Care of Maud Newton:
It is my heart-warmed and world-embracing Christmas hope and aspiration that all of us, the high, the low, the rich, the poor, the admired, the despised, the loved, the hated, the civilized, the savage (every man and brother of us all throughout the whole earth), may eventually be gathered together in a heaven of everlasting rest and peace and bliss, except the inventor of the telephone.
– Mark Twain’s Christmas greetings, 1890
As I walked past the Dive Bar on 96th and Amsterdam last night, a woman and her friend stumbled out those saloon-style doors, clinging to each other for balance. “Good night,” she said, “I’m headed to the liquor store.” He did not dissuade her. We won’t let these little sordid city moments, or a subway strike, cloud our Christmas cheer. Admittedly, the city in its profusion gives mixed holiday signals, and in this spirit I would like to do a little blog experiment, a first for Think Denk: a holiday reading list. ACTUALLY two lists: one for the optimist who wants his or her heart warmed (“Just what I need,” said Woody Allen, “hot cockles”) and another for the black-hearted Scrooge who wants to wallow in holiday depression. Choose your poison.
Anti-Holiday Reading List
1. Dostoevsky: The Idiot. I think Crime and Punishment is probably too heartwarming.
2. Shakespeare Troilus and Cressida. Perhaps the most nihilistic Shakespeare play? Certainly a contender. For instance: “… thou great-sized coward,/ No space of earth shall sunder our two hates./I’ll haunt thee like a wicked conscience still,/That moldeth goblins swift as frenzy’s thoughts.” Or how about: “O false Cressid! False, false, false!/Let all untruths stand by thy stainèd name, /And they’ll seem glorious.”
3. Baudelaire, Selected Poems. I am referring to my beloved Penguin Classics edition with ugly English literal translations in small print at the bottom of the page. Imagine waking Christmas morning as a family to read “La Squelette Laboreur”:
Are you trying to show … that even in the grave the promised sleep is not certain; That the Void betrays us; that everything, even Death lies to us, and that for all eternity, alas! we shall perhaps, in some unknown country, be obliged to flay the stubborn earth, and to push a heavy spade under our naked, bleeding foot?
4. Nabokov, Lolita. Lost laughter of childhood, incurable perversion, etc. (“Picnic, lightning.”)
5. Mann, Doctor Faustus. “In those days Germany, a hectic flush on its cheeks, was reeling at the height of its savage triumphs, about to win the world on the strength of the one pact that it intended to keep and had signed with its blood. Today, in the embrace of demons, a hand over one eye, the other staring into the horror, it plummets from despair to despair.” Etc.
6. Sebald, Austerlitz. Especially the passages about the futility of fortifications and the organization of Theresienstadt.
7. James, The Golden Bowl. For instance its final line: “And the truth of it had with this force after a moment so strangely lighted his eyes that as for pity and dread of them she buried her own in his breast.” Ahh, and they lived happily ever after.
8. Atwood, Cat’s Eye. More childhood cruelty, yippee!
9. Hardy, The Mayor of Casterbridge. I’ve never finished it, but I assume everything turns out horribly. Am I wrong? Have always enjoyed the first third of it though, before casting it away out of dread. Perhaps I got too caught up emotionally in the story; I am not the “ideal” reader.
10. (Of course) Kafka, the complete works, but if you had to select one: The Castle.
Okay enough enough. In the list above, with only one exception, I tried to choose books that I actually ENJOYED despite their high depressive quotients. But, on to the heartwarming recommendations:
1. Nabokov, Pnin. For just being beautiful: “Presently all were asleep again. It was a pity nobody saw the display in the empty street, where the auroral breeze wrinkled a large luminous puddle, making of the telephone wires reflected in it illegible lines of black zigzags.” Or for being tender: “… the little sedan boldly swung past the front truck and, free at last, spurted up the shining road, which one could make out narrowing to a thread of gold in the soft mist where hill after hill made beauty of disance, and where there was simply no saying what miracle would happen.” Or both.
