William Gaddis - Agape Agape

You wouldn’t need Grieg you wouldn’t need Gershwin or Paderewski or any of them because you’d have their authenticity and the whole concept of authenticity preserved, the music itself and the fleeting performance brought together forever, given permanence that’s the heart of authenticity like the, there must be some law of physics for this, for the or maybe it’s, maybe I’ve discovered one. No more piano! Absolutely no artist, no more so-called legendary performances oh my grandmother heard Paganini, absolutely fabulous they said he was in league with the devil yes one of these dangerous demons with lives and energies of their own you can’t control that can force you to do things you wouldn’t otherwise, or Gottschalk? Louis Moreau Gottschalk? A brilliant stunning pianist, Chopin said he was, so did Liszt, so did Berlioz, that’s the performer we’ll never hear, but the composer? The music he wrote? It’s so bad, honky-tonk and bouncy what he’d done, listen. Just like my plagiarist writing my ideas before I had them, he wrote music for the worst nickel-in-the-slot player piano fifty years before the player was invented. Pushpin or poetry it’s the quantity of pleasure in these enormous markets of the non-musical and the half-musical, these chance persons with no true sense of musical values because they don’t hear, they simply have no ear for music they don’t know pianissimo from sforzando, diminuendos from crescendos and those elegant gradations that distinguish the performance of one artist from another on these reproducing piano rolls went for ten, fifteen dollars for the Welte-Mignon they couldn’t dream of paying for these unique subtleties they simply couldn’t hear, as though their ears were closed against the racket of American industrial strife everywhere like my left ear was closed from grinding my teeth at night from stress, yes. Yes avoid stress, good God to go through that again maybe I still do. Maybe I still grind my teeth at night no way to know because I’m asleep? Nobody to hear me maybe it’s closed now and I don’t even know it because there’s nothing to hear if I, no wait, wait if I hold that glass against it and tap it with the where is the pencil, just stop shivering get this wet sheet over the, move my leg so numb I don’t even know where it is good God to go through that again with the hockey mouth-guard twelve seconds in boiling water two seconds in cold put it in your mouth to mould it doesn’t really matter if my left ear is closed though does it if there’s nothing to hear anyhow get my mind off it, avoid stress just get my mind back on the, on what it was on turn of the century mob coming in from southern Europe meant that collective poor Roman Catholic audience for the pantomimic’s products of the imitative arts produced to be reproduced just like themselves where the priest’s the pandomimic and the gap gets wider, just look back at the great 1890 census that Hollerith put together now there’s the beginning. There was the beginning of key-sort and punched cards and IBM and NCR and the whole driven world we’ve inherited from some rinky-dink piano roll widening the gap when Aeolian finally got into the reproducing piano act with their Duo-Art Pianola piano right before the war, they’d put one into a Steinway, for the pleasure of Plato’s best educated elite and the unique great artist whose use of the sostenuto and soft pedals and his tempo phrasing and attack they pretended they could hear giving demonstrations and testimonials for Welte and Aeolian and Ampico and Angelus and Apollo, because these things ran four or five thousand dollars even before they started the wood carving on the case like Tom Mix in the manner of the Spanish Renaissance to match his house or the gilded garlands and decorations on the old ivory enamel case for the juvenile movie star Jackie Coogan or Rudolph Valentino’s Angelus they’re all here I just saw it, where’s the list royalty right down the line I just yes, Dowager Empress of China letter here from Prince Ch’ing gets the jump on them all with her Apollo piano player back in 1906 goes right on to something I wrote in the margin what’s the last ⅛“ 51 100/thndth sec this my writing? Must be, shaky uncertain like every wrong decision I’ve ever made never made any other kind, never came through for anybody, why I end up here with a hopeless project like this one conversations with these detachable selves and belly-talkers get back to the slurred letters in dght can’t even read it shows character that’s what’s at the heart of the whole thing, lack of character see right here where money my ideas of money, my whole view of money has warped my entire life and the, all the, stress yes avoid stress widening the gap between Freud’s nickel and dime trash and Plato’s wealthy educated elite with these reproducing pianos in the Élysée Palace in Paris and Queen Mary in London, ex-King Ferdinand of Bulgaria, the Sultan of Turkey, the Khedive of Egypt, the Shah of Persia and the King of Siam, Mussolini in Rome, the Dowager Queen of Italy, the Duchess of Argyll and Her Late Majesty the Empress Alexandra Feodorovna of Russia direct line back to Marie Antoinette’s gold canary and that mob at the Bastille but here the widening gap was money and democracy, between the Ampico in Vincent Astor’s music room and six Autopianos on the battleship USS Delaware, between Helen Keller in the forest when the tree falls and the, no, no wait. Wait, this whole discovery I just made yes that’s what this is, this scribble in the margin it’s the technology! good God the technology! A hundred years ago this recording instrument that measured the time it took the hammer on the last eighth of an inch before it strikes the string for exact loudness, to fifty-one hundred-thousandths of a second! It’s the whole thing! It’s the proof of the whole thing, of my whole idea my whole thesis entertainment the parent of technology I should, I could write and publish a paper separate from this big project, combine this with authenticity preserved in the music itself and the fleeting performance by its finest interpreter or the composer himself like Grieg playing his dreadful Wedding March piece of paper here somewhere get it all written down before somebody steals it, of course if I write it down that’s almost an invitation to steal it, mail all over the place here drying out just something to write on because this is the heart of it right back to the start, you see? Back to Vaucanson’s flutist gives us Jacquard’s loom back to pleasure that’s bad in all circumstances and Pythagoras’ terrible catechism sit here wet as a hen suddenly see the underside of my arm royal purple didn’t even have to bang it, must have just pressed my weight on it got to get some, get my breath avoid stress just get my mind off the, back on the pantomimics and clones and mechanization of everything in sight, entertainment and the binary system and all-or-none computer where its technology came from in the first place, don’t really give one damn for it, for any of it, like this dangerous demon you can’t control not really part of you but can force you to do things you, head’s splitting grinding my teeth if anybody heard me they’d think I was losing my, that I’ve lost it yes maybe I have why I’ve got to get back to the, to things you can weigh and count and measure the technology good God yes the technology! A hundred years ago measuring the time it took the hammer on the last eighth of an inch of tape down to fifty-one hundred-thousandths of a second? Not for some great breakthrough in medical science no, not for advanced weapons design or aero, for aerodynamics no, for entertainment, for pleasure in its highest form for music to entertain Plato’s educated elite, widening the gap yes, between Huizinga’s eighteenth century, when aesthetic pleasure in the worship of art was the privilege of the few, and this democracy of every man his own artist where we are today, this democracy of Plato’s chance persons and having art without the artist because he’s a threat, because the creative artist has to be a threat so he’s swamped by the performer by the, by the pantomimic by the imitative who is not a threat see it right here in the, right here in Jung yes from the depths of his Swiss hypocrisy he’s an inveterate democrat he says but nature is aristocratic, that it’s elitist and so is he, Quod licet Jovi he quotes, non licet bovi draws the line right there doesn’t he? An unpleasant but eternal truth he called it what’s so damned unpleasant about that? Eternal truth that’s what it’s all about isn’t it? The poet, the artist set apart from the common herd by some inner illumination that Plato thought was, because that’s not even Plato no it’s Dodds damn it where’s Dodds? Had it right here didn’t I? I know I brought it, brought some Flaubert some Nietzsche Huysmans Heidegger some Tolstoy even brought Friedrich and The Physics of Baseball