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...
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