What about the rest—he looks down at the sea of heads below him and they all are staring straight ahead, like a school of fish, a herd of domesticated animals, oblivious and unknowing. They don’t appear to have noticed either. The conductor—yes, he seems to be glancing, or scowling, in the direction of the trumpets, but maybe that is only Theodore’s imagination. It was just a brief instant. The conductor’s arms are still waving wantonly about his head—up and down they go. With a flourish, he points towards the strings and asks them for more.
Perhaps Theodore has only imagined it. But whether he imagined it or not, even the thought of the wrong note has shattered the unified reality created by all of these musicians playing together. It has ruined the performance for him.
As the soloist and the orchestra come together one last time to play the final triumphant chords, Theodore finds he must look away. He stares down at the program clutched within his hands and tries to ignore the absorbing and resonant beauty of the ultimate notes, and the searing wave of applause that must follow.
AT HOME, IN the bathroom, Ilene undresses and starts brushing her teeth in her underwear. It is one of her habits that doesn’t quite annoy him, but is something that doesn’t lend itself to enhancing his mood in the moments before they might find themselves in bed together, ready for sex. He could say something to her about it, but that would only serve to expand this minor distraction into an incident that would certainly break the magical spell required for the two of them to come together, and, at worst, escalate into a full-blown argument between them.
At any rate, he isn’t in the mood for sex. They would normally top off a night such as this with a congenial session in bed, but Theodore cannot shake the disappointments of this day enough to avoid another disappointment. That sour note from the second trumpet—he knows he heard it—seems to linger in his ears; he can hear it reverberating through the vast concert hall, a momentary rip in the fabric of the symphony that has grown into a chasm.
Ilene can sense his mood. He sees that by the way she leans over the sink to spit out a mouthful of toothpaste. She doesn’t glance at him in the mirror as she does this, only looks down at the bowl of the sink. He unbuttons his cuffs and decides this is his chance to break away. He catches her eye in the mirror as she raises up from the sink and splashes water into her mouth to rinse.
“I think I’m going to go downstairs and work.”
“Okay.” The answer comes back to him as two even, level syllables, both an acknowledgment and an unstated question, the question being, “Why aren’t you coming to bed?”
He pats her, twice, on the bottom, with his hand slightly cupped, as lightly as a small child would tamp down sand around the base of a sand castle, a gesture that is enough to convey to her the idea that he still finds her sexy and attractive, it is only his own foul mood that is deterring him.
Relieved from the pressure of the bedroom, he hurries down the stairs before she can gather enough courage to call after him. He holds onto the railing as he turns the corner at the landing, in the dark. Lately, his hip has been bothering him, his left one. A tightness, a twinge of pain, that makes him take the steps after the landing one at a time; my God, he thinks, this must be what it feels like to begin growing old.
His study is all the way across the house, at the end of the back hallway that leads to the garage, as far away from their bedroom as can be. He often stays up later than Ilene, to work—he does some of his best work in the still hours after midnight, when the rest of the world is asleep and he can be alone with his thoughts. This study is his favorite place to think: the sound deadened by plush carpeting, a desk as wide as the two windows that look out onto the garden, two Degas prints flanking it—the one with the pink and green shades displayed most prominently on the wall that’s visible as he enters. Also here, the piano he uses to distract himself when the work is not going so well.
The sheet music is open on the stand above the keys, taunting him, luring him. It is more a book than a sheet, the entire Grieg concerto he heard only an hour and a half ago distilled onto 72 pages of paper. The score shows both the piano solo and the orchestral parts below, for reference. From a few feet away, the music appears to be a blur of dots and dashes, a secret code only a madman could read, crazy patterns zig-zagging up and down and across the page. He moves closer, drawn to the silent challenge of the score. Examining the music written out this way always proves to be a bit daunting for him: Look at all the notes, the beams and dots and demi-quavers and crochets, the prickly sharps and flats that litter the runs and transmit the feel of fingers trickling up and down the keys. How could one man conceive of such a thing? And then, having conceived of it, how could he so precisely translate his vision—his audition, more properly—onto the page?
Theodore sits down at the bench before the piano and turns to page 58, where the very last section of the third movement begins—the culminating majesty of the final runs and trumpet blasts and rolling tympani. He rolls his head around, shrugs his shoulders and shakes his hands to loosen up the fingers. He pronates his left foot, to get ready for the pedals—it feels as if he has banged his ankle on something, as if there is a bruise right on the ball of it, one of those odd aches and pains that he sometimes feels without knowing where it has come from. In his head, he hears the woods and strings play their jumping background rhythm that leads directly to the alternating left-hand chords he starts to play as a lead-in to the first trilling runs of this final six-minute section.
It is not all fast, but it is intricate. He bangs it out, with feeling, leaning his weight on the keys, bringing all the sound he can out of this little upright piano, pausing for a moment here and there where the orchestra is supposed to echo his runs. He has been working on mastering this section for eight weeks now; he knows he should begin with the slower middle movement, but these 88 bars of music are, to him, the epitome of greatness, the condensation of everything he feels about his own work, expressed in a wall of melody.