but, didn’t I bring it? Because it was Democritus, right there in Dodds it was Democritus saying the finest poems were composed with “inspiration and a holy breath” I remember that phrase, inspiration and the holy breath that sets us apart from reason and above reason, some inner revelation, some inner ecstasy even some abnormal mental state why they’re out to eliminate us, why they’d say I’m afraid of the death of the elite because it means the death of me of course I can’t really blame them, I’ve been wrong about everything in my life it’s all been fraud and fiction, let everybody down except my daughters maybe I can still rescue them, not their fault is it? Fact that I’m forgotten that I’m left on the shelf with the dead white guys in the academic curriculum that my prizes are forgotten because today everybody’s giving prizes for that supine herd out there waiting to be entertained, try to educate them did they buy those “Educator” piano rolls teach them to play with their hands no, went right on discovering their unsuspected talent playing with their feet here’s Flaubert yes, “The entire dream of democracy” he says, “is to raise the proletariat to the level of bourgeois stupidity.” You want the essence of elitism there he was, his idea of art that “the artist must no more appear in his work than God does in nature, that the artist must manage to make posterity believe that he never existed” good God, the rate things change a generation lasts about four days what posterity? Everywhere present and nowhere visible leads him right into the embrace of the death of the author whose intentions have no connection with the meaning of the text which is indeterminate anyway, a multidimensional space where the modern scriptor is born with this, this detachable self this second voice inside predicting the future in its hoarse belly-voice, Strabo? You hear me? Strip the romantic veil off the naked animal’s only purpose perpetuating the species the race the tribe the family for everybody else sex is for pleasure like the flute, pushpin or poetry “the most intense pleasure of which man is capable” says my golden Sigi, seek pleasure avoid not a clue what they’re being used for even that they’re being used till the roof falls in, doctors lawyers abortions adulteries thimble theatre learned nothing forgotten nothing go right back and do it all again. “My one impulse is to work and forget” says Tolstoy “but forget what. There’s nothing to forget” and then? here’s the scrap, “I shall write no more fiction,” he’s about thirty, “people are weeping, dying, marrying, and I should sit down and write books telling ‘how she loved him’? It’s shameful!” And where else yes here, “reading bad books helps me to detect my own faults more than good ones. Good books reduce me to despair” maybe where the idea for this whole absurd project of mine here came from this fear of failure, the technology the artist created being used to eliminate him and the piano, the player piano and its offspring the computer barricades against this fear of chance, of probability and indeterminacy that’s so American, this fear this stigma of failure which separates the crowd from the elite when Flaubert writes to George Sand “I believe that the crowd, the mass, the herd, will always be detestable. Nothing is important save a small group of minds, ever the same, which pass on the torch” try to sit up straight here stopped shivering and dry out mind’s clear as a bell, everything falling right into place get it all down before the belly-talkers come back with the death of the author, the artist’s solitary enterprise with the individual reader Hawthorne talked about horrified at success with the public taste, with the crowd meant you must have sold out, send the author of The Marble Faun out on a book tour? Out giving readings from The Blithedale Romance to entertain this gaping clutch of pleasure seeking chance persons, this enormous market of the non-literate and half-literate devouring the poets who compose to please the bad taste of their reviewers end up instructing one another, what this glorious democracy in the arts is all about isn’t it? Get up there and perform with what Hawthorne called “that damned mob of scribbling women,” even Poe with his mechanized genius for forcing order on chaos scorning the public and thirsting for fame, and Melville, good God Melville? Begins Moby Dick wants everybody to read it finishes daring them to, has to borrow money to write it because Harper’s won’t give him an advance, they publish it and he still owes them a hundred and forty-five dollars and eighty-three cents never forget that figure, “dollars damn me!” he tells Hawthorne, writes that terrible Pierre you can’t get thirty pages into hates feeling he must take his readers where they expect to go, talk about elitism about setting yourself apart from the common herd beyond reason above reason on the shelf with the dead white guys ends up in the Custom House at four dollars a day reduced to a nonperson, to herd anonymity humiliated castrated eliminated as a threat that’s what it’s all about that’s what I have to explain. Of course you can’t really explain anything to anybody that’s why all we hear are explanations of these explanations get right back to Wiener with his more complicated the message the more chance for error so stay with the June moon cliché on the fifty cent piano roll what this deification of democracy’s all about, what this tyranny of the majority that Mill got from de Tocqueville’s all about that made him famous, Mill never had an idea of his own in his life till that winter he got seriously tormented he said that the range of musical combinations might be exhausted. Five tones and two semitones in an octave you can put together in a limited number of ways only a few are beautiful and must have already been used up no more Mozart, no more Weber, like the head of the U.S. Patent Office resigning in 1875 because he thought everything that could be invented had been invented in that frenzy of invention flooding America only really began a year later with the yes with, the player piano always come back to it, all roads lead to Rome try to explain anything always come back to it, why this ought to be subsidized this work of mine look at it. Look at this mess, this bed this empty room these medicines cost of these medicines headache is gone clear as a bell must be these medicines whole thing government supported like it ought to be problem is you have to be wiped out. Have to be reduced to this herd anonymity, humiliated and eliminated as an artist like Melville got a nickel left they’ll make you spend it go to work in the Custom House to survive as a citizen you have to become a nonperson, own one square foot of property means you’re still self-sufficient because your property’s who you are that’s what America what the West is all about what it’s always been about what I’m trying to explain here. Can’t really explain anything to anybody no but if we could if you could just explain it to yourself and, and wait, damn! Should have brought those deeds, land surveys, title insurance tax records get the properties divided and cleared up and settled on my daughters before it’s all swallowed by lawyers and taxes and I’m drawn and quartered by the government supposed to be helping me out backing me up all I’ve paid in taxes years and years of taxes become propertyless now divide everything three ways one for each daughter and we all benefit, let them worry about the upkeep repairs rents administering the properties and I spend a third of the year with each of them, get on with my work they look out for me and I’m allowed to show my generosity and they have the opportunity to show their love for me. Give them my money now give them all my cash securities God knows what they’d pay taxes on it and I’d have to wait thirty-two months for the government to come through but they’d probably just pay the taxes make sure they get the money now and we’re all left out in the cold, don’t even know what it all comes to statements probably right here in this heap of wet mail but they’re my only refuge. Loss, loss all just loss wherever you look, only refuge I’ve got left for my, for what’s left of my memory my discovery what I thought was my, would be sort of my vest pocket immortality and my, yes for my generosity and dignity, none of it left anyplace else I just took off in the wrong directions. Wrong about everything all so long ago, about everybody especially friends, thought we were all friends so full of who I thought I was some buffoon all two dimensional some cartoon minute I turned sideways they couldn’t see me at all, left on the shelf forgotten work forgotten my prizes forgotten when a prize still meant something now everybody out there giving prizes to each other not even for winners no we’re all just props for the ones who give the prizes, pantomimics imitation entertainment for this