—Save some for me, I remarked, and helped myself.
—You know, said Olafson, they’re tasty, I suppose, but I don’t understand exactly why people thought of eating calves’ brains, say.
—It’s a source of protein, said Lisa McElroy.
—But that’s no reason, I put in. It explains more if you allow that meat possesses some of the qualities of the creature from which it comes. If there’s some chemistry of strong and weak, courage and capitulation, well, aren’t the intimate juices of a beast rendered in the fires and failures of its life, and expressed in its flavor? Why else is some meat good and some bad? Cows raised on a range taste better than cow clones force-fed on grain and ash, plausibly because they’ve had more chance to live, to explore more fully the possibilities of existence. From the meat of these cows we might learn something. They might have their philosophy.
—An animal isn’t conscious.
—Perhaps not. But we are. We know that cannibals eat their enemies, to acquire their strength. And if we eat brains . . . well, perhaps the first man who ate cows’ brains was a little dull. Who wants to ingest the qualities of a cow or a lamb? Now, bulls’ balls might have some value. . . .
—Bullshit, said Lisa McElroy.
—My dear, you’re welcome to eat cow brains if you like. They might improve you.
—Taylor!
—Now, now, this is a friendly picnic.
—Quite right, I apologize. Is that what’s wanted? We’re a little sensitive on this point. Shall I return to my story?
—Yes, go on. It’s most interesting.
—Well. After services I filed a formal complaint with the Honourable and Most Wise Council of the Thomaskirche against the “theatrical extravagances” of the new cantor, Herr J. S. Bach. This was the start of Bach’s troubles at Leipzig. To these I added in subsequent visits. I went as Johann August Ernesti, the rector’s son, later on, and I’d accost Bach’s students practicing on the streets for pennies, and bellow, “So it’s a pothouse fiddler you want to become, is it?” and chase them off. This was more or less in keeping with Ernesti Jr.’s character, and the added irritation to Bach was worthwhile. I went back as Johann Adolph Scheibe in the spring of ‘37, and wrote an attack published in Der critischer Musikus. Poor Scheibe. He couldn’t remember writing it, he’d earlier been a student and admirer of Bach, but there it was. He was vain enough to defend it instead of refuting it, and rose to the occasion splendidly, surpassing me in his later attacks, especially in that very funny letter published in April of ‘39, supposed to be from Bach himself. Everyone thought Scheibe had a grudge since Bach voted him down for the organist’s post at St. Thomas’s in 1729.
—Now some of my colleagues in our Kunstgestapo disapprove of these tactics. Why harass Bach? they cry. Well, you might imagine the cultivation of artworks as not unlike that of pearls; a little irritation never hurt, as our experiments have shown. Why, look at Webern—we gave him a life of unparalleled peace and leisure, given the circumstances. We smoothed over the roughest spots, got him a conductor’s job, a wife, steady money, and what did we get in return? Ninety minutes of music, all told.
—Don’t you like the symphony? someone asked.
—Symphony! It’s eight minutes long! All full of tiny little amoeba cries. And that absurd serialism he bequeathed to a generation of composers ... no wonder we had to go back and shoot him. No, it’s clear that irritation works better. In any case, the process is far from arbitrary. We have constant feedback from the computers, which know better than we what’s what. After every hop I’d check in at Donaueschingen to plan my next move. Oh, the theorists can explain this better than I, all that rigamarole about mean density of necessary events, clear and present realities, temporary temporalities, branches, buds, and whatnot. ... It started when the National Endowment Against the Arts turned up an increasing probability that the Brandenburg concertos would not be written, and, well, it was my job to save them. You understand that every interpretation of the past changes it, and it changes in ways ever more real as we learn to puncture time’s fabric. So if we begin to think the Brandenburgs might vanish, indeed they might, if we don’t take measures, and that vanishing would affect our world in turn. This drew my interest. If Bach hadn’t exhausted the Baroque instrumental forms, as he did in the Brandenburgs, he wouldn’t have gone on to the later sacred music, and the whole individual, solipsistic Western consciousness, the triumph of the mind laboring alone that culminates in music with Beethoven, why, the entire cornerstone of critical inquiry might have been lost. They saw at once that I was their boy. I believe in art, which today must include technology, after all, it’s our way to proceed by art—the wit of our minds rather than the strength of our hands. Music became an art when men removed themselves from the dance, took their hands from their instruments, and lifted a pen. That’s what we know, and that’s why we honor Bach as an ancestor, because he turned from dances and suites to the monolithic church works we know him by. But he wasn’t just a man of God, a master solipsist, he was quite a mensch as well, as vain, profligate, and unreflective as any jazzman.
