I sit in the room of my childhood, surrounded by relics of the past (my past!); they are numerous, scattered all around like detritus from cookies that somebody (not me, no way) could, hypothetically, have been noshing on in bed late at night while watching bootlegged episodes of Breaking Bad, which by the way is a supremely anxiety-inducing series so I would not be quick to judge anyone who might wish to counter the thumbscrews-heart-in-throat-pulse-pounding horror factor of the show with a stash of miniature almond biscotti, okay?
Anyway, the point is that artifacts of my early-to-adolescent years are everywhere. I keep expecting them to ambush me at any moment. Those pointe shoes hanging on the wall, frayed and worn-- if I examine them too closely, will I suddenly convulse with nostalgia for Nutcrackers past? What about the Ancient Greek textbook from high school with all my notes in the margins and my smartass (σμαρτας) transliterations of swear words using the Greek alphabet? Could a perusal of this volume unearth an cache of memories, the symbols of historical antiquity guiding me to a rediscovery of personal antiquity? And dare I read through my old journals, which mostly detail my various ill-fated infatuations with some poor schlub or another? Can I bear to go there?
Yet the objects are strangely mute on this visit, as though I interrogated them too many times in the past and they gave away all of their secrets. Now all I can remember is the ritual itself-- I am supposed to hold these things in my hands, as always, breathe them in, say "take me back, take me back." But "back" has been slipping away unnoticed while I've been out accumulating more "now," and "now" becomes the new "back" with astonishing rapidity, and the filing cabinet of my mind can only hold so much information and somebody, some sneaky ninja secretary of the Unconscious, must have been taking my outdated files to the shredder, bit by bit.
I pull a sheet of paper from the recesses of my desk: it bears a title, "Sentimental Value Bit of Graph Paper :)", in the high school incarnation of my handwriting, but it arouses no sentiment in me other than mild confusion, as in I am drawing a huge blank on the story behind this emoticonned remnant. It must have been juicy to merit such preservation-- I had obviously once taken the time to label the sheet and leave it for Future Me, expecting that she would wryly wink back across time and space. Instead, Future Me rubs her temples, looks around the room, concedes that she has not lived here for eons and that the rift has widened and it is starting to feel irreversible; more and more now her affection is contained in vessels that are elsewhere, dispersed all across the contiguous U.S. (and beyond) like so many crumbs of biscotti...
Saturday, January 21, 2012
Wednesday, January 11, 2012
Mystic Shores
Something is off, I say. Small discrepancies have started to emerge in my existence that do not square with the reality I thought I knew, kind of like in the new Haruki Murakami novel that I've been reading lately where the characters slip unbeknowst into a parallel dimension and start to detect subtle anomalies in their world (the police officers carry a different brand of firearm, there's an extra moon hanging in the sky... ) Such a shift must have occurred in my own life as well, for I can think of no other way to explain the incongruities that have arisen of late.
The other day, for instance, a stranger smacked into me on the street and then he... apologized. Whoa. Breach of etiquette there, good sir. It's well-established that if you jostle somebody in public, you must avoid eye contact and keep walking; the recipient of your jostling likewise does not acknowledge you and keeps walking, now harboring hatred in his/ her heart that he/ she will pass on to the next hapless pedestrian to cross his/ her path. But this man looked all concerned said he was sorry and I floundered for words to absolve him of guilt, all the while feeling cheated of a chance to curse him under my breath, to pay forward the ill will, to forge another link in the human chain of passive-aggression. So that was Oddity #1, the first indicator that something was amiss. Other signs began to pile up, too. The air itself had taken on a different quality-- my nose searched the atmosphere for exhaust fumes and falafel and roasted nuts and miscellaneous human vileness, but instead came up with adjectives like "maritime" or "pine-resiny." And one night I looked up and saw a salt-sprinkling of tiny white lights across the sky. Stars? Excuse me? We don't do stars in Schmanhattan; the lights of mass civilization have long superseded the lights of the cosmos. When I crawled into bed later, I lay awake staring at the ceiling, unable to settle down for some reason. And then it hit me. My usual nighttime lullaby of gurgling bathroom pipes and clanking radiators and pulsing Dominican dance music from above was absent, supplanted by a near-silence: eerie, unnerving, blockading sleep.
