Seiobo There Below (34 page)

And yet she had nothing at all, not even any meaning — this was a very sad thought; Chaivagne even tried continually to drive it out of his head, he didn’t want to think about it, he tried to convince himself, well, why was it not enough that every morning he could get up and immediately stand there again in her presence? — of course it was enough; at such times, he relaxed, and sleep really did chase these thoughts out of his head, and once again the next morning he appeared at his workplace with the same little smile on his face, and he took up his designated position in the room entrusted to him, tactfully withdrawing into one of the inner corners — from where he could keep an eye on the visitors, but could simultaneously also see the rising figure of Venus — another year went by like that, and again it was autumn, and it frequently rained in the city, although he took virtually no notice of this, because he did not move from his place, and the Venus de Milo did not move either, the reconstruction was still going on down there, and no one could even predict when the statue would turn up in its old spot, and neither he changed, nor did the Venus change — nor did that long crack in the Parian marble, which extended from the back of the statue along the back contour of the right thigh, and which of course was kept under strict observation by the restorers, but no, nothing happened — and well, really, nothing happened even with him, nothing, the days came and went, the crowds flooded in every morning, and flooded out every evening, he stood in the inner right-hand corner, observing the eyes and face of Venus high above, but never where the eyes and the face were looking, he observed the crowd as they trampled on each other, then once again he raised his gaze to the statue, and he just stared on and on from one autumn to another autumn, he diligently soaked his feet, he went in with the seven, the four, then the one, then he went home with the one, the four, and the seven, he meticulously parted his hair in the middle of his head in the morning with a damp comb, he stood and stood with his hands always clasped behind his back in the inner right-hand corner, he always smiled a little, so that he was always being approached, now by a group without a tour guide, now by a solitary visitor, and he always started by saying — and never saying anything else but — Praxiteles, always just Praxiteles.

377

PRIVATE PASSION

Music is the sorrow of one
who has lost his Heavenly home.

