by John Gardner
Perhaps there never before was so open a sea.
He tried to sleep, but his nightmares were so menacing he got up again. He should go on a trip somewhere. He should call the bus station, find out what was possible. But he remained sitting on the couch and, for a time, slept.
He couldn’t remember having turned on the stereo tuner, though surely there had to have been some flicker of conscious intent in the gesture. In any event, when he switched on the vacuum cleaner he was abruptly made aware that he’d been listening to music, unconsciously hanging on every note, fleeing into it as into sanctuary, though he had no idea what was playing. It was something he’d heard performed one night in Heidelberg. He remembered how the audience had roared its satisfaction. He stood mouth open, gazing down at the vacuum machine—an old Hoover he’d gotten second-hand through the Pennysaver, with tape around the bag—then decided to vacuum another time, maybe when the news came on, reinstating the world. He put the machine away and sat down again on the couch to fill and light his pipe, thinking about heart attack and the death of the fat man. He cringed from the memory and bore down with all his mind’s force on the music. He would work this thing out. Will power! It was stupid of him not to have done it long ago. Nothing could be more important!
For the hundredth time he regretted never having taken a good course in music appreciation. It was a humiliating lack in him, this stupidity about a thing so universal, so essentially human as music. Better to be born with one leg missing! He checked himself. Beware of rhetoric, he thought. Hair-line crack that in the end might bring everything crashing. He folded his hands, locked them together, eyes closed to slits. The woeful lack was there, undeniable, he confessed to himself; an emptiness of soul like the emptiness guilt brought on—perhaps a shaft too deep for any music course to fill.
He nodded, fell out of time for a moment, then was listening again, and thinking, straining his wits. He set his elbows on his spraddled knees, his hands behind his neck, pulling his head down to his chest.
It seemed clear, despite one’s natural doubts that one was applying the correct categories, that the music was in some sense “saying things,” crying out across the centuries to him—or to whoever might be alive to hear—with the greatest urgency; if not with the early Wittgenstein’s facts and propositions, then with something close; but the meaning, whatever it was, eluded him; he’d have gotten more sense out of Sanskrit. He pulled out of his strenuous crouch, stretched, then lit his pipe and puffed at it, gradually building a flat, sullen cloud above his head. Rausch. Drunkenness. Could it be only that? His whole soul resisted the likelihood. Surely music was the God-given language of Being, not complex and intellectual, like speech, the language of the mind, but direct, immediate: expression as simple as the sprouting, greening, and flowering of a plant. Audible dance. Perhaps it was Being, the perfect resolution of dualism (as Heidegger seemed to think); hence the gross, mechanistic Germans’ remarkable success with it. Emotion’s machine; from heaven through earth to hell with Mercedes-Benz. Abruptly, he half stood up to look out the window into the twilight beyond, checking to be sure no one was spying on him, watching as he sat here, red-faced and unkempt, jabbering to himself. He thought he heard something falling, heavier than snow or rain—a hollow, clattering sound. But it was nothing. He sat down again and once more threw himself into his project.
It was true of course, he thought, grinding his palms on his knees, that composers revised, labored endlessly over their manuscripts—so he’d read and believed—but surely it was only for the purpose of getting the emotion just right, the cry of pain or rapture or love’s sweet anguish precisely what it was. They wrote, played it through in their minds, revised, reconsidered, started over, and so by a gradual refining process expressed exactly what they meant or discovered they must mean, a “statement” purified beyond anything possible for human beings at first bleat. Surely even a tone-deaf dolt ought to understand the thing, penumbrally at least, once it was said. He had emotions, did he not? But wait.
If the music he was hearing was just emotional description, at best an infinitely careful, supremely artistic smile or groan …
He covered his face with his hands. What had any of this to do with …
But a moment later he was back on it, more intent than ever on breaking through the wall. Perspiration washed his forehead.
