The Musical Brain: And Other Stories (29 page)

These increasingly minor and intimate additions occupy the final days of his life.
When the new priest arrives, he admires the house and is horrified by the terrible
poverty surrounding it, as if he were performing a ritual. Just as his predecessors
anticipated, the contrast intensifies his determination to act, and he is about to
start handing out milk and diapers for the babies, medicine for the sick, blankets
and fuel for the rudimentary huts that offer scant protection from the winds of a
harsh winter. If he delays, it is not for want of initiative, but because there is
so much to do. There is so much poverty, he doesn’t know where to start: the urgent
needs compete among one another fiercely. And this delay, though meant to be brief,
is long enough for his intention to deviate. Prompted by a natural curiosity, he
visits the house, the gardens, the tea pavilion, the deer park; he only has to live
there for a day, or an hour, perhaps just a minute, to catch the echoes of a former
future of which he is the incarnation, and he begins to understand what motivated
the builders. The sacrifices they have made for him are sublime, and it seems mean
to take advantage of them . . . He will be followed by another, and he is inspired
by the idea of working for that other because, as he gradually sees and understands
everything that has been prepared for him, he notices all the things that could be
perfected and added for the next priest . . .

There is no need to pursue the series: it would take us too far, all the way to an
eternity that has been lying in wait from the outset. Let’s just say that the
successor to this third priest, and the one who takes over from the fourth, and all
those who follow, decipher the message and accept the challenge. The house continues
to be completed and beautified, in splendid isolation, an oasis of perfection in a
desert-like world devastated by egotism and indifference. In its permanence, the
house becomes a symbol of the virtuous soul, the divine soul, and its comforts are
progressively refined by the unbroken chain of just men, the golden thread that runs
through History, in the name of the redemption that Charity will bring.

AUGUST 1, 2010

Cecil Taylor

DAWN IN MANHATTAN.
In the first, tentative light, a black
prostitute is walking back to her room after a night’s work. Hair in a mess, bags
under her eyes; the cold transfigures her drunkenness into a stunned lucidity, a
crumpled isolation from the world. She didn’t venture beyond her usual neighborhood,
so she only has to walk a few blocks. Her pace is slow; she could be going backward;
at the slightest deviation, time could dissolve into space. What she really wants is
sleep, but she’s not even conscious of that anymore. The streets are almost
deserted; the few people who usually go out at this time (or have no indoors to go
out of) know her by sight, so they don’t examine her violet high-heeled shoes, her
tight skirt with its long split, or her eyes, which wouldn’t return their glassy or
tender gazes anyway. It’s a narrow street, with a number for a name, and the
buildings are old. Then there’s a stretch where they’re more modern, but in worse
repair: stores, fire escapes dangling from sheer façades. Farther on, past the
corner, is the place where she sleeps till late, in a rented room that she shares
with two children, her brothers. But first, something happens: five or six guys
who’ve been up all night have formed a semicircle on the sidewalk, in front of a
store window. The woman wonders what they could be looking at that has turned them
into figures from a snapshot. The group is absolutely still; not even the smoke of a
cigarette is rising. She walks in their direction, watching them, and, as if they
were a fixture to which she could attach the thread that is holding her up, her step
becomes somewhat lighter. It takes her a few moments to understand what is going on.
The men are in front of an abandoned store. Behind the dirty window, in the dimness,
are dusty boxes and debris. But there is also a cat, and facing it, with its back to
the window, a rat. Both animals are staring at each other without moving; the hunt
has come to an end, and the quarry has nowhere to run. Sublimely unhurried, the cat
tenses its every nerve. The spectators are not simply statues now but beings of
stone: planets, the elemental cold of the universe . . . The prostitute taps the
window with her purse, the cat is distracted for a fraction of a second, and that is
enough for the rat to escape. The men emerge from their reverie, look at the black
accomplice with disgust; a drunk spits on her, two others follow her as she walks
away . . . before the darkness has vanished altogether, an act of violence will take
place.

