Christopher Hacker - The Morels

“Why didn’t you just take the train,” I asked.

“Haven’t you been listening? I was in a panic. And we usually fly when we see Penelope’s parents — Will’s not good with sitting for long periods.”

His name was the last to be called, his seat between a pair of squabbling young boys. Their mother came over to apologize several times and to scold each into sitting quietly in his seat, but Arthur couldn’t help noticing that she didn’t offer to switch places with him. He felt a sudden pang of sadness for Penelope, who didn’t have the luxury of this mother — her ignorance of him or her freedom from him. Penelope was stuck, forced to carry with her the burden of knowing him and sharing a child. She wanted out — her parents had finally convinced her — and here he was, following her. She wanted to be left alone. To be free of him. Why couldn’t he leave her be?

But this empathy for his wife passed, and in its place came a wave of self-pity. His students loved him; he was their hero. He stood cornered after the reading the night before by a gaggle of them, eager for his esteem, eager to prove that they too understood literature’s power and importance. The fluorescent overheads were too bright for a cocktail party, but under their glare he had a cup of white wine, and then another. He enjoyed their belief in him, in what he’d written; it must be how a revolutionary feels after leaving home — family furious at being abandoned and put at risk — to arrive in the basement of his comrades, welcomed warmly as a fellow soldier, admired for the sacrifice he’s made of his family for the greater good of the cause. These were his true believers, fellow revolutionaries. They regarded him with awe, with respect. He stayed as long as he dared in that corner with a second, then a third, cup of wine, just to hear them talk, to have them ask him questions.

Overheard at the start of the semester, while passing a fellow faculty member’s office: One book does not a writer make . Had they been talking about him? Probably. He had not made friends among his cohorts. It was more important to have the alliance of faculty than his students. Full-time positions were not determined by student evaluations. Penelope urged him to invite his colleagues to dinner, to get to know the dean. Penelope was smart in these matters. It was all Penelope’s dream — the novelist husband, the distinguished professor — not his. One book . Whoever said it was right. He should have quit while he was ahead.

But he didn’t quit. Something compelled him to keep going, to seek publication. What was it he was doing? What was he trying to say? It was something Penelope had asked relentlessly, day after day, these two long weeks, and when he answered her, she assumed he was hiding his true intentions. But he wasn’t. If there were other motives, motives behind the reasons he gave her, then these motives were hidden, even from himself. Yet he could say this for certain: whatever he was trying for in that book, whatever possessed him to write what he wrote, these ambitions were not the same as, or even related to, the ambitions Penelope wanted for him — the academic ladder, lucrative book contracts — they were not the ambitions of even his most idealistic students either: he wasn’t aiming for great literature, to add to or dismantle the canon or reveal some hidden aspect of human nature or prove some political or philosophical point or make innovative use of language or form or style. They weren’t necessarily the ambitions of a writer at all. They were, if anything, related to his notions of art from many years ago, when he was studying music.

His old composition teacher worshipped at the feet of the “great” composers. He played Arthur recordings of the established living masters, “bearers of the torch,” he used to say, as though each of these men from different parts of the world, from different generations, shared the same aim, an aim that his teacher could never articulate clearly to Arthur. As if Bartók’s curatorial notions of his countrymen’s folk music were in any way related to the playful, kaleidoscopic symmetries that flowed from Mozart’s brain. For a while, Arthur would allow himself to become enamored of a composer or a certain contemporary school of thought — new serialism, indeterminacy, minimalism — feeling each time that yes, this was the answer. But then he would decide that the theory fell short in some way, didn’t account for some music, unwritten, that was inside of him, needing only to be unlocked.

However these composers and schools of thought failed individually, they failed collectively in the same way: the music was all dead on arrival. For every piece of music, once written down, was merely a description of itself, its true purpose a set of instructions. And to perform that set of instructions was merely to describe the description. It was to confuse the act of cooking with the act of reading a recipe out loud. True music was not created by instruments squawking out noises specified on a page. It was not to be written down. It was not to be thought about, codified into some school of thought — somewhere along the line, music found itself divorced from one of its more powerful, primal purposes.

Catharsis.

“It’s an antiquated notion,” Arthur said. “The lost art of ancient bards with their lyres. It’s been replaced by a more general suggestion that music should quote-unquote ‘move people,’ that it should activate the emotions in some way, but on the whole, people who make music — composers, performers — disown themselves from this responsibility: it’s up to the audience to feel what it will and is generally out of the hands of the person onstage. And many contemporary composers have taken it a step further — they reject the notion that music should do anything at all, that, in fact, to actively try to provoke a feeling in a listener is a futile effort at best and, at worst, a manipulative act better left to the hacks who score movies and, as such, something any serious-minded composer ought to avoid. So freed from any and all obligations to a listener, the contemporary composer is free to annoy — or more likely bore — that listener to death.”

Catharsis: to cleanse, to purge. According to my dogeared college dictionary, “an emotional purification through art, intended to renew the spirit.” Or “to rid oneself of a fixation by allowing it direct expression.” An appealing idea for Arthur, one that came to him not through his time at music school but at home, in the process of teaching himself French.

His parents’ bookcase at home was a special kind of library. Guests were free to take any book they wanted as long as, in its place, they donated one of their own. It was a tradition his parents began before he was born and continued to this day. It was better than any public library, they claimed, bringing them into contact with titles they would never have chosen on their own. (The spring of 1976 saw the sole, important amendment to the rules: the book donated must not already exist in the bookcase — after they noticed their shelves overrun by dozens of copies of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance , threatening to overtake their entire library like a virus.) They received books of all kinds, many in languages other than English, and during Arthur’s foray into the French language, he scoured the bookshelves for titles a little more challenging than Le Petit Prince . Arthur found a book by one Louis Moulinier entitled Le Pur et l’Impur dans la Pensée des Grecs , which seemed to describe, if he was reading correctly, cathartic traditions and rituals in ancient Greece.

In it, he learned that Greeks practiced music as a kind of medicine, as a way of keeping the “humors” in balance. In order to purge evil humors, the musicians would invoke them through their music — similia similibus curantur, “like curing like”—in the way that Achilles cleansed himself of the murder of Thersites by washing his hands in the ritual blood of a sacrificed piglet: blood purified through blood. In this way, Arthur learned, the Greek purged himself, through music, of all sorts of bad stuff. And it wasn’t only the audience that was the beneficiary of this treatment: the musicians themselves and the composers were cleansed as well.