In this damn dark, Joey, when I get the phono cranked, I can follow the song exactly where it goes, and it, not Galli-Curci, it alone is real — is a rare wonder, not of this world — a wonder and a consolation.
Nor will you hear its like anywhere but in its own space. A sneeze in C? Hah. A laugh in E? A siren that runs the scale like a soprano? The notes of music live in music alone, Joey. They must be made, prepared with care. To give voice to feeling.
You will never learn anything about music that is more important than this. Mr. Hirk, with a groan, straightened somewhat. Then he used his groan for instruction. You hear it, my ache, emerge from my mouth. It has a location. Because it is in ordinary space. It is there, fastened to its cause. My grunt, I mean, not my pain. My pain is nowhere, but that’s another matter. And my pain is a call like a child’s for its mother. But when we listen to music we enter a singular space, Joey, a space not of this room or any road. This you must understand.
Sound them together, sound the chord, play CDE, Joey. Can you do it? Joey protested by doing it dramatically. Suppose I mix a little yellow and a little green together. What after all are my sick plants doing? Is chartreuse two colors or one? Joey naturally made no answer. One. One. One. One. The book beat on the piano seat. But in the chord I hear clearly C and D and E. They penetrate but do not disappear into one another. They are a trinity — a single sound in which I hear three. C is the Son. D is God the Father, the sacred root, and E is the Holy Ghost. Now, Joey, can you do this? play all at once a loud C, a soft D, and an ordinary E. Which Joey did, triumphantly. Again and again to demonstrate how easily. There! You can hear them! They are everywhere yet in different places! They are one, but they are three. If theology wrote music … Mr. Hirk’s voice trailed away. At the heart of everything, in music’s space, multiple vibrations …
Joey was relieved to get away. Mr. Hirk was somewhat embarrassing in addition to being ugly and poor and pitiful. Needy too. His hands were beginning to look like tree roots. But Joey rode away sad himself — a small sad-infested Joey — for he had not canceled the lessons; he had been allowed no suitable occasion or merciful excuse, moreover he had permitted shame and cowardice to dissuade him, and now he would have to mail, messageless as was his mother’s habit, a few small bills in an envelope the way he understood a payoff would be made, so that next week, when the time arrived for his bike to skid in the gravel in front of Mr. Hirk’s door, at the time when Joey would be expected to pop in and ask, How ya doin? there’d be nothing and no one, no bowl of silence ready to be filled with the latest tunes, only patient expectation, puzzlement, disappointment, hurt. Joey felt guilty and sorry and sad. He pedaled recklessly. He hoped his father had, at one time, felt something of the same shame.
6
The fear that the human race might not survive has been replaced by the fear that it will endure.
You cannot end an English sentence with a preposition. Skizzen had more than once read that. Or the world with “with”—leaving the whimper unwhimpered, for instance. Or with “on account of”—overpopulation, for example, unspecified. Or with “in”—omitting fire or flood or wind … a storm of hail each one the size of an eyeball. Can you imagine what it will die of? There will be many endings vying for the honor. And any agent of our end will have a radiant sense of ruin. Any agent of our end will dance where the score says rest.
In the garden the cornflowers watch my small mother, Skizzen thought, watch my small mother wash her small hands in the soft loamy soil of the beds. She has dug in compost over years, compost mixed with sand, with bark, with mulching leaves, a little manure, a bit of bone meal; and with a fork she has carefully circulated the soil, turning sand and leaves and rotted peelings under one another, down where the earthworms slowly pass everything through themselves and thereby imagine shit as a city. She handles the leaves and touches the blossoms. She knows how to do it. Her grasp is vigorous, never shy or uncertain. The plants respond. Eat well. Thrive. Go to nefarious seed.
Our concern that the human race might not endure has been succeeded by the fear it will survive.
Oh — Skizzen oh’d, in his sermons to, in his repetitions of, himself. Oh — the decomposition of man will stench the sky at first but how immeasurably it will manure the soil, how thoroughly it will improve the land with all those fine bones added, while plants cover and trees stand. For worms the climate will be tropical, they will grow longer than tunnels, and their four hearts beat for blocks. Lakes will deepen and be blue again. Clean sky will harbor happy winds. Mountainsides of aspens will be able to color and flutter without having their picture taken. Waterfalls will fall free of enterprising eyes. It will be grand.
