Agape Agape (6 page)

Greece make a fresh start because this place was a fiction when I bought it, put in that breakfront over there window frames rotting replaced them with casements sell the whole thing because this Other I bought it for was a fiction kangaroo and all the rest of it I can't, can't tell if I'm shivering or just have the shakes try to get upright here my leg to, to avoid stress yes don't, don't don't try to stand up if I fell I'd never get up again pack it all up and get back to Corinth running through the streets, sitting at that cafe table reading was that, that was youth yes was that, was youth a fiction? No sweet sauces, no fancy Sicilian cooking no Athenian sweets no, girlfriend, allowed to have a Corinthian girlfriend? Certainly not! Pleasure deprives man of the use of his faculties, any greater pleasure than sensual love? No, nor a madder, true love is beauty and order so no intemperance or madness allowed near our true loving couple all of it fictions falsehoods lies, people weeping, dying, marrying, and I should sit down and write books telling “how she loved him”? says Tolstoy, it's shameful! The ultimate fiction the maddest of them all yes the most tyrannous because they believe it kill for it, die for it, only you! Has to be the most absurd, the most overwhelming fiction because of the enormity of what it has to conceal till it's too late yes, these illusions this fiction of love true love mad love strip it all away and lay things bare get the, get that towel I'm sweating I'm, even Wagner preaching love but he punishes all of them, Siegmund and Sieglinde, Siegfried and Brünnhilde burns them up for giving in, from all the foreplay Huizinga calls it just play, just imitation, over to the real thing, the true lie good God, ever see Montecavallo up there filling the stage? Good breeding stock but she's a victim of the true lie, the one who's deceived in the soul and she's punished for it, they all are, follows Hegel here they say where suffering's necessary for self realization shades of the Pythagorean catechism two or three thousand years ago here to be punished if I can, hold on to something sit up straight and get the other leg over why they, why I was put in this empty room no light, no air can't, sweating as if I'm, if I'm frightened? Feeling everything's beginning to slide try to concentrate yes, mind's as clear as it get myself oriented let it get myself oriented, Tolstoy says Pascal had a nail-studded belt he'd lean against when some word of praise pleased him good God! His powers are weakening he says, his profession is dreadful, “writing corrupts the soul” yes, we are thousands and they are millions that's exactly why the shape of his work isn't up to him, says Plato. That's the business of the state. These poets and other artists must not show indecency and intemperance so the first thing to be done is to censor writers of fiction or they'll corrupt the citizens growing up among images of moral deformity, because youth can't tell the difference between allegory and what's literal even in the great story-tellers so it's that or be banished, show only the image of the good or be banished because, it's no, do you believe it? Because no, got to stop it's all coming to pieces like the, like the belly-talker talking to the belly-talker because there's no difference now between allegory and what's literal, let lyric verse in there and pleasure and pain rule the state, the soul can't be filled with variety and difference and dissimilarity and we're back in this swamp of paradox perversity, ambiguity, aporia back where we started, listen. Listen. This is the heart of it, the heart of the whole thing, banishing poetry and banishing the poet, the greatest of them all because he is the greatest, banishing Homer for telling lies, for telling bad lies because of the power of Homer's art to charm, to seduce you with the honeyed muse of epic verse and lyric verse, to nourish emotions and passions in men instead of restraint, of law and reason what we've been arguing from the start isn't it? These lies and fictions of the, getting a little confused get my legs straight steady myself against the, careful? Good God, this heap goes I'd go with it never get up again just, slowly yes that's the danger, this honeyed muse painting inferior views of truth even her sister arts of imitation stacking the deck he'll let her back in, let our sweet friend back in if she'll prove her right to exist in his orderly state, be pleasant and useful to humanity it's all, getting things backward I'm, get my arm behind the careful! Backed myself into a corner here stripping the naked animal clean among, among images of moral deformity? What was that about musical training about the piano, the