supine half-literate and non-literate crowd out there have to be read to it’s all, good God why did we learn to read in the first place? You read to three year olds, get up and give a reading give a performance none of that fierce authenticity of Hawthorne between the writer and the reader, between the reader and the page what it’s all about, that solitary enterprise between him and the individual reader yes, the one who comes after you with an ax in the middle of the night or Melville’s grotesque hero who wants to be a popular novelist must have written Pierre out of revenge, only revenge the mob has on them both is to go to the movies, thirty fifty a hundred million dollars against a hundred forty-five dollars and eighty-three cents, the final great stupefying collective. No more illusion of taking part, of discovering your unsuspected talent when the biggest thrill in music was playing it yourself, your own participation that roused your emotions most no, no. The ultimate collective, the herd numbed and silenced agape at blood sex and guns blowing each other to pieces only participation you get’s maybe kids who see it come to school next morning and mow down their classmates no more elitism no more elite no wherever you turn just the spread of the crowd with its, what did he call it, what Huizinga called its insatiable thirst for trivial recreation and crude sensationalism, the mass of the mediocre widening the gap the popularity of a work is the measure of its mediocrity says Melville no news there is there? The masses invading the province of the writer says Walter Benjamin a hundred years later, by now the fences are down there’s no province left, on the shelf with the dead white guys you want the real gap, a look from the heights down on the mass of men who aren’t worth anything in the first place, that there’s a greater gap between some men and others than between these others and the animal kingdom yes that was Nietzsche before they twisted him all out of shape and the whole, get my breath here yes avoid stress try to get the, get my leg here makes him sound like what little my golden Sigi found any good about those human beings telling Reverend Oskar Pfister in his experience most of them are trash coming one way and Tolstoy the other with his duty to these scraps, just had them these scraps of Tolstoy under the wait, wait been looking for this yes that shot of mitoxantrone side effects may cause shortness of breath, lower back pain, swelling feet and lower legs good God from whom all blessings flow but which ones? No discolouration at the site here where the needle went into the vein, unusual bruising or bleeding what do they call unusual? Other arm’s already purple this one blossoming like a flower garden, red eyes yellow eyes whites of the eyes turn blue no way to see them any more than hearing grinding my teeth if there’s nothing to hear, blood on the no it’s not the blood on the shirt here it’s the shirt yes doesn’t look like my shirt was a broadcloth Egyptian cotton broadcloth this looks like a coarse muslin no collar on it either is there? Can’t see clearly no mirror on the wall over there a long time ago, when we rented this place to an actress one summer, and that purple velour chair there in the corner with the long tear down the cushion where her dog, she had a German shepherd dog where it tore a streak down the cushion too good a story to have it repaired but the, but I, not seeing too well get a little disoriented sometimes but this room is, when we rented out the whole place here that year but it’s not the change no but how fast the changes come now, not even the weeks the years but how many different lives you’ve lived, first step that counts yes I always took the wrong one like being five, ten, twenty different people wouldn’t know each other if they met in the street wouldn’t even say hello, you see? No. No it doesn’t matter does it because you don’t believe me so it doesn’t really matter, lies and falsehood wherever you look why I brought along Huysmans with his party waited on by these stunning naked black women and his symphony of liqueurs, his symphony of flowers and the flowers that look fake, that everything is fake like the room like a ship with mechanical fish and that marvelous description of two new locomotives as women, the deliberate cultivation of the fake and the false in this French novel more than a century ago, À Rebours in 1884 even then an elitist gloss on a culture whose literature and art are being ruined by greed and the embrace of the mob, the what, the epiphany, the embodiment of mediocrity and everything repellent about it even then! and the source of this rot even then yes, America, no news there is there? Lies and falsehood bursting from the mob’s mistrust of the elite wherever you looked, mistrust of the intellectual who Tolstoy called untrustworthy, useless and artificial nourished on books not experience who’d never fought in a war or plowed a field so their writings produced nothing but lies why you don’t believe me because they’re the common currency aren’t they. Falsehood’s the common currency and we’re back where we started, not the pure unadulterated falsehood but what Plato calls the lie in words that’s only sort of an imitation, a shadowy image that’s useful sometimes when you’re dealing with an enemy for instance that’s all we do isn’t it? Why Tolstoy says it’s our duty to edify the masses, our vocation to edify mankind even for the ones who think you can teach without knowing anything since artists and poets teach unconsciously, that music, literature, painting all the arts are just a stew of nonsense and falsehood if the masses don’t support them because where is it yes yes here. “Perhaps they don’t understand and don’t want to understand our literary language because it’s not suited to them and they’re in the process of inventing their own literature” Tolstoy wrote that, we must write what they want or not write at all, “we are thousands and they are millions” Tolstoy writes, obey the law of the greatest number talk about the tyranny of the majority here’s Ezra Pound widening the gap to the degree the serious artist lets his audience’s values shape his own vision, he lies, can’t say Tolstoy wasn’t serious can you? That our literary language isn’t suited to his common herd of millions out there maybe they’re inventing their own, been to the movies lately? Listened to their lyrics?! Man I mean like I’ve heard it you dumb ass-hole give this muhthrfuckr a blowjob every man his own artist in this democracy of the arts lined up Walt Whitman singing his body electric didn’t we? American classic Leaves of Grass he says the poet’s merit is determined by the multitude good God, write what they want you’ll end up with a Pulitzer Prize follow you right to the grave. Maybe won the Medal of Honor the George Cross even the Nobel but once you’ve been stigmatized with the ultimate seal of mediocrity your obit will read Pulitzer Prize Novelist Dies at whatever because they’re not advertising the winner no. No, like this whole plague of prizes wherever you look, it’s the prize givers promoting themselves, trying to rescue their thoroughly discredited profession of journalism. “The press is a school that serves to turn men into brutes,” Flaubert writes to George Sand “because it relieves them from thinking.” The prize winners? They’re just props, cartoonists, sports writers, political pundits, front page photos the bloodier the better for that instant of fame wrap the fish in tomorrow, good God how many Pulitzer Prizes are there? Over fifteen hundred entries, fourteen categories for journalists because if you started your bondage there you’re halfway home with that whole gang of sponsors, trustees, juries, God knows what who’ve survived that Slough of Despond and floated to the top. Just look at the next day’s New York Times, page after page bulging with self-congratulation with seven more categories to leech on, music, what they call drama and of course books where the Grey Lady finally got it both ways with their journalist who reviews books, like the misty-eyed ingenue but destroys women writers and just for fairness crosses the gender line for an occasional assassination, give that lady a Pulitzer with oak leaf clusters! The books that are candidates are read by a jury whose decisions are passed up to the Olympian trustees with an eye to the multitude. We are thousands and they are millions, write the fiction they want or don’t write at all, ruling out Pound’s cry for the new, the challenging or what’s labeled difficult, so when Gravity’s Rainbow is being devoured by college youth everywhere and wins the National Book Award, its unanimous recommendation by the Pulitzer jury is overturned by the trustees for a double-talk spoof of academic vagaries by a bogus “Professor,” to everyone’s relief, and the author at peril escapes unblemished by the, no, no, no you can’t depend on