“Now then, I have no time for folderol. I’m almost
criminally busy with the vexing problem of Schubert. In fact, I am, as a
coworker from the south side of Chicago once told me, busier than a cat
covering up shit. So I have no time to put you into my blog today. Sorry, but
that’s how it is!”
The ever-absent Lady, who is never and always around,
recoiled in horror.
“No, I didn’t,” she said. “Anyway, why does it always have
to be horror from which we recoil? Why can’t we recoil from sin? Or recoil in
ecstasy? Anyway, that’s hardly the point. Where have you been?”
“Sleeping with psychotics,” I told her. “If you must know….”
“What! Marc, you’re a married man!”
“The circumstances were unusual,” I told her, “starting five
days earlier, when I was strip-searched, and then bidden to squat with my butt
touching my ankles. Then I had to stretch my arms out, close my eyes, and
cough. Unremarkably, I performed this task superbly, though no videographic evidence exists to attest
to the fact. True, it may not have been YouTube-worthy, but at least
Instogram....”
“You know, Marc, you couldn’t be normal, because what would
you write about?”
“I wonder about it, sometimes. I imagine that there is a
huge bronze Buddha, somewhere hidden deep in the jungles of Southeast Asia. The
lucky or accursed chosen who stumble upon it get to rub the Buddha’s stomach,
and their wish is granted. Would I trek to find the Buddha? And would I wish to
be normal?”
“Well, if it meant not having to sleep with psychotics….”
“True,” I said. “Though I was gently initiated into the
whole affair. My first psychotic—sorry, but I do feel possessive towards
them—was accompanied by a male orderly. So as I was lulled to sleep by the
siren or sirens of two milligrams of Ativan—perhaps the most compelling reason
to believe that God exists—the orderly quite courteously shepherded the lunatic
away from me. (He tended to like hovering over my bed, being given to strange
sights, things invisible to see….)”
“Ah, the majestic words of John Donne,” Lady remarked, “and
did you ride ten thousand days and nights….”
“Sure felt like it,” I told her. “Anyway, when the orderly
showed signs of fatiguing, and the madman showed signs of very much not
fatiguing, I gently excused myself, and went to sleep in the seclusion room.”
“You slept in seclusion!”
“The best room in the hotel,” I told her. “It was quite
secure and yet unlocked. It was sort of like having a pied-a-terre in Paris. Anyway, that only lasted a couple of nights,
and then they kicked me out. So I had to go back to a regular room—nothing
lasts forever, my dear—but fortunately, I didn’t have a roommate. Until the
last night.”
“Marc, honey….”
“That’s when José Miguel arrived, fresh from another
institution. So there he was, but where were the transfer papers? Where
was his medical and especially psychiatric history? And what medicines was he
disposed to take?”
“Don’t tell me nobody….”
“These little things happen,” I told her. “But fortunately,
José Miguel stopped speaking Gibberish (the native tongue of Gibber) and
pleaded, in clenched Spanish, for 40 milligrams of Haldol!”
“Why is it, Marc, that every statement of yours arouses at
least three questions? In what way was his Spanish clenched?”
“There’s a kind of lockjaw that accompanies high doses of
antipsychotics,” I told her. “I’ve forgotten the name of it, but I remember it
from my old nursing days. Anyway, what I did remember was…”
“Yes?”
“…that the normal dose of Haldol is 5 milligrams.”
“What! And he was on 40?”
“Yup! Oh, and he was also on mega-overdoses of an
anti-depressive. So there I was, wondering which would manifest itself if he
were to remain untreated. I was voting, of course, for the depression.”
“Rather uncharitable of you…”
“Would you have preferred psychosis?”
“Well, you do have a point….”
“Anyway, the nurse knew just what to do, and scurried off.
And then she came back yielding a medicine cup, the contents of which were…”
“Sing it to me.”
“…two Benadryl! Yup, she was feeding the equivalent of
Nyquil PM to a madman! Well, you could have cut the sense of relief with a
machete!”
“And so you retired to the lure of seclusion?”
“Nah, by this time the madman and I had made friends. He had
lived and worked for seven years in New Jersey, which may have been a worse
fate than requiring 40 mgs of Haldol, and however much of the anti-depressive.
Anyway, I was supposed to be de-institutionalized in the morning, so I decided
to chance it. And indeed, the magic of Benadryl prevailed once again! I think
of doing a little testimonial for them. Or perhaps it was just my soporific
company. Anyway, the next morning did indeed come, and Mr. Fernández came and
collected me. See? I’ve lived once again to hear mermaids singing…”
“You certainly are doing Donne today….”
“Did, doing, Donne,” I told her. “Whoever heard of a poet
who was also a principal part? Anyway, that was so last week. Moving forward,
as we used to say in corporate America, what’s to be done—or Donne—with Franz
Schubert?”
“Must anything be…whatever?”
“Certainly,” I told her. “The failure to act on Schubert is
a principal cause of the malaise—always like them Frenchie words—of cultural
America.”
“So what’s the problem?”
