Message in a bottle
 
Valentine Basilevich Glass, native of Vyborg, accountant in the bureau of administration of the Leningrad Parks of Culture and Rest, led a number of unrelated lives. Whereas most people were trapped by the web of Soviet bureaucracy, he reveled in its complexity and quirkiness, finding in the course of his work numerous loopholes which he impressed in his memory, an unconscious act much like anticipating an annoying scratch on a phonograph record. Over the years he had become sensitive to these flaws, as a barefoot man can feel the grain of the wooden floor or the hot and cold spots in a mattress. He played the system with the knowledge and confidence of a blind pianist in recital. 
 
He had an upright piano in his flat, and the F sharp over middle C had a defective damper that was a characteristic of this piano from his mother’s day. Yes, an "Etude in D" would have a drone throughout, as would B minor fugues, Lieder in A, and Elegies in F# minor. A short chromatic run in an otherwise diatonic melody would send less sophisticated people running with their hands clasped tightly over their ears, the diminished fifth being too much of a reminder of the inadequacy of a seven tone scale.  
 
Glass, who was brought up not only with a strong atonal influence, but with a long line of experimentally tuned instruments, improvised melodies that made use of the inadequacies of the instruments he had available. His apartment was cluttered with wolfish violas, creaking clarinets, a harp for which spare parts were unattainable, a harmonium with a leaking bellows. Each he played with varying proficiency. He was the opposite of the perfectionist musician – who had to polish his instruments with certain cloths and varnishes, and could only play within certain temperature ranges – for he played old and new, cheap, broken unsullied instruments as they were, always finding the voice of each, and highlighting its uniqueness. 
 
He could tell, even in a recording, that a piano's linkage was sluggish in the lower registers, and that Sviatoslav Richter (or whoever the soloist was) usually discovered this too late and altered his style midway through the movement. It was this kind of sensitivity which enabled him to discover all the spies in his department. 
 
So, what seemed to be a toleration of the insane systems of the Soviets was in fact a fascination with and exploitation of its numerous flaws. For example, he created a number of employees on paper, he obtained visas for them, identifications for them, leaked certain information to the spies that he knew to flush out more spies, and occasionally called upon his minimal acting talent to impersonate them. A mainstay of his technique was suggestion – an assumption planted months ahead of time in many peoples minds, and anecdotes odd enough to be propagated beyond any of his known contacts, in phone calls, "wrong numbers," asking for one of these characters with qualifying adjectives and bits of information which are easily taken, by means of their accidental nature, for truth, and letters to organizations that he knew were being monitored by certain people as pet projects, and by misinforming tourists, the most gullible of information sources. 
 
And the amazing thing was that it was all done out of his own perversity, as a hobby, and was not suspected even by the Americans, whose  operations lacked in quality which they made up with quantity. 
 
Let it be said that his defection was a consequence of this perversity: not only did he leave, he did so in such a way that he was expected back after a few months. Part of his cover was his fluency in Finnish and his rough Finnish features, for his trip took him from Vyborg to Helsingör to Visby to Uppsala, a route logical enough for a Finnish professor on sabbatical. From Uppsala he went west to Malmö, across the Øresund to Copenhagen. He showed up in theatre orchestras, atomic protest rallies, left one of those cryptic classifieds in the International Herald Tribune, and made his way to Paris and Avenue Foch, where a huge apartment was waiting for him. The sizable Russian community in Paris provided him with much material. He traded art to support himself, some of it forged, and a good number of it under one or another of his many names.
 
Still, to enter any bar with a vacant piano filled him with an urge to test it, to run it through, to find its flaws.  His private jokes got to the point where he would become a different character depending on the flaws he found in the piano, whose various tics and attitudes would be complementing the instrument’s inadequacy.  It determined how deaf he would make himself, how short tempered, how somnambulistic, how languid, or how Polish, Finnish, Swedish, Parisian, American or Farsi his French would eventually tumble out in. He created pools of character into which his admirers and detractors alike contributed their streams. 
 
Some days, to aggravate some Parisian paper tiger, he would feign left-handedness in a way that caused discomfort to all in a subliminal way,  or walk with a limp with an ease that made onlookers proud to see a man who so nonchalantly overcame his handicap. The little impressions, popularly thought to be uncountable in one's assessment of another's character, he had discovered could be enumerated and controlled, and he required at most four tics and an anecdote or two to establish a lasting reputation. He never ceased to be amazed at other peoples malleability, their willingness to be exploited and manipulated. The more he thought about it, the more he realized how much time they spent fooling themselves, about the nature of their hierarchies, their habits of exchange, their definitions of power and impotence, the desirability of their goals, about the nature of inspiration and impressions, their Mana-filled Tiki's, their unspoken taboos. They expected to hear the same things over and over again, reinforcing these illusions. Their aesthetics and politics, popular or unpopular, all were based in the system of hot and cold mattress spots, pointers toward hollow symbols, clear and yet confusing choices. Glass played hypocrisy as he played faulty pianos. It only challenged him, never offending him. He had no contempt for other people, as he had no contempt for poor instruments. It made life interesting for him. 
 
