Blue Self-Portrait

nobody there to answer. So evidently at ease I was reading these legendary letters from Adorno to Mann and vice versa while my sister, eyes riveted on the air brakes, was telling me tales of great pilots, of masculine might and airborne derring-do, my sister elated by the takeoff, fascinated by the simple fact of having left the earth in order to fly, simply leaving Earth behind and flying, said my sister, it makes me go loopy when I think about it, just that, to leave the Earth and see it from the porthole, to see it and not be there, suddenly simply not be there! The porthole and my sister formed one cyclops eye above the world while beneath us genuine German cows with no national consciousness were grazing on German grass no more aware than the cows of its own roots, oblivious cows grazing which is to say tearing up the verdure and leaving the roots, you see Friesians in Normandy, Salers cattle in Limousin and Bavarians in Switzerland, cow here or elsewhere the fate is always the same, the cry of the cow when baby calf has gone, one day, two days she calls for baby then stop, and me above everything also in flight but without the joy of the airborne, Adorno and Mann on my knees and my knees ever shakier, it was too late, what’s said is said, I still and always have to say too much as I said to the pianist, Ich habe zu viel gesprochen, clapping him on the back and he, not at all, not in the least, it’s quite all right, yet weary of listening to me and frankly fed up with me, desperate really for me to go to bed so he too could go to bed and this evening might at last be over. He had many things to do the next day, many the next day and the next week and all these things were being jeopardized by a single evening the absurd prolongation of which was incompatible with the good condition required to practice piano in the morning and to compose in the afternoon, seeing him yawn and look at his watch and yawn again I understood only too late, what’s done is done nothing will ever change anything, I’ve breached the pianist’s night with a truly scandalous nonchalance and yet I know this tendency of mine. You don’t care my mother-in-law said in the era of my actual marriage soon over but not then yet altogether, I was on the tennis court with my mother-in-law, I no longer remember why I’d ended up playing a game with her that day, I so resistant to sport in general and tennis in particular, the problem is you don’t care my mother-in-law had said, who played tennis, had played tennis always, since childhood, and won hundreds of matches, who hated losing, who ran for every ball and would come to the net twice in a rally if she possibly could, picked up on my not-caring just when I thought I was all energy in action, when I could have sworn on my sister’s life that I too had that killer drive to win, I had the tennis bug, that I too was one hundred percent committed—you had to be with my mother-in-law for your partner and in sporting spirit—to the cause of tennis, my mother-in-law put her finger on this not-caring in me, the demon inside her son’s enchantress, while I was focused body and soul on dashing headlong after the ball I was laid bare by my mother-in-law who had a definition of not-caring, I’m wasting my time, she’d announced, you are making me waste my time which was the precise truth, I was imposing on the time of a mother-in-law who hadn’t much to spare, not-caring requires imposing on other people’s time, I saw it there on the tennis court, not taking other people’s time seriously is the effect of an inclination not to play games properly. That she should be so sensitive to not-caring I put down to her life story, it was due to her childhood and nothing else, she’d been a girl guide, I reflected on the court and again on the plane, not-caring is reviled by the girl guides of France but also by the World Association of Girl Guides as it is by all youth movements who sing beneath the stars, go camping and for healthy walks, guiding is the opposite of not-caring, as a young girl guide in France you learn to banish all not-caring from your life, to believe in what you do, to believe in activity in general and sporting activity in particular, as a girl guide one believes in the value of activity as part of collective action and in sport as collective sport, in singing for the sake of singing together; one has, in girl guiding, direct and compulsory experience of happiness through activity and singing popular songs, so the pianist could have said but didn’t have to for he hadn’t had to take a stance on questions of scouts and guides or on any youth movement, having had nothing to do with youth movements at any level. Even the para was less scout than the Scouts, had one day got the giggles over his parachute. We can’t know the precise moment my para jumped without due heed but it was somewhere over Chad, whistling his para’s song all at once he’d seen the funny side of the words and falling from a great height viewed his situation with quite new eyes but not my mother-in-law, she’d never fallen from a height, had in truth never fallen from either high or low or anywhere having never been too high nor too low nor anywhere but always precisely somewhere in the right place tempered by that characteristically well-tempered temperament borne of her early years in happiness training, a fresh-air childhood whatever the weather. Hence for my