Etude

The makeshift hall is hushed. The old firehouse cement floor is cold. The lights dim. Alone on the stage a small person listens to the shuffling sounds and the few coughs from the socially-distanced audience, forced by convention and the masks they all wear to be quiet for once for a few hours in their lives. The pianist already sees the notes that line up at attention along the tracks of the staves above the keyboard and begins moving toward them softly, so quietly those hard of hearing won’t yet be aware. Nothing moves, though, down those receding tracks except a changed kind of attentiveness.

The pianist begins—and plays a smallish town. It feels as if nothing moves while hours pass. This happens always when a present place is looked at in a special way: when it is seen from the special angle that makes it and also a hundred years or so of its past visible at the same time. It is as if an old illustrated calendar lies open on a counter beneath a window which shows the same scene; looking from calendar image, on which sunlight (slowly circling with a vortex of dust motes) falls, up to the other reality outside, it too seems as if nothing has changed (or flipped its pages) in many months or years. The railroad tracks in that still image and in the scene outside the window both unfold, curving into the distance like a remark one has heard distinctly but not yet processed.

Finally, a cloud of fawn-colored dust seems to shift everything from stillness into slow motion, then, leaving the village,

it gradually moves into the distance along the arpeggio of the railroad ties for several miles. There it takes a curve and another stretch of ties and track, flanked by trees, now lies open like a book. It becomes totally country, no longer town. And that book no longer lies open to show typeface, but in a full-page illustration in which, suddenly, a door is flung open and an old, stiff-gaited man materializes in today’s sunlight as he eases himself out of his hastily, precariously (and illegally) parked truck—parked too close to the ties and tracks for comfort. In his hand is a nearly invisible long wand as thin as a whiplash, as he hobbles slowly across the rails and heads for the brush.

A slight, faltering emphasis in the pianist’s run of notes seems to question the man, suggesting that he would rather not be seen, but has been sneaking across the tracks, and now is heading with dogged steps into the underbrush; but, then, around the end of the next stave, the answers appear. They materialize in theme of lyrical delight that begins to enchant just after the man has disappeared into the brush, crashing through it with surprising energy to where, glinting in pewter-colored sunlight, a small winding river flows—and where the old man, the music suggests, will catch the season’s first fish of what may or may not turn out to be a disappointing season—a first fish that will seem just as radiant as the first fish of his lifetime.

This delight at the start of a much-practiced, yearly event is a sensation that old men uniquely feel, the coloration of the pianist’s notes seems to suggest. Old age, after all, is mostly a prolonged slog through hard territory. The pianist knows this well from getting closer and closer to the average age of most of his audiences. At this age they always talk about and show special interest in accounts of baroquely various, ever-deepening health issues. The old man with the fishing rod is right in the middle of a number of such problems, and it makes his pleasure in this first moment beside the sun-flecked stream exquisite. As he makes his first cast, he is filled with light—de-light.

And with that the music disappears completely, and all the light turns out, sharply like a massive heart attack or stroke. It vanishes utterly and with it all goes all of the audience’s sensations of who, and what, and where they are. Or if there still is any sound from the performer it gives a scarily perfect imitation of suffocation. It feels like complete stasis and desperation. It has the power of a gorgon and paralyzes all that it ticks for. It warns us to ask not for whom this time ticks, because it no longer ticks for you.

The audience realizes all to well that they are in the dark night of the lockdown. That this is the time their society has ground to a halt. That this evening’s music has been advertised correctly as a corona concert. In this moment between ordinary life and perhaps the forever end of all normality, the pianist, perhaps in soulful elegy or sinister irony, has invited this diminished socially-distanced audience in face masks to come, listen, and spend their evening. Perhaps this evening in the hollowly echoing old firehouse will be their last, a mini-superspreader that will end everything.

To do this the pianist has invited an audience in face masks to come and listen to an old classical repertoire has been shattered and partially reassembled as a succession of changing images of former being. And, right now, at the start, he makes this moment of consciousness most exquisitely present—and, having done so, the music returns and with it a simulacrum of time. And in the dark, an artificially lit, luminescent, and static scene dials itself up in the darkness, both giving and denying relief to the audience.

The gas station is swathed in immobility. Forever doth that one car turn but never doth it turn. Forever does that other car seem to move along the lit store facade without gaining an inch of pavement. It is cold. Cold midnight. It is as if all the piano’s white piano keys have turned into frozen surfaces covered, difficult to touch, and the black keys have become the chilly darkness, and the soundscapes they produce (thanks to the pianist’s slow labor with cold-stiffened fingers) are, in contrast, the unnaturally static lighting in the center of a diorama.

