III.
octobers
an eoan diary
Read Part II.
This part was written over the course of this October. The tenses shift on account of the day on which a specific passage is written.
By October 1969, the October in which Abrahamsen wrote his eponymous opus one, a historic summer by any measure, at least for Americans, had come to pass. Humans landed on the moon on July 20; a phalanx of musicians descended upon Bethel, NY in mid-August. Abrahamsen started university that October. For him, as well as countless schoolchildren, who owe their calendars to the atavistic need for farm labor during the summer and harvest—originally the season before autumn proper— autumn is not just a decline into melancholia or senescence, but also a proposition for new beginnings.
Oct. 1
I write this on a sunny October 1 (it is supposed to rain the rest of the week). This is the birthday of someone I used to date. I remember once, though, how a birthday meal at a restaurant whose glory days had yellowed like a raft of mass paperbacks was spoiled by news of another school shooting, this time in Roseburg, Oregon, where my father was working at the time. It was the autumn of that relationship as well: cake eaten, cake had.
Oct. 5
Édouard Levé delivered the manuscript of his final book Suicide to his publisher P.O.L., who, utterly captivated by it, arranged to meet with him thirteen days later.
Oct. 8
A young composer I knew died, exactly five years ago when I write this. (It is only as I write these words that I realize I have known him in spirit longer than I have in life.) It happened in the early hours, at dawn. Of course he must have been dying for a long time before that morning. He had, I was told, been adamant about finishing up a project the night before. Psychologists, I am told, say this is normal. The gross irony of the situation was that his improvisatory compositions: brash, unpolished, extreme, but always sensitive, would be idolized now in the artistic environment at my home institution. His instruments were ones he made and manipulated himself, and his compact body, which moved with an erratic, electric quality suggestive of a Schiele self-portrait set at 14 frames a second, was every bit a duetting instrument. But back then he was out of season. Some would say he was “ahead of his time.”
Oct. 12
Ninety sailors led by a man who refused to believe in a Ptolemaic model of the world, saw the New World. They made land[]fall on the island of Guanahani, which became baptized through blessings of the Catholic god as San Salvador.
Oct. 15
Levé, born on New Year’s Day, hangs himself. (The second-person protagonist, tu, of Suicide shoots himself in August.) One of Levé’s other projects, Amérique (2006), comprises a series of photographs of American towns that bear the same name as international metropoles: Moscow, Paris, Delhi (pronounced “DEL-high”). The collection is, in my mind, a bookend to something starting with Edgard Varèse’s 1921 Amériques (ostensibly his opus one), his orchestral ode to urbanity, with its siren and thirteen or so percussionists in its original manifestation, to say nothing of the offstage banda that sounds out memories of old Europe. (Varèse: “I did not think of Amériques as purely geographic, but as symbolic of discoveries –new worlds on earth, in the sky, or in the minds of men.”) Which is old and new, early and late, then, in our country of New Mexicos, Yorks, and Canaans?
The final lines of Suicide comprise a collection of tercets found by the wife of the protagonist:
Happiness precedes me
Sadness follows me
Death awaits me
As Jim Ruland points out, Levé’s books, which privilege discovered doppelgängers and ludic deception, appeared in English in reverse order of their original writing. To English-language readers, his works rise from the dead. Coucher du soleil. Lever du soleil. This is him reading the start of his first published work Œuvres with all the intimacy and carbonated sibilance of an AMSR recording.
October 15–18
Schumann wrote his Gesänge der Frühe (Songs of Dawn), opus 133, in October. That is coincidence; still, they are autumnal. They were written five months before he threw himself into the Rhine, and so were supposed to be have been written during his last October. The 31 days of this bloated month almost exactly co-terminated with the historic stay of the “young eagle” Johannes Brahms at the Schumann household in Düsseldorf. At its heart, Schumann composed the set of five pieces, whose expression was so strange that Clara remarked upon her difficulty in understanding them in her diaries. Schumann had, years earlier, planned the title Gesänge der Frühe… an Diotima and twice mentioned it in his notebooks, and so it was a title in search of a piece, to borrow a phrase from John Adams. (Luigi Nono later picked up on this strand in his string quartet Fragmente-Stille, an Diotima.) The epigraphic dedication, a reference to Hölderlin’s Hyperion and his lover Diotima (for Hölderlin actualized by Susette Gontard, the wife of his employer), was eventually struck after a visit from the poet Bettina von Arnim at the very end of the month. Hyperion recounts to his friend Bellarmin a letter from Diotima, who, long separated from him in war, recounts her reactions of waiting, waiting, until it becomes too much:
So you are still on earth? And still see the light of day? I thought I should find you elsewhere, my love! Sooner than you afterward wished, I received the letter that you wrote before the battle at Cheshme, and so for a whole week I lived believing that you had thrown yourself into the arms of death…
Dear dreamer, why must I wake you? Why can I not say, ‘Come, and make them true, the beautiful days that you promised me!’ But it is too late, Hyperion, it is too late. Your maiden has withered since you have been gone…
Dearest Hyperion! Little did you think to hear my swan song this year.”
