Paris in the Present Tense: A Novel

“I’ve been working on Sei Lob und Preis mit Ehren.”

Jules was astounded that she picked this, the signature and emblem of his life. But he tried to check his astonishment, for it was a very well known piece and now quite popular. “Good,” he said, “I’ll fill in the second part.”

“There is no second part.” You could see in her face that she thought, how can he think there’s a second part?

“I’ll make one – following, echoing, reinforcing. After all, what we’re dealing with is a transcription. We have a lot of latitude. And don’t worry, I’ll watch you. I’ve been doing this a long time.”

She lifted her bow and, after counting to four, began to play. He joined in after the first phrases, offering a respectful but almost playful counterpoint. She was fully taken up by the music, and when they finished she had the satisfaction of having followed it beyond its explicable bounds.

“Beautifully done,” he said, “with technical virtuosity, love, and – let’s call it – lift off. But let me ask you this: when you held the bow, did you know that you were holding it?”

“Yes.”

“And when you fingered, did you know that that’s what you were doing?”

“Of course.”

“Lastly, did you feel the cello against you?”

“How could I not?”

“Then here’s part of my twenty percent and their not-even-one percent. Ideally, and it might take years – who knows? – you should be totally unaware that you’re holding the bow, fingering the strings, that the cello is against you. You shouldn’t be pushing the sound, it should be pulling you. That is, although you’re the agency producing it, you should feel only that you’re riding upon and within it as it carries you.”

“And how do I achieve that?” she asked somewhat skeptically.

“By understanding but then forgetting it – after a billion hours of practice. If you think about how you walk or how you speak normally, you’ll stumble. If you trust that the world has its own grace and that sound has its own life, you can enter into both. And only then will musicianship, theory, and the ineffable combine into something greater than the sum of its parts. For this I frequently use an analogy that, however, I feel uncomfortable about using now.”

“Why?”

“Because it’s about sex.”

“Try it.”

“Sex? I’ve already tried it.”

She smiled, slightly. “I mean the analogy. I’m not going to scream as if I’d seen a mouse. I’ve seen plenty of mice and I never screamed.”

“I haven’t ever mentioned this except in a class full of people, and even then I cautiously introduce it.”

“Well you didn’t cautiously introduce it now. I’m twenty-five years old,” she said, as if that actually meant something. Immediately upon saying it, she felt keen embarrassment for trying to impress that her twenty-five years had conferred upon her a weighty maturity. She saw a faint and compassionate expression that he kindly tried to keep to himself.

“All right. But don’t take it wrongly.”

“I won’t.”

“First, wait. There are a few things I forgot to mention.” He then referred her to the center of the piece by playing it himself. She was almost exasperated by his diversion, and yet fascinated by half a dozen points of musicianship that he conveyed as effortlessly as if he had done so thousand times before, which he had.

“I see, I see,” she would say, and then play a few bars, repeating them until she got it. “That’s interesting. That’s good.”

This lasted for about half an hour during which they both were fully absorbed. Then, thinking he had escaped, he said, “Now, to get the particulars right, you have to paint at first with a very broad brush. Technicians like Levin have no idea of what that means. The broad brush in this case, for this piece and for the classical era from Bach through Mozart, and partly into Beethoven although he marked the transition from classical to modern, is the spirit of the age. Human nature was the same, eternal and universal truths were the same, but conditions other than those of the natural world were different, and the difference must be understood.”

“What does that have to do with sex?” she asked. “You want to skip it, don’t you? All right, skip it.”

“No. That’s not so. It’s just that when I say it in class people twitter and smile stupidly. I hate the coyness.”

“I don’t twitter, I don’t smile stupidly, and I’m not coy,” she said, with an almost royal severity.

He loved it. “I’m not saying you would, or are. Clearly you aren’t. All right. I’ll go there. The layers I spoke of – musicianship, theory, and spirit – have equivalents of a sort in sex. From top to bottom, first you have just love, transcending mortality, when the physical is elevated paradoxically because it becomes unnecessary and pales in the presence of love. It’s a perfect and rare experience, as fleeting and insubstantial as evidences of the soul. I would risk saying that both parties become, as much as is possible in this world, agencies of the divine.

“The next layer down is earthbound and more erotic, and yet not entirely so. Through eros, the other person is central and always in mind. The overwhelming feeling is one of truth and discovery, of knowing someone else intimately and beautifully. Though this is less refined and more common than the first layer, it’s by no means accessible to everyone. It’s pure love but without a connection to the divine.

“At the bottom layer you have independent eros, in which – somewhat like the highest manifestation but in an entirely opposite way – the particularity of the partners disappears. The sex runs itself and feeds upon itself, which takes you out of yourself in a different way than the other two ways, but it certainly does.

“Most of us stay mainly in one area, which might encompass, for example, the top half of the bottom band and a bit of the middle band. And the range oscillates north or south as slowly as a storm front. In music it’s the same. You have the same progression from the base, which is rhythm more or less, through the middle, which is all those things of musicianship and even theory, that make one delight in knowing and feeling it. The highest level is ineffable, so refined that it cannot be captured.

“But ideally, and rarely, in both music and in love, there’s a fourth layer, which is when one can exist in the three layers simultaneously – driven, orgasmic, automatic; then, more gently, simultaneously knowing, loving, discovering, sharing, holding back nothing; then, again simultaneously, spiritually, ineffably, even religiously. When all combine, you ascend to another band, whether in music or in love, and you’re in heaven.”

“Is that all?” she said, meaning the opposite, and, frankly, wanting to try it.

“Yes.”

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