And as the chill in the pianist and audience grows, and as the pianist (playing as if in galoshes and thick cowhide gloves) presses forward further into the composition and struggles to get anything moving—then, (as if chocks are suddenly removed, brakes released, and lubrication applied, somewhere ahead what seems to be perhaps a tipping point, a bifurcation, an inflection point, and a light ahead widens from a dot to a hemisphere, and a tunnel sweeps by and past a train in suspension (not the other way around) and with a startling click or a shout the deep dark goes out—and wonder, of wonders, it is day, the sort of day that only midsummer brings, the year’s timeless afternoon of plants full of pollen and bees suspended unmoving in their fragrant monotone buzzing. And, after a second or two it seems to have always been there, that

long afternoon, that little breeze smelling of haying, that farmhouse nearby filled with the slumber of those who have worked and are napping before dinner.

Yet, along with that, there is something that is not quite right, something that stretches and deforms that boundaries of rural felicity, even when these contain a family dog or two plopped on their sides with tongues out panting. There is some little theme working with an impudent hammer down in a dank, even mold-smelling unfinished dirt basement beneath that legacy farmhouse. Even as one might be sprawling languid in the fragrant grass, and time be slowing to a stop, the music begins (in a strange slow transition) to dig under beneath the melody it had just been retailing, and disembed another, one charged with energy, that moves at high speed back and forth, like a film of a crowd that, projected, dashes off then restarts, with a stutter that mesmerizes and agitates any eyes that locked onto it.

For here, rising above the farmhouse in a shadow comes one of the etude’s major themes stalking at last toward the viewing audience in huge insectlike steps, health-hazardous transmission lines carrying high voltage power for hundreds of thousands of now modern people, structures that plainly display a skeletal architecture and, behind the hill they crest over, look like H. G. Wells aliens; and these carry the thick tube-like wires that are plugged, somewhere far away, into furnaces of superheated coal. And further, as the music looks up toward the horizon again, there is also no less than the etude’s other great theme, and it now rises up in a glorious and even more powerful daymare, a daymare with ambiguous prospects. It appears to have been climbing up the back of the foothills completely unseen; and seeing it suddenly now one wants somehow to warn, to rouse those (unseen, but clearly there) people slumbering in the farmhouse—and also everyone in the audience, now on the edge of their seats, because they know now how crucially important it is for the sleepers to wake and go out to consciously meet this outburst of radiance: this more than earthly radiance that approaches like a wild Ode to Joy but which, if not met, known, and managed, has the potential to mutate into demented havoc.

And as these powers that exceed limits of nature straddle both farmhouse and audience and, like a large animal doing a long dog-stretch of its back legs, pause and yawn, unexpectedly, a new sound is born; and the pianist, snapping erect now, with both buttock bones pressed firmly into the top of the bench, spreads out musically a vision of what is the edge of a great city, where an expressway lifts up its stanchions like gigantic hands that offer its novel commuters up as a generous gift to some new god, one not entirely unforgiving. But none of the people in the speeding autos and semis seem to have this perspective, immersed in their lives as they are. And the piano, accelerating like a big jazz band’s horn section, begins to animate them; and the cars start speeding; and the smoke from city chimneys starts ascending in swatches; and the sun’s rays reach through it and sink deeper into the world below; and, at last, a stunning, still more intense illumination emerges and lances still more deeply into the up and down, in and out flow of the collected traffic:

For down through the smudged
Cloud, through the smog of the morning,

And as if condensed from the general haze and released in a microsecond,

A shaft of white light
Strikes the throughway--
And it makes in the grey
An astonishing radiance—

(And now a new vein in the music opens up, one that doesn’t only make only images but also tells stories)

And as it happens
The figure it seems by chance to pick out
Is in an old-make beaten-up
American car driving
Maddeningly slowly:

And in it’s an old man, plug-nosed, with a
Face that is pitted
And with glasses so thick the eyes within
Are three times their right size--
And he drives with his head tilted back
And his mouth is hanging open,
As if his nose is too stopped up to breathe;