The next day I decided to clear my head in the best way that I know: seeking out a body of water and staring at it for awhile until the world rights itself and I become freshly cognizant of my smallness while re-apprehending the grandeur of Nature, etcetera etcetera. I made for the Hudson River overlook near my apartment, aiming to capture that limitless sensation of being on the edge of the land even if this particular vista was blighted by the neighboring Shores of Jersey. But this time Jersey was nowhere to be seen! In its place was a silver-blue pane of ocean that stretched off uninterrupted to some misty vanishing point. In shock I pitched forward onto my knees, expecting to meet the impact of concrete, but pillows of plush soft sand broke my fall-- awestruck I buried my arms in the substance, pure white and fine as baking soda, temperate on the surface but cooler and damper as I plumbed its depths.
At that point I became certain that I was not in Schmanhattan anymore, that I had pulled a Narnia or a Down-the-Rabbit-Hole and had toppled into an alternate plane of existence. Clearly I was on a coast, but an alien coast, an inverse coast. I paused to take in my surroundings. The topography was savage, almost alive; mountains rose like massive stone vertebrae out of the sea, like the backbone of some dormant monster that might occasionally twitch in its sleep and cause mayhem on a geological scale. Pine trees had still managed to eke out a living here, roots navigating rocks, branches forming an asymmetrical dusky green canopy... oh! THAT was why the air had that smell... well, there was one aberration explained, but still the larger mystery loomed.
Stymied, I searched the recesses of my handbag for my iPhone, which would surely answer everything: it would Google-map me, predict the weather, throw in a recommendation for a great local tapas bar, and perhaps I could even download a teleportation app to beam myself back home (certainly the Good People of Apple had come up with that by now...?) But as my thumbs got to work on that well-worn screen, a dreaded missive appeared: "Signal unavailable. Safari cannot connect to the internet." Disaster! Where the fuck was I in the known universe to be outside the scope of AT&T reception? (Actually, wait a minute, I could be a lot of places). I felt naked; my trusty device was incapacitated, cut off from its mother planet of Omniscience, and here I was, bereft, reliant on the meager reserves of information in my own mind. With Safari-the-Browser now defunct, it seemed I would have to embark on my own real-life safari, me versus the elements, [Wo]man vs. Wild.
The place was absurd, I thought, turning again to face the ocean-- the hues, the pinkish-tinged streaks in the sunset, so tacky, lifted straight from the palette of a Thomas Kinkade painting... and then I thought, How sad, I cannot experience any real thing without making immediate recourse to representation, to a stand-in, an ersatz rendition; isn't it more likely that Mr. Kinkade once witnessed some ravishing natural phenomenon like this one and strove to emulate it in a visual medium? But now I, when actually confronted with the Thing-in-Itself, could only understand it in terms of some schlocky reproduction. This was what it had come to-- soon enough I would start meeting new people, flesh-and-blood individuals, and instead of inhabiting the sphere of their presence for a while and then drawing my conclusions about them as human beings, I would quickly pigeonhole them into fictive archetypes ("he's very David Copperfield, or maybe kind of like that guy from Arrested Development")... oh wait, but I already did that constantly, and so did everyone else. It was our only mode of discourse, the rough analogy. Were we all then so incapable of freshness, unable to see anything as though for the first time, paralyzed by our infinite points of reference?
Mournfully I contemplated the tremendous gulf between immediate experience and comprehension/ analysis, all the while contemplating the literal gulf in front of me that tossed and roiled in the Kinkadian evening light. I sat down. And then something strange started to happen. The waves maintained their rhythm, in, out, crash, silence, suspense, crash again, reporting to the moon or whatever, and they got into my head and started to bear down on the chattering stupidities that resided there. This lingering petty resentment, that circular philosophical quandary, my twitchy cell-phone-less paranoia-- all were loosened like boulders from a larger rock-mass and then methodically pulverized by the weight of the waves... only a fine, fair sand was left: it streamed smoothly from my mind, exiting, leaving a clean bright chamber... my breathing aligned with the tides, gentle cycles of brackish air moving through me... and I realized I was doing the impossible, sensing the power of the Real Thing, the Original, but of course I can't describe it here without reverting to facile hackneyed putrid metaphor, so I won't even try.
