Nicholson Baker: Traveling Sprinkler

Debussy liked the bassoon a lot, although not quite as much as Stravinsky. Debussy once judged a woodwind competition at the conservatoire. He’d been feeling very low, he wrote to a young composer, feeling as if he’d prefer to be a sponge at the bottom of the sea or a vase on the mantelpiece, “anything rather than a man of intellect.” This was in 1909, a year before he finished his tenth piano prelude, “The Sunken Cathedral.” But the student woodwind players cheered him up mightily. The bassoonists were assigned a fantasy by Henri Büsser, a piece written, Debussy said, as if Büsser had been born in a bassoon—“which is not to say he was born to make music.” The bassoons, according to Debussy, were as pathétique as Tchaikovsky and as ironic as Jules Renard. And then Debussy judged a piano competition. The best player was a thirteen-year-old Brazilian girl whose eyes were, he said, “drunk with music.” Debussy’s own daughter, whom they called Chouchou, was a genius of a girl of twelve when her father died in 1918, with the sound of the long-range German guns booming outside Paris. “I saw him one last time in that horrible box,” she wrote to her stepbrother. “Tears restrained are worth as much as tears shed, and now it is night for ever. Papa is dead.” A year later she died, of diphtheria and medical malpractice.

After Debussy died, Henri Büsser, born in a bassoon, orchestrated “The Sunken Cathedral,” kitsching up the score with harp glissandi. It was a hopeless thing for Büsser to try to do, because the real sunken cathedral was Debussy’s own Blüthner grand piano, with its ineffably soft tone. He liked to play it with the top down.

HELLO AND WELCOME to the Paul Chowder Hour. I’m your host, and I hope by this time that I’m your friend, and I want you to know something. When you have me as a friend, you have somebody you can count on. If you need help, I’ll be there. Like if you need me to help you dig in some bulbs, or water your tomatoes, or carry your groceries, or tend your chickens, I can do that. The only thing I can’t do is I can’t call you up and be hearty and affectionate and cheerful if you’re mortally ill. That I can’t do. I’ve done it several times, but I don’t do a good job of it, because when I know somebody’s dying it’s just so sad and awful that I can’t pretend that it’s not.

Today we’ve got a couple of important things to talk about. I woke up at one-thirty this morning and I thought, This is the perfect time: one-thirty in the morning. Is there a better time of day or night to explain whatever seems to need explaining? No. It’s all there in that time: one-thirty. Half past one. It’s not that late. Lots of people are up at one-thirty. It’s not insomnia. It’s not early rising. It’s just that you’re up at one-thirty. I bet Bach was often up at one-thirty arpeggiating away at his freshly tuned harpsichord.

I went outside and sat in the green metal chair and tried to further my understanding of the problem of metaphorical interference. It’s a serious problem, at least for me. What is metaphorical interference? Okay, well, it’s when two or more strong metaphors are podcasting in the same room together and they mess with each other. They mix, but not necessarily in the very same sentence the way a classic mixed metaphor mixes. They mix structurally. Say, for example, that you’ve decided to mention the traveling sprinkler in your poem. The moment you mention it, it starts to twirl and hiss and spray water everywhere. It becomes a controlling metaphor. There’s no help for it, you’re going to get wet.

But then say the traveling sprinkler seems to be tightly connected in your mind, perhaps by a long, pale green hose, to another idea that interests you, which is Debussy’s piano prelude “The Sunken Cathedral.” You think you’re still all right, because one is a real object and the other is a piece of classical music that contains a metaphor of submergence. But then you remember that some yellowjackets have made their nest in the hollow plastic handle of the hose reel. This happens to me every summer. I know that if Nan says that I can set up the sprinkler’s hose route around her tomatoes, I’m going to need my hose as well as her hose, and I know that as soon as I start wheeling the hose reel around and pulling the hose off it the yellowjackets are going to fly out and dart at me angrily and sting me as I run away. I don’t want to be stung, so I’ll debate whether I should boil up a pasta pot of water and pour it on the hose-reel handle, destroying the yellowjacket nest. My friend Tim told me about this technique, and I did it two summers ago before my sister and her family came for lunch at the picnic table, and it definitely worked, but I felt horrible afterward. What right did I have to destroy a whole happy nest of insects, regardless of how annoying they are when they crawl around on the potato chips?

Now your poem is in trouble. You’ve got wasps in the hose reel, you’ve got the sprinkler twirling at the end of the hose, and you’ve got Debussy’s cathedral sunk under the waves. You’ve got fish, you’ve got tomatoes. You’re starting to get strange purple interference patterns, fringe moiré patterns, at the edges of each metaphor, where it overlaps its neighbor. Photographers call this “purple fringing,” and it’s a flaw. This is the moment when your creative writing teacher may say: “You’ve got an awful lot going on here, Paul. Maybe you need to pare this poem down and pick a controlling image.”

And you acknowledge that he has a point — too many colors make the rinse water muddy. We know that. On the other hand, the world is full of metaphors that are happily coexisting in our brains and we don’t go crazy. You have them all swarming and nesting and reeled up in there, but they don’t trouble one another. One moment you entertain one metaphor, and the next moment the next, no harm done. And this time you think, I don’t want to worry so much about this rhetorical non-problem. I want to pour them all in and let them go wild together. Let all the metaphors fuck each other like desperate spouse-swappers, I don’t care. I summarily reject this notion of metaphorical interference for the time being and I’m putting it aside and I’m going to think over the things that call forth thought, and if they get in one another’s way from time to time that’s just what happens. It’s my poem. I don’t care what Peter Davison might think. He’s gone now and God rest him.

• • •

I WANT TO REALLY BE with a woman. By that I mean I want to be able to stay up late with her talking about everything. I want to show her all the things that I’ve found out, which aren’t very interesting maybe, but they’re what I have. And I want her to show me all the things that she’s found out.

I’d rather not spend two hours a day reading political blogs, or flipping through People magazine at the supermarket checkout, or watching old episodes of The Office . What good does it do me to read Glenn Greenwald’s excellent blog? He’s right about everything and I’m glad he’s doing it, but it doesn’t seem to have any effect.

I want to confide — that’s what I want to do. What confiding is is that you have a woman you like a great deal and you tell her things that you didn’t even know were secrets. You look at her and you feel a nervous warmth because she’s the only person who will understand. She’s just said something so direct and so interesting — something you never heard before — and suddenly all of the distractions of people’s opinions swirling around you stop. You hear just this one woman next to you saying this one opinion that’s coming out of her mouth, and you think, I could listen to her say things forever.