XXXIII

M

orning below the pealing bells of a stony Anglican edifice is a glorious thing. One's hollow chest does reverberate with every resonate sound and the alert flesh of the face is full on warmed by our bright sun in a clear blue sky. Snow and ice colour all the ground around a shimmering white and I stayed there basking in all the ingredients of faith. I was arrested there, hat in hand, by some divine sense of life without time, even as the bronze bells chimed out to toll the Sunday hour. Faithless in a faithful world, I am yet bidden to enter. White and cold and sun combine to close my eyes and bring them to tear.

Arrayed on wooden benches (those painful uncushioned pews), citizens had congregated within to hear a musical sermon. They had come as pilgrims to have their spirits risen up to the heights of the high vaulted ceiling and, perhaps, beyond. Harmonies and chroma would at once lighten, warm, and embolden the soul that it might float free from the gravity of corporeal concerns if only for some short hours. A listener might follow such magnificent sounds all the way to Heaven. Not once, from such sermons, is there any whisper of reproach. There is no finger to accuse a soul of shameful sins. Music condemns no man to Hell that does not wish it so. Still, I had placed myself in the back corner of the church. I would not be judged. I would lurk.

No. I rebelled.

Decisively, I stood from my hide to march myself into the midst of the audience; not so close as to draw attention to presence yet in no wise would I elect to situate myself upon the fringes of this small society. My normalcy must be enforced now. Neither exclusion nor distinction may be tolerated anymore. It was, though, not camouflage that I sought, but instead to be, and to see myself, as just like everyone else.

My top hat rested upon the bench beside me. While winding my timepiece I did note that the performance was soon to commence. We each of us held our breath and awaited the possibility of a miracle. Such is beauty.

Beatrice, Phaedra, and some other musicians received polite applause as they entered to take up their positions before the altar. It is the nature, one supposes, of the Nordic redhead, that their pale flesh remain unblemished and their fiery hair remain ever shimmering with youth. They had both aged marvellously well. Still, what beauty they had was in their solidity and simplicity. They were neither lyrical nor pretty. Beatrice, in particular, was dull of features. My eye, by the movement of hers, was drawn to the black back of the head of what must have been her husband. She smiled for him with a queer and remarkable nervousness before she took her seat and so gave her cello its own resting place.

Then they played music. Chamber music has never delighted me to great degree. The performance seemed competent enough, but I was not moved and now, reflecting upon the concert, it does not inspire me to rhapsodize.

The tragedy of memory requires that we reimagine beauty once beheld. I have a good grasp of the details of the Sistine ceiling. Some fragments of it can be summoned to the mind's eye at will and there they may hover incomplete. There are memories of my emotions felt and thoughts that struck me while I, with head hung back agape to view that ceiling, delighted in the majesty of the work. I remember my physical space and I remember the sensation of being overwhelmed by its beauty, its genius, but I cannot recreate those feelings from memory. I cannot remember beauty, only the sensation of witnessing it. A postcard might hint at some detail that I had once beheld but such images speak so much more about what is not captured. The lion in a cage makes us yearn to set it free. We romanticise the beast and see it as a symbol rather than as a penned individual that should be seen and appreciated for its here and now: its instance.

Beatrice was giving us a pair of postcards. One told of the wonders of her encounter with Bach while the other was the image of a girl with a cello. If I did not pay attention to it, the music was also only a symbol. It is no longer that particular series of notes and pauses played by those particular musicians in that particular place. It instead becomes only that thing that I can point to at the back of my mind when I wonder what I hear. "Oh, classical music. I like classical music."

In the afterwards, I noted that what I did not witness, what I was not moved to rapture by, was energy and physicality in the performances by Beatrice and her sister. Had invisible age sapped their ardour for their art? I do not know for I did not mark it at the time. There is no recollection of their passion nor memory of any display of lethargy. I cannot find any mental snapshots.

The question is fair Cartesian. The senses are great deceivers, flattering courtiers, ever scheming to mollify the mind. Any rebellion against the perceived reality is placated quickly so that the world seems ever as we imagine it. The King, behind his high, but very climbable fences, must not be troubled by what transpires without. It requires only a decree: "I must see passion!" and the senses scramble to quickly find passion, each wishing to be the first to claim favour. On that day, my ministers were falling over themselves to report that there was nothing special being played out before me. Each bulletin was read without flourish. When once the Archduke d'Audio embellished on a particular stirring passage, the Comte des Yeux asserted that Beatrice was playing with no enthusiasm and that she thereby was encouraging the same in me.

We do not know when our senses have surrendered to our desires. We do not know when our eyes are closed.

It would have needed a burning bush for me to be once more bewitched as I was before by Beatrice. My Beatrice had become a symbol for obsession.

"Oh, it is Beatrice. I am obsessed with Beatrice. Very well."

For how long had this been this? Was it the case that she had only ever been but a symbol? She was pantomime perfection yet she never once pretended to be so. She was a caged lioness that led me to imagine the wild savannah. Yet even so she was but a symbol for a caged lioness. Every level of reality that I sought to affix to this woman was only another easy fiction.

Everything must be labelled, boxed, categorized, and symbolized. We cannot regard without finding a place in our minds for the things that we are given. The art of seeing is to not stop looking once the label has been writ and affixed but instead remain looking for definitions to be ever the more and more precise.

XXXIV