Glass was uneager to express his convictions, as doing so necessarily treads on many exposed toes, and besides, it was to his advantage to keep his marks uninformed, and he was forced to acknowledge that he himself had to bow to the symbolic actions, even if they were conducted at a different level with different symbols. Yet, how much suffering could be eliminated by the simple realization that one's own values were not universal? How many lives would be saved by a demystification of money, monogamy, and policy? How much energy could be saved by realizing that one has two feet and warm blood? How much guilt could be dismissed when one realizes that reproduction is as natural as sneezing? 
 
His obsession, combined with his creativity, up to now only found expression in his private journals. He kept one in each of the seven or eight languages he was proficient in, translating from one to the other, and refining his thoughts through translation. This way everything he wrote got a second look, and he could guard against his own capacity. His art now juxtaposed established symbols against each other, eroded rules of composition, sought to make the picture plane dirty, to show Madonnas engaged in scenes not reported in the Gospels, he specified that still lives be hung over windows and mirrors to drive in the point that the world of life is not still. But he found that as an artist he could not be taken seriously by enough people to cause any real change. He doubted he could cause these changes even if he had the power of the Church, for he knew how deeply rooted one's personal system of values could be. He realized that the only chance would be in early indoctrination, but how to instruct without becoming a catechism? He had learned at the keyboard of a broken piano. But what more common means could he use to turn the masses from passive participation to critical and adaptive production? So little thinking was required by a culture which pretended to provide choices when offering only dead ends.
 
I will leave Glass where he is and tell you now how I have manipulated you throughout this story. I started with the name "Glass", which I selected for the numerous puns and connotations it could have, and a wholly ridiculous job in a wholly foreign environment in order to create interest in the character:  as a rogue, imposter, sly fellow, multilingual, and multinational. The plural-ness of his character, shown to be a farce and a manipulation, is an attempt to show, through a process of identification, the plurality of Everyman. A long part of the story was devoted to comparing the limits of culture to the limits of flawed pianos. I regret that I could not work in the idea that even music itself, as codified in the West, was restricting and constraining  Glass's artistic forces, and that the themes of "Tema con Variazione" were themselves variations. Perhaps you recognize in Glass's art similar designs of the modern art movements of this century, and perhaps that art is clear to you now. I hope that you will realize that all symbolic transactions are based on tacit assumptions which vary from culture to culture and indeed need no culture to mother them. Observing the flawed glass of culture should help you respect and identify it.
 
 
© Henry Lowengard August 13, 1979
 
 
Ars Poetica 
 
When prompted, Van R could, at will, break into verse of exquisite texture, exceeding that of acclaimed laureates and emeriti. There, nestled in his familiar corner, next to a calendar long out of date, with its colors bleeding, he could summarize in a phrase new human subtleties, or bring Miss P to tears. In a half line, a tiny world could be revealed, a few feet later, the plant life of the world would start to blossom and give fruit, almost as suddenly, one could be embedded in a mountain of bone, or gain the perception of that single blade of grass which bends in any wind.
 
Van R himself was not outwardly affected by these transports, save for a tear or two. He compared the process to that of doing figures or playing chess, which he did poorly.
 
Of course, he occasionally needed loosening up. We once had an important visitor at our office, a Sr. Z, who had heard of Van R's talents through obscure and peripheral remarks at widely separated international conferences. Van R was in a state. He was intimidated by our visitor's foreign carriage, and only after being promised a bottle of Sr. Z's manorial sherry could he even whisper a couplet. He went on though, for half an hour, enchanting the Spaniard, while we, who had heard better, kept to ourselves.
 
On the other hand, it has happened that, in the midst of some unrelated busywork, Van R would suddenly start to swallow uncomfortably and wipe his lips with the back of his hand, and a little later, he would mutter something, hoping we would not hear, but the few syllables we would catch would make us stop and leave us glowing for maybe the rest of the week. Upon confronting him with his genius, he soured his bovine head with a discouraging grimace, which often enough had convinced us not to approach him in such a light.
 
 My fellow workers S and F, as well as Miss P the secretary, once discussed pooling our memories of Van R's poetry into an anthology, to be published under a clever pseudonym. But we, as honorable people, would not allow ourselves the liberty of plagiarizing our colleague's works, even though he thought little of them. And so, we as a group have started teaching bits of his poetry to our children, we drop a line here and there at parties and other functions, we use them as epigrams to our research projects. Van R is either unconscious or ignorant of our efforts, for the work he does rarely coincides with ours.
 
People grow older, and Van R grows older as well. The wrinkles in his face grow into ravines, his heavy head is approaching the level of his shoulders. His growing deafness makes him even more silent than before, his spurious remarks more fleeting.
 
Indeed, my own fame as a poet is based on works which were modeled on his more inferior ravings. I have my own career to think of. I am saving my interpretations of his better works until after his death, when I will be near retirement and will need the income. It sounds so bloodless, but one often needs to be practical.
 
 

  * * * *

 
 
I relate now the details of Van R's death. An operation had stilled his voice, his deafness had become more or less total. He could still see and write, but he was not as flexible as he once had been. Fourteen years I worked with him, not together at all times, but near. At this stage he started to radiate emptiness. His actions became formalized, and we realized how dull he really was, even before the operation.
 
It was a few days after his retirement. I went to visit him on a cool Sunday, when the ground was spongy and the air was set with green inchworms. I walked into his tiny apartment, and it was there that I learned the secret that you already have been told.
 
 
© Henry Lowengard April 11, 1978