Was wholly warranted as they’d done wrong
And it, though fort, was scarcely dure, so just
And fitting. If our libertine thought just
The opposite then we can best start off
By figuring maybe common sense is wrong
To hold that, for the sadist, it’s all one
Whether we’re talking real or fictive pain,
Whether those living torments taken straight
From Robespierre’s book or those that issue straight
From some odd neural kink that finds them just
To its inventive taste. So human pain,
Where real or witnessed, turns the Marquis off
Through that empathic gift that makes him one
With fictive beings whose imagined wrong
Goes straight to that raw nerve. What sets it off
Then looks like just his crying need for one
More suffering soul whose wrong might cause him pain.
WIFE TO MR. HAYDN
The daughter of Johann Peter Keller that Haydn really married was Maria Anna Theresia Keller, who was born the seventh child of her parents on 25 September 1730.…Since Anna Keller signed her marriage contract and her first will “Maria Anna” (names that were also part of Aloisia’s name) and appears as “Anna” in other documents, the mistaken identity never became apparent in documents from Haydn’s later life.
—Michael Lorenz, “Haydn’s Real Wife”
Suppose someone said, pointing to Nixon, “That’s the guy who might have lost.” Someone else says “Oh no, if you describe him as the winner, then it’s not true that he might have lost.” Now which one is being the philosopher here, the unintuitive man? It seems to me obviously to be the second. The second man has a philosophical theory. The first man would say, and with great conviction, “Well, of course, the winner of the election might have been someone else…” So, such terms as “the winner” or “the loser” don’t designate the same objects in all possible worlds. On the other hand, the term “Nixon” is just the name of this man.
—Saul Kripke, Naming and Necessity
So, room for hope: maybe she wasn’t such
A battle-axe, or apt to block her ears
And stomp off when the others came around,
Vanhal and Dittersdorf, and then (a touch
Déclassé but top-rated by his peers)
That Mozart boy, the only one she found
Half-way agreeable or up to much
Once they’d stopped playing, sunk a dozen beers
Between them, and agreed to let the sound
Of Josef’s music (or the double-dutch
They talked about it) silence any fears
That maybe this new Wunderkind was bound
To steal his show. Now it turned out that they’d
Defamed her monstrously, the scholars who
Just went on trotting out that same old tale
About the constant misery she made
Of Papa’s life, but so contrived to screw
Things up it took two centuries to nail
The libel. Seems that all the old brigade
Of musicologists believed it true,
The henpeck stuff, which led them without fail
To hand it down and so promote the trade
In any rumour-mongering that might do
To place Frau Haydn on the Beaufort Scale
Of stormy wives. Truth is, the thing went back
To his biographer, one C.F. Pohl,
Who (we now learn) took insufficient care
With note-keeping or else displayed a lack
Of proper training in his chosen role
And who must therefore take the largest share
Of blame for a false trail which gave the pack
Their scent of female prey. What blew the whole
Shebang sky-high was study (all too rare,
It seems) of certain records that kept track
Of dates and details and so proved the sole
Remaining proof of how it failed to square,
That legend, with the chronicle of those
Plain life-events set down with not the least
Small hint of myth or narrative intent
As births, deaths, marriages—whatever goes
Toward the stock of knowledge that’s increased
By every instance of the scholar’s bent
For patient archive-grubbing where he knows
Home-truths reside. So at this point they ceased,
The Haydn-seekers, to misrepresent
One candidate for wife and rather chose—
Since new research had diligently pieced
The evidence together—to prevent
Worse damage from befalling the fair name
Of Haydnstudien by making known
That, of the Keller girls, the one he’d wed
Was not Aloysia who’d achieved ill fame
As his domestic scourge because she’d grown
To a mere eighteen months, the record said,
When some obscure mishap or illness came
To cut life short. So Pohl & Co. were thrown
Off the right track by taking it as read,
That marriage-record, or supposing some
Plain fact-transcriber must back then have seen
The entry, made a note of it, and checked,
If only by calendric rule of thumb,
That the event might plausibly have been
As commonly set down. So the correct
Account—as scholars (most of them) have come
Around to thinking—says that we demean
The cause of scholarship and disrespect
The name of that dead child if we’re so dumb
As not to grasp the truth: that our routine
Ideas about which hen it was that pecked
The kindest and most genial of all
Our great composers have been way off-beam
Since almost the year dot. In truth his bride
Was that child’s sibling whom they chose to call
“Maria Anna” likewise, on a scheme
Straightforwardly if confusingly applied,
But then—as if half-minded to forestall
Such errors once the error-spawning meme
Was up to its old tricks—put that aside
And settled on “Theresia” as a small
