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Farhan Khalid's Reviews > Inez: A Novel
Inez: A Novel
by
by
We shall have nothing to say in regard to our own death
For a long time, this sentence had been going around and around in the aged maestro’s head
He did not dare write it down. He was afraid that consigning it to paper would make it real, with fateful consequences
He had dedicated his life to music — the least annoying of noises
He spent hours concentrating on one object. He liked to imagine that by touching something, his morbid thoughts would dissipate
Holding on to an object would give him earthly gravity, specific weight
It was a seal
A seal of crystal. Perfectly circular and perfectly whole
We are all both victims and executioners of the short-term memory
Long-term memory is like a castle built of great blocks of stone
Could this round seal be the key to his own personal dwelling? Not the physical house where he was living in Salzburg
Could it be the original space, the intimate, inviolable, irreplaceable circle that contains us all but at the price of exchanging sequential memory for an initial memory that is complete in itself and has no need to consider the future?
Inez. He repeated the woman’s name. Inez
In the crystal, seal the maestro hoped to find the impossible reflection of both: Inez and a return to a time before the years prohibiting his love
Light in silence. Lyrics without voice
Seal, create thyself! And the seal was
Music of the seal, music of the spheres, the celestial symphony that regulates the movement of all times and all spaces, never-ending, simultaneous
I betrayed my art, I deceived everyone who depends on me, the audience, the orchestra, and most of all, the composer
The architect of Salzburg had invented a tangible nature for a city filled with the intangible sculpture of music
Between the city and him, between the world and him, existed this object from the past, which did not vacillate before the course of time but resisted and reflected it
Was it dangerous, a crystal seal that perhaps contained all the memories of life yet was as fragile as they?
The crystal seal would be his living past
It would survive him
Almost hoping to transform life into an inanimate object: a thing
Beyond death
Memory was something that was distilled, transformed, with each new experience
The temptation to love the crystal seal so much that he would destroy it forever with the power of his fist
He looked at himself in the mirror and searched in vain for some trace of the young French orchestra conductor renowned throughout Europe, who when the war began broke with the fascist seductions of his occupied country and left to conduct in London
To love Inez, to love her to death
Growing old is a crime. You can end up with no identity and no dignity, sitting around in a nursing home with other old people as stupid and disinherited as you
What are they playing in my honor?
The Damnation of Faust by Hector Berlioz
Black horses racing through the skies
Tonight in London we are rehearsing during a blackout
Chorus of voices that will silence the bombs
Cry out like animals lost in the forest
The best way to hide something is to leave it out in the open. If they come after us, thinking we’ve disappeared, they would never look for us in the most obvious place
The sign of a good musician is to know how to listen to many things at the same time, and to pay attention to them all
The war changed the times of everything
Music is the image of the incorporeal world
Sound box of a place without time
Calendars are superfluous
A musician collects too many things
Piles of scores, notes, sketches, costume drawings, reference books
What happens on that coast is a battle
The land defends itself against the sea with its ancient stone
For me you have no name or nationality
Who crossed my path one night. A woman without age
The simplicity of the house, the rough whitewashed brick. The few books in the living room — most of them French classics, some Italian literature, several editions of Leopardi, of Central European poets. A broken-down sofa. A rocking chair. A fireplace
Voices flourish, if we know how to listen
He always liked long, mysterious disappearances
Envy is poisonous
Jealousy is generous — we want the other person to be ours
He lived through me and I through him
The universe was alive in every moment and in every object. From a stone to a star
Does time appear and reappear the way the tide rises and falls so punctually at two opposite points on the earth? Is history replicated and reflected in the opposing mirror of time, only to disappear and reappear by chance?
Listen to the sea, listen with the ear of the music I conduct and you sing
Music is the midpoint between nature and God
Don’t gaze off into the distance like that. There’s nothing there
There’s an island hidden in the fog. There’s nothing
When you don’t have any information about someone you love you imagine him in every possible situation
The important thing about him wasn’t the name, but his instinct. Do you understand? I have transformed my instinct into art. I want music to speak for me
The freedom he wanted was the search for freedom
There is no destiny without instinct?
Where does inspiration come from, energy, the unexpected vision you need for singing, composing, conducting
He chose the cage himself and has confused it with freedom
It’s possible to imagine anything
I wonder whether men really love us; what they want is to compete with other men and beat them
Pictures sometimes lie
A photo doesn’t live and die
Our memory of most things lasts no longer than seven seconds or seven words
To me the past is the other place
Everything seems primed for the farewell. Road, sea, memory
The face of the beautiful blond youth was his heritage. A lost country. A forbidden country
Forget and remember, facing the sea, there will be two moments in your head difficult to tell apart
He had always loved people who were open to surprise. Nothing bored him more than predictable behavior
In contrast, a spider and its web: doing the same thing but never repeating… It was like a repertoire
Berlioz possessed a boundless power to astonish
Maybe he could compare Inez’s body to opera itself. Making visible what the absence of the body — body we remember and body we desire — gives us visibly
The music would fulfill its eternal mission of hiding certain objects from view in order to deliver them to the imagination. Would music steal words as well, not merely vision? Was music the great mask of paradise, the true fig leaf of our shames, the final sublimation — beyond death — of our mortal visibility: body, words, literature painting? Was only music abstract, free of visible ties, the purification and illusions of our mortal bodily misery?
