Agape Agape by William Gaddis Page A

schön the goddess asking immortality for him like her immortal own but the legs have crumbled, pursued by age as punishment for pleasure and all of it fading into that bed of shades, those imitations and shadowy images of gossip where there is no present moment but only the next one being devoured in the immense maw of the past, where immortality finds its home at last, where the voice has dwindled to the dry scratch of a grasshopper and the legs are gone, they’re just not there and it all comes down in a heap good God look at them! Blood dried on the sheets and those damn rusting staples don’t know whether I’m shivering or shaking from the, try to find one dry corner down there. Try to sit up and get one leg down where it’s, something down there, just get my arm so I can reach the, whole sodden mess look at that. Mel-O-DEE Music Rolls, Mel-O-Art, QRS Campaign Against Filth in Popular Songs they sold a million rolls in 1926. Sell more Player Rolls! Sell more Player Pianos! Sell More Ukuleles and Banjos! More! More! More! God it was so it was all so America! It was the crowd, not the dry scratch of the grasshopper but the herd, it was “the little people making merry like grasshoppers in spots of sunlight, hardly thinking” just perpetuating the species weren’t they? “Foolishly reduplicating folly in thirty-year periods; they eat and they laugh too.” Groan against elitism, against Flaubert in retreat, “I believe that the crowd, the mass, the herd, will always be detestable” he writes to George Sand, remember? When he’s written his niece preparing his Paris flat before his death, “I ask to be liberated from my enemy, the piano, and from another enemy, which hits me on the forehead—the stupid hanging lamp in the dining room” and weeks later, de Maupassant to Turgenev, “Flaubert apoplexy, no hope” where nothing survives of importance “save a small group of minds, ever the same, which pass on the torch.” No more piano! I said. Absolutely no artist! By now electricity is spreading its blessings everywhere, from refinements on the reproducing piano with the, where, in Germany? No that was my invention wasn’t it? Wrote it down yes and somebody stole it? The reproducing piano is made possible by an electric motor attached to the pump providing constant and predetermined air pressure, while back at home here the electric player with a magnet for each key appears, the nickel in the slot making the electrical contact pounding out its mechanical note; missing some in bad weather, but still in the vanguard other public entertainment a murderer named Kemmler provides material for the first electrocution at Auburn Prison. Progress! Great God wherever you’d look says Reverend Newell Dwight Hillis, “For the first time government, invention, art, industry, and religion have served all the people rather than the patrician classes.” Wait a minute no, no not so fast Reverend, elitists staging a rearguard action here, Steinway brings Paderewski over here and Knabe opens Carnegie Hall with Tchaikovsky live, piano makers and European patrons supporting music and the arts as diversions for Plato’s patricians and disdaining American artists as rubes who disdain them as foreign laborers. Whole thing coming to pieces here, just to get it over with but, with what? Over with what? Prepositions make all the trouble but you can’t really explain anything to anybody why I’ve got to explain all this because we don’t know how much time’s left to finish this work of mine before it’s distorted and turned into a cartoon because it is a cartoon for that herd out there, the crowd, the mass waiting to be entertained, turn the creative artist into a performer because they are the hallucination, you see? The whole thing’s turned upside down, the kittens are bit and the houses are built without walls, you see? Used to be