Glenn Gould (4 page)

Glenn Gould died on October 4, 1982, just days after his fiftieth birthday. Acquaintances say he had predicted this half-century death. It is clear that, in more than one way, he precipitated it.

Beginning, end.

Personhood is a function of memory; it is also a fiction of memory. We cannot be ourselves if we cannot recall our past to our conscious minds each waking morning. Memory is fractured and hazy, distorted and untrustworthy; but it is all we have. Destroy memory and our strandedness in time is complete, our sense of duration and passage obliterated. Now we lose ourselves in timelessness. That, surely, describes the non-experience or absence of consciousness we call death.

Paradoxically, we seek this same timelessness in life: moments of self's annulment or transcendence, instants of self-loss. These are not really moments or instants, to be sure. They have no experienced temporal measure. They are times out of time, marking our lives as surely as life's beginning and end.

Theme and variation, expectation and resolution. Music reveals its architecture by existing in time. We sense a building movement, a problem is somehow announced. Our minds,
attuned to the ways of music, frame and anticipate the possible outcomes. In this manner, music makes us feel our way forward into the future before that future has arrived. When it does arrive—when anticipated future becomes experienced present—the past is resolved into sense, into something like (but not
exactly
like) meaning. Music's time is a time of conversion: it makes succession into progression. The silence at the end of the piece, always anticipated and then experienced, works like the end of a poem or the white space at the conclusion of a book. There could be no music, no poem, no book without that which underscores it, the line drawn at the end, the nothingness to come. Thus is sense delivered, via time, as the experience of consequence—as if caused, as if inevitable.

I suggested that biography, like history, is a consequential narrative. Traditionally, it sets itself a simple-sounding but difficult task. It seeks to resolve the contingency of personhood, one's strandedness in time, precisely by converting succession into progression—what that master of narratology, Paul Ricoeur, called the
emplotment
of self in a unified narrative.
¹⁶
A biography says: here is why this single person became this singular artist. (Or statesman, or philosopher.) Without being fictional, it remains a fiction. Consider the general problem of progression, found alike in music, stories, and persons.

“The experience of a linear ‘organic' flow of events is an illusion (albeit a necessary one),” says Slavoj Žižek. The illusion masks the fact that consistency, and so meaning, is only achieved retroactively, from the standpoint of the ending. Indeed, that is what an ending is, the point at which I can turn around and mask the “radical contingency” of my narrative in the very act of imposing it on contingent events, moments that all might have been otherwise. “But if this illusion is a result of the very linearity of the narration,” Žižek wonders, “how can the radical contingency of the enchainment of events be made visible? The answer is perhaps obvious: precisely by proceeding in a reverse way, by presenting the events backward, from the end to the beginning.”
¹⁷

Such illuminating reverse counterexamples can only be found in time-based media, where we can in fact run the story backwards: such films as Harold Pinter's
Betrayal
(1982) or Christopher Nolan's
Memento
(2000). Even here, the discrete chunks of narrative, however fractured and rearranged, still must be “run” forward. (An exception is the short opening and closing sequences of
Memento,
run in slow-motion reverse.) Shifting end and beginning emphasizes the power of narrative expectation; it does not actually challenge it.

The basic impulse of narrative is sequence: this happened, and then this happened. In
bare narrative,
the sort offered by
children or bores, the sequencing lacks consequence and is reduced to mere stated succession: and then, and then, and then. The felt lack in such a tale illustrates E.M. Forster's famous difference between story and plot: the queen died and then the king died is a
story;
the queen died and then the king died of grief is a
plot
. In
adorned narrative,
or plot, there must be some demonstrated enchainment of events, the creation of consequence. Only under these conditions is it possible to experience the libidinal release promised by all narrative, the sense of the
fitting end
.

The narrative presupposes the very thing it means to find, namely meaning under the sign of consequential structure: not just
and then, and then
but also
and then, therefore, and thus; and thus, therefore, and then
.

Consider the comparison to music. One may record the notations that indicate music, just as one may record the symbols that encode a narrative or an argument. But the logic of music's consequence cannot be exhibited except in the playing. The complex structure of the
Brandenburg Concertos
is available all at once as the score of the piece, but it is fully present only in the temporal experience of hearing the notes in time, pattern and meta-pattern unfolded between one silence and another. And then
therefore
and thus. And thus
therefore
and then. The story proceeds. The argument runs.

The piece resolves in the hearing, it plays, but the background tension does not go away. Is this experience of structure inherent in the piece or in our desire for the piece to mean, for the story to make sense?

Can it be any wonder that Gould's life, increasingly reclusive and eccentric, resists easy resolution? Or that it has proved the stuff of actual fiction? Thomas Bernhard's novel
The Loser
is the best of these, an extended interior monologue, in one continuous paragraph, by a man who had studied music with Gould and been obliterated by the shadow that genius casts over talent.
¹⁸
Another friend and fellow student, Wertheimer, has committed suicide under the pressure of Gould's extraordinary example—or, more precisely, by the fictional Gould's uttering the word
loser
(
Untergeher
) to him, “in his straightforward Canadian-American way,” even as Wertheimer recalled hearing Gould tackle the
Goldberg Variations
in a manner that definitively proved the difference between genius and talent. “They were originally composed
to delight the soul
and almost two hundred and fifty years later they have killed a hopeless person. …Wertheimer's fate was to have walked past room thirty-three in the Mozarteum at the precise moment when Glenn Gould was playing the so-called
aria
in that room.”
¹⁹

The narrator has, instead of killing himself, turned to philosophy—suicide on the instalment plan.
²⁰
“I will now devote myself to philosophical matters, I thought as I walked to my teacher's house, even though of course I didn't have the faintest idea what these philosophical matters might be.” One of these is what he calls his “Glenn Essay”—a work that is forever being contemplated, attempted, and destroyed because it is imperfect, its categories expanding beyond limit: “
Glenn and ruthlessness
,
Glenn and solitude
,
Glenn and Bach
,
Glenn and the Goldberg Variations,
I thought.
Glenn in his studio in the woods
,
his hatred of people
,
his hatred of music
,
his music-people hatred,
I thought.
Glenn and simplicity,
I thought …”
²¹

Is the present book an attempt at the Glenn Essay? Impossible to say. But, simple fact: the central mystery remains. What is the valid interpretation, the good story, to tell about a life, especially a life lived in music? How to create anticipation and resolution?

