Words Without Music

by Philip Glass

  Candy made many artworks in Cape Breton: a series of drawings of insects that became an accordion-style book called The Dead Bug Book; a small wooden case filled with rocks—99 Blue Rocks; a box of drawings of twigs; and innumerable landscape paintings of the hill leading to the cliffs by the ocean shore and the island across the sound from our house. We spent ten glorious and wonderful summers there.

  On a family trip with Juliet and Zack to the Yucatán in the summer of 1990, Candy made her usual travel journal. Upon our return, we went to Cape Breton, and at the end of the summer we came back to New York to our house to settle back into the routine of work and school for the kids.

  At this time, Candy began not feeling well. She said she felt tired. A visit to the doctor eliminated Lyme disease and parasites, and she was prescribed vitamins and told to stop smoking, which she did, trading in her Marlboros for packs of Nicorette gum.

  Later in the fall she felt somewhat better, and a few weeks before Christmas we flew to Santa Fe to stay for ten days with Rudy Wurlitzer and his wife, Lynn Davis, the photographer, who had rented a house for a month. At night we sometimes went to the outdoor hot springs, where you could sit in the warm water and look at the stars, thinking it might be therapeutic. We also thought the change of environment might help, but some days Candy had a hard time getting out of bed. We were still operating on the belief that her problems were related to some kind of fatigue syndrome, which could have a long recovery time.

  We returned to New York for Christmas, but then in the New Year Candy began feeling worse. She kept working and painting, but she was not well at all. Then, at a certain point, her skin turned yellow almost overnight, and it was thought that hepatitis was the cause. The Dalai Lama’s doctor happened to be in New York, and he was available for diagnosis. I knew enough people so I could get him to come to my house, and when he came, he did an analysis. He asked her for a urine specimen, took it into the next room, and came back. He didn’t say anything about what it was.

  “Take these pills,” he said. “Chew them up.” He gave me maybe twelve pills, and said to take one every week.

  “What do I do when we run out of pills?”

  He gave me a very strange look. “You’ll get in touch with me when that happens.”

  I realized later that he didn’t expect her to outlive the pills.

  Soon I received a call from the Tibetan doctor’s assistant and was given the analysis: “We’ve spoken to the doctor, and he says she has cancer of the liver.”

  I talked to someone later about this and asked, “How would he know that?”

  “What they used to do,” I was told, “is they would taste the urine. If there was sugar in the urine, it meant it was a disease of the liver.”

  Our Tibetan doctor was very experienced and his analysis was completely accurate. He also knew that she would only live another six weeks. He didn’t tell me that, but right afterward we got the diagnosis from her New York doctor, who had also done tests, who confirmed that in fact it was liver cancer. Hepatitis was something that maybe she could have survived, but not cancer of the liver.

  With the help of my friend Rebecca, who herself had survived lymphoma a year earlier, we found Candy the best oncologist, and she was admitted to Sloan-Kettering to begin chemotherapy. She would go in for a few days or a week at a time, then come back home. She began to have a syndrome where she would walk around at night. At the hospital she would go for walks, walking and walking around the corridors. It’s a known reaction to chemotherapy. When she came home, she would stay up all night painting.

  In such a life-threatening situation, you always want to think that there will be a positive outcome, but in our case, it was wishful thinking. If I had been thinking clearly, I would have realized, “No, this isn’t working.” But I didn’t think that at all. Nor did I think, until many years later, that her illness was, in fact, the realization of our fear of being separated, that it had finally come true, only not in the way we expected. That thought, This is the thing we were afraid of, never occurred to me.

  The last few weeks of her life, Candy came back home, stayed for maybe two weeks, then went back to the hospital for the last time and never came home again. During those two weeks at home, she painted nonstop, producing something like eighty paintings, at the rate of five or six a night. She would paint, and then she would come upstairs and go to sleep. I would come down in the morning to see what she had done, and all these new paintings would be there, eight of them at a time hung on the wall in two horizontal lines, four above and four below.

