A Couple of Good Pianos

A Couple of Good Pianos

(Or, The Big Other Goes to the Beach)

- for Keith Ward - 

I.

You once told me, when I was working on the piece by Copland, that you felt I was "90% there."  I quizzed you on how "close" you felt I might get with continued thought and practice.  You paused.  "Hmm...Maybe 98 or 99 percent."  "Why not 100%?" I asked naturally. "100% is not possible.  No one gets 100% - not even Rubinstein.  Anyway, you don't want 100%."  I didn't have to ask any further, but knew exactly what you meant and nodded my agreement, aware that the statement wasn't conducive to further elaboration. 

I was reminded of that conversation once when I read an interview with Bob Dylan in which he stated rather flippantly (in a response to an allusion the interviewer had made to the general sentiment felt during the 1980's that he had not given his art his best effort in recent years) that "I have always made sure never to give 100%."   The interviewer then asked him, "Well, do you feel that you've painted your masterpiece?" referring to his great song "When I Paint My Masterpiece."  He laughed and answered that he hoped he never would.

Possibly only those who have authentically participated in art can understand such sentiments.  If you'll permit yet another improvised foray into Lacanian territory…It is not possible to "achieve 100% in art" because art belongs to the dimension of the drive (Trieb), which is motored by the pursuit after a lost or forbidden or otherwise impossible object, an object which is unattainable because it is in fact constituted, mirage-like, by the very pursuit itself.  "Once found, it leaves," as you put it.  Or, differently phrased, "Once (one surmises that) the object of longing was (at a time now forgotten) found, (it is rather the case that) it had indeed always already (immer schon) been lost."  Meaning that the object is only retroactively posited as something that one once had at the time at which it has become felt through its loss.  

I'm at the piano.  After dozens of attempts with mixed success, I at long last perform the cadential rush in the coda's climax with splendor and ease.  But this feeling of splendor and ease is in a sense constructed retroactively through the repeated attempts to match the success.  "Now it's slipped out of my hands, and I can't reproduce it - I can't seem to get it right like I did that once, can't seem to get it back within my clutch."  Which leads me eventually to think, "But did I actually get it right even that one single time?  Didn't I perhaps mishear myself?"  Maybe the success I felt during that very brief moment was in fact no more than "a question of the weather/and of things that by lots had been thrown together," as I once put it in a poem.  Maybe, in other words, it was the result of factors external to the ideal triangle of player, score, and instrument.  

Addressing such questions, though, is like listening to old recordings of the Kolisch Quartet.  Years after their playing together had ended, writers used their example, made legendary by ongoing plaudits from the likes of Adorno and Schoenberg himself, to bemoan the loss of standards in string quartet playing - the loss of precision, the loss of the sense of musical rapport and cooperation, of fidelity to the spirit rather than the mere letter of the score, etc.  Yet now that recordings of their playing are available, it is easy to think, "What was the fuss?  It sounds like a contemporary ensemble's first or second rehearsal!"  Although their devotees protest that the extant recordings do not do justice to that famous quartet's phenomenal playing, maybe it's rather true that the "art" that happened in that singular meeting of minds known as the Kolisch Quartet is something that, though perhaps it "really happened" for themselves and for their devoted auditors, for us, in contrast, with our latter-day musical sensibility that has been permanently altered by the machine-like precision made possible through the subsequent history of sound recording and through conservatory training with its ever higher standards of specialization and exactitude, the "art" that went on in the Kolisch Quartet is something that we ourselves have projected into the past as a level of perfection that, if capable of realization, we imagine would suddenly make all of those irreducible difficulties and obscurities in Schoenberg and Berg fade away and would then allow us to integrate into our musical experience, to fully historicize, these composers and their permanently jarring, irremediably modernist works.

