The great nineteenth-century violinist and composer Henri Vieuxtemps took less than two weeks to learn Beethoven's deeply personal D major violin concerto (opus 61). The performance by Jennifer Koh at the Caramoor Festival in Katonah, NY (July 19, 2015) is painful evidence, for me, that Romanticism is cold in the ground. Koh remarked in a pre-concert interview that she had to walk away from the concerto for six years, in order to purge herself (I suppose) of the accrued influences of the ages. Would that she had not! Her lack of vibrato, slides, and position changes, and other expressive devices of the great Romantics and their heirs, up to and including Perlman, Shaham, and even Kremer, were absent or barely audible. I recall with immense pleasure hearing, as a child, a recording played for me by my grandfather, of Grumiaux singing -- not just playing! -- this astounding piece of music. One can only imagine how Vieuxtemps must have opened the piece: silvery lines slinking like enchanted serpents through the Arcadian lushness of the orchestra. Oh well. Jennifer Koh might as well have been a computer, spitting out the data pumped into her by some unimaginative programmer. It is sad, because I adore this concerto, and I recall the days of yore when I attempted -- and failed -- to perform it myself. It is no easy task to sing Beethoven's notes. Yet here we are, in a day and age in which lovely women with little talent gain attention for simply looking fine on the concert platform, damn the performance. A notable exception, of course, is Julia Fischer: beautiful but overwhelmingly gifted with the voice of the ages. Listen, if you'd like to recover from Koh's languid performance, to this fine example of the decaying Romantic art. We need a necromancer, a true master of the black arts, to raise Classical music once again to the demanding, sensual, and even subversive artform that it once was, and should be. I regret wasting the better part of my Sunday evening listening to Koh drag her tender heels through one of the most verdant soundscapes of the repertoire.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_N15_3_TP7ISunday, July 19, 2015
Friday, July 17, 2015
Something Deeply Personal, but not Maudlin (I think)
What horrifies me most is the idea of being useless: well-educated, brilliantly promising, and fading out into an indifferent middle age.
~ Sylvia Plath
Nobody likes a sob story, so I shall try not to torment my reader with sobbing, moaning, or whimpering. Yet here is something indicative of the United States of Armed-Buzz-Cutted-Uniformed-Officer-Worshipping-Nonthinkers. To get deeply personal, I am in treatment for bipolar disorder and alcoholism; I have been for some time. After my divorce (2010) I made two (obviously) unsuccessful suicide attempts, swam into the deepest ocean of booze I could find, had unprotected sex (thank whatever maker-critter that exists that I am not dying of something slow and creeping), and picked fights with guys much bigger and more agile than I. But I continued to read, write, and even lecture. Through it all, my ex-wife never once dropped me a line to ask about the piece of phosphorescent detritus that my life has become. So be it. However, one bright day, as I sat in my favorite spot by the lake, guzzling from a bottle of cheap gin and reading Keats, I finally decided to put a stop to the decline -- I called the Alcoholics Anonymous hotline and entered a rehabilitation clinic. That was back in 2013. Sure, there have been relapses since then, but for the most part I have remained sober. Yet under the miscropscopic and, yes, well-meaning care of the psychiatric professionals who treated me, it came to light that I am bipolar. Anyone who doesn't know what that means, well, google it. But the short version is this: I get happy and energetic for a day or two, and then I fall into a deep pit of despair and I want to die. So I am on medication and I go to therapy every week; I attend support groups and even -- despite my atheism -- go to A.A. meetings and say the Serenity Prayer with all the other depserate men and women who are taking it one miserable day at a time. I continue to write and have recently done a pretty fun lecture on Hemingway and a few other greats, near-greats, and ingrates of the literary world of the not-too-distant past. Anyway ...
A few days ago I had a notably horrible day. I awoke from a vivid dream of my ex-wife: a love-making scene that lingered after waking -- I could still smell her shampoo and taste her daffodil flesh. The dark corridor of my building was filled with the scent of pot smoke, and someone was arguing in an adjacent apartment. I walked outside, lit a cigar, and felt like every motion was an exercise not merely in futility but in cosmic mockery. I felt as though my very existence was an affront to everything that flourishes under the sun. I called my psychiatrist and went in for a very long session. We talked at great length, and she encouraged me to attend a performance of the student orchestra at the local university, which I did -- after asking a woman old enough to be my mother to go with me (but that is an ongoing drama with little bearing on this account). It was a nice time: Mozart's 14th symphony, rather languid but pleasing. When I returned home, I drank a few beers, took a few klonopin, and went to sleep. The days meandered: I read a new Clive Barker book, nothing deep, and listened to a lot of Art Blakey and even some Sun Ra. And now for the kicker ...
