night rpm
words. music. pictures. scheherazade.
A Shipwreck: Christmas Magic
In February 1901, a ship couldn’t maneuver through the dense fog off the coast of San Francisco, hit the jagged rocks near the Golden Gate Bridge and sank. 129 died and 80 survived. The only reason why this shipwreck of SS Rio de Janeiro came to my attention was that writer Natsume Soseki mentions it.
Between 1900 and 1902, Natsume Soseki stayed and studied in England, very unhappily so. He documented his small miseries and published them in Asahi Shimbun in serial form, as shohin (little items). I guess you can regard shohin as the Japanese counterpart of the European feuilletons. Soseki’s feuilletons of discontent were translated and published as Spring Miscellany and London Essays. Sure, the book can’t be called a must-read, but to a Soseki fan like me, there’s a minutely perfect, specific delight gained from reading about Soseki lost in a foreign land, meditating on Thomas Carlyle while roaming through the Carlyle Museum as his mind digressively but deftly jumps from Frederick the Great to Schopenhauer to Disraeli.
Tucked near the end of Spring Miscellany is Soseki’s letter to his wife, Kyo, on March 8, 1901. In the letter, Soseki is unnerved because he had been expecting a letter from her which never arrived, especially as he knows that Kyo must have delivered their baby. He asks her if the baby is a boy or a girl (Tsune, his daughter, was born on January 26, 1901). Soseki writes -
SS Rio de Janeiro which set sail from Yokohama on February 2nd, has been wrecked off San Francisco, and I am very worried as to whether there was mail for me on that very boat.
Apparently, on February 22, 1901, SS Rio couldn’t navigate through the dense coastal fog of San Francisco, and as the steamer neared the Golden Gate Bridge, she hit the jagged rocks near Fort Point and sank. It seems that even though the visibility was zero, the captain disregarded others’ warnings and decided to approach the harbor. 129 people died, and about 80 survived. The ship was filled with immigrants. An eyewitness is quoted in the New York Times article -
Chinamen were even more panic-stricken than the white women… [rushing] about the deck howling frantically.
About nine months after the wreck, a diver named Sorenson found the sunken ship about a half mile from Fort Point. On board, it was reported, were $65,000 in general cargo and $400,000 in raw silk. Sorenson, according to the article, was entitled to 70% of everything recovered from the wreck. I wonder how much of that booty he actually ended up keeping, how much of that was recovered. There was even speculation that vast quantities of gold and silver were on board - $3 million worth - the rumors of which were never substantiated. Anyway, in 1990, the wreck of SS Rio was declared a possession of the State of California and became listed in the National Register as nationally significant - it is still submerged beneath the water, just off the Golden Gate.
I suppose Kyo’s letter to her husband was in fact among the mail which sank with SS Rio. If so, it’s most likely that the letter has since been long dissolved in the water, forever irretrievable. But maybe - who knows - the letter is preserved still, kept inside some black chest impermeable to water and time, sealed and locked away for all eternity. Who the hell can ever know of such things?
In the same letter to his wife expressing his anxiety about his mail vanishing with the wreck of SS Rio, Soseki writes about the wonderful experience of attending a Christmas pantomime staged in a theatre on Drury Lane. He tells his wife of the stage effects, especially during a scene in which fifty girls dance in a submarine palace, their hair and costumes lit up, sparkling with thousand little red bulbs. And one can only guess how Soseki’s heart must have been expanding as he saw this scene unfold the moment he writes to his beloved wife, “Just think!” -
You have only just been looking at a palace beneath the ocean, and already it is covered over by the wonderful flower garden which succeeds it, and after this it is the sun shining on the sea, while finally we find blue-tinged mountains appearing and then turning into a snow-clad landscape.
(Images by Anthony Goicolea, Nick Veasey and Gerhard Richter)
Morning run. Poetry. Romanticism.
