What masterpiece?

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On December 22, 1808, a small private concert was held in the Theater an der Wien in Vienna.  It was bitterly cold, and as the under-rehearsed musicians sat in front of the sparse audience they rubbed their hands together and blew on their numb fingers.  The concert that was about to begin consisted of the following programme: the sixth symphony in F, the recitative and aria 'Ah! perfido', the Gloria from the Mass in C, the fourth piano concerto, the fifth symphony, the sanctus from the Mass in C and the Fantasia for piano, chorus and orchestra.  All of them were conducted and performed by the composer, Ludwig van Beethoven.  All the works were receiving their first public performance.  It would be the greatest concert in the history of western music.

Did that audience know this as they sat shivering through the long and gruelling programme?  It seems hard to believe that they could have failed to be overwhelmed by works such as the fifth symphony, whose opening unison challenge has now burnt itself into the collective memory of the world.  And what of the first performance of the ninth symphony, some years later?  Surely the audience then realised they were listening to the zenith of orchestral and symphonic music?

It is too easy for us naively to imagine ourselves at those first nights, and too difficult to appreciate the music's full pristine impact.  For we would come with our ecstasy and adulation ready prepared; our ears would not be innocent.  As a guide to what those early audiences heard and felt, we have to look for analogues in our own experience.  How often, for example, have we attended the first performance of a modern work, and known - as certainly as we know now that the ninth symphony is a towering achievement - that we are part of a unique and important occasion, one -  like that day in 1808 - that will go down in history?

I have attended at least one such historic occasion.  It was at a Promenade concert, during a long hot summer several years ago.  It was the first British performance of Tippett's 'Mask of Time', a work he had been labouring over for many years, and one which promised to be the summation of all that he had attempted in his richly creative life.  I had assumed that since it was a contemporary work I would be able to turn up just before the start and buy a good seat.  In fact, the concert was sold out when I arrived, so I went to the back of the long queue of promenaders. 

Eventually I reached the ticket desk; by now, even the arena was full, and so I was forced up to the gallery.  There promenaders wandered like lost souls across the echoing floors and through the deep gloom.  Down below me in the auditorium the choir and orchestra looked like toys.  At last the music began.  The sounds seemed to reach us minutes later.  My feet soon ached, it was hot and stuffy, my head hurt; the music was clearly the work of a madman.  I left after about a quarter of an hour.

A couple of years later, I listened to the work on records.  From the first chords it gripped me: I knew it instantly for one of the twentieth century's greatest masterpieces.  I also knew how that audience of 1808 had probably felt.

(1988)

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The profit of the beard

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Why do men grow beards? 

Passive acquiescence apart, we have at the very least the Everest explanation: because it is there.  Growing a beard is unanswerable proof that you can grow a beard; until then, however hirsute you may be, your beard is only potential, and therefore possibly feeble and risible.  And since time immemorial weak beards have by association been equated with those unable to grow them at all - the eunuchs, whose smoothness, that terrible facial absence, is their sad badge of manly dishonour.  To grow a beard is to wear a blazon, to throw in the world's face your face with its manifest masculinity.

Beards are not pure machismo.  On the contrary, there is a strong element of coquetry to them, a concern with the minutiae of appearance that in other contexts would be tagged dismissively as effeminate.  Men affect to despise such pre-occupations, but in reality they simply have less scope for them than women.  Given that make-up for Western men remains without social sanction, there are only two elements of the male visage that allow any latitude for acceptable personal flamboyance: cranial and facial hair.

  
Ordinary hair theoretically offers endless possibilities, and a wide range of tonsures is indeed found.  But here Nature plays a cruel trick on millions of men: their very masculinity, as measured by the hormonal rush of testosterone which courses through their veins every adult moment, undermines the premise and promise of the proud mane with a dreaded condition sometimes hidden under that terminological toupee, alopecia.  Or, to put it baldly, baldness.  Where women may express themselves with awe-inspiring concoctions of hair until late dotage, men are often reduced at an early age to shiny-pated skulls, fit only for phrenologists' models.

But even the headiest brew of the body's chemicals seems to leave the beard unscathed.  Hence the hordes of bearded, balding men: the one compensates for the other.  It also allows them the luxury of variegated styles: their hair may be gone or going, but they can still choose from a glorious gnathic gamut.  There are bushy beards, beards of stubble, beards combed up or down; Charles I beards, moustachioed and moustacheless beards; goatees, mandarins, beards to the chin and beards down the neck; long, white wizard beards and curious little beards shaved like an 'O' about the mouth.  And beyond these, there are shapes and styles without a name, marvellous idiosyncratic variations on the theme of bristles.