Just a short while ago, as I was finishing my dinner, a knock came at my door, and when I opened it I was shocked to see two burly armed police officers and a petite, unthreatening woman staring me down. She was a representative of the clinic where I go for my psychiatric treatment, there to check up on me (fair enough). But what bothered me was the two grim-faced officers, hands on weapons, staring at me like I was a criminal. So Edward being Edward, I asked them if they were planning to shoot me in the back. They didn't answer, so I said, "Oh, you won't shoot me, I'm not black." Again, no response, just threatening stares. After assuring the woman that I was not planning to harm myself or anyone else, I demanded that they leave my apartment. They did not immediately did so, as they should have by law. Instead, they made me wait while the woman called her "supervisor" to report the outcome of the visit. Shortly thereafter -- after the armed goons looked around my private residence -- they left.
Is this the United States I am living in? Apparently, one cannot have a mental illness without trigger-happy conformists showing up at one's door whenever they feel like it. In case you haven't figured it out, I despise cops. Anyone who wants to walk about armed and have the power to incarcerate one's fellow citizens should not be permitted to do so. Only the truly caring, altruistic ones among us ... Oh wait, where the fuck are they?
So here I am, in early middle age, looking down a barrel of hopelessness. I have no woman in my life, no real friends, no career any longer ... Shit, I don't even have a cat (landlord won't let me). Why do I write, and care. I picked up a book about Pope Francis today, planning to review it. But who will care? I'd like to say "fuck it" and stop at the liquor store before it closes (I have about an hour). Someone said that every writer writes for some one special person. I write for my ex-wife. She was the goddess who painted the world with the ever-shifting colors of her diverse, fascinating mind ... and tantalized me with the liquid silk of her clothes and the delicate arches of her feet, that made the ground grow rigid at her touch, as I still do -- albeit an imaginary touch.
BY ROBERT HERRICK
Whenas in silks my Julia goes,
Then, then (methinks) how sweetly flows
That liquefaction of her clothes.
Next, when I cast mine eyes, and see
That brave vibration each way free,
O how that glittering taketh me!
The Ruin (Part I.)
Anglo-Saxon Poem (ca. 750 C.E.)
Translation © 2015 Edward Moore
[Allegory is a neglected art nowadays. Chester, England, and the memory of She Who is Dearest saturates these lines: only part of the surviving fragmentary poem, which I plan to translate in full in the coming weeks, is plastered here today. -- E.M.]
Well-wrought were these walls, ruined by fate
Once proud work of giants pulled down
Now without roof, nothing remains
But pock-marked bricks, broken and strewn about
To tell of the great age when mighty men
Consigned now to the crusty ground
Made these monuments -- Alas! they are
Gripped by the unforgiving earth
Upon which now walks another race,
Until the long count of years
Overwhelms them too.
Many lives of men this wall outlasted
Battle-stained and storm-wracked
Withstood the onslaught of glory-seekers
But now it bows to the ground.
Monday, July 13, 2015
"Whoa there, palsy-walsy ... Mama spank."
Nathanael West, The Day of the Locust (1939)
Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, Venus in Furs [Project Gutenberg EBook 2004 #6852]
After the years of drinking, the months of pill-popping, the weeks of crying out like a finger-nail-biting brat at my psychiatrist's office, and the days of singing Marley's "Redemption Songs" in the shower (with aid of a fine drug called Lithium), I have at last begun to enjoy Bobby Timmons again. His pattern-finding piano style, which is like a reconnaisance of musical possibilities with a faulty set of binoculars, is suited to that which I can only call the soul's lament: too tired and sick of the sun to do more than recline in the shadows and murmur -- eloquently to oneself. This is of great importance to me, for sound is the only power capable of scrambling the all-too-organized onslaught of memories that has become increasingly vocal in my dreams.
She was much more than pretty. ... She was smiling, a subtle half-smile uncontaminated by thought.
She wasn't hard-boiled. It was just that she put love on a special plane ...
