Blue Self-Portrait

by Noémi Lefebvre

  Nonetheless, he hung the Blue Self-Portrait in the here and now of the Brandenburgian countryside, as if this was the only thing to do at this precise moment: bring together the living memory of Schoenberg as captured in the painting and the deathly presence of Brandenburgian nature, conversely bring together still and temporary life with the natural memory of Schoenberg captured in paint. Thus might the pianist have drunk his tall blended whisky on the rocks, that afternoon at the Neuhardenberg castle, in such circumstances, back in his car unworthy of a world-class pianist, slightly lubricated by the whisky and by the black trees and by Schoenberg and everything at once, inspired by each of the three elements of this serendipitous composition, he had invented an entirely original musical phrase which he’d had to scrawl down as fast as he could, a phrase that had nothing in common with standard musical phrases but sounded more like the rupture of musical phrases, the decomposition of the very principle of the phrase, a creation without precedent, a prodigious idea, a countering phrase such as he’d never dreamed of creating because, until this moment, he had attained neither the happy chance of this composition nor the car so conducive to the creative impulse, nor the negative solitude followed by a positive solitude, all come together in the ideal conjunction, the girl’s absence and missing the girl, then Schoenberg, then the blended whisky and lastly Schoenberg’s affinity with the black trees, he must have pulled his car up just like this in the wintry forest, in haste to scribble down the brand-new idea for a counter-phrase, written under the admiring gaze of his usual accompaniment who guessed at the supernatural and metaphysical and divine inspiration in this frenzied unrestrained fixing of music upon staves, thus she stood, the accompaniment, in a deferential and somewhat stupid silence.

  At the Kaiser Café, though I’d already put the disastrous experience at Café Einstein behind me, I nonetheless tossed out my witticism about American atavism, as if a blended whisky on the rocks had anything to do with nationality, anything to do with the culture of collective happiness in general and the culture of collective American happiness in particular, even though as soon as he walked in the pianist had made it clear that he was not and never would be lumbered with any collective happiness, neither American nor German nor of any other country, but that he was on the contrary impervious to happiness, in the same manner as Schoenberg of whose music I’d only ever heard a few notes, in passing and besides without intending to hear any Schoenberg, in the manner of Theodor W Adorno though I’ve not yet read one of his books and whose letters I was just now beginning, in the plane and without hope of return, alongside Thomas Mann whom I’d not read before either except by accident and without meaning to, not him in particular. My sister was deep in the Berlin guide, looking up what she’d seen and what she hadn’t seen, thrilled to have seen the sights she had and that she still had those to see that she hadn’t. We’ll have to go back my sister said, of course we’ll go back, said it over and over, I agreed, we’ll have to. It’s a done deal my sister said, I raised her a gold-plated deal, I thought yes, of course, how could we not, I looked for another tissue to mop up my capital and dorsal dripping, in other words my general dripping due to poor adaptation to the pressurized environment. The Wannsee was already far below and behind us, we must be flying over lands intensively cultivated for collective sustenance, I feigned serenity and admired the exterior effect, for a girl I’m pretty tough, I thought to myself in the plane, projecting such serene serenity, couldn’t get over seeing myself so at ease, practically meadow-grazing certainly not bellowing like a cow whose calf has been kidnapped, only her poor bovine maternal feelings left to nurse, the one doesn’t eliminate the other, to moo herself to death and nobody there to answer. So evidently at ease I was reading these legendary letters from Adorno to Mann and vice versa while my sister, eyes riveted on the air brakes, was telling me tales of great pilots, of masculine might and airborne derring-do, my sister elated by the takeoff, fascinated by the simple fact of having left the earth in order to fly, simply leaving Earth behind and flying, said my sister, it makes me go loopy when I think about it, just that, to leave the Earth and see it from the porthole, to see it and not be there, suddenly simply not be there! The porthole and my sister formed one cyclops eye above the world while beneath us genuine German cows with no national consciousness were grazing on German grass no more aware than the cows of its own roots, oblivious cows grazing which is to say tearing up the verdure and leaving the roots, you see Friesians in Normandy, Salers cattle in Limousin and Bavarians in Switzerland, cow here or elsewhere the fate is always the same, the cry of the cow when baby calf has gone, one day, two days she calls for baby then stop, and me above everything also in flight but without the joy of the airborne, Adorno and Mann on my knees and my knees ever shakier, it was too late, what’s said is said, I still and always have to say too much as I said to the pianist, Ich habe zu viel gesprochen, clapping him on the back and he, not at all, not in the least, it’s quite all right, yet weary of listening to me and frankly fed up with me, desperate really for me to go to bed so he too could go to bed and this evening might at last be over. He had many things to do the next day, many the next day and the next week and all these things were being jeopardized by a single evening the absurd prolongation of which was incompatible with the good condition required to practice piano in the morning and to compose in the afternoon, seeing him yawn and look at