“Quinte Duloop,” he said. “Really?” Slag and I just shrugged. Yes, really.

“Do you know what you’ve done?” he asked. His voice was low and controlled, far too controlled for our good and the both of us were mentally at least backing away.

“Honest to god . . .” I began, but he was shaking his head slowly, very slowly, and I broke off my thought and let my voice trail into silence. Slag shrugged again and the both of us tried to grin.

“Wolf Fifth,” he shook his head. Wolf Fifth, he repeated and the words hung in the cabin between us.

We had certainly meant no harm. No harm to anyone; not to Pooler, nor Kenny La Roche, nor even to Barber Perfect - though there are times when we feel ambivalent about Barber’s well-being. Besides, we had thought that we were in the realm of a simple superstition and yes we know that such things are not so simple to Kenny and his Krew. But Slag and I are modern men and we live in a postmodern world, a place where a valueless science has fairly measured such “superstitions” into the dull limbo of facts and not-facts. In such a place you cannot raise the devil thru an augmented fourth or a diminished fifth. In our world we no longer believe that Satan can hide in the Tritone in music.

“Wolf fuckin’ Fifth,” he said for the third time. “Would you like to meet him?” Slag and I were both shaking our heads but it was too late. Pooler stood up from where he had been seated in front of Slag’s fireplace and without another word he had loosed the belt of his jeans and had dropped his pants to the floor. He wore no underwear so in no longer an interval than the Diabolus in Musica itself he was standing crotch-naked in front of us and had grasped the ample bulge of his dick and pulled it out of the way so that he could lift up his testicles and show them to us.

“Jesus!” Slag said while I winced. There was only one - one nut in the sack. One ball. Pooler Jones was a one-nutted man & where the other nut would have hung his fingers traced out for us a long blue scar which looked ancient. For a moment I thought he was going to pull a Thomas-the-Doubter and have us each put our hands on the wound but this was not a homoerotic scene and neither was it a tableau of renewed faith in the miraculous.

“Ecce homo,” he whispered, "you know him now as Wolf Fifth. A.K.A. Quinte du Loup. But we knew him as Hyacinth Boboni when he did this.” Put it away, we were praying to ourselves. Just pick up your jeans and put it away.

“But why . . .” Slag started.

“Because in my world they were everywhere and in everything. They were especially in all things sensory. In color, in light itself and in the darkness, in the way seasons change, in the milk of your animals, in words, in names, in ill winds and in belle-fortuna - but also in music, most assuredly in music. Here - we have them nailed up in heaven or chained in hell where neither of them can escape so you don’t know what it was to have them always with us, always around us, always lurking in every intention, in every gesture, in every breeze.”

Which was true. We didn’t know them personally anymore at all - except for the ‘lil’baby Jesus freaks’ who could see them in Taco drippings and in oil stains on bathroom walls in Automotive Parts stores in Modesto, Texas. Or who gathered around weeping statues & bleeding figurines. You could have a personal relationship with Jesus and/or his brother Satan as a projected phenomena - as a Rorschach - but at our end of the 20th century that was about as close as you were likely to get. All it all it was a crisis in Hermeneutics because oil stains don’t have much to say directly and therefore it would take a leap of intuitive interpretation to figure out why god or the devil was appearing to you from the mute perspective of a smudge. How exactly should rusty tears be decoded? In our age the powers had gone iconic, gestural, and could only point and snarl. So Pooler was right. We didn’t know what it would be like to have god and his hairy asshole Satan hanging around all day and blathering nonstop. We no longer lived under the correspondences of the levels of the heavens. We no longer spoke color & wind, no longer heard the glory or the horror in simple plainchant. If the devil was in the music he was too well camoed-in for modern man to feel his pulse, his beat.

“You know what it does?” We didn’t so we knew we’d have to listen like school children while he explained. The diabolus in musica was a medieval term for the tritone - augmented fourth or diminished fifth - effectively it was a divisor which split the octave into two equal parts C and F sharp. Expressed mathematically the diabolus revealed a discrepancy between the idealized Mean Tone Scale where the C:E’ ration is defined to be exactly 5 instead of the expected (3/2)4 = 5.0625. In the hands of a skilled musician this discrepancy could be manipulated to exhibit a startling tonal picture. Pooler said that the diabolus in musica, also called the Wolf Fifth, or a Quinte-du-Loup, was an aural analogy to the visual problem of the Necker Cube - the 3D image of a cube where when you look at it the walls of the cube oscillate between the two possible & logical cubes which reside within the one structure. You can’t stop your mind from transposing the two cubes and that’s the point - at first it looks as if the near wall of the cube is proceeding towards and under the perspective of the viewer and then suddenly that image pops and is at once replaced by the image of another cube whose near wall is also proceeding towards the viewer but this time it seems aimed over the observer’s line-of-site. The first cube’s near-wall is now the rear-wall of the second cube. It’s all one cube remember and the entire thing is an optical illusion which depends on the human mind’s ability to abstract order from any phenomena - even an oil stain - and upon that mind’s insistence that two or more logical orders cannot simultaneously exist within one structure. Nature has not prepared us to deal lightly with the ambiguous. We are a single-truth mentality existing in a cosmos which like the Necker Cube has more dimensional realities than our minds can process at once. In music this problem presents itself as a kind of cacophony - a dissonance - which as you listen resolves itself into an unexpected harmony - in skillful hands that is. Order comes out of Chaos. But that’s our perspective - the order and the chaos are one and exist at once within each other - not alongside each other. That’s the key: they are each other. They are uroboric and Gnostic. Noise and signal at once. Certainty and doubt with each other in their mouths.