If music was studied, recreated or now-first-expressed emotion, why was he listening with such strained intensity, as if to learn some answer, solve some important life-riddle? Wasn’t it the case, in fact, that he’d been listening all this while for the wrong thing entirely; that music—for that matter, all the arts—told one nothing at all, simply described things as they are, or were, or might be, simply named things as Adam was said to have named things in the garden except that it was the thing named? Was it the case, to put the idea more exactly, that music was nothing more than, as the formalists thought, one more expression of Nature’s way, atomic orderliness, no more significant or meaningful—except for the fact that it was created by human beings and in public places flashed its complexity—than a jonquil, an elm tree, that it was simply one more particular thing in a crowded, gasping anarchy of things—itself, simply: meaningless and ultimately as worthless as a soup-spoon, or Donnie Matthews’ foetus; or meaningless except in that, like the foetus, it might not have existed and someday would cease to exist? Was it delusion, then, that made people turn to it in times of crisis? (He should get himself paper and pencil, he thought, biting his lip; they would help him think clearly.) He was tempted to turn off the radio. He thought of what might be called Plato’s theory, music as inspired intuition of pre-birth memory, God’s voice; Aristotle’s theory, the grounding of emotion, or catharsis; then of Collingwood’s, music as discovery through expression, music as the mirror in which one saw, hence seized, the world. He sat forward, his elbows on his knees, hands over his ears, his whole body clenched, like an explorer pondering one of Garret’s real-life dragons face to face, or face to helm, hypnotized, maddened by otherness, struggling to remember what he knew about the process of evolution, as if that might be of use. Why had he been listening, without even knowing it—sucking, gulping in the music on the radio as if it were oxygen, until suddenly the vacuum cleaner’s noise had broken in on him like reality, a reawakened consciousness of drowning? Why had he felt, as distinctly he had, outside himself?
Illusion. Truth was on the side of the vacuum cleaner.
Why the thought should irritate him—so much so that he had to get up and pace—Mickelsson couldn’t say; it was a familiar truth. (In his mind he saw the fat man’s long, futile gasp.) All his life, not quite consciously, he’d been looking for some kind of key in music (he registered the pun but could think of nothing to do with it)—had been looking for something with which to unlock secret gardens; but what music offered, if he was now on the right track, was Kant’s impenetrable wall; phenomena; a certain ordering of facts—not propositions—another baffling variant of Nietzsche’s “stone-hard words,” as if the conductor were to say, “Life’s a mystery? I’ll show you mystery!” and were then maliciously to perform for you, say, Sibelius’s Second Symphony, just now being announced, with unctuous respect, on the radio. Boston Philharmonic Orchestra. Mickelsson breathed shallowly and squinted where he stood. Gloom. Vague images came to him—dark shadows, something huge and restless—the roll of the wide, twilit North Atlantic, the clarinet a high, sunlit bird. (He remembered standing at the rail of the S. S. France with Ellen and the children.) Crap, he thought. Vibrating catgut. Disturbed columns of air.
He was striding now from one end of the room to the other and back, his hands fiercely wrestling with one another behind him. The whole world was noise, the outward expression of forces directly unknowable—not form, not “spirit” blind thuddings in the dark—and music, fiction, physics, philosophy were merely translations into other, secondary noise systems, further dark codes, glosses of the unknown, unknowable text, “better”
or “worse” in a given case only for their interesting complexity and internal coherence. (Wittgenstein again, though twisted, descended from Nietzsche.) One might say, in effect, that the arts—all forms of human activity—were simple ritual, the groping re-enaction of the unknowable but felt: universal forces too dark and mindless to understand, whether one called them demons or the dance of electrons, forces one grasped—insofar as one grasped them at all—by joining them, mimicking them, dancing. So Bierhalle music made the Germans stamp their feet or drip shining fat crocodile tears, getting away from it all, and Americans shot their jism to a disco beat. But then why was Beethoven described in certain circles as one of the world’s great philosophers? Could one look at Beethoven, then back at the world, and know something? One of Beethoven’s favorite writers, Mickelsson had somewhere read, was Immanuel Kant. One of his friends was Nietzsche’s inspirer, Cabinet Minister Goethe.