Pre-dawn morning runs in the Central Park, something about trotting to a run when it’s still cold and dark so I walk over a few blocks to the Jackie O Reservoir, which is about 1.5 miles in circumference, the lamps in neat intervals interspersed along its dark perimeter, a ring of halogen stones, each throwing an etiolated length of light on the water, the scalloped head of the Chrysler still lit in the distance. When the day breaks, I notice two ducks motionless (sleeping?) on the water, and at the moment, the sight is strange and perfect at the same time… which reminds me of another strange and perfect sight I saw during a recent walk near Union Square -
More than a bit cheesy if the person hung it as a bohemian “performance,” which is likely the case. Nevertheless, the sight did make me feel as though I were walking past a Puccini set. Lifted my spirits. So out of place, that it was perfect. A few months ago, I watched a film by Lee Chang-dong called Poetry -
There’s a scene in the film in which these amateur poets in some rural region of Korea gather together for dinner and drinks after their hobbyist poetry club meeting. And a middle-aged guy, looking not too many rungs more polished than a farmhand, offers to sing a song unbidden, buoyed by alcohol and good feeling. I frankly anticipated the guy to croak out some sappy Korean song from the 60s, but my expectations were totally subverted when he began singing, a capella, in a not-too-unpleasant baritone, “Der Lindenbaum” from Schubert’s Winterreise.
The unexpected Schubert shook me. When I was a kid in Korea, I used to visit my mother’s family in Jeonju. I grew up in Seoul but most of the relatives on my mother’s side were farmers or raised livestock in the country. One of my uncles - the husband of my mom’s older sister - was a farmer who moonlighted as a high school teacher (or vice versa, I don’t remember). According to my memory, he had a perpetually bronzed skin and only wore thin white cotton t-shirts, even during winter.
I must have been 6 or 7 years old, but I vividly remember looking through the books on the shelf. Bertrand Russell’s Why I Am Not a Christian was there. The shelf was stuffed with books by continental European writers and philosophers from the 19th century, mostly German. Goethe, of course. Novalis. Kant. von Kleist. E.T.A. Hoffmann. I flipped through the pages back then, but the words swam in front of my eyes, unmoored from meaning. His children, my older cousins, who were in junior high/high schools, read The Sorrows of Young Werther or memorized Schiller verses. These names seemed bigger than life to me back then, and worthy of devotion; I don’t think I’ve ever shaken off the kind of childhood romance I had about decoding the words in those books.
Romanticism. Schubert and Byron-worshipping rural folk in Poetry. My farmer/teacher uncle and his impassable love for the 19th-century German literature and thought. Perhaps this should not be so jarring for our sensibilities - that the keepers of Romanticism are those who remain outside of the mainstream academia or literary community. They are the common people, perhaps plowing through life in Korea or Sri Lanka or Ethiopia (or even, in an apartment next door) who read the Romantic masters not with irony or deflection, historicizing the texts ad nauseum… but with true belief and feeling.
A while back, I wrote about Andras Schiff’s recording of Bach’s Six Partitas, and compared his account of late Bach with late Brahms. While reading the New Yorker’s profile of Helene Grimaud, I was so pleased with what she said about late Bach and Romanticism -
If you talk to me, you can call a lot of things Romantic. You can call Bach’s Sixth Partita as Romantic as any Wagner opera. Romanticism is, for me, much more than a period in culture.
No lovelier way to encapsulate what I mean to say. In a certain poem or a song sometimes, that lush view opening up during a silence following a plosive? Romanticism.
By the way, noticed during a late morning walk over to my office on Monday that the kids are skating on ice already -
(Images by Caspar David Friedrich and Walmor Corrêa are buried in here somewhere, among throwaway shots I took with my BlackBerry)
PlayStation. Kids. Sandy the Cat.
One year in Baltimore, I shared a row house with five other guys, in a grimy area to the northeast of the Johns Hopkins campus. One Friday night, we all went out to a birthday party, held at a skanky strip club named Night Shift. Walking back after the party, approaching our house, all of us noticed that the lights in the house were on. Kinda looked at each other, shrugged shoulders, verified that we definitely turned the lights off when walking out of the house. I took out a Spyderco knife with a sickle-shaped blade which I used to carry around with me, all of us picked up whatever we could get our hands on, and kicked open the front door, which wasn’t totally shut… but instead of any threat or menace, we found a group of kids, all of them 10 to 13 years old, huddled in front of our TV in their dirty hoodies, playing our PlayStation. None of them were particularly perturbed, passing around a spliff - one of them, a boy named Deron, didn’t even look at us, too busy unleashing a deathly combo on his buddy on Soul Caliber. What the fuck, we yelled at them. My friend M., who weighed close to 250 lbs, acted like he was going to step on one of them, and another guy, J., actually kicked one in the ribs. The kids all half-heartedly ran away.