it. Step on more sensitive toes with a brilliant biography of William Randolph Hearst that’s a sure bet for a serious Pulitzer jury’s selection and, pow! The trustees, still held in mortmain by their mouldering Demiurge, look the book over and stumble on Pulitzer himself portrayed as tall and rail thin, a blind nervous wreck given to profane rages, jumping out of his skin at the sound of tearing paper, weeping and cursing on his infrequent visits to his newspaper office when he’s not in the soundproof rooms of his New York house, in one of his far-flung mansions or aboard his oceangoing yacht Liberty, called a “journalist who made his money by pandering to the worst tastes of the prurient and the horror-loving” by this free-spending Harvard Lampoon prankster who’s left fireworks and chamberpots behind for this cutthroat carnival of journalism, and who promptly follows suit to the letter. Hearst’s Journal and Pulitzer’s World, nothing they wouldn’t do, accuse the other of and promptly improve upon in the name of circulation and even survival, bogus news and personal thievery, scraping the bottom for crime and sordid sensationalism to bring the stupidity level of the bourgeoisie down to the subliterate appetite of the proles. Bogus news? It was, who was it, it was Pasteur wasn’t it in a happier context who observed that chance favours the prepared mind? And after all, all this bloodletting was going on just a century ago, when the US battleship Maine lay in Havana harbour waiting on the unswerving punctuality of chance to seize upon the prepared mind of Hearst and change the course of empires, dragging his reluctant antagonist with him. Bogus news and we’re right back with Plato’s lie in words aren’t we? Imitations, sort of shadowy images useful when you’re dealing with an enemy whose name pursues its victims to the grave yes but, no but listen. Since all writing worth reading comes, like suicide, from outrage or revenge, there must still be a way to deal with some serious ideas here without risking this seal of Tolstoy edifying the masses, in this novel published by some nickel and dime southern university press. Talk about the classic contributions of Aristotle and Plato in the participatory democracy of ancient Athens in creating the sense of community, just scare them all away. Places like Athens and Laodicea might as well be on the moon, names like Leonidas sound like a zoo, look for Athens you read New Or-leans, hide the great ideas someplace, disguise them, mask them and let them break out with a life of their own, a character who yes some simple name like Jones. His name’s Jones, dark glasses spewing cigarette smoke answering an ad for a job as a porter in a honky-tonk nightclub, he’s asked for a character reference. “A po-lice gimme a reference. He tell me I better get my ass gainfully employ” Jones says. “I ain exactly a character yet, but I can tell they gonna star that vagran no visible mean of support stuff on me. I thought maybe the Night of Joy like to help somebody become a member of the community, help keep a poor color boy outta jail. I keep the picket off, give the Night of Joy a good civil right ratin.” Experience? The pay is twenty dollars a week. “Wha? Sweepin and moppin and all that nigger shit? Hey! No wonder the right man ain show up. Ooo-wee. Say, whatever happen to the minimal wage? The las person workin in here musta starve to death. Don worry. I come in regular, anything keep my ass away from a po-lice for a few hour. Where you keep them motherfuckin broom?” See what he’s done? Isn’t that glorious? Aristotle defining politics as the struggle between the rich and the poor hasn’t changed a damn bit, has it? Maybe this sense of community they’re talking about would be accomplished by widening the rights of citizenship to the poorest class? Remember this great cradle of participating democracy depends on slave labor, whose participation may not be that enthusiastic, and Plato sees that force alone won’t ensure submission of the poor and lower classes, to make it work you’ve got to instill a sense of irremediable inferiority in the hearts and minds of these poor and lower classes, deny them these rights of citizenship and treat them like a different race? “She think cause I color I gonna rape her” Jones conjures of the woman sitting beside him on the bus. “She about to throw her grammaw ass out the window. Whoa! I ain gonna rape nobody. I gonna tell that po-lice I gainfully employ, keep him off my back, tell him I met up with a humanitaria payin me twenty dollar a week. He say, ‘That fine, boy. I’m glad to see you straighten out.’ And I say, ‘Hey!’ And he say, ‘Now maybe you be becomin a member of the community.’ And I say, ‘Yeah, I got me a nigger job and nigger pay. Now I really a member of the community. Now I a real nigger. No vagran. Just nigger.’ Whoa!” Good God, see what he’s done? It’s glorious. Are we what our mothers made us? His spends the next ten years breaking her neck to get it published and of course, it wins the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, it’s the book bears the blemish in a last bow to journalism, “Whoa! That paper sure sending out plenny mothers taking pictures and axin me all about wha happen. Who say a color cat cain get his picture on the front page? Ooo-wee! Whoa! I gonna be the mos famous vagran in the city!” get you one way or the other, Book Award they give you ten thousand for biting the hands that feed you every minion in publishing at that black tie dinner at the Plaza must run them half a million just a, get my breath here yes avoid stress maybe try to get my leg over the side here and, just a shadowy image isn’t it? Isn’t all of it? Count Tolstoy pounding it to stray peasant girls in the wheat field drops in to haunt this elegant Europeanized weepy panicky no, no gets too close where are those Tolstoy scraps yes, getting too close following Turgenev everywhere with his piercing terrifying glare “enough to drive a man mad” Turgenev tells a friend “with a few vicious remarks” and he’s in tears again, can’t understand “this ridiculous affection for a wretched title of nobility” he’s, you see? Can’t, can’t, gets too close being tormented like this by some monstrous, some detachable self, some dangerous demon not really part of you since you can’t control it but can force you to do things you, can’t let you get away from him follows Turgenev home like a dog can’t, getting a little confused here getting my dates mixed up doesn’t matter no, when Tolstoy was still much younger doesn’t really matter because you don’t believe me anyway just the shadowy image the imitation gets home shattered getting shaky, getting my breath here get my leg over the side staples are dry just to get the blood running get the, get my pencil get the mail’s still wet yes he gets the mail, letter from Flaubert says he just wants to be around long enough to dump a few more buckets of merde on the heads of his countrymen, end of an elite end of an era of, whole leg down there numb and heavy as a, foot numb and heavy as a clubfoot or do they just look numb and heavy? Publishes Childe Harold he’s famous a great hero great romantic hero scandals money horrors forced to sell his estate get out of England but why Greece? Maybe’s just a metaphor but who’s the metaphor? Byron for Greece fighting for freedom from the Turks or Greece for him, fighting for a fresh start, get rid of the fiction or be the fiction because he hated the idea of being between them if he could be the fiction he wouldn’t need Byron, strip the romantic veil off the naked animal’s only purpose being used to perpetuate the race sex with girls sex with boys not for pleasure no out of sheer despair sell the estate, go back to Greece make a fresh start because this place was a fiction when I bought it, put in that breakfront over there window frames rotting replaced them with casements sell the whole thing because this Other I bought it for was a fiction kangaroo and all the rest of it I can’t, can’t tell if I’m shivering or just have the shakes try to get upright here my leg to, to avoid stress yes don’t, don’t don’t try to stand up if I fell I’d never get up again pack it all up and get back to Corinth running through the streets, sitting at that cafe table reading was that, that was youth yes was that, was youth a fiction? No sweet sauces, no fancy Sicilian cooking no Athenian sweets no, girlfriend, allowed to have a Corinthian girlfriend? Certainly not! Pleasure deprives man of the use of his faculties, any greater pleasure than sensual love? No, nor a madder, true love is beauty and order so no intemperance or madness allowed near our true loving couple all of it fictions falsehoods lies, people weeping, dying, marrying, and I should sit down and write books telling “how she loved him”? says Tolstoy, it’s shameful! The ultimate fiction the maddest of them all yes the most tyrannous because they believe it kill for