Abruptly, scowling, short of breath from his anger at himself, Mickelsson turned off the radio, with clumsy hands got out his von Karajan Symphonies and Overtures of Beethoven, and carefully, touching the record-rim only, placed the First Symphony, side one, on the turntable. He stood staring at the slowly turning record, his pipe in his hand, keeping the philosophy of Kant in mind and listening with the sharpest possible attention to the music’s first bars. A familiar trembling came, something like the feeling he would get when near Jessica Stark, whom now he locked out of his mind. It was beautiful music (whatever that meant), so sweet (whatever that meant) that his eyes brimmed with sentimental tears—a baffling opening like an abruptly continued, half-forgotten conversation, as if God’s first words should be On the other hand … and then, quite suddenly, the music turned thrilling, an expanding, rising affirmation of … who knew what? Mickelsson refused to fool himself. He had no earthly idea what—if anything—the music was saying; it certainly had nothing to do, so far as he could tell, with the Critique of Pure Reason, not even with the mind’s inability to get past the phenomenon. Possibly it was related to the Critique of Judgment. On one hand there’s the universe, Beethoven might be saying; on the other hand, I give you … Von Karajan was said to have done well under the Nazis.
No, he had no idea what the music was mimicking, describing, or proposing, or why it so powerfully affected him, made him want to bawl like a child, or fly, smash down walls. Rausch, he thought again. Or maybe conquest of the horrible unconquerable by any other means. Perhaps the whole thing had to do with the phenomenon Garret had mentioned—a commonplace these days—the lack of connection between head and heart, the abyss between belief and attitude, cognitive and conative. Something deep within him, buried under tons of dispiriting experience and muscular fat, stirred to the music as a dowsing rod stirred to hidden rivers. Touched by the music’s unearthly probe, the almost dead child-angel within him, buried alive in mundane concerns—the grown-up’s miserable otherness of self-regard, cowardly paranoia—struggled feebly for an instant to unstick its eyes. (Was that what he was doing restoring the house: erecting his dead self’s sepulchre?)
Self-regard. Was that it? He couldn’t hear Beethoven because he was locked up inside himself, more deaf than the composer?
There was nothing he could do about it. (Now as he walked he was slamming his right fist into his left hand.) Story of his life. Wrapped up in himself, as if his once relatively solid flesh and vaulting ambition (will to power) were his winding sheet, he’d managed to sleep through his ex-wife’s whole existence. (He thought of how taken by surprise he’d been, noticing her beauty in the snapshot he’d found, made when Uncle Edgar had come to California.) No doubt he’d missed his children’s existence, too. It was the same thing he’d sensed repeatedly in his teaching, failing to hear what his students had to say because he was waiting to get on with the course. It was that that had kept him from understanding, possibly saving, Michael Nugent.
He frowned, stopping himself. Sentimentality was the great risk for the man cut off from others and himself. It was sentimentality that made a fool of the hermit in the woods. Flip side of fascism, as Jung had pointed out. He must beware! He covered his eyes with his hand. He felt a little feverish. His mind kept rushing, driving.