The thing is, they kept coming back. So much so, that we started hanging out with them every Saturday and Sunday mornings, became a weekend ritual. They just walked in, ate our cereal and played video games while we gradually woke up, opened our first cans of beers. The kids never took our shit, never bitched or whined, and were entirely circumspect and unintrusive in their own ways. Just liked playing video games. One thing was for sure: we didn’t mind having them around, and in fact enjoyed their company, because they took evil good care of our house cat Sandy, and Sandy loved them back.
(Images by luzinterruptus and Issei Suda, respectively)
The Skateboarder
On my way to work this morning, there was this lanky kid with a bushy half-afro who just barely skirted by me on his skateboard. The guy was skating downhill at a pretty fast clip, but from the easy way with which he was weaving on the sidewalk, agile and liquid, you couldn’t have said that he was going much faster than a pedestrian. He wasn’t flipping ollies or getting tricky, just fluidly swathing through, making his way, ridiculously at ease. It was beautiful to see. The weather was sunny but brisk, the leaves of trees teeming in their green rustling. And at one point, the kid lifted his hands and did this little flap, like he was going to fucking start flying? God, it must be so nice to be that young again, when you feel like you’re cresting on the swelling wave of life.
So that was what I saw, just before I ducked into the crowded 4/5 subway station to come into work.
(Image - a still from Godard’s Vivre Sa Vie)
Attached is the mp3 file of the Allemande from the C-minor Partita, played by Andras Schiff. You’d probably agree that it’s closer to late Brahms than Glenn Gould, the way Schiff’s Bach is filled with longing, a kind of winter-eros.
Caravaggio’s Penitent Magdalen. Michael Fried on Caravaggio’s Magdalen, from The Moment of Caravaggio -
… the precise slump of her head, the particular expression of her face, the strange slackness of her hands, which make contact with each other but seem to have altogether renounced outward action even of a devotional sort (they are conspicuously not clasped in prayer)… we instinctively feel, without thinking about it, that the young woman in the painting has been as we find her for some considerable period of time and is likely to remain so indefinitely…
Did you read this article, “Christmas in Baltimore,” by Lawrence Jackson? I enjoyed the essay very much, but then again, I enjoy anything that deals with Baltimore. There was one Christmas break, when [ ] and I hid in her dorm room of an art school in Baltimore, against the rules of the school. We had no money and we just decided to squat, avoid the security personnel and the janitors if we could. Remarkably, we weren’t caught. We stayed in that dorm room, holding our breaths during the day, until we could creep out into the orange-sky’d night, sirens howling down North Avenue.
There was no TV and we listened to a small batch of CDs that [ ] had through the tinny speakers of her Sanyo boombox. Leon Fleisher’s Beethoven Concertos. Some Japanese pop singer. There was also a CD of Bach’s Partitas on harpsichord we listened to one day, when it snowed like hell outside. The dorm room was typical - tiny and ill-furnished. But it was enough to make me believe that for that moment, which is forever, the room was a music box, spinning on some charmed axis to the Allemande, impervious to time, in C-minor.
Shaun Tan. Brodsky & Utkin.
Last month, a long profile of the graphic novelist/children’s book illustrator Shaun Tan appeared in NY Times Magazine. Just a few days later, a great interview with Tan appeared over at The Millions. I was one of the many who was bowled over by his book, The Arrival, which was a children’s book on the surface, but a Kafkaesque allegory about alienation, foreign lands and exile in reality. Above all, it was one of the sincerest books on the meaning of family that I’d read; The Arrival was not remotely embarrassed about the value of what a family was, what a home was, which made the book all the more emotionally engaging.
