But she had the impression her eyes were seeing something entirely different from what her body felt, as if there had been no link between the children leaning over her and the silent, rocking pleasure sweeping through her. And so she closed her eyes again to enjoy her body, because for the first time in her life her body was taking pleasure in the absence of the soul, which, imagining nothing, remembering nothing, had quietly left the room,
two princes (the fifth and fourth steps). Under their orders are four other dignitaries, each with his own special relation to the king and princes. The court also lakes in five other tones, which are called chromatic. They of course occupy first-rank positions in other keys, but here they are only guests.
Because each of the twelve tones has its own posi-tion, title, and function, any piece of music we hear is more than just a mass of sound: it is an action developing before us. Sometimes the events are terribly tangled (as in Mahler or still more in Bartok or Stravinsky), with princes from several courts intervening and soon you no longer know which tone is serving which court or if it isn't serving several kings at once. But even then, the most naive listener can still make a rough guess about what is going on. Even the most complex music is still speaking the same language.
That is what Papa told me, and what follows is all my own: one day, a great man saw that after a thousand years the language of music had worn itself out and could only keep on repeating the same old messages. By revolutionary decree he abolished the hierarchy of tones and made them all equal. He imposed a strict discipline to prevent any of them from appearing in a piece more often than any other and thus from reclaiming old feudal privileges. Royal courts were abolished once and for all and replaced by a single empire based on equality and called the twelve-tone system.
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This is what Papa told me when I was five years old: in music every key is a small royal court. The king (the first step of the scale) exercises power with the help of
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Maybe the sonority of music had become more interesting than before, but listeners, accustomed for a millennium to following the keys in their royal-court intrigues, heard a sound without understanding it. Anyway, the twelve-tone empire soon disappeared. After Schoenberg came Varese, and he abolished not only keys but tones themselves (the tones of human voices and musical instruments), replacing them with a subtle, no doubt magnificent structure of noises, but also inaugurating the history of something different based on different principles and a different language.
When Milan Hiibl in my Prague studio apartment developed his reflections on the possible disappearance of the Czech people into the Russian empire, we both knew that this perhaps justified idea was beyond us, that we were talking about the unthinkable. Even though man himself is mortal, he can imagine neither the end of space nor of time nor of history nor of a people, for he always lives in an illusory infinitude.
Those who are fascinated by the idea of progress do not suspect that everything moving forward is at the same time bringing the end nearer and that joyous watchwords like "forward" and "farther" are the lascivious voice of death urging us to hasten to it.
(If fascination with the word "forward" has become universal, isn't it mainly because death is already speaking to us from nearby?)
When Arnold Schoenberg founded the twelve-tone empire, music was richer than ever and intoxicated with its freedom. The idea that the end could be so
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near crossed no one's mind. No fatigue! No twilight! Schoenberg was animated by the most youthful spirit of audacity. To have chosen the only possible way forward filled him with legitimate pride. The history of music had ended in a flowering of audacity and desire.
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If it is true that the history of music has ended, what is left of music? Silence?
Not at all! There is more and more music, dozens, hundreds of times more than in its most glorious eras. It comes out of outdoor loudspeakers, out of the appalling sound machines in apartments and restaurants, out of the little transistor radios people carry in the streets.
Schoenberg is dead, Ellington is dead, but the gui-tar is eternal. Stereotyped harmonies, banal melodies, and rhythms all the more insistent the more monotonous they are—that is what remains of music, that is music's eternity. Everyone can fraternize by means of these simple combinations of tones, for it is being itself that through them is shouting out its jubilant "I'm here!" There is no more boisterous, no more unanimous agreement than the agreement with being. About that, Arabs join with Jews and Czechs with Russians.
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Bodies toss in rhythm, drunk with their awareness thai they exist. That is why no work of Beethoven's has ever been experienced with such great collective passion as this unvaryingly repetitive thrumming of guitars.
About a year before Papa's death, while we were taking our habitual walk around the block, we heard singing coming at us from all sides. The sadder people were, the more the loudspeakers played. They were inviting the occupied country to forget the bitterness of history and indulge itself in enjoying life. Papa stopped and looked up at the device the noise was coming from, and I felt he wanted to confide something very important to me. He made a great effort to concentrate, to express what he was thinking, and then, slowly and with difficulty, he said: "The stupidity of music."
What did he mean by that? Was he really trying to insult music, the passion of his life? No, I think he wanted to tell me that there exists a primeval state of music, a state prior to its history, a state before the first questionings, before the first reflections, before the first games with motif and theme. That primeval state of music (music without thought) mirrors the human being's inherent stupidity. It required an immense effort of heart and mind for music to rise above that essential stupidity, and it is that splendid arc over centuries of European history which has been extinguished like a skyrocket at the peak of its trajectory.