One story is followed by another. Vertigo. Retrospective vertigo. There’s an excess
of continuity. Narrative traction cannot be suspended, even by inserting endings.
Vertigo creates anxiety. Anxiety paralyzes . . . and saves us from the danger that
would justify vertigo: approaching the edge, for example the edge of the chasm that
separates an ending from a continuation. Immobility is art in the artist, while all
the events treated in the artwork take place on the other side of the glass. Night
comes to an end, so does day: there’s something awkward about the work in progress.
The opposite twilights drop like tokens into slots of ice. The eyes of statues
closing when they open and opening when they close. Peace in war. And yet there’s a
movement that’s out of control, and all too real; it makes others anxious and
provides the model for our own anxieties. Art figures it as Endless Revolving
Growth, and it gives rise to libraries, theaters, museums, and whole universes of
fantasy. It may stop, but if it does, an enormous number of remnants are left. After
a while, the remnants begin to revolve and breed. Multiplication multiplies itself .
. . But, as we know, there is only “the one life.” From which it follows that an
artist’s biography is hard to distinguish from the trials of its writing: it’s not
simply a matter of representing representation (anyone could do that) but of
creating unbearable situations in thought. That’s why biographies are usually so
long: nothing is ever enough to appease the mobile impulses of immobility. The
stories try desperately to coalesce, they wrap themselves in pearly teleological
scruples, the wind ignites them, they fall into the void . . . But maybe no one
cares.

And why should anyone care? Biographies are the lives of others. Children read the
illustrated biographies of famous musicians, who are always child prodigies,
possessed by a mysterious genius. They understand the music of the birds and fall
asleep to the murmur of streams. The obstacles that stand in the way of their
careers are not placed there by reality but by the story’s didactic design. These
lives are strikingly similar to those of the saints: persecution and martyrdom are
the instruments of triumph. Because all the saints have succeeded. And not only the
saints and the child prodigies: all the subjects of biographies have succeeded; they
have won the competition. Of the numberless people who have lived, History saves
only the winners, even when it is inspired by a humanitarian moralism. Because of
their essential banality and their immutable conventions, these life stories don’t
remain in the memory for long (they end up blurring into one another), but that
doesn’t prevent them from distorting it, inserting definitive, iridescent slides
that go from point A to point B, and then from B to C, and when the lights go out,
the points are illuminated; they are the beautiful souls who have risen to heaven to
make up constellations and horoscopes. How could we regard those books with anything
but suspicion, especially since they were and are the fundamental nourishment of our
past and future puerilities? “Before” there is the future success; “after,” its
delicious rewards, all the more delicious for having been the object of remarkably
punctual prophecies.

Let us examine a particular case, to refine the demonstration. For example, one of
the great musicians of our time, whose existence is unquestionable. Cecil Taylor.
Born into jazz, he remained faithful to its outward forms: the clubs and bars and
festivals at which he performed, the instrumental groups he put together, even the
odd vague (or inexplicable) declaration of an influence (Lennie Tristano, Dave
Brubeck). But his originality transcended musical categories. His thing was jazz,
but any other kind of music too, broken down into its individual atoms and
reassembled, like one of those celibate machines that produced the dreams and
nightmares of the twentieth century. According to the legend, Cecil made the first
atonal jazz recording, in 1956, two weeks before Sun Ra independently arrived at the
same result. (Or was it the other way around?) They didn’t know each other, nor did
they know Ornette Coleman, who was doing similar work on the other side of the
country. Which goes to show that beyond the genius or inspiration of those three
individuals (and Albert Ayler and Eric Dolphy, and who knows how many others),
causation was operating at some higher level.

That level is History, and History has an important role to play, because it allows
us to interrupt the infinite series that are generated by the art of thinking. This
is how interruption loses its false prestige and its insufferable preponderance. It
becomes frivolous, redundant, and trivial, like a muffled cough at a funeral. But
its very insignificance gives birth to Necessity, which makes the rule of History
manifest. Interruption is necessary, though it may be a momentary necessity, and the
moment itself is necessary too, and often sufficient, which is why we say that a
moment is “all it takes.”

In the end, biographies are literature. And what counts in literature is detail,
atmosphere, and the right balance between the two. The exact detail, which makes
things visible, and an evocative, overall atmosphere, without which the details
would be a disjointed inventory. Atmosphere allows the author to work with forces
freed of function, and with movements in a space that is independent of location, a
space that finally abolishes the difference between the writer and the written: the
great manifold tunnel in broad daylight . . . Atmosphere is the three-dimensional
condition of regionalism, and the medium of music. Music doesn’t interrupt time. On
the contrary.

1956. In New York City, there lived a man named Cecil Taylor, a black musician, not
yet thirty years old, a technically innovative pianist, a composer and improviser
steeped in the century’s popular and highbrow traditions. Except for half a dozen
musicians and friends, no one knew or could understand what he was doing. How could
they have understood? It lay beyond the scope of the predictable. In his hands the
piano was instantly transformed into a free compositional method. The so-called
“tone clusters” that he employed in his evanescent writing had already been used by
the composer Henry Cowell, but Cecil took the procedure further, complicating the
harmonies, systematizing the atonal sound current into tonal flows, producing
unprecedented results. The speed of it, the interplay of different mechanisms, the
insistence, the built-in resistances, the repetitions, the series, everything, in
short, that contributed to the turn away from traditional harmonic structure erected
majestic, airy ruins, on the far side of any recognizable melody or rhythm.

