Personae (19 page)

Better yet, what is the relation of an artist to his art and how does that in turn relate to this mandatory deterioration? Is the artist cursed, blessed, blessed to be cursed, or cursed to be blessed? Just plain cursed Antonio came to believe. How else to characterize an activity that in no apparent way benefited its creator but rather functioned more like a just-shy-of-mortal injury every time it was engaged in? There was simply no way to tell, and yes that included speaking to the actual writer, whether
Energeias
was unfinished or not and it was that uncertainty that had confounded Helen and initially tainted the rest of her enquiry.

Unlike Schubert with his Eighth, Antonio was under no external pressure to create
Energeias
. If you proceed from the notion that there are no unmotivated highly complex actions then a suitably complex explanation for its creation was needed; especially since there was a sense, Helen now saw, in which the creation killed the creator and this was so whether it was unfinished or not. Helen understood that the trajectory of life did not point toward greater complexity or obfuscation. It wasn’t quite the circle people made it out to be either because the two ends of the line never truly joined. It was instead a jagged parabola culminating in a return to simplicity and directness and a concomitant rejection of ornamentation and pretense. It was in this sense that
Energeias
killed Antonio since someone liberated from Time would be unable to distinguish between a work being written by imminent death and that same work essentially writing the death.

Still, she needed to identify a non-metaphoric cause of death and do so in a place where the leading cause of death was life. Necessary because, here at least, it was not the case that death was caused by an overabundance of life. This was, as she’d said,
unnatural
, and whether such an end occurred more than a century in or within minutes, Helen Tame found it offensive. Because it was one thing to accept that all life would terminate and terminate in substantially the same way and quite another to accept that this highly predictable process and outcome would nonetheless be susceptible to extreme unpredictability and randomness so that every participant would be denied even the small comfort of a guaranteed orderly progression to finity. Look at the person across from you or mentally designate the one whose sudden absence you would find most enervating, the one that would hollow you out, and realize that only the most negligible spacetime twitch is required to disappear them. Realize as well that the disappearance would be irrevocable and fixed and if you find these concepts to be uninterestingly commonplace think for a moment if it really had to be this way and whether you haven’t actually uncritically internalized something that in truth evinces highest-level cruelty.

Helen Tame rebelled against this cruelty, sought to stamp it out. But a responsorial growth was all she’d ever detected and now her latest revelatory insight was only confirming the almost cosmic or was it comic injustice of it all. We build on sand when we play at building so have to be prepared to watch it all slide down at displacement of the wrong grain. Knowing the answer, identifying the particular grain, changed nothing, but it did preserve the record in a way that felt important. Her report was done and her report would do that; one last time Red into Black. There were moments when Helen still skeptically wondered at the ease of some of its conclusions and of course she deeply distrusted ease but in spite of all that, she somehow knew the document was swollen with truth and that this truth gave it value notwithstanding anything else. She’d often, she saw, been given these direct lines to truth but so often what she’d found had not been encouraging. This case, the last one, had been different. Without being able to pinpoint a precise cause she felt almost ennobled by her work on it. She recognized that fittingly no glory would come to her from the work and that was an enhancement. No need to gather people and identify then take hold of the killer either. The killer was dead too; a victim, you could say, of the very violence he helped engender. How strange how if you burrow deep enough all you seem to find is connective interrelation. Learn a fact today and marvel tomorrow at how ubiquitous it then seems, how crucial to the edifice of human knowledge and how negligent of you to only then have learned it. Helen Tame knew this all along but only now felt it so entirely, except the sensation was not of discovery or knowledge but rather of something like detached bemusement. It meant you accepted what you had to because failure to do so changed nothing except to make you weaker when the only thing the universe understood and honored was strength. Simultaneously and paradoxically it meant that the timelessness of the connectivity made it so that personal mistakes endured like a stain. It meant a lot of other things but most crucially it just plain
meant
. The rush of a sudden exhilarative flood of meaning was what drew Tame to the activity in the first place and though she knew she would miss it she felt that the great flood of the last place was enough to sustain her indefinitely. How alone Antonio had looked on that dirty floor. And solitude may help the work but it may also poison the soul. At least it was not accurate to say that solitude worsened those final moments. No, the final passage can only be got through alone so at his finality Antonio was at last on equal footing with even the most accompanied human. Then Helen had helped. Taken his inert hand and breathed a final burst of life into him. She could rest.

