William Gass - Middle C

And the spider heard it, suspended there between floor and ceiling, felt it when the thin silver thread he hung from vibrated in sympathy with Chopin, with the étude’s instructional thirds. Joey — look at the green-gray light in this room, at this secondhand light, the pallor of death … and what do you hear in my voice, or what would you hear if you were to hear my heart? you’d hear the minor sixth — the sixths that the spider fled from, the gold ring in Rhinegold —the source of so much contention — Leonora’s bitter tears in Fidelio , sorrowful Don Quixote, yes, sixths serve anguish, longing, despair, so tell me why should the spider stay when the line he clings to trembles like a tear? Only we wallow in bitterness, only we choose gray-green lives and devote ourselves to worlds, like the shadow-lean leaves of those ghost plants littering the floor — leaves, worlds — which do not exist, the traces of a light that is no longer there.

Joey made as if to go, rising from the piano bench, when Mr. Hirk’s nearby presence pushed him down. Mr. Hirk hung over Joey now, supported by the piano itself, bent because of his bones. If one day you learn to play, Joey, you must play, whatever the key or the intervals are, as if for , as if in , the major third, the notes of praise. Play C. Joey struck a key. There were several Cs, but Joey knew which was meant, a key that would sound a certain way. In filling our ear just now it was everywhere, Mr. Hirk said. Every. Where. Was it sitting beside that pot? No. Was it lying on the rug? Of course not. Everywhere? Ah, in the piano? No? Where it was made? Not this tone. Suppose someone shuts the door and then you, Joey, ride away on your bike. Where is the slam? eh? where is the small growl of the tire in my gravel? Why there it is — the growl — it’s in the gravel where it was made; there is the slam, too, where the door shut on the jamb! Bam! Do D. Joey did D. Hear? The note is everywhere again. Not at the end of your finger. In its own space! That’s where it is, filling us up with it, making a world of its own on its own. Just one note is enough. Do E. Joey E’d. Another filling, yet the same jar! Each note makes the same space and then floods it.

Joey thought he sensed relief in Mr. Hirk’s voice, like someone wound up dangerously tight might feel once they began unwinding or the spring of a clock that was finally allowed to tell time.

Oh, a dunce might say, hey, it came from the piano. And the French horn’s passage is from the middle of the rear of the orchestra, while the violins sing to the left of the conductor, violas and cellos moan on the right, the strings closing in on the winds from both sides of the fan. Like the door’s slam, the dunce hears only the jamb where it was made. Because the bang, the gravel’s brrr , means something. So he fastens them there like tied dogs. But if you insist on silence, enjoy a little shut-eye when you listen, so there’s a bowl of darkness where your head was — then, in the music, where notes are made to appear through the commands of form, not by some tinkler on the triangle, Joey, not because they say something about their cause — then you can almost perceive — though squeeze-eyed — you can see what you hear, see the space, and see how one note is higher than another, farther away, or closer, closer than the heart. See, sir, the brightness of the trumpet among the constellations like a brighter star? Closer to whom, though, Joey? brighter than what? not to you or me, for we are no more than gravel or doors. Oh no. Brighter … closer … meaningful … to one another.

In this damn dark, Joey, when I get the phono cranked, I can follow the song exactly where it goes, and it, not Galli-Curci, it alone is real — is a rare wonder, not of this world — a wonder and a consolation.

Nor will you hear its like anywhere but in its own space. A sneeze in C? Hah. A laugh in E? A siren that runs the scale like a soprano? The notes of music live in music alone, Joey. They must be made, prepared with care. To give voice to feeling.

You will never learn anything about music that is more important than this. Mr. Hirk, with a groan, straightened somewhat. Then he used his groan for instruction. You hear it, my ache, emerge from my mouth. It has a location. Because it is in ordinary space. It is there, fastened to its cause. My grunt, I mean, not my pain. My pain is nowhere, but that’s another matter. And my pain is a call like a child’s for its mother. But when we listen to music we enter a singular space, Joey, a space not of this room or any road. This you must understand.

Sound them together, sound the chord, play CDE, Joey. Can you do it? Joey protested by doing it dramatically. Suppose I mix a little yellow and a little green together. What after all are my sick plants doing? Is chartreuse two colors or one? Joey naturally made no answer. One. One. One. One. The book beat on the piano seat. But in the chord I hear clearly C and D and E. They penetrate but do not disappear into one another. They are a trinity — a single sound in which I hear three. C is the Son. D is God the Father, the sacred root, and E is the Holy Ghost. Now, Joey, can you do this? play all at once a loud C, a soft D, and an ordinary E. Which Joey did, triumphantly. Again and again to demonstrate how easily. There! You can hear them! They are everywhere yet in different places! They are one, but they are three. If theology wrote music … Mr. Hirk’s voice trailed away. At the heart of everything, in music’s space, multiple vibrations …

Joey was relieved to get away. Mr. Hirk was somewhat embarrassing in addition to being ugly and poor and pitiful. Needy too. His hands were beginning to look like tree roots. But Joey rode away sad himself — a small sad-infested Joey — for he had not canceled the lessons; he had been allowed no suitable occasion or merciful excuse, moreover he had permitted shame and cowardice to dissuade him, and now he would have to mail, messageless as was his mother’s habit, a few small bills in an envelope the way he understood a payoff would be made, so that next week, when the time arrived for his bike to skid in the gravel in front of Mr. Hirk’s door, at the time when Joey would be expected to pop in and ask, How ya doin? there’d be nothing and no one, no bowl of silence ready to be filled with the latest tunes, only patient expectation, puzzlement, disappointment, hurt. Joey felt guilty and sorry and sad. He pedaled recklessly. He hoped his father had, at one time, felt something of the same shame.

The fear that the human race might not survive has been replaced by the fear that it will endure.

You cannot end an English sentence with a preposition. Skizzen had more than once read that. Or the world with “with”—leaving the whimper unwhimpered, for instance. Or with “on account of”—overpopulation, for example, unspecified. Or with “in”—omitting fire or flood or wind … a storm of hail each one the size of an eyeball. Can you imagine what it will die of? There will be many endings vying for the honor. And any agent of our end will have a radiant sense of ruin. Any agent of our end will dance where the score says rest.

In the garden the cornflowers watch my small mother, Skizzen thought, watch my small mother wash her small hands in the soft loamy soil of the beds. She has dug in compost over years, compost mixed with sand, with bark, with mulching leaves, a little manure, a bit of bone meal; and with a fork she has carefully circulated the soil, turning sand and leaves and rotted peelings under one another, down where the earthworms slowly pass everything through themselves and thereby imagine shit as a city. She handles the leaves and touches the blossoms. She knows how to do it. Her grasp is vigorous, never shy or uncertain. The plants respond. Eat well. Thrive. Go to nefarious seed.