And elaborating further on the "patient search for their manifestation in another composition," as you put it - The Art of Popular Song, as I call it, has shown us the merits in renewing, after the period of modernist formal experimentation, the traditional "strophic delivery" of art (or literary art, anyway).  For what is composition in strophes if not a "patient search for [the] manifestation [of the parameters that elusively comprise the empirical work of art] in another composition"?  This is the meaning behind certain of Bob Dylan's greatest songs, as in "Memphis Blues Again," with his signature chorus, "Oh, Mama, can this really be the end?/To be stuck here inside of Mobile with the Memphis blues again."  What is the forbidden/unattainable object of this song and of Dylan's art as it manifests itself in this song?  To get to Memphis, Tennessee.  Does he get there?  No.  He's still stuck in Mobile, Alabama, which he perambulates in a series of strophes leading him from humiliation to humiliation, frustration to frustration, until the final verse:  "Well, the bricks lay on Grand Street/Where the neon madmen climb./They all fall there so perfectly,/It all seems so well timed./And here I sit so patiently,/Waiting to find out what price/You have to pay to get out of/Going through all these things twice."  Will this belated recognition that the void - the void posed by his inability to get to Memphis - has been filled up with a series of meaningless incidents, that he is stuck in the futile repetitions of Drive…will this realization magically allow him to "pass Go and collect $200" and to finally get to Memphis?  Or is it rather true that he has found his true Memphis in Mobile and precisely in the never-ending "strophic" attempts to get out of it, in which, after all, even the bricks there "fall so perfectly" and seem "so well timed," though he hasn't yet realized this?

This is why I refer to my basic 15-line stanza as a strophe rather than an independent form in itself - because what I am after is a repetition or a groove of repetition through which, though I may never "get to Memphis" (or achieve the right balance of elements that will make for a true or perfect Poem), I may establish a situation in which Memphis (or Poetic Art) may, momentarily and from time to time, be evoked via the "patient search" itself - if not entirely within the strophes themselves, then in the interstices between them and in the multiplying effects of their cumulation.

What would happen, though, if you were to actually achieve "100%"?  This happens sometimes, but then you are no longer in the realm of art, but of kitsch, as "achieving 100%" is tantamount to actually grasping hold of the lost/unattainable/forbidden object, which then turns to slime in your hands. In other words, what you get with "100%" is Frank Sinatra doing it His Way.  Elvis in Vegas.  Doris Day singing Que Sera Sera.  The Three Tenors, with their bad medleys of "hit tunes from the classics."  In short, your advice, which I've never forgotten, alludes to an imperfectability fundamental to and even definitive of art. What I've found is that, though it is impossible to derive infinite satisfaction from a single artistic "happening" (whether it take place in the form of a poem in which everything suddenly comes together in just the right way or in the performance of another's work in which you seem to hit everything just the way you always wanted), the more abiding satisfaction (if not the most exhilarating or thrilling) is the one that comes from knowing that, though the search on occasion may seem fruitless, you do manage to produce those 98 or 99 percents, those near perfections, if not often then at least from time to time - and that more often than not these moments that make everything else clear (in my case, specifically, these rare and special strophes), come when you least expect them.  (I often wonder whether Robert Frost experienced anything like horror when he realized as he sat back and let the lines sink into his head that he had in fact produced at least the illusion of a "100%" with "Stopping By Woods On a Snowy Evening."  He might have had a hundred second-guesses, thinking, "It's SO simple that a grade-school kid could have written it.  It really must be nothing.  Just a wood scene, a string of dopey iambs, a repeated final line, and an obvious allusion to human mortality.  And this is the perfection I've been after. Forget it.  I'm not going to write anymore."  Yet there are those of us who would never be able to free ourselves of it, never be able to get it out of our heads, even if we felt that this were necessary or desirable.  But in truth the reason why "Stopping By Woods" is one of the greatest poems of the English language is that it doesn't quite hit 100% but falls somewhere rather in the vicinity of 99.9% - the simple fact of its utter transparency and of the misgivings such transparency produces takes just enough away from it to ensure that it will never fall into the 100% zone of kitsch.  (This is also Mozart's secret, of course - or at least the secret of the tonal system which an empirical individual named Mozart in the late 18th-century was fortunate enough to inhabit.))

