ME AND THE MOON; Beethoven Sonata 32

Excerpt from Cabeza and the Meaning of Wilderness: An Exploration of Nature, and Mind, Chapter 11

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ME AND THE MOON

Back to Cabeza.

          Well, actually back to the way back from Cabeza that April of 2003 when Ameri­can tanks were rolling into Baghdad. . . .

          First we stopped in the south half of the Sonoran Desert National Monument where a BLM ranger had told me he never goes alone now. But we had no encoun­ters, and had a fine hike through saguaro “forests” to an excellent view into the off-limits Area B live-bombing area. And it was here—to be totally upfront with the reader—that the cholla stuck between my fingers after I passed water. An actual jumping cholla, not the teddybears of Cabeza. But it could have happened at that pass in Cabeza, as there were scores of them, their segments impaling themselves on our boots. And I will, eventually, get to the meaning of those barbed quills.

          Then we drove down close to the border through Bisbee and Douglas, on to the Peloncillo Mountains of the boot heel of New Mexico and parked on an unfre­quented road for a day hike. Up to now things had gone smoothly between Anne and me, but that night after the hike . . . maybe it’s that each of us wants something from the other that the other is incapable of providing. Maybe that something is far beyond what any person, anytime, anywhere can provide. Maybe. . . . Albert Ein­stein wrote, after a failed first marriage, an unfulfilling second, and numerous af­fairs, “I must seek in the stars what is denied me on earth.” This is only learned, if at all, the hard way. Einstein does seem to have ripened from an arrogant, egocentric young man into, judging by his final letters and pictures, a far more gentle, spiritual soul. But that spirituality was always there, if latent, from the beginning.

          But for now, for me, the end result is I’m in a grand funk. After the trip Anne and I talk things out and our relationship deepens, but for the moment it’s: Stupid people, stupid relationships, stupid Iraq, stupid Bush, stupid Saddam, stupid Mus­lims, stupid Americans, stupid planet, stupid galaxy, stupid Universe—stupid, stu­pid goddamned mess! We eat, and I take my nap. When I wake it’s late . . . and the moon is up. Anne’s sound asleep, so it’s just me and the moon. I go out to stretch my legs and body, walk around, then make tea . . . and sit, just sit with the whole stupid, stupid thing. What else can I do? What choice do I have?

          Divorce Anne? But who’d do the dishes?

          Divorce myself? Now there’s a thought!

          Move to another planet? I recall a Twilight Zone episode from forty years past: Two scientists working on the space program received word that what they feared most but had surreptitiously prepared for—nuclear Armageddon—was about to occur. Quickly they ushered their families into a rocket they’d secretly customized, and blasted off just as the missiles flew. As they all looked back at the retreating globe, one father explained to his son that they were going to another wonderful planet where there was only love and peace and no more war.

          “What’s the name of this planet, Dad?”

          “Earth.”

          . . .

          Immigrate to a parallel universe? But what if they don’t have tea there?

          Of course there’s always suicide. After reading the chronicle of explorers locked in the Arctic ice on their ship, starving and freezing but still overawed by the per­petual aurora and infinite panoply of dancing stars all close enough to touch, I con­ceived the idea—if things ever got too bad—of driving to Inuvik, Northwest Territo­ries in midwinter, renting a snowmobile, and heading north until the gas was ex­hausted. Then hiking as far as I could. When I’d had enough, I’d break out a large flask of whiskey, a Discman loaded with The Art of the Fugue, and just settle in.

          But Anne had scoffed, shattering my idle dreams: “Oh, you’d probably get eaten alive by a polar bear.” Hmmm . . . not an appetizing thought (for the eatee, at least). Besides, at fifty-five I must be more than halfway through this nonsense anyway—why bother? (What about Prozac, you ask? I don’t do drugs.)

          So there’s no choice, no choice at all. I sit . . . with the whole stupid thing. The next day there’ll be Border Patrol helicopters and low-flying planes, cars, SUVs and pickups, with agents running across the sagebrush plain searching for who knows who. But tonight it’s still, still, totally, absolutely, utterly still. The moon is full . . . and dazzling . . . and all illumi­nating. And, as if I’ve just hit the right button on a magic combination lock, which in a sense I have, it all starts to open up.

