I recently saw a dance choreographed to a piece of music by Philip Glass, a composer called "minimalist" for the scaled-down, narrow-toned, repetitive pattern of his work. The music got me to thinking because it presents a unique problem: how will it end? The music's obligation to a kind of free verse means that it can only build its coherence as it goes: the end is not in the beginning. It doesn't wrap any thing up: it comes to a termination rather than a signature.
This can be disturbing, and a little frightening, because it violates our expectations about proper endings. We like endings that convince us that life can be tidied into a coherent, or at least consolidated, whole. We like fourth movements pitched to finality, like Beethoven's Ninth, where he makes a universe of our ears by braiding the music and chorus into an uprush of truth: we are lifted by the simple fact of our presence.
But Beethoven's way of ending should disturb us as much as Glass', though for different reasons. The uplift is not really "inside" life, moving in subterranean tempos, ready to be simply unearthed by the maker's genius. Beethoven distilled it from his brain as an act of will, of defiance. Life, being one damn thing after another, doesn't contain that levitated clarity, that sweet vision, that disarming promise that no thorns burden our eyes.
We become annoyed when our bluff is called, as it is with Glass' music, where the end never comes and we are refused our genteel affiliation. Glass' music reminds us, like a shard of ice in the ear, that living is really a series of endings lapsing one into the other, patterns finishing and blending into other patterns like the scales on the serpent that eats its own tail. There's an enormous variety of endings in this music, some severe, some no more than a touch of dust on the eyelids. But they all have in common a straitened rhythm of dissolve that is like the jerky arabesques of a man falling off a cliff: at the cliff edge is exhilaration, on the rocks is abrupt anonymity, and in between is the ambivalent nourishment of air rushing away.
We always struggle for purpose in all this, but can never forget that purpose is the effort to do magic in front of stones. Endings are our guardian angels; they haunt us even as they define us, and they define us by haunting us. We carry our endings like an extra set of retinas, eyes behind eyes, interpretive optics that filter out the mirage of cause-and-effect, sharpen the focus of that initial exhilaration, the mute rocks. As the poet Galway Kinnell says, we must always listen to the "finished music of our breath," chased into knowledge and darkness by the convention of endings that we are.
Addiction
Christmas Passed Up