Her invitation wasn't to pleasure, but to struggle ... If you threw yourself on her, it would be like throwing yourself from a parapet of a sky-scraper. You would do it with a scream. You couldn't expect to rise again. [my emphasis]
In the novella, Faye gives both Tod and Homer a chance to become fervent worshippers of disinterested female beauty. As I have written elsewhere (in my piece on Anglo-Saxon heroics), the decline of manly notions of self-sacrifice as heroism (exemplified in poems like "The Battle of Maldon," the Finnsburh fragment, and, of course, Beowulf) and the rise (so to speak) of chivalry as the noble licking of the female shoe (exemplified in the works of the great troubadors) made it possible for a man to really know himself sexually.
Man is the one who desires, woman the one who is desired. This is woman's entire but decisive advantage. (Madame Venus, in Sacher-Masoch, Venus in Furs, p. 10)
Actually, I did not write this explicitly in the piece on Anglo-Saxon heroics, but I'm writing it now. To be overwhelmed by a woman -- in all the gasping, pleading, writhing, breathless ways possible -- is, for me, the height of sexual experience and the utmost expression of my love for the one who entices, torments in exquisite fashion, and ultimately fulfills me -- by releasing me. I mean, of course, the release of orgasm, which only has meaning when the eyes of the cummer meet those of the one making it happen. I look up, out of the world, only held to sanity by the embrace of the one into whom I pour myself.
I am not sure what to make of The Day of the Locust. I only know that Faye stood out, for me, as a proto-dominatrix for whom the torment she inflicted upon her worshippers (and I consider Tod to have been a more deeply afflicted fane-builder than Homer) amounted to a trifle. For she only sought fame as an actress, to be loved by the faceless crowd. Her desire was the type that no single person can fulfill, and so she was inaccessible -- by accident of temperament, not by conscious design. My ex-wife sought, not fame, but a type of success that was peculiar to her: a carefully maintained and organized exertion of her abilities in a finite sphere (if that makes even a subatom of sense). In this, I had no effect, no influence, no staying-power -- once she achieved her goal, it was on to the next thing. Sex was a matter of desire meeting opportunity. For me, it was a world to be explored with no waystations prepared in advance. In music, one might compare Bobby Timmons at his unbuttoned best with the nearly neurotic tight-laced perfectionist mouldings of Steely Dan. There is perfection and grace in both, but the soul (and I am getting increasingly comfortable using that word again) lavishes itself upon itself most primally in the former, and finds itself a carven glazed monument in the latter.
* * * * *
She was, indeed, much more than pretty. That is a word that has become nearly obsolete, at least among the younger set. It is too cute and ... small. Which is precisley what it means: small, dainty, cuddly, easy to control. A pretty woman is a woman who is on one's level, who doesn't demand much in the way of intellectual investment -- she may not be easy sexually, but she is easy to talk to. Pretty much. My ex-wife demanded much in the way of talk; she had deep notions and her ideas, if not well-developed, were certainly large entities scratching frantically at the door of logos. Speaking with her was a welcome challenge; and as the conversation increased, so did my desire.
There is a Japanese visual art in which the artist is forced to be spontaneous. He must paint on a thin stretched parchment with a special brush and black water paint in such a way that an unnatural or interrupted stroke will destroy the line or break through the parchment. Erasures or changes are impossible. These artists must practice a particular discipline, that of allowing the idea to express itself in communication with their hands in such a direct way that deliberation cannot interfere. (Bill Evans, "Improvisation in Jazz," liner notes to Miles Davis, Kind of Blue [1959])
The excitement of the moment, when "direct deed is the most meaningful reflection" (ibid.), produces a space in which we may adjust the temperature to our liking. A mixing of metaphors here, but it makes sense. Think of the power resident in a single word from the one you love: productive of peace, elation, comfort, and the stress of response -- all in one elaborate yet tantalizingly simple moment. It is like the call in music ... the opening provided by the bassist, whose thunder, upon receding, gives the violin a chance to soar mightily into a realm of once repressed, now expressed, memories. Music does that to a soul -- there it is again -- music takes nous into a realm of instant communication, in which "I don't know" is not an option. Music demands a response, and a call in return. The beauty of the woman to whom one replies musically is not prettiness times ten, it is awesome Beauty. The sublime.