it, die for it, only you! Has to be the most absurd, the most overwhelming fiction because of the enormity of what it has to conceal till it’s too late yes, these illusions this fiction of love true love mad love strip it all away and lay things bare get the, get that towel I’m sweating I’m, even Wagner preaching love but he punishes all of them, Siegmund and Sieglinde, Siegfried and Brünnhilde burns them up for giving in, from all the foreplay Huizinga calls it just play, just imitation, over to the real thing, the true lie good God, ever see Montecavallo up there filling the stage? Good breeding stock but she’s a victim of the true lie, the one who’s deceived in the soul and she’s punished for it, they all are, follows Hegel here they say where suffering’s necessary for self realization shades of the Pythagorean catechism two or three thousand years ago here to be punished if I can, hold on to something sit up straight and get the other leg over why they, why I was put in this empty room no light, no air can’t, sweating as if I’m, if I’m frightened? Feeling everything’s beginning to slide try to concentrate yes, mind’s as clear as it get myself oriented let it get myself oriented, Tolstoy says Pascal had a nail-studded belt he’d lean against when some word of praise pleased him good God! His powers are weakening he says, his profession is dreadful, “writing corrupts the soul” yes, we are thousands and they are millions that’s exactly why the shape of his work isn’t up to him, says Plato. That’s the business of the state. These poets and other artists must not show indecency and intemperance so the first thing to be done is to censor writers of fiction or they’ll corrupt the citizens growing up among images of moral deformity, because youth can’t tell the difference between allegory and what’s literal even in the great story-tellers so it’s that or be banished, show only the image of the good or be banished because, it’s no, do you believe it? Because no, got to stop it’s all coming to pieces like the, like the belly-talker talking to the belly-talker because there’s no difference now between allegory and what’s literal, let lyric verse in there and pleasure and pain rule the state, the soul can’t be filled with variety and difference and dissimilarity and we’re back in this swamp of paradox perversity, ambiguity, aporia back where we started, listen. Listen. This is the heart of it, the heart of the whole thing, banishing poetry and banishing the poet, the greatest of them all because he is the greatest, banishing Homer for telling lies, for telling bad lies because of the power of Homer’s art to charm, to seduce you with the honeyed muse of epic verse and lyric verse, to nourish emotions and passions in men instead of restraint, of law and reason what we’ve been arguing from the start isn’t it? These lies and fictions of the, getting a little confused get my legs straight steady myself against the, careful? Good God, this heap goes I’d go with it never get up again just, slowly yes that’s the danger, this honeyed muse painting inferior views of truth even her sister arts of imitation stacking the deck he’ll let her back in, let our sweet friend back in if she’ll prove her right to exist in his orderly state, be pleasant and useful to humanity it’s all, getting things backward I’m, get my arm behind the careful! Backed myself into a corner here stripping the naked animal clean among, among images of moral deformity? What was that about musical training about the piano, the phantom hands not what I remember no, use my memory to get myself oriented here but I can’t remember, can’t remember can’t even remember what I was trying to remember back to training your memory, back to Pythagoras’ school of recollection train your memory to remember the sins and suffering of the, of the muses the daughters of memory of accurate memory of an actual vision from somewhere deep in the oh, oh, oh no yes don’t move no, carefully whole thing’s, whole thing’s slipping don’t, very, very slowly don’t, no. No! no no no help! Oh my, my God oh my God! Just, hold on just hold on to something or I’ll go with it just, no! Help! The whole heap it’s, good God all over the floor try to, try not to move get my breath sweating and shaking my face is wet it’s wet I’m, look at it. All over the floor the whole, look! Look there’s Dodds knew I’d brought it, knew I had it if I can let my, if I can stand up and no! Good God no, whole trash heap all over the floor go down and I’d be part of the trash heap. I can’t, wait where’s my pencil! I can’t, sweat stinging my eyes whole thing’s a blur out there hardly see across the room maybe I, spilled some papers on the bed here got to find it, got to find my pencil don’t write it down I’ll lose it maybe already lost it might be under the, find that towel yes clean myself up before I no, good God look at it! How could, all going backward braced myself against that heap like a pillar of salt whole thing yes, the unswerving punctuality of chance, clock without the clockmaker perfectly simple in word and deed says Plato, God wouldn’t lie or change because he’s perfect so it’s God God God, virtue and beauty and no mad or senseless person can be God’s friend no, make yourselves eunuchs for the kingdom of heaven’s sake says Tolstoy, nothing senseless about that is there? Strive for absolute chastity for the good of the neighborhood whole purpose of life to be part of God’s kingdom only way to get there’s absolute chastity, husband and wife live like brother and sister nothing mad about that is there? Dress up like a muzhik float around the house look like Noah’s Ark whole performance out of the greatest fiction ever created, take God out of the equation you’ve got nothing left not even love no, had that somewhere if I had that letter Wagner wrote to Röckel where love’s lost sight of because everything we do, think, take and give is in fear of the end, the greatest most desperate fiction of the afterlife ever created yes, the denial of death, what this whole mad escapade’s all about, isn’t it Levochka? Good God how you fight it! Your man Pozdnyshev in The Kreutzer Sonata wallowing in the slime of debauchery he tells us, keeps stripping away the fictions right down to what it’s really all about and then he can’t face it, not just love no, only you, the choice of one man or woman over all others says the lady on the train won’t have it will you, Pozdnyshev. Supposed to be something noble and ideal but it’s just something sordid that brings us down to the level of pigs. Natural? a natural human activity? No no no, eating’s natural, something you enjoy but this is unnatural and loathsome, honeymoon’s shameful and tedious, nothing sacred for us about marriage nothing to it but copulation, couple of months you’ve learned to hate the sight of each other ready to poison her or shoot yourself good God man, when you felt the blade go into her didn’t what it’s really all about stare you in the face? Some nonsense there about mankind following some ideal that’s the fiction isn’t it? What Plato’s poets and honeyed muse are all about, you strip it clean stop short and run because you really know don’t you, not like pigs and rabbits reproducing themselves as fast as they can but you hold it at arm’s length, even say animals seem to know their offspring mean survival of the species while you wonder if life has a purpose and that’s it isn’t it! That you’re being used, used, used, that you’re being used by nature simply to perpetuate the family line, the social tribe, the white race, the species just like your pigs and rabbits and that’s what you resent, what you hate, what you go through hell for and she knew it too didn’t she? Knew what her body was for, like animals know yes and she knew you thought you owned her body, why you’re terrified by a woman bearing down on you in a ballgown because you know those bare arms and shoulders, you know those breasts aren’t just play-things she’s offering to you posing as an instrument of pleasure but bigger the better there’s gallons, there’s the promise of gallons of survival of the species like a yes, like a huge brood mare. Pleasure yes, yes it’s beautifully done jealousy and the whole un, unreasonable the whole madness when the what was his name, the violinist Trukhachev God knows what shows up nice looking with a yes, yes I remember this with a well developed posterior? Like a woman yes like Hottentots they tell you with a talent they tell you for music and we’re off for music yes, for music the cause of it all? Him and your wife bound together by music, “the most refined form of sensual lust” you call it? The cause of most of the adulteries in your class of society? A fearful thing but what is it? That description you put in somewhere Pozdnyshev, it’s lovely, that music carries you off into another state of being that’s not your own, of feeling things you don’t really feel, of understanding things