Concession to the need that something seem
To make them different women or to guide
The suitors or the scholars in their quest
For the right girl. So, you may say, what’s here
Achieved is just a small but in its way
Impressive instance of how thought can test
For such false reasonings as no doubt we’re
Innately prone to and ensure that they,
If not eliminated or suppressed,
Are then at least not given the all-clear
To work their mischief wholesale. Yet this may
Be deemed one sign of how they all invest,
Those types, in the self-comforting idea
That some such well-judged putting-into-play
Of new-found evidence and clearer thought
Might somehow wipe the record clean or shift
The burden of those long-accustomed jibes
About Aloisia’s nearly having brought
An end to his good-humour or so miffed
His well-tuned temperament that certain vibes
Might strike responsive ears as somehow fraught
With echoes of the ever-widening rift
Twixt man and wife. For so it was the scribes
Of mainstream musicology once taught
Their reader-listeners first to give short shrift
To Aloisia, then—to mark the tribe’s
Belated turn to more enlightened ways
Of thought—advised us readers we should take
An altogether different view and d
itch,
Along with faulty scholarship, the craze
For serving up the usual range of fake
Bit-parts and sexist stereotypes by which
That old-school musicology betrays
Its male agenda. That’s why, for the sake
Of some cheap joke, it casts her as a bitch
Whose legendary ill-humour then displays
By contrast every gift that went to make
Her Josef, in his music, such a rich
Resource for anyone who’d ride them out,
Those patches of domestic Sturm und Drang
Or suchlike contretemps. These might,
To lesser mortals, spell the final rout
Of all that once united yin and yang
But, in his case, contrived to lift the blight
Of ages—or relieve the short-lived bout
Of gloom brought on (let’s say) by some harangue—
Through such a sense of darkness turned to light
As comes to solace grief and silence doubt,
At least for now. Yet if the chorus sang
About these things in bars they always cite,
The commentators, from the opening strains
Of his Creation, then the same applies
Elsewhere in ways less plain to hear yet still,
For many, what so perfectly sustains
The truth of those domestic lows and highs
That he transformed, Prospero-like, until
Their formal interplay alone remains
And keen-eared listeners can at best surmise,
By dint of fine-tuned analytic skill,
What subtly interwoven joys and pains
May here find voice. So if they now revise
The old back-story so as to fulfil
Their scholarly vocation, it’s no more
Of a corrective to the way they’d spun
The tale of Haydn’s genius than to read
The names “Anna Maria” where before
They’d read “Anna Aloisia,” while the one
Picked out as Josef’s bride is now decreed,
By general assent, to leave the score
Unchanged since still the source of old-style fun
With all the attributes that guaranteed
Her, like her sibling, as an endless store
Of anecdotal chat. So what they’d done,
Philosophers might say, was just proceed
To switch the proper names but not enquire
Too closely into how or by what kind
Of evidential warrant they’d accrued
Such power. Though new disclosures might conspire
To shift the referent they still inclined,
The genial Haydn’s less than genial brood
Of partisans, to stick with all their prior
Convictions when, as usual, they’d a mind
Not to let awkward truths-of-fact preclude
Whatever fictive tale they might desire
To put around no matter who’s consigned,
Like her, to bit-parts of the sort eschewed
By self-respecting extras. Listen well
To how his wit and humour always stage
Their peace-restoring comeback even though
He’s maybe (who knows?) just been given hell
Or else—a handy reference-point to gauge
Their differences—encountered moods as low
As any that, in Mozart, mean a spell
Of dark G minor. These a later age
Would take as ample reason to bestow
On him, not Haydn, prior claim to tell
Such inner-worldly truths as might assuage
Our music-wakened need to undergo
Those same upheavals of the human soul
That (we suppose) must certainly have played
Their part in drawing out a music prone
To overwhelm our fragile flood-control
Or bid Dionysus’ retinue invade
Apollo’s realm had he not also known
How most effectively to button-hole
The form-attentive listener. What’s conveyed
By Haydn’s gently civilizing tone
Is more: steer clear of the magnetic pole
Marked “tragedy” or “inner torment’, trade
Your fraught dispatches from the danger-zone
For feelings nearer home, and wonder if
Perhaps humanity, like music, stands
To gain far more by nurturing a sense
Of irony than letting some small tiff
Gain resonance. The discord then expands
As dark-side harmonies grow more intense,
Or rows turn into struggles on a cliff-
Edge looking out across the ruined lands
Where dazed combatants witness the expense
Of spirit as each rumour brings a whiff
Of grapeshot. Like a laying-on of hands,
That trick of Haydn’s somehow to condense
Fresh hope in every minor-major riff
Or bring forth, from those ear-bewildering strands
Of sound, creation’s aural hieroglyph.
