Endings

As always, getting out of things is a trickier business than getting in.

There are rituals for getting into a work of art, but a lot of these happen outside the work. For every art 'event', there is the lead-up - getting dressed-up, entering the theatre, shuffling in the seats, waiting expectantly. The lights dim. The preparations can seem at times to be as elaborate as those for a shuttle launch, and I think this is right, because a certain transportation is meant to take place. When I read a book, itself having no built-in rituals, I sometimes create my own: I inspect the cover, turn it around in my hands, glance at each of the mostly blank pages that precede Page 1, the dedication, the publisher; then I read the first line very slowly.

But, having gotten in, it is the work's responsibility to get us out. This is a tremendous burden, and the consequences of its failure are too horrible to speak aloud. I get this feeling of dread all the time when I sit in student recitals, and a note slips - the kid looks worried - and I know he is thinking the same thing as me and everyone else in the audience, which is shit, shit, what would happen if I just stopped? What would happen? Would it be something worse than death? No - but I had to think about that for a second.

As I wrote in the introduction earlier, an ending is a place where a movie becomes movie, a novel becomes novel, where the art becomes about itself and shows us its artifice. Or, if you think of the content or story as artificial - its truth. Either way, having got us in, the work has to carefully extricate us from the world it has created, absorbed us into. There is no better example of this than the ubiquitous zoom-out from a city at the end of the movie. We literally leave the world the characters inhabit, and where their faces once filled the screen, they now disappear, tiny, tinier, until we can't possibly care about them any more as real people and can step gingerly out of our seats and into our lives.

There are two ways to read this. We feel genuinely, emotionally connected to art; the art world becomes our world. To return us, art has to show us its bag of tricks and say "Ha!" - we were duped. We forget that we are watching a movie, but now, at the end, we must remember it is only a movie; artifice, then, is a severing tool. The other way to read it - and this is both nobler and more desperate - is that art creates fragile worlds, ones that are easily burst. Art cannot stand up to the pitiless force of reality; it has tremendous power, but only in its own domain. Against actual lives, actual problems, its basic contradiction of reality and unreality would cause it to implode, not because it is less, but because its subject is completely different. Artifice, in this reading, is a buffer or a bridge; it protects art from the contaminating presence of reality by allowing us to leave the work behind, safely, and whole.

My favourite example of an ending is the one used in American Beauty, which is nearly preposterous in its artificiality but necessary to counterbalance the harrowing emotional impact of the movie's climax. Here we have the classic zoom-out from an American suburb, overlaid with the equally classic voice-over of the protagonist (the return to narrator being a borrowed marker of artifice from literature) - except Kevin Spacey was killed not five minutes before, and so is now apparently narrating after his death. But it works. As the camera zooms out, you slowly become aware of the edges of the TV (or movie screen), the room you are in, the people with you, the time of day, the light in the window. Half an hour before, you could have been in that suburb. But you already have your own suburb, and at the end of the day there can only be one.

Another example: musicologists Carolyn Abbate and Roger Parker think they have smelled something shifty in Mozart; they say that the ending of Act II to The Marriage of Figaro reveals a discontinuity between music and action. Here, things are as confusing in the plot as they are likely to become - everyone is running around on stage, no one knows what the hell is going on. And yet the music is coming to a crash-bang dominant-tonic close - the epitome of musical certainty. A&P say, maybe music and action don't always have to correspond to one another. But I think that correspondence is still happening in the Act II finale, though it is not a correspondence of plot and music. It is a correspondence of music and the audience's relation with a work of art. We see that things are getting hairy on stage, but there is also an intermission coming, and we need to be ready. If the music ended on a note that reflected the stage, what would happen? It would end unexpectedly, we would be confused, and we would certainly not be ready to re-enter the work in the third Act. There is in fact a specific moment, as there is near the end of nearly every finale, when you know the work will be over within a minute or two. I can point to it exactly in Figaro: I always get caught up in the excitement of the Act II finale, and then there is a moment when the music suddenly jumps into a faster tempo, and I think Ah yes, it's almost time for the bathroom.

Are these codes learned, from watching lots of movies with zoom-outs and lots of operas that end with a crash-bang dominant-tonic? Probably, but that doesn't make them less real, and we need them besides. Think of these as tropes or devices used by artists to control a reader's position in relation to the work: close, middle, far? At the endings of things, I think most artists would say that they don't want the reader too close, where things are too specific and too much like life, or too far, where the work is held at arm's length and loses its relevance.

Instead: from a point of immersion, where the reader is in the world of the work, you pull back, up, and as you rise out of the work the universality of art stretches its relevance across the skin of the earth, encompassing everything. Everyone who has experienced this will know what I mean, and will not need me to describe it; it is an emergence, a moment that feels like rebirth or renewal. For a few delirious seconds after the work is finished, you are suspended halfway between the your world and the world of art, and touch both. Sometimes, I feel like art exists only for these moments.