... and then what happened? I can't possibly leave you hanging here, you think, at this narrative impasse, but oh yes, I can and I will, I must be cruel and sever the story at its apex because I don't know how it ends yet either; I, too, am left hanging (on a beach, in maybe [?] an alternate dimension). I seek, always, a way to return to my homeland, to the cultivated, human-scale terrain and that great metropolis of convenience, but it seems that for the time being I am marooned on this strange coast, this other world... I have since christened it California-- I wonder (wonderingly) what it will teach me next, while I wait--
The other day, for instance, a stranger smacked into me on the street and then he... apologized. Whoa. Breach of etiquette there, good sir. It's well-established that if you jostle somebody in public, you must avoid eye contact and keep walking; the recipient of your jostling likewise does not acknowledge you and keeps walking, now harboring hatred in his/ her heart that he/ she will pass on to the next hapless pedestrian to cross his/ her path. But this man looked all concerned said he was sorry and I floundered for words to absolve him of guilt, all the while feeling cheated of a chance to curse him under my breath, to pay forward the ill will, to forge another link in the human chain of passive-aggression. So that was Oddity #1, the first indicator that something was amiss. Other signs began to pile up, too. The air itself had taken on a different quality-- my nose searched the atmosphere for exhaust fumes and falafel and roasted nuts and miscellaneous human vileness, but instead came up with adjectives like "maritime" or "pine-resiny." And one night I looked up and saw a salt-sprinkling of tiny white lights across the sky. Stars? Excuse me? We don't do stars in Schmanhattan; the lights of mass civilization have long superseded the lights of the cosmos. When I crawled into bed later, I lay awake staring at the ceiling, unable to settle down for some reason. And then it hit me. My usual nighttime lullaby of gurgling bathroom pipes and clanking radiators and pulsing Dominican dance music from above was absent, supplanted by a near-silence: eerie, unnerving, blockading sleep.
The next day I decided to clear my head in the best way that I know: seeking out a body of water and staring at it for awhile until the world rights itself and I become freshly cognizant of my smallness while re-apprehending the grandeur of Nature, etcetera etcetera. I made for the Hudson River overlook near my apartment, aiming to capture that limitless sensation of being on the edge of the land even if this particular vista was blighted by the neighboring Shores of Jersey. But this time Jersey was nowhere to be seen! In its place was a silver-blue pane of ocean that stretched off uninterrupted to some misty vanishing point. In shock I pitched forward onto my knees, expecting to meet the impact of concrete, but pillows of plush soft sand broke my fall-- awestruck I buried my arms in the substance, pure white and fine as baking soda, temperate on the surface but cooler and damper as I plumbed its depths.
At that point I became certain that I was not in Schmanhattan anymore, that I had pulled a Narnia or a Down-the-Rabbit-Hole and had toppled into an alternate plane of existence. Clearly I was on a coast, but an alien coast, an inverse coast. I paused to take in my surroundings. The topography was savage, almost alive; mountains rose like massive stone vertebrae out of the sea, like the backbone of some dormant monster that might occasionally twitch in its sleep and cause mayhem on a geological scale. Pine trees had still managed to eke out a living here, roots navigating rocks, branches forming an asymmetrical dusky green canopy... oh! THAT was why the air had that smell... well, there was one aberration explained, but still the larger mystery loomed.
Stymied, I searched the recesses of my handbag for my iPhone, which would surely answer everything: it would Google-map me, predict the weather, throw in a recommendation for a great local tapas bar, and perhaps I could even download a teleportation app to beam myself back home (certainly the Good People of Apple had come up with that by now...?) But as my thumbs got to work on that well-worn screen, a dreaded missive appeared: "Signal unavailable. Safari cannot connect to the internet." Disaster! Where the fuck was I in the known universe to be outside the scope of AT&T reception? (Actually, wait a minute, I could be a lot of places). I felt naked; my trusty device was incapacitated, cut off from its mother planet of Omniscience, and here I was, bereft, reliant on the meager reserves of information in my own mind. With Safari-the-Browser now defunct, it seemed I would have to embark on my own real-life safari, me versus the elements, [Wo]man vs. Wild.