Furthermore, Tan’s book The Lost Thing was adapted into a short film, and it won the Academy Award for the Best Animated Short Film last year. I’ve yet to see the film, but the book is, of course, very good. What makes Shaun Tan so satisfying is that his work resists categorization. Here’s Tan on “meaning,” when he is asked about how many versions of visual metaphors he worked through to portray the pervasive loneliness in the book, The Red Tree -
Part of the idea behind that book is that it is very dreamlike, and resists a logical interpretation, so the reader can only make an emotional assessment. I am sometimes frustrated when readers keep looking for “meaning,” as if every story has a fixed set of answers, so I wanted to create a book that obviously has none – only whatever you can bring to it using your own imagination.
How can you not buy into the guy’s modus operandi! -
The NY Times Mag profile likens him to Chris van Allsberg (The Polar Express) and Hayao Miyazaki. Sure, okay, I can see that. But when I see Shaun Tan’s visual vistas, allegorical and densely lithographic, which are still accomplished with a deft sense of lightness and whimsy, I think of Brodsky and Utkin -
Brodsky and Utkin are Russian architects who were called “paper architects” during the Soviet years because they were avant-garde architects whose style remained radical, even after the Socialist Realist style was denounced as “over-decorated” by Khruschev in the ’50s and abandoned. Brodsky and Utkin, though, continued to produce a series of whimsical architectural etchings. They were influenced by the cosmopolitan architecture of the past (i.e. Byzantine, Egyptian) as well as the post-modern concept of the city. As a result, their work seems both utopian and dystopic at once.
Anyway, their etchings are usually accompanied by equally whimsical texts written by the artists. (My favorite is “Villa Claustrophobia,” the last picture above, clearly influenced by Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon; please check their small but fascinating body of work in a book published by Princeton Architectural Press.)
The picture below is “Crystal Palace” by Brodsky and Utkin -
Accompanying the image is a haiku by Basho -
Seaweed swarms with
Transparent [minnows] Catch them -
They shall thaw without a trace.
Brodsky and Utkin further augment the Basho haiku with their thoughts on what a “Crystal Palace” is -
Crystal Palace is a beautiful but unrealizable
dream[,] a Mirage which calls you always[,] seen
a the edge of [the] visible. But as each dream [is seen] in
close examination[,] it will prove the other thing
than it seemed [from] afar. [It stands on the edge of the city.] A person who wants to
visit it will make a long way through the town
borderland, blocks of slums and dumps but co
ming at last to the Palace find neither roof nor
walls - only the huge glass plates, stuck into the
huge box of sand. A Mirage remains simply
a Mirage, though it can be touched. Passing
from one glass chink to another, a visitor will
walk [through] the Palace… and find himself at
the border of a small square, where the Landscape
commences… Did he learn the very essence of the Crys-
tal Palace[ W]ill he have a desire to visit it once more
Nobody knows…
Funny thing is, much of what Brodsky and Utkin say about the visitor walking through the Crystal Palace can also apply to the protagonist of Shaun Tan's The Arrival.
This audio file is a little known song called “There’s Nae Lark” by Samuel Barber, sung by the great baritone Gerald Finley, accompanied by Julius Drake on the piano. Published posthumously, this song was composed when Barber was just 17 years old.
Calling it a full-fledged song is a reach: it’s a hair over one minute long. The words are by Algernon Charles Swinburne, but it’s not from a free-standing poem by Swinburne, which makes this song all the more interesting and endearing to me. The words are actually from the Act V of Swinburne’s play called The Sisters: A Tragedy.
Act V of The Sisters begins with a death-haunted monologue by Anne. But right in the middle of her monologue, one hears her sister Mabel, “singing in the next room,” according to Swinburne’s stage direction. And it’s Mabel’s song, heard askance from the next room, which provides the words to Barber’s “There’s Nae Lark” -
There’s nae lark loves the light, my dear,
There’s nae ship loves the sea,
There’s nae bee loves the heather hills,
That loves as I love thee, my love,
That loves as I love thee.
The whin shines fair upon the fell,
The blithe broom on the lea:
The muirside wind is merry at heart:
It’s a’ for love o’ thee, my love,
It’s a’ for love o’ thee.