 VIII

 Fina
l
Excerp
t
o
f
Dr
.
Hele
n
Tame’
s
Introductio
n
 t
o
He
r
Articl
e: BACH, GOULD, AND
 ACONSPIRATORIAL SILENCE

A young Glenn Gould sat often at the piano and, most relevant to the following, became fascinated by the long decay of struck notes. The progress of Gould as the piano player he was always expected to be was predictable in its conformative arc until 1955. That year, at age twenty-two, he recorded a performance of the Goldberg Variations that still resounds today. Sitting at the piano, his hands oddly moving at almost eye level, Gould attacked the variations like someone barely in his twenties should. The result was a musical maelstrom that seemed to lay waste to the very concept of
classical
music. I will argue that for our purposes, and in a development that is not unrelated, twenty-six years of silence followed as it relates to the variations.

In 1981 Gould returned to the studio, one enhanced by a quarter-century of human technological development, and again recorded the variations. This time the result was almost ruminative. What you sense in the difference between the two recordings is the prototypical human slowing; the recognition that there are hidden dimensions in life that must be accounted for, that there’s nothing to rush toward and that maybe it’s better to elongate things like the certain wistfulness that emerges from the epiloguey repetition of the aria at the end.

A couple things about these coupled performances.

Know that Gould came to view the recording studio as a kind of musical instrument onto itself. Of course today the studio Gould used would be laughed at by the average thirteen-year-old clicking in his parents’ basement. But it was the best Gould would ever see as the next year he suffered a stroke a couple days after his fiftieth birthday and died shortly thereafter. He was then buried under the aria, its first few measures deemed lapidary and engraved on his marker.

Also: audible in both performances, despite engineers’ best efforts, is the voice of Gould. Somewhere he acquired a habit that proved lifelong of singing the notes as he played them, the effect a kind of ghostly amen to the musical assertions. Of course the reason Gould hums, the reason the listener hums, is he wants the music to enter his body, his lungs; wants it to be the very air he breathes.

It is air that can be lived off of, these performances. Taken together and, I will argue, in necessary conjunction with ancillary facts of Bach and Gould like the spectral humming, they form one of the monumental works of art of human history. In creating this work, Glenn Gould obliterated the line that seeks to separate interpretive art from its creative superior. Consequently, it can be accurately stated that these two men showed Time for the mockery it is and collaborated artfully despite the impediment of more than three centuries’ distance and how many intervening people since? The result is a kind of exhaustion of the piece so that it cannot rightly be played again and someone in search of a similar achievement must of necessity look elsewhere.

Lastly, there’s silence that soothes and the kind that antagonizes. Any silence that brings us dishonor cannot be left undisturbed but must instead be loudly filled. The time for awed consumption of work like Glenn Gould’s has passed and left us in a quiet room, our mouths dumbly open. The filling of silences is left to those with voices but the determination of who does or does not have a genuine voice is only circularly made by identifying those who have filled the silence. But prior to all that the person with the voice knows and that person must at all times emit an agonized Munchian scream. It is the plaintive cry of the damned as they realize they may not win in the little time left and it may seem shrill at first only recognize it for what it is: beautiful in its defiance, expertly and melodically constructed to exform, its notes compose the siren song that may yet lead us home.

 IX

 What’
s
Lef
t
t
o
Echo

Ed.
Note:
After much debate and internal hand-wringing we have decided, those of us who didn’t resign from unpaid positions in protest, to post (with one minor emendation) the following. That the death of the described individual is newsworthy is not reasonably disputed. What can be, of course, is the accuracy of the contained account and consequently our decision to post it in our Obituaries section and not say the Arts section. Putting aside for the moment the lively debate that’s been ignited, with animating concepts like the distinction between New and Old Media and what it all implies for society, we’ll simply say for now that we found the following persuasive.

Obituaries

Antonio
Arce,
111,
Man
of
Letters

Antonio Arce, who endured a lifetime of struggle and bloodshed that encompassed the tumultuous period in Colombian history known as
La
Violencia
before ultimately landing in New York City where he created divergently powerful works of fiction, died alone last Tuesday in his Manhattan apartment. He was one hundred and eleven years old.