Schumann wrote to his editor on Feb. 24, three days before leaving Clara a note that he threw his wedding ring in Rhine, and that she ought to as well, the pieces depict “sensations at the approach and onset of morning, but more through the expression of feeling than tone-painting.” The morning of the title, for the Schumann scholar John Daverio, stands as a “metaphor for renewal. It may even call to mind Schumann’s turn, in the fall of Gesänge, to some of the concerns that occupied him in the earlier phases of his career.” We know, for instance, that he returned to reading Jean Paul’s Siebenkäs that October, after a ten-year hiatus from the character-artist who so held captive the young composer’s obsession. Daverio stresses the “hyper-reflectivity” (rather than the onset of madness) that has made Gesänge der Frühe far less accessible than the earlier, more descriptive Kinderszenen (Scenes from Childhood). The set resonates not with the first “awakening” of hopefulness, but rather a “second awakening of heightened consciousness.” This renaissance might describe the autumn of beginnings, the second awakening after an overheated summer. (1)
Oct. 21
Wild hot fury—cold snow: Thick white moor—mist—…bunked blackbird: rage—walk in white blank world—symbol of shutting off from normal clear vision…black stone fences—burning cheeks…vast power of cold, snow, stars & blackness…against small violent spark of will. [Sylvia Plath: scraps for a poem.]
Oct. 27
The last days of Plath’s last October teemed with poems composed in the early morning hours in Devon, where, as described by the poet Eavon Boland, the “Court Green, with its giant wych elm, shows off its thatched roof, its unsparing stone exterior.” In November she would be looking for a new apartment in London. In February, like Schumann, she would attempt—and consummate—her death, albeit by fire rather than water. The poems, most of which would be shuttled into the posthumously published Ariel, brimmed with cautious but frosty optimism. “I am writing the best poems of my life, they will make my name.” The Plath who composed these poems, freshly separated from Ted Hughes and caring for her two children, including her newest Nicholas, ushered in, as Boland argues, a new type of poem—her second awakening—strengthened by a new sense of motherhood, one in which the poet possesses rather than learns from nature.
The clutch of her “October nature poems” (Boland’s designation) surrounded her thirtieth birthday on the 27th. Boland imagines: “Here at the start of winter…the acoustics must have been made of the sound of freezing air and the squeak of starlight” (156). These felt sounds are pierced by the crying of “late mouths” of the eponymous “Poppies in October,” written, along with “Ariel,” on the day of her turning thirty. These mouths that “cry open / In a forest of frost, in a dawn of cornflowers” defy the autophagial October season—old-fashioned but blood red in their refusal to be consumed. Plath’s own reading of the poems is characteristically percussive, with a palpable undertone of insolence. The late mouth crying oh-so-out-of-season counterpoises the “bald cry” of birth in “Morning Song”—the cry that seemed to make itself so in season, so in fashion, and that “took its place among the elements.”
Oct. 31
Schubert’s late sonatas (the last three, in C minor, A, and B-flat) are frequently called “autumnal”: he completed them in the last year of his life, but they took him a good half of a year. The final one was completed Sep. 26. In October, he completed his Quintet (on the 6th), after which he set off on a three-day excursion on foot to Eisenstadt to visit Haydn’s tomb. Following that were two works that remain relatively obscure today. On Oct. 31, after a meal out (he ordered fish), he fell under a spell of nausea that would eventually confine him to his bed. He died on Nov. 19. (2)
But Beethoven died after the spring equinox, Lili Boulanger right before; Robert Schumann, eventually, in mid-summer, as did Bach. Tchaikovsky did die in November, Mozart in January. Lest it seem that I am angling for a mapping of life onto art so simply, that the stench of death, or the premonitions of eternal sleep back-haunt these works, or that I am equating dying young with autumn itself, I draw your attention more to the manic, almost ecstatic need to produce in these autumnal months, irrespective of impending death. I cannot say whether depressives, syphilitics, consumptives, or affluenza sufferers are more or less likely to succumb to the drastic in the autumn and winter months (and I have no knowledge of those in the Southern Hemisphere and their Aprils). What I am drawn to is the springlike, the dawns, in the autumnal. The meditation of collection—harvesting?— of one’s creative thoughts in the early morning hours of autumn, when they still remain untouched by sunrise, and will be so increasingly as they remain longer enveloped in sunlessness as autumn wears on. Mornings are so promising. They carry the day’s potential energy, which seems to ooze out from an invisible puncture once public, productive life begins. There is a reason I have wished I could drink my morning coffee all day long. It is an attempt at capture solemnity.
Read Part IV.
(1) The hyper-reflectivity almost certainly has to do with his re-visions and revisions of his earlier work, which often times end up squaring off what had previously been anomalous. We might see this hyper-reflectivity as well in the obsessive nature in Variations on an Original Theme in E-flat, written immediately after his suicide attempt, wherein the first three variations are constrain unvaried restatements of the theme. Though the theme was supposed to have been on a theme that appeared to him in a dream by Mendelssohn, it in fact came from the slow movement of his Violin Concerto.
(2) Michael Haneke’s film Amour includes a late Beethoven bagatelle, from the last collection of piano works he ever wrote, and the Schubert G-flat major impromptu—Schubert seems to demand no periodizing apart from autumn and late autumn.