The place was absurd, I thought, turning again to face the ocean-- the hues, the pinkish-tinged streaks in the sunset, so tacky, lifted straight from the palette of a Thomas Kinkade painting... and then I thought, How sad, I cannot experience any real thing without making immediate recourse to representation, to a stand-in, an ersatz rendition; isn't it more likely that Mr. Kinkade once witnessed some ravishing natural phenomenon like this one and strove to emulate it in a visual medium? But now I, when actually confronted with the Thing-in-Itself, could only understand it in terms of some schlocky reproduction. This was what it had come to-- soon enough I would start meeting new people, flesh-and-blood individuals, and instead of inhabiting the sphere of their presence for a while and then drawing my conclusions about them as human beings, I would quickly pigeonhole them into fictive archetypes ("he's very David Copperfield, or maybe kind of like that guy from Arrested Development")... oh wait, but I already did that constantly, and so did everyone else. It was our only mode of discourse, the rough analogy. Were we all then so incapable of freshness, unable to see anything as though for the first time, paralyzed by our infinite points of reference?
Mournfully I contemplated the tremendous gulf between immediate experience and comprehension/ analysis, all the while contemplating the literal gulf in front of me that tossed and roiled in the Kinkadian evening light. I sat down. And then something strange started to happen. The waves maintained their rhythm, in, out, crash, silence, suspense, crash again, reporting to the moon or whatever, and they got into my head and started to bear down on the chattering stupidities that resided there. This lingering petty resentment, that circular philosophical quandary, my twitchy cell-phone-less paranoia-- all were loosened like boulders from a larger rock-mass and then methodically pulverized by the weight of the waves... only a fine, fair sand was left: it streamed smoothly from my mind, exiting, leaving a clean bright chamber... my breathing aligned with the tides, gentle cycles of brackish air moving through me... and I realized I was doing the impossible, sensing the power of the Real Thing, the Original, but of course I can't describe it here without reverting to facile hackneyed putrid metaphor, so I won't even try.
... and then what happened? I can't possibly leave you hanging here, you think, at this narrative impasse, but oh yes, I can and I will, I must be cruel and sever the story at its apex because I don't know how it ends yet either; I, too, am left hanging (on a beach, in maybe [?] an alternate dimension). I seek, always, a way to return to my homeland, to the cultivated, human-scale terrain and that great metropolis of convenience, but it seems that for the time being I am marooned on this strange coast, this other world... I have since christened it California-- I wonder (wonderingly) what it will teach me next, while I wait--
Sunday, January 1, 2012
Schubert vs. Footie Pajamas
My dear friend Felix, a fellow disciple of Teacher and a very recent addition to the twenty-one-and-over-can-poison-yourself-legally-now club, came to visit me a few weeks ago. Our original plan was to destroy lower Schmanhattan together (as an Elder I felt somewhat obligated to be a force of corruption) but our activities ended up veering into wholesome territory more often than not: we shared a lemon tart, we took a jaunt through my neighborhood to see the wonderful old buildings and the steep rocky park and the silvery curvature of the bridge, we made an expedition to a Mexican grocery to purchase a piñata and ingredients for a dubious holiday punch involving horchata and tequila by the cupful... and oh whoops, already we've stepped outside the realm of Wholesome. That was fast. But hey now, the grocery store trip in itself was an innocent venture, only vaguely enabling the bacchanalian events of later that night in which a number of punch-drunk individuals, including myself, took up a Swiffer and had at the piñata. (Felix dealt the final death-blow, colored tissue paper bits raining everywhere, Dove Promises spilling onto the tile floor of my kitchen like entrails from a slain papier-mâché beast).
By the next night we were back to being good again. We had dinner with another member of the Teacher clan and his parents in their Upper West Side apartment-- just a bit of wine, the two manic family dogs figure-eighting around our legs as we sat at the table talking about Leonard Bernstein and pondering a plate of those neon rainbow marzipan cookies that are ubiquitous in this city. A Steinway grand sat in the living room. You can see where this is going; while we resisted the instrument's siren call for about two hours, inevitably there came a point where Felix and I decided that we HAD to play through the Schubert Fantasie right then and there. But alas! my score for the piece was wedged away in a bookshelf ninety blocks uptown.
Technology bailed us out. An internet connection, a few keywords, a database with vast reserves of public-domain music, and voila, just like that we were sight-reading off of two MacBooks, fumbling through forests of notes that we had not traversed for nine months while our other friend hovered over our shoulders and frantically scrolled down for us when our respective screens ran out of music. (Welcome to the page-turning of the 21st century, folks!) We spluttered and stumbled and came unglued and fell apart, snorting laughter, retracing measures and regrouping and can we take the tempo down a little and oh shit, here comes the fugue, sorry, Schubert, sorry sorry sorry.
