Suite for Three Voices

Prelude: Starting from Error

Make it a mistake

—Gertrude Stein, Patriarchal Poetry

There is an e at the end of time, my student Samantha whispered to Tim, pointing out to her friend that he had spelled time as though he were writing his name. I peered over his shoulder at his smudged page:

I whent to the Virginia beach with my mom and dad we stayed for the longest tim we at pizza and then. I when to lay down for a nap and then when I got up we whent back home and then I was taking a bath and when I got out of the tub we whent to the store and I got a cap gun and I played with it until the caps was out and then I throw it in the trash because I did not need it to play with so I have not played with one since and I still don’t.

I know that, Tim snapped, but I asked him not to fix his misspelling. I copied the paragraph and have kept it all these years.

There is an e at the end of time.

If you are old enough you have experienced first hand the midnight passage from the Star Spangled Banner to the high-pitched electronic note that signals off-air until dawn. There’s a wide-angle shot of Old Glory, as if you were standing under the flagpole and looking up. The flag flows—no snap, no flutter—in slow motion on a breeze made by trumpets. It’s hypnotic, in part because you’re exhausted, but the home of the brave ends abruptly and the color bars appear in shades of gray on your black and white TV. They’re backed by a piercing eeeeeeeee, and however much you dread the silence of midnight, it’s preferable to that sound of no tomorrow.

There’s always tomorrow/ For your dreams to come true crooned the claymation deer, big eyes like a Jersey cow and sweet voice to comfort all the misfit toys and Rudolph. In the right circumstances, I get a lump in my throat still. If you don’t, you have perhaps put away childish things. But some of these you will retrieve, and others will return in spite of you. Tim never let go of the cap gun after he threw it away. How quickly it becomes present in tense and to hand: he played with it until the caps was out and then he throws it away, right now, again, as he writes. Memory in transcription slips into the present. When went becomes goed it’s one thing, when it becomes go the child writes as (if) it happens. She is back in it.

It is six years since Samantha started me on this. I come back to it knowing it must end, whether or not I end it today as I write and listen. Upstairs and downstairs two kinds of music are playing. I tell you honestly, making no compromises for the sake of composition. Here at 5:48 PM upstairs is Ellen Taafe Zwilich’s Chamber Symphony. Downstairs, my wife Caroline listens to Radio One Canada, Quebecois singer-songwriters. Between, my son Jacob slaps his plastic sword against the bedposts—he is sparring. Trucks pass slowly and steadily outside, muffled, a tidal flow. As you near the beach you must roll down your windows to listen for the ocean. You will smell it first, my father says, then you will hear it. We turn off the country music and listen quietly.

Now upstairs a Bach Partita for violin,

Nathan Milstein performing. There’s an e at the end, she whispered, and it was a kind whisper, the voice of one who would spare her friend embarrassment and who has made such errors herself. She did not mention the e at the end of ate. Neither she nor Tim noticed its absence. we stayed for the longest tim we at… Take away the e (ate – e = at) and be suspended in not quite place as well as not quite time. At where? At pizza and then. It’s possible that being at pizza is like being at your best or at odds, that is to say, not so much a location as a state of being. He was at pizza and then.

And then at 9:55 all of the students are lined up at the door. But as I notice this I think about the fact that even the door has moved, imperceptibly. Nothing here is still. The e at the end of time must be the prelude to motionlessness we can barely conceive of, a space with no when or went.

What if there were an h in went, as there so often was in my students’ writing? When is involved in went, time rolled up in the past tense, its graveclothes. Great-Grandma Meggs told us about the silver dollars they laid on little James Weaver’s eyes when he died at three years old. On the mantle was the only picture of him, a tiny photograph the color of weak tea, and he was so small in it that you could make nothing of his expression, let alone his eyes. But there it was, along with the picture of her other son, Fordham, who died at 33, same as Jesus. Before they turned his body up from the flooded river on Mother’s Day, he had looked like Errol Flynn. The muddy water of spring returns the skin to clay and spittle. Those were pearls that were his eyes. Now I lay me down to sleep.

