Eric Knickerbocker
September 23, 2005

A Comparatively Tall Tale

My most engaging qualities have never included punctuality for appointments, not because I intend to be flagrant, but because procrastination so easily becomes a way of life, a way of trying to stave off the steady onslaught of time for just a moment longer in a world in which the cares of life never truly end until at last our time on earth has run its course and we stand again naked before our Maker. My arrival to Friday’s “Knowledge and Reality” class—in “simple” terms, a course consisting of epistemology and metaphysics—was no exception. Now I like philosophy and always have, even as a wee “wittle” one with my thousand-and-one questions over half again as many topics. So, a bead of sweat trickling down my neck (as the seasons have yet to fully shift to Autumn), I opened the door to “Knowledge and Reality”—but I never had a chance to sit down and stay awhile. It seems Professor Bert Helm had a trip planned to the Meyer Library where, at the touch of a button, reference books ride on electronic tracks in the basement and elsewhere students are sleeping on couches tucked away in corners and other out-of-the-way places. However, it was not the basement Helm had in mind: it was the balcony.

A hundred days I have heard the bells tolling high above as I scampered across campus; a hundred days they have told me, “Ring a ding, you are late; ring a dong, you are ever and always running, running late: dong! dong! dong!” A hundred days I have heard the bells without really hearing; a hundred days I have a hundred thoughts about a hundred things fragmenting me in a hundred directions, each one trying to scramble over, under, or between all the others and no single one winning, the collective teaming mass of these biochemical messages weighing me down, down, down, as a hundred days I scamper across campus, always running: ever and always running late.

We had been reading of bells in our book about time; how a set of rings is called a “change” and a set of changes a “peal.” We learned that “[t]hree bells can ring a peal of 6 changes; five bells, 120 changes; twelve bells, a peal of 479,001,600 changes,” and that regarding these twelve bells with their 479,001,600 changes, it “would take forty years of continuous ringing” to exhaust the cycle “with no change ever repeated.”[1] The book said a few things more about the Mayas and Plato and cosmic melodies and then left the topic of bells altogether to discuss the music of language. All forms of beauty, the book said, represent ways in which we try to stop time and secure permanence; beautiful things are forms we would wish to capture and perpetuate; ugly things are forms we would wish to capture and eradicate, at least on the level of consciousness. Ultimately, the book said, the search for beauty is the search for eternity, albeit cloaked in iridescent hues. Thus, the good, the true, and the beautiful—to say nothing of the real—is a quest for permanence in an impermanent world: a search for the timeless in the temporal.

Dr. B. Helm faulted the book for its failure to say more of the bells, their original importation from China, and their role in bringing not only a sense of time, but of eternity as well. Mechanical clock faces for public display, he said, are the evolution of bells, for once bells found their voice in Europe, they called not only the faithful to penitence but the peasant and farmer and family to festivities and marked the hour in the absence of timepieces. Bell towers, however, became feats of architectural engineering: the larger the village, the higher the tower; the higher the tower, the bigger and more numerous the bells; the bigger and more numerous the bells, the more sophisticated the system of ropes and pulleys and levers. These ropes and pulleys and levers came, in time, [2] to be hooked up to hands on circular faces pointing to Roman numerals numbered I through XII; the bells and the hands together told the story of time even as they pointed to a timeless order in which God controlled the working of the world. During the Great Plague and other such times of disaster, the bells tolled continuously, telling of the transcendence of God immanent within the world: suggesting that there was ultimate order in the seeming disorder and that one’s soul was secure no matter how lustfully Death might flash his bone-white smile.

The bells were still ringing in 1864, their message untarnished by the ravages of time, when Henry Wadsworth Longfellow penned the immortal verse “I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day,” bringing assurance of God’s providence during a time in which men ran other men through in the streets. All of the author’s objections—who “in despair” had “bow’d his head” (for “There is no peace on earth,” he’d said)—were overruled by the “belfries of all Christendom”:

Then pealed the bells more loud and deep:

“God is not dead, nor doth He sleep;

The wrong shall fail, the right prevail,

With peace on earth, good will to men.”

High above in the heavens, the bells not only marked the hour, but they marked communal rites of passage; as surely as they told of the birth, life, and death of God’s Son and His triumph over the grave, they told of christenings, weddings, funerals and the sending away of sons. And of the sons sent away, some of them sailed on ships where the bells told of the hour and the watch and the nature and rank of the dignitaries that arrived on occasion: of a major, colonel, lieutenant colonel, or any other up and down the rank of badges and honors and titles.

The bells of old told people when to rise and when to rest, when to work and when to refrain from working, when to eat and when to return to their duties. Spring, summer, winter, fall, the bells in the belfries marked the rituals of time. They said when it was six in the morning or six in the evening, when it was noon and when it was night, the candles soon after extinguished and the covers pulled down as tired bodies curled up, soon traversing uncharted terrain far above and beyond the reach of the workaday world, perhaps through lands far away shining where bell towers mark time in celestial cities of light.

