Pinball

by Jerzy Kosiński

  When the Indians left to prepare his dinner, Osten went into the studio to listen to Leila Salem’s favorite Mexican songs.

  As soon as he heard them, he knew how he wanted to play, sing, and eventually record them. He knew it all at once because that was how his mind worked, but also because he was already seeing himself—with Leila—in Tijuana.

  Here, in his own House of Sound, the sanctum of his creative retreat, he felt safe and secure. He had designed every inch of it, selected every instrument. There wasn’t a single object he didn’t know as intimately as he knew his own body; not one keyboard, push-button, switch, wire, patch cord, plug, oscillator, potentiometer, generator, or amplifier was alien to him. It was his secret nickelodeon, where he could cease to distinguish between memory and fantasy, the two springs of his imagination—one of the past, the other of the future. Here, all alone, a vivisector of his talent, he could instigate and control the whole creative process, from the initial source—his own songs and voice—to his arrangements for any of the electronic and nonelectronic instruments he used to produce the Goddard sound.

  At times, uncertain of the direction his music should take, he would consider the enormous potential for modern music in the field of electronic experimentation. He studied the music of those composers who wired their heads to neurological amplifiers in order to transform the brain’s signals into sympathetic resonances in an ensemble of musical instruments. Although he was intrigued by the technological virtuosity of these works, he always found them lacking in inspiration. He was equally familiar, and equally disenchanted, with laser and sound-sculpture experiments, as well as with all contemporary efforts to create multimedia music. In the last analysis, as a composer and performer, he knew that he had to rely solely on his own ideas and emotions and to search inside himself for the sounds and words that would express them, both for him and for all those people to whom his music could serve as echoes of their feelings.

  He also paid attention to silence. He admired what John Cage had said: “The music I prefer, even to my own or anybody else’s, is what we are’hearing if we are just quiet.”

  Often at dawn, when the Shoshones were still asleep in the small house, he would drive to one of the dry washes of the Anza Borrego Desert. He would get out of the Jeep and walk into the empty reaches of stone and scrub that opened before him like a dungeon of heat and sand. In the distance the rising mist revealed the lofty pinnacles of scraggy mountains, a reddish streak against the sky’s blue, and below, like dry bones stripped of flesh, the hillocks of the Borrego Badlands.

  Here, where no sound broke the quiet, he would stand and imagine that one day the well of his music might become as dry and as soundless as this desert. Until then, he knew, he had to search his inner life for traces of any spring that had so far eluded him.

  Osten loved his anonymity because it guaranteed his freedom, and he loved his freedom because it let him be anonymous. Even though his roots were in New York, only when he was secluded in the New Atlantis was he really at home—a disembodied spirit floating in a mysterious continuum, a mystic possessed by melody, as removed from the natural world as music itself. He could write his music and lyrics the way he liked and record them to suit himself. He rejoiced each time a digital master tape was finished and he could play it in the studio one last time before sending it to Blaystone. Such tapes gave perfect sound reproduction, free of any distortion. He was delighted by the pure sound of his voice, his words, his instruments pouring out from the quadraphonic speakers and converging on him, solitary there, slumped in an easy chair in the center of the room. Like an artisan in his shop, he would listen to what he had made, his eyes occasionally fixing on the ancient maxim he had hung as his motto on the white soundproofed wall: Ogaun ’suoi il segreti—“Everyone has his secrets.”

  Once a record was made from his master tape and published by Nokturn, his music would boomerang back into his ordinary life, where as Jimmy Osten he would listen to it as everybody else did. Then he would realize all over again that only his anonymity kept the public from trespassing on him and on the stimulus that gave birth to his music, and he would cherish his freedom to start fresh and create more.

  There was another advantage to his situation. If, for whatever reason, he ever chose not to record anymore, no one would ask him why; no reporters would appear on the doorstep or follow him around trying to find the cause of his creative block; and no explanations, true or false, would be expected from members of his family, from past and present lovers, from friends and associates, from his agent, from his manager, or from record company executives.

  In order to succeed, rock stars—no matter how talented they were—needed the visibility provided by the media, just as Renaissance artists in their time had needed the support of rich and princely patrons. Yet Osten knew that he had succeeded alone—and had done so in spite of his self-imposed invisibility.

  Best of all, the sales of the records he produced in seclusion secured the future of Etude Classics. Thanks to him, his father could live out his life a happy man, convinced that he had succeeded in bequeathing to his adopted country an everlasting legacy of classical music—the best expression of mankind’s spirituality. He need never know that his bequest was financed by his son’s success in rock, a field of music Gerhard Osten despised.

  Jimmy Osten’s commitment to his public thus ended where it had begun—at the New Atlantis. Once his music was published, it became public property, and people could then respond to it according to their own needs and means. He was no exception; he became at that point one more anonymous listener, and his critical judgment—whether he was listening in a car, a music shop, a disco, or at home; whether alone or among others—was no better, no worse, no more astute or more valuable, than the judgment of any other listener.