Music is an artificial portrait of human passions
Music is artificial. But human passions aren’t
The passions we keep inside can kill us, blow up inside us. Song liberates them, and finds the voice that characterizes them. Music would be a kind of energy uniting the primitive, latent emotions you would never display. The melodic tone of the voice, the movement of the body in dance, liberates us. Pleasure and desire come together. Nature dictates tones and cries: these are our oldest words, and that is why our first language is an impassioned song
Imagine music as an inversion of time
Emotionally naked. Slave to a memory. The memory of another youth
The boy who had disappeared from the photograph
Singing beside the celestial spirits
The postponement of pleasure is a principle of true eroticism, at once practical and sacred
There are so many possibilities in an unknown future
Tt was because of forgetting that you and I came together, the memories of a man and a woman who meet again are not the same, one remembers some things the other has forgotten, and the other way around, and at times we forget, because the memory is painful, and we must believe that what happened never happened, we forget what is most important because it may be the most painful
Tell me what I have forgotten
Maybe it’s only the body that ages, imprisoning youth forever within that impatient specter we call soul
They knew about the professional careers, both brilliant, both independent of each other. Now, like Einstein’s parallel lines, they would finally meet at the juncture of the inevitable curve
Love might bind her to a fate that wasn’t hers and, maybe, selfishly, not his either
Who knows exactly if the words in a memory were really said or only thought, imagined, spoken under the breath
We’re fading away like ghosts
There is never a story without its ghost
A failed love affair must immediately be put out of mind
This affair wasn’t over — however often they both might say not only that it had ended but maybe in the deepest sense that it had never begun?
What was it between them that thwarted the continuation of what had been and prevented the occurrence of what never was?
The first passion is never recaptured. On the other hand, regret stays with us forever. Remorse. Lament. It turns to melancholy and lives in us like a frustrated ghost. We know how to silence death. We do not know how to quiet sorrow
Passion is gone
Don’t worry. Everything is in order
The second story is a different life
Whose existence you’re denying?
I wanted to make her my eternal, my one thought
Now there is no warning, there are no fears. Now there is the fullness of love in the instant
Now whatever may happen in the future must await, patient and respectful, the next hour of the reunited lovers
CARTAGENA, COLOMBIA, JANUARY 2000
For a long time, this sentence had been going around and around in the aged maestro’s head
He did not dare write it down. He was afraid that consigning it to paper would make it real, with fateful consequences
He had dedicated his life to music — the least annoying of noises
He spent hours concentrating on one object. He liked to imagine that by touching something, his morbid thoughts would dissipate
Holding on to an object would give him earthly gravity, specific weight
It was a seal
A seal of crystal. Perfectly circular and perfectly whole
We are all both victims and executioners of the short-term memory
Long-term memory is like a castle built of great blocks of stone
Could this round seal be the key to his own personal dwelling? Not the physical house where he was living in Salzburg
Could it be the original space, the intimate, inviolable, irreplaceable circle that contains us all but at the price of exchanging sequential memory for an initial memory that is complete in itself and has no need to consider the future?
Inez. He repeated the woman’s name. Inez
In the crystal, seal the maestro hoped to find the impossible reflection of both: Inez and a return to a time before the years prohibiting his love
Light in silence. Lyrics without voice
Seal, create thyself! And the seal was
Music of the seal, music of the spheres, the celestial symphony that regulates the movement of all times and all spaces, never-ending, simultaneous
I betrayed my art, I deceived everyone who depends on me, the audience, the orchestra, and most of all, the composer
The architect of Salzburg had invented a tangible nature for a city filled with the intangible sculpture of music
Between the city and him, between the world and him, existed this object from the past, which did not vacillate before the course of time but resisted and reflected it
Was it dangerous, a crystal seal that perhaps contained all the memories of life yet was as fragile as they?
The crystal seal would be his living past
It would survive him
Almost hoping to transform life into an inanimate object: a thing
Beyond death
Memory was something that was distilled, transformed, with each new experience
The temptation to love the crystal seal so much that he would destroy it forever with the power of his fist
He looked at himself in the mirror and searched in vain for some trace of the young French orchestra conductor renowned throughout Europe, who when the war began broke with the fascist seductions of his occupied country and left to conduct in London
To love Inez, to love her to death
Growing old is a crime. You can end up with no identity and no dignity, sitting around in a nursing home with other old people as stupid and disinherited as you
What are they playing in my honor?
