David Markson - Wittgenstein's Mistress

As a matter of fact it has only at this moment struck me that every solitary thing I know about Brahms could have been learned by reading the backs of the jackets on phonograph records.

Possibly I have not mentioned reading the backs of the jackets on phonograph records before.

It is a thing one does, however.

Well, or did, in any event, since it can now also be fairly definitely stated that I have not read the back of the jacket on a phonograph record for basically as many years as I have not read a book.

In fact there are no phonograph records in this house.

Well, there is no phonograph either, when one comes down to that.

Actually, this may have surprised me when I first came to the house, although it is not something to which I have given any thought since I perhaps first gave it some thought.

Well, as I have furthermore said, I have not played any music since having gotten rid of my baggage in any case, said baggage having naturally included such things as generators for operating such things as phonographs.

None of this is counting whatever music I hear in my head, conversely.

Well, or even in certain vehicles when I have turned on the ignition and it has happened that the tape deck has been set to the on position.

Hearing Kathleen Ferrier singing Vincenzo Bellini under either of those circumstances being hardly the same thing as making a deliberate decision to hear Kathleen Ferrier singing Vincenzo Bellini, obviously.

Although what I am now suddenly forced to wonder is if certain things I do know about Brahms would have appeared on the backs of the jackets on phonograph records after all.

Such as about his affairs with Jane Avril or with Katharine Hepburn, for instance.

Or for that matter how do I know that Beethoven would sometimes write music all over the walls of his house when he could not get his hands on any staff paper quickly enough?

Or that George Frederick Handel once threatened to throw a soprano out of a window because she refused to sing an aria the way he had written it?

Or that the first time Tchaikovsky ever conducted an orchestra he was positive that his head was going to fall off, and held on to his head with one hand through the entire performance?

Well, or on another level altogether, would anybody writing the information for any of such jackets have actually troubled to put down that Brahms was known for carrying candy in his pocket to give to children when he visited people who had children?

Certainly nobody writing such information would have put down that one of the children to whom Brahms now and again gave some of that candy might very well have been Ludwig Wittgenstein.

Perhaps I have not mentioned that one of the children to whom Brahms now and again gave some of that candy might very well have been Ludwig Wittgenstein.

On my honor, however, Brahms frequently visited at the home of the Wittgenstein family, in Vienna, when Ludwig Wittgenstein was a child.

So if it is a fact that Brahms was known for carrying candy in his pocket to give to children when he visited people who had children, then surely it is likely that Ludwig Wittgenstein was one of the children he gave candy to.

Very possibly this was what was in Wittgenstein's own mind all of those years later, in fact, when he said that you do not need a lot of money to give a nice present, but you do need a lot of time.

By which I mean that if the person Wittgenstein had wished to give a present to had been a child, he could have naturally taken care of the problem exactly the way Brahms generally did.

Doubtless one does not stroll about Cambridge carrying candy in one's pocket to give to Bertrand Russell or to Alfred North Whitehead, however.

Although what one might now wish one's self is that Wittgenstein had been in the basement with me yesterday, so as to have given me some help with that Dasein.

Well, or perhaps even with that other word, bricolage, that I woke up with in my head, that morning.

Or likewise with the whole sentence that I also must have said to myself a hundred times, a little later on, about the world being everything that is the case.

Surely if Wittgenstein was as intelligent as one was generally led to believe he ought to have been able to tell me if that had meant anything, either.

Then again, something else I once read about Wittgenstein was that he used to think so hard that you could actually see him doing it.

And certainly I would have had no desire to put the man to that sort of trouble.

Although what this for some reason now reminds me of is that I do know one thing about Martin Heidegger after all.

I have no idea how I know it, to tell the truth, although doubtless it is from another one of those footnotes. What I know is that Martin Heidegger once owned a pair of boots that had actually belonged to Vincent Van Gogh, and used to put them on when he went for walks in the woods.

I have no doubt that this is a fact either, incidentally. Especially since it may have been Martin Heidegger who made the very statement I mentioned a long while ago, about anxiety being the fundamental mood of existence.

So that what he surely would have admired about Van Gogh to begin with would have been the way Van Gogh could make even a pair of boots seem to have anxiety in them.

Even if there was only the smallest likelihood that a pair of boots Van Gogh used to wear were the same pair he also once painted a painting of, obviously.

Unless of course he had painted with only his socks on, that day.

Or had borrowed a second pair of boots.

And on third thought it may have been Kierkegaard's boots that I was thinking about, and Van Gogh who had owned those.

Actually I rarely read footnotes.

Although doubtless it is also partly age, which will sometimes blur certain distinctions.

And by now there could well be a question of hormones too, and of change of life.

In fact the entire story may have had something to do with somebody sitting in one of Pascal's chairs.

And what I had really intended to have said by now was that I was familiar with the names of the writers on certain other of the books from the carton as well, besides the seven by Martin Heidegger.

Such as Johannes Keats, for instance.

Although there was also a translation of Anna Karenina in which case it was the title itself that I was able to recognize.

This simply being because the title in German appeared to be virtually identical with the title in English, as it happened.

But what I find interesting about this is that if the copy of that book had been the original book itself, and had not been translated, I would not have been able to make sense out of the title at all.

When one says that one does not read one word of Russian one is saying so even more truthfully than when one says that one does not read one word of German, obviously.

In spite of practically every other word in the latter looking like Brontë. Or Dürer.

Though there were also several items in the carton that I was not able to identify in any way whatsoever.

By which I mean that there were certain volumes on which I could not make sense out of the titles and did not recognize the names of the writers either.

Doubtless none of these was a book which had been translated from English, however, where I have the largest familiarity with writers, but had been written in German to begin with.

Which is scarcely to say that I am not familiar with certain German writers also, on the other hand.

Certainly I am familiar with Friedrich Nietzsche, for instance.

Well, or with Goethe.

Although by saying that I am familiar with either of these writers I do not necessarily mean that I am extraordinarily familiar with them.