7.
If I were to play the piano now instead of continuing to write this essay, I would begin with scales, up and down the keyboard, four octaves. Today my fingers might be in the mood for F-sharp major, and then for F-sharp minor. F-sharp minor sounds harder than it is.
Next, arpeggios. My lazy thumbs hesitate to tuck under, and I’m no good at rotation.
After warming up, I’ll make a cup of tea and stare out the window at the gas station, or, because my hands are cold (on the verge of hysterical immobility?), I’ll immerse them in hot water, à la Glenn Gould.
I, too, have a command of things contrapuntal, though my counterpoint is psychological—one thought pushing against another, interfering, cooperating.
Fugal subject: should I play the piano or do something constructive with my life?
I step into fog when I play. I begin with a clear intent: let’s attempt the Paul Bowles sonatina! And within fifteen minutes the familiar haze descends.
8.
Occasionally I intend my writing to be comic—to offset the melancholy, and to mute the maledictions. Unfortunately, there is little humor in this essay—unless we step back from the voice of its narrator, and imagine him as a character, a foolish, fearful, adamant man, gripped by a misconception.
I demand wisdom from my fingers: at least they must sound human, and not like spoons and forks! The piano, however, is not a human being. It lies halfway between a friend and a rock. More responsive than a rock. More predictable than a friend.
9.
At the moment I am preoccupied with two discords in “Corcovado,” a tranquil dance from Darius Milhaud’s technically undemanding suite, Saudades do Brasil. In the opening measure, a G in the left hand meets the piquant interference of an F-sharp in the right hand; and in the next measure, a C-sharp in the right hand, passing quickly, confronts a D in the left hand. These dissonances don’t linger long enough to sound provocative, negative, or rabble-rousing, but they make my fingers complicit with a tiny revolution in taste.
10.
I should suddenly talk about sex in order to draw the reader’s attention elsewhere, just as my attention is always distracted—by the view out the window, by the fantasy I forgot to describe, by the thought in front of the thought I am in the midst of trying to explain.
11.
Here is a miniature novel.
After suffering a memory lapse and nervous breakdown, Rosanna Duvette, an American debutante, travels to Sicily to recover. There she finds a ground-floor apartment in quaint Noto, and rents an upright. At lunch she sits beneath a lemon tree and broods about her wealthy parents. An American artist is also living in Noto. “Frances Churchweather” is his alias. Later she discovers his real name is Francesco. He wears a bead necklace, and has muscular, hairy legs. He tells her, when they are lying in bed, “See these soccer-playing thighs? I come by them naturally, from my dead father.”
12.
In the future I may write an essay on the tradition of the piano morceau? Especially about how my mind drifts while I play waltzes? Perhaps also an essay on the madness and pleasure of two-part inventions?
Soon I plan to venture into bitonality: two keys at once, superimposed, no attempt at reconciliation.
All my efforts to make sense of bitonality are doomed by my ignorance of tonality’s rules. What are the principles of voice leading? I can’t remember what a “dominant” is, though once I studiously marked up the score of an early Beethoven sonata with the appropriate symbols for modulations and tonal relations. Another time, as if under heavy sedation, I made inscrutable structural notes on the first movement of a Schubert quartet—“Death and the Maiden.”
13.
Pretend I work in an edge-of-town bordello as a “mood” pianist entertaining customers with Chopin waltzes as they wait for their ladies. No strain, no bravura: my technique, careless and “musical” (my first piano teacher’s highest term of approbation, though it is redundant to call a musician “musical”), smuggles into my apartment an imaginary atmosphere of prostitution, the floppy comfortable bodies of bawds and johns.
Satie wrote “furniture music.” Everything I play becomes, in my slack hands, “apartment music”: hedonism, hookahs, harlots, the bliss of being a transvestite on the brink of unconsciousness, adrift on out-of-tune album leaves.
Playing the piano for myself, in an apartment, in a tumultuous city, where there are so many more fashionable and productive things to do, proves that I am sliding downhill, and feels like gently but decisively biting human flesh.
The keys go down three-eighths of an inch. That’s not much. A true pianist would say: the ecstasies. Untrue pianist, I’ll say, instead: the ambiguities.
