Blue Self-Portrait

indifferent to collective happiness on this repugnant platform, calling him American in a stupid and frankly Nazi-comradeish fashion despite knowing nothing at all about his personal feelings towards America. You never know what kind of bond an American may have with America, one not only American but also German, not only German but also a pianist, that not only but moreover a composer, not only him but actually anyone at all with America, it’s a mystery this bond any Tom or Dick can have with America, the pianist’s America was measured out in bourbon, topped up with water and chilled with ice, that was the only way to appreciate whisky in its American incarnation, which is what I was missing, I was sticking with my well-known good taste, not innate but belatedly acquired, in the context of an apparently successful marriage which had led me to encounter though not necessarily recognize all kinds of whiskys, single and pure malts, and to despise fans of blended whisky, those drinkers being not enlightened enthusiasts but a lower class of consumers, as conceded by all true enthusiasts distinguished by their refusal of admixture, consumption combines while good taste defines, this is what I’d learned in the context of my marriage, my objective then: success founded on the theoretical knowledge of whisky, I therefore pursued the single-mindedness particular to good taste which cannot be learned for lack of a particular upbringing. These were my prejudices around taste, acquired belatedly and still channeling my judgment in accordance with conventions whose universally relative nature I didn’t always understand, I judged without considering the pianist’s capacity to judge which had enabled him serenely to sip his tall blended whisky on the rocks without in any way snapping back at this my anti-American sarcasm of the lowest kind, the most questionable sarcasm given the knee-jerk anti-Americanism that the pianist was always condemning and which I’d never meant to be part of, in which I was participating despite myself, which I made no attempt to resist: pro-Americanism would have been equally poorly received, the pianist has never been pro-American, has never supported America for America’s sake nor America versus the rest of the world, he has more than once taken a stand against America but without anti-Americanism either knee-jerk or of any other kind, ordering a blended whisky on the rocks was not a pro-American decision and called for no further anti-American critique, yet I criticized the pianist’s choice without first taking a deep breath and counting to ten or any other number, criticism he thought uncalled-for, being first and foremost a pianist-composer well up on America, better informed than he is hard to find. The pianist’s bond with blended whisky was in some way loaded, so I gathered from the nervy way the pianist had placed his order, as if it were quite a complex order and called for lengthy explanation to the Kaiser’s waiter, who it seemed did not serve tall blended whiskys on the rocks every day, the way he snatched up the glass and made the ice swirl inside it. Doubtless the pianist felt a personal bond with blended whisky, not in the way an alcoholic effectively fosters a personal bond with her drink, the pianist, I’d observed right from the start, has nothing remotely alcoholic about him, nothing could be further removed from the pianist than alcoholism, since our first encounter he’d behaved in that naturally unalcoholic manner typical not of teetotalers, for to be dry one must once have drunk, I mean drunk the way an alcoholic drinks, teetotalism is quite as excessive as alcoholism, one high-flying alcoholic used to say who knew what he was talking about. I knew an alcoholic, he used to practice moderation in his abstinence and overdid nothing else; he’d disabused me by stealth, shooting down anything that moved, he was a crack marksman, taught me to aim and to fire into the crowd, he would shoot at point-blank range till none were left, till Auslöschung and would drink moderately till he could drink no more, would prep himself the night before for the last drink of the day to come, unfailingly downed propped upright till first light and would hold forth upon significances, philosophizing about the world, understanding the earth’s tendency to spin as his world tilted and the deep meaning of everything in the depths of the bottle, with his lubricated ideas resisted non-lubricated ideas which express nothing definitively true only half-truths for the alcoholic to denounce. Denouncing the world’s half-truths by means of unarguable alcoholic truths was the alcoholic’s ceaseless work, it’s my job as an alcoholic, he would say, wetting his ever-thirsty whistle, never missed the chance to do his job whatever the working conditions, he was that reliable with work, never put off even when it was obviously a good deal too much for one man alone. The para used to drop from the sky and skip right over the facts, swinging from his parachute he could see the army’s colorful lies in Africa’s outline while the alcoholic was penetrating the quintessence of the world and analyzing that quintessence which no one would ever see from a parachute, explaining how bodies fall, the free-fall of inertial bodies and Africa’s free-fall down the woozy truth of the world’s luge, truth lies not in the leap but in the slide, it’s in the full but not the empty; at the Kaiser Café the pianist was neither between heaven and earth nor between one drink and the next, simply keeping up his unalcoholic bond with blended whisky, an intimate and precious connection, perhaps even more intimate and precious than the pianist’s bond with his car, a relationship one doesn’t enter into just like that, in open comradeship, but that remains for ever mystical and personal.

So, drinking his tall blended whisky on the rocks in the Neuhardenberg castle’s restaurant, he waited, flanked by the black trees of three months of winter, for something to come and pluck