The Great Concert of the Night

by Jonathan Buckley

  •

  On the occasion of her sixtieth birthday, Val has thoughts on the topic of getting older. Her body is not what it was. Of a morning, her joints seem to have rusted while she slept. Her eyesight requires ever stronger correction. Her sense of taste has become duller; she is aware that certain frequencies have become inaudible to her. Ageing is indeed no picnic. She has friends who have made use of hormone replacement therapy. It must be said, some of these proponents of medicinal enhancement do look marvellous. They have recovered something of the lustre of their earlier selves. But HRT, for all its benefits, was not the right way for Val. This had nothing to do with whatever risks such treatment might entail—though naturally one must be aware of these risks before making the choice that every woman is entitled to take. No, Val has preferred to let nature takes its course, unobstructed. Body and mind will remain in step, and the latter will be enriched, she believes, by learning to accommodate the changes to which the former is subject. Our culture’s cult of youth is deplorable. To counter it, we should take a lesson from those societies that still maintain a reverence for the wisdom of older people. It is a sign of what we have lost that it is almost impossible to use the word wisdom without embarrassment. Val makes no apologies for using that word. “The wisdom of experience” may be a cliché, she concedes, but clichés become clichés because they are true, she reminds us. The road becomes harder as we grow older, “because we are climbing perpetually.” And because we are climbing, “with every year we see farther.”

  •

  Our society enforces an imperative to preserve oneself at all costs, while at the same time pretending that death is not the end, said Imogen, after the first operation. But death was simply nothing, she said. Just look at a butcher’s counter; look at the insignificant little corpses flattened on the road. There’s nothing to be afraid of, she said; there’s no mystery—flesh is merely stuff, like everything else. And we can all, easily enough, come to terms with the death of anyone, with one exception, said Imogen. Though she had no fear of death, the sorrow of the thought of no longer being in the world was often too much for her, she admitted.

  •

  Fireworks had always thrilled her. I can see her face, the grin of wonderment at the geysers of silver light, the huge flowers of coloured fire that bloomed for an instant and vanished above us. We were watching from a road, at a distance from the bonfire. Shrapnel of firework casings—curved segments of thick grey cardboard—clattered on the ground around us. The detonations were as loud as thunder directly overhead. Francesca’s boyfriend stood behind her, with his arms clamped around her waist; he produced a laugh sound, but seemed pained by the pointlessness, the profligacy of it all. “Frankie” was what he called Francesca, which nobody else ever has, to my knowledge. We felt sorry for him, because he knew his time was almost up. Fireworks were an art form, Imogen proposed to Francesca: the display had been crafted with great care, to give delight, and it had no meaning that could be put into words.

  •

  But the other year: the parade of pirates and sailors, eighteenth-century yeomen and American Indians, Mongol warriors, Vikings—every one of them with a torch of fire. Belligerent jollity. A bandolier of firecrackers, hanging around the neck of an effigy of Guy Fawkes, detonated with the noise of an ambush. Then we saw, at the top of a tall pole, the words Lest We Forget in letters of fire. Two grim-faced men held up a banner that proclaimed Faithful Unto Death. Another: No Popery. Their demeanour was adamant; the papist hordes might have been massing in the hills.

  “I thought this was just an excuse to dress up and make a racket,” said Imogen. She had to shout to be heard. “These guys don’t seem to be pretending,” she yelled, making frightened eyes.

  •

  Our species took its great leap forward when it stood up and looked around. No longer were we genital-sniffing hominids, scuttling around on all fours. We stood upright, and sight became our primary sense. Now the optic nerve of Homo sapiens has nearly twenty times as many nerve endings as the cochlear nerve, the second most sensitive organ of perception. Conversation at normal volume becomes incomprehensible at a range of less than one hundred feet, but the human eye, unaided, can discern the flame of a single candle at a range of a mile and a half. It can distinguish in the region of ten million different colours, by some calculations.