When to lay down (there is only one kind of lie in the South, having nothing to do with rest) given so little time? We had only a weekend at the beach, we had counted down to it all summer, and I knew it would begin to pass as soon as we unloaded the car at the hotel. I would hide my watch so that I could not see the second hand, but I always knew what time it was. I always know what time it is and will know when the note sounds to mark the final hour.

Which should not be played sostenuto on the violin, incidental music after Armageddon, but should be the full-throated happy oblivion of a chickadee, or the recording of a chickadee, the long-playing record version for warmth of tone.

Tim did not want to end time, he knew how to do it but forgot as language poured from him, his sentimental tale of endings, its momentum carrying him forward oblivious to tense and punctuation and spelling, and to the fact that at the end there is an e.

Allemande (Noli me tangere)

Within Reach

My grandmother’s arthritic fingers would not straighten. Each knuckle was a marble, her palms were always cupped. To start a batch of biscuits, a daily routine, she built a hill of flour and excavated a pond in the middle for oil. Her hands resembled sand-bucket shovels, covered in a pale, powdery yellow. The powder seemed to have magical properties, because once the pond was filled, her fingers loosened ever so slightly, her hands began to scurry and burrow, cutting ditches and pinching small knolls until a ball formed perfectly between her palms. Now the transformation reversed, her fingers stiffened, and she dropped the ball onto a buttered baking tray to be rolled and sliced. Her biscuits came out rectangular and crusted, unique among the many biscuits by other hands in my family.

Imagine Grandma Delphia Flavelia after dinner with her autoharp. Her right hand sprouts talons, a claw more delicate than the hawk’s and again surprisingly agile. The harp (actually a zither, says the ubiquitous and omniscient Wikipedia) shouldered, her bent left fingers spread just enough to secure a knuckle in the pit of each damper bar, the talons skim and pluck, skim and pluck. With its sharp metal strings and eight possible chords, her instrument established its musical horizons: not from the autoharp comes an intricate weave or Celtic twilight, but the speed, strum, and drive that became bluegrass and country music. Mother Maybelle Carter—her age-mate, same poverty, same faith, from the same hard-pine porch steps—was her sign of the possible.

My grandfather on the other side of the family, Papa John, had no right hand. My little brother and I imagined it cleanly severed, boxed, and buried in the Smith family section of the Pleasant Hill graveyard. Not as it was, ground in the silage machine like a Shielding’s limb in Grendel’s teeth, then nowhere we could trace it, maybe nowhere at all. Except that he felt it, his invisible useless right hand, its cold pain real as a rotting tooth. So he wrapped where it might have been in a sleeve-end. Warmth thawed his imaginary blood.

As for the left, retrained to a compensatory suppleness, it did all: whittling, writing, steering, hoeing, swinging the ax. In my family, he became a symbol of perseverance, though he had no time for such symbolism. His life was hard from beginning to grim ending, as too many lives are, and he would probably say, without irony, just play the hand you’re dealt. We learn our limits, most of us, with some variation in timing and circumstance. How do we determine what’s truly out of reach? Robert Browning’s pitiable Andrea Del Sarto famously sighs, Ah, but a man’s reach should exceed his grasp/ Or what’s a heaven for? You mean that that ‘reach-versus-grasp’ business is not a cliché but is Browning?! a student of mine once asked, knowing quite well it could be both. The line tends to generate debate about the virtues of ambition and to betray how intolerant of failure most of us are. At best, the act of over-reaching shifts our limits, if slightly, just enough to keep us from throwing up our hands. So I tell myself, remembering my doggedly self-sufficient grandfather climbing a ladder to the barn roof and nailing tin back in place. If he teetered, he cussed the ladder.