Antonio Ricardo Arce Ochoa was born on February 29, 1900 in Tocaima Cundinamarca, Colombia, in a house with dirt floors that his father had only recently built. (Early 20
^th
Century, damn
present-day
for that matter, Colombian record-keeping was notoriously iffy. How iffy? Not until March 13, 1934 and Decree No. 540 did Colombia provide for the civil registration of birth, marriage, and death; and even then the provision didn’t take effect until 1940. Always in effect there, however, has been the Catholic Church and its baptismal etc. certificates with their marginal notes. It is mostly that kind of recordkeeping that forms the basis of the specificity you’re now enjoying.) Though generally described as a mild-mannered and kind child there was also ample evidence at an early age of Arce’s almost inhuman will. At the age of six he nearly bled to death following a vicious dog attack that he hid from his parents for a week before almost losing his arm.

By age eight Antonio was inseparable from his father, rarely attending school (not compulsory) but instead squeezing onto the back of the homemade saddle on the family horse to take the forty minute ride into
el
centro
every morning where they would sell the metal goods he’d helped his father forge.

It was at that age, on one of those trips to the center, that Arce witnessed the murder of his father. As they walked together, Antonio did not at first make the connection between the loud bang and his father’s sudden fall to his side and this failure persisted even as he frantically tried to squeeze his father’s neck to keep in its blood. When it was over and adults had gathered in increasing numbers, Antonio Arce took advantage of a sudden distraction, got on his horse, and rode home to tell his mother and sister; whose screams, it is said, caused a sinkhole in the pueblo with remains still visible to this day.

When, four years later, this sister drowned in a nearby river after becoming fixated on and following a group of grasshoppers out into the current, Arce’s mother was said to be a shell; one whose death a few months thereafter was attributed in the marginal notes of her parish death certificate to an
alma
derrotada
or broken spirit.

Antonio and his sister having been the only two of their mother’s five births to survive past six weeks, Arce was alone. The twelve-year-old was expected to walk to a distant aunt in Manizales but instead kept walking until reaching Cali. Cali, a genuine city, was unlike anything Arce had seen to that point. On arrival there he could not read or write, had never really even
seen
a proper book, but he soon taught himself to do both at an astonishing rate. Discovering that neither activity led directly to food he ran with loosely organized gangs that operated petty crime operations like street fighting for which he demonstrated considerable aptitude, often deriving significant income by playing the part of the much younger overmatched opponent before violently and remuneratively revealing the truth.

At seventeen Arce joined Colombia’s military primarily in the hopes that their uniform might serve as a kind of explanation that would reduce the fear he seemed to inspire in perceptive women. He rose quickly, his unlikely pairing of effortless physical and mental courage and elite intelligence something that others almost gathered to observe. The explanation worked as well and at age twenty-five Colonel Antonio Arce married Damiana Villabón who on March 6, 1927 gave birth to their only child, Margarita.

The following year, Arce’s dissatisfaction with military service culminated in his refusal to obey multiple orders to shoot during the so-called Banana Massacre, refusals that resulted in his death being ordered and his sudden flight with wife and daughter to Colombia’s coastal region and Barranquilla in particular. Not a great deal is known of Arce’s ensuing decades in Barranquilla other than the fact that he managed to amass a considerable amount of land and other property under the assumed name of Nio de Santos. Nor is there any continued record, or explanation for the absence, of either Damiana or Margarita from this time forward.

What
is
known is that in 1948, following the assassination of presidential candidate Jorge Eliécer Gaitán, Colombia descended into a kind of savage civil war between its two political parties: the Conservative Party (think military, church etc.) and the Liberal Party (think social reformists). As the country (especially the rural parts) sank into anarchic chaos one of the few things both parties could agree on was that they wanted Antonio Arce added to the list of more than 200,000 dead. Arce’s ultimate response was the abandonment of everything he’d built with the exception of the twenty-two foot boat he used to sail to Cuba.

In Cuba, Arce rebuilt what he’d lost but stood fast in his refusal to remarry, repeatedly characterizing such a move as a form of weakness. What he built there, aided by the island country’s improbably thriving economic environment of the nineteen-fifties, was a low-level media empire that included two radio stations and a newspaper. In 1960, the Cuban State began to help itself to private property including Arce’s stations and beloved paper. Though he was tempted to resist (Arce generally viewed Cuba’s men of violence as kind of quaintly cute) array enough numbers against any man and he accedes, meaning Arce had again lost everything including multiple boats he could have used to start anew.

