The Music School (1977)

hello I'm calling deur there are fewer Mass magazines alive today which publish short stories hence fewer stories are published but if the quantity of Stories We read has shrunk but quality has not American Writers continue to produce these highly polished fragments of Our Lives short stories continue to reflect brilliantly the way we are among the most prolific and accomplished of a contemporary story writers is John upik whose Work the music school were about to see in dozens of beautifully crafted fictions Updike has created one of our most elaborately detailed pictures of Contemporary American life he has caught the changing textures and heard the changing rhythms of our experience in our shifts of fashion in food or music or marriage he has seen our shifts of belief our changes of morality the waxing and waning of our hop and despairs he's developed an Ever sharper eye for the subtle gradation of color and form in our culture he retained a sharp ear for the inner Tremors of Consciousness that betray our our uncertainty Alfred schagen is the main character in The Music School published by Updike in 1964 swagon is haunted by the Paradox of being a thinking animal the conflict between the vestages of ritual and belief clinging to his memory and the chaotic world he cannot order causes him a kind of numb pain we experience his thoughts as they come to him random not apparently related having no more logical sequence than the chance murder of his acquaintance by a sniper or then that murder's relationship to a random comment made by a very contemporary priest in trying to connect these random minua to illuminate them with that human imagination that alone can fuse them into a Unity swagen is like his own daughter learning the new language of Music fumbling pausing beginning again with the impossible difficult and complex first fingerings the first deciphering of that unique language as a writer he is forced to create a new language of form and texture in order to reflect the particular experience of his time without new forms and textures our artists cannot reflect our lives meaningfully without their reflection we cannot know the way we are [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] for [Music] for [Music] for Happ [Music] now [Music] [Music] [Applause] make you feel like you're in church they do uh rather resemble the new Wafers last night I heard a young priest tell of a change in his Church's attitude toward the Eucharistic wafer all right now when you receive Holy Communion and when the rest the generations nuns and Priests but especially the young man's had NS have taught Catholic children that the wafer must be held in the mouth and allowed to melt let's TR that to touch it with the teeth would be this was never a Doctrine but merely a Nuance of instruction in some manner Blasphemous now amid the flowering of fresh and bold ideas with which the church like a tundra thawing responded to that unexpected son the late Pope John there has sprung up the thought that Christ did not say take and melt this in your mouth but Take and Eat the word is eat and to dissolve the word is to dilute the transubstantiated metaphor of physical [Music] nourishment this Demi Quaver of theology crystallizes with a beautiful simplicity in the material [Music] world The Bakers supplying the mass have been instructed to unlearn the science of a dough translucent to the tongue and to prepare a thicker tougher wafer a host in fact so substantial it must be chewed to be swallowed for this morning I read in the newspaper that an acquaintance of mine had been murdered [Music] my acquaintance with him was slight he's become the only victim of murder I've known and for such a role anyone seems drastically miscast though in the end each life wears its events with a geological inevitability he was a computer expert a soft voiced broads set man from Nebraska we spoke as people do whose fields of knowledge are miles apart of matters where all men are ignorant of politics children and perhaps religion I had the impression at any rate that he is as often the case with scientists and midwesterners had no use for religion and I saw in him a typical specimen of the human species that thrives around scientific centers in an environment of discussion groups and outdoor exercise cheerful husbandry like those vanished gentlemen whose Sexual Energy was exclusively spent in brel these men confine their cleverness to their work which being in one way or another for the government is usually [Music] secret they seem to have solved or dismissed the Paradox of being a thinking animal and devoid of guilt apparently participate not in this Century but in the next if I remember him with individual Clarity it's because I once intended to write a novel about a computer programmer and I asked him questions which he answered agreeably more agreeably still he offered to show me around his Laboratories anytime I cared to make the hours trip to where they were I never wrote the novel The Moment in my life it was meant to crystallize dissolved all too quickly and I never took the trip indeed I don't believe I thought of my friend once in the year between our last encounter and this morning isn't he do we know him I do not understand the connection between last night and this morning though there seems to be one I'm trying to locate it this afternoon while waiting for my daughter to finish her piano lesson I Pro rece in the two incidents a common element of nourishment of eating transfigured by a strange eruption and there is a parallel movement from an immaterial phenomenon an exegetical nicity a maniac hatred to a material one a bulky wafer a bullet in the