Winston and Andrew, hosts of a radio show about Romantic piano music, close with Brahms, the A major Piano Intermezzo, op 118, no. 2. Andrew says that he has played the piece, then corrects himself, I should say I’ve played at it. Winston echoes his played at. None of us at the station is a concert pianist, he declares, but how many of us have returned time and again to a piece such as this? I nod at the radio. The three of us then listen to Stephen Kovacevich, joyfully, knowing that we’ll never master it, this small wonder, at turns intensely introspective, declamatory, unsettled, and diaphanous. Even if our hands fully cooperate, the Intermezzo eludes them. We’re on the porch steps with a toy piano, Kovacevich is inside at the grand. But that image of child’s play, of playing at being a pianist, is not true to what we make of the Brahms each time we attempt it. We play at it, which is not to say we pretend to play it but that we go after it, coming close, approximating. We fall short, we are drawn again to the keyboard, some phrases do become ours. These we are playing, not just playing at. They enter not only our hearts but get fully under our hands, and we connect to a sound and its ideals. To cease playing at the piece is to settle along the border of pleasure, listening in.

Remember going to the beach when you were young. You kneel, your knees sink in the damp sand. You have your red shovel. When the next wave breaks, the crabs spill from it like beads from a necklace. You fix on one nearby who has begun his rapid descent toward the earth’s core. Forgetting your shovel (it floats out to sea) you shove your fingers into the sand and give chase. A lake forms, constantly filling from the sides and top, seawater and sand, and it remains shallow, regardless of your speed. Another wave bears down, and the lake becomes a plain of quicksand. You swirl the muck from your fingers. As for the crab, a spirit, he has disappeared. You will dig for another.

In high school I became obsessed with the myth of Sisyphus. My enthusiasm for the myth came from the fact that it gave the lie to the faithful field-clearing of my Protestant upbringing. By way of example, here’s the refrain of a Baptist hymn I often played as church pianist: (Sopranos) We’ll work (Tenors) We’ll work (Everyone) Till Jesus Comes / And we’ll be gathered home. A good Baptist works hard because all hard work contributes to the building of the kingdom of God. I emphasize hard because difficulty, unpleasantness even, is fundamental. In a community of farmers, a kid often finds himself moving rocks, literally, though the task has many corollaries: digging holes, carting dead animals, shoveling manure. The rewards of such work come hereafter, if not in paradise, as it were, in the assurance that heavy lifting is good for the soul. The calluses on your hands were stigmata; men would ask to see your hands and nod with approval. Sisyphus, as I understood it at sixteen, aroused my suspicions of all this. Maybe there were always just more fields to clear, more piles of rocks to make. Maybe nothing ever grew in the open spaces, nothing that lasts, at any rate. In the words of a country music song popular in those days, Work your fingers to the bone and what do you get? Boney fingers. People were doomed to roll boulders up a hill only to have them roll right back down like a feebly shot pinball. As a teenager will, I applied the phrase it’s a Sisyphean task with undue frequency to a remarkable range of human activity. I read the works of Camus, not necessarily well but with intensity and earnestness. I bought my first black turtleneck. I sat in the dark.

Ironically, my newfound understanding of the futility of human efforts did not make me less driven, even if it caused me to question the inherent value of hard labor. On the contrary, for the tasks that actually mattered to me, I angrily set goals and dared my limitations to get in the way. Hearing Horowitz play Scriabin’s D-Sharp Minor Etude, I declared to my best friend that I would learn to play it before graduation. Hard work and faith would surely put it within reach. If I felt the pulse of the etude along my own blood, couldn’t my hands be trained to perform it? Over and over I grappled with those thundering, ascending sixteenth-note chords. Over and over I fumbled and fell, knocking rocks loose and scrambling to regain a hold before I hit the bottom. Perhaps it’s needless to say I never got the etude in hand, and yet I don’t recall exactly when I gave up. I admit that occasionally I try again, if only to be reminded of what it might be