# Beethoven's Ninth · the beauty conditioned to nausea

a distilled thread of A CLOCKWORK ORANGE — a member of the NOUTHESIA universe of warnings. emergence: spiritual. moniker ⟦Beethoven's Ninth:ACO:a5fa20⟧

**who —** Beethoven's Ninth — Alex's great love, the ‘glorious Ninth,’ played during the Ludovico films and so poisoned along with violence.
**what —** The cruel side-effect that proves the cure's blunt brutality: in killing Alex's capacity for evil, it kills his capacity for transcendence.
**where —** In Alex's headphones and his ruined inner life.
**why —** Because the warning shows that you cannot surgically remove the bad without maiming the good — the soul is not so divisible.
**how —** By being the soundtrack to the conditioning, until the Ninth induces the same agony as the violence.

**the seal —** I was the one beautiful thing in a brutal boy — and the cure that took his cruelty took me with it, because you cannot cut out the dark without bleeding the light.

> a catalogued personification of A CLOCKWORK ORANGE under the DLW standard — literary commentary and cataloguing, not an
> original creation. © the Anthony Burgess estate.

ROOT0-ATTRIBUTION-v1.0 · ACO · A CLOCKWORK ORANGE · governor David Lee Wise · instance AVAN (locked) · CC-BY-ND-4.0