The Damnation of Faust by Hector Berlioz
Black horses racing through the skies
Tonight in London we are rehearsing during a blackout
Chorus of voices that will silence the bombs
Cry out like animals lost in the forest
The best way to hide something is to leave it out in the open. If they come after us, thinking we’ve disappeared, they would never look for us in the most obvious place
The sign of a good musician is to know how to listen to many things at the same time, and to pay attention to them all
The war changed the times of everything
Music is the image of the incorporeal world
Sound box of a place without time
Calendars are superfluous
A musician collects too many things
Piles of scores, notes, sketches, costume drawings, reference books
What happens on that coast is a battle
The land defends itself against the sea with its ancient stone
For me you have no name or nationality
Who crossed my path one night. A woman without age
The simplicity of the house, the rough whitewashed brick. The few books in the living room — most of them French classics, some Italian literature, several editions of Leopardi, of Central European poets. A broken-down sofa. A rocking chair. A fireplace
Voices flourish, if we know how to listen
He always liked long, mysterious disappearances
Envy is poisonous
Jealousy is generous — we want the other person to be ours
He lived through me and I through him
The universe was alive in every moment and in every object. From a stone to a star
Does time appear and reappear the way the tide rises and falls so punctually at two opposite points on the earth? Is history replicated and reflected in the opposing mirror of time, only to disappear and reappear by chance?
Listen to the sea, listen with the ear of the music I conduct and you sing
Music is the midpoint between nature and God
Don’t gaze off into the distance like that. There’s nothing there
There’s an island hidden in the fog. There’s nothing
When you don’t have any information about someone you love you imagine him in every possible situation
The important thing about him wasn’t the name, but his instinct. Do you understand? I have transformed my instinct into art. I want music to speak for me
The freedom he wanted was the search for freedom
There is no destiny without instinct?
Where does inspiration come from, energy, the unexpected vision you need for singing, composing, conducting
He chose the cage himself and has confused it with freedom
It’s possible to imagine anything
I wonder whether men really love us; what they want is to compete with other men and beat them
Pictures sometimes lie
A photo doesn’t live and die
Our memory of most things lasts no longer than seven seconds or seven words
To me the past is the other place
Everything seems primed for the farewell. Road, sea, memory
The face of the beautiful blond youth was his heritage. A lost country. A forbidden country
Forget and remember, facing the sea, there will be two moments in your head difficult to tell apart
He had always loved people who were open to surprise. Nothing bored him more than predictable behavior
In contrast, a spider and its web: doing the same thing but never repeating… It was like a repertoire
Berlioz possessed a boundless power to astonish
Maybe he could compare Inez’s body to opera itself. Making visible what the absence of the body — body we remember and body we desire — gives us visibly
The music would fulfill its eternal mission of hiding certain objects from view in order to deliver them to the imagination. Would music steal words as well, not merely vision? Was music the great mask of paradise, the true fig leaf of our shames, the final sublimation — beyond death — of our mortal visibility: body, words, literature painting? Was only music abstract, free of visible ties, the purification and illusions of our mortal bodily misery?
Music is an artificial portrait of human passions
Music is artificial. But human passions aren’t
The passions we keep inside can kill us, blow up inside us. Song liberates them, and finds the voice that characterizes them. Music would be a kind of energy uniting the primitive, latent emotions you would never display. The melodic tone of the voice, the movement of the body in dance, liberates us. Pleasure and desire come together. Nature dictates tones and cries: these are our oldest words, and that is why our first language is an impassioned song
Imagine music as an inversion of time
Emotionally naked. Slave to a memory. The memory of another youth
The boy who had disappeared from the photograph
Singing beside the celestial spirits
The postponement of pleasure is a principle of true eroticism, at once practical and sacred
There are so many possibilities in an unknown future
Tt was because of forgetting that you and I came together, the memories of a man and a woman who meet again are not the same, one remembers some things the other has forgotten, and the other way around, and at times we forget, because the memory is painful, and we must believe that what happened never happened, we forget what is most important because it may be the most painful
Tell me what I have forgotten
Maybe it’s only the body that ages, imprisoning youth forever within that impatient specter we call soul
They knew about the professional careers, both brilliant, both independent of each other. Now, like Einstein’s parallel lines, they would finally meet at the juncture of the inevitable curve
Love might bind her to a fate that wasn’t hers and, maybe, selfishly, not his either
Who knows exactly if the words in a memory were really said or only thought, imagined, spoken under the breath
We’re fading away like ghosts
There is never a story without its ghost
A failed love affair must immediately be put out of mind
This affair wasn’t over — however often they both might say not only that it had ended but maybe in the deepest sense that it had never begun?
What was it between them that thwarted the continuation of what had been and prevented the occurrence of what never was?
The first passion is never recaptured. On the other hand, regret stays with us forever. Remorse. Lament. It turns to melancholy and lives in us like a frustrated ghost. We know how to silence death. We do not know how to quiet sorrow
Passion is gone
Don’t worry. Everything is in order
The second story is a different life
Whose existence you’re denying?
I wanted to make her my eternal, my one thought
Now there is no warning, there are no fears. Now there is the fullness of love in the instant
Now whatever may happen in the future must await, patient and respectful, the next hour of the reunited lovers
CARTAGENA, COLOMBIA, JANUARY 2000
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