Yet something still came through in our very imperfect rendering, something having to do with our shared pedagogical lineage, of course, all of the Teacher tropes just flowing out of us unspoken, and also something having to do with the countless idle hours we had spent together over the years, subliminally swapping mannerisms and vocabulary, syncing up to one another. And then it was also us rediscovering the piece itself, which, as you might know, has it all. All of the Dionysian wildness of tequila punch contained in a classically viable piñata shell of structure, topic, form. First the lone voice over accompaniment like a desolate night bird, but then the stern collectivism of French Overture, but then it gets fed up with its own pedantry and busts out into dance-- supernatural waltz, earthy folky Ländler-- and then we have more plaintive sad-sack singing, and then The Fugue, communicating the deep chaos of the soul in the most learned of all musical tongues, and then the end, the kicker, sinking sweetly into Death's waiting arms or something similarly, horribly cliché but how else to describe it???
I was punch-drunk off of Schubert. I was stoned off of Schubert for, like, the whole next day, man. While Felix ran around the city meeting up with other friends, I stayed in my apartment and journeyed through the D major sonata and the B-flat sonata and the impromptus and the miscellaneous short pieces on my upright, stopping to savor this or that shadowy tender delicious phrase in the way you suddenly stop to savor the complexities of a salt crystal on a pretzel when you're stoned off of... Schubert. I listened to Schnabel, Erdmann, Richter. It occurred to me that Schubert, chilling out syphilitically in 1820s Vienna, had obviously seen into the future to ME, had examined the fabric of my psyche and had taken pains to convert it into musical notation. It likewise occurred to me that Schnabel, Erdmann, and Richter had embarked on pianistic careers and specialized in Schubert for the sole purpose of expressing my innermost self via sound.
Then it occurred to me that maybe this was all a little bit narcissistic, that maybe I was the one communing with those dead guys instead of the other way around, but WHOA that was kind of cool too! Collective unconscious! The continuum of humanity! A fragment of T.S. Eliot's "Burnt Norton" suddenly floated into my mind, something about sound and remembering and children's hidden laughter in the rose garden, and I feverishly consulted Google for the exact citation. ("Footfalls echo in the memory / Down the passage which we did not take..." ) It was all the same thing: the words spoke the music and the music sounded like the words and both pointed to some grander, more ineffable Ur-meaning that transcended representation. Duuude. And now let's just cut to the end of the scene, to me reading the whole poem about five times, bathed in laptop light, glassy-eyed, humming the second theme of the second movement of the Schubert B-flat sonata while spooning blood orange sorbet methodically into my mouth and trying not to drip it onto the computer keyboard.
Like I said, I was HIGH, you guys, High on High Culture. There was nowhere to go but down.
Felix was leaving that night, so we met at a tinselly, Christmassy Irish pub for a final sendoff. Perhaps I still betrayed some minor signs of intoxication at this point (tapping out Ländler rhythms on the table, muttering under my breath that "humankind cannot bear very much reality") but mostly I had returned to a socially acceptable state of being. We bantered about Bleep U and the sorry state of our bank accounts. Beers were ordered; Felix expressed disappointment that the waitress did not card us. Festive music assaulted our ears from hidden speakers.
"Oh no oh no," said Felix, stopping to listen. "This is NOT a Christmased-upped version of Pachelbel's canon, is it? Pachelbel meets Jingle Bells? Please tell me it isn't."
"Ohhh yes it is," I replied, "cheese on top of more cheese. Cheese squared. And there's going to be a children's choir in a second, which will make it cheese cubed. Just you wait. I've been hearing this one in department stores for months now."