Perhaps as the music they are.

Where, and how, does a person exist?

The neurologist Oliver Sacks relates the following terrifying case: in 1985, Clive Wearing, an English musician, musicologist, and conductor in his mid-forties, was struck by a ravaging brain infection, herpes encephalitis, which destroyed most of the brain matter governing memory.
²²
Like the character played by Guy Pearce in
Memento,
Wearing was left in a state of consciousness where his memory lasted only a few seconds. (Actually, that's considerably worse than Pearce's vengeful Leonard, who can remember for minutes at a time and track his murder plot by means of
aide-memoire
tattoos applied to his body.)

Wearing's condition, a kind of living death, is so hard to imagine that Sacks spends considerable time furnishing details. The musician repeatedly greets friends during a short visit, as if they have returned from lengthy absences. He can move around his apartment but, if asked, cannot say where anything is. He can carry on a conversation, after
a fashion, but only by stringing together familiar themes and non sequiturs. The one person he recognizes reliably is his wife, Deborah.

This, let it be said, is the functional Wearing. For years after his illness he was despondent, a suicidal man without the capacity to plan, let alone execute, his own suicide. His journal from this period consists of entries, made every few minutes and then crossed out, that read: “2:10 pm: this time properly awake… 2:14 pm: this time finally awake … 2:35 pm: this time completely awake.” Later: “At 9:40 pm I awoke for the first time, despite my previous claims.”
²³
Not even the gods who punished Sisyphus could have conceived a more devilish sentence.

But then: music. Wearing no longer remembers anything about the composers he wrote about, nor can he name pieces when they are played to him; but he can still play and can even conduct. Arising from silence, music is his sole refuge, memory or no memory. Representing nothing, as composer Arnold Schoenberg asserted, music creates anticipation, expectation, promise, and resolution. We call music a
time-based medium,
but it is perhaps more accurate to say that time is a
music-revealed condition
.

Clive Wearing would not remember this sentence by the time you finish reading it. Only music retains the power to
cradle and wrap him in its measured moments. Sacks quotes T.S. Eliot's
Four Quartets:
“You are the music / while the music lasts.”

Reflect for a moment on the relation among memory, mind, and identity. The standard story goes this way: I am only able to be myself if I can remember, from moment to moment and day to day, the story of my self. The narrative of singularity. Remove that and I am not I; I am not at all. But memory is a complex property, and not just because it can be broken into short-term, long-term, and contextual. The last is most persistent: Clive Wearing could remember that Margaret Thatcher was prime minister—though actually she no longer was—when he could not remember whom he was talking to from moment to moment. Memory is not all in the mind, however; or rather, more precisely, mind is not all in the head.

Inga and Otto are going to a museum. Inga, in good health, has memorized the directions to get her there. Otto, suffering from memory loss, has written down the directions because he knows he will forget. What is the difference? We want to say that Inga knows how to get there while Otto does not because he has forgotten. But are written directions not in a sense an extension of Otto's mind, functionally identical to Inga's memory? She, after all, consults her
memory just as Otto does his notes; indeed, in way-finding, many people rely on what is known as eidetic, or image-based, memory. That is, Inga may well call up in her mind a visual image of the map she consulted before leaving home. Otto's notes are part of his mind, even though they exist physically apart from his brain. He and his notes are part of a coupled system that is cognitive in its own right.
²⁴

Gould had a prodigious memory for music, possibly the most highly developed memory of his generation. It is impossible now to know just how his memory worked for him, but some generalizations can be hazarded.

Musicians rarely, if ever, employ eidetic memory to play music: that is to say, even if they learned a piece from its score rather than aurally, they do not conjure up an image of the notes scored on bars in order to play. Musical memory is more organic: it depends on felt structure, so that progressions in notes can be executed smoothly, correctly. A piece can only be remembered
in the playing
, not all at once. Players who sight-read from scores are thus engaged in a complex cognitive feedback pattern, whereby their eye-mind is processing information one way even as their finger-mind is producing results in a structurally different manner. Part of the joy we take in great performance is cognitive, something
well beyond our admiration, however real, for mere dexterity in fingering or sureness in attack and release. Playing a piano, whether from memory or before a score, is an enacted demonstration of the mind's power, extended in space and across time.

No mind is unextended. The score serves to render the composition, to fix it in place when it can no longer be held merely in mind. Also to communicate it to others. The same can be said of a recording. Tape and disc are extensions of mind just as paper is—that is why the mind of Glenn Gould is still accessible to us; it is
on the record
. At the margins of complexity and innovation, we are all Ottos rather than Ingas: we need tools of notation and arrangement to keep our minds in function. What else is writing except the most ancient and powerful of these tools? Except it is a tool that uses us as much as we use it. Or more precisely, it
is
us. We speak of these storage devices as
media
, to signify their position between source and target of meaning, their vehicular status shunting words or music or images from place to place. In fact there is no between because there is no distance, only extension. The medium is the mind.