phantom hands not what I remember no, use my memory to get myself oriented here but I can't remember, can't remember can't even remember what I was trying to remember back to training your memory, back to Pythagoras' school of recollection train your memory to remember the sins and suffering of the, of the muses the daughters of memory of accurate memory of an actual vision from somewhere deep in the oh, oh, oh no yes don't move no, carefully whole thing's, whole thing's slipping don't, very, very slowly don't, no. No! no no no help! Oh my, my God oh my God! Just, hold on just hold on to something or I'll go with it just, no! Help! The whole heap it's, good God all over the floor try to, try not to move get my breath sweating and shaking my face is wet it's wet I'm, look at it. All over the floor the whole, look! Look there's Dodds knew I'd brought it, knew I had it if I can let my, if I can stand up and no! Good God no, whole trash heap all over the floor go down and I'd be part of the trash heap. I can't, wait where's my pencil! I can't, sweat stinging my eyes whole thing's a blur out there hardly see across the room maybe I, spilled some papers on the bed here got to find it, got to find my pencil don't write it down I'll lose it maybe already lost it might be under the, find that towel yes clean myself up before I no, good God look at it! How could, all going backward braced myself against that heap like a pillar of salt whole thing yes, the unswerving punctuality of chance, clock without the clockmaker perfectly simple in word and deed says Plato, God wouldn't lie or change because he's perfect so it's God God God, virtue and beauty and no mad or senseless person can be God's friend no, make yourselves eunuchs for the kingdom of heaven's sake says Tolstoy, nothing senseless about that is there? Strive for absolute chastity for the good of the neighborhood whole purpose of life to be part of God's kingdom only way to get there's absolute chastity, husband and wife live like brother and sister nothing mad about that is there? Dress up like a muzhik float around the house look like Noah's Ark whole performance out of the greatest fiction ever created, take God out of the equation you've got nothing left not even love no, had that somewhere if I had that letter Wagner wrote to Röckel where love's lost sight of because everything we do, think, take and give is in fear of the end, the greatest most desperate fiction of the afterlife ever created yes, the denial of death, what this whole mad escapade's all about, isn't it Levochka? Good God how you fight it! Your man Pozdnyshev in The Kreutzer Sonata wallowing in the slime of debauchery he tells us, keeps stripping away the fictions right down to what it's really all about and then he can't face it, not just love no, only you, the choice of one man or woman over all others says the lady on the train won't have it will you, Pozdnyshev. Supposed to be something noble and ideal but it's just something sordid that brings us down to the level of pigs. Natural? a natural human activity? No no no, eating's natural, something you enjoy but this is unnatural and loathsome, honeymoon's shameful and tedious, nothing sacred for us about marriage nothing to it but copulation, couple of months you've learned to hate the sight of each other ready to poison her or shoot yourself good God man, when you felt the blade go into her didn't what it's really all about stare you in the face? Some nonsense there about mankind following some ideal that's the fiction isn't it? What Plato's poets and honeyed muse are all about, you strip it clean stop short and run because you really know don't you, not like pigs and rabbits reproducing themselves as fast as they can but you hold it at arm's length, even say animals seem to know their offspring mean survival of the species while you wonder if life has a purpose and that's it isn't it! That you're being used, used, used, that you're being used by nature simply to perpetuate the family line, the social tribe, the white race, the species just like your pigs and rabbits and that's what you resent, what you hate, what you go through hell for and she knew it too didn't she? Knew what her body was for, like animals know yes and she knew you thought you owned her body, why you're terrified by a woman bearing down on you in a ballgown because you know those bare arms and shoulders, you know those breasts aren't just play-things she's offering to you posing as an instrument of pleasure but bigger the better there's gallons, there's the promise of gallons of survival of the species like a yes, like a huge brood mare. Pleasure yes, yes it's beautifully done jealousy and the whole un, unreasonable the whole madness when the what was his