Robert considers heroism, music and physics: Absolute Zero

Who by Fire: Chapter 34 Audio and prose

Chagall

Note: Update: Robert on Absolute Zero and heroism …

You can start reading here or anywhere, then go back. See Table of Contents. Come in the middle? Robert is the narrator who discovers after his wife Lena has died that she had a lover, Isaac. Evan is Isaac’s wife. Robert is on a search for how he lost Lena: He’s creating the story through memory, invention and a search for the truth and his role in what happened—and by stalking Isaac.

Absolute Zero

Lena comes to me in fire and music. Stravinsky’s “Firebird” was playing at the Kennedy Center—the ballet with recorded music. I asked Gershon to go after I learned that he’s a big ballet fan, but hasn’t seen much of it except on television. To my mind, that’s like going to a concert with recorded music. I figured I could bear the recorded music and he wouldn’t be bothered by the muddy sound system. He’d get to see the real thing in person. I’d assumed they would use Balanchine’s choreography. Nobody’s done it better because Balanchine and Stravinsky collaborated. But they didn’t use Balanchine. Gershon said too much was going on and the costumes were bizarre. There were a lot of feathers and peasant outfits. There was nothing here of Chagall’s paintings, how I imagined the set would be done. So, we were both disappointed. But I consider the story more or less irrelevant, anyway, because it’s the music that gets to me. And I’m more interested in what the music says to me independent of any story.

This probably explains why I know every note, bar and orchestration of every song I listened to on the radio in the 60s, but know few of the lyrics. Lately, out of curiosity, I’ve listened to many of the lyrics on classic-rock radio. As it turns out, while I’ll grant that I missed some really good stuff in the old days, most of the lyrics, with the exception of Dylan’s perhaps, deserve to be ignored.

While Gershon was watching bad ballet, I closed my eyes. I don’t appreciate ballet, don’t really get it. I focused on the recorded music played on a less than effective sound system. The speakers in even the best sound system can’t ever exactly reproduce the same sound waves as the live instruments. It’s an impossibility the way reaching absolute zero, the temperature at which all motion down to and including the subatomic level ceases, is impossible to reach despite the fact that it is a fixed and precisely known temperature and the object of much modern-day effort to achieve a laboratory reading as close to it as possible. This, the Third Law of Thermodynamics, seems to me an apt metaphor for the inability of a recording to reproduce exactly.

Similarly, if events can be said to have occurred in an exact manner, perception can never capture that exactitude. I put it this way: I recall but I will not “reach absolute zero.”

I remember when she lay in bed and cried over the Second Law of Thermodynamics. She said, “That’s my problem. I’m going to entropy.”

And I stay in the game, pursuing the elusive through what you may call the tortured metaphor of a fire, a controlled burn that did happen, that I witnessed, that resulted in ash, grass turns to milk and I dream about glass because heroes break glass to get through fire.

Though I am no hero, though I can’t break through to save her, though I’m alone, I have the music in my head.

Stravinsky switches between the ominous themes in minor keys and the glorious themes in major keys, with large variations in volume for both, much of it played at the extremes. These forces struggle throughout for the upper hand, and the outcome is not clear until the end like a good movie. While we generally know which is which (ominous and glorious), things get complicated. Some of the quieter glorious passages have an ominous undertone. Some instruments serve as an “instrument” of the ominous at some points and the glorious at others. There are some steady voices—the horns repeatedly sounding caution; the oboe as the only consistent (almost without exception) expression of hope.

It’s like the movie North by Northwest, which is not so different from The Firebird—all tug between good and bad, with the good guys and bad guys clearly drawn. We know who is who; the only thing we don’t know is who will prevail (theoretically, if you put aside the fact that it’s Cary Grant).

Cary in North by Northwest

A frantic battle ensues—this is pretty late in the piece—the fifth section; the sections are short and the whole piece is only forty-one minutes, twelve seconds. The next scene moves into a lush melody with a strong hint of foreboding, or even despair, with cries and pleas from solo instruments.

And logic tells me the laws rule.

Once when I’d complained that the new dishwasher—a German-made product that supposedly was built to last—wouldn’t drain, “The damn thing is two years old and broken,” she’d laughed and said, “You forget the Second Law of Thermodynamics.” On the day when she wept, I said, “But you forget the First Law, the Conservation of Energy: Energy can be neither created or destroyed.”

C.P. Snow provided this shorthand to remember the laws: 1. You cannot win. 2. You cannot break even. 3. You cannot get out of the game.

Absolute Zero

In Vaudreuil, Quebec, a man, sixty-two, was inside the cab of his tractor-trailer after a highway accident with another truck. Flames erupted on the exterior of the tractor, on the passenger side. The man inside tried to get out, but the driver’s door was jammed shut. The hero, thirty-one, an off-duty police officer, drove upon the scene and stopped. He climbed up to the driver’s door, and saw the man struggling inside the cab. Unable to open the door, the hero broke out the glass, reached inside and began to pull the trapped man out, but his leg was caught inside the cab. Someone else came to help at the driver’s side of the tractor and supported the trapped man while the off-duty police officer leaned into the cab and pulled the trapped man free, with flames everywhere. The man was on the pavement and they were trying to get him and themselves away from the tractor-trailer when an explosion occurred. The tractor-trailer was engulfed by flame, destroyed. The man who had been in the cab, inside the glass, survived.

He can’t stop thinking about glass.△

Table of Contents

Coming next: Chapter 35: “Lena’s Garden”

Only Connect, all sections, and this serial novel come from my heart and soul—and ten years of research. I know the saying ‘time is money’: I couldn’t help but pursue this story. If you have already gone paid, my heart goes out to you with my thanks.

Love,