The sound is not the same—in his mind he hears the great soloist from a short while ago playing, the huge concert grand, like a giant harp laid down on its side, sending waves of thrilling notes across the giant space of the auditorium. But here, the notes are muffled, muddy, slightly off pitch. The piano needs to be tuned, and its small upright sound board will never match what he heard earlier this evening. A piano like that must cost two or three hundred thousand dollars.
As he attempts a delicate run in which he has to cross over his hands to get all the way up the keyboard, the fingers on his left hand catch, stumble over themselves, and falter.
The notes come to an abrupt stop.
He will probably never learn the entire piece—he will certainly never master it. Better to give it up.
Better to abandon the pursuit of excellence than to keep plodding along in a halting, stumbling, defiantly inferior manner. Enough. He will sign the letter, and, in doing so, formally give up the idea that he might ever accomplish anything as masterful and filled with genius as playing a piece such as this, or writing a piece such as this, or discovering a basic principle of the workings of nature. He can finally admit now that he has never possessed the spark of genius required to do these things.
He stands up from the piano and turns to his desk where the letter waits, hidden beneath the portfolio he uses for meeting notes. He reads the entire contents of the letter, standing, his hand quavering a bit as he holds the creamy rag paper Victor’s assistant uses for official documents. His eye is drawn to one sentence in particular: I freely admit that my use of the word “God” in my speech was a deviation from the proposed presentation approved by the Institute for Cosmological Physics and the New International Perspectives on String Theory Symposium and reflects a personal wording choice that was an attempt to provide a suitable metaphor for concepts that often prove difficult to describe outside the realm of mathematics.
When he considers it carefully, he must admit that all of this is true. He was grasp
ing for a way to express ideas that had been bothering him lately, in the run-up to the conference. And, it is true, that what he said was a deviation from what Victor saw and signed off on before the paper was submitted for publication and the presentation was sent to the conference chair. It’s all true, all the mistakes he has made. All the shortcomings.
He lays the paper down on his desk and takes up a pen. He glances at the empty space above his printed name for a moment and then slowly, carefully, draws the pen across the rough texture of the page, making sure each letter of his name is entirely legible, so everyone can see:
Theodore J. Reveil, Ph.D.
There is nothing left to do—he can let go now of everything that has ever mattered to him, of everything that has made him who he is. He goes over to the day bed on the far side of the room and lies down on it, closes his eyes, and lets it all return to its native nothingness.
THE DREAM BEGINS simply enough, as an encounter with his brother, whom he rarely sees these days, down in Texas with his two small children and his happy, conventional life as an insurance adjuster for the frequent weather-related disasters that plague the region, hurricanes and twisters and hailstorms, lightning strikes, fire and brimstone. As is usually the case, there is enough incongruity in the setting to let him know it is a dream. Geoffrey (not Jeffrey, their parents had a penchant for granting their children old-fashioned, more-British names and spellings) enters the living room of a house that feels very much like their great Aunt Irma’s house, a house Theodore has not thought about, much less visited, in nearly thirty years. He has in tow both of his young children, Avery, the girl, and Cassidy, the boy. Geoffrey was not going to saddle his own children with conventional names—no, they would have uniquely current names that carry little meaning. And the children, in this dream, are even younger than their current age, maybe three and five. They are happy to see him, their uncle Teddy, and perhaps that’s why his mind has placed them all in old Aunt Irma’s two-bedroom bungalow, giving extra emphasis to his role as an uncle in that way dreams have of giving us extra perspectives on things—he is in a way seeing the encounter both through his own eyes and through the eyes of the little children, and from above, as if he is floating near the gabled ceiling of the sparsely furnished room, a benign god-like presence overseeing all.
Now he sees that he is holding a large, floppy, leather-bound book in his hands, and as he opens the book to show Geoffrey something in it, his brother comes near, holding little Avery’s hand in his, and the three of them read the single line that is printed in the middle of the silky white page: WE ARE EACH OF US BEINGS OF LIGHT.
The words would seem to emit a shimmer of careless energy, transmitting a smile to Geoffrey’s face. Theodore turns to him and nods, as if to confirm the validity of the message; always the teacher, always the purveyor of wisdom, always smarter than the rest.
Then, something profoundly disturbing happens. His viewpoint draws within himself for a moment, and then is lifted up, away from this room and any other and, what’s more, releases itself entirely from his body. The pages in the book evaporate from view, and the house and people with it. Everything draws itself to a solitary station within him. Everything collapses into nothing, and every thing that made him who he thinks he is is gone completely. He is drawn within and lifted within, he is every reason and no reason at all. He is dressed in nothing, no longer clothed in the body that has carried him, he is beyond that now. He slides within a filament that draws around him like valves releasing him to another world. He sees this as a film of burnished celluloid, a bustling swamp of cells surrounding him, blinking, bunched up verdigris, a swarm of liquid animals that might be his very own.