Felix slumped in despair. Then his eyes widened at something over my shoulder. "WHAT is on TV? It's some kind of... sexy pajama infomercial. What? WHAT? Oh my GOD, what IS this?!" I followed his horrified gaze to the mute plasma screen on the wall behind the bar, where something called the Hoodie-Footie was being advertised. True to its name, it was an amalgam of hoodie sweatshirt and footie pajamas, available in Classic Pink, Holiday Cheer, Varsity, and Leopard. Four buxom young females modeled the various prints. Classic Pink demonstrated that the footie component was removable, showing a titillating flash of ankle in process; Leopard Print had a "wild side" and pawed suggestively at the camera; Holiday Cheer threw her arms adoringly around her boyfriend, who had presumably gifted the pajama suit to her and who would also presumably be getting lucky offscreen in a few seconds. All the while, Pachelbel's Jingle Bells continued to fill the space like a minor gas leak, not killing us exactly but still leaving a dull, persistent throbbing behind the eyes.
If I had been [culturally] high earlier, blissed out, then this was the flip side, the bad trip. I searched myself for that inner sanctum of Schubert, Eliot, essential meaning, etc. that had been so accessible mere hours before, but now it seemed irretrievably lost, eclipsed by canned music and simpering floozies in polar fleece. Talk about Schlock! I was seasick. How could these disparate elements, the sublimely metaphysical and the cloyingly material, even coexist? How was it that the two worlds did not destroy one another entirely? And then I realized that all of my elitist asshole posturing masked a shameful truth: I really, really wanted a Hoodie-Footie. I wanted fluffy head-to-toe insulation against the world, against the stultifying demands of the Western Canon. I wanted to learn about the true meaning of Christmas from choirs of rosy-cheeked children. I wanted to be placated by such things, and yet I could never truly embrace them because I knew myself too well: no sooner would I don a Hoodie-Footie than I would become disgusted, cast it off, and immerse myself in wintry, inconsolable Schubert, and THEN I would go press my nose against the window of some snuggly Hooded-Footed couple and disdain their lack of greater awareness, all the while secretly coveting their simple comfort... I, the Wanderer, banished to the Outside with nobody but myself to blame...!
Felix must have sensed me slipping away, must have shared in my spiritual malaise, because he gave up on his shepherd's pie and said, "Let's get out of here." We paid, then exited the pub and its pernicious cheer. The fumy neon New York night crooned to us, soothed our sugar-sick souls and we were much better. But Felix had to be on his way, so we walked in the direction of Penn Station."So I read somewhere," he said, "that Penn Station used to be this huge beautiful grand complex, but then they tore it down sometime in the '60s. Right?"
"Yeah," I said. "I Wikipedia'd it one day. They wanted to 'option the air rights,' which means basically that they wanted to build more skyscrapers and office space and put the railways underground. But the demolition caused a huge uproar. People had loved the old architecture. There's still a little part of the old station somewhere around here-- I think it's a post office now. Looks neoclassical." Felix wanted to see it, so we went a few extra blocks to the lone edifice, stared at the wrought iron doorways, the steep mounting steps like the Steps to Parnassus, the rows upon rows of white stone columns (Ionian or Corinthian? Doric? neither of us could remember). Across the street loomed a sleek modern building facade upon which some sultry photoshopped creature modeled H & M's latest push-up bra for only $13.95. "Look at all of this!" said Felix with a sweeping gesture. "In two thousand years, will archaeologists be excavating the remains of these buildings? The colonnade in rubble? And the faint traces of lingerie advertisement on some wall fragment? Seriously, what the hell kinds of INSANE things will they think about us and our civilization?" I laughed and had no answer.
It was time to go, so we descended into the earth, hugged, promised to visit each other soon, made our ways to opposite train platforms. I felt a slight lump in my throat that I always seem to get whenever saying goodbye to people in public spaces, no matter if our parting is completely temporary and I'll see them next week or call them in forty-eight hours but it's the whole principle of the place, the transit station, the always coming and going, beginnings and endings on display, time marked out in small parcels. And then my train arrived and I got on and found a seat, still imagining some archaeologist from Time Future (an infinitely more fractured time) who would study the remnants of our strange eclectic buildings and would dream, with a stab of longing, of the warm human connections that once might have flourished in their shadow...
By the next night we were back to being good again. We had dinner with another member of the Teacher clan and his parents in their Upper West Side apartment-- just a bit of wine, the two manic family dogs figure-eighting around our legs as we sat at the table talking about Leonard Bernstein and pondering a plate of those neon rainbow marzipan cookies that are ubiquitous in this city. A Steinway grand sat in the living room. You can see where this is going; while we resisted the instrument's siren call for about two hours, inevitably there came a point where Felix and I decided that we HAD to play through the Schubert Fantasie right then and there. But alas! my score for the piece was wedged away in a bookshelf ninety blocks uptown.
