I still dream of Orgonon

For Bollywood, visual depiction of the monsoon is largely a question of extremes. On one hand are the perfectly engineered montages of sensual excess: the uninhibited, virginal child-of-nature dancing in the rain (Aishwarya Rai in Guru), the seductress inviting the hero to shed his sombre chastity (Raveena Tandon in  Mohra ), or the entire cast rain-dancing with the great unwashed masses (in Bollywood, this means street urchins), hinting towards the monsoon's role in nation-building (Shah Rukh Khan, Karisma Kapoor and Madhuri Dixit in Dil Toh Pagal Hai). On the other hand are the poverty porn classics like ‘Allah Megh De Paani De’ (Lord, bless us with rain), a Bengali folk song used by SD Burman in the Vijay Anand classic  Guide ; or that shot in Ashutosh Gowariker’s  Lagaan , where a thousand smiles are wiped off in choreographed unison, as the villagers see rainclouds making way for the unforgiving Champaner sun.

Allow me to suggest a surreal alternative to the aforementioned scene: the peasants frown and head back to their huts. Six of them wheel out a ginormous machine and point it squarely at the sun. The machine whirs into action and blasts a blue jet of energy into the sky, attracting a group of fluffy clouds, thick with rain. Lightning cracks its whip, the faucet overhead opens, drenching everyone in sight. Everybody goes home nonchalantly, nodding at the guys operating the machine. Easy peasy.

The music video for Kate Bush’s 1985 song ‘Cloudbusting’ (from the album  Hounds of Love ) features a similar plotline. A young boy (played by a surprisingly androgynous-looking Bush) helps his scientist father (an earnest Donald Sutherland) set up a complicated-looking machine in absolute secrecy on their farmhouse. The boy is very close to his father and clearly idolises him. Meanwhile, a group of menacing government officials approach the house. Before they can arrest the scientist and trash his laboratory, however, he urges his son to switch on the machine, which he does. Even as the scientist is led away, he watches as the skies open up.

What will really stump you is the fact that this video, directed by Julian Doyle and conceived by Bush and Terry Gilliam, is based entirely on facts, except for the climactic rain-catching, of course. The scientist was Austrian psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich (1897-1957) and the boy was his son Peter, who would go on to write a memoir called The Book of Dreams , which Bush and Gilliam drew upon.

On reading the book, Bush had been moved enough to write and produce a song around it. The very first line of the song, backed by a muscular cello riff and lush with that ethereal, inimitable Bush delivery, goes “I still dream of Orgonon”.

‘Orgonon’ was the name of Reich’s 175-acre home, laboratory and research centre. He lived there after moving to Maine in 1950. It was named after his most controversial claim: a cosmic form of energy that Reich called ‘orgone’. It was an extrapolation of Freud’s concept of the libido; Reich believed that every neurotic patient in the world could be cured if they reached their full ‘orgastic potential’, that is, surrendered themselves utterly to the throes of orgasm. To that end, Reich developed machines called ‘orgone accumulators’ or ‘orgasmatrons’, meant to harness the orgone.

The ‘sexual revolution’ that Reich wanted to bring about would find takers during the 1968 student revolts of Paris and Berlin; protestors threw copies of Reich’s The Mass Psychology of Fascism at the police. This moment, along with Reich’s several eccentric, blatantly illegal and unethical experiments are documented by Christopher Turner in his 2011 non-fiction work Adventures in the Orgasmatron .

The first full-body orgasmatrons were built in the early ’40s, and after that, it was natural that Reich set his sights higher, attempting to control and harness the orgone of the elements. He designed and built machines called ‘cloudbusters’ (after which Bush named her song), which could supposedly make rain by manipulating the orgone of the atmosphere. It is important to note the symbolic parallels between the human and non-human orgone here: the bursting of the rainclouds was, in Reich’s eyes, analogous to sexual release. Not particularly subtle, it must be admitted. Even Vivek Agnihotri, maker of so-bad-it’s-hilarious movies like Buddha in a Traffic Jam and Chocolate , understands this analogy. In Chocolate , Sushma Reddy’s character is called Monsoon Iyer, one suspects, just so Anil Kapoor can voice a dirt-cheap pun about “monsoon ki raat” (a monsoon night / a night with Monsoon).

Bush is a fiercely inventive songwriter, encyclopaedic in the range of her inspirations and allusions: it is difficult to imagine, for instance, any other major-league star singing the string of decimal digits for pi. ‘Cloudbusting’, with its rousing, soaring chants, its faux-military drum crescendos, and its thoughtful lyrics, proves to be an effective buffer against the otherwise undeniable despondence of Peter Reich’s story. A boy discovers, for the first time, the inevitable fallibility of a parent. Pushed into a corner by this revelation, the boy will believe anything to restore lost agency, even that his father made it rain.

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