On the Role of Anticipation in the Experience a Work of Art
Richard Strauss wrote Eine Alpensinfonie over four years, a triumph of realism that depicts 11 hours trudging a wide flank of the Alps in just above an hour depending on the tempo. For a month and a week I hummed in anticipation of hearing the Vienna Philharmonic play it at Carnegie Hall, listening, I think, eight times through, trying on my gut reactions in the walk-in closet of the sublime (through headphones). The morning of the concert, performing the mental ablutions necessary to wait on 57th street for rush tickets for four hours in the cold, I was overwhelmed with the realization of how thoroughly human experience is bound by the capacity of the bladder. I mean I had feelings in the genre of realism—this horrible and tender vision of the masterpieces stockpiled in the Louvre as a monumental succession of the fruit of piss breaks. My fatal mistake was that I wrote beforehand. Looking back, I wrote this: “A big problem with prayer is its unspecificity. I suppose that’s part of the humility in regards to who do you think you’re talking to. But I think it would be nice, regardless, for every evening, folks to get down on their knees and ask for exactly what they want. Annie asked me again yesterday if I prayed. I was down on my knees at the time.” I was only three and a half hours in the cold in advance of the box office opening, the first in line not to receive rush tickets.
This brief essay is about the role of anticipation in the experience of art. I was left at 11:07 a.m. on 6th Avenue holding the bruised plum of my disappointment. But that is only a turn of phrase, to say the bruised plum. I was pregnant then with an absence that was just beginning to moan and rattle, how a haunting, say of some quiet proper Victorian, could make a much bigger horror in the home than the live one who’d only tinkle a cup against a saucer as a maximum perturbation, repressed by the ordeal of actuality.
Annie B., my date, thank goodness, had a backup plan—other rush tickets to a play at the Armory called Love that, despite its title as monumental as an Alp, was a one-room drama imported from Britain about the plight of the inadequately housed. Those could be had online, sparing one the company of seniors and scalpers.
Rhinehart, the scalper directly ahead of me, had been explaining to another scalper, Greg, who, being houseless and having slept on the sidewalk, had the advantage of being first in line, how tattooing is an ancient human impulse, he said, of primitive men. He explained that to ornament is to disguise function and that this concealing (which we have tamed and ennobled with clothing) is why we have not yet discovered the function of human beings. Rhinehart’s usual occupation is the sale of used books on a folding table on 74th and Broadway and he is incredibly and proudly gullible or, rather, taken in by whatever the subject and argument of the most recent book he has read in order to advance his professional understanding—he sells one book at a time. Greg agreed. He had once met a Papuan on Avenue A waiting for the uptown bus who was so highly ornamented that it was clear to Greg that the Papuan’s cosmology held that to discover the function of humanity would be a disaster. Greg had a tattoo of a large breasted woman stepping off of a motorcycle.
A middle-aged Chinese woman named Cynthia brought eggs and apples from East Hampton to bribe me to hold her spot in front of me in line. Two young scholars, David and Julian, flashed hardboiled eggs from their jacket pockets to show they have been similarly befriended. After my rejection, I cracked the shell against the side of Carnegie Hall and ate it in the 7th Avenue sun. I had seven hours to kill until Love. I walked to the Chrysler building and the moment I entered its blood marble lobby of leaping industrial arcades I was told by a security guard that it is closed to the public. “How did you know I was the public?” I asked. “We are trained.” He answered, flatly. What is the purpose of art? Not to die of the real.
My day, that day, ended like this: after the play, which was too real to remember, I played the sunrise as a descending A-minor scale, the opening of Eine Alpensinfonie, on the steps of the Armory shielded from the the rain by its overhang through my phone’s minute tinny speaker cupped to Annie’s and my ears. Oh my G-d, I said. Oh my G-d! I know a little bit about composing, and Strauss, a Late Romantic, here did the typical strategy of tension and, after about five weeks of me humming, longer than even Wagner in his megalomaniac dream of endless melody could have ever hoped for, release. The performance, ending around that same time, encased in its exclusive room of gold and ivory: that was only the tip of the iceberg in the long duration of an artwork’s creeping geologic infection. But I was the iceberg.