And, if anything, he slows down still more as the traffic backs up, and it seems that the music brings the audience closer and closer into the car with the old man, so that they hear his breath and feel its attempted expulsions of semi-liquid congestion; and it does this so insistently the people in the dart listening feel the increasing impatience of the slowed drivers. For everything about him seems irritating: the fact that he doesn’t seem to care about slowing everyone down to a crawl is infuriating; and the fact that he is doing this so blatantly right in the rush hour is even more so; and, worst, the nagging feeling that is he is joined with them at the hip, as a too-vivid demonstration of what they also will become, and seems like an intolerable responsibility they can’t unload on anyone else:


And then the light says to them
(And it says it in a voice that balls up all their furious impatience
And shakes it right in front of their eyes) YOU
It says, YOU had better get this clear,
This is the ONE,
THIS one, not you, is the ONE I have chosen
For my favor: you
figure it out,
You make sense of it,
In this brief shaft of light I have given
You for your illumination--
And the white light pours in-
To his front seat as he passes
The stadium and mudflats and proceeds with you and the others
The traffic backslashing around and behind him,
Steadily with his working, open,
Mouth, deliberate, slow,
Like some stunned fish immersed
In unfamiliar light,
While the mass
Of you go glacially slowly but are beginning to realize
What you, yourselves, might just by extension mean

And they and the audience in the midst of this struggle feel a kind of desperate hope that at last the piano is reaching high for some surprise, even though painful, that would change all, some closure, some possible grandeur: yet as soon as they think that the music responding starts slipping, loosening the last grasp it had clawed up to manage, and its sound complexifies and starts sliding back into a minor key and then splits into a number of different directions; and it enters a muddle and the whole vision of people, their cars, and the throughway fades.

And though the music becomes quieter, it is not happier, and then it suddenly stops dead.

For the pianist finally has raised both hands and keeps them both suspended, so that it seems the light left on the stage just on the brink of revealing a meaning is poised—poised at a crisis—poised to then, suddenly, without warning, the hands blur and come down shockingly hard on the keys and, just as shockingly, everything in and about the darkened firehouse stage becomes visible, and it is total day.

Not just total day. An intensified vision of total day. It is the total illumination of what seemed to them to be their as reality before the pandemic, of the Omega heights of those thoroughly real days. People caught in the midst of being and doing what they had to be and do every workday. People caught in the instant in late afternoon when traffic (always annoying) thickens like stew into which too much flour has been put, and the thickness of the tide of commuters reaching their exits thickens it still further, as at each exit a cohort too large for passage slowly drains through the secondary blockages and into the grid of side streets, there to turn, twist, and curlicue together into the incomplete privacy awaiting them in the places cut small into grids of likewise small buildings, where at day’s end they eat and try to sleep.

And the sound that expresses all this would certainly have startled the makers of Steinways, as the quintessance of the daylight of decades and decades becomes more and more fraught as people and infrastructure grow older and denser and spread our more widely. And the small individual exit ramps from the communal snarl double and quadruple, and the homes the individual drivers are seeking become perhaps less happy, and the intensity of the signals to go and to STOP turn more and more ubiquitous, and the sky shade of orange is removed from its archaic genesis and intensified into pollution-tinged sunsets. Now, shining over the places where people are dwelling the sunset becomes a quotidian apocalypse, a workaday last day, a gigantic hair of the dog that daily bit them, or (for lovers of felines) an real cataclysm.

And this is the exact moment that the virus is starting to board the commercial jets in Asia and Europe, and showing its many passports to the plane crews, and beginning to travel, some bits of it in first class other bits common carrier, across the oceans to be met at the gates by their future viral spouses and parents, their extended relatives, waving their handwritten signs and excited greetings.

But as this disquieting intensity rises now into awareness, it is once again immediately mitigated, as, inside the music, a proliferation of echoes commences—as notes and fragments of chord changes, runs and shadings each to grow their own shadows, shadows fashioned from reverbs and all of them echoing the sort that preceded everything MOOG-made. It is as if a forest has darkened and grown quieter, echoing the birdcalls of a thrush (say, a veery) singing to a companion, and their songs echo in the woods’ fragrant darkness: except that these reverbs are not just from birds and their loved ones but from the generous cloister of echoes that were part of a past more suggestive than anything that is merely now. A past that also has infrastructures like a town’s tolling bells or the moon-howls of watchdogs, and that echoes with greater negative spaces than any of ours have now—like the spaces radios first made outside of cities in the days before television—when the music, news, and dramas condensed in dark spaces, was sent from faraway cities into the darkness of listeners’ private imaginations, so much less adorned than these all are today. And this all turned into an even more reverberant silence at the midpoint in the night when the stations, with quotidian drama, switched off.