14.
Why can’t I manage, ever, to sit alone, slightly drunk, in churches, listening obediently to claviers? Maybe I should become a Quaker. Quakers believe in silence. Perhaps I should devote time to “green” causes.
15.
Some favorite piano records, from youth:
Best beloved was a live recording of Vladimir Horowitz’s return to Carnegie Hall after twelve years without performing. (Some critics considered him neurasthenic.) I limited myself to half of the four-sided affair: I listened to the Bach-Busoni Toccata in C (side one) and the Schumann Fantasy (side two), but I ignored the Scriabin “Black Mass” Sonata (side three) and Chopin’s G minor Ballade (side four). I esteemed the way Horowitz teased inner voices away from their ordinary bourgeois surroundings, and the way he tended to play notes not simultaneously: he broke and staggered them, deliberately tripping them up, or spreading them into a peacock-feather fan.
Second beloved was Dame Myra Hess’s recording of Symphonic Etudes by Schumann, who tried to drown himself in the Rhine: certain notes evaporated the moment she played them. I admired her humility: she knew how to subordinate her artistry to besieged wartime England, and to muteness.
Third beloved was the last B-flat major Mozart Sonata, recorded soon after World War II by Artur Schnabel, famous, in my eyes, for his warm-toned perfectionism: the disappearance of some notes signaled a decorousness beyond the pale, as well as a hyper-showmanship, the virtuosity of diminuendo-unto-nothing. That has always been my unreachable ambition: to show off moments of diminishment, to prove to a rapt audience that I, too, know how to curve backward into emptiness.
Fourth beloved was Rudolf Serkin’s recording of the knotty Brahms D minor Concerto. (Serkin himself meant little to me: he was merely the vehicle for Brahms.) I revered the chunkiness of the chords, each resting on what seemed the wrong foundation (the sixth, rather than the tonic?). When I first heard the trills at the beginning, I thought, “Ugly.” They sounded like unmitigated, antisocial racket. Then I listened to these tremolos a few more times, and found them, eventually, beautiful.
Fifth beloved was Arturo Benedetti Michelangeli’s performance of Chopin’s B-flat minor Scherzo. (Here is what the liner notes say of Mr. Michelangeli: “His own personality is so perfectly expressed in his piano playing that his private life outside music, together with any somewhat bizarre or puzzling features which might be known or alleged to mark it, seems completely unimportant.”) I worshipped his flirtation with disappearance—in the soft passages, the melody stood out, appropriately, while harmonic filigree fell back into one undifferentiated sea. Slavishly, this background forgave the tune its arrogant impositions. I appreciated servile accompaniment, a left hand that minded its own business.
16.
I plan to compile a useless roster of every piece I have ever performed, in however humble, juvenile, and unprofessional a venue. This list will be very brief.
Another futile list I hope to compose is all the chamber music I have performed or attempted: this list will be even briefer.
A final list will include every word I’ve written—or that a teacher has inscribed—in every musical score I own. I will annotate—gloss—each enigmatic indication.
However, I don’t want to be Blanche DuBois, praising a phantom, bygone Bel
le Reve. Harboring few illusions about my piano past, I care exclusively about this current life of desultory, incremental practicing toward no goal.
17.
Of course I may be exaggerating my affection for this reclusive activity. For twelve years, a period of willful abstinence, I stopped playing. Piano disappeared. Eventually it may disappear again.
18.
Poets disappear: Arthur Rimbaud stopped writing poetry when he was nineteen, and his disappearance is an important part of his extant work. Silence provides a resonance chamber for the lyrics that preceded his defection from words. According to critic Wallace Fowlie, after Rimbaud quit poetry, he “enlisted in the Dutch army,” “deserted,” “worked for a while on the island of Cyprus,” “worked for an export company, dealing principally in coffee,” and “sold guns to King Menelik of Choa.”
Soon it will be evening, and I will allow myself to stop writing and to approach the piano. First I will do scales. Then, a wordless Poème (1913) by the underrated Russian mystic composer Scriabin, who, soon after composing it, died of an infected boil on his upper lip. This piece is marked en rêvant, avec une grande douceur: dreaming, with a grand sweetness.