          How does one describe what is beyond description? It is not a revelation. It is not “kosmic konsciousness.” It is not “nirvana.” And it is, I know full well, only the tip of the iceberg of what a human being can experience. It is, just, very simply, very, very simply, an open fullness, a beingness, a wholeness, a completeness. Nothing lacking, nothing wanted, nothing to fear, nowhere to go, nothing to think about, nothing to do, nothing to be. Just being . . . here and now . . . me and the moon. I sit  . . . and sit . . . and sit . . . and sit. Tomorrow—well it’s now today—is the start of our three days of driving back, so I should sleep. But I sit. And sit. With the moon.

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          Beethoven’s last Piano Sonata, No. 32 in C minor, opus 111: Hans von Bulow, the late-nineteenth-century pianist and conductor, writes in the notes to my edition that the two movements of this piece may be characterized as “Resistance . . . Res­ignation, or, still better, Samsara . . . Nirvana.” The first movement is as bad as it gets for us humans. It’s been a decade since he broke off with his “Immortal Be­loved” (so named in letters found after his death; no, I didn’t dare see the movie), and Maynard Solomon, in Beethoven, makes a per­suasive case that she (Antonie Brentano) was willing to leave her husband and chil­dren for him. But he said no, sensing it would stifle his creativity. Still he suffers greatly due to his decision, and after a desperate, bitter, and pathetic custody battle over his nephew Karl whom he even physically abuses, and with his ever-advancing deafness further isolating him, he is now faced with the unbearable truth. No hope, no dreams, nothing in this world for him: only total, absolute, complete isolation and despair.

          He obviously had a manic-depressive temperament. Solomon: “Signs of neurotic eccentricity—sudden rages, uncontrolled emotional states, an increasing obsession with money, feelings of persecution, ungrounded suspicions—persisted until Bee­thoven’s death, reinforcing Vienna’s belief that its greatest composer was a sublime madman.” Though his name was known to all, he was even arrested, though promptly released, for looking like a tramp. (“But I’m Ludwig van Beethoven.” “Yes, and I’m Napoleon Bonaparte. Come along, now.”) If only he’d had Zoloft. Then he wouldn’t have wasted all that time writing all that useless music, and could have been an optimally functioning, productive member of society. Maybe then he’d have been less abnormal. And maybe counseling, or better yet a support group, would have helped him deal with his hearing

loss

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I mean, Vienna was a big, important city. There must have been, say, every Wednesday at 8 p.m., something for deaf composers of consummate and transcendent art. But no, he, who wrote in his Heili­genstadt Testament (written in his early thirties and found after his death in a drawer) that the dread affliction had brought him near suicide, just did not know how to cope. He really should have switched to architecture and created something useful and enduring. Instead, when English piano manufacturer Thomas Broadwood vis­ited and inquired (either by shouting into Beethoven’s ear horn or writing in his notebook) how he liked the piano Broadwood had sent, and Beethoven said, Fine, very much, Broadwood made the mistake of peering inside. A tangle of broken strings greeted his eyes, the product of repeated and utterly vain attempts by the com­poser to hear a single sound.

          Me, I’m the same way. I’m not deaf, but I’m just as desperate to hear, to realize the music I hear in my head. Charles Rosen, whose recording of The Art of the Fugue served as an inestimable impetus to my playing, writes in Piano Notes: The World of the Pianist that for an adult to learn to play the piano seriously is like at­tempting to scale a vertical cliff (I should learn rock climbing!). I have, in my fury and frustration, one, put my fist (once) and elbow (twice) through the wall (if you try this at home, aim between the studs), two, smashed the keys, breaking hammer shanks (steel must be stronger these days as the strings survived), three, flung my beloved Bach across the room, ripping pages and binding (you should see how pa­thetic it looks after thirty-five years), and four, finally and more intelligently, pounded a sitting cushion all the way to the “other shore.”* Although the last of these events was in the far distant past—say ten years ago—as I am now more re­signed to the piano being my cross to bear, even tonight wasn’t much better. There was one day last week when there seemed at least the potential to play the way I’ve always longed to play. But tonight . . . tension and resistance ruled.