The history of music is perishable, but the idiocy of guitars is eternal. Music nowadays has returned to its primeval state. It is the state after the last questioning,
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after the last reflection, the state after its history.
In 1972, when Karel Klos, a Czech pop singer, left the country, Husak became fearful. He immediately wrote a personal letter to him in Frankfurt, from which, inventing not a word, I quote the following: Dear Karel: We want nothing from you. Please come back, we will do for you whatever you wish. We will help you, you will help us. ..."
Think about it: without batting an eye, Husak allowed the emigration of doctors, scholars, astronomers, athletes, stage directors, filmmakers, workers, engineers, architects, historians, journalists, writers, painters, but he could not bear the thought of Karel Klos leaving the country. Because Karel Klos represented music without memory, the music under which the bones of Beethoven and Ellington, the ashes of Palestrina and Schoenberg, are forever buried.
The President of Forgetting and the Idiot of Music were two of a kind. They were doing the same work. "We will help you, you will help us." Neither could manage without the other.
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But in the tower where the wisdom of music prevails, we sometimes yearn for the monotonous rhythm of
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the soulless cry coming to us from outside. It is dangerous to spend all one's time with Beethoven, just as all privileged positions are dangerous.
Tamina had always been a bit ashamed of admitting she was happy with her husband. She was afraid of giving people a reason to hate her.
Now she is torn between two feelings: Love is a privilege, and all privileges are undeserved and must be paid for. It is thus for punishment that she is here on the children's island.
But that feeling soon gives way to
another: The privilege of love was not only a paradise, it was also a hell. Life in love was constant tension, fear, agitation. She is here among children to gain, at last, the rewards of calm and serenity.
Until now, her sexuality had been occupied by love (I say "occupied" because sex is not love but merely a territory love takes over), and it had therefore participated in something dramatic, responsible, serious. Here among children, in the kingdom of triviality, sexual activity has reverted to become what it had originally been: a small toy for the production of physical pleasure.
Or to put it another way: sexuality freed from its diabolic ties to love had become a joy of angelic simplicity.
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If the children's first rape of Tamina was charged with that astonishing meaning, on repetition it swiftly lost its character as a message and became a more and more empty and dirty routine.
Soon the children were quarreling among themselves. Those who were fascinated by the sexual games started to hate those who were indifferent to them. And among Tamina's lovers there was a growing hostility between those who felt they were her favorites and those who felt rejected. And all these resentments began to turn against Tamina and weigh on her.
One day when the children were bent over her naked body (they were kneeling on the bed or standing beside it, sitting astride her body or squatting at her head and between her legs), she suddenly felt a sharp pain. A child had pinched her nipple. She let out a shriek and could no longer control herself: flailing her arms, she drove them all away from her bed.
She realized the pain had been caused neither by chance nor by sensuality: one of the brats hated her and wanted to hurt her. She put an end to the intimate encounters with the children.
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to pounce on her. Tamina defends herself, she is an adult, she is strong (and filled with hatred, oh yes, she hits out at the children as if she were hitting everything she has always hated), and soon children's noses are bloody, but then a flying stone strikes her brow and Tamina staggers and clutches her bleeding head as the children move aside. There is a sudden silence, and Tamina slowly returns to the dormitory. She stretches out on her bed, determined never to take part in the games again.
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And all of a sudden there is no longer peace in the kingdom where things are light as a breeze.
They are playing hopscotch, hopping from square to square, first on the right foot, then on the left, and then on both feet at once. Tamina too is hopping. (I see her tall body among the small figures of the children, hopping, with her hair flying around her face, and heavyhearted with immense boredom.) Just now, the Canaries are shouting that she stepped on the line.
The Squirrels, of course, protest: she did not step on the line. The two teams are bent over the line, looking for Tamina's footprint. But the line drawn in the sand is blurred, and so is the mark of Tamina's sole. The matter is arguable, and the children have been screaming at one another about it for fifteen minutes, with greater and greater urgency.
Tamina now makes a fatal gesture; she raises her arms and says: "All right, I stepped on it."
The Squirrels begin to shout at Tamina that it's not true, that she's crazy, that she's lying, that she didn't step on it. But they have lost their case. Their refutations of Tamina carry no weight, and the Canaries shriek cries of victory.