II.

I enjoyed your response to my admittedly exaggerated reflections on the "retroactive positing of the object."  I concede that in art there is a difference between the event and the memory of it (it would be a rather extreme empirical argument to suggest that Art goes on as Art in capital letters only insofar as one remembers it to have done so).  Yet I think that the obsessive component in Art (as you rightly referred to it) often entails a feeling of distance that sets in once the elation surrounding a particular achievement subsides - and a sort of dialectic of uncertainty that arises in wondering a) if you will again be able to achieve that "marriage with the object" as you did that once, or b) whether indeed you ever in fact DID achieve that - the feeling that, "well, it seemed right at the time, but in fact it wasn't IT."  This sort of dialectic between a) and b) is what I was getting at in my ideas on "strophic art". 

III.

Art as truth.  "But truth of what?" you ask.  That's a good question, and I do have some concrete ideas about this (again, based on my readings of Lacan).  A lot of my thoughts in this direction have to do with the problematic relationship between truth and knowledge on the one hand and being on the other in modern philosophy - roughly since Kant and Hegel, though clarified through the Freudian discovery of the unconscious and through the idea that there is a(n unconscious) truth that escapes one's conscious efforts to speak it.  In the Lacanian interpretation of Freud, the unconscious is essentially a linguistic entity.  "The unconscious is structured like a language," as Lacan put it famously, and is therefore intersubjective in the same way that language is (meaning at bottom that what I say is the same essentially as what everybody else is saying).  Truth is nothing besides that which can be expressed in language and is unconscious, linguistic, and intersubjective.  We speak it all the time without knowing what we are speaking (its unconscious aspect), and, moreover, speak essentially the same sort of truths that everyone else speaks (its intersubjective aspect).  Yet there are two modes to truth - that of the symbolic order (also known as the "Big Other" - which simply indicates language in its intersubjective dimension), and that of the Truth-Event.  (Truth-Event is an idea developed by the French philosopher Badiou based on ideas taken from Lacan.  Žižek has been relying on it heavily in his recent books).  "Truth-Event" is the idea that, on rare occasions, the symbolic order (or "reality", in everyday terms) is suspended by an Act, on the part of one or of many individuals, which effects a momentary suspension/disintegration of the symbolic order, of the Big Other.  (Badiou uses Christ, the French Revolution, the Bolshevik revolution, and the Second Viennese School as examples.)  "Reality," of course, scrambles to historicize, contextualize, and normalize this Act, though the entire structuration of what we understand by “reality” is changed once order has been re-established.  In short, the Truth-Event is what effects permanent alterations in reality, whether that reality is conceived in terms of the symbolic order, the big Other, or language itself understood in its unconscious and intersubjective fullness.  After the Truth-Event, the sort of "truths" (with lower-case t's ) that may be uttered are entirely different from the sort of "truths" that could be uttered before.

All of this is a very preliminary sort of introduction to certain of the themes that I am exploring in my book on Adorno, and one of the things I will be working on for the next few years is the idea that art (or true Art, whenever it happens) relies on a simulation (or maybe simulacrum is a better word) of the Truth-Event.  Whenever it happens, and whenever one has been there as it happened, one has participated in something (call it divinity, call it Truth) that is not accessible to the symbolic Order which governs our lives.  Sometimes I like to call it truth, sometimes the divine, sometimes simply Art.  In more mundane terms, it has to do with the either big and powerful or tiny and barely perceptible transformations that go on from one unconscious, linguistic, intersubjective order to another.  And one of the big problems at stake in my Adorno project is the question as to the extent to which music may be understood as a linguistic entity (and hence properly unconscious and intersubjective in the Lacanian notion of language).  Does music, that is to say, take part in Truth-Events?

IV.