name, the violinist Trukhachev God knows what shows up nice looking with a yes, yes I remember this with a well developed posterior? Like a woman yes like Hottentots they tell you with a talent they tell you for music and we're off for music yes, for music the cause of it all? Him and your wife bound together by music, “the most refined form of sensual lust” you call it? The cause of most of the adulteries in your class of society? A fearful thing but what is it? That description you put in somewhere Pozdnyshev, it's lovely, that music carries you off into another state of being that's not your own, of feeling things you don't really feel, of understanding things you don't really understand, of being able to do things you aren't really able to do it's everything we've been talking about from the start, discover your unsuspected talent, you can play better by roll than many who play by hand, the biggest thrill in music is playing it yourself even untrained persons can do it, it's your participation that rouses your emotions most, these phantom hands, this detachable self, Homer's dangerous demon with its own life and energy you can't control force you to do things you wouldn't otherwise, everything Plato wants to banish, scrape away every fiction get down to the truth, to the naked animal banish them yes, banish the Lydian mode and the Ionian and the flute above all the flute worse than all the strings together invented for nothing but pleasure and Homer, banish Homer and all of the poets and painters and sculptors whose love poems and naked Venuses celebrate women as instruments of pleasure take that first movement of The Kreutzer Sonata, the presto you say, can we allow it to be played in a drawing room full of women in lowcut dresses? Good God Pozdnyshev and we're back where we started, where pleasure in all circumstances is bad, we're here to be punished and we ought to be punished so you've killed your wife and her Hottentot suitor with musical tastes escapes under the piano, is all this simply an outburst of the passions and emotions Plato wants to save us from censoring practically banishing the arts or is it, is it a stew of disease and impairment, madness and suicide that produces the artist, Keats consumptive and Beethoven deaf, Dostoevsky epileptic, Byron's foot and Homer's blindness if he existed at all, Baudelaire and Schiller and enough madness and suicide to please God himself, Schumann and Kleist suicides, Hölderlin insane and the most agonizing of them all of course yes, sitting there empty eyed in a white gown on exhibit for his loathsome sister's teatime guests, wasn't that she'd betrayed the man, the artist, sold him out no that's to be expected, he's expendable, just the vehicle or the husk of it for the work that's what she betrayed, that's our immortality and that's what she corrupted, worse than murder Pozdnyshev, worse than murder you can ask your master Pozdnyshev and take comfort, yes, of all people, Tolstoy of all artists of all suicides manqués Levochka would agree. She's just been widowed by a blazing anti-Semite suicide herself and here's dear brother fresh out of the madhouse and long out of the spell of his most famous friend he believed to be Germany's greatest creative genius, good God Pozdnyshev! If you were playing the “Pilgrims' Chorus,” how much would it mean to you to have the composer Richard Wagner himself by your side? Great Wagner comes and, lifting them aloft above the clouds, transports them to the mighty halls of old Walhalla in Ride of Walkyries taking this poisonous anti-Semitic little woman with him. No more wooden fingers no but phantom hands, she seizes the rights to all her stupefied brother's work published and unpublished, unfinished ideas, notes and letters, even letters to his mother she alters and forges addressed to herself and comes out with a completely corrupted pasted together jumble called The Will to Power as his final work, the blond beast and ruthlessly distorted superman orchestrating the blackest period in German history, you see? His immortality that's what she corrupted, his glorious vision in his early book The Birth of Tragedy where Apollo's classic Greek power to create measured and harmonious beauty is endlessly assailed by the drunken frenzy of Dionysus threatening to smash everything the sheer, the sheer tension the energy the tinge of madness, the supernatural powers that emerge, from disease that Plato mentions and the primitive idea that crazy people speak in divine languages and above all yes above all the catharsis of abandoned music and dance we've talked about that haven't we, should have looked into that yourself Pozdnyshev, should have tried