And the pianist having shepherded his people back through the valley of nostalgia, with music that affects them like a gentle ghost at the feet of their beds, sighing softly in the dark—and having done this, he settles again into minutes of evoking the miles of old tracks still left where once railroads ran: the sounds of those tracks and assorted bridges hidden away in the dark woods like treasures, along which, after midnight, the wraiths of even the earliest of prewar commuters still travel, and from which howls and whistles still seem to soulfully emanate—and still move the hearts of even deep sleepers, whose old memories surface and stir them half awake, and

sets them to remembering the wailing of whistles and crashing of wheels over iron, and the light in the bar cars, and the weekly commuters arriving drunk and impossible at places which had learned to tolerate this bad behavior, because everyone in the past was both happier and more flexible—or were supposed to have been.

Only then do the tracks of the staves leave the premodern echoes and move the remembering audience closer and closer to the city, and only then do the tracks feel the uplift of the elevations that still takes them rattling at night through warehouses and tenements, those wonderful routes that even now take people back and forth above the sea level of the city’s rooftops. And there is joy in at last being out of places still stuck in premodern darknesses, and in lifting the people up to look out over wave after wave of dark and lighted windows, to glimpse the staccato of their fellows at meals or reading the day’s news in armchairs and undershirts, or stretching in lingerie beneath dim overhead lights, bare bulbs but with each one with proudly in possession of its separate string. And by now the harsh repetition of the railroad ties’ metronome slowly but surely morphs into something resembling a slightly irregular pulse-beat—a sound that hesitates sweetly before each sinuously postponed stroking of snare drum by a man in an old suit with a hatbrim pulled low over his ecstatic features, flicking his brushes so as to smooth off all of life’s edges with a soft syncopation that adds warmth to their feelings and metamorphoses their walking into a slow soft shoe dance.

And so having approached the rim of the city, the trains haul themselves up sharply and plunge into tunnels under the river, while the music soars up from them and sweeps on its own up and over the city, above its tall buildings and the bright colored neon necklaces they once wore years ago: over the marvelous turn-of-the-century signage everywhere in Times Square and downtown beyond. For the music, flexing its wings, spreads them to soar over a remarkable pickle, verdigris green burning a great HEINZ into the imaginary of men and of women; then up over Times Square where Little Lulu the tomboy made history by handing her colleague Tubby, a shining Kleenex for his nose; and with the great blow he then made both head and tissue flew up and out into the dark, as meanwhile below, the pianist’s music swoops down to dance slowly beside a much-loved, sagely-winking, conspiratorial camel, a camel that, heedless of cancer, wheezed puff after puff of smoke into the hats and faces of eager pedestrians. And refreshed by its free drag from that camel, the music rises up above rooftops, to sail toward the harbor: rooftops now with lit windows below and a full moon beyond—where once, night after night, for two thousand times two times, two roman chariots, channeled their inner Kirk Douglas into the slave Spartacus, and their impatient horses were loosed to race with dramatic vehemence toward a finish that tens of thousands of brilliant incandescent bulbs rapidly rotating raised high like a high voltage cocktail to be quaffed in the nights of Manhatta.

And then with the echo of these great things behind them, the pianist’s notes settle down to feeling their way toward the Long Island side of the second great river that made with its passage Manhatta Manhattan, high over the bridge that Hart Crane hailed as River-throated, iridescently upborne Through the bright drench and fabric of our veins (and thus by extension through our arteries also); and then north to the L.I.E. stretching out like a fist with six fingers, to claw back the two escaping, Long Island boroughs—near where the greatest of Gatsbys traveled, and thence to softly accompany the time from Gatsby to the sixties, where the piano at last settles down to reassemble itself into just one more lilting song.


Tale of Two Persons

Having just finished The New York Review of Books,
While the underground rises up to roof-high tracks,
Above all he rides, deep in his copy of Soul On Ice,
And adds to the book’s margins sets of tiny tracks
Fine-hand quibblings, caveats and added thoughts.
While, going the other way, she’s immersed in Friedan
While by her side rocks The Second Sex.

