Mickelsson's Ghosts by John Gardner (guided reading books .TXT) 📕

Perhaps there never before was so open a sea.

He tried to sleep, but his nightmares were so menacing he got up again. He should go on a trip somewhere. He should call the bus station, find out what was possible. But he remained sitting on the couch and, for a time, slept.

He couldn’t remember having turned on the stereo tuner, though surely there had to have been some flicker of conscious intent in the gesture. In any event, when he switched on the vacuum cleaner he was abruptly made aware that he’d been listening to music, unconsciously hanging on every note, fleeing into it as into sanctuary, though he had no idea what was playing. It was something he’d heard performed one night in Heidelberg. He remembered how the audience had roared its satisfaction. He stood mouth open, gazing down at the vacuum machine—an old Hoover he’d gotten second-hand through the Pennysaver, with tape around the bag—then decided to vacuum another time, maybe when the news came on, reinstating the world. He put the machine away and sat down again on the couch to fill and light his pipe, thinking about heart attack and the death of the fat man. He cringed from the memory and bore down with all his mind’s force on the music. He would work this thing out. Will power! It was stupid of him not to have done it long ago. Nothing could be more important!

For the hundredth time he regretted never having taken a good course in music appreciation. It was a humiliating lack in him, this stupidity about a thing so universal, so essentially human as music. Better to be born with one leg missing! He checked himself. Beware of rhetoric, he thought. Hair-line crack that in the end might bring everything crashing. He folded his hands, locked them together, eyes closed to slits. The woeful lack was there, undeniable, he confessed to himself; an emptiness of soul like the emptiness guilt brought on—perhaps a shaft too deep for any music course to fill.

He nodded, fell out of time for a moment, then was listening again, and thinking, straining his wits. He set his elbows on his spraddled knees, his hands behind his neck, pulling his head down to his chest.

It seemed clear, despite one’s natural doubts that one was applying the correct categories, that the music was in some sense “saying things,” crying out across the centuries to him—or to whoever might be alive to hear—with the greatest urgency; if not with the early Wittgenstein’s facts and propositions, then with something close; but the meaning, whatever it was, eluded him; he’d have gotten more sense out of Sanskrit. He pulled out of his strenuous crouch, stretched, then lit his pipe and puffed at it, gradually building a flat, sullen cloud above his head. Rausch. Drunkenness. Could it be only that? His whole soul resisted the likelihood. Surely music was the God-given language of Being, not complex and intellectual, like speech, the language of the mind, but direct, immediate: expression as simple as the sprouting, greening, and flowering of a plant. Audible dance. Perhaps it was Being, the perfect resolution of dualism (as Heidegger seemed to think); hence the gross, mechanistic Germans’ remarkable success with it. Emotion’s machine; from heaven through earth to hell with Mercedes-Benz. Abruptly, he half stood up to look out the window into the twilight beyond, checking to be sure no one was spying on him, watching as he sat here, red-faced and unkempt, jabbering to himself. He thought he heard something falling, heavier than snow or rain—a hollow, clattering sound. But it was nothing. He sat down again and once more threw himself into his project.

It was true of course, he thought, grinding his palms on his knees, that composers revised, labored endlessly over their manuscripts—so he’d read and believed—but surely it was only for the purpose of getting the emotion just right, the cry of pain or rapture or love’s sweet anguish precisely what it was. They wrote, played it through in their minds, revised, reconsidered, started over, and so by a gradual refining process expressed exactly what they meant or discovered they must mean, a “statement” purified beyond anything possible for human beings at first bleat. Surely even a tone-deaf dolt ought to understand the thing, penumbrally at least, once it was said. He had emotions, did he not? But wait.

If the music he was hearing was just emotional description, at best an infinitely careful, supremely artistic smile or groan …

He covered his face with his hands. What had any of this to do with …

But a moment later he was back on it, more intent than ever on breaking through the wall. Perspiration washed his forehead.

If music was studied, recreated or now-first-expressed emotion, why was he listening with such strained intensity, as if to learn some answer, solve some important life-riddle? Wasn’t it the case, in fact, that he’d been listening all this while for the wrong thing entirely; that music—for that matter, all the arts—told one nothing at all, simply described things as they are, or were, or might be, simply named things as Adam was said to have named things in the garden except that it was the thing named? Was it the case, to put the idea more exactly, that music was nothing more than, as the formalists thought, one more expression of Nature’s way, atomic orderliness, no more significant or meaningful—except for the fact that it was created by human beings and in public places flashed its complexity—than a jonquil, an elm tree, that it was simply one more particular thing in a crowded, gasping anarchy of things—itself, simply: meaningless and ultimately as worthless as a soup-spoon, or Donnie Matthews’ foetus; or meaningless except in that, like the foetus, it might not have existed and someday would cease to exist? Was it