it. Should have learned the tango Pozdnyshev, the most elegant, merciless, disciplined abandon never would have killed her, learned the tango you never would have killed her and if I had I wouldn't be here now, listen. Listen where's my clothes, can you help me? Ought to go out and get some fresh air, get out of this dim suffocating airless lightless little no no wait not yet no, these demons of Homer's and Golyadkin's doppelgänger who's gone with his bed in the morning when Petrushka brings in tea and explains that his master's not at home shouting You idiot Petrushka! I'm your master!! Can't get away, each one of them haunting the Other, hounding the Other, following him everywhere with his piercing terrifying glare and a few vicious remarks enough to drive a man mad, moves in with him moves out to some dirty little hotel room like this one but follows him home like a dog finally simply has to end it, simply has to get rid of the Other, he wasn't mine was he? He was my fiction wasn't he? Not easy no but it's got to be done, my creation wasn't it? Like Levochka thinking your thoughts so you can have them? Lie back here and see things falling into place like reading the Tarot, no reason that betrayal can't be positive is there? Beautiful little innocent climbs into my lap fell on my neck with kisses while we put together this fiction of appearing as the nonperson my joy! My honeyed muse, my sometime daughter, scraping it away now for the real nonperson here because there's finally no getting around it is there. Because what I've been dreading, what I've feared, what got me here in the first place no surgery no but this, this hormonal chemical God knows what treatment has put me out of business, out of being a threat yes maybe I never was. Maybe I never was! That was the great betrayal wasn't it, where it all started, and everywhere the ceremony of innocence was drowned. Listen. Can you, can you pull a shade over there? The sun's getting in my eyes, sitting still here in a room God knows these shadows of the real state we're all living in, dim shapes, those weightless shadows the chorus held up to Ajax in his slaughterhouse survive now simply as gossip like everything else in the end where they'll say I never really planned the whole property transfer to them out of love but just as a scheme to avoid taxes? Where they'll say I'm the one who betrayed my daughters because I'd really surrendered nothing, the baby king who tyrannizes through the sheer blackmail of his existence, that I betrayed them and you and everyone yes, the artist as confidence man that I betrayed even myself from the fear of trying to carry the unforgiving burden of the real artist, to try to hide the failure of everything I'd promised there left stranded, like some maiden aunt's Torschlusspanik at being left unmarried on the shelf, art and entertainment and technology, of authenticity and the true story of its philosopher corrupted by his sister as gossip of the most sinister sort, of love as the ultimate fiction and music the most refined form of Levochka's sensual lust building up like the pressure of steam that would burst the boiler if the safety valve of sex didn't release it he tells us in that frenzied metaphor of mechanization reaching everywhere, of art without the artist as a threat and the end of him at the twist of a knife but it wasn't that crude, no. No it doesn't really matter because that's what gossip does, isn't that what gossip is? Dawn breaking on the handsome face of mortal youth, verweile doch! du bist so schön the goddess asking immortality for him like her immortal own but the legs have crumbled, pursued by age as punishment for pleasure and all of it fading into that bed of shades, those imitations and shadowy images of gossip where there is no present moment but only the next one being devoured in the immense maw of the past, where immortality finds its home at last, where the voice has dwindled to the dry scratch of a grasshopper and the legs are gone, they're just not there and it all comes down in a heap good God look at them! Blood dried on the sheets and those damn rusting staples don't know whether I'm shivering or shaking from the, try to find one dry corner down there. Try to sit up and get one leg down where it's, something down there, just get my arm so I can reach the, whole sodden mess look at that. Mel-O-DEE Music Rolls, Mel-O-Art, QRS Campaign Against Filth in Popular Songs they sold a million rolls in 1926. Sell more Player Rolls! Sell more Player Pianos! Sell More Ukuleles and Banjos! More! More! More! God it was so it was all so America! It was the crowd, not the dry scratch of the grasshopper but the herd, it was “the little people making merry like grasshoppers in spots of sunlight, hardly thinking” just perpetuating the species weren't they? “Foolishly