And yet she had nothing at all, not even any meaning — this was a very sad thought; Chaivagne even tried continually to drive it out of his head, he didn’t want to think about it, he tried to convince himself, well, why was it not enough that every morning he could get up and immediately stand there again in her presence? — of course it was enough; at such times, he relaxed, and sleep really did chase these thoughts out of his head, and once again the next morning he appeared at his workplace with the same little smile on his face, and he took up his designated position in the room entrusted to him, tactfully withdrawing into one of the inner corners — from where he could keep an eye on the visitors, but could simultaneously also see the rising figure of Venus — another year went by like that, and again it was autumn, and it frequently rained in the city, although he took virtually no notice of this, because he did not move from his place, and the Venus de Milo did not move either, the reconstruction was still going on down there, and no one could even predict when the statue would turn up in its old spot, and neither he changed, nor did the Venus change — nor did that long crack in the Parian marble, which extended from the back of the statue along the back contour of the right thigh, and which of course was kept under strict observation by the restorers, but no, nothing happened — and well, really, nothing happened even with him, nothing, the days came and went, the crowds flooded in every morning, and flooded out every evening, he stood in the inner right-hand corner, observing the eyes and face of Venus high above, but never where the eyes and the face were looking, he observed the crowd as they trampled on each other, then once again he raised his gaze to the statue, and he just stared on and on from one autumn to another autumn, he diligently soaked his feet, he went in with the seven, the four, then the one, then he went home with the one, the four, and the seven, he meticulously parted his hair in the middle of his head in the morning with a damp comb, he stood and stood with his hands always clasped behind his back in the inner right-hand corner, he always smiled a little, so that he was always being approached, now by a group without a tour guide, now by a solitary visitor, and he always started by saying — and never saying anything else but — Praxiteles, always just Praxiteles.
377. PRIVATE PASSION
Music is the sorrow of one
who has lost his Heavenly home.
The end has come and there is nothing, he said, and even if there is something, it is only the squalid fulfillment of that process, hidden at first, which has made chance, ever more blatant, and then finally insolent vulgarity — shaming even the most horrifying premonitions — completely victorious; because there was an age when something reached its own culmination, the height of its own boundless possibilities, for it is not the case — no, not at all — that each age is granted its own articulatory world, a world incomparable with the others, and that the art of every single epoch, for each given genre, carries the inner hypothesis of its own internal structure to perfection; no, decisively no; still, it is true, well; I, he added, am speaking of something else, that is to say that there lies before us, after the hazy bestial zero, a long continuum arising from all the noises and rhythms having to do with music, which then reaches — as it did indeed reach a perfection no longer perfectible — the roof of a seemingly infinite celestial vault, a particular border of Heaven close to the godly spheres, so that something — in this case music — comes into being, is born, unfolds, but then it’s all over, no more, what must come has come; the realm dies away, and yet lives on in this divine form, and for all eternity its echo remains, for we may evoke it, as we do evoke it to this very day and shall evoke it for as long as we can, even if as an ever more faint reflection of the original, a tired and ever more uncertain echo, a misunderstanding ever more despairing from year to year, from decade to decade, in a disintegrating memory that no longer has a world, no longer shatters people’s hearts; no longer elevates them to that place of such achingly sweet perfection, because this is what happened, he said, and he straightened his suspenders, such a music came into being that shattered people’s hearts, if I listen to it, I still feel, at some given point, after an unexpected beat, I feel, if not that my heart is being shattered, that at least it is falling apart, as I collapse from this sweet pain, because this music gives me everything in such a way that it also annihilates me, because how could anyone think that they could get away without paying the price for all of this, well, how could we even imagine that it is even possible to traverse that distance where this music exists and not be annihilated one hundred, one thousand times — if I listen to them, I am in a thousand tiny pieces, because you can’t just roam around in the company of the geniuses of inexplicable musical fulfillment and at the same time, say, be able to fill out a personal income tax form or prepare the technical blueprint for a building while this music is sinking to the depths of your heart, well, it doesn’t work, either this person filling out tax forms or completing technical blueprints is annihilated, or will never understand where he has arrived, if this music strikes him from above, it definitely comes from above, of that there is no doubt, and I — he pointed to himself, on the podium, with both hands — I am speaking solely and exclusively about music, not about anything else; the discussion here cannot be generalized, it is not possible to extend my train of thought to include all of the arts, and blabber about those kinds of absolute generalizations; what is being referred to, what one wants to say, must be stated precisely, and I too say it now, that I am merely reflecting on music, and that I consider my statements valid only with regard to that, so that I cannot begin by stating, ladies and gentlemen, this evening, within the framework of this widely promoted lecture that you shall hear, through an analysis of music’s essence, about the essence of so-called art itself, when my subject, the subject of this widely promoted lecture, is only music; that is while delivering this lecture, it’s as if I were standing here with a smoking bomb in my hands and I were telling you that it was going to explode in a minute; now, try to imagine that I began by saying, ladies and gentlemen, and so forth, with this bomb in my hands, you would all rush headlong out the door, would you not? — which would not be a bad idea, well, perhaps at one point I shall turn into a real bomb; anyway, for now just imagine a smoking bomb in my hands, as I try this evening to share my thoughts with you about that moment in time when the pinnacle of music, within the world history of music, came to be, so that you will hear such things from me tonight that you never heard from others, nor shall you ever, because I myself represent — truly, like an anarchist holding a bomb — my own thesis, and, as it happens, it is precisely because of this thesis that I am, even from our own degenerate society, excluded, exiled, expelled; so that I am an object of scorn, indeed, put more crudely, I am jeered at; it is possible that there are those among you who are thinking but, well, you are an architect who shall give a lecture about his private passion, about music, and how can an architect be excluded from society when he is at the exact center of society, in that case, perhaps, someone among you is thinking, that he, an architect, is as deep as anyone can possibly be in the whole thing, only that in my case that person is mistaken; I am an architect who has never seen a single plan constructed, I don’t know how many buildings I have planned already in my life, I am now sixty-four, so you can imagine how much I have planned and planned and planned, how many maquettes and drawings and who knows what else rose up beneath my hands, it’s just that not one of them was ever built, this is the situation, you see here today a lecturer who is also an architect, but who has not built a single thing, who is himself a total architect-fiasco, who moreover does not even deal with architecture in his free time, and is not even peddling architecture here from village to village, thanks to the Kíler district library’s program, “Village Cultural Days,” and who will not even speak of architecture, but of something perhaps unexpected from an architect: of music, of one of its highly particular embodiments, because that of which I am going to speak is truly unique, a sacred fact, because I shall, with this finger — and he raised his index finger — draw your attention to a certain age of musical history, an extraordinary, a peerless, an unrepeatable moment of what we call music, or, put more simply, you will hear about the essence of music of the very highest order, a music whose time had come, so that from the very beginning of the seventeenth century until the middle of the eighteenth century it came, let this suffice for a starting point, in place of a more precise designation, as you cannot really expect dates from me, generally I do not believe in dates, things flow into each other and grow out from each other, the whole thing proceeds somehow like tentacles, so that there are no definite eras or other such asininities, the world is much too complicated for that, because just think about it, where does an accident begin and where does it end, so there you are, there is no point in looking for dates or demarcations of eras, let us leave that whole thing to the experts, to those who are either feeble-minded or pig-headed know-it-alls — those who, thanks to their position, instead of simply saying what happened, what largely came to pass between these two time-designations — could trumpet throughout the world how music, the story of music truly has a pinnacle from which it doesn’t go on, or rather it does, but this is only and exclusively the so-called