Technology bailed us out. An internet connection, a few keywords, a database with vast reserves of public-domain music, and voila, just like that we were sight-reading off of two MacBooks, fumbling through forests of notes that we had not traversed for nine months while our other friend hovered over our shoulders and frantically scrolled down for us when our respective screens ran out of music. (Welcome to the page-turning of the 21st century, folks!) We spluttered and stumbled and came unglued and fell apart, snorting laughter, retracing measures and regrouping and can we take the tempo down a little and oh shit, here comes the fugue, sorry, Schubert, sorry sorry sorry.
Yet something still came through in our very imperfect rendering, something having to do with our shared pedagogical lineage, of course, all of the Teacher tropes just flowing out of us unspoken, and also something having to do with the countless idle hours we had spent together over the years, subliminally swapping mannerisms and vocabulary, syncing up to one another. And then it was also us rediscovering the piece itself, which, as you might know, has it all. All of the Dionysian wildness of tequila punch contained in a classically viable piñata shell of structure, topic, form. First the lone voice over accompaniment like a desolate night bird, but then the stern collectivism of French Overture, but then it gets fed up with its own pedantry and busts out into dance-- supernatural waltz, earthy folky Ländler-- and then we have more plaintive sad-sack singing, and then The Fugue, communicating the deep chaos of the soul in the most learned of all musical tongues, and then the end, the kicker, sinking sweetly into Death's waiting arms or something similarly, horribly cliché but how else to describe it???
I was punch-drunk off of Schubert. I was stoned off of Schubert for, like, the whole next day, man. While Felix ran around the city meeting up with other friends, I stayed in my apartment and journeyed through the D major sonata and the B-flat sonata and the impromptus and the miscellaneous short pieces on my upright, stopping to savor this or that shadowy tender delicious phrase in the way you suddenly stop to savor the complexities of a salt crystal on a pretzel when you're stoned off of... Schubert. I listened to Schnabel, Erdmann, Richter. It occurred to me that Schubert, chilling out syphilitically in 1820s Vienna, had obviously seen into the future to ME, had examined the fabric of my psyche and had taken pains to convert it into musical notation. It likewise occurred to me that Schnabel, Erdmann, and Richter had embarked on pianistic careers and specialized in Schubert for the sole purpose of expressing my innermost self via sound.
Then it occurred to me that maybe this was all a little bit narcissistic, that maybe I was the one communing with those dead guys instead of the other way around, but WHOA that was kind of cool too! Collective unconscious! The continuum of humanity! A fragment of T.S. Eliot's "Burnt Norton" suddenly floated into my mind, something about sound and remembering and children's hidden laughter in the rose garden, and I feverishly consulted Google for the exact citation. ("Footfalls echo in the memory / Down the passage which we did not take..." ) It was all the same thing: the words spoke the music and the music sounded like the words and both pointed to some grander, more ineffable Ur-meaning that transcended representation. Duuude. And now let's just cut to the end of the scene, to me reading the whole poem about five times, bathed in laptop light, glassy-eyed, humming the second theme of the second movement of the Schubert B-flat sonata while spooning blood orange sorbet methodically into my mouth and trying not to drip it onto the computer keyboard.
Like I said, I was HIGH, you guys, High on High Culture. There was nowhere to go but down.
Felix was leaving that night, so we met at a tinselly, Christmassy Irish pub for a final sendoff. Perhaps I still betrayed some minor signs of intoxication at this point (tapping out Ländler rhythms on the table, muttering under my breath that "humankind cannot bear very much reality") but mostly I had returned to a socially acceptable state of being. We bantered about Bleep U and the sorry state of our bank accounts. Beers were ordered; Felix expressed disappointment that the waitress did not card us. Festive music assaulted our ears from hidden speakers.
"Oh no oh no," said Felix, stopping to listen. "This is NOT a Christmased-upped version of Pachelbel's canon, is it? Pachelbel meets Jingle Bells? Please tell me it isn't."
"Ohhh yes it is," I replied, "cheese on top of more cheese. Cheese squared. And there's going to be a children's choir in a second, which will make it cheese cubed. Just you wait. I've been hearing this one in department stores for months now."
