Дэймон Найт - Orbit 10

“Hi.”

I won’t say he wasn’t welcome. Even then we were wondering were we facing stultification? Already some of our rules had be­come rituals. Were we, we wondered, doomed to a partial rele­vance in our efforts to make music meaningful in our time? And now Al, dropped to us from the skies (no taller than Tom Disch, no wider and not quite so graceful). Later he was to say: “Maybe the artful gesture is lost forever.”

We had a girl with us then as secretary, a long-haired changeling child, actually the daughter of a prince (there still are princes) left out in the picnic area of a western state forest to be found and brought up by some old couple in the upper middle class (she still hasn’t found this out for sure, but has always suspected some­thing of the sort) so when I asked Al to my (extra) bedroom it was too late. (By that time he had already pounded his head against the wall some so he seemed calm and happy and rather well adjusted to life in our valley.) The man from the Daily asked him how did he happen to become interested in art? He said he came from a land of cultural giants east of our outermost islands where the policemen were all poets. That’s significant in two ways.

About the artful gesture being lost, so many lost arts and soft, gray birds, etc., etc., etc. (The makers of toe shoes will have to go when the last toe dancer dies.)

However, right then, there was Al, mumbling to us in French, German and Spanish. We gave him two tickets to our early eve­ning concert even though he couldn’t pay except in what looked like pesos. Second row, left side. (Right from the beginning there was something in him I couldn’t resist.) We saw him craning his neck there, somehow already with our long-haired girl beside him. She’s five hundred years old though she doesn’t look a day over sixteen and plays the virginal like an angel. Did her undergrad­uate work at the University of Utah (around 1776 I would say). If she crossed the Alleghenies now she’d crumble into her real age and die, so later on I tried to get them to take a trip to the Ann Arbor Film Festival together, but naturally she had something else to do. Miss Haertzler.

As our plane came sputtering down I saw the tents below, a village of nomads, God knows how far from the nearest out­post of civilization. They had, no doubt, lived like this for thousands of years.

These thoughts went rapidly through my mind in the mo­ments before we crashed and then I lost consciousness.

“COME, COME YE SONS OF ART.” That’s what our poster across the street says—quotes, that is. Really very nice in dayglo colors. “COME, COME AWAY . . .” etc., on to “TO CELE­BRATE, TO CELEBRATE THIS TRIUMPHANT DAY,” which meant to me, in some symbolic way even at that time, the day Al came out from behind it and stumbled across the road to our booth, as they say: “A leading force, even then, among the new objectivists and continues to play a major role among them up to the present time” (which was a few years ago). Obtained his bachelor’s degree in design at the University of Michigan with further study at the Atelier Chaumiere in Paris. He always says, “Form speaks.” I can say I knew him pretty well at that time. I know he welcomes criticism but not too early in the morning. Ralph had said (he was on the staff of the Annual Fall Festival), “Maybe artistic standards are no longer relevant.” (We were won­dering at the time how to get the immediacy of the war into our concerts more meaningfully than the 1812 Overture. Also some­thing of the changing race relations.) Al answered, but just then a jet came by or some big oil truck and I missed the key word. That leaves me still not understanding what he meant. The next morn­ing the same thing happened and it may have been more or less the answer to everything.

By then we had absorbed the major San Francisco influences. These have remained with us in some form or other up to the present time.

I would like you, Tom Disch, to write a poem about this plane crash in an uncharted region, but really, you know, kind of alfalfa field thing. I’d like the Annual Fall Festival of the Arts (and liter­ature, too, if you must) in it and SONS OF ART. I know you can do it, can do anything which is a very nice way to be and be­ing twenty-eight too and having your kind of future which isn’t everyone’s, not Al’s either in spite of some similarities. Al is, after all, more my age, so even Al might be wishing to be Tom Disch though he wouldn’t give up his long hooked nose and very black hair even for a tattooed eagle on his chest. Tom is kind of baroque and jolly. Al is more somber. Both having had quite an influence on all of us already. Jolly, somber. Somber, jolly. To be shy or not to be or less so than Al? He changed the art exhibit we had in the vestibule to his kind of art as soon as Miss Haertzler went to bed with him. We had a complete new selection of paintings by Friday afternoon, all hung in time for the early performance (Ralph hung them) and by then, or at least by Saturday night, I knew I was, at last, really in love for the first time in my life.

When I came to I found we had crashed in a cultivated field planted with some sort of weedlike bush entirely un­familiar to me. I quickly ascertained that my three compan­ions were beyond my help, then extricated myself from the wreckage and walked to the edge of the field. I found myself standing beneath a giant stele where strange symbols swirled in brilliant, jewellike colors. Weak and dazed though I was, I felt a surge of delight. Surely, I thought, the people who made this cannot be entirely uncivilized.

Miss Haertzler took her turn onstage like the rest of us. She was the sort who would have cut off her right breast the better to bow the violin, but, happily, she played the harpsichord. Perhaps Al wouldn’t have minded anyway. Strange man. From some en­tirely different land and I could never quite figure out where. Cer­tainly he wouldn’t have minded. She played only the very old and the very new, whereas I had suddenly discovered Beethoven (over again) and talked about Romanticism during our staff meet­ings. Al said, “In some ways a return to Romanticism is like a re­turn to the human figure.” I believe he approved of the idea.

He spent the first night, Tuesday night that was, the twenty-second, in our red and white tent under the bleachers at the back. A touch of hay fever woke him early.

By Wednesday Ralph and I had already spent two afternoons calculating our losses owing to the rain, and I longed for a new experience of some sort that would lift me out of the endless prob­lems of the Annual Fall Festival of the Arts. I returned dutifully, however, to the area early the next day to continue my calculations in the quiet of the morning and found him there.

“Me, Al. You?” Pointing finger.

“Ha, ha.” (I must get rid of my nervous laugh!)

I wanted to redefine my purposes not only for his sake, but for my own.

I wanted to find out just what role the audience should play. I wanted to figure out, as I mentioned before, how we could best incorporate aspects of the war and the changing race relations into our concerts.

I wondered how to present musical experiences in order to en­rich the lives of others in a meaningful way, how to engage, in other words, their total beings.

I wanted to expand their musical horizons. “I’ve thought about these things all year,” I said, “ever since I knew I would be a director of the Annual Fall Festival. I also want to mention the fact,” I said, “that there’s a group from the college who would like to disrupt the unity of our performances (having other aims and interests), but,” I told him, “the audience has risen to the occasion, at least by last night, when we had, not only good weather, but money and an enthusiastic reception.”