Unless there is a universal flood and fish school in corner offices; unless there is an atomic wind and an image of our race is burned into the side of a glass cliff; unless glaciers creep down from the North almost as blue as green as winedark as the solidifying sea.
The thought that mankind might not endure has been replaced by the fear it may luck out.
End zone to end zone, Armageddon’s final field was nearly laid out once before. It was half a cataclysm — a clysm — maybe. Preliminary bout. A third of the world sickened during the three years of the Black Plague: 1348–1349—1350. And the plague swung its scythe four times, its last swath reducing Europe to half what it had been the century before: in 1388–1389—1390. They believed the disease was Evil advancing like an army. They said it was Satan’s century. Diabolus in musica. That was before Passchendaele. The population of the planet diminished by a fifth.
Those who suffered the plague and survived: they suggested to Joseph Skizzen the unpleasant likelihood that Man might squeak through even a loss at Armageddon, one death per second not fast enough, and outlive the zapping of the planet, duck a fleet of meteors, hunkerbunker through a real world war with cannons going grump to salute our last breath as if horror were a ceremony, emerge to sing of bombs bursting, endure the triggers of a trillion guns amorously squeezed until every nation’s ammo was quite spent, and all the private stock was fired off at the life and livestock of a neighbor, so that in battle’s final silence one could hear only the crash after crash of financial houses, countless vacuum cleaners, under their own orders, sucking up official lies, contracts screaming like lettuce shredded for a salad, outcries from the crucifixion of caring borne on the wind as if in an ode, the screech of every wheel as it becomes uninvented, brief protests from dimming tubes, destimulated wires; though the slowing of most functions would go on in silence, shit merded up in the street to be refried by aberrant microwaves, diseases coursing about and competing for victims, slowdowns coming to standstills without a sigh, until the heavy quiet of war’s cease is broken by … by what? might we imagine boils bursting out of each surviving eye … the accumulated pus of perception? a burst like what? like trumpets blowing twenty centuries of pointless noise at an already deaf-eared world … with what sort of sound exactly? with a roar that rattles nails already driven in their boards, so … so that, as the sound comes through their windows, houses will heave and sag into themselves, as unfastened as flesh from a corset; yet out of every heap of rubble, smoking ruin, ditch of consanguineous corpses, could creep a survivor—he was such a survivor, Joseph Skizzen, faux doctor and musician — someone born of ruin as flies are from offal; that from a cave or collection of shattered trees there might emerge a creature who could thrive on a prolonged diet of phlegm soup and his own entrails even, and in spite of every imaginable catastrophe salvage at least a remnant of his race with the strength, the interest, the spunk, to fuck on, fuck on like Christian soldiers, stiff-pricked still, with some sperm left with the ability to engender, to fuck on, so what if with one leg or a limp, fuck on, or a severed tongue, fuck on, or a blind eye, fuck on, in order to multiply, first to spread and then to gather, to confer, to wonder why, to invent, to philosophize, accumulate, connive: to wonder, why this punishment? to wonder, why this pain? why did we — among the we’s that were — survive? what was accomplished that couldn’t have been realized otherwise? why were babies born to be so cruelly belabored back into the grave? who of our race betrayed our trust? what was the cause of our bad luck? what divine plan did this disaster further? why were grandfathers tortured by the deaths they were about to sigh for? why? … but weren’t we special? we few, we leftovers, without a tree to climb, we must have been set aside, saved for a moment of magnificence! to be handed the trophy, awarded the prize; because the Good Book, we would — dumb and blind — still believe in, said a remnant would be saved; because the good, the great, the wellborn and internetted, the rich, the incandescent stars, will win through, that … that … that we believed, we knew, God will see to our good outcome, he will see, see to it, if he hasn’t had a belly full, if the liar’s, the liar’s beard is not on fire like Santa Claus stuck in a chimney.