William Gaddis - The Recognitions

Still, he was most upset in these calculations over the prospect of the Last Moment. Would he have time to wash himself to perfect newness, dress in unworn, uncreased garments? Perhaps not. Perhaps he would be snatched up as he was! a picture so discomfiting that when it really came upon him, he would surprise everyone by appearing spotless for a day or two, leaving unanswered (except in his own apprehension) the cordial question, — Where are you going, Stanley? Perhaps what had happened to him when he went for an army physical examination was meant to be a lesson: told to undress, he was so mortified at the dirt on him that he went to the bathroom where the only place he could find to wash in privacy, in secret if you will, was the toilet bowl itself. Would he have time?

The perfect naked death of a baby (right after baptism).

What of Saint Catherine? appeared in pieces, did she? rolling that wheel before her. But there, she had that wheel, Saint Lawrence the gridiron, as witness to their unseemly appearances. But not in this world: things wore out, and you lost them in a thousand ways, preposterous and unconnected with any notion of devotion, martyrdom, sacrifice. . What of Mother? a thought which had been running under the surface of all these others. What of her?

And at that moment a stab of pain penetrated a tooth, and slowed to a blunt ache as he turned his face to the wall, and his eyes to the crucifix there. The dull throbbing persisted, he took his jaw in his hand of cold thin fingers and turned his face again. On a low table near his head, under gathering dust and black flecks from the river and a railroad shunting track, were newspaper clippings, sequestered for no reason but to avoid throwing them away, un-matching pictures and unrelated information one shred of which might, at some extremity, be demanded. On top lay the most recent, the feature story on the Spanish girl to be canonized in the Easter week of the year ahead. The pain in his jaw subsided as he stared at her picture upside-down hanging from the table's edge, and his mind confused its thoughts and images, more vivid and irrelevant, as it did always when he lay this way, as unable to sleep at night as he was torpid during day.

He shuddered at Esme, seduced by an apprehension in a world real enough to her: appalled one day when an airplane moving with the speed of sound had disemboweled the heaven above them and eviscerated its fragments in nausea from their bodies walking below. Alone, he might have thought nothing of it, but shut it out as he did all the frenzied traffic of the world. But her terror shook him; and she was right. And if on the other hand, they'd met that early Jesuit Father Anchieta in the street on a sunny day, sheltered under the parasol of birds he summoned to hover over him and keep pace, she would have appreciated such resourcefulness without profane curiosity, probably not have repeated what she'd 'seen to a soul. But the airplane! Had she met Saint Peter of Alcantara, Saint Peter Nolasco, Saint Peter Gonzalez, walking, as they did, upon the waves of the sea, why, there was more reason in those excursions than that streak of cacodaemonic extravagance sundering the very dome of heaven.

Stanley moved suddenly, sitting up as though to break a spell. He sat rigid on the edge of the bed, clenching his teeth as though to discipline the activity of his mind, which he could hardly stir during the day when he tried to work. How could Bach have accomplished all that he did? and Palestrina? the Gabrielis? and what of the organ concerti of Corelli? Those were the men whose work he admired beyond all else in this life, for they had touched the origins of design with recognition. And how? with music written for the Church. Not written with obsessions of copyright foremost; not written to be played by men in worn dinner jackets, sung by girls in sequins, involved in wage disputes and radio rights, recording rights, union rights; not written to be issued through a skull-sized plastic box plugged into the wall as background for seductions and the funnypapers, for arguments over automobiles, personalities, shirt sizes, cocktails, the flub-a-dub of a lonely girl washing her girdle; not written to be punctuated by recommendations for headache remedies, stomach appeasers, detergents, hair oil. . O God! dove sei Fenestrula?

Still he did not get up, but sat staring toward the dim shape of the print of the cathedral. Beneath it was the table where he worked, a cardboard practice keyboard in the center, piled at both ends with papers in uneven stacks, one weighted with the ceramic fragment, another with the Liber Usualis opened upon the Missae pro Defimctis, his own cramped scribblings in the margins of majestic words between the bars, — Quántus tremor est futúrus, Quando júdex est ventúrus. . And one page was marked with a tattered piece of notepaper. It was a Misereris omnium, and on the paper was written this piece of verse by Michelangelo, and beside it Stanley's broken attempt at translation:

O Dio, o Dio, o Dio, O God, O God, O God,

Chim'a íolto a me stesso Who has taken me from myself from me myself

Ch'a me fusse piu presso Who was closest (closer) to me

O piu di me potessi, And could do more than I most about me

che poss' io? What can I do?

O Dio, o Dio, o Dio.

Specks of dirt on the floor caught his attention from the corner of an eye, and, as was his habit he reached out and flicked at them, to see if any moved of their own volition. The tooth throbbed; and as he lay back he thought again of his mother, to whom his work was to be dedicated when it was finished. He looked at his \vrist watch, turned off the light, and in closed eyes embraced a vision of the antiphonic brass of Giovanni Gabrieli pouring forth from the two choir lofts in Saint Mark's, to meet over the heads of those congregated below.

His work, always unfinished, was like the commission from a prince in the Middle Ages, the prince who ordered his tomb, and then busied the artist continually with a succession of fireplaces and doorways, the litter of this life, while the tomb remained unfinished. Nor for Stanley, was this massive piece of music which he worked at when he could, building the tomb he knew it to be, as every piece of created work is the tomb of its creator: thus he could not leave it finished haphazard as he saw work left on all sides of him. It must be finished to a thorough perfection, as much as he humbly could perceive that, every note and every bar, every transition and movement in the pattern over and against itself and within itself proof against time: the movement in the Divine Comedy; the pattern in a Requiem Mass; prepared against time as old masters prepared their canvases and their pigments, so that when they were called to appear the work would still hold the perfection they had embraced there. Not what was going on around him now, a canvas ready when it had been stretched and slavered with white lead, or not prepared at all, words put on paper, flickering images on celluloid, with no thought but of the words and the image and the daub to follow. (Stanley's work was done on scrap paper which he ruled himself and on envelope backs, old letters, or old scores which he had erased. He was saving a pile of new paper for the final composition.)

As dawn neared outside he was still fully awake, lying under the crack in the ceiling, under the yellowed ivory (thirteenth century) crucifix over the bed. He heard the truck collecting rubbish at the far end of his block. Christmas so near, again? Suddenly he looked at the watch strapped to his wrist, a rage of figures battling through his mind. He saw Anselm, and shuddered; Esme, and moaned: what unholy thing was that? what knowledge of evil did they share? for so they did, antipodal, but embracing in his mind, images profaning his love in their coupling. He stretched his arms above his head. Did one wear a watch in the tomb? A long walk, he decided; and then he would go to Mass. Why had Agnes Deigh refused to go to Mass with him, one day when they had met; it was just time, and near enough. — I've got to have drinks with someone, business is business darling, he could hear her voice again. Then her profane images shouldered his missionary intentions aside, and the more he thought of her.