reduplicating folly in thirty-year periods; they eat and they laugh too.” Groan against elitism, against Flaubert in retreat, “I believe that the crowd, the mass, the herd, will always be detestable” he writes to George Sand, remember? When he's written his niece preparing his Paris flat before his death, “I ask to be liberated from my enemy, the piano, and from another enemy, which hits me on the forehead—the stupid hanging lamp in the dining room” and weeks later, de Maupassant to Turgenev, “Flaubert apoplexy, no hope” where nothing survives of importance “save a small group of minds, ever the same, which pass on the torch.” No more piano! I said. Absolutely no artist! By now electricity is spreading its blessings everywhere, from refinements on the reproducing piano with the, where, in Germany? No that was my invention wasn't it? Wrote it down yes and somebody stole it? The reproducing piano is made possible by an electric motor attached to the pump providing constant and predetermined air pressure, while back at home here the electric player with a magnet for each key appears, the nickel in the slot making the electrical contact pounding out its mechanical note; missing some in bad weather, but still in the vanguard other public entertainment a murderer named Kemmler provides material for the first electrocution at Auburn Prison. Progress! Great God wherever you'd look says Reverend Newell Dwight Hillis, “For the first time government, invention, art, industry, and religion have served all the people rather than the patrician classes.” Wait a minute no, no not so fast Reverend, elitists staging a rearguard action here, Steinway brings Paderewski over here and Knabe opens Carnegie Hall with Tchaikovsky live, piano makers and European patrons supporting music and the arts as diversions for Plato's patricians and disdaining American artists as rubes who disdain them as foreign laborers. Whole thing coming to pieces here, just to get it over with but, with what? Over with what? Prepositions make all the trouble but you can't really explain anything to anybody why I've got to explain all this because we don't know how much time's left to finish this work of mine before it's distorted and turned into a cartoon because it is a cartoon for that herd out there, the crowd, the mass waiting to be entertained, turn the creative artist into a performer because they are the hallucination, you see? The whole thing's turned upside down, the kittens are bit and the houses are built without walls, you see? Used to be the reality was the stone Doctor Johnson kicked and Doctor Johnson himself, and hallucinations took place in the head, in the mind, now everything out there is the hallucination and the mind where the work is done is the only reality, because the work is the only refuge from this torn wet-smelling hallucination of the body looks like a, like some map all fingered and latticed see right through it where the Great Lakes with that biggest one hanging down like some immense weak malformed invertebrate fit only to be whipped, so if reality is the work when it goes wrong all that's waiting out there is the sweat, the blood and, problem where's the blood coming from, not bleeding anywhere but I keep finding fresh blood on the, not even on the collar no under the collar like a vampire? Nothing mystical about all this it's not some half-baked Buddhist nirvana where all is illusion good God no, because the rage is there at the heart of it, the sheer energy, the sheer tension the tinge of madness where the work gets done, the only reality, the only refuge from the vast hallucination that's everything out there, and that you're all part of out there where everything equals everything else. Ten, a hundred, a thousand years ago it's all one, where immortality becomes gossip, 1890 van Gogh shoots himself in a wheat field, Rimbaud's gone the next year, and so is Melville and to even things out Whitman a year later Rudolf Diesel invents the internal combustion engine, Eastman Kodak is founded in his mother's kitchen tainted by gossip over just where he got the idea for flexible film and Thomas Edison celebrates entertainment and art and the ascendancy of the crowd, the herd, with the patent on the kinetoscope, you see? Carnegie the working man's friend locks him out and goes fishing in Scotland to avoid the death and carnage at Homestead so it's Frick who gets stabbed, pushpin or Pushkin long since killed in a duel and it's all one, everything out there it's all this grand hallucination where Count Tolstoy is stalking Turgenev, following him everywhere with his piercing frightening glare enough to drive a man mad with vicious remarks Turgenev tells a friend and he's weeping again, remember? Being haunted