  •

  “It is time to abandon the world of the civilised and its light,” wrote Georges Bataille in “The Sacred Conspiracy,” published in 1936, in the first issue of Acéphale, a journal founded by Georges Bataille to publish writings from the secret society of the same name, also founded by Georges Bataille. “Secretly or not, it is necessary to become other, or else cease to be,” he declared. “WE ARE FEROCIOUSLY RELIGIOUS,” he proclaimed, in capitals. “What we are undertaking is a war.” The war was to involve a sacrificial ritual, a sacred game such as Nietzsche had proposed as a means by which humanity, having brought about the death of God, might find it possible to overcome the consequences of God’s removal. The sacrifice was to be conducted at the Egyptian obelisk in the centre of Place de la Concorde. It appears that an animal was to be slaughtered, but precisely what species of animal was to give its life in the cause of spiritual regeneration remains open to question. It might have been a goat, or a rabbit, or a gibbon. A female gibbon, of course. The members of Acéphale seem to have considered performing a human sacrifice, perhaps in the forest of Saint-Nom-la-Bretèche, where the group often gathered by a tree that had been riven by lightning. Writer and ethnographer Michel Leiris, with whom Bataille and Roger Caillois established the Collège de sociologie in 1937, pronounced this sacrificial project “puerile.”

  On January 21st, members of the Acéphale group, I have learned, gathered to commemorate the execution of Louis XVI, who on that date, in 1793, had been guillotined on Place de la Concorde.

  •

  When she was ten years old, Imogen had learned from a schoolfriend that during the French Revolution the men who worked the guillotines had worn chain-mail gloves, because the severed heads would try to bite their fingers when lifted out of the basket. Years later, she was still having nightmares in which the biting heads appeared. The heads would roll across the wooden platform, mouthing words that they could not make intelligible.

  •

  “Our desire to consume, to annihilate, to make a bonfire of our resources, and the joy we find in the burning, the fire and the ruin are what seem to us divine.” So wrote Bataille—pornographer, anthropologist, numismatist, archivist at the Bibliothèque Nationale and, some (eg Antoine Vermeiren) would say, philosopher. “Our only real pleasure is to squander our resources to no purpose,” he wrote.

  He is buried in Vézelay, in Burgundy, where he died on July 8th, 1962, at his house in Rue Saint-Étienne, close to the basilica of Saint Mary Magdalene. As a young man, Bataille considered becoming a priest; for a short time he attended a seminary.

  •

  Coming out of a slump, Imogen joked: “Everybody, at some time, wants to be dead—but just for a week or two.”

  •

  Franck Boudet waited at a distance until the family had left, then approached the grave again. He looked into it, frowning deeply, as if he had happened upon a murdered body in a field. His attire was uncompromising: black suit, black shirt, black tie, black shoes. But he had the appearance of a man who had just stepped off a long-haul flight: the clothes were creased and a shave was needed; it looked as if some sleep would be beneficial too. The hair and forehead put me in mind of images of Benjamin Franklin in his later years, though I doubt that Benjamin Franklin dyed his hair as Franck Boudet dyed his—an unnatural tone of charcoal predominated, with lanes of deep chestnut near the scalp. The belt of his trousers dug a groove into his belly, and the shirt buttons were under some strain. He could have been cast as a rock guitarist who hadn’t yet quit, after four decades in the business. At the graveside he put his hands together and murmured inaudibly, for some time. That
done, he looked up, into the branches of the trees, steadying himself with the sight of them. He looked at me, and nodded, as though we had been in attendance together by agreement. We had not yet spoken, but I had intended to speak to him. “You are David?” he said, putting out a hand. Through Imogen, there was a kinship. We walked to the cars. In everything Imogen did, he said, she was a very strong woman. In Maintenant et à l’heure de notre mort she was “sublime,” he told me. He stopped and turned to look back, in the direction of the place where Imogen lay. She was “very true,” he said, as if seeing her image in the air. “There are things that are more important than technique. Imogen was not a technical person. She served the truth,” he said. He looked at me; the look announced that a moment of significance was imminent; a momentous parting. “We knew her,” he said. “Lovers are easy to find, but not friends. For Imogen, we were friends. We know this,” he said, and he shook my hand martially. “We remember her,” he said, making the words sound like the oath of our two-man sect.