2. Chabon, Wonder Boys. No, not the movie. I will hold to my opinion that this is the best of his books. Its tale of renunciation and self-awareness, brilliantly plotted over the weekend of a writer’s conference, makes me happy again and again. How dare they cut the f**&()#$ tuba from the movie!
3. Capote, A Christmas Memory. How topical! How about this passage:
Three hours later we are back in the kitchen hulling a heaping buggyload of windfall pecans. Our backs hurt from gathering them: how hard they were to find (the main crop having been shaken off the trees and sold by the orchard’s owners, who are not us) among the concealing leaves, the frosted, deceiving grass. Caarackle! A cheery crunch, scraps of miniature thunder sounds as the shells collapse and the golden mound of sweet oily ivory meat mounts in the milk-glass bowl. Queenie begs to taste, and now and again my friend sneaks her a mite, though insisting we deprive ourselves. “We mustn’t, Buddy. If we start, we won’t stop. And theere’s scarcely enough as there is. For thirty cakes.” The kitchen is growing dark. Dusk turns the window into a mirror: our reflections mingle with the rising moon as we work by the fireside in the firelight. At last, when the moon is quite high, we toss the final hull into the fire and, with joined sighs, watch it catch flame. The buggy is empty, the bowl is brimful.
That’s what I call musical prose.
4. Proust, Time Regained. The catch of course is that there are six essential prequels, which makes the title of this last volume somewhat ironic.
5. Emerson, Essays: “We grizzle every day. I see no need of it. Whilst we converse with what is above us, we do not grow old, but grow young … In nature every moment is new; the past is always swallowed and forgotten; the coming only is sacred. Nothing is secure but life, transition, the energizing spirit. No love can be bound by oath or covenant to secure it against a higher love. No truth so sublime but it may be trivial tomorrow in the light of new thoughts. People wish to be setlted; only as far as they are unsettled is there any hope for them.” And more in that vein.
6. Frazier, Coyote v. Acme. The title essay alone probably worth the purchase price. Don’t forget Boswell’s “Life of Don Johnson,” however.
7. Thoreau, Walden. “Every winter the liquid and trembling surface of the pond, which was so sensitive to every breath, and reflected every light and shadow, becomes solid to the depth of a foot or a foot and a half, so that it will support the heaviest teams, and perhaps the snow covers it to an equal depth, and it is not to be distinguished from any level field. Like the marmots in the surrounding hills, it closes its eyelids and becomes dormant for three months or more. Standing on the snow-covered plain, as if in a pasture amid the hills, I cut my way first through a foot of snow, and then through a foot of ice, and open a window under my feet, where, kneeling to drink, I look down into the quiet parlour of the fishes, pervaded by a softened light as through a window of ground glass, with its bright sanded floor the same as in summer; there a perennial waveless serenity reigns as in the amber twilight sky, corresponding to the cool and even temperament of the inhabitants. Heaven is under our feet as well as over our heads.”
8. Marianne Moore, Nevertheless.
The weak overcomes its
menace, the strong over-
comes itself. What is there
like fortitude! What sap
went through the little thread
to make the cherry red!
9. Oliver Sacks, Awakenings. I know it’s a bit of a stretch. How about this passage:
“I used to think of Hell as a place from which no one returned. My patients have taught me otherwise.”
Okay, so far, not so heartwarming. Going on:
“Those who return are forever marked by the experience; they have known, they cannot forget, the ultimate depths. Yet the effect of the experience is to make them not only deep but, finally, childlike, innocent, and gay.”
10. Cervantes, Don Quixote. What more needs to be said? If you own the new translation by Edith Grossman, my favorite passage is on page 145.
Okay, really got to get back to Beethoven now. So far behind, so much to do.
The desire for a treat steals upon me, wickedly, in every dutiful day. A day of rehearsing, some practicing, and of course strike-related walking, left me vulnerable in the final minutes of my favorite show, House. Though I had eaten wisely, with perhaps an excess of conscious prudence, the grocery downstairs beckoned; my stockinged feet were shod, a jacket donned, and I was out the gloomy entrance of my building in a flash.
