Blue Self-Portrait

easy to run away with a violin and off she went on foot unilaterally, my sister’s audacity and Papa’s face in the pallid early hours, Maman’s distress so upsetting to see though comforting her It’s not so bad, Maman, was all I could think of to say, which wasn’t in the least reassuring but actually made things worse, Maman’s distress and Papa’s face, nothing next to the distress caused by this inability to recognize the serious during my increasingly disastrous marriage, this truth about myself would indeed condemn my apparently successful marriage to the most complete disaster, by dint of my unconcern I concerned others more and more, a girl as concerning as me is probably hard to find, I concern as a matter of course and that’s why I’m disturbing, I said to my sister in the plane which flew on straight ahead. You don’t disturb anyone replied my sister who knows far better than I the truth about myself, my sister can at any moment tell the truth about me for she knows me better than anyone, she knows the entire truth about me without having to labor the disagreeable truths, she’s no need to do annual accounts for my truths, doesn’t total truths about me to complete a picture of my person, she has never trapped me between unpleasant truths, yet she can at any time tell me any truth about myself without ever being wrong, that’s my sister for you. You don’t disturb at all, really not at all, from your first cry you refused to cry out loud so as not to disturb you were already not disturbing, I remember, the day you first cried you refused to cry aloud, Maman worried about your breathing you spent so long not crying, so many times Maman begged you to cry to be sure you were breathing but you wouldn’t, after that first cry that you refused to cry you became obsessed with not disturbing and you pursued your refusal of personal expression while I cried the whole time and had tantrums and stamped my feet and disturbed everybody, anyone would think you practically didn’t exist, if you disturb it’s more by default, the floor’s yours when it comes to disturbing my sister said, you can express your presence in a much more striking way without anyone being disturbed by your crying. I know I told my sister but morally I ought to concern myself a little, I ought to show some consideration, I lack consideration living like this without disquiet, I ought to disquiet myself in life because a moral life is always disquieting nevertheless if you think about it. Morally you have nothing to worry about my sister replied and took a Brötchen out of her bag, eat please, it’s teatime.

Talking about my moral life is rather ridiculous, the pianist had said to whoever’d listen, to talk of my moral life is absurd but not to talk about it is impossible, how then to talk about my moral existence without endangering my existence, my morale and the both of them together, he often wondered. “The conviction that I have written nothing I should be ashamed of forms the foundation of my moral existence,” Schoenberg had said on the 31st of March 1931 on Radio Berlin, he’d publicly referred to the moral life, radiophonically refused the collective morals of musical happiness and reaffirmed the individual morality of the composer, could have enjoyed applause but could not compose for applause, bore solitude better than shame, had chosen between shame and solitude, would reap no benefits from nor have any share in the collective happiness of which he must have been ashamed. After reading Schoenberg’s letter to the Reich’s culture minister, the pianist had gone back to the Blue Self-Portrait intending to examine the portrait’s blue, had registered the blue’s chill negativity, had taken a few steps back because of the negativity, this reflex move allowing into his field of vision a screen on which was unfolding a scene at once musical and fashionable, political and musical, Nazi and fashionable. He had only to see the director of the Reich Music Institute at the piano, that old Cavalier à la Rose gazed at by Nazi couples swimming in musical felicity, and Schoenberg’s Blue Self-Portrait in the background with no audience and swimming in nothing, to be brutally plunged into that negative solitude as if he’d been rubbed out. At the restaurant in Neuhardenberg Castle he had then imbibed in his blended whisky the courage he needed to refuse applause, had hung Schoenberg’s painting among the black trees in the park, refreshed his musical memory among those trees and begun to imagine the possibility of a brand-new original musical phrase, the music not collectively prepared-for but music that was personal, unheard by any before, a composition of resistance for which the pianist-composer would never have to blush.

Still, had the girl been there he’d have been able to talk to her, just talk, no need to explain but so as not to be silent, without having to reveal his personal moral code, the moral code of a composer in difficult times, he might have felt better in the company of the girl who perfectly understood the question of compositional morals, who knew about it not through musical experience but as if by magic, understood the necessity for a personal compositional moral code without any connection to the public mores of collective happiness, he would simply have felt all right with the girl no need to explain what to think about Schoenberg or about black trees or about music, she would have been there and they would at last have begun to explore the territories of the present, they’d have been there together in the untrod reaches of the present. The future wouldn’t yet have been at issue and the girl would have known it, she’d have realized the impossibility of discussing the future and of course would not have pushed