  •

  Benoît, I see, is now a professor at the university of Grenoble, specialising in environmental economics. The list of publications is impressive, as is the website photo: a strong-jawed man, with closely cropped dark hair and a trim grey-flecked beard. The eyewear—circular lenses, sturdy metallic frame—is distinctive; this boffin has a sense of style. It is not a casual snapshot—it’s a portrait such as one might see in a publisher’s catalogue. The gaze is percipient; here is a man who sees the big picture.

  When he learned what had happened with Imogen, he came to Paris at the first opportunity. Benoît had followed her career with interest, he told her. They talked about Maintenant et à l’heure de notre mort but not about the films she had made with Vermeiren. Benoît looked well—a little heavier, and more expensively dressed. Politicians, journalists and company directors now consulted him for his opinion and analysis. He had achieved a certain position in life, a position of some eminence, influence and reward. As Imogen put it: he was not self-satisfied, exactly, but he struck her as a man who was comfortably clothed in success. He had married an Italian woman, a physicist, and they had two children, of whom a photograph was produced; the beautiful children sat in kayaks, on placid blue water, in front of snow-topped mountains. As soon as Imogen was feeling stronger, said Benoît, she would have to come and stay with them; they had an apartment on Lago d’Iseo. When she showed him the bag and the stoma, he was momentarily at a loss. “You will get better,” he declared. She was to take this as praise for her strength of character. He was invited to the funeral, but was unable to attend. I study the face of Benoît; a different Imogen is remembered by this man; only in his mind does that Imogen exist.

  •

  After the first operation: I recall a walk along the river, with little conversation. It was not quite fearfulness that I saw in her gaze, as she looked across the water. It was more, I think, an almost desperate avidity. She stopped at a bridge, and seemed to take in the scene as if every object within it were over-charged with meaning. Elsewhere, she frowned as one would frown at something that might prove to be not as solid as it seems.

  •

  I stepped off the train into a crowd, but I saw her immediately, at the end of the platform. She looked weary, but no worse than weary. She put a hand on the knot of her scarf, at her throat; a gesture of self-protection, it seemed. And the way she stood back from the surge of departing passengers suggested a new fragility. Yet the embrace she gave me was strong. The first words she spoke were: “Behold the cavalry.” This was not to be a romantic reunion. I had not been summoned to take the place of the disappointing Loïc, and I had no desire to replace him. This had never been said, but it had been understood. We walked for a while, before taking the Métro. She took my arm; as we waited for the traffic to stop, she pressed her cheek to my shoulder. I was reading when she came in to say goodnight. She showed me where her body had been cut. When I touched the scar, she ruffled my hair and laughed, then whispered: “I am bound to thee forever.”

  •

  Driving out to the maison de maître, what I had felt, above all, was dread—perhaps, intermittently, a dread akin to what I imagine might be felt before a first sky-dive, as the door opens onto the depths of air. A trial was imminent, from which I might emerge changed in some way. As we drove back into Paris, the city was awakening; we were returning to the familiar world. We had emerged from the underworld, into the light. I kissed, in courtly manner, the back of the hand that she held out. My position might have seemed to be one of servitude, but she had confessed everything to me, knowing that the one who receives the confession has power over the one who confesses. An irreducible intimacy had been established; an absolute friendship. I regarded her with something close to wonder; with an admiration in which there was also an element of fear.

  •

  Memory: the background noise of the sensory world, sometimes barely audible, but always there. Making sentences of it, we amplify the signal, introducing distortion.

  •

  A list of things seen in a single glance: chestnut trees; a slope of grass; other zones of grass, beyond the trees; several human bodies; starlings; a dog; thin formations of water vapour and crystals of ice, known as cirrus clouds; cars. More than this was seen, much more. I could list what is seen of those bodies, in that single glance: the form, the clothes, the movement. The tumult of things, the irresistible visual deluge, of which the brain makes a scene, in the instant of seeing. One seems to see a picture, an arrangement of objects with names attached: starlings; chestnuts; cirrus clouds. Stopping, I looked. I tried to make no sense of it, to give up, to lose myself in the torrent of the visible. Impossible, for me.