The Squirrels are furious, shouting at Tamina that she is a traitor, and a boy shoves her so violently she nearly falls. She tries to hit back, and this is a signal for them
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I see Tamina standing in the middle of the dormitory filled with children in their beds. She is the center of attention. A voice from a corner shouts "Tits, tits!," then all the others join in and Tamina hears the shout become a chant: "Tits, tits, tits ..."
What until recently had been her pride and weapon— the black hair of her groin, her beautiful breasts—were now the target of abuse. In the children's eyes, her adulthood had turned into a monstrosity: her breasts were as absurd as tumors, her hairy groin was bestial.
She was now at bay. They were pursuing her all over the island, throwing stones and pieces of wood at her. She ran away, she tried to hide, but wherever she went she heard them calling her name: "Tits, Tits, Tits, Tits ..."
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Nothing is more degrading than the strong running away from the weak. But there were too many of them. She ran and was ashamed of running.
One day, she laid an ambush. She caught three of them; one went down under her blows, and the other two started to take off. But she is too swift for them and grabs them by the hair.
And then a net lands on her, and another and another. Yes, all those volleyball nets that had been hanging very close to the ground in front of the dormitory. They had been waiting for her. The three children she had just been pummeling were decoys. And now she is trapped, twisting and turning in a tangle of string as the howling children drag her along behind them.
ing her to one another. She has become the cement of their brotherhood.
Her misfortune is not that the children are bad but that she is beyond their world's border. Humans do not revolt against the killing of calves in slaughterhouses. Calves are outside human law, just as Tamina is outside the children's law.
It is Tamina who is filled with bitter hatred, not the children. Their desire to hurt is positive and cheerful, a desire that can rightly be called joy. They want to hurt anyone beyond their world's border only in order to exalt their own world and its law.
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Why are these children so bad?
Come on, they're not at all bad! On the contrary, they're kindhearted and always showing friendship for one another. None of them wants Tamina for himself alone. "Look, look!" they are always shouting. Tamina is trapped in a tangle of nets, the strings ripping into her skin, and the children are pointing to her blood, tears, and grimaces of pain. They are generously offer -
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Time does its work, and all joys and diversions wear out with repetition; even hunting down Tamina. Besides, the children are not really bad. The small boy who urinated on her when she lay beneath him tangled in the volleyball nets gave her a beautiful, innocent smile a day or so later. Tamina takes part in the games again, but now in silence. Again she hops from one square to the other, first on one foot, then on the other, and then on both feet at once. She never again will enter their world, but she is careful not to find herself outside it either. She tries to stay right on the border.
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He said "Children! You are the future!" and now I realize these words have a meaning that was not initially apparent. Children are the future not because they will one day be adults but because humanity is becoming more and more a child, because childhood is the image of the future.
He shouted "Children, never look back!" and this meant that we must never allow the future to be weighed down by memory. For children have no past, and that is the whole secret of the magical innocence of their smiles.
History is a series of ephemeral changes, while eternal values are immutable, perpetuated outside history, and have no need of memory. Husak is president of the eternal, not of the ephemeral. He is on the side of children, and children are life, and living is "seeing, hearing, touching, drinking, eating, urinating, defecating, diving into the water and gazing at the sky, laughing and crying."
What appears to have happened after Husak finished his speech to the children (I had closed the window by then, and Papa was preparing to remount his horse) was that Karel Klos came out onto the platform and started to sing. This brought tears of emotion streaming down Husak's cheeks, and the sunny smiles shining everywhere were refracted in his tears. And j
ust then a great miracle of a rainbow drew its curve over Prague.
Looking up at the rainbow, the children began to laugh and applaud.
The Idiot of Music finished his song, and the President of Forgetting spread his arms and shouted:
But the lull, the normality, the modus vivendi based on compromise, brought with them all the horror of permanence. If a while ago her life as a hunted animal made Tamina forget the existence of time and its immensity, now that the violence of the attacks had fallen away, the wasteland of time had emerged from the shadows, excruciating and crushing, much like eternity.
Yet again, please engrave this image in your memory: Tamina must hop from square to square on one foot, then on the other, and then on both feet at once, and she must consider it important whether or not she steps on a line. She must go on hopping like this day after day, bearing on her shoulders as she hops the weight of time like a cross growing heavier from day to day.
Is she still looking back? Does she think about her husband and Prague?
No. Not anymore.
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The ghosts of monuments torn down were wandering around the platform, and the President of Forgetting was at the rostrum with a red kerchief around his neck. The children were applauding and shouting his name. Eight years have gone by since then, but I still hear his words coming to me through the flowering apple trees.