Newly expanded, Barzini’s is even more of a pleasure dome. Its single automated door is now cruelly, Satanically stationed before a barrage of cheese; though I had intended to pass by, it was as though I were suspended, held, in the very idea of cream. My meals of the day, I realized, had been so fat-free as to leave me morally ill-equipped for a night in the Valley of Temptation. My eyes even lingered on the pates, for a moment of aspic desire. No no! And I would have made it, too! except just as I turned the corner, the dust of other customers’ impatience kicking beneath my heels, a hidden bank of Shropshire Blue met some inner feast of my imagination in a field of joy, and I snapped up cheese and crackers without a further qualm. On to the ice cream freezer, my original target. Cunningly some organic English Ale (perhaps the perfect mate for my Shropshire Blue?) caught my eye on the way and it too was gathered up into the folds of my now burgeoning winter coat, and then just as I rounded the home stretch and approached the cash register and opened the door to the adjoining freezer, just as I felt the first frost on my bare fingers, twitching to choose a flavor, I heard a horrible sound. The very symbol of perversion and guilt. The Dominican girl with dyed blonde, curly, greasy hair at the register began to dance along to the rockin’ beat. She understood it better than I! As my hand further froze, and my eyes tried to distinguish Homemade Ice Cream Ben & Jerry’s from Frozen Yogurt Ben & Jerry’s through the now-misting glass (through a looking-glass, darkly), I realized it–the horrible sound–was a ringtone, and Beethoven’s four fateful notes had filtered through two centuries only to be slapped together with this horrendous rhythm section, to indicate and signify nothing except to the owner of Barzini’s that someone, anyone had called. I marvelled briefly at Beethoven’s universality, and then fell morose at the sheer horrible cooption of it all, the way in which anything can become anything. Hadn’t I just yesterday taken a little cheap shot at the Fifth Symphony, here on the blog? And here it was coming back to haunt me, perhaps–even?–to dissuade my gluttony. But I paid it no mind; I chose my flavor, paid my tab, and shunted back out past the cheese to the cold lanes of Broadway.
And let that be the lesson. At two in the morning, when the combined forces of cheese, ale, and ice cream awakened me unpleasantly, I was confronted both with the discomfort of my stomach and another mysterious sonic sensation, emanating from a screen at the other side of the room which I did not quite yet understand. The screen said: “Mulder, be careful.” Believe your omens.
I want to follow up on a remark I made a post or two ago about Bach seeming “more Romantic” than Beethoven. According to a conventional view of music history, Beethoven is leaning out the window of the Classic, and seizing the Romantic by its budding ear. In the meantime, he is a bad tenant; he leaves the Classic house he inhabits in ruins. But there is a second layer to the Beethoven myth: the perpetually modern, the adventurer who knocks on every door, who makes any avant garde look tame. Neither decadent Romantic nor well-proportioned Classic, he is the force which converts one to the other: distilled Revolution.
Bach is distilled Something Else. He composed against the currents of his day; he swam upstream; he was a reactionary (for example: composing elaborate difficult counterpoint when the musical world was simplifying into homophony). His genius, according to the usual view, is not that of inventor or destroyer, but belongs to that colder virtue of perfection. Separation from Time is part of the Bach myth; against his island of perfection the vicissitudes of music history uselessly and cyclically break their waves. He ushers in no new Style, no Movement, no Ism; he opens the door to no Revolution; and therefore he is “pointless,” historically speaking. He would not “Stick it to the Man;” he is The Man.
It is harder, therefore, to empathize with Bach than with Beethoven.
After immersing myself a long time in Bach, I was reworking some familiar Beethoven Sonatas, and from the first moments of playing them I had a odd, unsettled feeling. Even the most revolutionary passages seemed somewhat quaint, like the customs of another era. I blinked and tried again, but the feeling persisted; I was being roughly jolted from one culture to another. And further: the Bach (in my mind) seemed to be, in a reversal of the “actual” chronology, more modern, while the enunciated phrases of Beethoven seemed outmoded… like a style to be shedded … how can this happen with the “eternally modern” Beethoven?
