by J. D. Landis
I myself am doing a splendid job getting through this night. I am even more content in my solitude and excited by it than I had imagined I would be. And I do not want to sleep.
But I do close my eyes. I close them in order to be blind like Bach.
And then, I open them.
I open them, because ten days before Bach died, his eyesight miraculously returned.
I like to lie here and replicate that experience. All is darkness. And then, ten days before eternal darkness, sight is restored.
What do I want to see, in this brief time before the lights go out forever?
I want to see Clara.
I want to see Clara naked, unmasked, anew.
I do not know what Bach saw in his ten remaining days or what he wanted to see. Anna Magdalena, perhaps.
He certainly would not have wanted to see his grave. Not that there was anything to see, once he had been thrown in and endirted. Though you would have thought that however many of his twenty children had survived would have bought him a headstone, nothing marked the place of his burial. And nothing would until nearly a hundred and fifty years later when his grave was accidentally dug up to make room for the augmentation of the church in whose yard he had shrunk to the size of an oboe.
Do our children think they can sweep our dust even beyond the corners of their minds once we have ceased inventing life? Apparently so. These were the same Bach children who later allowed Anna Magdalena to be buried in a pauper’s grave, far away from the husband who had immortalized her with a sensuous if not exactly lascivious sarabande.
If I am buried far from where Clara is buried, I will dig my way through the wet, wormy earth until I lie with her again, forever.
* * *
*Actually, it was Johann Friedrich Wender who built the organ in the Neukirche at Arnstadt, but John’s little joke is more amusing in his employment of the sibilant names of those other great organ builders, Silbermann and Schnitger.
9 P.M.
The Goldbergs have put me to sleep. For a few minutes, then, though I am unconscious during them, I am Count Keyserlingk.
“Dear Goldberg,” I whisper aloud to that young boy who has soothed me with such beauty, “please do not die so soon.”
Nor you, Glenn Gould, most enviable of men, to have found ecstasy in art and art alone, and art on its loftiest mission in solitude, and peace, for goddamned once, in death.
That melancholy aside, I am full of happiness. Never, in fact, have I felt at such peace.
I have awakened into almost total darkness. The only illumination in this one huge room of ours comes from the minuscule coinedge of moon that is visible from where I lie through the west windows and from the lumpy counterpane of light that floats in the sky over this city every night, smothering the stars.
I cannot see my own toes. I doubt I’d be able to see my own erection, were I moved to generate it. But I am not. With Clara gone, this place is sexless. I am free of stimulation. I am at peace with my body. My body is my own.
How nice to have one’s wife away, not to miss her but not to miss her.
I, former rhetorician—failed rhetorician, to be honest, or at least defeated rhetorician—I wonder if I’ve created a new figure of speech with that: not to miss her but not to miss her. I have never encountered its like, though some argument might be made that it is a kind of deviant chiasmus, balanced to a degree that would compare with the disconcerting experience of looking in a mirror and confronting your image unreversed.
But better than that, it is as great an example of the need to split an infinitive as there might be: not to miss her but to not miss her.
Still, not missing her, I find myself missing not missing her. It compares to the feeling of guilt over the absence of the feeling of guilt over something that should have produced a feeling of guilt in the first place.
Why do I not miss her?
I turn on my side in the darkness and take one of her pillows from next to mine and pull it into the middle of my body. “Clara,” I say.
I am reminded of August Strindberg, with whose life I became familiar when I learned he and Nietzsche had exchanged correspondence (in four languages, two of them dead), though very few letters actually passed between them before Nietzsche slipped wholly into madness and ceased communicating altogether. Strindberg had experienced his own insanity, particularly after his third wife, Harriet Bosse, had left him. It was at that time he began to have hallucinations, visions, fantasies, which were to him, in a grand display of what Husserl would come to call transcendental subjectivity, their own reality. “If I see my pillow assume human shapes,” wrote Strindberg, “those shapes are there, and if anyone says they are fashioned only by imagination, I reply: ‘You say only?’ What my inner eye sees means more to me.”
I bend my neck and kiss the pillow. I kiss the pillow chastely. But it is, after all, only a pillow, though a special one, for Clara claims to have covered it herself with a piece of Log Cabin quilt that her grandmother had made and given to her in the irretrievable days before she was born into my life. It does not assume human shape, this pillow. It is not Clara herself. She has not left me. Though if she had, I am sure I would have gone mad too and have hugged the pillow to me and have discovered that it is Clara, as Strindberg found his wife Harriet back in his distraught arms.
But it does smell of her, the pillow. It smells of the different smells of her hair, of her neck, of her shoulders, of her back, of between her legs from when she flings it down there and, laughing, says, “Fuck me, Johnny.”
“Oh, Clara,” I say, remembering her, and I laugh first at the remembrance and then at the fact that I’m talking to a pillow.
It occurs to me that I never once talked aloud to myself in the year that I talked aloud to no one. It takes the absence of Clara to turn me into everyone’s image of a lonely man.
