taut supervision of the Catholic Church; popular music and dancing like that spread by the Trouveres and the Troubadours was frowned upon and most often it was officially proscribed. Music can turn a congregation into a howling mob with a hardon. It must be leashed.

There was no tighter leash than that which held the diabolus in musica. The first mention of the problems concerning the tritone were published in a 9th or 10th century “organum treatise” called “Musica Enchiriadis.” Then from the time of Guido of Arezzo’s hexachordal system until the end of the Renaissance the Wolf Fifth was “regarded as a dangerous interval associated with evil and was banned by the church as being thought to summon Satan.” The punishment for playing the chord was nearly always a slow death which began with genital mutilation and ended with the Skullcrusher or the Breast Breaker and the Wheel. If it happened in a diocese without a well found dungeon then they just burned you at the stake as a witch.

So there it was. Pooler Jones had been a Troubadour and a Jongleur. A Pétengueule, Soufflacul, as well as a Cathar. He had not only played forbidden chords but he had had forbidden thoughts. And had spread them both. They came for him like in time they come for everyone who occasions doubt in settled truths. Kenny always warns us of that. “What you hang with your rocks is uncertainty,” he told Slag. “When you force a man to ask a question you hand him doubt. They will burn you for shit like that.” Then he started mumbling about Bruno and Slag knew it was time to pop smoke.

“How come it only cost you one nut?” I asked Pooler. How come the church didn’t send you off the way of the smoke?

“Because,” he smiled, “they sent an idiot to do a Pope’s work. Idiots can be bribed. Once you know a man can be bribed you know there’s an opening in your fate. Once you have an opening you can get a plan.” It was a long story, he said, and one that would take him a season to tell.

“But your part of it now,” he continued. So we would have to hear it all. We had invited - inadvertently - the devil into our group and into our lives so we would be part of it all now. I had opened just enough information on the internet to find out that the diabolus in musica was also known as Quinte-du-Loup or in the English Wolf Fifth. Then I did what I have long shown students how to do; I searched the alternate names too. Always search the synonyms I tell them. I found the link under a Wolf Fifth search. It was a document which had nothing to do with music or anything particularly devilish. It was a document which seemed to be about too much and nothing at all. In fact the front page of it - the Home Page for the site - looked to be a paste board for a graphic artist who couldn’t make up his mind. The page appeared to be titled with an image, or perhaps it was someone’s idea of a logo - 3 bulls or oxen stared back at the viewer over the expanse of a summer field. One of them, the animal nearest to the foreground had a garland of flowers around its neck. The flowers looked odd; they were not a neat circle of daisies or some such bloom which you might expect to be used in a wreath. They were Hyacinths, the early spring flowers which grew on squat stalks from bulbs. So they looked knobby; they looked stupid. They looked as if someone was using them for a rebus, or a code, and not a decoration. Cows do not make convincing Hyacinth girls and the flowers were being worn as indicators.

When we showed the site to Pooler he just shook his head and mumbled something in Occitan or some other language which he knew neither Slag nor I could follow. After a moment he said in Latin: de rure bovensi and pointed at the animals in the image.

“Do you want to bet?” he asked us. But he was already at the keyboard and pecking away before either of us could ask him what we would be betting on. He called up the Alta Vista search page from the net and typed “de campo de bueyes” in the search-string window. Only a handful of documents answered his search. He quickly read the two-line blurbs which accompany the hot-links and then clicked on one. In a moment we were staring at the exact same document and image which Slag and I had found on the Web but this time it was in Spanish. Then he tried another search in French. The same thing happened. In less than three minutes he had found the same document in a mirror site but in French. Then German. Ditto. Then he settled back and stared. A long thin quiet stare. His fingers did a drum beat on the spacebar.
"Allons, allons, seigneurs et valets, Sautillez par ici, vous tous, Jeunes et vieux, beaux et ridés, Vous devez tous aller au bal."
“De rure bovensi,” he repeated. A field of oxen. He said it meant: of a field of oxen. We shrugged. I’ll be damned if we could see what the rest of the document had to do with a field of oxen. The whole thing looked academic and innocuous, one of those web sites where someone shows off his esoteric knowledge on subjects which the rest of us have never heard of or have long forgotten. The focus of the site was an interactive walk-around thru a virtual-reality cemetery. According to the text the cemetery was a reconstruction of the famous 'Cimetière des Innocents' in Medieval Paris. The Cemetery of the Innocents was the most important burial ground and charnel house in Paris until it was closed and then destroyed just before the French Revolution. Like most of the ossuaries, cemeteries, and charnel houses of medieval Europe the Cimetière des Innocents had been built in a large rectangular format - like a small walled city. Grand buildings and structures flowed around the perimeter. A long cloister ran along 3 ½ walls on the inside of what in a castle would be called the “inner ward.” Within that ward, which was a long fat field of lawn and greenery punctuated by stone monuments and crucifixes, sheep would often be grazing. In European cites of the middle world a cemetery was a walled city within a walled city. It had to be; it was the city of the dead. And in that time the dead had influence; they had powers. So you had to keep the dead walled together in consecrated ground and in a temenos - a sacred space.