There was no bell, however, that sent me to bed last night nor did the sound that woke me this morning seem very belle-like, as the French describe all things feminine and beautiful. So, scurrying along with my hundred different thoughts about a hundred different things and Fraser’s book in hand, I made it to “Knowledge and Reality” at 11:03, the red digital numbers as impolite as the sound of the alarm to which I arose, this world of alarms and red digital numbers so seemingly far removed from the bells of bell towers and the numerical clocks that soon after emerged from them. I arrived, as I said, at 11:03, but I never sat down. Professor Bert Helm had bells on the brain and a fellow student whose face is a frequent in the halls of the philosophy department had arranged for just such a carillon encounter. And so, out the door through which I had so recently scrambled, along the sidewalk, across the street in front of Strong Hall, and on to Meyer Library we ambled, not to the basement bursting with books on electrified tracks, but to the balcony high above caged in mesh to keep the songbirds from nesting—and presumably from pooping—on the forty-eight bells.

We entered the library in the usual way, climbing the stairs to the third floor before entering through a cage metal door and onto narrow stairs somewhat precariously threading their way up to a small room in which was seated, not a hunchback as class member Daniel R. Newell anticipated with notorious drollery, but a petite and rather pretty woman perhaps in her forties, pounding on rows of batons with the bottoms of small bunched fists. We soon learned that she struck the levers in this way because if she did not drop her fist directly down on top of them—if her fists should even so much as slide off as they fell—brutish blisters might then soon appear. As a further feat of skill, to sound two bells as one, the lower pitch—and thus the heavier bell and accompanying clapper—had to be started on its trajectory first so that the two notes would then ring out in unison. Unlike an organ or a piano, there were no foot pedals to mute or sustain the sound: whatever variance there was to be had, it was all in the power of bunched fists pounding levers. However, this is not to say that there were no foot pedals of any sort, for far below the rows of treble-bell batons was indeed a row of pedals at her feet that sounded those somber bass bells hung lowest and resounding loudest (a bit like a contemporary drum kit).

In a way, she almost looked like a marionette, no strings on her fingers and toes of course, but rather the zipping out of fingers and toes to effectively strike the strings that sound the bells: a waiflike foot darting out to sound a bass note way low, a small fist flung far to pound a treble note from its home on high: the higher the note, the accordingly higher the altitude from which the bell is suspended. On cold days, she said, in which the windows were closed, she could not hear the bells above at all, only the clacking of the batons amplified by the sparseness of a room every bit as pocket-sized as its pianist. (We were bunched up here and tucked in there and in general crammed all ’round her—one big happy philosophic family stuffed in a tiny room atop a belfry, the lady of the tower announcing the joyous occasion to the earth with her music in the sky.)[3]

Two by two and only two at one time, we climbed the steps—essentially a skeletal steel stepladder bolted in place—up into the small hole in the ceiling that led to the bells themselves. Surely this opening was able to be closed, for upon our entrance to the world of solid singing bronze, we found ourselves peering out of heavy-gauge wire that formed so many three-quarter-inch diamonds separating us and the almost certain death waiting patiently six or more stories below on the concrete steps. If it were raining or snowing, water could easily stream through the mesh and down the hole in the ceiling and on a day shrouded in mist, the fog could roll in and down and rub its back on the window-panes below as the bells tolled “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.”

All of bells were solidly secured—only their clappers move—and the biggest, baddest bell of them all was right at the foot of the stair: none other than C3, measuring five feet one and a half inches in diameter and weighing 5,894 pounds.[4] When my turn came, up the rungs and into the belfry I went, watching entranced and just a bit deafly as the melody unfolded just mere inches and feet above my head. The bells were no longer singing “Ring a ding, you are late,” but were instead inviting me to widen new eyes and see, inviting me to open new ears and hear.

Soon enough I climbed down, and, not long after, Dr. Helm (who as many of you know is neither exactly young nor exactly short) unfolded his lanky frame up the ladder to have a peek for himself. Now of course, the first bell that greeted him was the first bell that greeted us all: the first bell that greeted him was C3, the biggest and baddest and bassiest and it was the very bell that the organist—if we may call her such[5]—chose to punctuate the last sentence of her melody, ending, as it were, on an exclamation point. Now I do not know what the bells were singing to Dr. Helm as he peered up into the belfry, but I suspect that after that little encounter, whatever else they were saying, his bells were going bong. And as for our soloist, a tiny smile played on the corner of her lips, suggesting a certain mischief that even musicians in the sky betray from time to time. What is more, after his somewhat laborious descent—for his knees did not want to conform to the constraints of the narrow ladder—the tiny smile on the corner of Dr. Helm’s lips suggested that he caught something of the joke as well. As for the rest of us, whether our smiles were slight or sizable, there was something a bit whimsical in the rarefied air, a wisp of humor the ordinary world of mortals below evidently had yet to catch.