A couple of Lacanian "axioms" that might help clarify the thoughts expressed above:   First, the idea that language is both unconscious (for the reason that any specific human subject has only a tiny little bit of the language he or she is able to speak in mind at any one time) and intersubjective (for the reason that all members of a given linguistic community speak the same language and end up saying much the same sorts of things).  Second, that the human being is only able to think insofar as he or she is able to speak (this is one of the central axioms of structuralist philosophy - that human beings think what they speak and vice versa, despite the psychoanalytic caveat that there is a thing - the Id - that thinks but doesn't always speak).  If one had to encapsulate in a single sentence the central theme of 20th-century Western philosophy, in fact, you might venture by way of summary the proposition that "we are what we speak" - an idea central to analytic philosophy (as inaugurated by Russell and Wittgenstein) and continental thought in its vast diversity (including Freud, structuralism, Foucault, Derrida, etc.).  (The film director Peter Greenaway provided a couple of variations on this idea when he said that the theme of his infamously disgusting movie The Cook, the Thief, His Wife, Her Lover was "we are what we eat" and that of his weird version of The Tempest, "we are what we read."  If one admits the structuralist thesis that it is the capacity for symbolism more than anything else that separates human beings from the rest of the animal kingdom, the further thesis that the spoken languages are merely the primary "symbolic orders" but by no means the only ones, and finally the idea that the dishes we eat and the books we read are also entities that have their places within their respective "symbolic orders" of cooking and of printing, then it can be readily seen that Greenaway's movies provide filmic theses of a sort on the very modern idea that "we are what we speak.")

And getting back to the topic of truth:  A corollary to the thesis that “we are what we speak," of course, would be that there are no truths beyond the realm of that which is spoken.  This is not to say that there is nothing in the universe beyond the words that humans speak, but simply that we can only think, know, or talk about this "something beyond speech" via the words that we use when we think, know, and talk about it (or, if not the words we use to speak of it, then the symbols that we use to represent it) .  In other words, our perception of "what is out there beyond words (or symbols)," is always mediated by the world of symbols, by symbolic orders.  (The Lacanian notion of the "big Other" is another name for the Symbolic Order in its intersubjective dimension and stresses that, for instance, the linguistic symbols that I use in communicating with another speaker of American English are shared by every other speaker of American English.)  The Symbolic Order is one of three orders that for Lacan define human experience, the others being the Imaginary and the Real.  I won't go into the Imaginary at the moment, but the Real in Lacan indicates that "world out there beyond speech" which remains unsymbolized.  The Real differs from "reality" as we generally understand it, which is essentially equivalent to the Symbolic.  We never "know" the Real, as knowledge is always symbolized (or, rather, knowledge is by definition symbolic).  We can only postulate the Real.  The best example of this is the Kantian distinction between phenomena and noumena.  Noumena are the things that we do not "know" (the "things in themselves," in the terms that one used to speak of such things during Kant's time) but that we posit must exist in order to prop up the world of phenomena.  But even this doesn't quite get as far as the Lacanian notion of the Real, because as soon as we say the word "noumena," we have already symbolized something unknowable qua unknowable by simply giving it a name.

I have just described what might be called the Kantian dimension of the Real (i.e. the fact that it refers to that which is not known in itself, that which has not yet come to be symbolized through the workings of knowledge).  Yet by the Real Lacan does not always intend a transcendental, Kantian conception.  Sometimes he is simply referring to what might be called "the raw stuff of nature."  By this material dimension of the Real we might indicate the sounds babies make with the vocal apparatus before they have learned to use the symbols of language, or the acoustical realm, the physical realm of sound, prior to its utilization by humans for the purposes of (musical) enjoyment.  In other words, understood in this less mysterious, non-transcendental dimension, the Real is the material substratum of human reality.  (Another excellent example, this time from Marx, would be the raw materials that exist prior to their transformation through human labor in the productive process).