The last time he’d seen Nugent, down at the office, just as he was packing up his books and papers to leave after a long day of classes and appointments—a day now declining into darkness, yellow lights coming across the dark snowy lawn from the Chemistry Building and classroom wing—Nugent had seemed happy; there had been a flush of color in his cheeks. How little one ever really knew about what was going on in others! Nugent had talked excitedly about some vision that had come to him one night when he was sitting alone, depressed, in his dormitory room. It had been raining (now Mickelsson found some of it coming back), and Nugent had been seated beside his window, a book of Wittgenstein’s open in his lap. He’d been so sunk in wretchedness—the sense of loss and futility that always came when he thought about the deaths he’d been through this year (his father, whom he rarely saw—Nugent’s parents were divorced—the father killed in an electrical accident at Niagara Mohawk, where he worked; and then Nugent’s teacher, Professor Warren), he—Nugent—had been unable to read, had neither the will nor the eyesight, because tears were streaming down his cheeks. Then something almost miraculous had happened, he said; something eerily related to what he’d been reading. He’d looked with his teary eyes at the dark, rainwashed window and had seen, scattered as if not on the windowpane but in the night beyond, thousands of blurry droplets, all glowing with color, every color of the rainbow. He wiped his eyes, startled by the beauty of it, and when he looked again he saw a different vision, equally beautiful: sharp, distinct waterdrops, each with a tiny pinprick glow of color. He had closed his eyes then, wondering at the sensation of warmth and peace that had suddenly welled up in him, and into his mind had come the idea he had dropped in on Mickelsson to talk about, the idea of a universe of infinitely precious glowing particles, every one of them necessarily against every other, that was the tragic law of individuation in space and time, but each and every one lit up by the ruby, emerald, sapphire, and diamond shine of God’s consciousness.
Mickelsson, of course, had had nothing to say. It was not a philosophical insight, only mystical—conatively persuasive but cognitively meaningless—and what it had to do with the feeling of peace that had swept through Nugent and seemed not to have left him yet, heaven only knew. Apparently it had left him, sometime afterward. Perhaps its leaving had been for Nugent the final blow. Tranquillity recollected in emotion. No telling now, of course, except if one day he should come across the black boy who was Nugent’s friend. And what would they say? A loud crack came from the pipestem and Mickelsson awakened to the fact that, in his anger and frustration, he’d been biting down hard.
While he fixed and ate supper, carelessly, almost reluctantly—the grocery bags still out on the counter; he must remember to put them away in the fridge—he listened to Beethoven symphonies one after another on the stereo, learning nothing, his brain grown numb. His back began to ache, an effect of a muscular tension he hadn’t been aware of. He imagined Donnie Matthews, riding on a train somewhere, looking out with frightened eyes.
Close as the stereo was to the kitchen—the speakers were just inside the livingroom door—he felt as if he were listening to something far away, increasingly far away—maybe Donnie’s train plummeting into darkness—as if the music were coming from somewhere deep in the interstices of things, perhaps from himself, not that the music became clearer to him now: the cypher remained as inscrutable as ever. He felt himself more and more one with it, and yet, paradoxically, removed from himself, as if he were vanishing. (There was something about that in Ortega y Gasset.) He was in a state almost trancelike; indeed, perhaps he was in a trance, as when one sits in a chair and by self-hypnosis raises one’s arm, telling oneself with full conviction that the arm will rise, though one will not consciously raise it. He had a sense that by a head-shake he could pull out
of this state, but by the faintest flicker of choice he allowed it to continue. The lines and colors of the kitchen became sharper, cleaner, as if brute existents were springing to life. His thought was dreamy and confused. He could not have explained, if someone had asked him, the distinction between himself and the walls of the room, the sudden swell of horns and violins.
When he went in to change the record at the end of the Sixth Symphony, he saw the old woman standing at the window, looking out, dabbing at her mouth with the pitifully wrinkled, gray hankie. She looked lost, befuddled. He could get no trace of anger from her now.
“Is there something I can do for you?” he asked.
She seemed not to hear.
His heart ticking rapidly, causing a light pain, he moved closer to look at her face. She was not the kind of ghost one could see through. No one, if he had come in and seen her standing there, would have believed she was a ghost, though somehow it was clear that she did not belong here in ordinary reality. Sometimes she whispered something, talking to herself—nothing Mickelsson could make sense of. After the hours of music, he was strongly conscious of the silence. He felt then, suddenly, a physical shock, a blow as if from inside that gave him, instantly, a splitting headache; and now, as if something had prevented it from getting through before, filtering it somehow, he felt the anger. He wouldn’t have believed that one could live, not have a stroke, walking around in such a rage.