“Well, first of all, there’s an incredible amount of music
that the guy wrote. Here I am, struggling along on day 12 of a book, but
Schubert managed, in the course of fifteen or twenty productive years, to write
over 800 songs, nine symphonies, two major song cycles, fourteen or fifteen
string quartets, and I don’t know how many piano sonatas. Amazing, when you
think of it….”
“Noted,” said Lady, busy not being there.
“And then there’s the fact that we tend to think of him as a
cheerful, filled-with-sunshine composer. Maybe because he could certainly write
a pretty tune. But really, Schubert is dark, dark. Beethoven could be sobbing
away, at times, but he was always essentially normal. And when he wasn’t
sobbing, he was shaking his fist, or raising his finger, or doing something
healthy. And even Schumann—who is probably our next problem, dammit—is
healthier than Schubert. And given that Schumann had his mind rotted out with
syphilis, threw himself into the Rhine, and then begged to be taken to the
madhouse….”
“Marc, dear, have you considered that, well, it may be just
a bit unhealthy to listen to all this stuff? Have you thought of heavy metal?”
“A serious point. Anyway, Schumann’s later works can be a
little extreme, to say the least. But Schubert, to me at least, goes from being
absolutely paradisiacal to…well, omnicidal.”
“Omnicidal?”
“You know, homicidal / suicidal / fratricidal / genocidal….”
“That violent?”
“At times, yes,” I told her. “I recently listened to the
slow movement of his next to last piano sonata—your Internet is sloughing off
today, so I can’t tell you which—and the middle section reminded of nothing so
much as an autistic child banging away at an open piano. It was completely
wild, weird, and unsettling. I listened to it with my jaw sweeping the floor
and thought, ‘and this is the guy who wrote the Unfinished Symphony?’”
“I don’t suppose it was syphilis?”
“It almost certainly was, and by the way, has anybody ever written
a treatise of the relationship between syphilis and creativity? Damn, I wish
your Internet would come back!”
“Now, now,” said Lady.
“Then, then,” I responded, “so here we have this pudgy
little Viennese guy, who was never married but deeply loved by his friends.
Which leads to the speculation, of course…”
“Of course.”
“Well, probably only his hairdresser knew. Anyway, his work is
as amazing as it is unfathomable. Sorry, but that’s just me….”
“So how did you come across Schubert?”
“Well, I was young, fifteen or so, and had already begun my
war with the cello.”
“You had a war with the cello?”
“For decades,” I told her. “It was a witch’s cauldron,
boiling and spewing, that got poured down onto me and the cello. I was gay and
didn’t know it. Or perhaps I did know it, but couldn’t believe it was happening
to me. Or rather, it was never going to happen to me. Am I making sense?”
“Utterly not.”
“That’s how it was in those days. Well, and then I had a cello teacher whose
train was substantially larger than mine, and was coming down the track at
considerable speed. And right toward me….”
“Really?”
“He emphasized technique, emotional restraint, and an
intellectual approach to playing. And of course I had NO technique, and wanted
to play pieces that were way beyond me. He was a great teacher for young,
female cellists who wanted to be music teachers. But for a young, gay-male,
hyper-confused kid who wanted to be the next Rostropovich? He came down hard,
and suggested that if I ever shaped up, I might get into a grade B orchestra.
You know, something like the Dade County Symphony….”
“Dade County has a symphony?”
“No—so that’s how bad I was. Or he thought I was. Or I
thought he thought I was. Did I mention that it was a rather confused time of
my life?”
“Might that be why you sleep so well with psychotics?”
“Very likely so. Anyway, I was sent off to a music camp, and
part of that was chamber music. Meaning music played by two to ten other
musicians. So there I was, with four other guys, and there the music was:
Schubert Quintet in C Major. Do you know, there may be a god after all? Because
I thought it would be the simplest, easiest affair—nothing more than doing plink plunk plunk, plink plunk plunk for
forty minutes or so. But it was nothing like that at all….”
“Do you plink plunk plunk well?”
“All cellists do,” I said. “Anyway, we tottered off at the
beginning, stumbled—most of us—to letter A…”
“What’s all that about?”
“Well, in the likely event that all of the musician are not
gods, at some point you’re going to have to stop and regroup. So sheet music
comes sectioned off into A / B / C, etc. Anyway, we lurched onto letter B,
which is when the clouds parted, and the beaming, benevolent face of god
appeared, sending his choirs of angels to caress benisons upon us all.”
“Letter B was that good?”
“Letter B was unimaginatively good. And the rest of the
movement was as well. And then the second movement? Well, Arthur Rubenstein
wanted it played at his funeral, and he was a pianist, dammit. So he passed
over the entire piano repertoire and chose this piece. Anyway, at a certain
point, a man who became a second father to me—well, one of my many second
fathers: I’m lucky that way—strolled into the room. And he told us that the
quintet was from that last, amazing year, and he told us the story of—I
think—Dame Myra Hess. And she had said about Schubert and that horrible /
heavenly year, ‘he knew he was sick, he knew he was dying, and I know he
knew what heaven was….’”
“That beautiful?”
“Shall we?” I said, and the great C Major quintet filled the
air….
(The actual music starts eight minutes into this clip. But Joel Krosnick's introduction is superb. In fact, had I heard it before writing the post, it could have saved me a morning's work....)