Ibn al-Faradh

The end has come and there is nothing, he said, and even if there is something, it is only the squalid fulfillment of that process, hidden at first, which has made chance, ever more blatant, and then finally insolent vulgarity — shaming even the most horrifying premonitions — completely victorious; because there was an age when something reached its own culmination, the height of its own boundless possibilities, for it is not the case — no, not at all — that each age is granted its own articulatory world, a world incomparable with the others, and that the art of every single epoch, for each given genre, carries the inner hypothesis of its own internal structure to perfection; no, decisively no; still, it is true, well; I, he added, am speaking of something else, that is to say that there lies before us, after the hazy bestial zero, a long continuum arising from all the noises and rhythms having to do with music, which then reaches — as it did indeed reach a perfection no longer perfectible — the roof of a seemingly infinite celestial vault, a particular border of Heaven close to the godly spheres, so that something — in this case music — comes into being, is born, unfolds, but then it’s all over, no more, what must come has come; the realm dies away, and yet lives on in this divine form, and for all eternity its echo remains, for we may evoke it, as we do evoke it to this very day and shall evoke it for as long as we can, even if as an ever more faint reflection of the original, a tired and ever more uncertain echo, a misunderstanding ever more despairing from year to year, from decade to decade, in a disintegrating memory that no longer has a world, no longer shatters people’s hearts; no longer elevates them to that place of such achingly sweet perfection, because this is what happened, he said, and he straightened his suspenders, such a music came into being that shattered people’s hearts, if I listen to it, I still feel, at some given point, after an unexpected beat, I feel, if not that my heart is being shattered, that at least it is falling apart, as I collapse from this sweet pain, because this music gives me everything in such a way that it also annihilates me, because how could anyone think that they could get away without paying the price for all of this, well, how could we even imagine that it is even possible to traverse that distance where this music exists and not be annihilated one hundred, one thousand times — if I listen to them, I am in a thousand tiny pieces, because you can’t just roam around in the company of the geniuses of inexplicable musical fulfillment and at the same time, say, be able to fill out a personal income tax form or prepare the technical blueprint for a building while this music is sinking to the depths of your heart, well, it doesn’t work, either this person filling out tax forms or completing technical blueprints is annihilated, or will never understand where he has arrived, if this music strikes him from above, it definitely comes from above, of that there is no doubt, and I — he pointed to himself, on the podium, with both hands — I am speaking solely and exclusively about music, not about anything else; the discussion here cannot be generalized, it is not possible to extend my train of thought to include all of the arts, and blabber about those kinds of absolute generalizations; what is being referred to, what one wants to say, must be stated precisely, and I too say it now, that I am merely reflecting on music, and that I consider my statements valid only with regard to that, so that I cannot begin by stating, ladies and gentlemen, this evening, within the framework of this widely promoted lecture that you shall hear, through an analysis of music’s essence, about the essence of so-called art itself, when my subject, the subject of this widely promoted lecture, is only music; that is while delivering this lecture, it’s as if I were standing here with a smoking bomb in my hands and I were telling you that it was going to explode in a minute; now, try to imagine that I began by saying, ladies and gentlemen, and so forth, with this bomb in my hands, you would all rush headlong out the door, would you not? — which would not be a bad idea, well, perhaps at one point I shall turn into a real bomb; anyway, for now just imagine a smoking bomb in my hands, as I try this evening to share my thoughts with you about that moment in time when the pinnacle of music, within the world history of music, came to be, so that you will hear such things from me tonight that you never heard from others, nor shall you ever, because I myself represent — truly, like an anarchist holding a bomb — my own thesis, and, as it happens, it is precisely because of this thesis that I am, even from our own degenerate society, excluded, exiled, expelled; so that I am an object of scorn, indeed, put more crudely, I am jeered at; it is possible that there are those among you who are thinking but, well, you are an architect who shall give a lecture about his private passion, about music, and how can an architect be excluded from society when he is at the exact center of society, in that case, perhaps, someone among you is thinking, that he, an architect, is as deep as anyone can possibly be in the whole thing, only that in my case that person is mistaken; I am an architect who has never seen a single plan constructed, I don’t know how many buildings I have planned already in my life, I am now sixty-four, so you can imagine how much I have planned and planned and planned, how many maquettes and drawings and who knows what else rose up beneath my hands, it’s just that not one of them was ever built, this is the situation, you see here today a lecturer who is also an architect, but who has not built a single thing, who is himself a total architect-fiasco, who moreover does not even deal with architecture in his free time, and is not even peddling architecture here from village to village, thanks to the Kíler district library’s program, “Village Cultural Days,” and who will not even speak of architecture, but of something perhaps unexpected from an architect: of music, of one of its highly particular embodiments, because that of which I am going to speak is truly unique, a sacred fact, because I shall, with this finger — and he raised his index finger — draw your attention to a certain age of musical history, an extraordinary, a peerless, an unrepeatable moment of what we call music, or, put more simply, you will hear about the essence of music of the very highest order, a music whose time had come, so that from the very beginning of the seventeenth century until the middle of the eighteenth century it came, let this suffice for a starting point, in place of a more precise designation, as you cannot really expect dates from me, generally I do not believe in dates, things flow into each other and grow out from each other, the whole thing proceeds somehow like tentacles, so that there are no definite eras or other such asininities, the world is much too complicated for that, because just think about it, where does an accident begin and where does it end, so there you are, there is no point in looking for dates or demarcations of eras, let us leave that whole thing to the experts, to those who are either feeble-minded or pig-headed know-it-alls — those who, thanks to their position, instead of simply saying what happened, what largely came to pass between these two time-designations — could trumpet throughout the world how music, the story of music truly has a pinnacle from which it doesn’t go on, or rather it does, but this is only and exclusively the so-called
sad descent
, because afterward, nothing else occurs but the slow degradation of the form, so it is perhaps more correct to express it by saying that the whole thing isn’t even sad, but pitiful, a mockery, a long, drawn-out vulgar ceremony, but no, those who take part in this perpetually clamoring, false, base propaganda, hammering into us that music is, like art in general, a science, and altogether, that culture and civilization only advance in such a way that the whole thing, starting from some confusingly designated cause, goes onward and moreover surpasses itself again and again, that is it develops, and according to
their
