Exchange Place

Rapid Eye Movement

I replaced the Longines watch in my jacket pocket, took out my notebook, and read what I’d written the day before yesterday in the smoking area of Caffè Nero in Ann Street. I’d driven into town on one of my vintage clothes shopping expeditions. Ann Street has a couple of vintage shops, and there’s another, Bang Vintage, round the corner in Church Lane where Muriel’s is situated. Since the missing notebook remains missing, I cannot be certain as to what exactly I wrote in that notebook then, but I think it concerned an experience I sometimes have when I switch on the car radio and hear nothing beyond the ambient hum of the apparatus. I have it more or less permanently tuned to Radio 3 for the classical music, and know that the nothing signifies a lull between the movements of a piece, or the silence that follows the announcement of a piece, perhaps a live performance, and you can imagine the performer’s hands poised over the keyboard of his instrument, about to approach the piece, readying himself for the onset — you can almost hear the expectant hush in the audience — or, if it is indeed that break between movements, and it is live, the silence might be betrayed by a muted fusillade of coughs, a rustling of chairs or shuffling of feet until there is complete silence, and then you hear the opening bars of the next movement emerging from the silence. At any rate, this is what I wrote the day before yesterday:

I’d just passed the Waterworks when I switched on the radio and got silence. Then the piece began, and as it proceeded I knew I was listening to Glenn Gould playing Bach’s Contrapunctus XIV from The Art of Fugue. I pictured Gould, famously eccentric in his dress as in other aspects of his life, clothed in overcoat, muffler, hat and mittens even in midsummer, and then saw him hunched over the keyboard seated on the old chair his father had made for him, which he used even when the seat had completely worn through and his bottom was supported by nothing but the frame, swaying to the music, and as I listened to him playing I could hear the familiar background vocalizations, an almost coital groaning and crooning, ebbing and flowing and quavering with the dynamic of the music; his mother had told him to sing everything he played; he said his singing was unconscious, and increased proportionately with the inability of the piano in question to realize what he had in mind, the repeated or mirrored or inverted themes of Contrapunctus XIV intertwining, unfolding, recapitulating, as they had always done; and I wondered how many times I had heard this piece and where I was at the time, or what I was doing at the time, if anything, and as always I remembered the first time I had heard it, and who it was who introduced me to it, and where I was, and I wondered as I always did where he might be now, or what had become of him whether living or dead.

My CD of Gould’s playing of Contrapunctus XIV lasts twelve minutes eighteen seconds, and I knew the piece had a good few minutes to go when I got to the top deck of Castle Court car park. I let the engine run because if I switched it off I’d lose a few seconds of the performance. I knew how the piece ended, if that is the right word for a fugue which Bach never finished, and I see the video of Gould’s playing Contrapunctus XIV, the camera close in to show the eyes behind the big square horn-rimmed glasses, the eyes sometimes open, half open or closed, the eyelids fluttering as if in REM sleep, dreaming the music, the mouth grimacing and smiling ecstatically, camera panning out to show all of Gould on the stage, until Bang! he punches out the final note before the shock of silence, a blank that strikes one almost bodily, and Gould throws up an arm as if shot, his index finger pointing to the heavens.

I turned off the engine. The radio stopped. I sat in the aftermath of the music for some minutes. I felt I had been somewhere else. In a state of fugue as it were, that temporary amnesia in which one loses the sense of oneself and takes on a life as another before coming to oneself again months or years later. Fugue, from Latin fugere, to flee.

When I got to Caffè Nero I wrote this all down, or what I remembered of it, knowing I’d written or thought of it many times before, thinking this time it might serve as a beginning or preamble to the book I had in mind, and again I try to picture the words I wrote in the missing notebook, but all I see is the rain-spattered page, all illegible splashes, blots and asterisks. And, as I write now in another notebook in 41 Elsinore Gardens, I try to see myself sitting outside the Morning Star, and I hear the rain drumming down on the awning and picture myself hunched over the missing notebook, cigarette in one hand, pen in the other, scribbling whatever words I wrote then. My eyes are wide open but it is as if I am dreaming. I am inside my mind floating outside myself looking down at myself, a disembodied mental eye or camera lens, I find I can pan round and see myself from different angles, and it is as if I see myself as someone else, the way that something I wrote years ago looks written by another; and in any event we never really see ourselves, all we see of ourselves is what we see in the mirror, ourselves reversed, which is not how others see us, we can never walk around ourselves and see what we look like from the back, so I float down and hover at my back and look over my shoulder at what I am writing, or what the other me was writing before the wind gusted a flurry of raindrops over the words, but try as I might the words swim and dissolve into splashes, blots and asterisks.

I pull myself away and see the other customer two tables away from me sitting before his pint. The brim of his trilby is pulled down so I can’t see his face, but his body language looks familiar and I think maybe that is only because I have tried to picture him many times before, perhaps all I am remembering is a memory of a memory, or a speculation rather. In any event one could posit a relationship between these two figures brought together by whatever happenstance, a previous history in which they met each other in some other existence, that the man who was me, John Kilfeather, had met this man, let us call him Mr X, on some other occasion or several occasions, though I am pretty certain we had never met before. I suppose that at a certain point Mr X will come over to me and introduce himself to me as a stranger, and he will ask me what I am writing in my notebook, and I will not tell him the truth, for that would be too convoluted, and perhaps embarrassing, or seemingly pretentious, and in any event why should I tell him the truth, for the odds are that I and Mr X will never meet again, or perhaps we might, so I make up a story that will suit should we ever meet again. I could even give myself another name.