  She called the series Vessels. The paintings were watercolors on paper, eighteen inches wide by twenty-four inches tall. Each painting was of a bowl, glass, cup, or pitcher. Some resembled ancient Greek vases. The “vessel” was situated on a horizontal line toward the bottom part of the painting, as though sitting on a stage. Many of the paintings had what looked like pulled-back theater curtains in the upper right and left corners, often with streamers of paint dripping all the way down to the “stage.” The background might be smooth or tumultuous, most often a single color that could be solid or washed-out—red, blue, yellow, gray, or green.

  Clearly, these were very personal paintings. The vessels became a stand-in for herself. I’m talking about the function of a symbol, how an object can become filled with the personality of a person. It becomes easier to paint the object than to paint the person, so the object becomes a stand-in. All the qualities of a person are in the painting, but it takes the shape of a vessel. We can ask, “Is it a womb?” or “Is it the chest?” but it’s easy for us to imagine it as the human form.

  What Candy did—and she was very good at this kind of thing—was to take an ordinary shape or form and use it symbolically. It would become a presence, a kind of artifice, a substitute for a person. It’s easy to say that these were portraits of herself, but they were more than that. The painting she was doing was an extraordinary exercise that she was going through. It was almost as if the bowl or the vase represented an organic unity of some kind that was her. And of course, it was a feminine image, not a masculine one. She didn’t talk about this at all. She just continued painting them.

  One morning I came down, and she had done four or five more paintings as she did every night, but one painting was empty. She had done all the background, with the stage and the curtain, but she didn’t paint the last vessel. There was no object. It was gone. It seemed that as long as she could paint a vessel, she would stay alive. Then one night she could no longer paint it. She had gone up and gone to sleep, and when she got up the next day we took her back to the hospital and she never came home.

  I called Juliet, who was twenty-two and at Reed College, and said, “Juliet, you have to come home now.” And she came home.

  “How could this happen?” she asked.

  Candy was only thirty-nine. It didn’t seem possible that someone could be that young and die. We had been in complete denial about what was happening right in front of us. We never thought we were going to lose her. We didn’t think that the universe was so badly arranged that someone like her could be taken away from us. We just couldn’t believe that could happen. And we were totally wrong.

  When Candy died, I was sitting with the children in the hospital room. I wanted everybody to leave the room but Juliet and Zack and me, and we sat there together. Anyone who has sat with people who are dying will know—it’s not a mystery—that after the last breath, after the heart has stopped beating, after what common medical practice recognizes as the physical death, there is still an energy in the body. Until that energy leaves, the body doesn’t relax, if I can put it that way, and this can go on for some time. In Candy’s case it would last two or three hours.

  “Let’s wait here until she’s gone,” I said.

  An intense passage was taking place, both for the children and for me. We stayed there for a couple of hours, and at one moment—it was the damnedest thing—it was as if a film director had changed the light
ing. Somehow, the whole appearance of the body changed. The actual physical change was slight, but it was unmistakable. It was as if the body had just gone limp.

  “Did you see that?” I said.

  “Yes,” Juliet and Zack both said.

  “She’s gone.”

  And that’s what it was.

  I think this was the first time we understood the fact of impermanence and the inevitability of death. It became very clear to us. Until then, we had no idea. We were strangely out of touch with the simplest reality of life, which is that death doesn’t keep score of our years. It moves at will, and it takes who it wishes to take.

  Candy had carried on until she wasn’t able to do any more. Artists very often do that. They work up until the last minute. There’s no time when they’re not engaged in the work. With that last painting, there was no vase, no vessel, and when I came down and saw this, I knew it was an omen, a sign, or a message. It was very clear.

  I actually had the incredibly foolish idea that I could will her life to continue—I was sure that I could do that—but my will had nothing to do with it. Will is okay for writing music, or for writing books, but not when it comes to the great matters of life and death.