He lived in a modest sublet apartment, on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. The place
was rife with black mice, and there was a floating population of cockroaches. Doors
ajar, the routine promiscuity of an old apartment building with its narrow stairs
and its radios playing. That was the kind of atmosphere. He slept there through the
morning and part of the afternoon, and went out at dusk. He worked in a bar that was
part of the scene. He’d already made a record (
Jazz Advance
) for a small
independent label, which hadn’t distributed it. A date to play in the bar, which for
various reasons hadn’t worked out, had given him the idea of asking for work, and
he’d been there for a few months, washing dishes. He was waiting for offers to play
in places that had a piano. Given the number of night spots with live music in the
city at the time, and the constant turnover of famous and unknown performers,
opportunities were bound to come up. It was a time of renewal; there was a hunger
for novelty.

He knew, of course, that because of the demanding and radical nature of his art, he
could forget about being suddenly or even gradually discovered, his reputation
spreading like ripples when a stone falls into a pond. He wasn’t that naïve. But he
was perfectly justified in hoping that sooner or later his talent would be
acclaimed. (There’s a truth here, and an error: it’s true that now he is celebrated
all around the world, and those of us who have listened to his records for years,
gaping in admiration, would be the last to question that; but it’s also fairly
easy—almost too easy, in fact—to demonstrate that there’s an error in
the reasoning. It could, of course, be objected that such a demonstration is no more
than a flight of literary fancy. Which is true, but then it’s also true that
stories, once they’re imagined, acquire a kind of necessity. A strange and rare
kind, whose strangeness has an influence, in turn, on the imagined story. The story
of the prostitute who distracted the cat wasn’t necessary in itself, which doesn’t
mean that the virtual series of all stories is unnecessary as a whole. The story of
Cecil Taylor calls for the illustrative mode of the fable; the details are
interchangeable, and atmosphere would seem to be out of place. But how can we hear
music except in an atmosphere, since the sounds are transmitted by air?)

The bar in which his first performance finally took place (it wasn’t strictly
speaking the first, because there’d been one already, but Cecil chose not talk about
it) was a dive where music was secondary, a background to waiting and drug deals.
But drugs, and waiting too (they went together), were so intimately related to time
that the artist felt he should be able to arouse some interest; all he knew for sure
was that he wouldn’t cause a scandal, which was a pity in a way, because a scandal
is an intensification of interest, but it wasn’t in his gentle, contemplative
nature; and in a place like that, where people were risking everything, they would
hardly be shocked by one more disruption of the dominant key. He prepared himself by
imagining indifference as a plane and interest as a point: the plane could cover the
world like a paper shade, but interest was punctual and real like a pair of
neighbors wishing each other good day. He readied himself for the inherent
incongruence of the higher geometries. The unpredictable clientele could provide him
with a modicum of attention: no one knows what grows by night (he would be playing
after midnight, the following day, in fact), and when tomorrow appears today, it
never goes totally unnoticed. Except for this time. To his astonishment, this time
turned out to be precisely “never.” Invisible ridicule melting into inaudible
giggles. It was like that all through the set, and the proprietor canceled his date
for the following night, although he hadn’t paid for it. Cecil didn’t talk to him
about his music, of course. He couldn’t see the point. He just went back to his
room.

Two months later, his erratic work routine (he’d gone from washing dishes to working
at a dry cleaner) was enlivened once again when he agreed to perform in a bar, just
one night this time, in the middle of the week. It was like the previous bar, though
maybe slightly worse, with the same kind of clientele; there was even a chance that
some of those who’d been present the other night would hear him again. That’s what
he got to thinking (what a dreamer!), misled by his own repetitions. His music
reached the ears of fifteen or so drunks, and maybe those of one or two women
dressed in silk: small, black, beautiful ears, each adorned with a golden bud. There
was no applause, someone laughed stupidly (at something else, no doubt), and the
owner of the bar didn’t even bother to say good night to him. Why would he? There
are times like that, when music meets with no response. He made himself an idle
promise to come back to the bar some other time (he’d been there before), to put
himself in the situation, or rather the position, of someone listening to music and
knowing that it’s music, so that he could imagine what it would be like: the
consummate pianist intuiting each note as he plays it, the slow succession of
melodies, the reason for the atmosphere. But he never did; it wasn’t worth the
trouble. He considered himself unimaginative, unable even to imagine the reality
surrounding him. After a week, the mental image of this latest failure blended with
that of the previous one, which left him feeling somewhat bewildered. Could it have
been a repetition? There was no reason why it should have been that simple, but
sometimes simplification works in tandem with complication.