—Oh, come, now. . . .
—You think not? Look at his work, look at the title page of the Inventions: “Wherein lovers and students of the clavier are shown a clear way to deal well with three obbligato parts; furthermore, not only to have good invention, but to acquire a strong foretaste of composition.” He was an improviser! He thought the Baroque Age would last forever, and well it might have if we hadn’t goaded him to exhaust its forms. Oh, he was perilously close to loving craft over art. And he liked his beer as well. He wasn’t unaware that the Latin for Bach is Bacchus. Not that I hold that against him . . . yes, thank you...but my God! we could be living today in a musical community as primitive as Bali’s.
—Would that be so horrible? This came from a young nearsighted ethnomusicologist, whom I marked for a later reproof.
—Yes! Yes, indeed. We have an interest in maintaining our present. Are we what we eat, ladies, gentlemen? History itself is a vast maw. In the words of a popular song (you know I’m a student of the popular arts), “Life is a carnivore.” It gorges on all the events of all possible pasts, it has its upsets and its regularities, we’re learning that time is not linear, it’s infinite, and constantly in flux, and now that we possess the art, it’s up to us to regulate it. So if we can influence events . . . alter the Diet of Worms . . . martyr Luther . . . drop stones in the time stream . . . make history with a will and consciousness, Zukunft zur Kunst, rather than submit to it as to a flood, well, oughtn’t we? Don’t we have that responsibility?
I paused to get my breath.
—In any artist’s mind is a chaos of experience, past art, possibility, which he organizes in his work in order to get information, whether he knows it or not, about himself. Art is the artist’s mechanism of repression. When all the elements of a system are ordered, it’s dead—administrative—totally organized, totally communicative, and wholly uninformative. But it doesn’t know it’s dead until that information comes from a higher state of disorder. So the Baroque Age created the Classical, and that the Romantic, and so on, each exhausting its forms, each subsuming the administrative order of the period before in a higher chaos, extracting all meanings possible, and pointing on to an eventual universal understanding of mind. It’s imperative that we maintain this progress, so that we, the scholars and, if I may say so, artists of this future, can rise to a higher, more synthetic level of musical discourse—the job of extracting information not just from tones and forms, but from whole periods.
—But I digress. Next I went to Cöthen in 1720. Bach was happy there. He had forsaken church music, for he had an intelligent, sympathetic patron in Count Leopold; he had full freedom, excellent musicians; his wife drew a salary . . . there were no complaints at Cöthen about the “operatic, too theatrical” nature of his music. He was bound to encounter that from Pietists; in fact, I’d added to his problems in the guise of Johann A
dolph Frohne, a Pietist at the Mühlhausen church, oh, about 1707. You can find the formal complaints, in my hand, in the Donaueschingen archives. But there was no conflict at Cöthen, nothing to drive Bach to assert his genius to the fullest. He wrote dance suites, sonatas, sinfonias ... all very pleasant, but meaningless without the Brandenburgs.
