[Los Angeles, 1991]
I am in the waiting room, going through my outline and list of readings for the degree exam in musical aesthetics. First is Cooke: naïve, but he made a good shot at figuring out the basic problems. If only he weren’t such a dilettante – he works his arguments right up to their most remarkable implications, then backs off into an absurd mysticism, claiming: we can’t ever really know why music works. Well, I don’t buy it. The nurse calls me in to write down my symptoms. How many days has it been like this? Has there been any blood? Your chart says you’re allergic to sulfa?
Are you in pain now? Yes.
Back out to the rows of plastic chairs to wait again. Ingarden, defining the work of music: fine, that’s clear. No problems. Of course, he doesn’t get anywhere near the problem of meaning. Meyer and information theory, okay. Limited point of view, it avoids the ecstasy, the eroticism of music. Hard to care much about what he thinks. Don’t any of them care, don’t they remember why they wanted to play music in the first place? A pleasant older nurse comes out with my file and says: Walk along the orange line and turn left.
Temperature and blood pressure, the usual routine. I should be nicer to the nurse, be willing to chat, but I’m tired and distant after three days of sudden sickness, watching my body draining so rapidly, it’s frightening. He tells me to sit and wait again. Nattiez, that’s someone I would argue with, he thinks what music means is merely its grammar, its syntax: how we understand the relation between the notes, between the phrases. But it must be more than that, otherwise music would be a matter of chess games, equations, which, I admit, have their attractions, but – it must be so much more. The primary care doctor calls me in.
Answering the same questions all over again. But at the end I ask a few questions of my own: what is cryptosporidia? From the Greek, and with that malicious prefix, as though the disease is a secret code that can’t be broken. Well, she says, it shows up sometimes in people in your condition. And she answers once more, well, there is one experimental drug, but for the most part, no, there is no successful treatment. She goes out to consult with the doctor from the AIDS clinic, leaving me to take my clothes off and lay them on the chair, and sit with a hospital robe in my lap. And again I think of the question of what it means, how we got to music in the first place, what does it mirror? Why do we make these sounds? She comes back in, and examines me with a slightly alarming thoroughness. She speaks carefully, telling me about the tests: yes, we really should check these things. You’ll probably be fine. Don’t think about it too much, there’s no use worrying before we know.
I think music has some absolutely lucid, powerful relation to the way we think, the order in which we go through things, how feelings and ideas develop in our heads. I think it mirrors what we really are, the content erased and replaced with notes. Not a metaphor or image as in writing, where it resembles something we think about what we are, what we feel: but the structure of how we feel, the pattern of the thing itself. She tells me I can get dressed and take the samples down to the lab.
I seem to be perilously close to some sort of Baroque theory of affects, as though the patterns of music resemble certain standard movements in our blood and organs, four temperaments, eight, maybe more; as though the falling notes recall our sobs, the long sweet ones our cries of sorrow or ecstasy. Or the Japanese: they weep because the koto recalls for them the flight of cranes into the sunset, they envision a loss and a fading, and they become sad, resigned. But no, that’s a cultural construction, I’m not talking about that. It’s more than that, it must be more. The man taking my blood is a little rough; he apologizes, and I press the cotton into my arm. I leave the lab and find my way through the labyrinth of white halls to the parking lot.
In the car, I sit for a moment. I am numb and tired, angry at them for charging me money I don’t have for tests that frighten me, not wanting to think of what is happening, of the story my body is unfolding, and of its probable end. I put on a tape of gentle music, melancholy and distant: guitar and piano. How do composers imagine it, how do they write such stuff? It sounds like wisdom, but a wisdom we cannot touch, living on the other side of a permeable but unbreakable membrane. But the truth is, I am blessed in this: I know more about music than most people. And about the meaning of music, the structure, the unending attempt to find out why it goes this way, and why we also go that way when it does: I must understand more about it than all but, perhaps, some few thousands of the people in the world, maybe less. I thought I had something special to say, I wanted to write papers, or a book that would magically illuminate us all, tell about the lights that guide us through our lives. But that takes time, time and energy, and both are failing me more quickly each day. And why, when I hear this gentle, stepped falling of the guitar notes between those of the piano, does it bring me away from the numbness, back into myself?
It is the exact shape of grief. Not a metaphor or a picture, not the description of the things that put me into this place, but the place itself, the shape of its movement through time and my body. I can hear the form of my own sorrow as I drive home through the endless traffic, crying quietly and listening to the music. And I still can’t answer the question: how does it do that?
Maybe if I knew, I would live forever.
[Los Angeles, 6/25/91-4/19/92]
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