It’s remarkable to me how a 17 year-old Barber saw or read that small moment in Swinburne’s play - not even a central moment, but a mere fleeting fragment - and found it worthy of his love and attention, that he gave that fragment a separate, thriving life. What Hegel says of Dutch painting in a post I wrote yesterday - the utter devotion to the small, banal detail - you can also tell in Barber’s love for this Swinburne fragment, in the “soul and living love of his execution,” as Hegel puts it.
What this reminds me of is Friedrich Schlegel’s comment on the fragment as an art form -
A fragment must, like a little work of art, be entirely isolate from the surrounding world and complete in itself like a hedgehog.
This Barber song, this beautiful hedgehog, reminds me also of Schumann’s “In der Nacht,” which I wrote about before. Both songs have the effect of the listener eavesdropping on a private utterance of the subject. They are the musical equivalents of a furtive, long glance from a hidden place of longing.
(Images, respectively, by Hammershoi and Caillebotte)
"With me, the plan and the piece develop at the same rate. I don’t believe in making plans. In architecture you have to. If you build a house without a plan, it will fall down. But in the other arts, you don’t need one: those huge paintings by Brueghel, full of a lot of small figures, do they have a rigid composition? I don’t think so. Or Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights: it doesn’t have a plan. And neither do the works of Shakespeare, or Proust, or the plays of Ionesco, or Beethoven’s late string quartets."
~ György Ligeti, whose attraction to fractal geometry I mentioned in this previous post.
The Russian Driver, Blackberry, Irina
Last night, I got out of work late, took the car back home at 12:30 am. While I was browsing through a magazine in the backseat, my driver asked me if I had any expertise with Blackberrys. The guy was in his late 50s, thick Russian accent. He was having trouble reading the assignment messages that came from the dispatcher because he left the glasses at home, and wanted me to adjust the font to a bigger size. So I did.
We got to talking, and he asked me about my background, and I asked his. I mentioned that I admire a lot of Russian writers, and he was a bit surprised. Probably thought I was a bureaucrat. Talked about Dostoevsky a little bit. He didn’t much care for him. Reading Dostoevsky, he said, is like reading a medical textbook for me. Then he handed me a copy of a book he was reading as he swerved badly through a bend on the FDR. I had no clue, as I don’t know Cyrillic from Klingon. What is it, I asked him. “Beros,” he replied. Beros? I thought to myself, and made a mental note to look him up at home… perhaps he’s some contemporary Russian writer I should look into.
Then I saw the author photo in the inner folds of the book’s jacket, and he looked suspiciously like William S. Burroughs. Oh, duh: Burroughs = Beros! The book he handed over was a Russian translation of
, which I have not read. He told me it was pure drivel and that Burroughs was a con, that were I to give him some drugs now, he could produce something as bad as what he was reading.
My favorite Russian writer is Isaac Babel, I said. I’ve not read any Babel, he replied, almost gruffly. I told him that I once confided to my Russian friend named Irina, that I worship Babel, and she told me that Babel is not a Russian writer but a Jew from Odessa. The driver told me that although he is a muscovite himself through and through, he is also Jewish. My blood is totally Jewish, he said, but I don’t understand their tradition or the language. We were nearing my apartment. I didn’t know whether his statement was either a confirmation or repudiation of my friend Irina’s statement regarding Babel. I wanted to ask him, but after I signed his voucher, he wanted me to show him how to navigate through his Blackberry’s settings, so I couldn’t.
I thought about my friend Irina. We worked together at a bookstore, years ago. She’d followed a man to the US, and the marriage had gone awry. She was tall and forbidding, blond. Icy demeanor and sangfroid. I want to say she was fond of Bulgakov, but I’m not certain if I’m remembering correctly. She was a very tender person, however, and I could make her laugh a lot, which her friends found amazing. She eventually met a guy on a plane from Russia back to Los Angeles, and promptly decided that she was in love enough to follow him to Kansas on an impulse, against the advice of all her friends. Many months later, we received word that she hung herself from the shower rod in the bathroom of her apartment. Her mother in Russia did not have enough money to bring Irina’s body home, so all of us friends collectively chipped in what we could so that she could fly back to her native land, back to her mom.
It is evening. The reading room grows dark. The immobile figures sitting at the tables are a mix of fatigue, thirst for knowledge, ambition.
