mother-in-law my not-caring at tennis was an intolerable disposition typical of girls like me, an inexcusable attitude towards sport and towards life in the sense of living, joyously singing life, a fine life in the fresh air and lived collectively as life can be from a certain point of view, the viewpoint of youth movements. I didn’t hit a single ball, I invariably dashed too late, I was sweating and breathless and excelling myself as best I could playing tennis, applied myself to running to and fro, hopping from foot to foot and executing little jumps on the spot while staring hard at my mother-in-law then the ball then my mother-in-law then the ball, believing I was playing tennis with every sinew and with all the conviction I could muster, when my mother-in-law discovered the root cause of everything, revealed to me who I really was, made me analyze my case, set me at last squarely before my true self, which is above all made up, I am obliged to admit, of an unmistakable plain-as-day not-caring, not-caring such as one rarely encounters, as natural to me as breathing and to all purposes, then, a deep-seated handicap. This not-caring prevents me from living normally, speaking normally, eating normally, sleeping normally, walking normally, running normally, from playing sport normally, from understanding normally what my bones consist of, from measuring the seriousness of my own body, the substance of my own body, my body’s malleability, my body’s presence, it was as if I didn’t have a body I thought as I ran to and fro across the tennis court, winding myself and missing the ball with an impressive frequency that visibly irritated my opponent, a frequency of misses that would indeed have irritated any tennis-player who was actually playing tennis, not in the carefree manner I always affected, I couldn’t see how to rid myself of a not-caring so inimical to tennis, how to be straightforwardly myself without any further agenda as if my self were in fact made up of this not-caring that my mother-in-law had noticed, noticed as has been stated in me, and the deplorable ideological and behavioral outcome. Enough of my mother-in-law now, I admonished myself in the plane, no matter that she thinks this or that of not-caring in general or of mine in particular, what difference does it make since I finished with her along with that marriage at first seemingly successful but ultimately a failure, due praise to my mother-in-law for putting her finger on the weakness in my character, which I always remember too late, when it’s done it’s done. If I thought more often and constructively about that game of tennis, I’d learn my lesson and I’d try to modify my principles and the behavior that flows from them but I almost never think about it except much too late. I think about it but only post-fallout. I coiled my legs up like snakes and hunched, I plunged into the letters. I read the letters but couldn’t understand them. I could understand the words but not the letters, yet I was trying to understand in order to get over my not-caring but the not-caring was stopping me from understanding, understanding without caring is not truly understanding and faking understanding is not understanding, I needed not only to get over but to disavow this aspect of my character, to engage directly and without ulterior motive, but I had legions of ulterior motives, they were floating about above the letters, turning over on themselves and all pointing more or less directly towards the pianist, dancing too around that encounter in the Kaiser Café which hadn’t even gone on that long, during which nothing ground-breaking or life-changing had been said but which had certainly been life-changing. In the end, nothing definitively life-changing had been said, yet from the start, in the environment of that unremarkable place, something had made all my verbal posturing as pointless as it was pathetic, a consistency in missing the ball, it was this unremarkable environment and I in that environment, the patient, generous pianist had granted me a second serving, ordered another Berliner for me, but while I was sweeping forearm over forehead before launching into a fresh conversational bout, he picked up Mann and Adorno’s correspondence, which I had set down on the table, opened and skimmed through it, taking in news first of one then of the other he wasn’t listening to my news, to my brand-new news he preferred the old news of Mann and Adorno, Mann’s health and Adorno’s analyses, Mann’s birthday and Adorno’s holiday, the pianist was simultaneously worried for Mann and happy for Adorno while I was relaying news of my day, a day that held no interest for the pianist, a day lost among other days, a necessary step no deeper than the usefulness of a pause. This lost time is not dead time, staying here is not about waiting but imagining, don’t think of this empty time as a time to be filled, musical time like a painter’s frame, a musical frame is not there to be filled up, take away the frame, pop out the picture, the painting at once within time and outside its bars, the pianist had hung Schoenberg’s painting among the black trees and broken through the framework of negativity, then composed an original musical phrase in the Brandenburg forests, a brand-new antiphrase while his accompaniment for the day maintained a reverential and passably stupid silence as it often goes with reverence but ultimately perhaps a beneficial silence, productive and positive, the silence and the accompaniment’s reverence an essential climate for the transformation of a musical intention into a compositional act, the antiphrase a monody perhaps or a recitative but expressionless, the sentence that says nothing, a cold shade, the cold shade in a recitative, the blue face, the painting’s blue but far and scattered as if suspended, the painting in the branches, the monodic line unaffected by the crows’
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