For several years in my early 20’s, I was fascinated by the apocalypse. It held no religious meaning for me then—and nor does it now—but there was something about it that I found irresistible from an aesthetic point of view, and from a social point of view. I imagined all of us huddled together, trembling at first, as fire rained down from the sky. As the inferno raged on, our whimpering would slowly turn into cries of joy and raucous laughter. The calves would be slaughtered and the wine cellars emptied and the ripe fruit gathered in one last harvest. A great feast was laid on. Hesitant lovers made their long-delayed approaches and held each other close under a dark and darkening sky. There was an effusive blossoming of long-dormant humanity in those last hours, and I wished that I could find and subsequently remain forever in this condition, an ecstatic and endless present.
This admittedly-bizarre image may have come to me first as an undergraduate when I read Mikhail Bakhtin’s Rabelais and His World, a brilliant work of mid-century criticism in which the author identifies a “carnivalesque” mode in literature, fleeting moments when social truth is revealed through transgressive behavior during periods of literal or figurative carnival. Jesters are lauded as kings and masked princes wander the streets, freed from their courtly rituals of decorum and restraint, all submerged in the heaving throng. This image was so compelling to me at the time that I wrote my first symphony in response to it, giving it the subtitle “Les Carnivalesques.”
When, a few years later, I began work on a second symphony, I returned to this end-of-days atmosphere. Once again, though, I wasn’t fixated on the cataclysm itself, but rather the infinite and (I was sure) celebratory stillness just before the end. I wanted to dwell in that moment when society would confront its collective mortality and understand, at last, the absurdity and triviality of the conventions that bind our everyday behavior once they are viewed against the immense backdrop of true and monumental catastrophe. I called the symphony Crime in the House of Names and gave each movement a rather baroque subtitle:
On the last night, there were vultures in the air and wolves outside the door; with hands raised and throats wide, a cry went up to heaven.
The mirrors reflected the play, and the joy.
Sparkling fools, they were aglitter and aflame.
Alone, but not afraid, it was the clocks that sang the world to sleep.
The last movement was a setting of Rilke’s “Herbsttag” for orchestra and mezzo-soprano. Rilke’s poetry seemed to me then, as it does now, the greatest embodiment of this idea of lateness, of a beautiful thing in its final days and hours. In literature, Thomas Mann captured this feeling best. In music, it was Gustav Mahler. In film, Visconti.
In hindsight, I am very sure that this idea first came to me after reading Adorno’s iconic essay about Beethoven’s late work, which led me in turn to Edward Saïd’s elegant short book on a related theme, On Late Style. The latter was published in 2006, the same year that I began graduate school at the University of Oregon and first had the luxury of a community of artists and intellectuals with whom I could discuss and celebrate these ideas for hours at a time. But both Adorno and Saïd were concerned with the work that artists produced at the end of their lives: an individualized lateness. I, on the other hand, was drawn to artists who themselves represented the final flowering of decades or centuries-long artistic traditions, or at least who were supposed to have done in the historical framework through which I learned about the history of art and ideas. Mahler was the “last symphonist” (of course this was not true, but it was a fiction that invested his work with greater meaning for me at the time). Mann created elaborate allegorical eulogies to the crumbling social world of pre-war Europe, but did so using the prose style of 19th-century realism. Visconti gave us staggeringly detailed visual recreations of Venice or Bavaria or Sicily at moments of intense social upheaval or psychological decay.
In my own creative imagination, I found that the aesthetic of “lateness” connected, improbably, with the chiseled and statuesque prose style of the King James Bible, parts of which I read for the first time during this period as part of a larger project to understand the foundations of western intellectual life. I created abstract instrumental works with titles like Quintet: at the end of the long feast of goodness and timeand Let There Be Not Darkness But Light. In both of these pieces, along with many others, I sought to capture the interlinked feelings of terror and ecstatic, boundless joy that I imagined would accompany this final feast.
It was around this time, too, that I first took an interest in literal feasts and made my acquaintance with food, wine, cooking, and entertaining. When I was 22, long before I could competently assemble a meal, I threw my first dinner party. Guests were asked to dress formally in order to dine at a shabby kitchen table in a ramshackle house a few miles from the paper mills and pulp processing plants in Tacoma, Washington. The spartan undergraduate meal was broken into an interminable series of “courses.” Cheap supermarket wines were drunk deliberately as if selected with care from a great wine cellar. In one memorable photograph, a guest holds a $5 bottle of merlot up to the camera in an ironic display of mock connoisseurship. Most importantly, “serious” topics were discussed in a preposterously high register of language. We fancied ourselves student radicals in ‘68, or Hemingways and Gertrude Steins in Parisian garrets, or Diego Riveras and Frida Kahlos in a little blue house in Mexico City, or nightclub patrons in Weimar Berlin, or Pollack and his friends in a downtown loft, or whomever, wherever, whenever. These were all basically interchangeable to us then, so long as the things we said mattered and, to each other (if not to anyone else), they did. At a moment when most of the other men I knew were playing video games or team sports or chugging beer from kegs in basement parties, or preparing for careers in business, all of this felt incredibly transgressive. Inviting a few friends over to eat a long dinner was a profound assertion that I wanted, somehow, to live differently.
Over the years, it turned out that throwing dinner parties was an affectation which—like the rare garment that remains improbably on-trend year after year—has proved to be a remarkably durable habit as I have grown up, built a career, started a family, and bid farewell to that particular phase of my life. After a few years, my aesthetic fascination with this single image—a great feast on the very last night—began to fade. I am still guided by the power of image-as-metaphor, the notion that a location or a landscape or a real or imagined moment in time can be a container or a gathering place for ideas. But now, when my mind wanders to the place where ideas are born, I find myself alone and lost in the forest somewhere, as far from the human world as possible. The feast continues in my social life (and I hope it always will), but it is no longer central to my creative life.
Which brings me to my final observation, and the impetus for this short essay: during all those years that I spent ruminating on the aesthetic and social implications of the end times, I always took for granted that they would find us gathered together in a great, huddled mass of humanity. It never once—not for a moment—occurred to me that a catastrophe would be followed by a state of unending social distance, or that human closeness would be the cause of, rather than the solution to, our existential threat.
For the past several weeks, we have been pulling further and further away from one another, as we must do in order to stem the tide of this bizarre plague. During my lifetime, every significant social, political, or natural disaster has called for us to reaffirm our connections to one another, to gather ourselves up to sing and to hear songs, to eat and to share our food, to embrace one another, to let our children play together, and to address the divine or the great mystery, each in our own way. All of these activities were carried out in the largest groups we could muster. Indeed, in those times the magnitude of our gatherings served as the measure of the intensity of our determination to resist whatever adversity we then faced. But now, that inexhaustible cure—togetherness—has become the source of the sickness itself. That, for me, is why this moment feels so singularly disorienting.
