The Ocean Liner

Los Angeles

Stravinsky sat transfixed in the darkness of the movie theatre. The music was his, but there was no virgin dancing herself to death. The images were new and extraordinary.

As the familiar movements of The Rite of Spring rolled from the speakers, he watched volcanoes erupting, the molten lava pouring and swirling, rolling into the sea with fantastic eruptions of steam and foam. In the depths of the oceans, tiny protozoa and amoebas coalesced, growing eyes and legs, becoming fish, crawling on to the land.

The fish became lizards that nibbled on the lush vegetation, then evolved into mighty dinosaurs that roared and lumbered through the swamps. Tyrannosaurus rex and Stegosaurus battled to the death in primeval rain. Spikes and claws and teeth tore at one another. Pterodactyls soared into a lurid sky.

The rain ceased. The climate changed. Now he was seeing herds of dying dinosaurs trudging across a desert landscape, searching hopelessly for water, their pools and rivers drying up, their mighty limbs becoming trapped in mud. Despairing, skeletal, dying, they raised their monstrous heads to an orange sky, where a fatal sun bloomed.

And then, whirling from the depths of outer space, a meteorite collided with the earth. The movie theatre shook with the rumble of the impact. Eyes were dazzled by the blinding flash which destroyed all life, levelling mountains and emptying seas.

Stravinsky’s mouth was open. His fingers gripped the arms of his seat. It had taken a great deal to get him to come here to see Fantasia today, but he was experiencing a revelation.

This music – his music – had worked on the minds of others to produce images that were very different from the ones he himself had had half a century ago, when he’d written the Rite; but they were extraordinary images, images shot through with fire and brilliance and – yes, with genius.

It was a new kind of genius, flickering and evanescent. But was not all art flickering and evanescent? Did not music itself appear from the depths of darkness, flash like a comet across the brain, and then vanish into silence? Was that not the fate of every human soul?

Sitting beside him, Vera put her lips close to his ear.

‘Do you forgive them, Igor?’

‘It is extraordinary,’ he replied, so loudly that people in the audience turned to hush him. ‘It is extraordinary,’ he repeated in a lowered voice. ‘They have reinvented the Rite.’

‘So you approve?’

‘It doesn’t matter whether I approve or not,’ he replied, his round spectacles reflecting the restless shimmering of the screen. ‘They have reinvented me, too.’

He heard her soft laughter.