In my hands, the piano is a grave occupation: without jokes, without sexuality.
19.
While playing, I silently give myself musical advice, with the intensity of a pharmacist describing side effects. A recent, wordless, internal lecture concerned the importance of correct rhythm. I decided I didn’t need to inject expressivity into the piece; my duty was simply to count the beats and to keep the polyrhythms (five against three) in perfect order.
I don’t listen to these lectures, and I never write them down for further consideration, so today’s adages disappear by nightfall, and tomorrow I must begin again, trying to figure out, from scratch, how to play.
20.
Last night I dreamt that a former teacher, an important critic, asked me what I wanted to write about. I hemmed and hawed: I wanted to say, “Nothing!” But I needed to come up with a respectable answer. So I said, “Genre and utopia.” I knew this was hot air. But I also meant it. The teacher scoffed: “Genre and utopia? Some people shouldn’t be allowed!”
21.
A music teacher once told me that I occasionally revealed a sophisticated attention to details but that my basics were bizarrely out of place. Fact: the one time I performed the Chopin G minor Ballade, in a difficult passage my left hand simply stopped for a measure. Confused, the fingers retreated, gave up. A decent pianist would never skip four beats of the bass, impoverishing the harmony, leaving the right hand alone with its contextless declaration.
22.
Playing a piece for a listener, I race toward the finish line, panting, out of breath, as if unattractively flailing my arms. No time to notice beauties, or to observe simple rules of musical prosody: enunciation dissolves in a flurry of missed notes, punched-out figures, rushed gestures.
Problem: when the piano suddenly seems too loud, I clumsily resort to the soft pedal, as insurance against impoliteness.
The few times I’ve heard a tape of myself performing, I’ve been horrified—more so than when catching my bespectacled reflection in a shop window.
“I play” is one of the working hypotheses undergirding my existence. That supposition, however, is hobbled by an unfortunate adverb: “I play badly.”
The pathetic, too, demands anatomization; failure is as genuine a subject as success. Playing pathetically interests me as much as playing well.
23.
If in a few years I come down with arthritis or another crippling hand disease, then I will look back at this present time, this period of grousing about my mediocrity, as an opportunity squandered: “All those years he had a fully functional physical mechanism, and he did nothing but complain!”
As a teenager I had a crush on Misha Dichter, a handsome Shanghai-born Jewish pianist with a shock of dark hair, like a delinquent in a ’50s “social problem” film. (Dichter is German for “poet.”) As I saw him play the first Liszt concerto’s final octaves, he half-stood, hovering, raising his butt a few inches above the bench, strength moving from his shoulders down to the keys. This feat impressed me: rising gave him immeasurable power to state an ending.
(2001)
CORPSE POSE
I have corpse envy. At the end of yoga class we do corpse pose, savasana: dress rehearsal for the morgue. I’d planned to write an essay about how literature should start enjoying its own corpse mode, its oft-foretold senescence; I’d planned to become an expert on corpse pose, to analyze what I feel lying on a blue yoga mat, waiting for the bell to ring, savoring my slack-jawed simulation of interment. I’d planned to divagate on corpse pose’s relevance to contemporary literary practice, but then, yesterday at noon, my stepfather died. What if the chaos surrounding my stepfather’s corpse—figuring out funeral arrangements or letting my older brother handle them while I stand idle—ruins the essay I’ve promised to deliver? I’ve sworn to write a piece entitled “Corpse Pose,” but now I must fly to California to deal with a real corpse.
I could write “Corpse Pose” on the airplane, en route to California for the funeral. But maybe I’ll be too discombobulated. On a plane, I can’t spread out my notes. While I paint, in my studio, I jot down notes on lined yellow 5-by-7-inch pads. My painting notes aren’t literature, though I save them in a manila folder as if they were valued drafts. I could transcribe them and reincarnate them as a poem or an essay, but I dread that process. Transforming the notes into literature will involve making Sisyphean prosodic decisions. Should I mutate the fragments and phrase-clusters into sentences? Should I stack up the sentences paratactically, or integrate them into coherent paragraphs? I might decide that the notes are actually a poem; lyric identity helps me avoid syntactic maturity.