"And always cold in this modern world of ours, she seeks to keep her sublime body warm in a large heavy fur and her feet in the lap of her lover. I imagine the favorite of a beautiful despot, who whips her slave, when she is tired of kissing him, and the more she treads him underfoot, the more insanely he loves her" (Sacher-Masoch, Venus in Furs, p. 119). Such is the metaphor of the one who has found his perfect match, only to be aware -- in a manner so painful as to defy words -- "that the end was in sight even before she did. All he could do to prevent its coming was to increase his servility and his generosity. He waited on her hand and foot" (West, The Day of the Locust, p. 143). Any man who has ever been in this position knows it does not work. It annoys the goddess, and the whipping and the kissing ceases. Role-play is the closest one can ever come to the experience of loving a woman from below, from beneath her exquisite feet, while gazing into her incomparable eyes. Speech does not occur here, and so the tearing of the ever-so-delicate parchment is not a danger. Yet the comforting absence of speech, the pure anticipation of what may or may not occur -- Will she permit an orgasm? Will she make me pass out beneath her latex-clad bottom? -- these wonders are safe possibilities. No matter what she does or does not do, when the role-playing session is over, she remains my beloved. Yet the time comes -- not for all, but for me -- when the fun is over and the the fear is not the luxurious fear of the tightening of the plastic bag over my head as she brings me to climax, but the very real fear of knowing that she has contacted attorneys, and my days of hearing her voice and kissing her with all the love a mind-body composite can bear to feel without going mad are over. Forever.
I remember the glory of seeing her so long ago, in her bathrobe, gloriously barefoot, smiling the placid smile of one who has something so special planned that it must be concealed beneath the subterfuge of a bedtime gesture: a night of placing my tongue in places that produce the most mellifluous moans ...
The Day of the Locust is a book about the loss of a goddess who never had a chance to be genuinely adored and worshipped, for both Tod and Homer were uncreative souls, incapable of knowing that Faye's wall of apparent unobtainability was in fact a result of "boredom and disappointment" -- for a powerful woman despises uncreative men.
"Yes--you have awakened my dearest dream," I cried. "It has slept long enough."
"And this is?" She put her hand on my neck.
I was seized with a sweet intoxication under the influence of this warm little hand and of her regard, which, tenderly searching, fell upon me through her half-closed lids.
"To be the slave of a woman, a beautiful woman, whom I love, whom I worship." (Sacher-Masoch, Venus in Furs, p. 48)
And this most creative man got his wish -- for a while, for it eventually turned into a hell. But one must experience the fullness of female dominance before undertanding that it forces a man to appreciate what made the troubadors tick, what made poets like Byron cherish in verse the all-too-rare gift of unconditonal love, or which made Wyatt write, in a different vein, "But all is turned now through my gentleness / Into a strange fashion of forsaking." One never knows if one's love is truly returned, if the light behind the beloved's eyes is burning within or simply a reflection of one's own. The only truth, really, the truth that can be experienced without question, is that of plain old forsaking. When I fell upon my knees, kissed the hem of her bathrobe -- much later in our marriage -- and watched as she turned away in disgust, I knew with a certainty unknown before: I was despised. Not for lack of creativity but for my addiction to the bottle.
She whipped so hard that the blood flowed, and that, at last, notwithstanding my heroic spirit, I cried and wept and begged for mercy. She then had me untied, but I had to get down on my knees and thank her for the punishment and kiss her hand. (Venus in Furs, p. 42)
All is metaphor here (well, not entirely), but I never did get a chance to kiss her hand. I was utterly forsaken.
* * * * *
I am writing this piecemeal, after a bout of blackout drunkenness and a trip to the hospital for detox. It is 4:30 AM and I am drinking black coffee by the potfull and writing in spite of myself. I realized in the hospital that if all were to end, it would be like this:
"One step further," [Marilynn] commanded. "Now kneel down, and kiss my foot."
She extended her foot beyond the hem of white satin, and I, the supersensual fool, pressed my lips upon it. (Venus in Furs, p. 99)
Yes, I was and am a fool -- but not an uncreative one. I did not, like the silly Tod in West's tale, run madly into a crowd who possessed no "mental equipment for leisure" (p. 178). But leisure is not what the supersensualist wants. The lovely Lisa [she was / is a woman from Philadelphia whom I "dated" for a bit after my wife left me; Lisa was, perhaps still is, a sexual acrobat with ever-open legs] enjoyed the leisure of free sex: experimental episodes with bondage equipment was not her thing, but she did give me several handjobs that made me scream so loudly that the neighbors complained -- so I guess I can't complain. One day, as "punishment" for forgetting to buy her bourbon, she made me remove the shoes she'd been wearing that hot summer day and kiss her feet.
What does this have to do with anything? Not a fucking thing, except that I am sober and suffering from insomnia and need to ejaculate some words. I am listening to the Stones, Exile on Main Street, and none of it makes a damned bit of sense. I look at the unsmoked cigar sitting on my desk and wonder why I am still alive.