—I went as a doctor. I was the one called when Barbara took sick while Sebastian was away at Carlsbad. I gave her some medications that I knew were useless. And I returned late that night, slipping the latch to let myself in. It was still. All the children slept. The moon shone through the lattice over the window. It was a brooding light, laden with time; the shifting of a billion motes between myself and its source left it cold and placid. And I was poised on the edge of an action that would make a future. Barbara awoke; her eyes were without fear, or even surprise. They simply opened ... as the doors to the Bach house had opened to me that afternoon to reveal the rooms, furniture, children, alight with life . . . as if she hadn’t been asleep at all, or had been dreaming of me and knew she had drawn me there by her dream. Then she shut her eyes. I bent over and pierced her with the hypodermic, alien to the age; her eyes never opened. Then I hopped to Donaueschingen.
—But one thing relies on another. In the time labs the probabilities were seen to have shifted once more. I had to go to Weimar in 1717, as Bach’s patron Duke Johann Ernst, and when Bach applied to me for his dismissal to Cöthen, I had him thrown in jail. I stayed on for a month while the real Duke was kept under sedation at Donaueschingen. ... A dreadful month. . . . The Duke retired at eight, he was crotchety and pious, and his accent nearly wrecked my voice. I couldn’t stand it, going to church every morning at the crack of dawn, putting all the lights out at eight, so I took to dropping the disguise and slipping out at night. Strictly against regulations, going abroad without a persona. But I’d been thinking of Barbara; I had already given her a fatal injection, yet that day was three years hence. Can you understand the well of regret, beauty, and inevitability, that derangement of time which is the heart of romantic love, that opened in me? She was thirty-three, my age, she was beautiful—much better preserved than the average German woman of thirty-three—and she was a Bach. I confess it. I wanted to have a Bach. So I wooed her. And before I had to return to my age we were meeting every night. Since Sebastian was locked up the while, I can only assume that the next child, Carl Philipp Emanuel, was mine. He was, of course, the most talented of Bach’s many sons. . . .
—Hold it, said Olafson, chewing. Carl Bach was born in 1714. I thought this was in 1717; that was the year before Leopold Augustus was born, the feeble-minded one.
I kept still. Not everything I’d said was strictly true, but it was of the highest imaginative value.
—May I continue? I asked. It’s painful to think of Barbara, but I think I should give all the details.
—Before I finished in Weimar, the time boys did me a favor and sent me back to Arnstadt in 1705, when Sebastian was still courting Barbara. I wanted to see her young. As Johann Christian Geyersbach (a land of pun on goer-back I thought of myself) I went, a musician in the church orchestra. Bach insulted me during rehearsal, and that night I accosted him while he was out with Barbara. He’d called me a Zippelfagottist, and, well, for the moment I forgot that Fagott is German for bassoon, so I lost my head. I attacked him with a stick and called him Hundsfott. And he drew a sword! I cried “Nicht fair!” but he kept coming, cursing at the top of his voice and smelling of malt. I held him off with the stick until a couple of classmates got hold of him. Then I made him apologize. I wondered if, those nights in Weimar, Barbara recognized me as the dashing young stranger in Arnstadt.
—There were some other trips, matters of necessity dictated by the computers, too numerous to mention. You may see me chasing Bach through history, showing up now and again in the cursing, capering figures of Johann Martin Schubart, Johann Caspar Vogler, Johann Tobias Krebs, Johann Nicholas Gerber, Johann Philip Kernberger, Johann Ludwig Krebs, Johann Gottlob Krause, Johann Harrer, or a dozen others, for a second, hour, or month, obvious or indetectable, melody or counterpoint as Bach’s tutor, student, patron, doctor, cuckolder, critic, jailer, father, or son, a fugue of Johanns, a lusus ingenii surpassing anything the old master ever invented.
—Finally we succeeded. Hounded and harassed, Bach was driven into himself. He marshaled all his genius, with its full complications, to the great religious works we know from the Leipzig period, thereby closing off a still larger realm of possibilities for later composers. His work was complete.
