Inside the Kaiser Café my sister left me to await the arrival of my fine company and gave me her parting tips, you are not intellect alone my sister, think of your body, think of straightening out your legs, try to untangle them and drop your shoulders, you have to relax, one day we’ll go to a Turkish bath, think of the Turkish bath, she left and I dived for the first time into the correspondence, Lieber Dr Adorno on one side, Lieber und verehrter Herr Dr Mann on the other, trying not to expect too much of our meeting, to expect as little as possible, preparing already to expect nothing ever again, staking everything on the correspondence, burying myself in it to the point of disappearing altogether, Lieber Dr Adorno on one hand, understanding nothing fundamentally but plunging, able only to drown to swim you have to have learned and to learn you have to have dived in, plunged in the correspondence, Lieber und verehrter Herr Dr Mann on the other hand, when the pianist made his entrance. I saw the pianist enter and I knew he wouldn’t save me from drowning but would press his pianist’s hand on my head and clap his lovely pianist’s hand over this mouth of a girl who’s said too much already but perseveres, not straight away no first he’d watch me struggle but then he’d do it, he’d help me to disappear, would press that hand down and apply that fine hand and would make me shut up, shut up the pianist would say pushing my head down his hand clapped over my mouth, shut up now don’t say a word stop talking, don’t say a single word either in German or French or in any language please shut up, you have to shut up now, there you go, silence, the sooner the better, I had very little time before the head pushed down and the hand clapped over, I didn’t know how long but very little. What was I really after, I wondered, why did I want to talk to this pianist, not to converse with the pianist or shoot the breeze but to go to the heart of the matter before being reduced to silence by the pianist’s two hands, go for broke, as if he’d asked me for the crux of it whereas obviously he hadn’t, had no interest in what mattered that particular day rather preferred to avoid it, was pursuing quite other ends, life is infested with matter what use is talking about it, he looks straight ahead, the strasse des 17 Juni leads to the Brandenburg Gate and behind it Pariserplatz, go round the roundabout, several times round for thinking time, could be anywhere but is here going round and round wondering how he can solve the problem of the Blue Self-Portrait, its musical composition like the painting’s composition, its composition a re-composition without imitation or plagiarism but aligned with the painting up until that end for the beginning is superb, truly superb, he’s sure of it, the best beginning he has ever come up with, he’s managed some decent ones and even some excellent but this beginning surpasses anything he’d ever thought possible, the crucial matter exposed right from the start, its inadequacy already in the first phrase, the bare essence, the black trees of Neuhardenberg figured by the entanglement of signifying lines, the interplay of timbres and the singularity of this polyphony whose further developments he’d been able to arrange like spiky branches, yes it’s the spitting image of the Blue Self-Portrait, my self-portrait like Schoenberg’s, you had to hear this opening of the Self-Portrait with full orchestra, at the piano already brand-new and already on the staves original yet still faithful to the first idea, faithful thus to the original without plagiarizing the original nor acting as an allegory or evocation or metaphor, its fidelity outside and beyond the original, and yet you could never dream up anything closer to the original, so much so that listening to this opening you are immediately in the presence of the painting, this the usual accompaniment had confirmed having seen the Blue Self-Portrait by Schoenberg then heard the opening of the Blue Self-Portrait by the pianist and compared the one to the other, had reassured him it’s a good opening, reassured a very good opening, but had not begun by calling it an excellent opening, only a good opening, the composer hadn’t believed her, this wasn’t a good opening or even a very good opening it was in point of fact an excellent opening, he knew it and wasn’t really relying on the accompaniment to confirm the truth about the opening being certain the opening was excellent but the finish still a limbo, the middle perfectly good, the middle in keeping with the black trees and the exhibition in the background, he had rendered that background by a violent turn to tonality, the twelve tones and then a sudden drop into tonality, got hold there of a genuine idea