And he looks out where the reeds are moving,
And she too eyes them, and the industrial and stark
Fragments of architecture, silhouetted, dark.
And who knows? Some night—perhaps they watch
And perchance each sees the other, two headshots
Framed in the lighted windows sweeping by,
As if, perhaps, the planet somehow has ordered

For each to find her/his soul mate in this odd way.
But always the trains pass too fast for that to happen
And resolves in fading clicking. and empty tracks
Until then the screech that drags their station past them,
And slowing, pulls them to a groaning stop.
Then winter scours their windows with whitish gusts.
And for thirty days, then years, they shuttle like some rust-
Colored stroke across a Chinese scroll, pure, clean.

And their children, spouses, change—like changing dress
Of nature on the bleak, reedy expanse;
Their lives lurch forward, still afire with dreams
Of marks they might make, of love, of brilliant chance—
But year glides into year—and intrepidity
Starts bleaching with the decades already spent.

And as the sunset slides above the dark marsh birds
Her mouth moves softly with Jane Austen's words;
And, bifocled with slack skin that no massages
Could tighten on the bone again, he pages
Meticulously through a folded Sunday Times;
And outside the scrawling clouds spell less and less for them.

Yet a look, a flash of eye, a glance
Stirs still that longing that they not depart
Until some great change alter their ennui;
Erect and tense, the wetlands sliding by,
The teeth of windows ratchet up the sky;
And with a twist that curves their rail-beds back
They plunge into dark reeds, then floods of light—

And what lost spark flickers from the stutter
That telegraphs the hint that all’s not over?
What tune starts playing through their hollow bones
Then wells above the tracks’ timed metronomes?
And why do their old regrets—forfeited chances—
Turn into surging memory of great romances?

Struck helpless, they make out, almost, the diction
They scour their lives for, even as they race,
Immersed in newsprint, stories and nonfiction,
And pass each other, glimpsing in the space
Their consanguinity in the text of sun-drenched reeds—
And there, in quivering letters, each, quivering, reads
The great love into which each, still faithful, speeds.

Then as the last verse peaks in the auditorium, and as the ceiling of the music and words and of life itself seems to have been raised up off the backs of them all, and all the poor, tired and hungry everywhere—but then, oh failure of failures, instead of grasping the successful consummation just one notch above him in the music, the pianist reaches out and—alas, misses, makes a fatal error, seems even to snap his fingernails while clawing his way up over the last edge—and the piano emits a glop of notes too loud and dissonant for comfort or even belief—and the whole firehouse (even its red exit signs) goes black, the piano loses it totally and stops, so that the metal building is plunged into darkness and silence.

And the final strangling sounds of the piano and the outage last, and last, and go on so long everyone there gets exquisitely uncomfortable, and the primitive folding metal chairs the audience sits in start squeaking and creaking as the people become more and more unsettled, even frightened.

But gradually, though, enough peoples’ eyes have acclimated themselves to the extreme darkness so that the dim outlines of the space they are in becomes again noticeable. And then—wonder of wonders—only then, as if in a strange sort of compensation, an actual, visible, physical (though virtual) image begins to glow and grow increasingly visible as it rheostats itself up to a completeness the pianist so nearly attained. And it remains become bright and full above the dais with the Steinway—an image thrown on a curtain from a hitherto unnoticed projector:

And in the silence people gaze at it, an image that seems to show (even though it was just Brooklyn harbor) just where the music was heading before the pianist’s error; and as time stretches on, it seems to become even comforting as well.

But as the silence continues, and people start getting chilly, and start noticing that the the pianist not only has disappeared from the stage but that there is absolutely no sign that he will return—or anyone else will, the concert organizer for example, or perhaps an actor with lines to say, or even some authority to explicate or label what it is that they have gone through. And this absence, dragging still further on seems perplexing, even painful.

And they realize that, though masked and socially distanced as they are, they all have been and still are in a closed hall with no antiseptic filtering of air, and that they are hearing various sniffles and even muffled sneezes in the rows around them, and that what they aren’t hearing is any sound from the heating system. And they are getting cold, and they, with a sound of finality, free themselves from their chairs, and begin to move.

And so the etude reaches out to end with this silent disappointment, as everyone, in separate pods, misplaced now, leaderless, knows the Corona concert is finished. And so they mill about in its socially distanced, embarrassed silence and find there is nothing they desire (through those uncomfortable masks and the fear of expelled droplets) to say to each other, and that what they only want to do (and indeed very much want to do) is shuffle out of the theater quickly, so that manage to get out of it before everything goes dark.