Outside the wide windows soft snow is drifting. Nearby, on the Nevsky Prospekt, life is blossoming. Far away, in the Carpathian Mountains, blood is flowing.
C'est la vie.
from “The Public Library,” by Isaac Babel (tr. Peter Constantine)
Imago, Darkness
Not at work today. In the morning, while walking on the sun-spilt 3rd Avenue, found myself thinking involuntarily about the sketch of a woman from a Vuillard painting that the photographer William Gedney made in his notebook, from his memory (I wrote about it here). How the girl in the Gedney sketch must be different from the girl in the Vuillard painting in physical detail, yet how we should be able to somehow recognize that they are indeed the same girl. By the orientation of their compassionate gaze, only, fixed on the same point on the same axis.
Wittgenstein says this, in Philosophical Investigations -
What makes my image of him into an image of him?
Not its looking like him.
The same question applies to the expression “I see him now vividly before me” as to the image. What makes this utterance into an utterance about him? - Nothing in it or simultaneous with it (‘behind it’)…
… (But it is also possible for a face to come before my mind, and even for me to be able to draw it, without my knowing whose it is or where I have seen it.)
It is also possible for a face to come before my mind, Wittgenstein says, even for me to be able to draw it. Not just faces, then, but also certain inexorable scenes from the lost times. Like: winter, 1995. It was dusk. I walked out to housebreak our golden retriever puppy, Milan. The snow blanketed roads; no cars could pass. And me in my red pajama pants, shivering. Why the hell I had a pair of red pajama pants, I have no idea. I looked up: the halo around the street lamp. By twos and threes, then eventually in precarious swirls, snow fell in slow wafts. Then I spotted the window of our apartment, and she was there, looking down at me. I waved. She didn’t wave back. I creased my hands in the folds of my armpits, fighting to get warm, waiting for the dog to shit, looking at her, what. And I wondered why she was at that window, so still, looking at me for so long. The beams from the TV ghosted out the window in mesmeric bursts, making her stillness seem, in blue relief, like the first process of bidding goodbye.
Also - a picture we took at the Six Flags in Virginia that I’d lost, but remember vividly. She is wearing a white shirt and white pants, short black hair curled up at the ends. We are sitting on a bench, summer trees teeming behind us. I only remember because in the picture (and in life), she had her hand on my knee and I remember that touch, the weight of her white hand.
Again, Wittgenstein -
“I was going to say…..” - You remember various details. But not even all of them together shew your intention. It is as if a snapshot of a scene had been taken, but only a few scattered details of it were to be seen: here a hand, there a bit of a face, or a hat - the rest is dark. And now it is as if we knew quite certainly what the whole picture represented. As if I could read the darkness.
(Images, respectively: William Gedney, Caillebotte, Kim Hyun-shik)
Schumann’s lied “In der Nacht” from Spanische Liederbuch was written in 1849, which was a phenomenally productive year for Schumann (I think he finished forty works) - a rare period of mental lucidity for the composer. In five years, as most of you know already, he’d throw himself into the Rhine, only to be rescued by some fishermen. In 1856, he died in an asylum near Bonn, the voices in his head telling him that he’s sailing on the arctic seas, commanding him to make lists of towns and rivers.
The luminous version of “In der Nacht” that I listen to (attached) is sung by Jan De Gaetani & Leslie Guinn, accompanied by pianist Gilbert Kalish, from their Schumann: Duets album, which is out of print. There’s a reason why this CD fetches 70-80 bucks sometimes in the used CD marketplace. De Gaetani, who is well renowned for her interpretations of 20th century composers, like Charles Ives, has an even-keeled, silver-flecked voice that is allergic to cloying sentimentality: perfectly suited for “In der Nacht” and other songs in Spanische Liederbuch. I actually listen to the original pressing of it on vinyl (Nonesuch); I got it from a street seller who usually hawks LPs near Astor Place. A big secret for you New Yorkers - he’s very knowledgeable about jazz and classic rock, so he prices them high, but doesn’t much care for classical, and often sells his classical stock at a ridiculously low price at the end of his shift, just so he can have less to carry back home: I picked up my LP for $2. On vinyl, the album sounds startlingly good, better than CD, easily.
