The Great Concert of the Night

by Jonathan Buckley

  •

  Antoine Vermeiren, discussing La Châtelaine, tells us of his distaste for “American film sex.” He hates “all that pounding, all that grasping.” It is like the mating of cave people, he says. When we grasp something, we try to take possession of it. La Châtelaine is a “celebration of the caress,” he would have us believe. When we caress a body, we do not attempt to conquer it, he states.

  •

  In today’s paper, an interesting article: neuroscientists propose that the human brain is wired to administer doses of dopamine when we are in pursuit of a goal, rather than when we attain it. Discontent is rewarded, in other words. The evolutionary advantage is clear: happy Ugg, loafing with the wife and kids around the fire in the family cave, loses out to the never satisfied Agg, who is out in the woods, working on a new and better spear. As my sister knows, the customer must never be allowed to feel that enough is enough. And what lessons for the lover?

  •

  Last night: sitting on the harbour wall, thinking of nothing. The rich perfume of the sea. A black sky of remarkable clarity; uncountable stars. Contentment; pleasure in the happiness of William and Jenna. Then a memory of walking with Imogen, to the farthest part of the garden, out of the light that came from the house. Her breathing was effortful. At the fence we stood arm in arm, facing the hills. I put my coat around her, but still she shivered. The sky was cloudless; we looked at the stars. I remember some of her words: “tiny cold points of light” that we saw were “unimaginable fires” in reality. With mock portentousness she pointed to the sky and proclaimed: “Our ancestors. Our destination.” Entering the house, she said: “I really was having a Zen moment back there. If I had an Off switch, I would have happily used it.”

  •

  The top table: Jenna and William; the bride’s parents; Jenna’s best friend, Katie; and myself. Most of the father’s speech is devoted to Jenna’s qualities as a daughter and as a mother; William is praised as an incomer who is putting down roots—a young man who went so far as to try his hand on the boats. Light-hearted and affectionate reference is made to William’s ill-starred maritime career. “But that’s commitment for you,” the father-in-law pronounces. “Commitment” is the key motif.

  The trawler anecdote has been used up; improvisation is therefore necessary. All jokes are jettisoned. Having known William for some time, I can vouch for his determination. But the idea of destiny is what I want to talk about: William’s feeling, within days of arrival, that he had at last found the place where he was meant to be; and the powerful sense, on first sight of Jenna, that they would meet; and the certainty, on talking to her, that this was his soulmate. I quote from our conversations, embellishing only a little. And I talk about his love of Tilly. No laughs, but here and there a tissue is applied to an eye.

  Jenna’s mother wants me to know that she is happy that her daughter has found a replacement for Tilly’s father. “That one was about as much use as a blind guide dog,” she tells me. William is a level-headed and dependable chap, I assure her. “So he lived with you for how long?” she asks, with the suggestion that something does not quite add up. “Not for very long,” I answer, unsure as to how much of William’s back story she knows. “But you’ve known him for years,” she reminds me. I explain that I had happened to get talking to him one day, and from that point on we had always stopped for a chat whenever our paths had crossed. “He has some funny ideas, doesn’t he?” she says, when William and Jenna, clasped in a dance, have passed out of earshot. I feign curiosity as to what she might mean. William has introduced her to his research on black holes. He has a lively imagination, I agree. “One way of putting it,” says her husband—his first contribution for many minutes. He is on his third or fourth pint. “So,” he says, “you’re not wearing the yoke yourself?” I am divorced, I tell him. Putting an arm around my shoulder, he promises me that it’s better second time round. “First time, you don’t know what the hell you’re doing,” he says.