—I saw Bach once more, as Dr. John Taylor of England. An eye expert. The operation, although it had to be repeated, turned out very badly. He not only lost his sight, but his otherwise excellent bodily health was destroyed by it, and by some mischievous medicines and other treatments, so that for a full half year afterward he was continually ill. You can read this in the Necrology. It was always a matter of regret that, since there was neither a death mask nor a skull, it was impossible to model a bust of Bach, but the funeral was arranged rather hastily. When the body was disinterred in the 1890s, there was even some doubt whether it was his.
—Of course you’re a notorious liar, said Lisa McElroy.
—Oh, in the broadest sense, yes. A lie isn’t just a misstatement, but, in the hands of a skilled liar, an assumed personality of presumably greater imaginative value than his own. I did that, certainly. As for variance from fact, you should know by now that facts are always provisional. They’re whatever best serves the imagination. If I tell you that Bach finished his Art of the Fugue, is that a lie?
—It certainly varies from what we know.
—Here. I displayed the autograph of the last five pages. Olafson gasped.
—He finished it. If not in this reality, in some other. You might prove that I forged this. Or you might prove that one of his sons finished it. But that would be provisional as well. Or, most deranged of all, consider this: that all of us might be fictions, figures in a dream of the ailing Bach. The year is 1749, the only possible present in a solid concept of time, and he is ill, asleep, fevered. He has broken down, the Art is unfinished. He invents us. We are the actors in a shameful interior drama of regret, recrimination, and persecution. Here I hold the key to that dream.
And I dropped the papers onto the embers.
Olafson screamed.
—No, I said, restraining him as the pages blackened and curled. —It’s best this way. This is what we know.
I considered. Solipsist to the last, he had worked the notes BACH into his final theme, and died. A signature, a triumph of self-reflection, then Tod, süsser Tod. The imaginative value was greatest that way.
The present, after all, is no more than the likeliest collaboration of past dreams. Bach and a million others had collaborated to produce us. No less had we labored to produce them, to make them real to us.
My story was done. A few ashes blew up from the embers. It was dusk, and the lights of Berkeley, Oakland, and San Francisco were coming on. We all admired the view for some minutes.
—Look, said Lisa Davis. —The campanile just lit up. I live a few blocks from there.
—You see, I murmured, we’re all self-regarding. When you look raptly at the moon, or study from a height the city where you live, or regard a painting, or gaze into the eyes of a lover, or consider a period of history, what are you contemplating but your absence from that place?
No one answered.
—We have abandoned the creative act. It has been rationalized out of us. So we seek our self-worth in connection with the past ... to vindicate our own absent presence. We are the children of what parents, what lineage? Now we may choose. That part of the mind which most needs the connection has developed the art to make it. And in that way we become parents of the past, of children who are truly our creation. They understand (and I pointed again at the cloning labs) that need for the idea and the reality to close ranks, so that we can have true children, not shared, not bor
n of women, or of history, or of accident, or necessity, but immaculately and without labor. Ours. Ourselves.
The streetlights, laid out in diagonals and perpendiculars, followed the chaotic swells of the landscape, and rose in verticals where the ground would support them. Their patterns mediated the course of the mind through the natural world, as did the vaporous densities of airborne chemicals that colored the western sky red. Jet trails disturbed the smog, cars moved on the streets, man progressed through his own mediations, with no hint of rain. Beyond the Golden Gate lay the ocean, as old and complex as time, as simple as death.
—Well. It’s getting chilly here. Everyone had enough to eat? If so, I think I’ll take the head. I believe I’m entitled to it.
There were no protests. I put the top back on the skull and took it home. Later I had it bronzed. It stands now on my mantel, between Handel and Brahms.
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* * * *
Here is a fascinating novella that combines a completely fantastic situation with the sort of detailed logic usually found only in “hard science” stories.
Imagine: You’re a man who wakes up one morning in a strange room . . . and in a body that’s not your own. It’s a woman’s body, and the muscles are completely uncoordinated. You’re in a hospital. . . .
Universe 10 - [Anthology] Page 18