conceptions, attains ever higher and higher levels; look upon them as people who, in a word, are there to mislead you with their prestige, and who not only keep silent, but try explicitly to ter-min-ate, to an-nih-il-late the fact that the history of music has its pinnacle, after which the entire history of music, summa summarum, begins to decline, in the end it simply rushes into vulgarities masked as a crisis, and drowns in a kind of sordid sticky flood, but enough about that, let us speak instead of how I ended up in all of this; perhaps it might be interesting if we were to pause for a moment at a little anecdote, for surely I, too, am aware — even though I’m not a professional lecturer, apart from these appearances organized by the district library through which, strictly between ourselves, I merely try to supplement my meager income — I am well aware that from time to time a little relief is called for, a small personal touch, as they say: a well-placed comic sentence, a little material drawn from experience, and in this case, I will offer just a brief account of an afternoon in the office where I go now and then as an early-retired pensioner, that is to say about that afternoon when, with maybe thirty similar architects, I was plying the trade completely senselessly, bent over a meaningless architectural blueprint for who knows how many times now, and the colleague sitting next to me, fiddling with the little pocket radio set out on the desk finally settled on one particular station, and left the dial there, and this, this random movement with which the finger of my co-worker stopped the dial right at that point, was fateful, I am not exaggerating, it had a fateful effect upon me, because there began to resound forth, of course in terrible quality and not for the first time in my life, but audible to me for the first time in my life, a
faultless, eloquent
melody, produced on the strings, together with a second faultless, eloquent melody, and then with another, and this, this melody-architecture having become wondrously complex, created with the leading part high above, such a heart-wrenching harmony, causing within me such joy, in that large, soulless, bleak architect-hangar, under the fluorescent lights, that I was simply breathless; well, I will stop here, although I recall with exactitude every single moment of that afternoon, and of course as well, what music was wavering, crackling, whining right next to me: an Oratorio of Caldara, one of the arias for Santa Francesca Romana, it was the Si Piangete Pupille Dolente, and so I have now incidentally betrayed that I entered the Baroque through a small side-gate, if I may express it in this way; he said and then again adjusted his suspenders with his right hand, and managing it only with difficulty, because his trousers, in spite of the suspenders, continually wanted to slip down beneath his gut, rolled into thick protuberances, in the meantime with his other hand he reached for the glass of water set on the table behind him, where otherwise he had also thrown his coat when he arrived, during which the eight people — six old women and two old men, who comprised, here in the village library, the courageous audience of this completely incomprehensible lecture, entitled “A Century and a Half of Heaven,” were given yet another opportunity to scrutinize the older gentleman who had arrived from the capital city, and to determine that naturally he had many peculiar features: the short, fat, yielding build, the few strands of hair brushed to the right side of his balding pate, the soft flabby double chin tipping over onto his chest, or his voice, which sounded as if someone were trying to scrape out stew-scraps from a saucepan with a wire brush, and the old-fashioned eyeglasses with black plastic frames that might have turned up on him only by mistake, because they were so large as to conceal that entire upper section of his face like scuba goggles, but it was really his gut that captured the attention of the locals, because this gut with its three colossal folds unequivocally sent a message to everyone that this was a person with many problems, it was no wonder that he was continually adjusting the elastic straps on his trousers, like someone who didn’t even trust in them himself, or like someone whose confidence in the straps built up gradually and cautiously, but had been lost time and time again, one nearly felt that one wanted to help him, because everyone sensed how these trousers were continuously, ceaselessly sliding downward across those three thick folds of fat, down toward the thighs, it is doubtful that any kind of trousers can be of any use at all with a gut like that, and that this gut could be of any use whatsoever to any kind of trousers, so that in a word the listening public, comprised of eight persons, was without exception preoccupied with these trousers, these suspenders, and this gut, for they understood not one solitary word of what the gut’s owner was talking about, and, moreover, the person in question spoke without pause, never lowering his voice once and never raising it, never subduing it and never strengthening it, and there was no pause and stop and rest and forbearance, he just spoke and spoke and spoke, he put the glass of water back on the podium borrowed from the school next door, and he said: well now, let’s get to the point, and let us take one of the masterpieces of Johann Sebastian Bach, the Quia Respexit Humilitatem from the Magnificat, in which the greatest musical genius of all times, in an aria for alto, created a kind of compound from pain and humility, from sorrow and supplication, clearly due to heavenly exhortation, which in and of itself could serve as enough of an example here, it would be enough just to speak of these small individual compositions for us to arrive at an instantaneous understanding of the essence of the Baroque, of that entire era, for that is our subject today, the Baroque, and this is what I have spoken of so far as well, and this is what I shall continue to speak of, for I maintain, and I can prove, that it was through the Baroque that music reached that divine sublimity I mentioned earlier, from where there was no going any further; and yet as it was only possible to sustain for a brief time — that is, it was not possible to sustain it — for that star within us that could have sustained it has inevitably died out, that star is extinct, its geniuses vanished into death, those who came after transcended them, transcended the so-called Baroque musical world, because this is the phrase the experts use, they “transcended” them, which is already itself a scandalous expression, and perfectly betrays just who we are dealing with here, what kind of characters employ such turns of phrase, because what does that mean, transcend them — transcend Monteverdi perhaps?! transcend Purcell?! transcend Bach?! — still, to transcend them, we should have transcended them by not listening to them — but that accursed 18th century, those accursed last decades, poisoned everything and destroyed everything, and made everyone unsure if they should listen to the words of the soul — or the mind, as they put it, the mind — the lecturer now shouted, and there was no one in the room who did not sense that a great wrath was trembling in his voice, even if, still, they had not the foggiest notion as to the meaning behind this wrath — and the mind, he shouted again, and to transcend — he raised his voice more and more, so much so that the more timid members of the audience began to steal cautious glances toward the exit, for, all of this — to speak in this vein — is not just baseness but iniquity, for they, the experts, knew full well whom they could honor in this Monteverdi, this Purcell, and this Bach, they knew exactly, and yet they still spoke of how time had passed them by, they announced this in unison, as if time could pass beyond something for which the medium is eternity — Sublime God in Heaven — the lecturer raised both of his hands toward the ceiling, freshly whitewashed not too long ago, he raised his hands and vehemently began to shake them, so then, after Monteverdi, after Purcell, after Bach, there comes someone who would be a greater genius in music? — or what?! — so who came after them?! — I ask you, the lecturer asked, now with lowered hands, and the public really began to feel uncomfortable, because it seemed, since he was looking at them, that they were the ones causing this problem, they were the ones he was angry at, saying: perhaps you’re thinking of Mozart?! about this child prodigy?! who was capable of everything as well as its opposite, are you thinking of this genius of