temple about the murder I feel certain from my knowledge of the victim but his offense was blameless when I try to picture it I see only numbers and Greek letters and conclude that from my distance I have witnessed an almost unprecedented crime a crime of unalloyed scientific passion and there is this to add the young priest plays a 12 string guitar smokes mentholated cigarettes and seems unembarrassed to find himself sitting socially in a circle of Protestants and nonbelievers like my late computer friend a man of the future but let me describe the music school I love it here it is connected to an old Baptist Church The Sounds arrive like hints of another world a world where Angels fumble pause and begin [Music] again listening I remember what learning music is like how impossibly difficult and complex seem the first fingerings the first deciphering of that unique language which frates each note with a double meaning of position and duration how mysterious appears that calligraphy how great looms the gap between the first gropings of vision and the first stammerings of [Music] percussion Vision timidly becomes percussion percussion becomes music music music becomes emotion emotion becomes vision [Music] few of us have the heart to follow this circle to its end I took lessons for years and never learned my daughter is just beginning the piano these are her first lessons she's 11 she's eager and hopeful silently she sits beside me as we drive the 9 miles to the town where the lessons are given silently she sits beside me in the dark as we drive home unlike her she does not beg for a reward of candy or a Coke as if the lesson itself has been a meal I love taking her I love waiting for her I love driving her home through the mystery of Darkness toward the certainty of [Music] supper I do this taking and driving because today my wife visits her psychiatrist she visits a psychiatrist because I'm unfaithful to her I do not understand the connection but there seems to be [Music] one in the novel I never wrote I wanted the hero to be a computer programmer because it was the most poetic and romantic occupation I could think of and my hero had to be extremely romantic and delicate for he was to die of adultery die I mean of knowing it was possible the possibility crushed him I conceived of him whose professional life was spent in the sanctum of the night when I was told the computers are free as it were to frolic and to be loved as devising idioms whereby problems might be fed to the machines and emerge under binomial percussions as the music of truth I conceived him as being too fine translucent and scrupulous to live in our coarse age it was to be if the metaphor is biological an evolutionary abortion a mamalian mutation crushed underfoot by dinosaurs and if the metaphor is mathematical a hypothetical ultimate one digit beyond the last real number [Music] me [Music] [Laughter] [Music] [Laughter] [Music] the title of the book was to be n + one its first sentence went as Echo passed overhead he stroked Maggie John's side through her big flowered dress his halted body seemed to catch up in itself the immense slow revolution of the earth and the firm little white star newly placed in space calmly made its way through the older Points of Light which looked shredded and faint in comparison From This hushed Moment under the ominous Sky of technological Miracle the plot was to develop more or less downhill into a case of Love guilt and nervous breakdown with physiological complications I had to do some research here that would kill the hero as quietly as a mistake is erased from the Blackboard there was be the hero his wife his love and his doctor in the end the wife married the doctor and Maggie John's would calmly Contin away through the comparatively faint stop me my psychiatrist wonders why I need to humiliate myself it is the habit I suppose of confession [Music] beloved in the Lord let us draw near to the true heart and confess our god father we shall find nothing in us but sin and death from which we [Music] can set ourselves free take eat this is the true body of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ given unto death for your sins take eat this is the true body of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ given un death for your sins take eat this is the true body of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ given unto death for your sins take I remember the faces I saw while a wafer was held in my mouth above their closed lips their eyes held a watery look of pleading to be rescued from the depths of this mystery and it distinctly seems in the reaches of this memory so vivid it makes my salive of flow that it was necessary if not to chew at least to touch to embrace and tentatively shape the wafer with the teeth we left refreshed [Music] [Music] I am neither musical nor religious each moment I live I must think where to place my fingers and press them down with no confidence of hearing a [Music] cord my friends are like me we are all pilgrims faltering toward divorce some get no further than Mutual confession which becomes an addiction and exhausts them some move on into violent quarrels and physical blows and succumb to sexual excitement a few make it to the psychiatrists a very few get as far as the lawyers last evening a woman entered late in the party she had come from the lawyers she saw our black garbed guest was amazed ashamed perhaps and took two backward steps but then in a hush she regained her composure and sat down Among Us and in this Grace note of the two backward steps and then again the forward movement aoda seems to be urged the world is the host it must be chewed quick [Music] for [Music] for for