  When Candy died in 1991, she left close to six hundred paintings, objects, combines, books, and other pieces, a lot of them made in her last few years. We were able to make books and publish her work, which continues to be shown at the Greene Naftali Gallery in Manhattan. In the last year, the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City and major collectors have purchased her work.

  IT TOOK US ALL SOME TIME to put our life back together. It was especially hard for Juliet and Zack. Our ten years together had flown by and, without warning, had come to an end. To them, and me too, it was unimaginable.

  I took some time off and went to stay in the country with Tomo Geshe Rimpoche at his place in the Catskills. I was in a little house by a lake, just walking in the woods, listening to the wind in the trees, looking at the night sky. He was in the main house, a mile away, and I would walk down the hill in the evening to have dinner with him. We didn’t talk much about it.

  One afternoon, Geshe Rimpoche caught up with me walking around the lake. He patted me hard on the back and with a quiet smile said, “That was a big lesson on impermanence.”

  I smiled slightly and nodded.

  THE COCTEAU TRILOGY

  NOT LONG AFTER CANDY’S DEATH, DURING A SIX-WEEK RETREAT in Rio de Janeiro, where since the late 1980s I had been spending parts of January and February composing, I began writing Orphée, the first of a trilogy of operas (Orphée, La Belle et la Bête, and Les Enfants Terribles) based on the films of Jean Cocteau.

  Orphée is based on the well-known Greek myth of Orpheus as told by Virgil, Ovid, and many others. It is the story of a man who, when his wife, Eurydice, dies and is taken to the Underworld, descends to try to bring her back from the dead. Hades and Persephone, the god and goddess of the Underworld, are so moved by the music of Orpheus that they allow him to take Eurydice back with him to the upper world, on the condition that she walk behind him and he not look back at her until they have both reached the world above. In his anxiety, Orpheus forgets these instructions, and as soon as he sets foot in the upper world he turns to embrace Eurydice, who vanishes back into the Underworld. He loses her again, this time forever.

  It’s hard for me to believe now, but at the time I was working on Orphée I had no idea I was reproducing my own life.

  “No, it has nothing to do with Candy,” I said, when I was asked about it back then.

  But thinking back on it, how could it have been otherwise? In the story, the wife dies, the poet-musician Orpheus tries to save her, he almost succeeds, and then he loses her for eternity. I was in denial, and it wasn’t until much later on that I realized it.

  The story of Orphée may be the most famous and widely set story in the history of opera. Monteverdi, Gluck, and Offenbach are the first few that come to mind. There are plenty of modern ones besides. Harrison Birtwhistle has a famous one—The Mask of Orpheus. There is a long list that goes on and on. The themes of love, life, death, and immortality are, for theater composers and authors, just about irresistible.

  One of the things that drew me to these films of Cocteau is the pacing of his writing. If you look at it, it is truly Shakespearean. He knows when to introduce a character, he knows how to develop him, and he knows how many characters are needed. The real secret of writing operas is having a good libretto. Composers know that, because operas are not easy to write. I have, in fact, done operas without great librettos, but they are operas that don’t require librettos. Einstein on the Beach didn’t really require one, nor did Satyagraha and Akhnaten. For a number of years I avoided the issue of librettos entirely, but at a certain point I wanted to see what it was that I was avoiding, so I began to write narrative operas. I chose the films of Cocteau because his sense of dramatic development was impeccable. For the mixture of the tragic and the comic in one opera, Orphée is the perfect example—it’s a romantic opera, it’s a comic opera, and it’s a grand opera. It’s all three together. And very few artists have the ability to combine all three.

  When I began composing these operas, it was always clear that Cocteau could be found in the characters he invented. In Orphée, Cocteau is Orphée. At the beginning of the film, sitting at a café, Orphée, the poet, encounters a well-known critic. None of the avant-garde crowd at the café is paying attention to Orphée. Everyone is busy lavishing attention on the young “poet of the day,” Cégeste, who, at a nearby table, is surrounded by a crowd of young admirers.