Introduction to Endings

Does music tell a story? This is a valid question for many, and those who reject it generally do so because of a belief that music goes beyond storytelling, that it is beyond mere signification. But what if we could grant that music does not tell a specific story, that music does not mean or equal one thing? We would then be wondering, by asking the question "does music tell a story?", whether music is like a story, whether the two operate in the same way. For instance, I can tell you about something that happened to me today, and then you might go and listen to a CD of the Eroica. These are both temporal events; they rely on time for their existence. But are they the same kind of experience? And do they have the same relationship to time, or different relationships?

A clue is already given in the way we formulate our sentences. We might say that music tells a story, but we rarely say that music is a story. It is true that we do often say, "This song is about" or "This opera is about," but it is understood that we are actually referring to the story imbedded in the opera, and not the opera itself. The opera tells a story of such-and-such, but it is not the story of such-and-such. This is quite different from what I might say to a friend, namely, "This is the story of such-and-such" before launching into it. Storytelling is only one thing; but there is a distance in art, which means a distance between the part that is story (if it exists) and something else. It is this something else that I am interested in.

If music is unlike a story, and music is a temporal art, then we might guess that all temporal arts are unlike stories, and we can examine this thought further. This would include, of course, theatre, and even novels. To make this claim, we would have to say that Charlotte's Web is not the story of an unlikely friendship between a spider and a pig; but we can say that the novel Charlotte's Web tells that story. This may strike some as a ridiculous distinction to make, or even no distinction at all. How does the story of Charlotte's Web differ from Charlotte's Web?

I choose this particular book because it is a transparent, clear case of story-telling, which means that it is an important test for my argument, but not necessarily the easiest to tackle. Let's begin with a more straightforward case, which is by contrast a piece of opaque, metaphorical, deliberately artificial writing:

A few light taps upon the pane made him turn to the window. It had begun to snow again. He watched sleepily the flakes, silver and dark, falling obliquely against the lamplight. The time had come for him to set out on his journey westward. Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.

This is the last paragraph of James Joyce's short story The Dead. Now imagine I was telling you this story - as in, "Hey dude, want to hear a story?" - and told you a story that ended with the above. What would you think? You would probably notice my mode of presentation - my rhetoric - as a separate feature from the plot. Yes, you can follow the story, but whereas you might not be aware of any particular mode or rhetoric in the hundreds of exchanges you have daily with people you meet, here the way it is said becomes a striking and even distracting element that exists alongside the what that is being said.

What if you simply read the passage above as part of the short story The Dead? You would still notice the prose, probably, though it would not seem so out of place, since writing never sounds like conversation to begin with. But not all writing can dare to be as heavy-handed in its metaphor, its alliteration, its repetition as the passage above; here Joyce pulls it off (I think miraculously) because the passage comes not only at the end of a short story, but also at the end of the whole Dubliners set. The above paragraph is simultaneously the close of a story and of a whole progression of stories, which latter gain in complexity and depth as they approach their end. The so-called "purple prose" of the above is still obvious, but given its placement and what it is meant to do, I would argue that the style is also necessary.

Most importantly, the last paragraph of The Dead gives us an instance where the art of the literary work is discernible against the story, or content, of the literary work.

(SIDEBAR: I know we're trained to believe that art and technique, or style and substance, or art and story, are inseparable. It is a belief I've stood by and defended vehemently, often. I still stand by it, but I have started to suspect that there are points of separation, especially at the ends of things, and this is where I want to pick at.)

And if an overabundance of style over content is actually necessary, as I have claimed, then we can make a statement to the reverse: that without this overabundance, without this glaringly obvious dive into the machinations of rhetoric, the ending to The Dead and Dubliners would not feel like an ending at all.

Maybe I have taken too long to get here, but here I am: Even when art looks like storytelling, the two are not about the same thing. When I tell a story, there is not as strict an order in which my words must go, and few impositions on my style or delivery (aside from being clear, of course). Art can resemble story, as in novels, but always in their endings - and this applies to all temporal arts - there is a certain rhetorical acceleration, a point at which the style of art draws attention to itself, and indeed breaks the reader's concentration on the story of art. In storytelling, this concentration is maintained to the very last word; in art, the shift of focus from story to art - in the sense of its relation to artifice - is a necessary event. Without it, the work of art, be it opera, play, novel, risks losing its status as art; it risks becoming only story.

You and me, part 2

I want to speak to you, you, but I am afraid that everything I say is a lie. I feel the fraudulence rising from my sentences even as I write them, gaining in stench as I pile on words, each more false than the last. Here is the problem: I want to speak to you. You, I assume, also want to speak to me. But if lies are the only coin we have, then should we barter in lies rather than not barter at all?