In any case, the main idea is that human beings are what they are through the uses they employ of symbols, and that human reality is comprised of symbols - erected, altered, and ultimately understood through symbols.  However you want to conceive it, in contrast, the Real is everything that is not comprised of or erected, altered, and understood through these symbols made available to humans (or which humans make available to themselves). 

The big questions for me:  Is music a language, meaning a system of symbols?  If not, then what could it be, as the human world is all symbols, and music, after all, is a human creation.  But if it is a language, on the other hand, then does it grant "knowledge" of things?  It must, as by definition knowledge is that to which we gain access through symbols.  But then what would be the status of a knowledge granted to us through music?  And assuming that music allows us to have knowledge of things, then is it also possible in music to make truth statements (as when I assert in my spoken English that "Roses are red")?  If so, then, as you ask, what are musical truths truths of?  (This, precisely, is where my train of thought loops back into the recent elaboration of Lacan in Badiou and in Žižek with their idea of the "truth-event" and into the attempts made on the part of such thinkers to answer the question, "How does transformation take place within the various (political, social, linguistic, artistic, etc.) symbolic orders?"  And, further, "Can a deeper understanding of "truth" be located in the transformations that take place from one symbolic order and the truth-statements it is possible to make within that order to a subsequent order with its revised conception of "truth"?")  But then there is the alternative possibility that music indeed is NOT a language, not a symbolic order.  Does it, then, touch on the Real in a way that the symbolic systems do not?  Does it touch or even partake of an unsymbolized Real?  If so, is that true in some way of all art?  In that case, forfeiting along with their status as symbolic systems any claims that we might make on behalf of music and art for truth and knowledge, in what way would a Music and an Art that encroach upon or partake of the Real change the status of humans in relation to everything in the universe that remains unsymbolized by them?  And what might the study of individuals who maintained a prolonged, even life-long engagement to or involvement with Music or Art (mention who you want - Bach, Jane Austin, Kandinsky, Louis Armstrong...) - the study of such individuals and their productions - have to say about the ultimate status of humans in relation to that portion of the universe (or Unknown or Absolute or Godhead or Ultimate Reality or however else you want to refer to it) that they symbolize and that (ostensibly much larger) portion of this Mysterious Entity which remains unsymbolized?

Adorno more than any other writer addressed such questions in thousands of pages written over a forty-year period.  Very likely, he's the first theorist in history who has made possible a genuinely "scientific" understanding of music ("scientific" understood in the broader, Continental sense of the word, of course) and belongs to that class of recent thinkers (thinkers central to what in France is known as the "human sciences") that includes Marx (who made possible a science of the economic), Saussure (a science of the linguistic), Freud (a science of the unconscious), and Husserl (a science of logic or of phenomenology).  Yet like Freud, he didn't yet have a proper understanding of the 

central importance of symbolic structures in the human world - an understanding that came into prominence with the advent of modern linguistics (Saussure) and with the further utilization of Saussure's findings in anthropology (Lévi-Strauss), poetics (Roman Jakobson), and psychoanalysis (Lacan).  The question is, is it possible to establish for the first time a true "science of music" (Musikwissenschaft) through studying Adorno against the claims made for the centrality of language and of symbols in contemporary philosophy? 

And why is it important for me, a poet, to ask such questions?  Precisely because poetry is spoken language in its musical dimension.  (Nietzsche from The Birth of Tragedy:  "Lyric poetry is the imitative fulguration of music in images and concepts...Lyric poetry is dependent on the spirit of music, which does not need images and concepts but merely endures them.")  These questions bear directly on how I feel about my work as a poet and on how I feel about my ability to continue working as one. 

V.