With this variety comes the possibility of change.  It is striking how women are re-animated and even re-juvenated simply by an alteration of hair-style; with the new image comes a sense of new possibilities, of a sloughing-off of old cares with old looks.  A beard gives a man the same luxury, that of re-making himself, of surprising the world.

Finally, there is the supreme treat - one denied to all women however well-endowed they are with gorgeous, silken tresses and a pampering panoply of attendant hairdressers  - available only to the man who has grown a beard: the simple, unforgettable experience of shaving it off.

(1989)

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The contingent apple

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Somebody gives me a fruit, an apple, say; I take it.  I look at it: I notice that it is a very special apple, because it has taken a unique and extraordinary journey to reach to me.  A journey so extraordinary, in fact, that the chances of it occurring were one in a billion.

First, it had to be selected from those on offer before I received it.  Before that, perhaps, it was among several chosen from the stock of the local greengrocers.  The greengrocers in turn had first to include it in their selection from the wholesalers at New Covent Garden, who had previously bought it among many others from the importers - assuming it is foreign - who earlier had included it in a batch from some country's national apple growers association.  Earlier still, that same apple had somehow managed to be chosen by that same association's buyer among lots sold by local apple growers; to reach that lot, the apple first, by some miracle, had been picked at the right time and at the right place.  Out of the billions of apples that I could have taken, is it not marvellous that this particular apple made it through against all the odds?

The answer, of course, is no, because I never specified months before that I wanted to receive that apple and no other; in fact more or less any apple would have done, making its appearance in my hand rather unextraordinary.  

Thus speaks the pedant; and yet it is rather wonderful to imagine all those foods I have eaten, all those clothes I have worn, all those books I have read, coming from plants and animals and trees which existed long before I knew I wanted them, almost as if they knew before I did.  The same goes for people: all my friends were apparently preparing themselves to be the right person at the right moment.

This logic carries us further.  For it implies that everything I shall want, everyone I shall meet, is already in preparation: the fig I shall eat next year is already growing on the tree; friends-to-be are at this moment living, carefully developing their personalities and manoeuvring themselves into suitable situations so that we shall meet and shall hit it off.  At least so it will appear in retrospect; and so it must appear to any gods watching the curious confluences of people and of things.  Able to see where everything comes from and where everything is going, to them the world must look like a huge, carefully orchestrated courtship ritual with objects and people marrying up despite the most extreme of obstacles.

Viewed in this way, we can imagine lines flowing back from the future, like threads ending in our hands; as each second advances, we pull in the cords a little.  When the string runs out, a something or somebody appears in our life, and we in theirs: for they, too, have been pulling on the cord, reeling us in across space and time through the nexus to come.

And so, as I contemplate the apple, I can imagine that one day, at the appropriate moment, there will be another apple that somebody will hand me, another miracle at the end of its journey towards me.  And with this knowledge, I eat.

(1989)

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Silly farts

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Farting is not a subject polite society ever considers.  It is one of those inconvenient little reminders - like death - that we are not gods, however smartly we may dress and talk.  As a result, farting has become a subject colonised by children - who are in any case rightly fascinated by all the mysteries of the human body - secure in the knowledge that no adults will come along and start asserting their superior experience in this field as they do in most others.

When the fart occurs - in life or in literature - there is always a shocked pause, as if leaving space for it to pass.  In society, the instinct to pretend that the unpleasant never happened manifests itself as usual.  With art, which habitually comes freighted with explanations and interpretations, this is not so easy.  For example, in the thirteenth century round 'Sumer is icumen in' - a virtuosic essay in double canon, one of the earliest in music - there occurs the line which is usually translated as "bulls leap and bucks fart."  Despite valiant attempts at emendation, the phrase still crops up in books on medieval music and poetry.  Because of the work's historical importance, its text must, of course, be glossed - a task which leaves the rigorous but prim scholar appalled and red-faced.  At moments like these, art seems to be blowing a raspberry at the world and its prudishness.  And aptly: raspberry in this phrase is short for raspberry tart - cockney rhyming slang for a fart.  

