Nicholson Baker - Traveling Sprinkler

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ON MONDAY I woke up feeling dull and lost, as sometimes happens on Mondays, and I drove to Stockbridge, Massachusetts, where “The Sunken Cathedral” was first performed in the United States a little more than a hundred years ago, on July 26, 1910. The pianist was Walter Morse Rummel, a then famous songwriter who was the grandson of the inventor of the telegraph. Also on the program — I guess it was a long evening — were some Chopin pieces, some Couperin, some Handel, Rummel’s own piano sonata “To a Memory,” and two compositions by Edward MacDowell, “From a Wandering Iceberg” and “To the Sea.” Rummel was Debussy’s favorite pianist. Once Debussy wrote Rummel a praising letter, in his tiny, almost indecipherable handwriting, about a performance Rummel had given. “One doesn’t congratulate the sea for being more beautiful than cathedrals,” he said.

I got to Stockbridge at about noon, and after a lot of GPS’ing and driving around — always being careful to use my turn signal — I found the former Casino building where Rummel had played. In the twenties the building was moved to a quieter place out of town, and it’s now the main stage of the Berkshire Theatre Festival. It was designed by Stanford White. This was where the cathedral first submerged itself in the United States. I looked at the white building from the car for a while, parked near a young birch tree, and I ate a carrot and felt very little emotion. Then I climbed a set of steps to a permanently locked door. Its windows were covered with a layer of rubberized diffuser, painted black, as were the three large arched windows on the front façade. They wanted it dark inside. An abandoned wasps’ nest was tucked into the doorway’s lower left corner. I took some pictures and got back in the car. I considered putting on my headphones and listening again to Paul Jacobs play “The Sunken Cathedral,” to beef up the occasion, but the building had been moved, after all. You have to choose your sunken occasions carefully.

Instead I read an interview that Debussy gave to a woman from The New York Times that same summer of 1910, soon after he had himself first performed “The Sunken Cathedral” and three other of the preludes in Paris. Debussy, who was wearing a blue suit, left the Blüthner piano when the interviewer arrived and sat at his desk, which was immaculate except for a few ink stains on the blotter. The interviewer asked him how he composed. Debussy said that he really didn’t know how to explain it. He had to begin with a subject, he said. He concentrated on the subject for a while. “Gradually after these thoughts have simmered for a certain length of time music begins to centre around them, and I feel that I must give expression to the harmonies which haunt me. And then I work unceasingly.”

Did he always like music? the interviewer asked. Yes, he was always fond of music, he said, although he was no child prodigy. He didn’t always agree with what he was taught at the Conservatory, but he kept his opinions to himself — he wanted to graduate. He didn’t care for genres and classifications — he just wanted music to be beautiful. “Beauty in a woman — and in music — is a great deal, a very great deal.”

I banged the steering wheel. Right on, Claude! I kept reading. He said he couldn’t live up to the ideals he tried to put into his music. “I feel the difference there is in me, between Debussy, the composer, and Debussy, the man. And so, you see, from its very foundations, art is untrue. Everything about it is an illusion, a transposition of facts.” The interviewer disagrees. By the end of the article it’s clear that she — I think it’s a she, I think it’s a writer named Emilie Bauer — has fallen in love with Debussy. “He spoke with such warmth,” she writes, “he was so carried away, that one felt how the work of the French composer is exactly a reproduction of his soul — a sensitive, delicate soul, yet determined and firm.”

I turned on the ignition and drove home a different way, and here’s what I saw: town, town, town, town, town, town. None of the towns made sense anymore because the needs that had brought them into being as towns were no longer needs. The flow of the river, the spire of the church, the little cluster of stores, they were none of them important. What lasted was the clustering itself — the grouping of houses and the fiction of the center of town, and then the miracle mile outside town where people really shopped. The supermarket with the bakery in it with passable octopus muffins that killed the real bakery. I drove by the abandoned road that led down to the lost town of Enfield, flooded in the forties during the building of the Quabbin Reservoir. I got some gas in a convenience store and went inside to buy a bag of salted almonds. A kid of maybe eighteen was walking around the store with his mother, cracking his knuckles. He was one of the loudest knuckle-crackers I’ve ever heard. He had a gift for it. The sound was like those clacking balls that were in vogue for a while when I was in grade school. He held one hand up, as if to support a violin, and with the other hand he bent his thumb back, and then bent his finger, and from his hands came a ghastly clacking. I stared openly at him and he ignored me, and I realized that like me he was doing his best to let the world know that he existed. I drove off toward New Hampshire, thinking maybe I should rent a bassoon and start playing again. Then I thought of the ache in my jaw. Good-bye, bassoon.

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ON ROUTE 16, I saw a yellow banner on the back of a truck that said OVERSIZE LOAD. I turned on my recorder. “He was driving down the road with an oversize load,” I sang.

It was big

It was bad

It was round

It could explode

Yeah, he was driving down the road

With an oversize load.

I remembered a talk I’d gone to at the University of New Hampshire once. Rebecca Rule, who is Portsmouth’s jolly postmistress of literature, was in conversation with Charles Simic onstage. Simic hadn’t yet been appointed Poet Laureate back then. He read a poem by a Serbian poet named Vasko Popa, part of the poet’s “little box” series. Poets sometimes write a series of poems on one subject. Ted Hughes did it with Crow , the book he published after his wife Sylvia Plath killed herself, which has frightening Leonard Baskin illustrations. I tried to do it with my flying spoon poems but I finished only one of them. Vasko Popa’s poem was a story about a little box that grew and swallowed up the cabinet that it, or she — she was a female box — was in. She got bigger and then the room was inside her, and then the house, and then the town, and then the whole world. And now there’s a little box that you can put in your pocket that holds everything. It’s easy to lose it. “Take care of the little box” is the last line of the poem.

I passed the truck, which was carrying half of a modular house. The driver had an elbow on the door. He was relaxed. He knew his job. Ahead of us there was some slow traffic and the driver pulled on his jake brake for a moment. He pulled it almost lovingly. And I suddenly understood about jake brakes.

A jake brake is a method of somehow using the truck’s compressed air system to slow the truck down, rather than using the friction on the brake shoes. It makes a blatting, flatulent sound. The faster the truck is going, the louder the flatulence. And I knew that this driver was in the trucking business partly because he liked jake brakes. They made a lot of noise, and they sounded like motorcycles, and they were basically a way of having a wonderful huge powerful trumpeting farting sound emanating from where you were.

What the driver of the oversize load wanted was not that different from what I wanted. He wanted to make a sound. He wanted to have people hear him. This truck was his medium. This was how he sang. Some people sing through motorcycles and wear T-shirts that say “Loud Pipes Save Lives,” some sing with a guitar, some people crack their knuckles loudly.