his watch and yawn again I understood only too late, what’s done is done nothing will ever change anything, I’ve breached the pianist’s night with a truly scandalous nonchalance and yet I know this tendency of mine. You don’t care my mother-in-law said in the era of my actual marriage soon over but not then yet altogether, I was on the tennis court with my mother-in-law, I no longer remember why I’d ended up playing a game with her that day, I so resistant to sport in general and tennis in particular, the problem is you don’t care my mother-in-law had said, who played tennis, had played tennis always, since childhood, and won hundreds of matches, who hated losing, who ran for every ball and would come to the net twice in a rally if she possibly could, picked up on my not-caring just when I thought I was all energy in action, when I could have sworn on my sister’s life that I too had that killer drive to win, I had the tennis bug, that I too was one hundred percent committed—you had to be with my mother-in-law for your partner and in sporting spirit—to the cause of tennis, my mother-in-law put her finger on this not-caring in me, the demon inside her son’s enchantress, while I was focused body and soul on dashing headlong after the ball I was laid bare by my mother-in-law who had a definition of not-caring, I’m wasting my time, she’d announced, you are making me waste my time which was the precise truth, I was imposing on the time of a mother-in-law who hadn’t much to spare, not-caring requires imposing on other people’s time, I saw it there on the tennis court, not taking other people’s time seriously is the effect of an inclination not to play games properly. That she should be so sensitive to not-caring I put down to her life story, it was due to her childhood and nothing else, she’d been a girl guide, I reflected on the court and again on the plane, not-caring is reviled by the girl guides of France but also by the World Association of Girl Guides as it is by all youth movements who sing beneath the stars, go camping and for healthy walks, guiding is the opposite of not-caring, as a young girl guide in France you learn to banish all not-caring from your life, to believe in what you do, to believe in activity in general and sporting activity in particular, as a girl guide one believes in the value of activity as part of collective action and in sport as collective sport, in singing for the sake of singing together; one has, in girl guiding, direct and compulsory experience of happiness through activity and singing popular songs, so the pianist could have said but didn’t have to for he hadn’t had to take a stance on questions of scouts and guides or on any youth movement, having had nothing to do with youth movements at any level. Even the para was less scout than the Scouts, had one day got the giggles over his parachute. We can’t know t
he precise moment my para jumped without due heed but it was somewhere over Chad, whistling his para’s song all at once he’d seen the funny side of the words and falling from a great height viewed his situation with quite new eyes but not my mother-in-law, she’d never fallen from a height, had in truth never fallen from either high or low or anywhere having never been too high nor too low nor anywhere but always precisely somewhere in the right place tempered by that characteristically well-tempered temperament borne of her early years in happiness training, a fresh-air childhood whatever the weather. Hence for my mother-in-law my not-caring at tennis was an intolerable disposition typical of girls like me, an inexcusable attitude towards sport and towards life in the sense of living, joyously singing life, a fine life in the fresh air and lived collectively as life can be from a certain point of view, the viewpoint of youth movements. I didn’t hit a single ball, I invariably dashed too late, I was sweating and breathless and excelling myself as best I could playing tennis, applied myself to running to and fro, hopping from foot to foot and executing little jumps on the spot while staring hard at my mother-in-law then the ball then my mother-in-law then the ball, believing I was playing tennis with every sinew and with all the conviction I could muster, when my mother-in-law discovered the root cause of everything, revealed to me who I really was, made me analyze my case, set me at last squarely before my true self, which is above all made up, I am obliged to admit, of an unmistakable plain-as-day not-caring, not-caring such as one rarely encounters, as natural to me as breathing and to all purposes, then, a deep-seated handicap. This not-caring prevents me from living normally, speaking normally, eating normally, sleeping normally, walking normally, running normally, from playing sport normally, from understanding normally what my bones consist of, from measuring the seriousness of my own body, the substance of my own body, my body’s malleability, my body’s presence, it was as if I didn’t have a body I thought as I ran to and fro across the tennis court, winding myself and missing the ball with an impressive frequency that visibly irritated my opponent, a frequency of misses that would indeed have irritated any tennis-player who was actually playing tennis, not in the carefree manner I always affected, I couldn’t see how to rid myself of a not-caring so inimical to tennis, how to be straightforwardly myself without any further agenda as if my self were in fact made up of this not-caring that my mother-in-law had noticed, noticed as has been stated in me, and the deplorable ideological and behavioral outcome. Enough of my mother-in-law now, I admonished myself in the plane, no matter that she thinks this or that of not-caring in general or of mine in particular, what difference does it make since I finished with her along with that marriage at first seemingly successful but ultimately a failure, due praise to my mother-in-law for putting her finger on the weakness in my character, which