It is interesting to me that I do not want her. It used to be that I could want her just from the smell of her, from any of the smells of her. And the smell needn’t emanate directly from her skin or hair. I might smell her on a pillow, like this, or a chair, a plate, a towel, a brush, my undershorts or hers, and I would want her so much that I seemed to become nothing but desire, shrunk to an impenetrable density of need, like some black hole.
Desire. Not the fulfillment of desire. Desire alone. That longing so pure it decontaminates ambiguity.
When I do not desire her, it is as if she does not exist.
A wife, then, might be said to exist in direct proportion to the husband’s desire for her. And vice versa, of course.
How, I wonder, do we stay alive to one another while the years erase us like a reproachful teacher buffing a blackboard?
As I ponder these perhaps unanswerable questions as if I had all the time in the world and find myself hoping that Clara will not come home too soon, I become aware that the CD changer has continued to provide a choice of music that perfectly accompanies my emotional needs.
It is still soloing, as it were, but it has left Glenn Gould’s piano for Yo Yo Ma’s cello and the Bach suites, for me perhaps the most anamnestic of music since I cannot hear them without being reminded of Clara and my wedding day.
As I am unable to lie here and not think of Clara, though she has, in a sense, ceased to exist for me, so the music seems unable to abandon Bach and his Anna Magdalena.
There is great mystery surrounding these suites for cello. While still living in Cöthen, after the death of Maria Barbara, Bach produced in 1720 a clean copy of his six sonatas for solo violin, perhaps the only music that tortures me even while its beauty makes me weep (no fool I, those pieces are not programmed for this special evening of listening enjoyment).
On the title page of that copy, Bach put the words “Libro primo.” So if that is Book One, where is Book Two?
There is nothing labeled Libro secondo. And there cannot be a First if there is not a Second, which is to say, the First becomes a First and not merely an Only by virtue of their being a Sec
ond.
But here are these six suites for solo cello. Except there is no surviving original clean copy of them. There is nothing but a copy written out in the hand of Anna Magdalena. And while that copy has significant mistakes involving tempo markings and bowings and ornaments, it is still fortunate that Anna Magdalena’s handwriting was not quite so sphingine as Clara’s, or I would probably not be lying here this evening feeling the sound of this cello in my tranquil loins.
It is my theory that these cello suites were indeed the Libro secondo and thus that they were written soon after the completion of the violin sonatas in 1720 and thus further that they were composed in the heat of Bach’s preparations for his 1721 wedding to Anna Magdalena, a prenuptial display of his affection, passion, his desire to lie with her and, to judge from the music itself, dance with her. So, even before they married, he gave her the original of the scores for her to copy them out. For a composer, it was like giving someone your diary to read.
Anna Magdalena was clearly receptive. Suffering from temporary dysgraphia, she could hardly write straight as she heard the cello in her mind. Perhaps she even felt like the cello, held firmly between the legs of her man, stroked by a bow that she knew to be, and to remain, hard, for in the early 1700s the flexible bow for cello was not yet used, which accounts for a certain lack of polyphony in these suites if not in the reaction of Anna Magdalena to them.
They were, in essence, a kind of wedding present to her, or so I have always theorized, which is why, aside from their tendency to make me feel like dancing, they were the music I chose to play at my wedding.
It was a simple wedding.
It was the most wonderful day of my life.
But it was not the most important day of my life. The most important day of my life was the day I found Clara. Had I not found her, I could not have married her. So the day I found her was the most important day of my life. More important even than the day I was born.
Had I not been born, I would simply not have lived.
Had I not found Clara, I would not have come to life.
ON THE DAY we met, barely four years ago, I was wandering the city, listening to music through my headphones, trying to escape the tyranny of language.
I was functional, at that time in my existence, only when I was moving. It was, in the words of Matthew Arnold, an “illiberal, dismal life.” Today, I leave this room without her only to take back something secret for her. Then, I was always out in the street, always walking, like some tormented St. Jerome in Chalcis, trying to keep up with my thoughts and to escape my thoughts.
I was afraid that if I lay down, my thoughts would race ahead of me, a visible net of words that would spin from my mind and wrap round and round my head until I was bandaged from crown to Adam’s apple, featureless, sightless, suffocated. Words can be a merciless enemy, and I tried to avoid them the way one would some deadly, unseen bacillus or a plane about to crash whose shadow swells upon the rutted surface of the earth.
In those days, once I returned home from my daily sciamachy with morphemes in the hope of embracing the gentler Morpheus, I even tried to sleep standing up, because I hoped thereby to induce in myself a habit of sleepwalking so I might keep moving. Thus, while others all over the city were lying in bed and pulling their blankets to their chins and pounding their pillows, I was finding a congenial corner in one of the many rooms of my apartment and leaning into it with my eyes closed and my hands prayer-like to protect my face from the insidious crack where walls meet.
I never did learn to sleepwalk, or if I did I managed to do it without ever waking up or stepping out a window, and I always returned to the corner to which I’d condemned myself the night before, where I’d awaken at first light to find myself on the floor with the top half of my body against one wall and the bottom half against the other wall and my posterior, suitably enough, in that crack, though my crack and the walls’ crack, with what I thought was equal idoneity, made the sign of the cross.