“You do not want the dead in your lives,” Pooler was explaining. Slag and I were caught. We had fucked up and we were being spanked. We had to listen even though the both of us wished the whole problem would just go away.

“I wish the past would just stay where it was,” I said. I was being clever.

“You’re a wise man, Skippy. A real Menschenkenner.” Pooler said, but I could tell by the way he said “Skippy” that it was all sardony. Slag asked him if he knew the place, the Cemetery of the Innocents. Pooler said yes with his shoulders and with his hands and what he meant was wait and it will come out in the telling.

Pooler used us for narrative. He needed us - Slag and I - to listen. There were things that he had to say, stories that he had to tell. So even though we fucked up and the devil was loose you could tell that Pooler was secretly glad. It was good to have such things as Hyacinth Boboni in the open. Kenny and Barber would also greet this development with mixed emotions. Barber Perfect might even try to have the two of us killed. He could do that. Slag and I sometimes get the impression he would love to do that. But Pooler Jones needed ears like ours. What he missed most was narrative. He had a million stories and he couldn’t tell them. Not to anyone but a handful of Passers-by who had heard them all - a million times. Most of them were a part of the stories anyway. I learned early on, more than 35 years ago, that Pooler loved to talk.

You do not want the dead in your lives. Not in an age when the wall between the living and the dead was right across the street. Pooler was guiding us around the virtual cemetery and commenting on the architecture of the buildings and the carvings on the columns of the cloister. Apparently the site’s author - who had used the name Quint Duloop in the document’s text - had gotten it right. Pooler said that it was perfect and that was a problem.

“It’s the cemetery in the 1400’s,” he said. “If my guess is right I would say that Duloop has constructed a simulation of the Cemetery of the Innocents as it looked in late Autumn of 1425. Kenny can verify that better than I. Now let’s see the rest.” Without either Slag or I showing him - each of us had navigated the site a dozen times or more - Pooler moved the mouse across the greenery to a spot underneath the vault of the cloister which ran along the inside walls of the cemetery precincts. Exactly as if he knew where to go.

“Holy shit.” He said it low and slow. Holy shit. We were looking at a mural, at a painting on a wall. The scene itself was a virtual-scene - that is it showed a grouping of 4 figures: 2 skeletons or near skeletons - some of the other scenes on the walls of the cemetery showed these figures of death as not yet fully decomposed and bits of skin and other organs were often hanging off them - and then there were two human figures who were obviously still alive and just as obviously who were costumed in clothing and in paraphernalia which would give their station-in-life or their occupation away. The five of them were standing on a small hillock with plants and flowers and the entire grouping was enclosed between two painted columns which were holding up a doubled-arch between them. So the scene under the columns of the cemetery’s cloister showed a scene itself set between a representation of those same columns. It reminded me of Magritte’s similar Trompe d’oeils. A painting of a window placed in front of the window. It was a mirror reality painted on the wall.

'The Danse Macabre,' Slag said and I nodded. Pooler nodded also. We wanted to show him that we had done the homework. This scene within a scene within a scene right now happened a month after Slag and I had blundered into Quint Duloop’s virtual cemetery. So we had already been sucked in and had already done the research. I found a guy in Quebec who ran a huge web site totally devoted to the phenomena of the Danse Macabre. But like I say, Pooler needs to talk. He must say these things again if for no other reason than to hear their syllables - in whatever language the situation allows. So even though Slag and I had already been there we were going to have to go again and this time see something else that we hadn’t yet seen. Either because we missed it or we couldn’t decode it when we saw it.

It was during the days of Spinoza and the triumph of Atelierbraun as a background color that the Tritone became accepted in music. The Baroque. The Classical. Composers began to use it for what it does: tension/release. Liszt used it to paint an aural picture of Hell in his Dante Sonata. It was Saint-Saëns, however, who Truly Gave the Devil his Due. In his Symphonic Tone Poem: Danse Macabre Op 40, Saint-Saëns sets to music a scene in a popular poem: Midnight, All Hallows Eve, in an ancient Cemetery, Death plays his fiddle which has the power to rouse the dead from their graves for a night of dancing & orgy. Scordatura! The top string is tuned down a half step which creates the Tritone with the open A string. Death himself playing the Diabolus in Musica and letting out the Devil. Paris loved it; Saint-Saëns once staged the symphony in the Parisian Catacombs among the bones of 4 Million of those gone before. The Symphony has been used recently as background Muzak for the TV series: Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Disney used it in a Hansel and Gretel scene staring Mickey and Minnie Mouse. The repeating Coda of the Poem which Saint-Saëns built Op 40 around goes: "Zig, zig, zig . . . " It is illuminating that Zig-Zig is French argot for Sex. Freud nods from the grave . . .
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