Thinking back this morning over what I’ve written recently, I found a quote which made me aware of the connection between my first train of thought on the impossibility of "hitting 100%" in Art and the later train of thought on truth and its relation to the Lacanian orders of the symbolic and the real.  It’s from the opening to a 1966 television interview (which has been published in an eminently readable translation entitled Television: A Challenge to the Psychoanalytic Establishment):  "I always speak the truth.  Not the whole truth, because there's no way to say it all.  Saying it all is literally impossible: words fail.  Yet it's through this very impossibility that the truth holds onto the real."  Referring back to my earlier thoughts, it is impossible to "hit 100%" because one can never achieve a full symbolization without remainder in any given symbolic order, including the symbolic orders of art.  Paraphrasing the last sentence of the Lacan quote, "it is through the very impossibility of "scoring 100%" that Art [conceived here as a synonym or trope for Truth] maintains a foothold in the Real, or in that which pre-exists Art in its symbolic functioning, that which remains unsymbolized throughout the endurance of Art in its successes."  One of the Lacanian definitions of psychosis is the closing of the chasm that normally separates the symbolized from the non-symbolized - the failure of the necessary minimal gap between the Symbolic and the Real.  A fully symbolized field, a field on which a "100% saturation" of the symbol had been achieved, would be the equivalent of a psychotic universe.  

This set of thoughts can be developed in terms of Adorno's claim that the "100% saturation of the symbol," as you might call it, in Schoenberg's 12-tone technique converges with the 100% saturation that goes on in kitsch that is otherwise diametrically opposed to Schoenberg (Elvis in Vegas, Doris Day, the Three Tenors, etc.). (Think of the masterful effectiveness of the use of the kitschiest pop tunes such as "Blue Velvet," "Love Me Tender," and Roy Orbison's "Crying" in the famous, psychotic vignettes that fill David Lynch's films.)  Discussing Adorno's writings on Schoenberg and on popular music in terms of Lacan's symbolic/real dichotomy has the effect of further strengthening one's opinion of Adorno's critical rigor - whether or not you ultimately agree with his generally negative assessment of the 12-tone technique or with his notorious appraisal of popular music - though to me, at least, the fact that Adorno's writings on "dodecaphonic music" work better as literature than most 12-tone pieces work as music seems to indicate that at bottom he was right).  

I was also thinking over my thoughts on "Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening," and it occurred to me that one doesn't need to point to the poem's apparent transparency and to the misgivings that such transparency leads to in order to show how it falls short enough of "100%" to prevent itself from falling into kitsch.  Take a look at the third quatrain:

He gives his harness bells a shake

To see if there is some mistake.

The only other sound’s the sweep of

Of easy wind and downy flake.

From the standpoint of normative spoken language, the only bit of artifice in the entire 16-line poem is the unconventional "sweep/Of easy wind" ("sweep of wind" would be acceptable, or "easy sweep of wind," but "sweep of easy wind" is strained from the point of view of convention) and "downy flake" (in itself it's a pretty image, but again "sweep of downy flake" is strained, not to mention the fact that, in any case, no one would ever think to speak of a "sweep of flake" - "sweep of flakes," maybe, but not "sweep of flake" in the singular).  The precise problem here (again from the standpoint of conversational syntax) is that you can't allow anything to intervene between "of" and "wind", as the conventional pattern is ACTIVE VERB - "OF" - SUBSTANTIVE UNPRECEDED BY INFINITIVE.  Flow of water.  Breath of air.  Rush of sound.  Stench of sewage.  Etc.  Yet imagine if we replace the line with a rhyme more acceptable from the point of view of daily speech; for instance, "Of wind that keeps us both awake."  That's bad.  But consider, "Of wind that leaves us in its wake."  Somewhat better.  Or, "Of wind that renders mute its ache."  Better yet.  Replace the original line with any of these three alternatives, though, and the poem falls inexorably into the 100% zone of kitsch, or of what any schoolchild who hasn't yet had a real taste of Art could accomplish.  Voila - the difference between mere craftsmanship and the genius of a Robert Frost.  The somewhat awkward, original line ("Of easy wind and downy flake") thus functions within the symbolic universe of the poem, defined as it is by Frost's patent recourse to conversational Yankee English within a strict metrical framework, as a sort of "minimal gap" between the poem's symbolic order (conversational language, perfect rhymes, 8-syllabled lines, iambic feet, etc.) and the Real of that which remains unsymbolized within that order (in this case, language that is "non-normative" from the standpoint of conversational English).  