you don’t really understand, of being able to do things you aren’t really able to do it’s everything we’ve been talking about from the start, discover your unsuspected talent, you can play better by roll than many who play by hand, the biggest thrill in music is playing it yourself even untrained persons can do it, it’s your participation that rouses your emotions most, these phantom hands, this detachable self, Homer’s dangerous demon with its own life and energy you can’t control force you to do things you wouldn’t otherwise, everything Plato wants to banish, scrape away every fiction get down to the truth, to the naked animal banish them yes, banish the Lydian mode and the Ionian and the flute above all the flute worse than all the strings together invented for nothing but pleasure and Homer, banish Homer and all of the poets and painters and sculptors whose love poems and naked Venuses celebrate women as instruments of pleasure take that first movement of The Kreutzer Sonata, the presto you say, can we allow it to be played in a drawing room full of women in lowcut dresses? Good God Pozdnyshev and we’re back where we started, where pleasure in all circumstances is bad, we’re here to be punished and we ought to be punished so you’ve killed your wife and her Hottentot suitor with musical tastes escapes under the piano, is all this simply an outburst of the passions and emotions Plato wants to save us from censoring practically banishing the arts or is it, is it a stew of disease and impairment, madness and suicide that produces the artist, Keats consumptive and Beethoven deaf, Dostoevsky epileptic, Byron’s foot and Homer’s blindness if he existed at all, Baudelaire and Schiller and enough madness and suicide to please God himself, Schumann and Kleist suicides, Hölderlin insane and the most agonizing of them all of course yes, sitting there empty eyed in a white gown on exhibit for his loathsome sister’s teatime guests, wasn’t that she’d betrayed the man, the artist, sold him out no that’s to be expected, he’s expendable, just the vehicle or the husk of it for the work that’s what she betrayed, that’s our immortality and that’s what she corrupted, worse than murder Pozdnyshev, worse than murder you can ask your master Pozdnyshev and take comfort, yes, of all people, Tolstoy of all artists of all suicides manqués Levochka would agree. She’s just been widowed by a blazing anti-Semite suicide herself and here’s dear brother fresh out of the madhouse and long out of the spell of his most famous friend he believed to be Germany’s greatest creative genius, good God Pozdnyshev! If you were playing the “Pilgrims’ Chorus,” how much would it mean to you to have the composer Richard Wagner himself by your side? Great Wagner comes and, lifting them aloft above the clouds, transports them to the mighty halls of old Walhalla in Ride of Walkyries taking this poisonous anti-Semitic little woman with him. No more wooden fingers no but phantom hands, she seizes the rights to all her stupefied brother’s work published and unpublished, unfinished ideas, notes and letters, even letters to his mother she alters and forges addressed to herself and comes out with a completely corrupted pasted together jumble called The Will to Power as his final work, the blond beast and ruthlessly distorted superman orchestrating the blackest period in German history, you see? His immortality that’s what she corrupted, his glorious vision in his early book The Birth of Tragedy where Apollo’s classic Greek power to create measured and harmonious beauty is endlessly assailed by the drunken frenzy of Dionysus threatening to smash everything the sheer, the sheer tension the energy the tinge of madness, the supernatural powers that emerge, from disease that Plato mentions and the primitive idea that crazy people speak in divine languages and above all yes above all the catharsis of abandoned music and dance we’ve talked about that haven’t we, should have looked into that yourself Pozdnyshev, should have tried it. Should have learned the tango Pozdnyshev, the most elegant, merciless, disciplined abandon never would have killed her, learned the tango you never would have killed her and if I had I wouldn’t be here now, listen. Listen where’s my clothes, can you help me? Ought to go out and get some fresh air, get out of this dim suffocating airless lightless little no no wait not yet no, these demons of Homer’s and Golyadkin’s doppelgänger who’s gone with his bed in the morning when Petrushka brings in tea and explains that his master’s not at home shouting You idiot Petrushka! I’m your master!! Can’t get away, each one of them haunting the Other, hounding the Other, following him everywhere with his piercing terrifying glare and a few vicious remarks enough to drive a man mad, moves in with him moves out to some dirty little hotel room like this one but follows him home like a dog finally simply has to end it, simply has to get rid of the Other, he wasn’t mine was he? He was my fiction wasn’t he? Not easy no but it’s got to be done, my creation wasn’t it? Like Levochka thinking your thoughts so you can have them? Lie back here and see things falling into place like reading the Tarot, no reason that betrayal can’t be positive is there? Beautiful little innocent climbs into my lap fell on my neck with kisses while we put together this fiction of appearing as the nonperson my joy! My honeyed muse, my sometime daughter, scraping it away now for the real nonperson here because there’s finally no getting around it is there. Because what I’ve been dreading, what I’ve feared, what got me here in the first place no surgery no but this, this hormonal chemical God knows what treatment has put me out of business, out of being a threat yes maybe I never was. Maybe I never was! That was the great betrayal wasn’t it, where it all started, and everywhere the ceremony of innocence was drowned. Listen. Can you, can you pull a shade over there? The sun’s getting in my eyes, sitting still here in a room God knows these shadows of the real state we’re all living in, dim shapes, those weightless shadows the chorus held up to Ajax in his slaughterhouse survive now simply as gossip like everything else in the end where they’ll say I never really planned the whole property transfer to them out of love but just as a scheme to avoid taxes? Where they’ll say I’m the one who betrayed my daughters because I’d really surrendered nothing, the baby king who tyrannizes through the sheer blackmail of his existence, that I betrayed them and you and everyone yes, the artist as confidence man that I betrayed even myself from the fear of trying to carry the unforgiving burden of the real artist, to try to hide the failure of everything I’d promised there left stranded, like some maiden aunt’s Torschlusspanik at being left unmarried on the shelf, art and entertainment and technology, of authenticity and the true story of its philosopher corrupted by his sister as gossip of the most sinister sort, of love as the ultimate fiction and music the most refined form of Levochka’s sensual lust building up like the pressure of steam that would burst the boiler if the safety valve of sex didn’t release it he tells us in that frenzied metaphor of mechanization reaching everywhere, of art without the artist as a threat and the end of him at the twist of a knife but it wasn’t that crude, no. No it doesn’t really matter because that’s what gossip does, isn’t that what gossip is? Dawn breaking on the handsome face of mortal youth, verweile doch! du bist so schön the goddess asking immortality for him like her immortal own but the legs have crumbled, pursued by age as punishment for pleasure and all of it fading into that bed of shades, those imitations and shadowy images of gossip where there is no present moment but only the next one being devoured in the immense maw of the past, where immortality finds its home at last, where the voice has dwindled to the dry scratch of a grasshopper and the legs are gone, they’re just not there and it all comes down in a heap good God look at them! Blood dried on the sheets and those damn rusting staples don’t know whether I’m shivering or shaking from the, try to find one dry corner down there. Try to sit up and get one leg down where it’s, something down there, just get my arm so I can reach the, whole sodden mess look at that. Mel-O-DEE Music Rolls, Mel-O-Art, QRS Campaign Against Filth in Popular Songs they sold a million rolls in 1926. Sell more Player Rolls! Sell more Player Pianos! Sell More Ukuleles and Banjos! More! More! More! God it was so it was all so America! It was the crowd, not the dry scratch of the grasshopper but the herd, it was “the little people making merry like grasshoppers in spots of sunlight, hardly thinking” just perpetuating the species weren’t they? “Foolishly reduplicating folly in thirty-year periods; they eat and they laugh too.” Groan against elitism, against