Felix slumped in despair. Then his eyes widened at something over my shoulder. "WHAT is on TV? It's some kind of... sexy pajama infomercial. What? WHAT? Oh my GOD, what IS this?!" I followed his horrified gaze to the mute plasma screen on the wall behind the bar, where something called the Hoodie-Footie was being advertised. True to its name, it was an amalgam of hoodie sweatshirt and footie pajamas, available in Classic Pink, Holiday Cheer, Varsity, and Leopard. Four buxom young females modeled the various prints. Classic Pink demonstrated that the footie component was removable, showing a titillating flash of ankle in process; Leopard Print had a "wild side" and pawed suggestively at the camera; Holiday Cheer threw her arms adoringly around her boyfriend, who had presumably gifted the pajama suit to her and who would also presumably be getting lucky offscreen in a few seconds. All the while, Pachelbel's Jingle Bells continued to fill the space like a minor gas leak, not killing us exactly but still leaving a dull, persistent throbbing behind the eyes.
If I had been [culturally] high earlier, blissed out, then this was the flip side, the bad trip. I searched myself for that inner sanctum of Schubert, Eliot, essential meaning, etc. that had been so accessible mere hours before, but now it seemed irretrievably lost, eclipsed by canned music and simpering floozies in polar fleece. Talk about Schlock! I was seasick. How could these disparate elements, the sublimely metaphysical and the cloyingly material, even coexist? How was it that the two worlds did not destroy one another entirely? And then I realized that all of my elitist asshole posturing masked a shameful truth: I really, really wanted a Hoodie-Footie. I wanted fluffy head-to-toe insulation against the world, against the stultifying demands of the Western Canon. I wanted to learn about the true meaning of Christmas from choirs of rosy-cheeked children. I wanted to be placated by such things, and yet I could never truly embrace them because I knew myself too well: no sooner would I don a Hoodie-Footie than I would become disgusted, cast it off, and immerse myself in wintry, inconsolable Schubert, and THEN I would go press my nose against the window of some snuggly Hooded-Footed couple and disdain their lack of greater awareness, all the while secretly coveting their simple comfort... I, the Wanderer, banished to the Outside with nobody but myself to blame...!
Felix must have sensed me slipping away, must have shared in my spiritual malaise, because he gave up on his shepherd's pie and said, "Let's get out of here." We paid, then exited the pub and its pernicious cheer. The fumy neon New York night crooned to us, soothed our sugar-sick souls and we were much better. But Felix had to be on his way, so we walked in the direction of Penn Station."So I read somewhere," he said, "that Penn Station used to be this huge beautiful grand complex, but then they tore it down sometime in the '60s. Right?"
"Yeah," I said. "I Wikipedia'd it one day. They wanted to 'option the air rights,' which means basically that they wanted to build more skyscrapers and office space and put the railways underground. But the demolition caused a huge uproar. People had loved the old architecture. There's still a little part of the old station somewhere around here-- I think it's a post office now. Looks neoclassical." Felix wanted to see it, so we went a few extra blocks to the lone edifice, stared at the wrought iron doorways, the steep mounting steps like the Steps to Parnassus, the rows upon rows of white stone columns (Ionian or Corinthian? Doric? neither of us could remember). Across the street loomed a sleek modern building facade upon which some sultry photoshopped creature modeled H & M's latest push-up bra for only $13.95. "Look at all of this!" said Felix with a sweeping gesture. "In two thousand years, will archaeologists be excavating the remains of these buildings? The colonnade in rubble? And the faint traces of lingerie advertisement on some wall fragment? Seriously, what the hell kinds of INSANE things will they think about us and our civilization?" I laughed and had no answer.
It was time to go, so we descended into the earth, hugged, promised to visit each other soon, made our ways to opposite train platforms. I felt a slight lump in my throat that I always seem to get whenever saying goodbye to people in public spaces, no matter if our parting is completely temporary and I'll see them next week or call them in forty-eight hours but it's the whole principle of the place, the transit station, the always coming and going, beginnings and endings on display, time marked out in small parcels. And then my train arrived and I got on and found a seat, still imagining some archaeologist from Time Future (an infinitely more fractured time) who would study the remnants of our strange eclectic buildings and would dream, with a stab of longing, of the warm human connections that once might have flourished in their shadow...
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