Here are five of my painting notes. If you want to help me sculpt them into literature, be my guest.
(1) Add white to black edges to cover up the blue.
(2) Change color of lozenge behind butt.
(3) Lavender heavens deepen Joan’s body.
(4) Cover the ultramarine area with Twombly-esque graphisms, using small brush.
(5) Use palette knife. No outlines until I see forms in the smudge.
These notes won’t be literature until I shape, frame, or contextualize their stammering.
Contextualize: that was what I learned in grad school, a PhD program, not theory-heavy. Contextualize. That meant history. Find the historical context for my close reading of butt-fucking imagery in H. Rider Haggard’s novel She. The context that interested me wasn’t history. The context was my desire to find butt-fucking imagery in H. Rider Haggard’s She, and to stimulate my class of fellow grad students by audaciously leading them through my sodomitic interpretation.
In my stepfather’s presence I never referred to him as “stepfather.” Perhaps this omission distressed him. One year, for Christmas, I gave him a copy of The Arcades Project, an assemblage of notes, a book difficult to read but easy to idealize. I had fallen in love with Walter Benjamin’s numinous incompleteness, and wanted to present this ruin to every man or woman I knew who needed fixing, who needed to be made more monumental. My real father (my mother’s first husband) was born in Berlin, 1928; father and Germanic are twinned concepts. I thought I could firm up my non-Germanic stepfather by giving him The Arcades Project. Or maybe I wanted to make him a bit more ruined.
My stepfather, a historian, knew how to find contexts for random information; his specialty was the Second World War, and so he could divine a context for The Arcades Project. Amelioration, idealization, repair, and obfuscation are the indirect aims of most of the gift-giving I’ve done in my not particularly generous life. I’ve given my real father Georg Christoph Lichtenberg’s The Waste Books, Benjamin’s Reflections (containing “A Berlin Chronicle”), and a CD of Schumann’s Der Rose Pilgerfahrt (The Pilgrimage of the Rose). Here are prerequisites for a gift to a father. (1) It must be German
. (2) It must be fragmented. (3) It must be lionized only posthumously. (4) It must represent ruin. (5) It must do a good job of transfiguring ruin.
To the first session of a semester-long seminar I taught on The Arcades Project, I brought two personal relics of dubitable relevance: a 1968 Kodak Super 8 movie camera, and a photo of my great-uncle Walter, a chemist, who died in Caracas in 1956. Born in Berlin, he looked uncannily like Walter Benjamin; judging by my great-uncle’s face in the photograph, I could imagine that he’d died of overthinking. The photo, though it served no legitimate pedagogic function, encapsulated my infatuation with The Arcades Project, whose incompleteness held my lacunae in a loving, unparaphrasable grip. Because I, like my uncle Walter, resembled someone liable to die from overthinking, then perhaps I could be trusted as a living representative of Benjamin’s auratic incompletion.
But why the movie camera? I brought to that first Arcades Project class my Super 8 movie camera to embody the aura of outmoded technologies. This scuffed object—a pathetic, nonmonumental bit of American midcentury flotsam—hurtled me back to photoreproductive crossroads, the fork in the road separating Swann’s way from the Guermantes way. I now display this talismanic camera in my apartment’s hallway; next to the camera, on a diminutive shelf, are ten back issues of BUTT magazine, a Ballantine 1961 paperback screenplay of Fellini’s La Dolce Vita, and a stack of yellowed books I bought in Berlin, including Benjamin’s Berliner Kindheit um Neunzenhundert (Berlin Childhood around 1900) and a 1914 edition of Richard Dehmel’s Hundert Ausgewählte Gedichte (100 Selected Poems). Dehmel wrote the text that inspired Schoenberg’s Verklärte Nacht. Transfigured Night, like my 1968 Kodak Instamatic, was a bygone innovation I still hadn’t adequately studied, an outmoded iconoclasm still waiting, over a century later, to wake me up.
Figure It Out Page 3