Flaubert in retreat, “I believe that the crowd, the mass, the herd, will always be detestable” he writes to George Sand, remember? When he’s written his niece preparing his Paris flat before his death, “I ask to be liberated from my enemy, the piano, and from another enemy, which hits me on the forehead — the stupid hanging lamp in the dining room” and weeks later, de Maupassant to Turgenev, “Flaubert apoplexy, no hope” where nothing survives of importance “save a small group of minds, ever the same, which pass on the torch.” No more piano! I said. Absolutely no artist! By now electricity is spreading its blessings everywhere, from refinements on the reproducing piano with the, where, in Germany? No that was my invention wasn’t it? Wrote it down yes and somebody stole it? The reproducing piano is made possible by an electric motor attached to the pump providing constant and predetermined air pressure, while back at home here the electric player with a magnet for each key appears, the nickel in the slot making the electrical contact pounding out its mechanical note; missing some in bad weather, but still in the vanguard other public entertainment a murderer named Kemmler provides material for the first electrocution at Auburn Prison. Progress! Great God wherever you’d look says Reverend Newell Dwight Hillis, “For the first time government, invention, art, industry, and religion have served all the people rather than the patrician classes.” Wait a minute no, no not so fast Reverend, elitists staging a rearguard action here, Steinway brings Paderewski over here and Knabe opens Carnegie Hall with Tchaikovsky live, piano makers and European patrons supporting music and the arts as diversions for Plato’s patricians and disdaining American artists as rubes who disdain them as foreign laborers. Whole thing coming to pieces here, just to get it over with but, with what? Over with what? Prepositions make all the trouble but you can’t really explain anything to anybody why I’ve got to explain all this because we don’t know how much time’s left to finish this work of mine before it’s distorted and turned into a cartoon because it is a cartoon for that herd out there, the crowd, the mass waiting to be entertained, turn the creative artist into a performer because they are the hallucination, you see? The whole thing’s turned upside down, the kittens are bit and the houses are built without walls, you see? Used to be the reality was the stone Doctor Johnson kicked and Doctor Johnson himself, and hallucinations took place in the head, in the mind, now everything out there is the hallucination and the mind where the work is done is the only reality, because the work is the only refuge from this torn wet-smelling hallucination of the body looks like a, like some map all fingered and latticed see right through it where the Great Lakes with that biggest one hanging down like some immense weak malformed invertebrate fit only to be whipped, so if reality is the work when it goes wrong all that’s waiting out there is the sweat, the blood and, problem where’s the blood coming from, not bleeding anywhere but I keep finding fresh blood on the, not even on the collar no under the collar like a vampire? Nothing mystical about all this it’s not some half-baked Buddhist nirvana where all is illusion good God no, because the rage is there at the heart of it, the sheer energy, the sheer tension the tinge of madness where the work gets done, the only reality, the only refuge from the vast hallucination that’s everything out there, and that you’re all part of out there where everything equals everything else. Ten, a hundred, a thousand years ago it’s all one, where immortality becomes gossip, 1890 van Gogh shoots himself in a wheat field, Rimbaud’s gone the next year, and so is Melville and to even things out Whitman a year later Rudolf Diesel invents the internal combustion engine, Eastman Kodak is founded in his mother’s kitchen tainted by gossip over just where he got the idea for flexible film and Thomas Edison celebrates entertainment and art and the ascendancy of the crowd, the herd, with the patent on the kinetoscope, you see? Carnegie the working man’s friend locks him out and goes fishing in Scotland to avoid the death and carnage at Homestead so it’s Frick who gets stabbed, pushpin or Pushkin long since killed in a duel and it’s all one, everything out there it’s all this grand hallucination where Count Tolstoy is stalking Turgenev, following him everywhere with his piercing frightening glare enough to drive a man mad with vicious remarks Turgenev tells a friend and he’s weeping again, remember? Being haunted by this Other we’ve been talking about, The Kreutzer Sonata’s been banned here why? because Beethoven’s German? But it’s not the World War when Wagner’s music was banned here no, no this goes back to the day Wagner’s art was damned as “nothing more than the dope required by a decadent generation” by his disciple, his apostle, by the one who believed him to be Germany’s greatest creative genius, by the, good God can’t you see? Wagner was the Other, he was the where is that, Michelangelo and the Self who could do more because that’s what it’s all about so he had to be killed, Nietzsche had to kill him and be carried away to an asylum a year later, while great Wagner lifts us aloft above the clouds to the mighty halls of old Walhalla where these great artists will never play again, but their phantom hands will live forever, haunt us forever. Forever! Good God that’s, question’s whether all this clatter and bang, old Walhalla and Chin Chin Temple Bells preserved on piano rolls are part of the hallucination or only escape from it, see what was going on everywhere out there in this frenzy of invention more than a century ago? In Germany the Ariston player with thirty-six notes then the Hupfeld with sixty-one still no pneumatics till the Welte family patents its pneumatic Orchestrion operated with a perforated paper roll, in France Carpentier shows his Melograph and Melotrope to the French Academy, mechanical fingers brought to life by electromagnets and a perforated strip. But before that France had claimed credit for the whole thing with Fourneaux’s pneumatic Pianista, its fingers worked through a piece of pierced cardboard, and here? Peel off these damn notes sticking together worse than I am just the smell and all the rest of it, half the time inventing half the time litigating, Kelly invents a wind motor with slide valves opening and closing ports with electrical help, Merritt Gally’s inventions fighting on both fronts, R W Pain and Henry Kuster build Needham & Sons their first pneumatic piano player that’s half as big as the piano it attacks, somebody else is making a folding piano that’s portable and there’s the Piano écran that can be used as a screen or set up as a card table I mean all that’s got to be part of the hallucination doesn’t it? Look. There’s more to it, all that beating the bushes out there there’s more to it there’s a, a hunger that hasn’t taken shape haunting the whole thing. It’s not just mother tapping the parlour piano note by note with her illustrated song The Little Lost Child or one of a hundred more about lost children, orphaned children, sick children, all in plentiful supply no, there’s more to it. More what! Are you crazy? You think some phantom hand some, some significant Other will burst out of the bushes and redeem any shred of value hidden in your grand hallucination? Provide some refuge from it where your reality prevails? Where the work gets done? Yes and why not! Because right now it finds its despairing voice in a novel that sweeps the nation, when Peter Ibbetson would “buy or beg or borrow the music that had filled me with such emotion and delight, and take it home to my little square piano, and try to finger it out for myself. But I had begun too late in life. To sit, longing and helpless, before an instrument one cannot play, with a lovely score one cannot read!” Yes and then at that moment what, deliverance? A patent issued for the Angelus Piano Player that can be played by hand or automatically with its mechanism working at the rear end of the keys not interfering with anything. You see? Why that novel of du Maurier’s was a rage in America where the biggest thrill in music would be in playing it yourself, what we talked about back at the start of all this? Where it’s your own participation that rouses your emotions most? Where you can play better by roll than many who play by hand, where you can play all pieces while they can play but a few? And isn’t that your significant Other who cut the roll in the first place? Your self who can do more yes, these phantom hands that transform you into this Other, not talking about those detachable selves that can be withdrawn from the body we talked about, no. Not like the belly-talkers or doppelgängers, Golyadkin pursuing his doppelgänger or Golyadkin’s