  Jenna points her phone at us, then shows me the result. I look like a melting candle. A slow song is playing; as with most of the evening’s music, I don’t recognise it. Jenna thinks I should dance with her; the parents too think I should dance with her; I am excusing myself when William intervenes, as if to protect a visiting dignitary from excessive attention. The parents are summoned to the other side of the room. A friend of Jenna’s, an attractive and burly young woman in a short strapless dress, slaloms across the dancefloor, huge cocktail in hand, to tell me that her mum likes the look of me. She takes a deep drink, then points across the room at a woman who is making wiping motions with her hands, to disassociate herself from whatever it is that her daughter is saying to me. “Thank you,” I answer, and Jenna’s friend gives me a wink.

  Time to go. I give a goodbye kiss to Jenna and another to Tilly, who is clinging to William’s back while he dances. William puts his stepdaughter down, in order to execute a manly embrace. Promises are made.

  •

  Seneca reports that in the garden in which Epicurus taught his pupils the following words were carved: “Stranger, here you will do well to tarry; here our highest good is pleasure.” (Epistulae morales ad Lucilium, Book I, Epistle XXI.) These words are well known, but are widely misunderstood, Francesca explained; Epicurus was no hedonist. Her favourite tutor was an authority on Epicurus, and was working on a translation of the letters. His keenest students were occasionally invited to join him and his wife, a professor of archaeology, at their riverside house. The garden of this house had a reputation, as did the wine cellar. In the sunset hour the chosen few would sip fine wines and admire the prospect. Though Epicurus is commonly taken to be an advocate of self-indulgence, he was nothing of the sort, her tutor impressed on her. What Epicurus meant by “pleasure” is not what we generally mean by the word. “I am more of a sybarite than Epicurus ever was,” he told her as he replenished her glass; this man cultivated a roguish manner that was almost camp, but was turning out to be a camouflage for real roguishness. Epicurean pleasure, he explained, was rather the elimination of pain and suffering, both physical and mental; it was the achievement of a state of tranquillity—ataraxia—that was free from covetousness, desire and the fear of death. There should be a bust of Epicurus in the museum, by the front door, Francesca suggested; nothing should be believed, he had argued, except what has been tested by observation and analysis.

  •

  The people presented here are word-puppets, imperfectly controlled; the writer included.

  •

  “Bill’s just like you,” my father once remarked. “He likes looking at things,” he said, as if looking at things were a small peculiarity, like a preference for overcast days.

  December

  Marcus Aurelius, Meditations iii 11: Make for thyself a definition or description of the thing which is presented to thee, so as to see distinctly what kind of a thing it is in its substance, in its nudity, in its complete entirety, and tell thyself its proper name, and the names of the things of which it has been compounded, and into which it will be resolved. For nothing is so productive of elevation of the mind as to be able to examine methodically and truly every object which is presented to thee in life, and always to look at things so as to see at the same time what kind of universe this is, and what kind of use everything performs in it, and what value everything has with reference to the whole.

  •

  Looking into a mirror, I see a face that is scrutinising the scrutinising face, and reacting to being scrutinised. Confronting oneself, one begins to play the part of the examiner, the judge.

  •

  To love truly, wrote Simone Weil, is to consent to the distance that separates us from the object of our love. Attention, as she uses the word, is a receptivity in which one’s self is suspended; it is open and passive, not active and focused. What people mean by “love” is usually appropriation, sometimes camouflaged with tenderness, but sometimes barely camouflaged at all, as Imogen said. The life t
hat I sometimes allowed myself to imagine, a life shared for many years with Imogen, was not a life that she could have lived.

  •

  Sight is the only sense that responds to the assertion of the will; we impose our will on what we see. But at the maison de maître it was necessary to suspend the will: I possessed Imogen only in so far as my eyes received the sight of her.