  His denial of a public self was therefore the ultimate affirmation of his private self. Freed of Goddard, Osten could welcome new experience, let his feelings emanate honestly, be justly critical, and carve out from life’s unlimited possibilities his true emotional destiny.

  If, out of occasional loneliness, he had ever doubted the wisdom of his choice to remain anonymous, his doubt had vanished when John Lennon was murdered. Osten had been in New York City at the time, and he had gone to stand with the thousands of anguished mourners outside the Lennons’ apartment building.

  He realized that Lennon, by stepping too easily and too often into the midst of his fans—whether to sing for them, shake their hands, or autograph their albums—had unwittingly undermined his separation from ordinary people, which was the essence of his charisma.

  Given an easy chance to be close to the famous man, the assassin—once a fan of Lennon’s music—had seized the opportunity to kill him, as if by doing so he could usurp the very greatness Lennon had sacrificed by stepping down to the crowd, by attempting to prove himself ordinary.

  Standing in that wailing throng, Osten had been happy to be James Osten and not Goddard.

  The New Atlantis owed its existence to events in Osten’s life that occurred at a time when he knew what he wanted to be but could not decide how to bring it about. A major cause of his indecision had been his father.

  Gerhard Osten had come to the United States from Germany to escape the Nazi persecution. A classicist by training, he had specialized in the early Greeks, beginning with Pythagoras, particularly in their investigations relating mathematics to music. But he was not keen on devoting himself to a life of scholarly research or to teaching the classics in an American university, and he was wary of trying to be a creative artist. He believed that an individual risked being viewed as totalitarian if he was original enough to produce art, for the very act of imposing an image of the world on others demanded their approval or disapproval; it polarized people into friends and enemies, leading them to see art not in terms of its own merit but as an image of the artist. Just as a military hero was the product of a war, so was an artist a product of his art, able to say, after Alexander P
ope,

  “Yes, I am proud; I must be proud to see

  Men not afraid of God, afraid of me.”

  Thus, life and art necessarily became confused in the eyes of the audience, and any success the artist might have he would have to pay for with his happiness and with the happiness of those dear to him.

  Gerhard Osten’s real love was classical music, which was to him—as it was to the ancient Greeks—as pure and abstracted from quotidian reality as was mathematics. More and more he began to feel that only through classical music could he, and others like him, be lifted beyond the memory of all the hideous events of his young manhood and the terrible destruction of his family in the Holocaust. Therefore, with the encouragement and financial help of two friends, Goddard Lieberson and Boris Pregel, who were musicians by vocation and business entrepreneurs by occupation, he had founded Etude Classics. From then on, music was Gerhard Osten’s country, and like the citizens in Aristophanes’ The Birds, he was free to become anonymous and contented in that “land of easy and fair leisure, where a man may lounge and play and settle down.”

  But under the glass top of his office desk Gerhard Osten kept a letter written by a Jewish concentration camp inmate shortly before his death in the gas chamber.

  We are in the company of death. They tattoo the newcomers. Everyone gets his number. From that moment on you have lost your “self” and have become transformed into a number. You no longer are what you were before, but a worthless moving number… . We are approaching our new graves … iron discipline reigns here in the camp of death. Our brain has grown dull, the thoughts are numbered: it is not possible to grasp this new language.

  To Gerhard Osten, only classical music offered modern man the means to repair the part of him that had been brutalized by this new language of hate and despair.

  Even though Gerhard Osten seldom talked about the events of World War II, Jimmy knew that his life under the Nazi yoke had been one of constant fear, flight, and hunger. Being forced daily to seek new hiding places, having to pretend not to be Jewish, living among strangers, he must have been filled with an unending sense of terror. He had made extensive notes in a series of small notebooks during that time, notes about his life as well as about music, but not wanting to upset his son by passing on to him the story of the horror of his earlier life, Gerhard Osten had always kept these notebooks locked up. Only once had Jimmy been able to glance at them, and then he saw clearly that the notebooks had been his father’s way of transcending the hideous events that surrounded him daily. What Jimmy read in the notebooks forever affected his relationship with his father. On coming of age, the son had made himself the guardian of his father.

  Leonore Osten, Jimmy’s mother, had died when Jimmy was fifteen, and he remembered her as a frail, elegant woman. A promising pianist when she was young, she had given up all her hopes of a career when she married Gerhard Osten, who convinced her that the titanic efforts required to achieve artistic success would destroy their chances of having a family. An invalid confined to her bedroom during the last few years of her life, she saw Jimmy only twice a year, when he was on vacation from the boarding school he attended in New England.

  Thus, from adolescence on, Jimmy had had only his father for family, and he worshiped everything about him—his shyness, his soft-spoken manner, his refinement, his constant preoccupation with the sanctity of privacy—and in every way he could the boy emulated the older man.

  In every way except one: Gerhard Osten detested rock. It represented for him victory of obsession over reason, emotion over logic, chaos over composition. By ruthlessly imposing itself upon the mass audience, rock ‘n’ roll was, for him, totalitarian in nature.