It was a terrible way to sleep. It was a terrible way to wake.
But it was not, I thought, until I found Clara and learned how to live, such a terrible way to live.
I was rich from inheritance.
I was free from the necessity to work or even to educate myself.
I was able, from the moment I awakened on the floor to the moment I went to sleep where walls met, to search for myself without having to ask directions of another.
So there I was, walking aimlessly around the city with my portable tape player hooked into my belt, my cache of AA batteries in the pocket of my suit’s trousers causing me to look as if I wore myself on the left instead of the right, and my fanny pack bulging with whatever tapes I had taken along that day for the eighteen to twenty hours I customarily filled my head with music to accompany or better yet obliterate my thoughts.
I don’t remember what I was listening to when I found the notebook. I would remember had I known how significant a moment that was to be in my life. But I didn’t know. And so the music that chaperoned the first touch of my flesh to something touched by Clara’s flesh has escaped the catalogue of my existence. I have tried so incredibly hard to reconstruct that moment and hear what I had been hearing when I saw that little notebook hanging open over the curb, colorful binding up, the edge of the curbstone in the gutter of the book so that half of it faced the serenity of the sky and half the gurging traffic in the street. I wondered why I thought, “Look at that book asleep there,” until I realized, as I stepped over to it and looked down upon it, that it was bent just like me when I lay asleep on the floor, split in half by the crack of the walls.
I leaned over and picked up the notebook. I could see and feel it was one of those common blank books sold in most bookstores and representing today’s most popular and accessible literature. But its covers had been overlaid with a cloth material that was worn and faded and skinsoft like something that I recognized even then must be from an old quilt. It was glued or pasted, one piece on the front, one on the back, so the spine of the book was blank and black with its original imitation-cloth binding.
I stuck my thumb into the place where the book had fallen open over the curb. I was afraid that whatever might have been written there would have been erased by rain or the sodden slime that regularly accumulates along the edges of the city’s streets.
But when I turned the book over to look, I found myself elated to see writing covering both pages that faced me.
I was shocked, however, first to see that the writing was in pencil, which to me was almost as evanescent as something written in chalk and that in fact had already begun to fade, though whether from its being in pencil lead or from its lying in the street I did not know.
And then I was shocked to see the writing itself.
I had never seen anything like it. It was chaotic and seemingly indecipherable. But I reminded myself that language was my game, had been my life, and that if this were a new language, I might as well be the first human being to learn it. So I thumbed off my music in what turned out to be a profoundly aposiopetic act—I broke into earsplitting silence, as it were—and began to read what was written there.
I don’t know what stunned me more: to find that I was able to read it or to read what it said.
A man came into the shop and said he wanted to buy a quilt for his wife. “Do you want it for the bed or for hanging?” I asked. “For the bed,” he replied. “Does the bed get much use?” I asked. “I don’t see what business that is of yours,” he replied. “I’m trying to determine fragility,” I explained. “She is very fragile,” he replied. “Of the quilt,” I said and laughed. “We’re not going to fuck on it if that’s your concern,” he said. “I’m sorry to hear that,” I said. “My hanging quilts are for admiration. My crib quilts are for comfort. And my bed quilts are for fucking on.” Now the man laughed. But nervously. “We’ve been married for 12 years,” he said. “So.” “It’s dead,” he said. “My quilts are alive,” I said. “If you buy one you’l
l kill it.” I wouldn’t sell him a quilt. He left. I spent the rest of the day happy at the thought that I hadn’t sacrificed one of my quilts to his unhappiness. I also imagined spreading out a Star of Bethlehem on the floor and having him fuck me while my hands held onto the points of the star and my heels rode his ass all the way to Jerusalem. When we were done, that’s the quilt he bought. It saved his marriage. I watched him spread his wife out on it. They were beautiful together. I numb my fingers. Words fail me.
I stopped reading, not because of any effort it took to decipher such griffonage—I found it barely more difficult to read than something printed in the most relaxed Helvetica—but because my hands were shaking. I suppose my reaction was like that of someone to whom money is important and who finds some large sum of it lying on the sidewalk: he can’t believe his good luck; he flushes; he trembles; he is afraid someone is watching him; he grasps his treasure to him; he is filled with an unfathomable desire for more.
One feeling he does not experience, however, is the wish to locate the true owner of what he has found. And of all the feelings I had with that notebook clutched to me, none was greater than my desire to return it to the woman who had written it. (I assumed it was a woman, though the handwriting was not particularly feminine, and there was nothing in what I had read that apodictically qualified its author as female.)
Who would write such a thing? I wondered. For whom? Was this Derrida’s Mystic Pad, meant to isolate and consolidate the world? Who would run a business like that? Who would deal with inanimate objects as if they were alive and would be affected by where and with whom they lived? Who would laugh like that? I could hear her laughter in my head, where the music had been. Who would desire such a man given up as dead and record such a fantasy of sex and betrayal and forgiveness and reparation? Who would find the failure of words to come from the numbing of fingers on the pencil as mine had come from the numbing of my entire being?