“Great,” Pooler sneered - he was still upset and still absently stroking the scar on his maimed testicle, “Skippy has a memory to share with us.”

It was in Paris two years ago. It was Christmas and I was at the Solemn High Mass at Notre-Dame, Kilometer Zero, a mass served by Cardinal Jean-Marie Lustiger, the Archbishop of Paris and a small coven of other lesser priests. The program called for “Grégorien, Nöels populaires, Messe de Mozart.” There were two choirs and two organs - one for the choirs and the other was the Grand Organ, the church-stuffer and world-filler, under the mad hands of Olivier Latry. It’s the best show in Paris on Christmas. It’s the oldest continuing act in France. No other ceremony as old continues to today: no opera, no football rivalry, no tournament or circus of any type. No coronation ritual has survived the end of the kings. No Feast of Fools, nothing is as old as the big show at the Nativity under the big-top of Notre-Dame de Paris. So it was cool and I had a good seat.

Since I don’t know the Mozart Mass well enough to find a diabolus lurking within his music and since I believe that the Quinte-du-Loup is a quickly passing moment in the melody, I cannot at all claim that I heard him. Satan. And that it was the devil who I heard wailing at the news of the Nativity. But the organ movements, as the Mass itself, are elaborate but ordinary. And by ordinary I mean harmonious, melodious, and predictable. Beautiful things - but models of order. So it was great music but it was all very New Age and drifty like ambient music and Pink Floyd without the Angst. But then suddenly towards the end - over the hump - past the Consecration and Communion but before the Ita Missa Est, you were suddenly aware that the Grand Organ had broken loose and was running free from Olivier Latry. It was NOISE. It was disorder. It was liquid fucking doubt. There was a devil in the goddamn music and he was waving his cold dick around in the temple of god. One of those stone gargoyles had ripped himself off the wall and was walking up the nave towards the altar. Everyone felt it. People were slack-jawed and gawking. All the tourists around the edges quit popping off flashbulbs. The entire volume of the cathedral was filled with cacophonous noise as Olivier Latry had a spasmodic, twitching, major grand-mal event and was dying as he randomly punched out keys & bellows on the Big Organ.

You could feel the sound all over your body and all over the congregation’s body at once and at one. It was so oppressive that its pressure had filled the room like a gas and had lost us each within the diffusion. Mr. Satan just picked us apart. Deep, deep, booming disorder had raped us like a solvent and there was no where to go, no direction. We had lost our aim. We had become arrows loosed at the void.

And then finally and just as suddenly — seemingly out of nowhere — just as the crowd had merged to the mob stage and each of us could feel that everyone was having one thought: someone should go up there; someone should go up and kill Olivier Latry to end his aperiodic misery! Just then it ended and the beast was back in his chains. Sweet order and chords which swelled and resolved exactly as you know they should. But wait. That’s not the point. That’s not really what happened at all. As soon as you could sense the musical structure again there was a simultaneous realization that the structure had never been violated at all. All thru the noise the Grand Organ was still on the attractor.; he was still on a course. The man had fucked with our minds. He had bifurcated onto a parallel branch of the order and was now playing what was possible and not just what was necessary. Like a Necker Cube the music had taken advantage of the mind’s disability to entertain two solutions to a single problem without plunging itself into a chasm of doubt. And like a Necker Cube it had used indecision as a bridge to a higher dimension.

“Exactly,” said Pooler, who looked pleased at my example, “and that’s the bridge the Inquisition stakes out and watches.”

“Doubt is the devil,” Slag said and you could see the relief which spread across his face - and mine - as Pooler Jones dropped his ample dick and picked up his jeans. He and The Captain were both hung like mules but there is something about knowing that a man’s dick is 900 years old which ends the comparison. Put it away.

“I’ll tell you who the devil is. At least who the devil is for Kenny and Me, I can’t talk for Barber Perfect. Hyacinth Boboni is the devil.” Indeed. And we had conjured him, Slag and I. We found him on the Internet. On the WWW. I had read a review of the Rock group Slayer’s new album/project called Diabolus in Musica and I went on line to find out more. I used Alta Vista as a search engine and came up with a few hundred hits. Most of them were documents which concerned Slayer but a handful were sites from music encyclopedias and oddly enough - at that time - a few were from Vatican & religious sources. Slag and I opened them.

In the medieval world view, as Pooler was explaining and as we have so often heard it parsed from Kenny La Roche, god and his problem - the devil - really were everywhere and in everything. Equal measures in most cases. The world was a dangerous place which had to be decoded and deciphered. Appearances were only surfaces and right beneath would always dwell its opposite. Everything was a symbol and pointed to something else beyond itself. Living was an act of narrative. The universe was a semiotic event first and a physical thing only after. Things like music were especially dangerous because of music’s power to liberate emotions and to embody great truths about the design of god’s nature. The mind of the middle ages was steeped in Pythagorean correspondences between the natural intervals of mathematics and those of music. Melody was a geometry and all of geometry was a gnosis which served and showed god’s thoughts. God was order and hierarchy and predictable sequences. God was the set of all known orders. A kind of Symphony.