  From the time Jimmy first heard rock as a boy in boarding school—he had never heard it at home, for his father would never have allowed it there—he was struck by an overpowering desire to create such music, to speak to others through it in a big, rich, compelling voice such as he, Gerhard Osten’s son, for whom seclusion and circumspection were the inherited principles of life, could hardly dream of possessing or displaying.

  Because of his growing need to listen to this kind of music and his fear that he might hurt his father by his love of it, he chose to go to college in California, far from home but close to San Francisco, where the rock culture had exploded and still flourished.

  He enrolled at the University of California at Davis, where Karlheinz Stockhausen, the master electronic music composer, had once been a lecturer. Osten was particularly impressed by Stockhausen’s Counterpoint No. 1, a work in one movement for ten instruments, in which he fused six different timbres, winds as well as strings, into the single timbre of the piano. Osten was fascinated, also, by Stockhausen’s experiments with synthetic composition of sound and aleatory music—music composed and performed to a great extent by chance. In such music—aimed at the inseparable partnership of composer and instrumentalist—the composer selected keys and tempos by dice throws or by computer and the performer could decide on the order in which to play the principal sections.

  Still his consuming love was rock. He collected every rock record and tape he could find, and when he ran out of space he transferred it all to cassettes. But his dormitory room was still not big enough to hold the cassettes and the equipment needed to play them. As his passion—and his collection—grew, he became more and more afraid that his father might surprise him with a visit and learn of his obsession, so with some of the money he received from his mother’s trust, he rented an attic from an elderly widow who lived near the campus and moved his tapes and stereo equipment there.

  During his freshman and sophomore years he drove to rock concerts and festivals all over California, and at the same time he devoured all the literature covering the history of rock. He became an encyclopedia on the subject. He knew every song by every rock group, from the Jefferson Airplane to the Rolling Stones, from Elvis Presley and Otis Redding to David Bowie, and he could describe every musical happening in Berkeley or Haight Ashbury or Los Angeles over the past twenty years, down to the psychedelic slides and the stroboscopic light shows. He saw the Beatles’ films and the film of the Monterey Pop Festival, watching the thousands in the audience stand up and dance to the music of Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix; and with each viewing he understood more forcibly something his father could never accept: that rock was much more than a part of the record business; it was democratic in nature, a necessary part of the broad, popular culture of a free society, a way of life in itself—something classical music had never been or aspired to become.

  Over a period of two decades, rock, the new music, had come of age. More and more the rock audience had learned to perceive rock as a serious form of musical expression, something worth listening to as well as dancing to, and the new singers and bands had responded in kind, creating music that was way beyond hootenannies and folksy rock stuff—music as good in its way as the classical music his father loved so much, music which was subtle, complex, and intellectually demanding.

  Because of his knowledge of electronic music, Osten studied with particular care rock electronics, especially the guitar improvisations of Jimi Hendrix. He noticed that some groups, such as the Velvet Underground, had initially used electronic techniques to convey the psychic effect of the drug experience—as in the song “Heroin”—or to produce the new, heavy, thick sound of hard rock—as in “Sister Ray.” In the song “What’s Become of the Baby?” on their album Aoxomoxoa, the Grateful Dead modified keyboard and percussion sounds, mixing and symphonizing natural and artificial tones by means of electronics. They modulated the human voice electronically and built an entire vocal ensemble from the sound of a solo singer by recording the singer’s voice and then playing it on top of itself at specified intervals. As Osten listened to the works of other rock musicians who favored electronic effects—Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention, Pink Floyd, Brian Eno of Roxy Music, Rick Wakeman of Yes and Keith Emerson of Emerson, Lake, and Palmer—he became aware of the
ir original use of electronic technology in multitracking, the mixing together of several separately recorded virtuoso solo performances, frequently with adaptations of motifs from classical music. He also studied such artists as Tangerine Dream—the German group of keyboard players who used synthesizers and other electronic instruments to create a uniquely rich, innovative, avant-garde music.

  Steadily and systematically, Osten taught himself to play the instruments favored by rock stars—acoustic guitar, harmonica, electronic organ. He imagined that if he mastered these instruments, as well as synthesizers that could generate their own tones, as well as modify other voices and instruments, and if he learned the techniques of threading several sound sources into a recording device, thereby creating musical montages, he might actually succeed in becoming a one-man musical event.

  In time, after he had gone through dozens of musicians’ guides to independent record production, it seemed only logical to him to transform the rented attic into a practice studio. There he sang, played, and recorded by the hour, hoping that, one day, he might even manufacture his own record matrices and create his own—Jimmy Osten’s own—musical tradition. The old widow never disturbed him, nor he her. She was a victim of muscular dystrophy and spent most of her life in front of the turned-up TV set in the living room of the spacious house.

  He had always been vaguely aware that he had a pleasant singing voice, but by the time his innate reticence allowed him to admit even that to himself, he had learned from his reading and listening that in order to succeed, a professional singer needed more than a nice voice. He had to make a forceful impact on listeners. Only a well-trained singer could produce controlled sounds with a distinct individual quality.