Wahre Kunst bleibt unvergänglich. (True art remains eternal.) -- Ludwig van Beethoven (page 83)
the discursive asides sometimes lead us back to where we belong, back where we come from
Standing in the ruins of Jaromarsburg, the October winds flying over the cape into his cyanblue eyes, Janosch A. Prufrock half-remembered his father´s lines:
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
Through the unknown, remembered gate
When the last of earth left to discover
Is that which was the beginning;
At the source of the longest river
The voice of the hidden waterfall
And the children in the apple-tree
Not known, because not looked for
But heard, half-heard, in the stillness
Between two waves of the sea.
The sea made music, the way his father´s words did. His father wrote qartets of sound and meaning, capturing music using letters in place of notes.
“Auf dem Lande weiß ich keinen schönern Genuss als Quartettmusik. Do you, Herr Prufrock, know of a pleasure in the country more beautiful than quartet music?” asked a man´s voice behind him. The voice was loud, as if still seeking its balance in timbre after a recent bout of Hörsturz, which was exactly the case.
Reacting to Janosch A. Prufrock´s startle, Ludwig van Beethoven acknowledged the uneven boom of his tone, “Yes, I had a sudden hearing loss. Something about my habits. They were not the… healthfullest. I needed to go on a Kur… insisted that would help… left them all behind… yes, that would help… learn new habits… find a new way… as if that were possible… nonethelesss… here I am, Kur-ing, relax-ing… RELAX-ING,” boomed Beethoven, relaxing hard against the whistling wind before it whistled the words out of his mouth. By the seaside, on an October, when the wind is so chilly, just five degrees above zero, and it is morning, and you´re on the cape, where the old Jaromarsburg used to stand, and you´re trying to speak, you simply have to fight that wind or you´ll never be heard. And Beethoven will not, not be heard, and the man, ewig Dein, ewig mein, ewig uns, forever yours, forever mine, forever ours, conversed with Janosch A. Prufrock, Hörsturz or no Hörsturz.
Wilhelmina Wang, with caesar in her name, had come from one sea to another. She had flown kites on the beaches of Weifang. Cathay´s kites were delicate papers, painted, shaped, strung, and glued to the lightest framework of crisscrossing wooden latices. And Weifang´s were the queens of all Cathayan kites.
The wind that blew into Janosch A. Prufrock´s cyanblue eyes and whistled out the words from Ludwig van Beethoven´s mouth was too strong to fly a kite. But not Wilhelmina Wang´s Weifang kite.
Between two waves of the sea, carried by the salty iodine air, her koi fish kite flew and swam, dipped and soared, and played a quartet on the wind´s notes of G, D, A, and E. For the winds of the Baltic Sea is a violin, and its four strings and seven levels, this morning, were under Ludwig van Beethoven´s command.