WAVELENGTHS
Slowness and constancy; receptive openness to the environment; a passive, somewhat withdrawn character; a gesture of pulling in or retracting rather than projecting outward; being formed from the outside – each of these phrases emphasizes a slightly different side of a unitary way of being. We can, with inner effort, bring all the sloth’s traits into a coherent picture that ‘holds together’. And when we do this, we find that ‘every detail can begin to speak “sloth”’. That is, we can recognize a ‘slothness’ that shines through all the details and makes them into a single whole.
—Stephen L. Talbott
While film buffs know Hedy Lamarr . . . for her roles in many classic films, she was also an accomplished inventor. Lamarr is best known . . . for a ‘Secret Communication System’. The subject of the patent is a frequency-hopping spread-spectrum technology intended for a difficult-to-jam radio-frequency guidance system for torpedoes . . . . By transmitting on multiple radio frequencies, and switching frequencies rapidly (multiple times per second), the radio signals would sound like random noise to anyone monitoring any of the frequencies. But, with the sender and the receiver of the signal hopping frequencies simultaneously, the signal would be clear.
—Matthew M. Yospin
From his far vantage-point the pendent sloth
Looks down. The watcher’s metabolic rate
Begins to quicken as she sees it. Both
Now undergo a certain change of state
Although the one is naturally loth
To let the woman’s distant gaze dictate
Some correspondent quickening, while her growth
Of interest bids her freeze-frame and await
The sloth’s next move. Truth is, I didn’t know
What moral it should point, that little tale
Like some Aesopian fable meant to show
(At a first shot) how artefacts of scale,
Time-scale in this case, offer such tableaux
Of mortal finitude. It’s what we fail
To grasp if we suppose that things must go
Along in concert or one beat prevail
For all despite those detours that accrue,
Those time-lapse intervals that came between
Their two attempts to have eye-contact do
World-bridging work. Then looks exchanged could mean
Things understood, instead of sent askew
Across the species-gulf installed to screen
Out any chance some message might get through,
Some signal flash up clear and so convene
The kind of freak assemblage that defied
Genetic codes or laws of natural kind,
As well as chronometric scales supplied
To keep genetic profiles well defined
And crosstalk filtere
d strictly on the side
Of background noise.
Still, if she had a mind
To get on terms with him (the sloth, but I’d
An interest here) then likely she inclined
Toward the sort of wavelength-hopping ruse
Thought up six decades back by ‘well-known star
Of stage and screen’ - yet, it appears, one whose
Gifts far surpassed all that - Hedy Lamarr,
None other. She worked out how you could use
Such one-off channel-binding to debar
The enemy from tracking subs that cruise
The depths and scan the airwaves. Safer far,
These nonce liaisons, on account of their
Occurrence not requiring any code
That might be cracked but simply that they share,
Each time, theTreffpunkt of this episode
Where two devices conjugate and where,
Next thing, the system’s ready to reload
And pick some other frequency to pair
Them off again. What this device bestowed
In time of war, as now, was just the trick
For keeping channels open, making sure
Stuff went from A to B, allowing quick-
Change backup codes, and plenty of secure
Alternatives lest something fail to click
Straight off.
Suppose she manages to lure
The creature’s eye while his slow seconds tick
For the Tempus-Fugitives Page 11
