Fugue #159

Enbal’s boyfriend’s film company, formerly Seminal Seminole (he went to Florida State for a year), is called American/Independent. He’s wearing a t-shirt, check it out: The logo is the silhouette of the Statute of Liberty wearing a miniskirt and knee-high lace-up boots, holding what appears to be a Super-8 camera, instead of her customary torch.

He’s working on (he would tell you) a short film about hockey fights in the 1970s:

"‘About is maybe too strong of a word. It’s about hockey fights in the same way that a Pollack painting is about paint. No, scratch that. Most of Pollack’s stuff actually is about the paint, ha. In the same way that...ok, take Ellsworth Kelly. In the same way that Kelly’s stuff is about the world around him - Paris, New York. Like that."

A blank look.

"This film is about hockey fights in the sense that the film contains footage of hockey fights, but it’s not narrative or documentary. Hockey fights are an inspiration for abstraction."

Another blank look.

"It’s an implicit homage to Stan Brakhage."

That, indeed, clears it up. Or would, if Brakhage had played hockey. He didn’t. Why hockey?

"I dunno. I just like it. Look at this clip from a Boston Bruins game in 1981. There’s this one guy, I don’t know his name, he’s big. I used this shot over and over again, each time adding more junk to the negative. It’s great."

Fugue #158

Do not be discouraged, Gene. You are not forgotten.

I think about you every day.

Today, I thought about how you taught me to fight when I had to. You told me to grab the guy by the shirt collar with my left hand ("grab him hard," you said," like you’re serious, so he knows he’s not getting away"). You told me to hold him at arm’s length, and pull him quickly toward my right fist, which should shoot straight out and turn slightly in, so the outside of my last two knuckles become the point of a line starting at my shoulder. ("Smash across his jaw, it works," you said.)

I never had to use that lesson. Maybe someday I’ll be lucky enough. Not to fight, but to use your advice.

Dad is still kind of a mess, even this long after. Mom is ok. The house is the same mostly, though your bedroom has a weird feeling to it. They kept it pretty much the way you left it that morning, but they didn’t. The furniture in the same place, but everything is tidy, too tidy. No clothes dropped on the floor, no papers scattered across the desk, and no pictures. The pictures of Emily are gone, and so are most of the pictures of you. Actually, there’s not much of you left in that room.

Fugue #157

A night on the town (montage)...

Ana describes Off-Broadway to Marbell. She went to see Enbal’s new piece. So what was it like? "Performance art, I guess, " says Ana. "It was just so weird."

Her voice gets softer and becomes Dina’s, forty years ago, describing the same place at a different time.

- It was just so weird.
- Yeah?
- Yeah...I mean, the play itself was ok as far as those things go. It wasn’t always clear what they wanted. Maybe some sort of post-modernist, Beckett-y thing - with abstract sets and costumes, and quixotic grammar? Or more of a mannerist thing - like Pinter uprooted from the Queen’s London and replanted in Queens, the accent and attitude modified to fit.
- That’s good, D.
- So they kind of threw in everything. It was a mess, of course, but there were a couple of nice moments. Anyway, afterwards, all they wanted to do was drink and smoke, and talk in loud voices about the method, and name drop Strassberg and all his people, and no thanks. I said good night and came home.

Ana, "I said good night and came home."

Marbell smiles.

"What?" she asks. "What?!"

Fugue #156

In Arcana (1925-27), Edgard Varèse responds to Berlioz - never explicitly, but implicitly in his use of the idée fixe.

Varèse strips the concept of the idée fixe from its romantic roots and places it squarely in a modernist context, where the form itself becomes more important than its ability to advance any narrative line. And so Varèse, in some ways, operates on a meta-level, telling a story of Berlioz telling a story, by using a repeating theme.

a siren screaming getthefuckoutofmyway

A fugue, according to music theorists, is a type of composition for a number of parts or voices. A fugue opens with a main theme, or subject, which then sounds or repeats in each voice throughout the piece, imitating the subject. When each voice has entered, the exposition is complete, and the subject returns. This is then followed by a coda, or closing material.

Essentially, then, there is the point - the theme - and there is the counterpoint - its echoes: two lines proceeding simultaneously.

Fugue #155

Writing restructures the speech act, for every text is addressed to every reader in every time, carries its own world of reference within itself, and has freed itself from the intentions of its author.... Its world is always created in the dialectic between itself and the reader.... Once written, a text assumes a an independent existence and acquires meanings of its own quite apart from those intended by its author.

Marbell pauses, and looks around the class.

