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

delusion, then, that made people turn to it in times of crisis? (He should get himself paper and pencil, he thought, biting his lip; they would help him think clearly.) He was tempted to turn off the radio. He thought of what might be called Plato’s theory, music as inspired intuition of pre-birth memory, God’s voice; Aristotle’s theory, the grounding of emotion, or catharsis; then of Collingwood’s, music as discovery through expression, music as the mirror in which one saw, hence seized, the world. He sat forward, his elbows on his knees, hands over his ears, his whole body clenched, like an explorer pondering one of Garret’s real-life dragons face to face, or face to helm, hypnotized, maddened by otherness, struggling to remember what he knew about the process of evolution, as if that might be of use. Why had he been listening, without even knowing it—sucking, gulping in the music on the radio as if it were oxygen, until suddenly the vacuum cleaner’s noise had broken in on him like reality, a reawakened consciousness of drowning? Why had he felt, as distinctly he had, outside himself?

Illusion. Truth was on the side of the vacuum cleaner.

Why the thought should irritate him—so much so that he had to get up and pace—Mickelsson couldn’t say; it was a familiar truth. (In his mind he saw the fat man’s long, futile gasp.) All his life, not quite consciously, he’d been looking for some kind of key in music (he registered the pun but could think of nothing to do with it)—had been looking for something with which to unlock secret gardens; but what music offered, if he was now on the right track, was Kant’s impenetrable wall; phenomena; a certain ordering of facts—not propositions—another baffling variant of Nietzsche’s “stone-hard words,” as if the conductor were to say, “Life’s a mystery? I’ll show you mystery!” and were then maliciously to perform for you, say, Sibelius’s Second Symphony, just now being announced, with unctuous respect, on the radio. Boston Philharmonic Orchestra. Mickelsson breathed shallowly and squinted where he stood. Gloom. Vague images came to him—dark shadows, something huge and restless—the roll of the wide, twilit North Atlantic, the clarinet a high, sunlit bird. (He remembered standing at the rail of the S. S. France with Ellen and the children.) Crap, he thought. Vibrating catgut. Disturbed columns of air.

He was striding now from one end of the room to the other and back, his hands fiercely wrestling with one another behind him. The whole world was noise, the outward expression of forces directly unknowable—not form, not “spirit” blind thuddings in the dark—and music, fiction, physics, philosophy were merely translations into other, secondary noise systems, further dark codes, glosses of the unknown, unknowable text, “better” or “worse” in a given case only for their interesting complexity and internal coherence. (Wittgenstein again, though twisted, descended from Nietzsche.) One might say, in effect, that the arts—all forms of human activity—were simple ritual, the groping re-enaction of the unknowable but felt: universal forces too dark and mindless to understand, whether one called them demons or the dance of electrons, forces one grasped—insofar as one grasped them at all—by joining them, mimicking them, dancing. So Bierhalle music made the Germans stamp their feet or drip shining fat crocodile tears, getting away from it all, and Americans shot their jism to a disco beat. But then why was Beethoven described in certain circles as one of the world’s great philosophers? Could one look at Beethoven, then back at the world, and know something? One of Beethoven’s favorite writers, Mickelsson had somewhere read, was Immanuel Kant. One of his friends was Nietzsche’s inspirer, Cabinet Minister Goethe.

Abruptly, scowling, short of breath from his anger at himself, Mickelsson turned off the radio, with clumsy hands got out his von Karajan Symphonies and Overtures of Beethoven, and carefully, touching the record-rim only, placed the First Symphony, side one, on the turntable. He stood staring at the slowly turning record, his pipe in his hand, keeping the philosophy of Kant in mind and listening with the sharpest possible attention to the music’s first bars. A familiar trembling came, something like the feeling he would get when near Jessica Stark, whom now he locked out of his mind. It was beautiful music (whatever that meant), so sweet (whatever that meant) that his eyes brimmed with sentimental tears—a baffling opening like an abruptly continued, half-forgotten conversation, as if God’s first words should be On the other hand … and then, quite suddenly, the music turned thrilling, an expanding, rising affirmation of … who knew what? Mickelsson refused to fool himself. He had no earthly idea what—if anything—the music was saying; it certainly had nothing to do, so far as he could tell, with the Critique of Pure Reason, not even with the mind’s inability to get past the phenomenon. Possibly it was related to the Critique of Judgment. On one hand there’s the universe, Beethoven might be saying; on the other hand, I give you … Von Karajan was said to have done well under the Nazis.

No, he had no idea what the music was mimicking, describing, or proposing, or why it so powerfully affected him, made him want to bawl like a child, or fly, smash down walls. Rausch, he thought again. Or maybe conquest of the horrible unconquerable by any other means. Perhaps the whole thing had to do with the phenomenon Garret had mentioned—a commonplace these days—the lack of connection between head and heart, the abyss between belief and attitude, cognitive and conative. Something deep within him, buried under tons of dispiriting experience and muscular fat, stirred to the music as a dowsing rod stirred to hidden rivers. Touched by the music’s unearthly probe, the almost dead child-angel within him, buried alive in mundane concerns—the grown-up’s miserable otherness of self-regard, cowardly paranoia—struggled feebly for an instant to unstick its eyes. (Was that what he was doing restoring the house: erecting his dead self’s sepulchre?)

Self-regard. Was that