Mark de Silva - Square Wave

Larent smiled. “Just listening.” Moto was right, of course. But he was dwelling on more than musical failures. Renna had been on the fence about him then, in school, and he was already in love with her. After that, they’d had their few years. Then not. Now, she might be back on that fence. Or else, he thought, what they had was all they ever would. It looked like a lot. It was a lot. But if nothing changed, it would shrink to a blip in the years to come.

“No, it’s fine,” Moto said. “Maybe she was listening too. Not to me, but just playing it all back in her head. I don’t think we actually talked about the show later. Anyway, Bundy did play another couple of songs, the opener off the first Tortoise record, and then ‘Dreams of Being King,’ which was, I’m remembering, the perfect summation of Dianogah. But none of that sticks in the mind like that first piece with Bundy.”

In the far corner, behind the gear, a young man with hair poking out beneath a logo-less baseball cap got up from a table and in one motion hopped over a couple of drums inverted on the floor. Their silver snares rattled from the Fahey. He flipped the power switch on the Korg; the speakers popped and the Fahey cut out. With the palm of his left hand he rocked the modulating wheel back and fingered a minor seventh with his right. The wheel drew the chord smoothly down a step to D minor. “Like that?” he yelled over the Korg’s pipe-organ tones. He let go of the wheel and the chord snapped back to E. The three at his table nodded vaguely as they swigged from dark bottles of beer.

While holding the chord he put his cap on the keyboard and leaned over the keys, brought his face close to them. His hair, three shades of brown distinguishable under the stage lights, fell over his face. He brought his head back up and rested the cap lightly on it, with the bill angled down over his forehead, obscuring his eyes.

Several long rows of buttons ran above the Korg’s keys. Above them was a narrow screen, as wide as the keyboard, flashing parametric data: pitch, amplitude, attack, decay, and such. He riffled through the presets and the chord showed itself protean, incarnated by turns in violins, in guitars, in trumpets, in piccolos, in vibes, in oboes, and finally, in tinny synth tones. The screen showed a timbral profile for each in green, broken down into a few dozen categories. The last preset displayed most simply. The graphs were smooth, the mathematics of the sound free of natural complications like the overtone series.

He blinked heavily and brought his left hand back to the keys, away from the buttons. In those planar tones, with his cap covering his eyes and his shoulders raised, he sounded the opening bars of Satie’s third Gymnopédie. The rendition was airless, free of heat or cold. But the score wouldn’t submit, not wholly, to the slightness of its dress. Gravity remained.

Larent studied the player’s hands, perhaps for a meaning of some sort. He ran his thumb across a broad knot in the wood of the table, pressing his finger into a divot.

“Ridiculous,” he said.

Moto laughed. “I don’t know,” he said. “Yes.”

“And still no drinks?” Larent asked.

They turned toward the doorway. There was no one.

The music ran its course.

Albert coten, anders jaikies, frank relleau, and Harold Kames — the four sat in a row. On one end was Coten, his cuffed flannels, tailored in gray-purple Super 150s, falling finely over his crossed legs. He sat up in his chair and pulled it imperceptibly forward before settling back. An old Monte-grappa cut across the blank legal pad in his lap. The ruby celluloid of the pen held the light, glowing as if lit from within.

Kames, at the other end, reset the sleeve of his blazer to a half-inch of his shirtsleeve. He fingered a cufflink as his watery gaze met the broad doors at the back of the auditorium. Relleau and Jaikies, sitting between the other two, only looked into the stage lights.

Men and women, middle aged and primly dressed, had filled most of the seats, except for the rows in front, which were occupied by younger men, mostly students wearing the off-duty uniform of the well bred: loafers, shaggy-dog sweaters, and button-downs with rumpled collars. Two generations of Halsley wealth.

The hundred odd seats, arranged in several tiers, were three-quarters full now, and the flow through the doors had slowed to a trickle. Kames stood and took the podium.

“Let’s begin, I think,” he said. “To start, then, a brief statement of tonight’s theme. My colleagues and I — some of you will know this — have been thinking through, over the last months, a few of the contrasts that give shape to political orders, social orders. Tonight we want to see if we can throw a bit of light on that between the mercantile and the martial. By mercantile we mean not the economic theory of that name so much as the broader orientation of the merchant toward life, and of societies that take the merchant’s outlook, if only implicitly, as the primary mode by which to apprehend the world. Societies that treat the merchant as offering a template for citizenship, you could say. In the same way, by martial we mean the outlook of the warrior — not only the brutish or rapacious conqueror, but equally, the defender, the guardian.

“Except for our revolutionary period, and not even then, really, this country has never known anything resembling a martial order, or its common descendant, the royal order, the earliest monarchs often being triumphant warlords themselves, if they are not backed by them. The martial and the noble, the royal, these are really one category.

“Now, to put it in the crudest, quickest way, one which I can only hope we will improve on tonight, the merchant’s life is built around a particular ethos, we can say, one that invests certain notions with special importance. Among these: exchangeability, trade, consumption, profit, calculation, consensus, negotiation, persuasion, dissimulation, connivance.

“The values of the noble are, as we said, molded by the demands of war. So we have the knights of Europe, the samurais of Japan, the kshatriyas of India. The appealing qualities first: courage, honor, loyalty in action. And then the less approachable ones, which are nonetheless bound up with the others: an acceptance of the necessity, and the permanent possibility, of violence; of the unequal distribution of virtue and wisdom among men; and of the reality of unexchangeability — of seeing some matters as musts, whatever the cost, personal or social, which you can call, in a language that will be familiar to our philosophers, the deontological limits on action and citizenship, ones that cannot be gainsaid or inputted into any broader moral calculus.

“This is much too simple, of course, but it gives the flavor, I hope, of what’s to come.” Kames looked back on the other three and lifted his brow. “Anything to add, then, just at the start? Surely I’ve muddled things. Albert, will you help?” There was mild laughter.

Coten put his hands on his thighs and cleared his throat. “Sure. My own training,” he said, still seated, “is in the philosophy of politics, as Harold’s is in law and history. I would just add the following. If — if — you think virtue and wisdom should have pride of place in our social decision-making, there is, and it’s distressing, there is no guarantee that decisions made that way will yield popular consent. The ‘wisdom of crowds’ is reassuring, and if you look hard enough you can find cases that seem to substantiate it. But there are too many negative results to sustain the idea. It just doesn’t look like the popular bears an inherent correspondence to the good. We take this as a truism in domains outside politics. In art, of course, but also in science. We don’t take polls to decide on the load-bearing capacities of bridge designs. We leave it to the people who know better. Should we assume politics must be different?