separationism

excerpt from the short story "someone else's theme" by sigizmund krzhizhanovsky (from the book memories of the future)

for a minute straight was quiet, dividing the silence into beats with his hand. and then: "i'm even afraid of that andante expressivo: it is so artfully absents, so imperiously parts a person from people and things; a few more bars, it seems, and any return will be impossible. it's that feeling - we've all had it - when wheels are carrying us away, while our thoughts keep coming back, when the space between 'i' and 'you' is inexorably windening, and the closer the one and only, the farther away, and thus, the farther the closer. i understand why beethoven, striving to drive the e-flat melancholy of this sonata of leave-takings into fingers not his own, could not find - for the first time in his life - readymade terms. yes, it's here, above the theme of absences, that we see the direction - seemingly lost among the italian words - in his native language: in gehender bewegung, doch mit ausdruck.* i remember that then too, through the accelerating race of piano keys, in the howling wind of octaves and thirds, there flickered a tiny 'i beg you,' but pounding right after it came the final six bars at tempo primo, and before i could catch the signal word, the sonata had veered into its third movement: the abrupt vivacissimamente flooded my ears like a joyful torrent. this was the famous le retour: the return, the reuniting of the disunited. you recall those oscillating triplets in the left hand, hand joining hand, the fever of notes and lips, the pedal pumping on the upbeats so the piano nearly chokes. . . but then stuart mill was right: to understand is to transgress. the devil only knows how it's all done, but it's done in such a way that when i had finished listening, i stood for a long time under the now-shut window, unable to take my leave of the sonata of leave-takings. at the time i had a fair amount of leisure - so i invited the sonata, as it alighted from the keys, to walk with me along the muddy cobbles in the lanes across the river. in exchange for the emotion the music had given me, i offered to help it finish what it had begun. happiness, i argued, doesn't like to oblige people because people don't give it (happiness) any holidays. if people knew how to live like the sonata, in three movements, interspersing meetings with partings, allowing happiness to go off for short spells, for a few bars at least, they mightn't be so unhappy. strictly speaking, music isn't in time, time is in music. yet we treat our time extremely unmusically. a city knows nothing of separations - that never-dispersing crowd, music without pauses - the people in it are too close together to be close to one another. the narrow streets along which you and i are now wandering, sonata, are forever knocking into each other for want of space, physical or otherwise; but the roofless sky thrown open overhead reminds us of its boundless and insuperable emptinesses. if orbits intersected like streets, and stars crossed paths like people, they would all have crashed into one another and the sky would be benighted and black. no, up there, everything turns on an eternal separateness. and if we won't unwedge our cramped everyday life with separations, if we won't convert our collectives from a close order to an extended one - we may perish. an old saying compares separations to the wind that douses the candle but fans the flames. so let us sow the wind. let all the guttering tapers go out, and the sooner the better, all those tiny particles of feeling that produce more soot than warmth or light. the person who doesn't want his soup rattles his spoon and pushes the plate away; but people with no appetite for each other tend to rattle on and on, unable to push away what is unnecessary. the idiotic 'light in the window' should also be put out by the winds of separations: we don't need sitting rooms, or shaded lamps, or round tables. we need strictly enforced rules: on odd days of the month, say, forbid acquaintances to recognize each other in the street; replace two-seater droshkies with one-seaters; impose fines on those who go out in pairs. equate meetings of husbands and wives with those of convicts; allow children to speak to their parents only on the telephone; give those who abandon their families reduced fares. . .

[. . . ] i could easily outline my elaborate yet elegant system of separationism, but what interests me now is the art of separationism - not the theory but the practice."

*in unhurried motion, but with expression (german)