In a corner of his vision, another layer appears; another and another, drawing him down, within. He passes through several layers and stops, it seems, in one. In this layer the cells are gone and there are only patterns, shapes, relationships. Brightly colored textures, flashing past him, cords of fabric woven from boiling worms of ruling death. Molecules that bind together, attracted one to another, tendrils of particular weight and thickness that dictate whether or not one may happen to link to this one or that. And soon enough he passes through this, drawn down once more past layers upon layers, each more fantastic than the next.
Whatever corner of his soul has opened up to reveal has drawn him down and within to restless wandering, a fitful flight of midnight learning, quenching his true scholarship by means of miracle and glorious scrawled delight. Here nothing seems as it is and the dust of his imperiled intellect has been swept aside, leaving only the essence of matter itself laid bare. The ground of being sweats away a monstrous secret excellence. The ordering of every level makes way for one far deeper and far more intricate than the one last. Wave upon wave of violence operates here and now the final unity of matter shuns the forms he would recognize as his own. Here buzzing particles shimmer and flit by like tides of trembling light. Here hosts of frozen absolute passion form the final layer of something that could leap from one state to the next. Distance, space and time are nothing here—there is no time or space. When only energy is present, in its primal form, its first endeavoring, then only emotion rules the superabundance of power. Time cannot be measured without a gap between one second and the next. Space cannot be measured without a stopping point, where one thing is and another isn’t. When all everything smoothly flows throughout, there is no longer here nor there. There can be no yester-day or to-day. There is only the swinging constant rhythm of total lacerating Now.
There is only every covenant of droves of buzzing particles, a shimmering flow through copious proud and angry lust. And finally, when he thinks his head will burst with the staggering pressure building out in all directions, it stops.
It stops, and opens to reveal.
Reveal; now heaven opens in a dream.
Heaven, true to light, a primal empty vastness on beyond whatever lies on top of it, brushed and varnished empty vastness, too enormous to be real. All everlasting nothing opened up to a chasm abyss wider than a sky that held a leaf that fell and landed in a perilous delight. Perhaps a tenuous cloud existed here once, but if it ever did, there can be no trace of it now and here there was no yester-day, is only evermore. There can be only pure fantastic vastness, an emptiness that has no bounds and makes the vacuum of space appear to be a teeming jungle filled to the brim with stuff by comparison. It is a nothingness that supports all the layers he fell through with its serenity and calm. It is a naked gleaming pasture of clarity through which all the other common blooming filth of existence can emanate. It is the single place from which everything ex-ists. It is the unitary moment from which all days take place. It is the one and only thought from which all other thoughts deliver.
It is.
And there can be no other.
It is the roiling surface of the sun scraped smooth until it is only light. It is the proud reluctant vastness of a shore that knows no end. Two cubits and four cubits, four cubits and eight. Flashing screeching something was a beast that meant no harm from fullness of a whim to terrible love or blood must slobber and groan and forge a tabernacle of hosts of tender impatient imagining there goes no other lure no other bait and cast and significant of the wherewithal to turn away from here to preach and keep on preaching to stare into the vastness of a crippled wave of curative disease to harken to the listless tentacles that rip apart a swinging necessity that never goes away. Yield and never yield, never stand apart and never waste the start of nothing never the savage instrument of his demeanor launching startled flesh-and-bone delight; how many times has this tautology been taunting him and us and them? How many vitriolic modulations terminations terrifying dress and sword and shield and analogy to meanwhile great performance field reveal. In Kepler’s tentative abundance of forms and formulations there was naught imperative to which a decaying shadow of doubt were instead of protable sweat and shorn. And shore again and faith who lived for me who knows for him the days and nights that mount t
o thee the boy that counts the agony. And drift bespoke beside the English passion the daughter raised and honed and silently prepared for slaughter. Wherein there is the giving up of eyes of sense relation between perceptual and untarnished thought secure. Wherefore there is the supper time dilation of a heart’s abundant beating. Wherever may come the ruined palaces of long and latent reversible respites. Wherefore the two men who came to love the wretched summits of the earth the hallowed valleys of Copernicus delight, wherefore these two men who came to love were smitten by the very selfsame cause and ceaseless maker who made them. And whosoever triumphed by existence in and out of time harmonious and also riven senseless by fear, whosoever brought the channel of a smell of tinctures and ointments unto the prime and incarnal maker, for whatsoever reason, for whomever could excuse him and shed his chains before the gallows baleful appeal, those are the ones who are nothing but the portals of the maker. Those are the ones whom Newton found in surrogate murmurs of the night. Whenever a half-insistent arc or formula for parabola joins the weather wander for a final peril or venality in spite, whenever terminations of points or lines are proven limitless by bounding up and out to further ever onward other dementias and dimensions, destinies and destinations, whoever sought to lessen the fair finality of expanding outward glow of light by whatever self-wrought frailty or treason, those are the ones whom Andromachus twirled and intertwined and over turned before they could ingratiate themselves before their maker.
And the likeness of the harps and bugle calls is the flaring trumpet of the hymn of all existence flaring out from a single point of nothingness to everything that is like women with sympathy and mourning a hollow firm receptacle for longing, that is what emanates from the suns and moons and stars nothing more than vast and fugitive longing, stretching out and out and out so far curved it tends to straightness, so long-standing it flashes into emptiness and disappears.
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