Blue Self-Portrait

true sense of the word, his companion was right there, entirely pleasant company, the ideal accompaniment in fact, the very one for him, conducive to creativity for which you need serenity and calm and mental tranquility and for which what you really don’t need is complications; a habit, this accompaniment, an habitual accompaniment, the pianist might have been thinking, relieved in the end not to have bumped into the girl yet at the same time not altogether, for though he really didn’t want complications he did rather want them too, didn’t want the girl but did want her too, felt incapable of talking about the music but was also dying to give it a good talking-about, one would never say anything about Theresienstadt but something must be said, impossible to say anything to the usual accompaniment but impossible not to and most of all not to hear the accompaniment talk about Theresienstadt in terms both polished from the verb to polish and acceptable from the verb to accept, discussing Theresienstadt in terms initially inadequate and finally insulting and destructive. The black trees speak more eloquently of Theresienstadt than my usual accompaniment, thought the pianist, sucking the peatiness around his tongue, staring at the black trees outside, and being so implicated in the sombre nature of the coda to a Brandenburg winter was an even greater comfort to him than Schoenberg’s Blue Self-Portrait in and of itself, a self-portrait that he hung unthinkingly in the black branches whose musical significance he understood and whose palette of winter tones he found precisely those of the park at Neuhardenberg. The gloomy palette of the Brandenburgian winter added nothing to the painting; this direct connection between gloomy nature and the painting was an entirely personal fantasy, Schoenberg had painted his portrait without the black trees and the black trees themselves were self-sufficient, independent of Schoenberg.

Nonetheless, he hung the Blue Self-Portrait in the here and now of the Brandenburgian countryside, as if this was the only thing to do at this precise moment: bring together the living memory of Schoenberg as captured in the painting and the deathly presence of Brandenburgian nature, conversely bring together still and temporary life with the natural memory of Schoenberg captured in paint. Thus might the pianist have drunk his tall blended whisky on the rocks, that afternoon at the Neuhardenberg castle, in such circumstances, back in his car unworthy of a world-class pianist, slightly lubricated by the whisky and by the black trees and by Schoenberg and everything at once, inspired by each of the three elements of this serendipitous composition, he had invented an entirely original musical phrase which he’d had to scrawl down as fast as he could, a phrase that had nothing in common with standard musical phrases but sounded more like the rupture of musical phrases, the decomposition of the very principle of the phrase, a creation without precedent, a prodigious idea, a countering phrase such as he’d never dreamed of creating because, until this moment, he had attained neither the happy chance of this composition nor the car so conducive to the creative impulse, nor the negative solitude followed by a positive solitude, all come together in the ideal conjunction, the girl’s absence and missing the girl, then Schoenberg, then the blended whisky and lastly Schoenberg’s affinity with the black trees, he must have pulled his car up just like this in the wintry forest, in haste to scribble down the brand-new idea for a counter-phrase, written under the admiring gaze of his usual accompaniment who guessed at the supernatural and metaphysical and divine inspiration in this frenzied unrestrained fixing of music upon staves, thus she stood, the accompaniment, in a deferential and somewhat stupid silence.

At the Kaiser Café, though I’d already put the disastrous experience at Café Einstein behind me, I nonetheless tossed out my witticism about American atavism, as if a blended whisky on the rocks had anything to do with nationality, anything to do with the culture of collective happiness in general and the culture of collective American happiness in particular, even though as soon as he walked in the pianist had made it clear that he was not and never would be lumbered with any collective happiness, neither American nor German nor of any other country, but that he was on the contrary impervious to happiness, in the same manner as Schoenberg of whose music I’d only ever heard a few notes, in passing and besides without intending to hear any Schoenberg, in the manner of Theodor W Adorno though I’ve not yet read one of his books and whose letters I was just now beginning, in the plane and without hope of return, alongside Thomas Mann whom I’d not read before either except by accident and without meaning to, not him in particular. My sister was deep in the Berlin guide, looking up what she’d seen and what she hadn’t seen, thrilled to have seen the sights she had and that she still had those to see that she hadn’t. We’ll have to go back my sister said, of course we’ll go back, said it over and over, I agreed, we’ll have to. It’s a done deal my sister said, I raised her a gold-plated deal, I thought yes, of course, how could we not, I looked for another tissue to mop up my capital and dorsal dripping, in other words my general dripping due to poor adaptation to the pressurized environment. The Wannsee was already far below and behind us, we must be flying over lands intensively cultivated for collective sustenance, I feigned serenity and admired the exterior effect, for a girl I’m pretty tough, I thought to myself in the plane, projecting such serene serenity, couldn’t get over seeing myself so at ease, practically meadow-grazing certainly not bellowing like a cow whose calf has been kidnapped, only her poor bovine maternal feelings left to nurse, the one doesn’t eliminate the other, to moo herself to death and