Silent Music

Julian Wolfreys

Description

Silent Music is a 'theoretical' novel that explores through its narrative and the central analogy between love and music, several themes now common to literary theory and interdisciplinary studies working at the intersection of memory studies, psychoanalysis, philosophy, historiography, rhetoric and poststructuralism.

Informations

• Publié par: Triarchy Press
• Date de parution: 21 octobre 2014
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781909470422
• Langue: English

Extrait

Published by:
Triarchy Press
Station Offices
Axminster
Devon
EX13 5PF
United Kingdom
[phone]
[e-mail]
www.triarchypress.net
© Julian Wolfreys, 2014
T HE right of Julian Wolfreys to be identified as the author of this book has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.
All rights reserved.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means including photocopying, electronic, mechanical, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Print ISBN: 9781909470415
Epub ISBN: 9781909470422
For Phil, Phil, Rob …and Morphy
Contents
Prelude
I Endless Summer
1. Overture: A Meeting (July 1976)
2. First Act: James (August 1973)
3. Interlude: Evening (July 1976)
4. Second Act: Kate (Autumn 1974)
5. Interlude: A First Day—The Island (July 1976)
6. Third Act: Graeme (Winter 1975)
7. Third Act: Graeme (Winter 1975)
8. Fourth Act: Tout Ensemble (August 1976)
II Entr’acte: After the Rains Came
III Four Seasons
9. A Journey North (Winter 77/78)
10. Lines, Lives, Converging (Autumn 77-83)
11. Moving (1982)
12. A Letter and a Party (December 1982)
13. A Lost Breath (Spring 1983)
Coda
Encore: Murphy
Acknowledgements
Prelude
It is said that the dead are the most demanding of our love. We are defenceless and delinquent in the face of them. Yet even the most beloved of ghosts is reticent, never to be seen when the sun is brightest, the sky bluest. The merest breeze coming off the sea might give you to recollect a face, a look, another place not unlike this, but nothing more than the slightest of traces returns. All we have is the memory of a voice; a whisper in the silence of a sound we no longer hear, but merely imagine was just there. Or, in the absence of the beloved’s face, there is just that feeling of having recently been seen, watched. I had the sense I was looked at. Observed, I turned to nothing, save for the memory.
A look, a final glance. A last gaze; what else is there?
Sitting here, before the light goes, I am looking at a photograph of you. At the piano, smiling, knowing the applause, silent and therefore invisible in the photo but obviously there, the appreciation is for you. The music has ended, remaining a memory, a silent music you once had called it, that small space between the last note and the first pair of hands closing together. The photograph, a close-up, head and shoulders; a nimbus of light, a halo of golden hair rendered white in the spot, your eyes their bluest, radiant, looking over, not seeing, the lens into the unseen. You are gazing as if blindly at all those faces looking toward you. Head held to one side, as you often did, in public, in private.
Faintly embarrassed, as if surprised, that others could be so taken with you. Though no more than twenty-four or twenty-five at the time, laughter lines appear strongly at the corner of those eyes, your bluest, oceanic eyes, their colour signs, ciphers of a calm, a depth in which is carried every secret. As with so many other photographs, I was not the one to take it; had I been, I would not have seen you so; I would not have seen you at all; but here, in photographs such as this, I see you again as if you were there; I see you as I saw you when you were not looking at me but turning elsewhere. Looking at you now, I can see that you were unaware of my gaze then. So, I fancy myself your ghost, your only phantom looking on unseen, lovingly. In that world, I am the memory you barely realise. And so you remain.
I, and the others, we must have been off to the right of the image, on your left as always. Where were they looking? I no longer remember. Toward the audience, perhaps? At you? What had been the song? Or was it something without words? All the questions miss the point, they miss you, precisely who you were; irrelevant, they simply detract. The photograph though protects you from the questions, from all interrogations. Nobody asks. Nobody says, what was she like or tell us who she was . They respect what they think of as my privacy, trust to me to let them in just enough. That’s sympathy for you, even now, after all this time. You are kept secret, then. You withdraw behind the image; just like this photograph. I know your face, its contours, what they reveal, how they might be read, the turn of mouth, the tilt of the head, the other small signs, all the little ghostly flickers, about to disappear, captured in the instant of transition. But all at once you are there, and secret at the same time; you remain hidden, except to me.