VI.

It is now Sunday afternoon.  Today I scored something of a personal family triumph that I'd like to relate.  Chinese, as you may or may not know, are not particularly avid beach-goers.  This always strikes foreigners on their arrival in Taiwan as odd, as Taiwan is an island with long stretches of beautiful, sanded beaches and water that is swimable year-round.  Why don't the Taiwanese take advantage of it all?  I won't bore you with my personal socio-historical speculations on the Taiwanese distaste for beach-going.  Suffice it to say, Rebecca's family provides no exception to the general rule (Rebecca herself excluded, though I assume she has gradually picked up her love for the ocean from her foreign husband).  Although for long I have been aware of the presence, within a 12-minute drive from Shuang Xi, of fantastic all-purpose beaches that would suffer nothing in comparison with the beaches of Delaware and New Jersey, I have long used the Lin Family lack of interest as an excuse to stay at home on summer weekends and work on my various projects.  However…About a year ago it began to occur to me, after a July trip to Lewes, Delaware with Rebecca and Stella, that sooner later, out of responsibility for the "recreational education" of my children, I would need to figure out a way to make use of the sparsely frequented but excellent beaches near her Chinese grandparents' home in Taiwan.  During a recent vacation to Bali, the idea presented itself again, and I decided that when we returned to Taiwan I would make a drive out to the beaches on the Northeast coast and check out the new government-run beach facilities that have been set up in the five years since my last trip there when I discovered to my dismay that the beaches were being ruined by local residents using them for trash-burning.  So I took a drive out last weekend and was treated to the shock of the year in the form of impeccably maintained beach facilities replete with changing and showering areas, kiddie pools this side of the dunes, lifeguards, rental stations for beach equipment, elevated boardwalks, and a decent, shaded café.  I couldn't believe my eyes.  And, on the sort of summer day on which, in New Jersey or Delaware, the beach would be populated to standing-room only capacity, there were a few dozen umbrellas spread out from left to right and no more than a couple hundred adults and children with their beach toys scattered up and down a half-km stretch of beach.   I immediately returned to the Lin-family residence, informed the other adults of my find, and the six of us agreed upon a beach outing with the four Lin grandchildren to be held this weekend.  

And now for the Lacanian tie-in.  We arrived at the beach late this morning, only to find it nearly deserted, in contrast to what I had seen last week.  "What on earth?  I'm telling you, last week there were at least a couple hundred people here!"  Rebecca:  "You're forgetting something."  "What?"  "It's Ghost Month."  Pause.  "Oh, yeah."  The eighth month on the Chinese lunar calendar, which just began, is known as "Ghost Month," and there are many activities that Chinese consider unadvisable during this month.  Going anywhere near the sea apparently is one of them.  The other five adults had agreed to this venture so as to humor me.  I shook my head.  "Well," said Rebecca, "of course we don't believe it, but everybody else does, and no one wants to get blamed for doing anything risky…"  