  •

  Val writes of a conversation with a woman—not a client, she is at pains to point out—whose “every waking moment” is consumed by her resentment of her ex-husband, a man from whom she separated more than ten years ago. This man treated her abominably. Of this there is no doubt, we are told. He was a philanderer. His business, unspecified, brought him into regular contact with alluring young women, a temptation to which he all too willingly surrendered. Since the divorce his career has taken a steeper upward trajectory. Every year there’s a new car; his girlfriend is startling. It is all so unfair. Val’s acquaintance, the wronged woman, revisits every day the crimes this man committed against her. She replenishes her grievances. The woman is in the right, but there can be no resolution if she continues this way. She must, says Val, “let it go,” even if this means living with the acceptance that the wrongdoer has, in a sense, won. Anger is a “barrier against the present.” Sometimes one must forget, if not forgive. George Santayana is quoted: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” But Santayana was wrong, Val proposes. Recollection of past injustices rarely helps to bring about reconciliation. Our culture is obsessed with commemoration, with demands for apology for events that occurred many lifetimes ago. Perhaps it is best not to reopen old wounds. Forgetting is good for us; indeed, it is essential to our well-being, “just like sleep.”

  •

  I pause Le Grand Concert de la Nuit at a sequence that always moves me: Agamédé and the twin maidservants, the deaf girls. It appears that she has instructed these children in a private language of gestures. She converses with them by means of flurrying fingers, complex arabesques of the hand, quick caresses of her own face and arms. Agamédé sweeps a finger around the palm of each of the girls, as though playing notes on a glass harmonica, and the girls smile at whatever favour it is that their mistress has promised. From this intimate choreography, we know that the unfathomable Agamédé, the cold and subtle Agamédé, loves these children as she loves no one else.

  •

  The Count, walking past the belvedere with Agamédé, makes an observation. We do not hear his words, but the expression is sardonic; we assume that the subject of the remark is the pensive young Guignon, who has just crossed the path on which the Count and Agamédé are strolling. Agamédé laughs. At this moment, in the background, in the belvedere, the nervous-looking theorbo player, who is evidently a real musician and not an actor, directs a brief but longing look at the poised and pretty flautist, who seems to be aware of his attention, though her gaze does not stray from the score on the stand in front of her. This moment is accidental, I’m sure; but it has been allowed to remain because it could be seen to serve the purposes of the film. I find it touching, this glimpse of the truly real amid all the high artifice.

  I freeze the scene at the instant in which the flautist, at the end of a long phrase, lifts her lips from the flute for a fraction of a second; a small smile appears, in response to the admiring gaze, I believe. In that frame, Agamédé’s laugh is reaching fruition, but if one looks at that frame alone, her face is not laughing: if one were to see this image in isolation, the expression might be read as one of pain. Freeze the action a moment later, and one now sees weariness in Agamédé’s face. But twenty-four frames flash onto the retina in each second of the film, and in watching this tiny episode one sees not a succession of photographic images but a single event—an outburst of gaiety. By means of the phi phenomenon and beta movement, our brain converts the sequence of unmoving images into a perfect illusion of motion. We see the movement of life. Agamédé glances to her left; touching the tip of her tongue to her teeth, she laughs, and in the same instant the theorbo player glances at the attractive young flautist. That sentence might be said to consist of thirty frames. In description, the scene becomes a bodiless tableau; there is no illusion of movement; no illusion of anything.

  •

  But does he who loves some one on account of beauty really love that person? No; for the smallpox, which will kill beauty without killing the person, will cause him to love her no more.

  And if one loves me for my judgement or my memory, he does not love me, for I can lose these qualities without losing myself. Where then is this “I,” if it be neither in the body nor in the soul? And how love the body or the soul, except for these qualities which do not constitute me, since they are perishable? For it is impossible and would be unjust to love the soul of a person in the abstract, and whatever qualities might be therein. We never then love a person, but only qualities.

  Let us then jeer no more at those who are honoured on account of rank and office; for we love a person only on account of borrowed qualities.

  Blaise Pascal

  •

  An announcement: the Sanderson-Perceval Museum will close to the public on March 31st next year. A hotel group has expressed an interest in acquiring the building. There are no immediate plans to auction any more items from the collection. I am authorised to put in place as many loan arrangements as possible; unloaned items are to be stored, for an indefinite period.