Suppose we take one of the “hallmarks” of the Classic style: dialectic. The question-and-answer construction of phrases, merged with the pendulum of tonic and dominant, and peppered with contrasts of loud and soft, changes of character and material; the reasonable disposition of opposed phrases, like sentences in an comparative paragraph, or the argumentative model: phrases in conflict. Classical style so often depends (on a red wheelbarrow?) on the juxtaposition of two- and four-bar ideas, of different character… he said/she said, etc. …
All of this sounds hopelessly general. But in Bach, so often you have a short, clear phrase at the beginning, circling I-IV-V-I, outlining the home key, followed by a much longer outpouring in which beginnings and endings are far less clear… an opening answer followed by a much longer question? The logic of his comparisons is held somewhat beneath the surface, not always enunciated or articulated. And at the ends of these arcs, when the sense of “wrapping up” threatens to destroy the carefully preserved aerodynamics of Bach’s writing, to close the enigma, to bring it in a sense “down to earth”: often at these moments Bach inserts an unexpected, bizarre dissonance, some inexplicable nuance or event, some mitigating shade of light or dark. I was recently savoring with a student how, towards the end of the E-flat Fugue from Book I of the Well-Tempered Clavier, Bach provides in the right hand an almost “Arabian-sounding” descending scale; it is difficult to reconcile this bizarre scale with the overall gist of the fugue; is it a taint, an impurity of conception? I feel these events are not just meant to be quirky (though they often are), but work to create a more comprehensive sense of enfolding, a more inclusive cadence: an answer that is still a question, that allows for non-answers. (How Romantic is THAT?) Whereas, so many of Beethoven’s answers are indisputable, almost irritatingly conclusive (end of 5th Symphony). Their certainty is powerful but is this kind of certainty really modern?
And I have been thinking a lot lately about the last three piano sonatas of Beethoven, in which the shifts, jerks, and starts of the Classic are answered or rebuked by long, gradual processes: continuity as antidote. For example, Op. 109: both the first and second movements are riven by dialectical shifts, by rhetorical emphasis, by sturm und drang; but the last movement begins with a tremendous UNITY of conception, with the affirmation of long, uninterrupted line. Different solutions occur in Op. 110, in which fragments of classical ideals and molds are gradually replaced by chaotic recitative (reminiscent for me of Monteverdi’s Orfeo, of early Italian monody), and evolving fugue (reminiscent of you-know-who). And of course the two movements of Op. 111: notice, for example, the tremendous dynamic contrasts in the opening Maestoso and compare them to the still, unperturbed dynamics of the opening of the Arietta. Beethoven teaches us, in these late works, that the grass is always greener, in every style. I am not sure he is yearning for the Romantic, so much as for anything that is not the Classic, any way whatsoever to define a different space. This dissatisfaction is ironically married to music that gives the appearance of total renunciation and serenity. These works are culminations, yes, but also they seem to cast a skeptical, destructive eye back on the whole language of Beethoven’s lifetime, on the Classical rhetoric itself.
I do not think Bach manifests this kind of dissatisfaction. His styles do not yearn for other styles.
Lately, I find myself making emotional, “Romantic” decisions about the Partitas, and feeling nervous about them. Bach is universal, beyond the personal, I tell myself guiltily, and try to get back at the “purity” of the notes. But then the guilt passes, and I dwell on different shades of elation in the 4th (D Major) Partita, for instance; the more I immerse myself in this idea of elation, paradoxically, the clearer and purer the music seems to get. My Romanticism does not seem to obscure anything. I make comparisons. The 5th (G major) Partita is happy, in a playful, down-to-earth kind of way; sometimes jokey, even silly, unpretentious; but the D major’s joy is more exalted: a spiritual happiness far from a joke. And in each movement, the dark comes in to shade the light. Bach works his way, kaleidoscopically, through the keys; no matter how buoyant the gist of a movement, somehow a minor-key episode manages to exist. In Beethoven, perhaps, these different keys are willed; they express by turns anger, suspense, doubt, affirmation, melancholy, happiness, playfulness; a whole spectrum of conflicting emotions, motivations, characterizations; dramatic turns of events, forces in opposition. The minor keys in the major movements of the D major Partitas do not seem to oppose the prevailing mood but to fill it out; these momentary sadnesses seem to make the overall joy believable.