What I am looking for most of all is a feeling. Meaning, after all, is a shared feeling. We cram words together clumsily and hope for meaning to pass, in the way that some cram their bodies together clumsily and hope for love to appear. We know, we should know, that love doesn't come from the mechanics of sex, but why should meaning come any more from the mechanics of language? The two are not the same, I know. But we often have one, and assume the other; we speak, and assume meaning; and never consider the possibility that our speech stops at speech, our words reach no further than themselves.

I would like to say that true meaning is as rare as true love. We go days or weeks or months without encountering a single living word, but instead walk through graveyards of words. They glint dully, the words you exchange with your barista or your wife or read in the paper or a novel - or a blog. Ask yourself: is there meaning behind these words, or are they simply transactions, and nothing more? We often say that if you could describe a piece of music in words, then you wouldn't need the music. But the same unspeakable, wondrous, felt quality is possible for words too, and when meaning happens the words themselves disappear, even as they mean.

If you seek to mean, then, know that you are in for a terrible time. But it can be done; as in the last lines from "Song of Myself":

I depart as air, I shake my white locks at the runaway sun,
I effuse my flesh in eddies, and drift it in lacy jags.

I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love,
If you want me again look for me under your boot-soles.

You will hardly know who I am or what I mean,
But I shall be good health to you nevertheless,
And filter and fibre your blood.

Failing to fetch me at first keep encouraged,
Missing me one place search another,
I stop somewhere waiting for you.

Or these, from Hart Crane:

And so it was I entered the broken world
To trace the visionary company of love, its voice
An instant in the wind (I know not whither hurled)
But not for long to hold each desperate choice.

I once asked myself, upon reading difficult poetry, what it meant; I see now this is the wrong question, or not the most useful one. For even as I asked it, I felt a stirring as I read the words that I did not understand; perhaps words have to resist conventional meaning in order to carry something else. You might ask me to explain what these words by Whitman or Crane mean, or mean to me; but if I could, then why would we need these words by Whitman and Crane? I will not use words to explain meaning. Meaning and words are not the same; and when meaning is at its strongest, words can be its deadliest enemy.

As I say, we may all be in for a terrible time. But I think - I think - we must try. I admit that I'm impatient: I want clarity, focus, I want to find words only to forget them. I want to be pithy all the time, I want to be a human Pith-machine. But the road ahead is long; and what would be the value of meaning if it were easy?

What a mess

My parents and I watch movies very differently. I suppose it's a generational marker, one that just so happens, in our case, to be a cultural marker as well. To lay it flat: they grew up in a world with not much fiction, I grew up in a world suffused in it. The consequence of this - one consequence - is that I have developed a stout resistance to fiction, much as my parents inherited a resilience to the ginger and coriander that so easily defeat me. I can hold a movie at arm's length, observe it in the light; for them a movie is a loved one in distress, and is unquestionable.

Let me give an example. I was deeply moved, in a positive way, by There Will Be Blood. My dad hated it. Why? It ends with a guy killing another guy, senselessly. How can you love something that ends in murder? I think it's a good question, and one that I don't really have an answer to, only an evasion of sorts: that for me, the "murder" that ends the movie is not really murder, not murder in a real sense, and therefore I can hold it at arm's length and look at it in the light, whereas my dad saw murder, and reacted accordingly.

… and here I must confess that I had written more, I had written several different paragraphs, but rejected each one. This I think because I am trying to make sense of this line between fiction and reality, of what truth is (as in, is fiction truth?) and how we sense it, and nothing I wrote satisfied me because what I really have is a question, and not an answer. The question arose a few nights ago, though it has been in my mind for much longer before that, and perhaps the best I can do is try to capture the question here, and leave it unanswered.

So then - I was driving home on the 401 in mid-evening, and followed the highway as it rose gently above the city. Tall buildings in the distance appeared to float unmoored on an invisible floor, and for several minutes, the angle of the road aligned perfectly with the side of a faraway building. I was reminded of my crude childhood attempts to bring a third dimension to a flat page, which basically consisted of a square with short diagonal lines emerging from three points, and voilà! - depth. Against the strange yellow of the city's air at dusk, and at this precise angle, the building ahead looked exactly like those drawings.

In fact, the entire vista before me reminded me of something I had seen hundreds of times before as a teenager, watching Star Trek reruns after school: the painted backdrop, that staple of low-budget low-tech sci-fi. A camera would zoom slowly into a picture of a strange alien landscape, and sometimes you might even see real people standing in front of a picture of a weird desert, oddly-formed mountains, a backdrop whose purpose was to simulate reality by simulating depth. Of course you could tell they were painted, but sometimes you had to look carefully for the chink in the illusion - a certain dullness of colour, usually, or a frozen waterfall - and as I drove on this day I found myself staring at the scene before me, trying to find its chink, except this time the thing that made it real, the thing that set it apart from the fictions of my youth.

…

Why do we write?