My snapshots of Ludwig van Beethoven
Hi-ho, Silver! Away! August 13,
2009
I like this one: Ludwig on his white
stallion
galloping across a great field
toward a higher country;
the sun is loud and the clouds are
piled high
in that marvelously meaningful
complexity of structure
that can never be explained
and on the brink of the higher plateau,
seeing ahead more sun, more clouds,
bigger mountains,
he pulls up, rears the great white
horse against the blue,
and brimming over with electric
exuberance
he waves his white Stetson
three times in a circle, high above his
head;
and then he turns the stallion's mighty
head,
and thunders furiously up into the far
hills.
You know that place, in the Fifth.
In order to avoid sadness,
I imagine him simply never coming back.
How many times February 16, 2000
in your life will you hear
the Pathétique?
asks the classical disk
jockey as I
drive my great rusty wagon
from the supermarket to
the gas station
under a cold impartial
moon
and this seems to me an
important question
as the piano fills the car
with almost
harshly clear thought
Beethoven pounding out the
truth once again
from long ago and far away
and
filtered, interpreted,
enhanced and digitized
and sent to me through the
miracle of
frequency modulation to
ponder one more time
as I drive my great rusty
wagon to get gasoline.
My mother was so bold as
to try, all her life,
to play the Pathétique,
even though
she knew she would never
so much as
crack its massive, ornate
iron gates.
Every note of the
Pathétique is written
somewhere in my childish
soul;
and every thought of the
Pathétique
makes inescapable sense to
me now.
And so it does not matter
how many more times
I will hear it.
At the Exxon station the
pavilion arches spaciously
over the nearly deserted
pumps.
I turn the radio up
set the gas to pump itself
and listen carefully to
Emil Gilels
think through the
Pathétique
at times with an
extraordinary eloquence
that seems wrong to me;
yet perhaps he
just grew weary of his
master’s unshakable confidence,
Ludwig walking the
tightrope down through the
centuries, never to fall
or even tremble on the wire.
I lean against the mighty
flank of the wagon
filling itself with the
acrid life’s blood
of our civilization
and eat a perfect glazed
doughnut, quite slowly.
The fallen, the ruined
pavilions, gleaming in the moonlight.