I knew you for a short while. All too brief a time. At the time, during its measure, it seemed as if it might go on forever. There was, I do not think I exaggerate, a glimpse of the eternal in what we shared. But eternity lasted not long enough. A few months shy of seven years. Seven years, save for three months, twelve, thirteen, perhaps fourteen weeks. I could count them of course, I could work it out to the day, but that kind of thing is for others, for those who like evidence, details, those dull enough, unimaginative enough, brutish enough to believe the biography is the be all and end all. For those who would like, but do not dare to ask, how did it end? Them? For them, nothing could be easier. I could give them the facts, just the facts, along with other details determined by their objective accuracy. She was born , I would say, here not there, and she…. But no, I cannot bring myself to say that. At the end, that was told to me by another, our mutual friend. She had to deliver that terrible sentence. The event itself, or what I know of it, if pushed, I could tell what I was told, at first delivered with care, shared shock and horror, then shortly after, I’m very sorry to inform you. I was not there, though I found out not that long after…after; after what, what should I call it? The event, as I just did? Why do I find it hard, impossible to say? Why do I search for, and use words, as if they were a picture frame enclosing emptiness, silence, loss? Or is this, the act of saying, too easy? You would tell me, wouldn’t you? I wish you would. I wish you could. Give me the word for what remains unspoken, the nameless act, a short moment for which all words are obscenities.
Those who never wanted to know were the ones I had to tell. Like a ghost, I had to relive in my imagination for others, betraying their lives in one irredeemable instant, a few minutes to last a lifetime, irreversible. The ones who want to know though, who like facts with which to anchor loss, as though it were a balloon seeking to escape gravity, leave earth’s orbit, disappear upwards; those who would see the photo and confusing the who and the what, would ask what you liked, what you enjoyed doing; they are the ones who would politely, tastefully, with just enough embarrassment of their own to signal a proper sense of gravity, offer condolences as if it had just happened: oh, I’m so sorry. You know, the kind of thing one says when accidentally knocking over a cup, just at that moment, as though this unspeakable event had just occurred and was no longer in the past, nearly thirty years ago, a generation. Such inquisitors, all solace and consideration, want life stripped bare nonetheless; they want you naked. They want me to bare myself as I present you to them. What is it in people, tell me, please, if you can? They want some clues that give them the real you, to sum you up, by stripping the mystery of you down to a few short lines, whats, hows, whys, captured in the tabloid fact of the compact biography. They think, knowing me—but they don’t, you would interrupt—that they have some insight into you; but then they think they have me in a nutshell. How you would laugh at the very idea.
I know what the others would say, our friends, a small group, a family in more than blood or definition, the four or five friends, more than friends; and then your family, your other family as you would like to say. Our friends knew you, and that is enough, it is more than enough. It is enough that there are just a few, we few. There can be no more; this would be unthinkable. I will for the time of telling struggle to keep the larger world at bay.
For now though, no one around this evening, I am alone with just the photograph. There are so many photographs. All the boxes ranged before me, kingdom of ghosts, of the past. This is just the first to come to hand. There you are: your hair, flaxen, shining, woven intricately, finger thick braids entwined, embracing, though, of course, a fugitive strand insinuates itself down one side of your face, as you smile; no, you are laughing, absolute joy; one earring visible, shimmering in the artificial light, silver; a favourite pair, hand-made by a mutual friend as a present from me to you, a surprise one Christmas: leaf earrings, larger leaf below smaller, delicately tooled blade; and on the reverse, fine, hidden script: in aeternum. Te in aeternum amabo. I had this inscribed in what, in all seriousness you used to call my dead language. Now it returns in silence just for you, in your wake, trailing after you. Inadequate words, words giving away their only secret, which is that they give nothing away, being inadequate. You sit, laughing in the light, brightly alive, your dress, one you loved so much, coffee brown, horizontal bands interrupted by dark blue horizontal lines, and, against the broad brown bands, small cream leaf motifs. You appear briefly in the world, only to retreat. Of the world, unworldly.
Though I have not opened any of these boxes for nearly thirty years, though I have not dared to, coward that I am, self-recriminating all the while, having left you alone in the darkness when I know how much you loved the sun, how much your h