Testaments Betrayed: An Essay in Nine Parts

two apparently very different artists, Kafka and Stravinsky.

A Little Boy in Ecstasy

Of course, one cannot say that music (all music) is incapable of expressing feelings; the music of the Romantic era is authentically and legitimately expressive; but even about that music it can be said: its worth has nothing to do with the intensity of the feelings it provokes. For music can powerfully stir feelings with no musical art at all. I recall my childhood: sitting at the piano, I would throw myself into passionate improvisations for which I needed nothing but a G-minor chord and the subdominant F minor, played fortissimo over and over again. The two chords and the endlessly repeated primitive melodic motif made me experience an emotion more intense than any Chopin, any Beethoven, has ever given me. (One time my musician father, completely furious-I never saw him so furious before or after- rushed into the room, lifted me off the piano stool, and with a disgust he could barely control, carried me into the dining room and set me down under the table.)

What I was experiencing during those improvisations was an ecstasy. What is ecstasy? The boy banging on the keyboard feels an enthusiasm (or a sorrow, or a delight), and the emotion rises to such a pitch of intensity that it becomes unbearable: the boy flees into a state of blindness and deafness where everything is forgotten, even oneself. Through ecstasy, emotion reaches its climax, and thereby at the same time its negation (its oblivion).

Ecstasy means being 'outside oneself,' as indicated by the etymology of the Greek word: the act of leaving one's position (stasis). To be 'outside oneself' does not mean outside the present moment, like a dreamer escaping into the past or the future. Just the opposite: ecstasy is absolute identity with the present instant, total forgetting of past and future. If we obliterate the future and the past, the present moment stands in empty space, outside life and its chronology, outside time and independent of it (this is why it can be likened to eternity, which too is the negation of time).

We can see the acoustical image of emotion in the Romantic melody of a lied: its length seems intended for sustaining emotion, building it, causing its slow enjoyment. Ecstasy, on the other hand, cannot be mirrored in a melody, because memory strangled by ecstasy is incapable of retaining the sequence of notes in a melodic phrase, however short; the acoustical image of ecstasy is the cry (or: a very brief melodic motif that imitates a cry).

The classic example of ecstasy is the moment of orgasm. Think back to the time before women had the benefit of the pill. It often happened that at the moment of climax a lover forgot to slide out of his mistress's body and made her a mother, even though, a few moments earlier, he had firmly intended to be extremely careful. That second of ecstasy made him forget both his determination (his immediate past) and his interest (his future).

The instant of ecstasy thus weighed more heavily on the scales than the unwanted child; and since the unwanted child will probably fill the lovers whole life span with his unwanted presence, it may be said that one instant of ecstasy weighed more than a whole lifetime. The lovers lifetime faced the instant of ecstasy from roughly the same inferior status as the finite has facing eternity. Man desires eternity, but all he can get is its imitation: the instant of ecstasy.

I recall a day in my youth: I was with a friend in his car; people were crossing the street in front of us. I saw a person I disliked and pointed him out to my friend: 'Run him over!' It was of course only a verbal joke, but my friend was in a state of great euphoria, and he hit the accelerator. The man took fright, slipped, fell. My friend stopped the car just in time. The man was not hurt, but people crowded around and threatened (understandably) to lynch us. Yet my

friend was not a murderer by nature. My words had sent him into a momentary ecstasy (actually, one of the oddest: the ecstasy of a joke).

We are used to connecting the notion of ecstasy to great mystical moments. But there is such a thing as everyday, ordinary, vulgar ecstasy: the ecstasy of anger, the ecstasy of speed at the wheel, the ecstasy of ear- splitting noise, ecstasy in the soccer stadium. Living is a perpetual heavy effort not to lose sight of ourselves, to stay solidly present in ourselves, in our stasis. Step outside ourselves for a mere instant, and we verge on death's dominion.

Delight and Ecstasy

I wonder if Adorno ever found the slightest pleasure in listening to Stravinsky's music. Pleasure? By his lights, Stravinsky's music offers only one such: 'the perverse pleasure of deprivation'; for all it does is 'deprive' itself of everything: of expressivity; of orchestral sonority; of developmental technique; casting a 'spiteful look' on the old forms, it deforms them; 'grimacing,' it is incapable of invention, it only 'ironizes,' 'caricatures,' 'parodies'; it is just 'negation,' not merely of nineteenth-century music but of music altogether ('Stravinsky's music is a music from which music is banished,' says Adorno).

Curious, curious. And what about the delight that beams from that music?

I remember the Picasso exhibition in Prague in the mid-sixties. One painting has stayed with me. A woman and a man are eating watermelon: the woman

is seated, the man is lying on the ground, his legs lifted up to the sky in a gesture of unspeakable joy. And the whole thing painted with a delectable offhandedness that made me think the painter, as he painted the picture, must have been feeling the same joy as the man with his legs lifted up.

The delight of the painter painting the man with his legs lifted up is a double delight; it is the delight of contemplating delight (with a smile). It is the smile that interests me. In the delight of the man lifting his legs up to the sky the painter glimpses a wonderful tinge of the comical, and he rejoices in it. His own smile spurs him to a merry, heedless invention, just as heedless as the gesture of the man lifting his legs to the sky. So the delight I'm talking about bears the mark of humor; this is what sets it apart from the delight of other ages in art, from the Romantic delight of Wagners Tristan, for instance, or from the idyllic delight of a Philemon and Baucis. (Is it a fatal lack of humor that makes Adorno so unreceptive to Stravinsky's music?)

Beethoven wrote the 'Ode to Joy,' but that Beethovenian joy is a ceremony that requires us to stand at respectful attention. The rondos and minuets of the Classical symphonies are, so to speak, an invitation to the dance, but the delight I'm talking about and that I love would not proclaim itself as delight through the collective act of a dance. This is why no polka makes me happy except Stravinsky's 'Circus Polka,' which is written not for us to dance to but for us to listen to, with our legs lifted up to the sky.

There are works in modern art that have discovered an inimitable delight in being, the delight that shows in a euphoric recklessness of imagination, in the pleasure of inventing, of surprising-even of shocking-by an invention. One might draw up a whole list of works of art that are suffused with this delight: along with Stravinsky {Petrushka, Les Noces, Renard, the Capriccio for Piano and Orchestra, the Violin Concerto, etc., etc.), everything by Miro; Klee's paintings; Dufy's; Dubuffet's; certain Apollinaire writings; late Janacek (Nursery Rhymes, Sextet for Wind Instruments, his opera The Cunning Little Vixen); some of Milhauds works; and some of Poulencs: Les Mamelles de Tiresias, his comic opera on a text by Apollinaire, written in the last days of the war, was denounced by people who thought it scandalous to celebrate the Liberation with a piece of fun; and indeed, the age of delight (of that rare delight which humor sets aglow) was over; after the Second World War, only the very old masters Matisse and Picasso still managed, against the spirit of the times, to keep it going in their work.

In this listing of the great works of delight, I cannot overlook jazz music. The whole jazz repertory consists of variations on a relatively small number of melodies. So it is that all throughout jazz we keep catching sight of a smile that has slipped in between the original melody and its elaboration. Like Stravinsky, the great jazz masters enjoyed the art of playful transcription, and they composed their own versions not only of old Negro songs but also of Bach, of Mozart, of Chopin; Ellington does transcriptions of Tchaikovsky and Grieg, and for his Uwis Suite, he composes a variant of a village polka that recalls