What he did then was build a glorified raft with these crazy twin brothers everybody told him he should distrust and direct it to Florida, one of the United States of America. The waters between Cuba and Key West equal ninety miles of natural treachery. The unpredictable currents and a nasty storm with absurd swells made the many sharks therein suddenly and mortally relevant. The best Arce could manage at that point was to make the sharks most responsible for the death of the twins pay, like worker honey bees, the ultimate price for their aggression.

When he arrived on shore, after skillfully evading
rescue
, he walked in bloodied rags through horrified beachgoers to a remote area where he buried one belonging of each twin under a makeshift cross then made its sign. Then, after immediately and unfavorably assessing his surroundings, he continued on to New York City.

New York City in 1960 but all Arce seemed to see was books. His lack of English now offended him so he taught himself to speak, read, and ultimately write it. He did this while working as a restaurant dishwasher, one who was often kidded about his advanced age but rarely twice by the same person. Then he cooked and then he co-owned when the owner got himself into the kind of trouble with the kind of people that only Arce’s baleful intensity could get him out of.

From there Arce kept adding restaurants including some of the initial Colombian ones in highly Colombian Jackson Heights, Queens. He also began to write fiction. He wrote exclusively in English and he did so somewhat obsessively. On his 90
^th
birthday, however, he destroyed everything he’d written to that point saying a man should only write that which he’d be willing to see engraved on his gravemarker. Expecting not to last much longer, he gave away his considerable possessions and devoted himself exclusively to writing.

In his last few years this devotion became almost monastic. He lived alone save for his cat Achilles. The circle of friends he played dominos and drank coffee with disappeared one by one and finally, inevitably, even
his
body began to give out. He kept writing best he could, often forgetting to eat or bathe to the point that the few interested observers wondered if intervention was warranted. It wasn’t and during this time Arce bled to produce
The
Ocean
,
Personae
, and lastly
Energeias:
or
Why
Today
the
Sun
May
Not
Rise
in
the
East,
Set
in
the
West
.

One of his last willful acts involved Achilles. Specifically, he came across the cat as it appeared to be torturing a mouse and prevented him from delivering the final blow. He then gave the cat away to a neighbor saying only “I’ve lost my stomach for it all.” The mouse ultimately perished due to its injuries but not before chewing an exposed line near the stove in Arce’s apartment creating a leak of CO or carbon monoxide that soon turned the cramped space into a kind of gas chamber. So what started as a headache that wouldn’t end was joined by nausea, fatigue, hallucinatory visions, and finally an extreme debilitating weakness that caused Antonio Arce to sit then lie on his kitchen floor where he died shortly thereafter. He is survived by no one. His influence, if any, is not yet known.

THE NEW YORK TIMES
OBITUARIES
WEDNESDAY, MARCH 16, 2011

Helen
Tame,
Otherworldly
and
Multivalent
Talent,
Dies
at
40

Helen Tame, who began publishing highly influential scholarly articles at age 16 and later shocked the music world with inexplicably mature and groundbreakingly virtuosic piano performances beginning at age 20 before voluntarily and suddenly disappearing from that scene entirely, only to then reappear on the public stage years later having reinvented herself as a preternaturally gifted homicide detective often called on to solve some of law enforcement’s most longstanding and seemingly impenetrable mysteries, died yesterday at age 40.

Helen Tame was born on October 16, 1970, in Christ the King Hospital in Jersey City, New Jersey to Anthony Tame and the former Laura King. At age 5 she is said to have announced to her parents that they could either purchase a legitimate piano or put her up for adoption by a family that already owned one. Once the purchase was made, Tame apparently practiced constantly as a child although she never performed, adhering to her belief that musical performance by the too young was pointless.

In 1986, Tame, then a Princeton undergraduate, published her universally acclaimed monograph on the proper use of contrapuntal melody. A series of similarly lauded articles then followed in rapid if ambivalent succession. (Tame once famously said that “the only thing worse than writing them is not.”)

In the fall of 1990, Dr. Tame (at 19 she had acquired a PhD in both Music and Philosophy) performed an astonishing series of concerts at Carnegie Hall. She quickly became the most sought after pianist in the world. Despite that, her performances in the ensuing years were sporadic and she never permitted any recording of them, nor did she ever take advantage of any of the many lucrative offers she received to enter a recording studio.

Then, in 1997, Tame announced that she would never again perform for a concert audience and for the remaining 13 years of her life she made no more public statements beyond the occasional publication of more articles.