          When I was eight I received a “magic” kit. Included was a small tube of thatched grass of some sort. The trick was to insert your index fingers into each end, and then remove them not using any other part of your hand. The fibers would tighten as you pulled, the diameter of the tube become smaller, and the harder you pulled, the more impossible it became. This, simply put, is the first movement of Sonata No. 32. Resistance. Samsara. Hell.

          A Zen koan: What do you do if you are trapped in a burning house with no es­cape? The answer . . . lies in the second movement. Von Bulow says “Resignation” but this is not accurate in its usual sense. Nirvana? A term trivialized by the perhaps justly cynical. One answer to that koan (there is no “right” answer to a koan because the “answer” is . . .) is given in The Three Pillars of Zen: Die, what else. Beethoven understood. The first movement—the last pages of which remind me of nothing so much as a bird fluttering wildly, hopelessly trapped in an inescapable net—literally dies away. And from the ashes arises. . . .

          Climber Dave Roberts writes as the last lines of his book (the subtitle of which is A Climbing Life Re-examined; pretended to be re-examined, in my view): “In the human heart there are nobler feelings than pride. And there are more important things in life than joy.” Unfortunately he declines to reveal what he thinks these feelings might be. Earlier he writes that backpacking gives him “not the slightest urge to throw my arms into the air and shout with joy.” As chimps, football players, and conquerors of nature do.

          There is joy . . . and there is. . . . . . .

          The first is the joy of reproductive success. I can’t speak for women, but guys, do you really believe that the greatest joy a man feels, (or at least wants, until . . .) when his sperm leave his body, is not determined by his selfish genes? And what are the other joys people speak of? Graduating from college. Getting married. Having a baby (not having a teenager). Climbing a peak. As Robert Wright observes in The Moral Animal, our genes have evolved to make us feel “pride” (i.e., feeling good, very good about ourselves) when we do something difficult that raises our status. Throwing a touchdown pass. Winning a tennis match. Or, if you’re a chimp, maiming or killing a chimp from another band.

          Perhaps some, many, or all of you are thinking I’m much too cynical. Well, at the moment I’m extraordinarily fascinated by a photograph, on the cover of a book I’ve been reading, of a crowd of people gazing ecstatically towards a point above the photographer’s head. I have quite honestly never seen—not even on the face of mothers gazing at their babies, lovers at their beloved, nor sports fans at their cham­pionship team—such pure, unalloyed joy and love in even a single person’s face, much less in every member of a group. And many of them are actually shouting out their joy with abandon . . . and with their right arms raised in high salute. “Sieg Heil!” we hear them cry across the decades, to the one, their leader Der Führer, who has promised them all reproductive success to the nth degree. “Sieg heil! . . . Sieg heil! . . . Sieg heil! . . . ” (Hitler’s Beneficiaries: Plunder, Racial War, and the Nazi Welfare State, by Götz Aly. Look at amazon.com for the picture on the cover. It’s really quite amazing. This is the way our genes make us all want to feel.)

          And then there is. . . . . . . Words are impotent here. They only have use in describ­ing shared emotions and experiences. The second movement, the Arietta, is shared by few indeed. Not by me for sure until . . . Beethoven “spread ITs rays.” You could call it ecstasy, but there’s that drug and besides, ecstasy is something that hap­pens to you. The second movement does not happen to anyone. It is, when there is no one there wanting. Or trying. Or fearing. Just “a condition of complete simplic­ity, costing not less than everything.” I oversimplified when I wrote, “he is in the end unable to pay Eliot’s always utterly nonnegotiable price of not less than everything.” He did pay it at times, and at other times he resisted. He did the best he could. Fac­toring in Beethoven’s volatile disposition, his “Applaud friends, the comedy is ended” and shaking his fist at the end were merely a reprise of Christ’s last words: “O Lord, why hast Thou forsaken me?” Which may be the way a lot of us feel, a lot of the time . . . if we’re honest about it.

          So I agree with Dave: There are more important things than joy. But . . . . . . ? Let’s call it J-y. All-caring. All-consoling. All-suffering. All-embracing. All-loving. All-encompassing. All-knowing. All-everything.

          Not much more I can say. It’s there, waiting: here . . . now . . . always. Listen to it . . . when you’re ready.