But imagine for a moment a world which does not have this rather queasy Victorian attitude to what is, after all, just another bodily activity.  In this world people would be free to fart in public without embarrassment just as they might at home.  There would be nothing unusual about entering an office to be greeted with a rich and overpowering melange of such odours which would linger in your clothes and hair for days.  Sometimes special rooms would be set aside specifically for those who wished to indulge themselves in this way, and areas allocated in restaurants for those who felt the need to fart during meals.  

Because of the social acceptability of farting, we can imagine that organisations dedicated to widening the constituency of farters would mount advertising campaigns in magazines and on hoardings to encourage more people - and especially the young - to fart in public as well as in private.  There might even be fads associated with the activity: for example young men might consider it particularly cool to fart in a loud and demonstrative way, while the most refined and soigne of women might take up farting not for the pleasure it gives them, but purely as a sign of sophistication.

The idea of such a world is plainly ridiculous.  And yet we live in that world.  Substitute the word 'smoke' for 'fart' in the above description, and the fit is perfect.  Or nearly.  It must be conceded that for all the superficial similarities, there is one crucial difference between farting and smoking: breathing in someone else's fart, unlike breathing in someone else's smoke, does not give you cancer.  It is an interesting question as to who are the sillier farts in this situation: those who selfishly inflict their loathsome and lethal smoke on others, or those who let them.

(1988)

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8.8.88

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'Now, who can tell me today's date?'  I remember the teacher standing in front of the class; a female teacher, so perhaps it was Miss Pinkney or Mrs Sutcliffe - but not Miss Grogden or Mrs Day.  I am at the back of the class to the right, next to Angela - but this may have been the following year.  I half remember sitting next to my best friend, Neil Campion, at some stage, which must have been around this time, towards the end of my infant schooldays.  Perhaps he sat in front of me.  I suppose I should be amazed at how easily I lost touch with him.  I never saw him again, though I do remember being told how his brother - who had a withered left arm with a rather disturbing hook-like device he clipped over it - was killed a couple of years later when he rode his motorbike into an unlit skip late at night.  Apparently his girlfriend riding pillion was also killed, but none of this touched me in the slightest.

'And what is special about today's date?'  Our double desk - whoever it was that shared with me - consisted of a top with a kind of rectangular cavity underneath.  In it we would keep all our text and exercise books, along with pencils and rubbers and set squares and the like.  I remember that I arranged mine in two neat ziggurat forms, one in each corner.

'And when will be the next time that that happens?'  Outside, in the sunlight, lay the grass playing area bounded by a high wire netting fence.  At the far end this gave on to the forbidden sports fields of the secondary modern school next door.  I never knew anything about this place, except that it was where most of those at my primary school ended up.  It never occurred to me to wonder whether I too would go there.  Not that I assumed I would automatically go to a grammar school, because I would not have recognised the concept; it was more that I spent my childhood in a strange kind of volitional and experiential haze.

'Yes, Glyn?'  But I did know what the date was, what was special about it, and when it would happen again.  The answer seemed obvious, and that I should know it, natural.  Like my desk, like the sunshine that poured in through the high windows, like the steady progress through the junior school towards the 11+ exam and beyond, everything in my world seemed perfectly ordered and perfectly right.  My schooldays were hardly the happiest of my life, but they were totally stress-free, insouciant, and frictionless.  I scarcely felt them pass at all.  Time flew by in standing still.

Thus it is that I have few memories from that time, just the odd, flickering image from each year.  But the question that opened that June morning has remained with me ever since.  Eleven years, one month and one day after hearing it, I wrote on my 1977 desktop diary for 7 July: '(remember 6.6.66?)'.  And I did.

And I do today.  The anniversaries are moments of punctuation which come round with a quirky regularity, as if governed by sunspot activity.  Like strange, temporal vortices, they exert a complex force.  All my life, I know, they will give me pause for thought: thought for what was on these dates in the past; and thought for what might be in the future.

(1988)

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The finite brain

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We do not like to think about our brains.  When we look at the world we conveniently gloss over the sensation that the living person who sees seems to be located behind our eyes, in that cranial bowl of inert, grey paste.  Our niceness in this respect even shows itself in our eating.  The idea of eating brains is repulsive to most, which is strange given the other glands and organs we dine off - what are kidneys used for?  But eating it would confront us with the fact that the brain really is an organ, and physical.  From the inside it feels neither of these things.