"Steven Tyler...‘every reader in every time.’ Do you hear that? That’s the point here. That’s the theme.

Take T, for example. He’s writing a culturally contextualized novel - contextualized in the nearly pre-novelistic literary history of his country, contextualized in the socio-political milieu of that country at that time (movement and change, always movement and change - spurred by angry young men), contextualized even within the canon of his own work, which until then had been...picaresque? So a reader at that time comes at this novel differently than we do. But neither can we step into that time and place, nor can we hope to confine the novel to it. It exists. We exist. We can experience it on our own terms."

Fugue #154

The mayor, an architecture buff and avid photographer, had done his research, consulting books both borrowed and bought over the years. And this is where his speech either lost people, or helped them grieve:

"As David Plowden, in the introductory essay for his book Grain Elevators, eloquently noted:

Pyramids they are not. They are hard evidence of another time’s achievements. Like portraits of our ancestors, they too remind us why we are the way we are, that we have all walked in someone else’s footsteps. It is well to remember that nothing was ever done in the past, only in someone else’s present. True innovators, it has been said, do not destroy the past, they amplify it. In this age of remarkable scientific achievement, it is often hard not to indulge in the arrogance that we shall be the only ones to have made history.

We are not, clearly. The men whom we lost in this terrible tragedy made history for us. They died working in this place, this place which has defined us for so long. We remember them today, and we will remember them tomorrow. Thank you."

Fugue #153

A postcard from Marbell:

So welcome to November, Ana. The month you were born. The month that prepares us to straddle the fence between the newborn winds of winter -

(The pianos filigree, then block out chords. It’s dramatic, think Varèse. Winter is coming, marching forward, with autumn in retreat. Each day is shorter, each night is longer and colder. We bundle up, we cuddle up, and wait.)

and the halting breezes of an early faux spring.

(The block chords stop, then single notes. It’s syncopated, think of the beat of a happy child skipping. Winter is in retreat, and spring is coming. We unwrap ourselves, shudder, stand and look. Here we are.)

Think on these things - think on them, and know the questions well. The answers will come. The possibility of discovery is everywhere.

Whatever. She puts on Marquee Moon.

Fugue #152

Paulie learns about the stars from Gene.

They work together on the chart.

"Here’s how it works, Paulie. You turn this circle thing here to find the month, day, and hour. And that will show you what’s in the sky. From horizon to horizon."

They’re in the back yard, laying on a blanket, staring at the night sky. Talking, teaching learning - how to find constellations, how to be brothers. Gene is an instructive 12 year old. Paul, barely 6, is a good pupil.

"So take tonight, for example. April 26, and it’s 9 p.m. Turn the circle...okay. Look at the chart. Now look up. See, there? That’s Cassie."

And there she is. Cassiopeia, Queen of Ethiopia, she whose words excel. Beautiful, but vain and arrogant, she is depicted, per Ptolemy’s imagination, as a lopsided and often upside-down W. Sitting, waiting, for someone to notice her.

Fugue #151

Gene hates this class. He asks himself how he let Emily talk him into taking it? He’s just not creative, so creative writing is outside his comfort zone. Maybe that’s why she asked him, and why he said yes. He’s having second thoughts.

And writer’s block. He taps his pen against his left thumb, then tosses it down. He stares at the blank paper on his desk.

(If white is the ground, are the blue lines the figure?)

This is stupid.
What am I supposed to say?
Does it have to rhyme?
Maybe?

Gene starts, and the words don’t flow, but kind of trip out of his mouth, one by one onto the paper. He whispers them as he writes them:

I hear
that the measure of things are motion and wheels
that the vessel of time is a train.

Vessel? That’s not bad.

Fugue #150

"Ok. Who’s next? Emily? What do you have for us?"

Emily glances at Gene, she’s nervous, then at the teacher. She stands up, opens her notebook halfway, and clears her throat, "This is called ‘Tumbling Feet.’ "

feet caked with snow,
stomping it down
kicking it back up
rolling, churning through a foot of white powder -
running, we’re running panting holding hands,
trying to laugh, trying not to -
about to fall -
laughing, finally, and why and why not?

We are free, and the air is cold.

breaths puffing and eyes watering,
arms pulling and necks stretching -
forward ahead farther faster
than our heavy legs.

falling snow
snow falling snow fall tumble tumbling feet and finally,
poof! down in it.

Our eyes meet, our noses, our lips turn into smiles.

Snow is falling, melting over us -
we roll away from each other and look up,
and huge flakes, white then heavier darker gray,
pat our hot cheeks.

We lay there - breaths, but no words:
here, together in the land,
in the land alone.