  “No doubt they think I’m old hat,” Orphée says to the critic, “and that a poet shouldn’t be too famous.”

  “They’re not overly fond of you,” the critic replies.

  “What you mean is they hate me. And who’s that rude drunk over there?”

  “It’s Jacques Cégeste. A poet. He is eighteen and adored by everyone. The Princess finances the magazine that just published his first poems. Here’s her magazine.”

  The critic hands the magazine to Orphée, who opens it.

  “But every page is blank,” Orphée exclaims.

  “That’s called ‘nudism,’” the critic replies.

  “Totally absurd!”

  “No excess is absurd. Orphée, your worst fault is knowing how far one can go before going too far.”

  “The public loves me,” Orphée/Cocteau says.

  “Il est bien le seul (The public is alone),” says the critic.

  As depicted in Orphée, Cocteau’s reaction to being seen as an aging lion, from having once been a brilliant young genius, overflows with humor. It is as if Cocteau can’t wait to roll out this scene, placing it at the very beginning of the film. We don’t see the critic again until toward the end of Act 2, when he returns with the League of Women leading a rabble that surrounds Orphée’s home, goads him into coming outside, and then murders him. That, I take it, is the measure of the role of the critic in the eyes of Cocteau.

  The scene pretty much sums up how Cocteau must have felt when he began Orphée only a few years after World War II had come to a close. In 1949 Cocteau, who died in 1963, was sixty years old, and he was no longer treated as the young artist, writer, and filmmaker genius he was taken to be in the twenties and thirties. He had clearly been pushed aside. He knew that he was a great creative personality, yet nobody was any longer paying attention to him. He was regarded as someone who no longer had to be taken seriously.

  The situation that Cocteau found himself in interested me, and when I told my French friends that I was basing operas on Cocteau’s work, they said, “Why would you do that?” They didn’t ask even what it was that I was planning to do.

  “He is one of the great writers of France,” I replied, recalling how intrigued I had been when I first saw his films in the Hyde Park theater when I was a student at the University of Chicago.

  “No, he isn’t.”

  “Yes,
he is.”

  “Mais non!”

  “Mais si!”

  In their opinion, Cocteau was a populist and a dilettante, because he did drawings, he wrote books, and he made movies.

  “You’re absolutely wrong,” I said. “What he was doing was looking at one subject—creativity—through different lenses.”

  In Cocteau’s version of the myth, in the film’s last act, after Orphée has been killed and returns to the Underworld, he declares his love for Death, whom we met in the first scene of the movie in the guise of the Princess, the poet Cégeste’s patroness and companion. But Death has already decided on a course of action that will free Orphée to become an immortal poet: to restore Orphée and his wife Eurydice to life, Death/the Princess reverses time back to the moment before Eurydice’s death. Heurtebise, Death’s chauffeur, tries to dissuade her from the forbidden act of reversing the arrow of time, but her answer is astonishing and final.

  “The death of a poet requires a sacrifice to render him immortal.”

  When Death is asked what will happen to her now, she replies, “It is not pleasant.”

  But we know that the price Death will pay is her own death—her own immortality will be taken from her. We know this beyond a shadow of a doubt, and we have known it from the beginning. Shakespeare’s rendering of this idea appears as the last line in his famous Sonnet 146, written more than 350 years earlier:

  “And Death once dead, there’s no more dying then.”

  Only a writer as remarkable as Cocteau would have known to take a sentence of Shakespeare and make it the key that turns the lock in his film. The skill of Cocteau is to lead all the threads—Orphée’s political, social, and personal obsessions, many of which reflect Cocteau’s own—to a resolution and clear expression. One of the autobiographical aspects of Cocteau’s treatment of Orphée is that Orphée, the consummate poet and visionary, is trapped in an ordinary domestic life that, for an artist of his caliber, is intolerable. The real issue for Orphée and, by extension, for any artist is to escape his earthly fate and make the jump into immortality. Cocteau has made the route to immortality abundantly clear. Only Death herself has the key to immortality.