  •

  “To be full of things is to be empty of God. To be empty of things is to be full of God.” Again, Meister Eckhart.

  •

  I turn into Green Street and almost collide with Bianca’s owner. The dog, at the end of a lengthy lead, is urinating in the gutter. It’s a likeable animal. Bianca gazes skyward, as if patiently waiting, like her owner, for this tiresome procedure to be concluded. “Excuse us,” says the woman. Bianca steps out of the road and walks towards me. I hold out a hand, and the dog raises its head to touch my fingers with its muzzle. One might be inclined to think that Bianca too has some recollection of our previous encounters; I find myself persuaded that this is the case. “This is unusual,” her owner informs me. “A stand-offish little madam, as a rule.” She is on a mission to buy a book for a grandson. It’s not his birthday; she just has an urge to send him something, for his parents to read at bedtime. He is the same age as Francesca’s Jack, more or less. I recommend Each Peach Pear Plum—my niece’s son’s favourite, I tell her. She thinks that little George already has Each Peach Pear Plum. “Let me make a call,” she says, looking for a place out of the flow of shoppers. Ten yards from where we are standing there’s a recessed doorway. In response to my offer, she hands Bianca’s lead to me. The dog and I follow, at a discreet distance. Within half a minute George’s mother has answered: they do indeed have Each Peach Pear Plum. The three of us walk together as far as the bookshop; I am going that way, I decide. Gorgeous Georgie and adorable Jack are the topics of conversation.

  •

  An email from my father: his friend Bill has won a prize at a photography exhibition. He thinks I’ll like Bill’s picture. A click on a link brings up the winning photo: the subject is a barn, in a very photogenic state of disintegration. Tyres and pallets and gas canisters are strewn outside, with lengths of pipe and engine parts and sheets of corrugated iron. The variegated tones of rust are nicely distributed.

  One day in December, in the first year of unemployment, Bill took a diversion to the factory in which he and my father had worked. Nobody had taken over the premises. A chain-link fence surrounded the site, but a section of the fence had been uprooted; all he had to do was duck his head to get in. A skim of grit now covered the concrete floor of the workshop. In the
offices, pens and cigarette packets were strewn on the desks; health and safety notices were pinned to the board; invoices and letters had curled into shapes like flowers. Everything was turning grey under dust. A week later he went back, with a camera. Belatedly, Bill had found his hobby, to the relief of his wife. He became a connoisseur of dereliction. Soon a filing cabinet had been filled with images of his discoveries: a saw mill, a flour mill, a half-built house that had been left to rot, a barracks, two schools, a pillbox, a field of gutted cars, an evacuated farm, dead factories. He tried to persuade my father to come along: the expeditions kept him in good shape, he pointed out, with all the fences to be breached and walls to be surmounted. Sites at which trespassers were threatened with prosecution had an additional attraction: having been discarded prematurely by the world of work, he was taking revenge in flouting the law.

  •

  When I think of Imogen, what presents itself to my mind is not a story. I think of her, not of a life. A story, a life, is something one makes; it is not what one remembers. She, the living Imogen, is what I remember. Each memory is a reliquary; each memory contains something of the substance of her. Not an account, but a constellation of moments, or of their remains.

  •

  The death of the Châtelaine—a beautiful scene. All we see of the young woman’s body is the motionless hand, almost touching the floor, with one finger extended, pointing down—as if directing our attention—at the beads of blood on the flagstones, from which the camera then departs, to observe a basket of oranges and an ivory-handled knife in a pewter bowl, in sunlight, and particles of dust drifting across the window. Relishing every surface, the camera roams the room that had held the lovers. Sunlight rakes the walls, showing the grain of the stone; it soaks the flesh of a blood-red rose; it makes the rust glow on the blade of a sword. When the servant enters the chamber, we are at a remove from the tower, so the woman’s cry comes to us quietly, more quietly than the birdsong in the garden and the footfalls on the gravel path.