THE NEW YORK TIMES OBITUARIES WEDNESDAY, MARCH 16, 2011
Helen Tame, Otherworldly and Multivalent Talent, Dies at 40
Helen Tame, who began publishing highly influential scholarly articles at age 16 and later shocked the music world with inexplicably mature and groundbreakingly virtuosic piano performances beginning at age 20 before voluntarily and suddenly disappearing from that scene entirely, only to then reappear on the public stage years later having reinvented herself as a preternaturally gifted homicide detective often called on to solve some of law enforcement’s most longstanding and seemingly impenetrable mysteries, died yesterday at age 40.
Helen Tame was born on October 16, 1970, in Christ the King Hospital in Jersey City, New Jersey to Anthony Tame and the former Laura King. At age 5 she is said to have announced to her parents that they could either purchase a legitimate piano or put her up for adoption by a family that already owned one. Once the purchase was made, Tame apparently practiced constantly as a child although she never performed, adhering to her belief that musical performance by the too young was pointless.
In 1986, Tame, then a Princeton undergraduate, published her universally acclaimed monograph on the proper use of contrapuntal melody. A series of similarly lauded articles then followed in rapid if ambivalent succession. (Tame once famously said that “the only thing worse than writing them is not.”)
In the fall of 1990, Dr. Tame (at 19 she had acquired a PhD in both Music and Philosophy) performed an astonishing series of concerts at Carnegie Hall. She quickly became the most sought after pianist in the world. Despite that, her performances in the ensuing years were sporadic and she never permitted any recording of them, nor did she ever take advantage of any of the many lucrative offers she received to enter a recording studio.
Then, in 1997, Tame announced that she would never again perform for a concert audience and for the remaining 13 years of her life she made no more public statements beyond the occasional publication of more articles.
The reclusiveness gave rise to rumors: that she had retired because of impending motherhood, that she had specifically not ruled out studio recording because she was recording in her home studio what would prove to be the seminal performances of the complete Beethoven piano variations, or that a violent interruption had placed her on a surprising trajectory distinct from music.
This last rumor gained credence when in 2002 the NYPD’s police academy received a most unique cadet to be sure. Remarkably this fact remained largely unnoticed until Detective Helen Tame began solving several high-profile, and in many cases seemingly intractable, homicides.
Nonetheless her silence, at least for public consumption, persisted through stunning arrest after stunning arrest.
Yesterday Helen Tame responded to what appeared to be a routine death in a Manhattan apartment. The NYPD has not commented on why Dr. Tame was left alone at the location but she was found dead on a sofa there late last night. The cause of death is tentatively being listed as carbon monoxide poisoning. Details of any funeral services for Ms. Tame have not been released.
She is survived by no one.
X. How Some Things Can Function as Postscript Without Intent
ENERGEIAS: or Why Today the Sun May Not Rise in the East, Set in the West
WHICH is why someone seeking to encounter fewer people should generally go left in such situations. What this Man truly seeks is harder to define, even for him. He knows only that going right, away from the dropping sun, takes him to the place where the bad people are. He knows more too. He knows the bad people, all of them, are going to regret that what little remains of their lives has intersected with his remainder in this way.
2 A giant boulder rolling down a hill will appear menacing and as if nothing can stop it. But if an equal or greater rock comes along only one of them can occupy a given space at a given time.
3 And this is true as well of these people in this place at this time. That they cannot coexist together in harmony but rather that one must instead destroy the other.
4 So this Man walks to where they are. He walks barefoot, guided by the sun, his right arm ending in a blade and swinging like a pendulum. He walks through living then dead vegetation and he knows the destruction he carries there will be terrible and swift.
* * *
IN the time before this he had been one of the first to bring water to his village. Back then un pueblo was just another way of saying a collection of people congregated near a river. The necessity of water and mankind’s inability to provide it mechanically and widely left vast expanses of Colombian earth free of human activity.
2 The first insight was wells. A process in truth well known to even that collection of people but remember that even the greatest knowledge must defer to spirited action. He took action.
3 He dragged others with him, some coming almost involuntarily, others unable to resist the magnetic pull of his will paired with his frightening physical strength, and in unison they worked. Armed with no machine greater than the human body, they dug. They dug and soil was displaced and water rose in response and when quickly thereafter his dissatisfaction with this new convenience rose they formed irrigatory canals that ultimately gave every home in the village its own private store of the freshest almost to the point of invisibility water the world had seen to that point.
4 And during this time it was true that probably the most complex thought that arose in his mind as he afflicted his body with the harshest possible abuse was that he wanted water so the globe must yield it to him.
* * *
WE’RE going to go ahead and call this the heyday of the New York City coffee shop only without doing anything coarse like resorting to statistics or dates. This was way before the country started scrutinizing its coffee so the default result was an abysmal tan liquid that did honor to no one. His idea was to play up his Colombian heritage (even his wildly-uneducated-in-these-matters clientele understood vaguely what that word meant with respect to coffee) to confer the shine of expertise on his new shop. But this was no mere marketing gambit as he ground the beans himself (unheard of then) and those beans (only dark-roasted to avoid sowing unnecessary confusion) came exclusively from Colombia. The result was uncommon artistry, especially in the nascent espresso field.
2 Aside from the coffee the rest of the shop was paradigmatic. Waist-high metal columns rose from the floor near an impermeable countertop to end in fully rotatable and cushioned circles. Translucent plastic top hats covered exorbitant slices of pound cake and giant perilously stacked nuts comprised of dough.
3 Most of all a place like this tends to collect familiar faces in usual spots. The faces don’t start familiar but repetition makes them so. The repetition is due to this: lonely people, even ones who wouldn’t self-identify as such, can long to hear other people and interact with them regardless of the level of that interaction.
4 Back then wasn’t like now. Television had maybe four legitimate channels. You couldn’t as skillfully simulate company, and Silence, despite its far greater incidence, had a more powerful potential to sting.