  •

  In the last hour of full sunlight we came upon a tiny bay. The tide had turned an hour ago: a thin curve of sea-smoothed sand, dark with water, was now exposed; small pools shone in the low-lying rocks. A narrow path descended steeply through the grass, bringing us to the back of the inlet. There we sat. The sun was in our faces, a disc of gorgeous tangerine, within a shallow bank of cloud that ran across the whole visible horizon, a wall of violet and mauve. The higher sky, above the mauve, was palest lemon. A windless evening. We heard only the rushing of the little waves; the sighing of the sea. “My God,” Imogen whispered, staring across the water. The pleasure was inexpressible, but it compelled acknowledgement, an exclamation. And in the moment of that exclamation it waned a little, necessarily, having been acknowledged; by no act of will could the pleasure now be recovered completely. I recall her face before she spoke: the widened eyes, momentarily ingenuous; the slight parting of the lips; she combed her hair with her fingers. In one of the rock pools, a blenny swam among the beadlet anemones. She watched it, fascinated.

  •

  The plausible atmospherics of the little bay. Some of those words may have led me astray. Was the sky “violet and mauve”? Perhaps it was; it should have been. The colours seem right; the colour-names, rather. The scene cannot be seen; the mind’s eye is not an eye. In bringing the past closer, into words, a distance is created. In writing, one steps outside of life.

  •

  We watched a pair of jays foraging in the oak trees. It would have been one of the last times we walked to within sight of the copse. The birds delighted her—their agility, the gorgeous colouring. Everything delighted her that afternoon. Her thoughts were like the birds, she remarked. Perhaps, she said, what was happening in her mind could not be characterised as thought. Impressions and notions alighted weightlessly and quickly departed. Everything that she saw was of interest, but her interest was disinterested, she told me.

  •

  Interview not a success. By the time I arrived, I knew that I could not live in London again. At the Tube station, I found myself acting the part of the bewildered provincial; I actually flinched at the noise of the approaching train. My self-presentation lacked conviction.

  Having a couple of hours to spare, I retreated to the National Gallery, and went directly to Tiepolo’s melancholy Venus, as if expected there. Whenever Imogen was in the vicinity, she would pay her a visit, to see that lovely face and the otherworldly pink of the fabric that spills from her cloud-throne. She brought me to look at h
er, the first time I stayed at Imogen’s flat. This Venus directs her gaze at Time. Other Venuses regard their own reflection, or Mars, or Adonis, or merely avert their eyes from their beholders. The multitudinous Virgins, however, live among us. Even here, in exile, among people for whom she is merely an image, the Virgin looks at us, or down on us, returning our gaze. Whereas Venus looks away, at the object of her passion, or at nobody at all.

  An altercation in the Velázquez room: a guard steps in front of a dozen teenagers who have run into the room as if the place were a playground. “God, what’s her problem?” shouts the queen bee, departing at the head of the gang. Later, I meet them again. The queen bee has paused to take a picture of herself, in front of a painting which she has been told is really famous. She grins as though the painted face were the face of a celebrity. Nearby, a teacher is talking to a school group. Half of her audience are looking at their phones.

  •

  “But every time you do something it’s the last time you’ll ever do it,” Imogen remarked. We had walked to the village; it would not be the last time we walked that far—not quite. “This afternoon is never going to happen again, the same as every afternoon,” she said, serenely. That evening, however, she was distraught.

  •

  I am drinking more than I used to, and more than I should. I read and I drink. I watch films and I drink. I drink as I try to write. Grammar and syntax help to keep me in order. Charles Perceval’s laudanum is something I would like to try. It gave him wonderful visions: the garden became a lake of viscous liquid, emerald green; he roamed across glaciers that were the colour of amber and yielded to the pressure of his feet; impossible animals, monstrous yet benign, fed from his hand; voices spoke from the leaves of trees.