Blue Self-Portrait

destroys me every time, pamper myself at the hairdresser? not on your nelly, beneath this hair I resist hairdressing so hard that instead of feeling better leaving than when I went in, I feel worse, to be honest, I come out of there each time with a stranger’s head on my shoulders, no relation to the rest of me, interior and exterior no longer connected, capillary alienation as re-self-estrangement, die Entfremdung beim Friseur, I translated, you’re mixing everything up said my sister, you confuse getting your hair done with looking after yourself but they’re two separate things, my sister knows what I’m like, looking after yourself means aligning your mind to be in tune with your body, my sister sometimes comes out with this kind of thing. I could already picture the healthy mind in a healthy body, it was the end and the means brought together but which one to begin with, I asked myself there in the Kaiser Café. First I tried to focus on the healthy body and started smoking as if it was my last smoke in this life, all smokers believe they’re smoking their last smoke more than they ever used to and until they feel sick. Thomas Mann and Theodor W Adorno were in my bag, I was counting on them for the healthy mind, between them those two would get me over my DTs, Thomas Mann had good reason to worry about culture and literature, Theodor W Adorno his own reasons to fear the worst for music and philosophy, here in the Kaiser in this cozy ambiance I had no real reason to worry, I was trying to keep perspective by switching between the two and in order not to be found waiting for the pianist while I waited for him, when in he came.

The pianist’s entrance is always a big moment, I had expected this moment to be a big one and I wasn’t disappointed. He was admirably himself, pianist and composer and himself all at once, did not appear as the pianist making his entrance but entered, made his entrance without ostentation or affectation or complication, nor in any other manner but simply and authentically without care for authenticity, not trying to make an authentic entrance and not presenting himself as a pianist entering but simply came in. The simplicity of the pianist’s entrance struck me like a bullseye in my club chair, already I was under his spell before he’d said a single word and without his having to play a single note, in any case there wasn’t a piano in the Kaiser Café and he wasn’t there for a recital, wasn’t dressed as a pianist but in everyday things, was not wearing his pianist’s black polo-neck or his standard black trousers with the crease at the front or his black polished recital shoes, presented himself au naturel but not naked, in casuals, I instantly noticed the pianist’s lack of elegance, elegant at Café Einstein but not at the Kaiser, the pianist quite as awkward and under-cover as the para in his civvies, the pianist komisch in civvies, laidback like any friend coming by for a coffee in the company of any lady friend, as one does now and then when one is well brought up and this pianist was that, had no need of any special education to make him well brought up without, for all that, having to comply with the requirements of collective happiness. Not a trace of collective happiness in our pianist. Nothing in his eyes to make you think that the pianist might at some time or another have been burdened by the quest or the realization of this collective happiness, no trace of happiness in this smiling, warm and friendly person, sitting in the club chair beside mine, I began to shiver from head to toe, couldn’t stop shivering although it wasn’t cold and I didn’t have the flu, but was trembling like a sick sheep. From cow to sheep my bestiary is domestic, I realized to my annoyance, I should have preferred a wild animal without a pack on its back, I could just see myself galloping across the steppe or the pampas or the taiga and gamboling unwittingly like a savage without a stitch on, skin and bones nothing more, what a stupid sick Dolly I am, the pianist has noticed, he has seen the sheep’s shivering but made no comment either agreeable or disagreeable, he has counted to ten unlike others such as myself, ordered a blended rather than a single malt, topped up to the brim with water and ice, so straight away, despite my sheepish and shaky state, I allowed myself to use the whisky to break his ice. Why I started with the whisky I’ll never know but what I do know is that’s where I started and nothing now can make it so I didn’t. He’d hardly ordered his tall blended whisky on the rocks when I pointed out, in the thoughtless way I’ve made my own, that he was a real American to be drinking a thing like that; why I said that I’ve no idea however I turn it around in my head, perhaps because I couldn’t make myself wait, sat like a sheep in my club chair, for him to begin the conversation himself, perhaps because as soon as he arrived I noticed a slight malaise about the pianist, and by way of reassurance could muster only an old-fashioned bit of chaffing, perhaps a way of establishing our relationship on a level of frank camaraderie from the outset. If I’d been able to show off my frank camaraderie by taking a spin round the table while sat backwards astride my chair like those imbecile Nazis of course I’d have done it, I thought there in the plane, I could see myself singing one of those Nazi hymns to the glory of comradeship, schmettern die hellen Fanfaren, I established my relationship with the pianist thoroughly