In the second half of the Courante, for example, Bach finds himself in the vicinity of E minor. A short plaintive passage follows, a descending sequence, which concludes by confirming that we are, in fact, in E minor. But then there is no knowing what will happen next, what this minor key will inspire. With no hint of contradiction or rebuke (E minor is not “a problem”), Bach pens an extraordinary passage, taking us out of E minor, and towards the home key, with a sustained line in the top voice and cascading, replying arpeggios in the other voices…
For me these measures are unplayably beautiful; in short, a miracle; turning on a dime from minor-key melancholy to a kind of flourish of joy, without appearing at all manic. There is no sense of transgression or shift, just the turning of a corner. The turn to major arises from the confirmation of minor; sadness is a cause for celebration and vice versa; the happier and sadder moments do not rebut each other, they are no dialectic; even the terms “happy” and “sad” may not be applicable; they each draw on the other, and blur the other, in a chain of logic, inspiration and cause.
I have digressed? The skeptic may call the 4th Partita simply seven dances in D major, to which I say (being the Romantic I often am): a transcendental vision of a possibility of D major. At least so it has seemed to me these days: each dance a complicated emotional state of its own (excepting perhaps the Menuet and Aria), elation ranging from still contemplation to crazy overt display, to pouring enthusiasm … and all of them together a kind of impossible, infinite constellation, a kaleidoscope with a message. Bach, to my mind, creates little mini-universes with these Partitas, like the fantasy houses I used to invent in daydreams as a child, with endless rooms and closets and nooks … Beethoven’s houses have open floor plans; you tend to see an architectural arc all at once. The uselessness of a word like Romantic! In some ways the dialectical traumas and narrative gestures of Beethoven are perfectly, stereotypically Romantic (the conflicted Romantic soul), but this less dialectical vision of Bach suggests to me another kind of Romantic. The Romantic shaking his fist at the world; vs. the Romantic looking to make a new space within.
When I returned to Beethoven, it was as though I had to abandon an internal quest I had been on for some time, and come back to the world. I’m sure after some more time with Beethoven I will have forsaken some other world. But: Bach the escapist? He escaped from the drama of music history; he merely had to create masterworks and wait for rediscovery. The kind of personal, emotional associations I have been making with the Partitas do not seem like indulgences to me, as much as a kind of extended meditative act. I have always had a grudge against meditation: that it seems to forgo sensual pleasure. Not so with my meditations with Bach! We seem to share all kinds of sensualities, across centuries. And not so for another famous meditator:
The change from storm and winter to serene and mild weather, from dark and sluggish hours to bright and elastic ones, is a memorable crisis which all things proclaim. It is seemingly instantaneous at last. Suddenly an influx of light filled my house, though the evening was at hand, and the clouds of winter still overhung it, and the eaves were dripping with sleety rain. I looked out the window and lo! where yesterday was cold grey ice there lay the transparent pond, already calm and full of hope as in a summer evening, reflecting a summer evening sky in in its bosom, though none was visible overhead, as if it had intelligence with some remote horizon. I heard a robin in the distance, the first I had heard for many a thousand years, methought … O the evening robin, at the end of a New England summer day! If I could ever find a twig he sits upon! I mean he; I mean the twig…
A single gentle rain makes the grass many shades greener. So our prospects brighten on the influx of better thoughts. We should be blessed if we lived in the present always, and took advantage of every accident that befell us, like the grass which confesses the influence of the slightest dew that falls on it; and did not spend our time in atoning for the neglect of past opportunities, which we call doing our duty …
Call me crazy if you will, but in my Romanticism I am imagining some affinity between Henry, patiently building his cabin and farming his beans and looking at the bubbles in the ice as it changes all winter long … and Bach working, day in and day out, at his tonal ponds, exploring every permutation of happiness.
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