Unfortunately the advent of computers has given us some troublesome metaphors and analogies.  In earlier days of pre-lapsarian computer innocence, we might accept the brain's workings as mysteries too deep to fathom, or even comprehend.  Now, though, we are almost forced to articulate concerns which were perhaps better left unspoken.

For example, all computer users know that you can never have enough memory.  When you run out - as always happens - you either upgrade your capacity, or you throw away old files to make room for new data.  The brain too stores data, though how is not clear in detail.  An obvious question poses itself: does the brain ever run out of memory?  Or, equivalently: just how finite is the brain?

As we blithely go through life, experiencing, learning, remembering, we assume that this state of affairs will continue until we die.  The idea that the brain might at some point become full, become incapable of learning or remembering any more, is terrifying.  But not ridiculous: the brain evolved in hominids whose life expectancy was around 35 years, not 70, and who moreover led a relatively simple and uneventful life.  Today, people probably experience more new sensations and ideas in a month than their distant forebears did in their entire lives.  Has the brain enough spare capacity to cope with this excess?  

If it hasn't, what will happen - given that there are, as yet, no upgrades for the brain?  The best we can hope for is that the brain will dump old memories and knowledge just as we delete old files.  We might lose treasured moments and hard-won skills from the past, but at least we would have room for the future.  This does, in any case, clearly happen: nobody remembers all their childhood, and the older you get, the less you recall from long ago.

Worse would be the situation where we simply forget everything we see or do or learn beyond a certain time.  If this were proved to happen, our whole attitude to life would alter.  No longer would we thoughtlessly be hungry for new knowledge and experiences; we would need to ration them, to apportion them year by year.  We would become parsimonious with our brain, costive with its valuable capacity.  Of course just as some poor fools now smoke and drug themselves heedless of the eventual damage, so we would have info addicts who gorged themselves on facts today, reckless of tomorrow.  For the rest of us there would be anti-education programmes, even government mental health warnings on books, art, music, on everything offering a new idea or experience.  It makes you think, doesn't it?

(1989)

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The check-out

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It is a sketch from countless comedy shows.  A man goes into a supermarket.  He lingers oddly over the carrots, he inspects carefully the boxes of soap.  His whole body speaks unease; he is shifty and continually looking over his shoulder.  Finally, he judges the moment to be right: he boldly seizes his prey and half runs up to the check-out till.  Just as he lays the article on the counter, from nowhere a woman appears and queues behind him.  The cashier decides to savour to the full the process of ringing up the price and finding a suitable bag.  All this while, the man's small package lies there accusingly, naked to the world; it seems to glow with obviousness.  Even in the age of AIDS, buying condoms is still not easy.

Our delicacy in purchasing intimate items such as these is purely vestigial.  For the most part, individuated goods have been reduced to abstract commodities: when you load up a trolley in a supermarket, it is almost as if you are buying generalised objects, things shucked of any purpose except to be bought, a fact underlined by the meaningless brand names and bland packaging which de-emphasise the good's real function.

So it is that we happily buy personal goods like expectorants and toilet paper without making the embarrassing connection with their final use - as we do with condoms.  Standing in the queue with these goods for all the world to see, we can pretend to disown them and their revelations, if only because everyone else tacitly agrees to do the same.

And yet that basket and each of its goods says something completely specific about you, your habits and your tastes.  If sociologists were to watch you at the check-outs, they could re-construct your daily life as an archaeologist reconstructs the past from its rubble.  Each item represents a line in the multi-dimensional space of consumerism; where all those lines intersect, is you.

This is not as abstract as it sounds.  Sociologists may not be hiding behind the sliced bread to carry out their research, but the statisticians are there.  One of the main reasons for the introduction of bar-coding in supermarket chains is to define who you, the public, are in precisely this way.  It is certainly not to speed up the process of checking out: the bottleneck is merely displaced from the pricing to the packing.  Instead it gives the stores employing barcodes in-depth and instant knowledge about purchasing patterns.

Hitherto, data on sales has been obtained by stocktaking - a slow and inefficient process.  Now, stores can see a snapshot of what is being sold at any instant by downloading the information from the automated tills and combining the data.  Moreover, if you pay by some form of identifying credit or debit card, an alternative picture could be built up, of your purchases over time.  From that it would be possible to make good guesses at your income, your family size, your tastes - even your sexual habits.  Imagine now a cashless society, and one where all such sales data were linked together: total information on every individual.  Governments are doubtless checking it out at this very moment.

(1989)

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