Amos Oz - Touch the Water, Touch the Wind

Eventually Yotam was sent out to Argentina as an instructor. He lived in a commune along with several other young envoys from Israel, and took part in heated discussions which lasted into the early hours. After some months his eyes were opened and he saw the dazzling splendor of the wealthy villas on the outskirts, he saw stunning women, he saw life. And so he joined his maternal aunt, who had settled in Argentina and now exported canned beef all over the world in partnership with her daughter and two other elderly Russian émigrés.

But while Yotam was making progress toward a complete recovery and finding his niche in life, Ernst fell ill with a painful and incurable blood disease.

His gray eyes grew even grayer.

His mind was no longer exercised by Pomeranz's relations with kibbutz society. On the other hand, it sometimes happened in the evenings that the mathematical concept of infinity and the resultant paradoxes aroused his curiosity.

His eyebrow which was perpetually raised in astonishment — how could his interlocutor sink to such depths — now lowered itself to a level with its partner. His expression conveyed something resembling the rest of the hilltops to which Goethe's poem perhaps alluded.

He called on Pomeranz, too, occasionally, after the ten o'clock news. He sat with him and listened, and even put one or two questions.

Despite his illness, Ernst was still calm and composed; he showed no sign of alarm. He sat with his host and devoted himself to examining words and expressions, comparing them, weighing them, holding them up to the light, leaving them to soak for twenty-four hours, seeing what and checking how far.

The night which enfolded Ernst and his host, the early summer night which here in Galilee betrays a suffocating, simian quality, did not distract him from the even course he had followed all his life. Even the subject of which he was now trying to learn the rudiments did not lead him astray. He would return to his room before midnight, one of the women — sometimes both of them — would make him a glass of tea, hand him his pills, make up his bed, and in the meantime Ernst would type out a kind of résumé of what he had seen and heard, a kind of logbook or journal. He maintained his balanced style almost to the end, and subjected each word to an almost physical scrutiny before allowing it to take its place on the page. If there are one or two points, particularly in the final entries, where he seems to have lost his equilibrium somewhat, we must remember that he was seriously ill at the time, and was at the mercy of agonizing pain and bitter humiliation. And perhaps also apprehension.

First observation: If one reflects carefully on such concepts as gravity, inertia, or natural law, one simple conclusion emerges at once: the sciences employ metaphors and similes. A scientist would be thoroughly taken aback were his attention drawn to the literal meaning of such phrases as "the earth's pull" or "the attraction of opposites." We are confronted by a choice: either-or.

Second observation: Mass. Energy. Electricity. Magnetic fields. On the other hand: Time. Space. Motion. And again: Will. Suffering. If all these have a "meeting-point" or "junction" — it is music. Without arriving at any conclusion we can report: from this there emerges a highly tempting hypothesis.

Third observation: Let us suppose for the moment that music is energy in a primary, more authentic form, and that it existed before all things and will outlive them all. Music, according to this line of reasoning, is meta-energy. And yet: it is interchangeable with mathematics. From here it is possible to arrive at "thoughts like radar beams." The possibility of trapping the will and suffering in a web of figures, on the supposition that what can be caught in notes can also be caught in numbers. Moreover, the system of reciprocal relations between the dimensions of time, space, and thought — and between these and energy, motion, and rhythm — all these have already been caught in music. If you possess the vital formula you will be able to translate everything into mathematics. Into formal quantitative relationships.

Fourth observation: We have before us, then, a musical scale. Time and will, electricity and image, space, magnetism, suffering, gravity, from now on they are all susceptible of being apprehended synoptically, all part of the same system, key, various modulations, rhythm. Transfiguration of time and matter. Resonant conjunction of the subjective and objective. Let us call this whole system "mathemusics."

Fifth observation: The mathematical theorem which "operates" great galaxies and tiny particles alike, as well as the elements of life, is a theorem which can be grasped and expressed in music. The paradox of mathematical infinity is not "solved" but actually disappears: in the musical system it is no longer a paradox, it is no longer in conflict with the fundamental logical forms. One possible practical implication is, for example, the conquest of gravity through the power of music. The dissolution of matter. Even the eradication of bearishness through the dance, to quote his own words. Music, therefore, is melodic mathematics, and whoever has the key is able (in principle) to transform matter into energy, energy into suffering, suffering into time, time into will, will into space, everything into everything else in any order whatever, as everything truly is before the mind breaks it down into different elements, some of which are completely distinct from the others. Music abolishes the distinction and once again everything becomes possible, provided you can master the universal music or — again to use words which are not my own — provided you can hear the song of the stars in their orbits and can reproduce it.

On the subject of magic et cetera Elisha is not prepared to waste a single word, and I am glad. Death is the bitterest modulation of all. Nothing more. Nothing less. A simple change of key. Sixth and last observation: I, Ernst Cohen, being of sound mind, hereby acknowledge the uncertainty of my five previous observations. I admit the possibility that they were written under the pressure of illness, pain, and fear. That they were all written not of my own free will but at the instigation of my present condition which has made me clutch at straws. That everything is a delusion which exists for a time only because the whole world, including the scientific world, is in desperate need of salvation, and therefore is prepared to accept for the time being any clever prophet, any novel formula because of its novelty, until some even more novel formula makes its appearance.

That nothing exists and nothing has ever existed. Neither he nor his equations and discoveries and signs, our after-dinner discussions, neither my son nor I myself, neither this hand nor the words it is writing. Nothing whatsoever. A dancing bear. A laughing fox. Nothing.

I, Ernst Cohen, at this moment, tonight, on the point of concluding this my last observation, hereby testify: here and now, with my very ears, I can hear the stars singing. There is no possible answer to the question, Is this in itself a sufficient proof that the stars are singing.

I may add that if I tried to grasp the melody, to repeat it, to reproduce it — there is no doubt that I should sing it out of tune.

Furthermore, it is late. And the night is cold.

Whenever Elisha Pomeranz recalled his wife, he could not remember her voice, but he could almost see her hair, the line of her neck and the curve of her shoulder, her gentle, dreamy fingers. And as from a great distance he could see the late afternoon light slowly fading around the belfry of St. Stephen's Church, and the street lights coming on one by one along Jaroslaw Avenue, hesitantly, wrapped in a yellow haze, as though reluctant to mar the color of the night. And the endless forests around the town of M—, in which there were quiet, decent things which a man could look for all his life and never find: bushes, stones, huts, squirrels, wild flowers, unbelievable wild flowers. There were foxes and hedgehogs, the song of the night breeze, the breath of empty paths.