doppelgänger pursuing Golyadkin no, more like one of those dangerous demons of Homer’s with lives and energies of their own that aren’t really part of you since you can’t control them. And now even untrained persons can do it! Back with Plato’s chance persons pouring out Für Elise without a flaw till the last perforation in the roll passes over the corresponding hole in the tracker bar and democracy comes lumbering into the room with the piano player hunched over the keyboard half as big as the piano itself. It’s all like, it’s like a kind of plagiary, like Gottschalk composing his bar room player piano music fifty years before the player was invented, like my own ideas being stolen before I even had them since I’m clearly the one person qualified for a piece of work like this one, first because I can’t read music and can’t play anything but a comb. Second because I use only secondhand material which any court would dismiss as hearsay so we can reduce it to gossip like everything else, and finally. Finally I really don’t believe any of it. You see? I don’t really believe you can take ninety-six people, that’s almost two hundred hands, take out some of them like the sleigh bells there’s still more than a hundred-odd hands doing entirely different things, guiding bows across strings pressing the neck so fast it’s dizzying, fingers pushing, plunging valves, keys opening holes and closing them, the clarinet changing whole registers translating every jot and tittle on the score into a stab, a wail, a delicate lonely suspense, a blast to wake the dead, sforzando, piano God knows what all of it going on at once but not exactly all at once because what’s coming out of all this is a Pastoral Symphony, what’s rising to the heavens is Bruckner’s Eighth or Mozart’s D Minor Piano Concerto, what overwhelms the senses is Eliot’s “music heard so deeply That it is not heard at all, but you are the music While the music lasts” but isn’t that then, isn’t that the hallucination? Transforming this chaos of hands guiding bows, fingers plunging valves resolving this clutter of physical of, you see? I can’t think about it, I can’t not think about it but when I try not to think about it I go absolutely crazy but that’s, no. Can you hear me? Listen. Start back with these three wait, two pianos, first the enemy Flaubert asked to be liberated from. No more piano! I said, only that small group of minds, ever the same, to pass on the torch. And the second one, Peter Ibbetson’s enigmatic little square piano that will not surrender its secrets, leaving him helpless before an instrument he cannot play, a score he can’t read, finding its author one day walking across Hampstead Heath with Henry James and a new idea for a story, begging the American novelist to write it, good God what it might have turned into in James’s delicate hands! But James handed it back yes and here’s the third one, the third piano, a big semigrand by Broad-wood, brought to Paris by La Petite Vitesse freshly tuned for the hands of the man once the best pianist of his time at the Leipzig Conservatory, but now fallen to poverty and deceit, borrowing money, betraying and cheating anyone in reach, bullying anyone less talented, that is to say everyone, in the name of the art which he still holds bitterly sacred, supplying his miserable needs with any dodge he can devise, treating a young woman suffering from severe pain with an approach floating up from central Europe, where my golden Sigi had opened the era of psychoanalysis with a paper on the psychological mechanism of hysteria and was already embracing “free association” to replace hypnosis, left in the hands of those who’ve departed most lamentably from his own ideal most ably represented by the scapegrace now seated on the divan opposite the suffering girl looking at him fixed in the whites of his eyes. He passed a hand on her forehead and temples, and down her cheek and her throat till her eyes closed and her face emptied. Was she still in pain? Oh! presque plus du tout, monsieur! she cries out and he, stunned by the shock of her cri du coeur ringing in the rafters, asks to look into her mouth, finding its roof like the dome of the Panthéon with room for toutes les gloires de la France, its entrance like the middle porch of Saint Sulpice, not a tooth missing, the bridge of her nose like the belly of a Stradivarius, what a sounding board! She must come back to be cured of her pain when it returns, he will play Schubert and her voice will be trained, meanwhile she shall see nothing, hear nothing, think of nothing, think of nothing but Svengali, Svengali, Svengali! And the world at large but America in extravagant particular would hear nothing, talk of nothing, read nothing, but Trilby, Trilby, Trilby, nothing but the inevitable stage production of Trilby where even the soft felt hat worn there became and is still called a trilby. People went trilby mad. You had to be there. Can you hear me? The America of discovering your hidden talent, of self-improvement, of one born every minute. Over there, dying Offenbach’s one wish, to see the premiere of his Tales of Hoffmann, had come a year too late with its mechanical dolls by Spalanzani passing off one as his daughter for poor Hoffmann to fall in love with, and a girl in act three who sings herself to death. But three years? Svengali and a friend teaching Trilby eight hours a day morning noon and night for three years, violin and Svengali with his little flageolet, Gott im Himmel! Wieder zurück! The most astoundingly beautiful sounds ever heard from a human throat, one note drawn through all the colors of the rainbow as Svengali’s eyes directed her, the greatest contralto, the greatest soprano the world had ever known till that terrible night in Drury Lane when Svengali died in the box opposite and it was all over. Can you hear me? I’m, no, get my breath can’t get my breath, what it’s all about anyhow, that note drawn through the rainbow as his eyes directed this Other he had created feel like myself just the breathing, the breathing the, not being able to, to make these wonderful sounds he’d wanted and nothing else, to think his thoughts and wish his wishes, all of it nothing but Svengali’s love for himself turned inside out wasn’t it, yes! Yes and that, where did that come from! Finally yes that, where it’s all been going from the start, that cry from Michelangelo, O Dio, o Dio, o Dio, Chi m’a tolto a me stesso Ch’a me fusse più presso O più di me potessi, che poss’ io? O Dio, o Dio, who has taken the one closest to me who could do more than no, no it’s not that pedestrian it’s fifteenth, sixteenth century Italian nearer poetry, Who nearer to me Or more mighty yes, more mighty than I Tore me away from myself. Tore me away! che poss’, what can I do? I’ll tell you che poss’ io! Get him back, whoever took this Other, tore away the closest to me who could do more yes wheel up the player, put a roll in and start pumping all trying to get out from under this cumbersome damn thing with its tiny fingers get a fine burnished player inside a case, a cocoon, says one pupa to the other as a butterfly passes, you’d never get me into an outfit like that, O Dio, o Dio, odious, repugnant, from odium, hatred, odisse to hate God the bed-maker you hear me Svengali? That old friendship between myself and myself broken by age coming on, left my ideas and opinions to suit public opinion and be part of it a, a yes a nonperson looking back at the arrogant self-made self when you were the finest pianist at the Leipzig Conservatory before it was torn from you, before your love of singing became a croak in your throat and before you became Trilby’s Self who could do more till Age finally took you and the magnificent voice that we’d heard, that the world had heard when she sang the Impromptu was yours wasn’t it Svengali! You singing with her voice, wasn’t it! Age withering arrogant youth and worse, the works of arrogant youth and the book I wrote then, my first book, it’s become my enemy, o Dio, odium, the rage and energy and boundless excitement the only reality where the work that’s become my enemy got done and the only refuge from the hallucination that’s everything out there is the greater one that transforms you good God, Pozdnyshev, those words that Levochka gave you to transform the whole thing when “music carries you off into another state of being that’s not your own, of feeling things you don’t really feel, of understanding things you don’t really understand, of being able to do things you aren’t really able to do” yes, that transforms that transfigures you yourself into the self who can do more! That was Youth with its reckless exuberance when all things were possible pursued by Age where we are now, looking back at what we destroyed, what we tore away from that self who could do more, and its work that’s become my enemy because that’s what I can tell you about, that Youth who could do anything.Читать дальше