Conversation Cracks

For Fanny Assingham in Henry James’s novel The Golden Bowl, “discussion had itself to herself become a danger—such light, as from open crevices, it let in.” I am reminded of Leonard Cohen’s acknowledgement: “There is a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in.” Ralph Waldo Emerson said something similar in his essay, “Compensation”: Emerson writes, “There is a crack in everything God has made.” In this essay Emerson suggests that since in this world perfection does not exist, everything has a price that must be paid. If everything in Nature comes at a cost, then every engagement in our lives necessitates some form of compensation. The light reveals the cost of experience and what might be returned. I think that the light reveals what must be paid: nothing occurs without consequence. Bob Dylan sings “I can tell you fancy, I can tell you plain/You give something up for everything you gain.” Cohen welcomes the crack in everything; Emerson acknowledges the crack and its price, and Dylan accepts the crack and the necessary compensation it requires: Pay for your ticket and don’t complain,” he sings. And each appreciates that through that crack comes some insight and even sometimes, wisdom, but that nothing happens without cost. Fanny Assingham, however, prefers the darkness; returning from the party where she has engaged in conversation with Charlotte and with the Prince, she huddles in the dark corner of the brougham in which she travels home. Fanny chooses to cling to the darkness and to shut out the light. Her conversations with Charlotte and the Prince had revealed to Fanny that the two have been too long left alone by their respective spouses and that an affair that might have begun in the past might now be renewing. And because by her machinations she has brought the Prince and Charlotte again together, Fanny suspects she is incriminated by her suspicions. Fanny’s conversations have exposed the crack that let the light in, but she would prefer to shut out the light. Conversation was for her a danger.
            Last evening we enjoyed a concert of Piano Trios by Franz Joseph Haydn, Maurice Ravel and Felix Mendelssohn, performed by Jean-Yves Thibaudet, piano, Lisa Batiashvili, Violin and Gautier Capuçon, cello. As I listened to the music I was struck by how the composers had put the instruments in conversation and how in listening I participated in on their colloquy. Though the theater was darkened the cracks in the conversation let in some light. 
            Now, verbal conversation intends to mean and often to even mean something specific. But conversation is the crack through which the light flows. Gregory Bateson suggests that “most conversations are only about whether people are angry or something. They are busy telling each other that they are friendly—which is sometimes a lie.” We might prefer to believe in the lie and like Fanny sit in the dark corner of the brougham and refuse the light that the crack lets in.  “Statements,” says Fanny Assingham, “were too much like theories, in which one lost one’s way,” and I believe that too many questions are either judgments or statements. Now a musical conversation might present information (that my ignorance of composition does not understand), but certainly music performs an action to which response can be made or refused. In The Ninth: Beethoven and the World in 1824, Harvey Sachs recounts the story of a composer who arises from his piano having played a recent composition for a small, intimate audience. “Ah, how beautiful,” a guest comments at the conclusion of the piece, “and what does it mean?” The composer nodded his head and returned to the piano and played the piece again. Music means itself and it might inspire meaning in the listener. Jacques Barzun has said, “ . . . it is plain that the composer might use sounds to set off a particular stirring within us. But the stirring is nameless, so that if it does not accompany the words of a text and yet we want to refer to it, we have to make up some analogy.” Meaning and fulfillment depends on the listener’s attention to the conversation and the light it allows to flow in. Conversation, as Fanny recognizes, does let in the light but the listener must define the nature and consequence of that light. And the conversations in the musical trios last evening let some light flow through the cracks.
            I recalled an earlier concert program featuring Beethoven’s Violin Concerto that I had years ago attended with my daughter. She played the violin. At the time she hadn’t been all that excited about either the concert or the company—all adults— but she acceded to be my companion for the evening. We had seats in the upper balcony. The violinist whose name I do not recall was a young thin woman and she was dressed in a lovely gold full length dress. Daughter was sitting back in her chair almost expectantly but with a certain defiance. But when the concerto began and the soloist entered the conversation my daughter’s eyes opened wide and she sat up and forward in her chair into a position that did not change throughout the concerto’s three movements. I do not know through what crack the light allowed to flow in for her, but she was in those moments illuminated. And I was in those moments very happy. And the wonderful conversation I shared last evening between the piano, violin and cello somehow spoke to me of how happy I had felt at my daughter’s response at that earlier concert and reminded me what visceral happiness felt like, and though in the present I did not experience that happiness, I recalled that visionary gleam and I was happy. The conversation in the music last evening remembered that for me.
            Sometimes the conversation in a piano or organ recital takes place between the left hand and the right and between the treble and bass lines. Sometimes the simple conversation in single instrument recitals takes place simply between the music and the listener. But as the compositions grow in size then the conversation becomes more complex and occurs between instruments to which the listeners are privileged eavesdroppers. In all these instances—and more—the light enters through the crack that exists in everything. I think that what is important is to acknowledge the crack and then to see the light. That crack is the inevitable distance between . . . perhaps that is the meaning of the story above: it seemed obvious to the pianist that the listener wasn’t engaged in the conversation and therefore, the pianist sat down again and spoke.