Suddenly it occurred to me in a minor epiphany that this episode provides me with an excellent means to explain to non-Lacanians the notion of the Big Other.  If you are someone who grew up in the New World and have had the fortune to spend an extended part of your adulthood living in a traditional society, you eventually come to the realization that in fact nobody "really believes" in the numerous superstitions that inform daily life in such societies.  The standard rejoinder you receive when, as a foreigner, you reject on rational premises a warning not to do something that is based on an inherited and time-honored superstition, is not one of "but really, it's true," but rather one of "well of course I myself don't believe this, but there are people who do."  No one, in fact, is willing to admit to his or her belief in this or that superstition (except for those fools who form a naïve minority in any given society).  But if all the people you come across are anxious to make known their personal disbelief in superstition, then who precisely is this mysterious one "who really believes"?  Answer: the Big Other.  It is not necessary to personally believe in a particular superstition (say, to use an example from Catholicism, in the real empirical presence during the communion ceremony of the body and blood of Christ) precisely because there is a Big Other who will believe in it for you so that you can get on with your daily life and not waste an inordinate amount of time puzzling over the mystery too deeply.  Why, though, is the Big Other a synonym for the Symbolic Order, for the unconscious, and for language itself in its intersubjective dimension?  Because, according to Lacan, when the human being enters into language sometime during the second year, he or she simultaneously enters into a realm of (generally unconscious) suppositions and presuppositions that come along with and are implicit to the medium in which we communicate with others, a medium which is no more than a structuration of symbols that make up the various human orders, linguistic and otherwise.

To get back to the story: The trip was a great success, the kids had a great time, and I will never forget the impression made to everyone's joy by Stella's two-year old cousin Zi-zi as she sat, for about half an hour, in the narrow margin where the surf encroaches most closely upon the sand, transfixed in delight by the approaching and receding foam and the manner in which it played about her two-year old extremities - her very first experience at the edge of Homer's "wine-dark sea."  

Best of all, the Big Other has registered its approval, despite the occasional discomfort and messiness that go along with wind, sand and sun, and has agreed to such outings in the future.

VII.

I'll conclude these ramblings with some lines from a poem I wrote long ago called "Leviticus" which came to mind in resonance with the thoughts expressed in your message.  In them I write about truth, but they could just as well be about art (or the truth of art):

And truth is leased, untermed, on an unmarked plot;

The covenant is kept or it is not.

From the splinters, from the fragments

We seek provisional commandments -

Forms, forever undeclared,

That lurk in unimagined wake;

Divinities we, in passing, shared,

Divinities we, in chancing, take!

Going back to my work on that Copland piece during my 18th year - I remember that, when an older, respected musician had heard me play it, he approached me and told me with seeming sincerity that "there was really music going on there."  That was the first time anyone with any real authority had complimented me as a pianist.  Also, maybe, the first time that I, through your guidance, had achieved one of those fleeting moments that come and go ("once found, it leaves"), had participated in the divinity that is on occasion granted to those who commit themselves to the "patient search" for the fleeting manifestations of truth that we call art.

Postscript

What went on in those rooms that you had once inhabited during the years after you vacated them?  What went on in those rooms, now occupied by a recording artist with a pedigree and a young product of the conservatory?  Was there Art, musical Art?  Certainly there was able bookkeeping, archiving, bibliography.  That's what conservatories are for.  To produce able bookkeepers, archivists, and bibliotechs, able preservers and maintainers of the European musical tradition (or "classical music," as it goes on the market).  But also (with another nod to Lacan) to preserve the illusion that the Master is not yet dead.  An entire industry, with its training grounds, its recording centers, and its public performance venues, its myriad enclaves of frenetic activity employing hundreds of thousands in the effort to keep from the Big Other the knowledge that the Master is dead, that the European concert music tradition (or whatever you want to call it) is defunct, over, done, finished, that Art fled its doors, its halls and stages too long ago now to remember exactly when, how, or why it happened.  Which is not to say, of course, that Art may not happen under the industry's auspices from time to time and under special circumstances, such as during those weeks, months, and years that two individuals, one with a sound decade's worth of devoted practice and commitment to the search for an Art of music beyond bookkeeping and bibliography, another with a need for Art based on personal experiences that will go unmentioned between them for two decades - when two such individuals come together with a series of key texts and a couple of good pianos.  Both of whom, once the collaboration has ended, will learn in time not to succumb to the spiritually enervating resentment (the sort that Nietzsche warned against again and again) that will threaten to take hold of each of them when, as is inevitable, the undertakers of Art have emerged to chase out its midwives and truer practitioners.