by this Other we've been talking about, The Kreutzer Sonata's been banned here why? because Beethoven's German? But it's not the World War when Wagner's music was banned here no, no this goes back to the day Wagner's art was damned as “nothing more than the dope required by a decadent generation” by his disciple, his apostle, by the one who believed him to be Germany's greatest creative genius, by the, good God can't you see? Wagner was the Other, he was the where is that, Michelangelo and the Self who could do more because that's what it's all about so he had to be killed, Nietzsche had to kill him and be carried away to an asylum a year later, while great Wagner lifts us aloft above the clouds to the mighty halls of old Walhalla where these great artists will never play again, but their phantom hands will live forever, haunt us forever. Forever! Good God that's, question's whether all this clatter and bang, old Walhalla and Chin Chin Temple Bells preserved on piano rolls are part of the hallucination or only escape from it, see what was going on everywhere out there in this frenzy of invention more than a century ago? In Germany the Ariston player with thirty-six notes then the Hupfeld with sixty-one still no pneumatics till the Welte family patents its pneumatic Orchestrion operated with a perforated paper roll, in France Carpentier shows his Melograph and Melotrope to the French Academy, mechanical fingers brought to life by electromagnets and a perforated strip. But before that France had claimed credit for the whole thing with Fourneaux's pneumatic Pianista, its fingers worked through a piece of pierced cardboard, and here? Peel off these damn notes sticking together worse than I am just the smell and all the rest of it, half the time inventing half the time litigating, Kelly invents a wind motor with slide valves opening and closing ports with electrical help, Merritt Gally's inventions fighting on both fronts, R W Pain and Henry Kuster build Needham & Sons their first pneumatic piano player that's half as big as the piano it attacks, somebody else is making a folding piano that's portable and there's the Piano écran that can be used as a screen or set up as a card table I mean all that's got to be part of the hallucination doesn't it? Look. There's more to it, all that beating the bushes out there there's more to it there's a, a hunger that hasn't taken shape haunting the whole thing. It's not just mother tapping the parlour piano note by note with her illustrated song The Little Lost Child or one of a hundred more about lost children, orphaned children, sick children, all in plentiful supply no, there's more to it. More what! Are you crazy? You think some phantom hand some, some significant Other will burst out of the bushes and redeem any shred of value hidden in your grand hallucination? Provide some refuge from it where your reality prevails? Where the work gets done? Yes and why not! Because right now it finds its despairing voice in a novel that sweeps the nation, when Peter Ibbetson would “buy or beg or borrow the music that had filled me with such emotion and delight, and take it home to my little square piano, and try to finger it out for myself. But I had begun too late in life. To sit, longing and helpless, before an instrument one cannot play, with a lovely score one cannot read!” Yes and then at that moment what, deliverance? A patent issued for the Angelus Piano Player that can be played by hand or automatically with its mechanism working at the rear end of the keys not interfering with anything. You see? Why that novel of du Maurier's was a rage in America where the biggest thrill in music would be in playing it yourself, what we talked about back at the start of all this? Where it's your own participation that rouses your emotions most? Where you can play better by roll than many who play by hand, where you can play all pieces while they can play but a few? And isn't that your significant Other who cut the roll in the first place? Your self who can do more yes, these phantom hands that transform you into this Other, not talking about those detachable selves that can be withdrawn from the body we talked about, no. Not like the belly-talkers or doppelgängers, Golyadkin pursuing his doppelgänger or Golyadkin's doppelgänger pursuing Golyadkin no, more like one of those dangerous demons of Homer's with lives and energies of their own that aren't really part of you since you can't control them. And now even untrained persons can do it! Back with Plato's chance persons pouring out Für Elise without a flaw till the last perforation in the roll passes over the corresponding hole in the tracker bar and democracy comes lumbering into the room with the piano player hunched over