The melancholy of “In der Nacht” is pointed, despite its nocturnal dreaminess. The words are based on an anonymous Spanish poem translated by the lyric poet Emanuel von Geibel, a slight material for a song, if you ask me. All of its thirty words:
Alle gingen, Herz, zur Ruh, alle schlafen, nur nicht du. Denn der hoffnungslose Kummer scheucht von deinem Bett den Schlummer, und dein Sinnen schweift in stummer Sorge seiner Liebe zu seiner Liebe zu.
(All have gone to their rest, heart, all are sleeping except you. Because hopeless care frightens away slumber from your bed, and your thoughts wander in silent sorrow to their love.)
It is breathtaking what Schumann does with those few words; to me, the song’s a wonder of emotional compression and economy. It begins with a simple, seemingly aimless piano prelude that suggests - in its somnolent brevity - a sleepless night of walking, maybe in a garden or a path. Then a woman’s voice enters, singing the words. And what can I say? It’s the music of insomniac longing of the best kind, its sorrow gently plaintive, but always clear-eyed.
Then comes a moment in the song which is purely Schumann at his genius best. Just when you think the woman’s song is about to end, her lover’s voice enters, echoing the exact same words she has said. Two voices twine, singing about the same longing separately, together. Just as you think that you are hearing the woman’s soliloquy, the song opens up a different perspective, and lets you know that it’s actually a dialogue between two lovers, or, at least, their consonant thoughts reverberating in darkness. It has a similar effect as a long passage in W.G. Sebald’s work might - when in the midst of reading a monologue by a character, say, Max Ferber in The Emigrants, a reader realizes that the monologue is actually nested within a dialogue between Ferber and the Sebald narrator.
Every time I finish listening to Schumann’s “In der Nacht,” my mind hearkens back to the first half of the song, when the woman is singing alone. I think about her lover’s patient silence as he watches her speak, hidden in the shadows perhaps, his gaze across the night’s darkness, its narcotic span. How could I have missed him? I think to myself, and let the song repeat.
(Images by Kazha Imura and Jeff Wall, respectively)
Beethoven: Opus 110 Sonata
Mentioned Kundera’s comments on the fugue in Beethoven’s Opus 110 Sonata yesterday. I frankly found his writing on the fugue in the third movement somewhat bloated and sentimental. But before he launches into his thoughts on the fugue, he writes about the recitativo which begins the movement, and at least to me, it’s far and away the best part in Kundera’s essay -
… the fugue is a part of the third (final) movement; it is introduced by a short passage of a few bars marked recitative. The melody loses its songlike quality here and becomes speech [bold, mine]; intensified, with an irregular rhythm, consisting mainly of the repetition of the same notes in sixteenth and thirty-second notes; then comes a composition in four parts.
Kundera’s description of the recitativo, that “the melody loses its songlike quality and becomes speech,” is perfect. (Kind of like Wittgenstein’s private language that Murakami mentions in his interview? Perhaps… more later.) Here below is the part that he’s writing about -
It’s a just a bar of music at first glance, a seemingly simple stretch. Consists of a mere few seconds of one note - A-natural - being repeated in common time. But look closer and you see that there are dramatic shifts in tempo and dynamics, as the progression of A-naturals gradually speeds up and grows louder tutte le corde, then diminishes and slows down in ritardando. When you actually hear it, the effect is haunting, as a single note is struck over and over again, each note tensely ghosting in place. As Kundera mentions, it becomes an utterance, more speech than song. (I’ll post up the audio for this later, when I’m home)
What’s enigmatic is the shift in key, right in the middle of the bar. From submediant F-flat to E-major. No audible difference in the tonality, as F-flat tonally is E; A-naturals sound just as they did before the change in key. But in the spectral key-change that exists between two A’s -
it’s as if something… or everything has changed. As if tonality is rendered irrelevant, and what should seem familiar, both internal and external to us, are no longer so: somehow altered, without our cognizance. I wrote about Anne Carson’s poem, “Gnosticism VI” earlier this week, and its closing lines perfectly capture how this single bar of music affects me -
And suddenly a vacancy, a silence,
is somewhere inside the machine. Veins pounding.
About Me
books. baseball. LPs. 45s. 78s. City. alcohol. ghosts.
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