Our musical guide explained that once upon a time, in the first towers of this sort, it took many mighty men to ring a single change: men who not only had to pull heavy levers down but push them back up again. While the newer systems still require forcefulness in the form of fists, they stand in tribute to years of technical innovations that accomplish a great deal above with comparatively little effort below; for example, in the case of the Missouri State belfry, 32,660 pounds[6] worth of bells are playable by the fists of a woman little taller than five feet in height. The only automated aspect (as is common with carillons) is the striking of the bells on the quarter hour to the Westminster chimes, timed in such a way that the bell within the change marking the hour rings out precisely on the hour or its increment. In other words, the bells start ringing seconds before the hour so that the decisive bell in the cadence falls exactly as it ought.

Though the bells themselves never go out of tune, small brass counterweights on the cables that lead out of the “lever board”[7] and up into the belfry can be adjusted to accommodate for atmospheric factors. These make minute adjustments in the positioning of the clapper in relation to the striking surface.

The Missouri State bells span a four-octave range, from our big C3 friend to the tiny chromatic-C7, omitting only the C#3 for reasons unbeknownst to moi.[8] Further, the higher the pitch, the more tin is added to create a more brilliant tone (for as you may well recall from your previous store of knowledge, bronze is a mixture of tin, copper, and trace amounts of lead); the low C3 contains about twenty percent tin whereas the tin in the chromatic-C7 has been increased to about twenty-five percent. All forty-eight bells are proudly inscribed with Eijsbouts Astensis me Fecit anno MMI, which translates to “[The Royal] Eijsbouts at Asten [in the Netherlands] made me in the year 2001”; the largest and lowest ten bells are also inscribed with the names of Meyer family members in honor of their patronage in donating the necessary funds for the project.[9]

Our carillon hostess told us a few more tales of bell ringers being shot by the Germans and their bells captured to make cannon fodder and how one ship owner could not bear the thought of the bells of his city being used against him and purposely sank his own ship rather than commit such treachery; these bells have since been recovered and now reside in museums somewhere out there in the wide world (and presumably in Europe). Before departing, we were given the opportunity to ring the bells ourselves, a few in the class feeling adventurous and ringing the “wrong” bell, perhaps confusing the unsuspecting student below who might have wondered if the bell tower had become momentarily possessed. I thought to ring a bell myself and then thought better of it, merely testing the baton to see how much strength it might require and then walking away in the unbroken silence. Had I played upon my truest whims, I would have sounded a three-note cadence akin to the music I often hear in my head.

Our adventure, like all such moments in time, came to a close, and we all, one large household of surrogate members, tromped single file back down the narrow stairs, through the metal casing, and again into the world where the books in the basement slide on electronic tracks and students lie stretched out and snoozing on out-of-the-way couches.

The last picture that framed our memory was the sight of a sleeping couple, a man and woman lying face to face on the narrow couch, tightly drawn together in the sanctuary of each others arms, oblivious for a few precious moments to the world of time with all of its many pressures and deadlines and never-ending demands, oblivious to the philosophy students feeling surreal as they tiptoed past, oblivious even to the bells high above their heads playing a melody perhaps first heard a millennium or more ago. There was something at once both very ancient and very sacred about the scene: the sleepers a picture of the human race with all of its hopes, dreams, and desires, the bells a symbol of time and eternity, and we but shadows silently gliding past.

Leaving the pair to their sacred repose and the bells to their cage-wire belfry, we walked out blinking into the sun and parted ways, my classmates to wherever my classmates go in this wide world of ours and me back into the world of time in which I am forever running late, scampering down the sidewalk as the bells high above chime “Ring a ding, you are late; ring a dong, you are ever and always running, running late: dong! dong! dong!” The only difference is this time I can almost fancy the deep-throated C3 nodding slightly, a tiny smile playing upon the corner of its big bronze lip.

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Quick facts: Of all the musical instruments in the world, the carillon is the largest, consisting of a minimum of twenty-three bells. Australia has only two carillons in the entire country; the other (not mentioned in the photo credits) is at the University of Sidney. MSU has one of only two carillons in Missouri: the other is at Concordia Seminary in St. Louis with forty-nine bells—presumably, they have the missing C#3 in their collection. All of the carillons in the world are listed at http://www.carillon.org/carillon/car_ame.htm country by country including the number of bells that comprise them. Africa has only one carillon; Asia only two. There are over a hundred and sixty carillons in the United States and even more spread out over the various European nations.