I always remember too late, when it’s done it’s done. If I thought more often and constructively about that game of tennis, I’d learn my lesson and I’d try to modify my principles and the behavior that flows from them but I almost never think about it except much too late. I think about it but only post-fallout. I coiled my legs up like snakes and hunched, I plunged into the letters. I read the letters but couldn’t understand them. I could understand the words but not the letters, yet I was trying to understand in order to get over my not-caring but the not-caring was stopping me from understanding, understanding without caring is not truly understanding and faking understanding is not understanding, I needed not only to get over but to disavow this aspect of my character, to engage directly and without ulterior motive, but I had legions of ulterior motives, they were floating about above the letters, turning over on themselves and all pointing more or less directly towards the pianist, dancing too around that encounter in the Kaiser Café which hadn’t even gone on that long, during which nothing ground-breaking or life-changing had been said but which had certainly been life-changing. In the end, nothing definitively life-changing had been said, yet from the start, in the environment of that unremarkable place, something had made all my verbal posturing as pointless as it was pathetic, a consistency in missing the ball, it was this unremarkable environment and I in that environment, the patient, generous pianist had granted me a second serving, ordered another Berliner for me, but while I was sweeping forearm over forehead before launching into a fresh conversational bout, he picked up Mann and Adorno’s correspondence, which I had set down on the table, opened and skimmed through it, taking in news first of one then of the other he wasn’t listening to my news, to my brand-new news he preferred the old news of Mann and Adorno, Mann’s health and Adorno’s analyses, Mann’s birthday and Adorno’s holiday, the pianist was simultaneously worried for Mann and happy for Adorno while I was relaying news of my day, a day that held no interest for the pianist, a day lost among other days, a necessary step no deeper than the usefulness of a pause. This lost time is not dead time, staying here is not about waiting but imagining, don’t think of this empty time as a time to be filled, musical time like a painter’s frame, a musical frame is not there to be filled up, take away the frame, pop out the picture, the painting at once within time and outside its bars, the pianist had hung Schoenberg’s painting among the black trees and broken through the framework of negativity, then composed an original musical phrase in the Brandenburg forests, a brand-new antiphrase while his accompaniment for the day maintained a reverential and passably stupid silence as it often goes with reverence but ultimately perhaps a beneficial silence, productive and positive, the silence and the accompaniment’s reverence an essential climate for the transformation of a musical intention into a compositional act, the antiphrase a monody perhaps or a recitative but expressionless, the sentence that says nothing, a cold shade, the cold shade in a recitative, the blue face, the painting’s blue but far and scattered as if suspended, the painting in the branches, the monodic line unaffected by the crows’ spasmodic cawing, ad libitum crows in peaked black uniform, three tones of the twelve, the call of birds obliged to spend their lives circling over cemeteries and denuded trees, to each naked tree a definitive bed and the individual, himself blue, who knows his own end and does not waver—my relationship with Schoenberg is changing the pianist realized. Understanding not the musician but the painter Schoenberg first of all, understanding for the first time first the painter in Schoenberg and then through the painter the musician, I’m evolving, evolving! the pianist realized on witnessing the sheer miracle written by his own hand. He had often felt Schoenberg’s influence, who can resist Schoenberg, the pianist had pondered, if not Schoenberg himself? Schoenberg had, the pianist reminisced, held him in his arms and kissed him as he must have held Berg and Webern before him and any number of disciples German and American, he had called him my little one my baby, just as he had called Berg and Webern my little one my baby, then as with Berg and Webern before him, had called him my son and wished this son a fair wind, like a father, the pianist imagined, good luck my dear son a father would say, go, explore, the father orders the son, leave the studio behind, you don’t teach an artist his art, Schoenberg had said, the habit can be learned but not the art, I am not a craftsman, you’re no apprentice, I have nothing more to teach you that can be learned, I’ve done a little exploring but so little, said this father, what the hell, when I’m gone ahoy the next Flood, to play Beethoven without Schoenberg is impossible, Liszt without Schoenberg impossible, but to play Beethoven and Liszt like Schoenberg hopeless, Schoenberg said in his Viennese accent, it’s quite simply not possible, in our times, to play those two as if it were not our times, the pianist watched his times flow by and his brand-new musical phrase counter-phrase itself without counterfeit. The muttering of my contemporaries is my raw musical material said the pianist rereading his brand-new phrase, my contemporaries’ memories are also my raw material, the accompaniment laid a hand on his right knee, a soft and gentle hand, barely a pressure, my relationship with Schoenberg is a musical relationship not only musical but memorial, the accompaniment contemplated the superb pro
file, not only memorial but moral, the accompaniment loved this profile, for having said the word memorial like that, the word moral, that’s beautiful murmured the accompaniment, almost added Ich liebe dich but kept quiet so as not to disturb.