The Absolute, page 30
It’s because his whole being refused to suffer again after the loss of Vera that Alexander couldn’t know or accept, much less say to Tatiana, that every one of his words and thoughts and acts in the last months had been dedicated to her. This recognition would have been equivalent to admitting he was losing Vera again. Pain thus opposed itself to the confession of the truth, and exerted its tyrannical hold; instead of embracing the truth that saw itself prevented from coming to light, and unaware of the true reasons for his difficulty behaving the right way, my uncle went over events, trying to analyze their respective positions, seeking alternatives, justifying himself or, what comes to the same thing, beginning to ask whether error could exist if he hadn’t encouraged it. At heart—he thought—Tatiana was also responsible . . . Sometimes she was a little unfair. Not just a little. She exaggerated. All women did. It was imprinted on their character to mark the force of a conviction with an abuse of brio. The problem came from an absence of regulation of this excess, a riot of this intemperance. In Tatiana, a lack of control made her too unjust. After all, he’d tried, he’d done things for her! Hadn’t he?
Convinced he wouldn’t be able to discover what Tatiana wanted from him through logic (if she did want something), my uncle opted to trust instinct. Working from intuition, he chose to respond to the request that, strictly speaking, Tatiana had never formulated and to go deeper in the direction he’d already chosen, which had given such poor results. Like a physician who calculates the success or failure of a cure by adjusting the proportions of a tincture, the subtle oscillation between poison and medicine, he judged that the error had its origin in an insufficient dose of his music: Tatiana had come to know it, she’d been sufficiently steeped within it, but she hadn’t sunk deeply into it enough times for this act of spiritual communion to transport her to a higher dimension. Additional and heavy measures of his gift were needed to produce a transformative experience, something that raised her to his heights and made her just like him, a part of his own being.
“I want the torrents of my music to pass through her metaphysical body and flood her with an orgy of sensations,” he wrote to his friend and agent Koussevitzky.
9
Unable to know exactly what was going through Alexander’s head, Tatiana saw in his didactic insistence only the violent gesture of a man who lacked consideration for anyone’s feelings but his own. In fact, one of the most irritating elements in the matter was that my uncle was publicly taken to be a champion of the new aesthetic sensibility, along with Blok, Diaghilev, Nijinsky, Stanislavski, Artsybashev and Kschessinska, among others. What could one think but that this conduct put him at the border of moral duplicity, or straightforward hypocrisy? For Tatiana, these characteristics affected his music, or at least began to affect the perception she had of it. Gradually, the exasperations, romantic outbursts and passages of misty emotion (the famous “atmospheres”) in his compositions began to grow intolerable to her. And this wasn’t only because Alexander’s demands on her functioned as an imposition, but also, and above all, because in their unfolding, every one of the features of his style worked as a layer that enveloped and lulled to sleep her own tastes, the manifestation of her own artistic possibilities. Alexander—Tatiana believed—was the vampire who drank from her blood to make her his mirror, the sole reflection in which one of his species can contemplate himself. But this swapping of youth for immortality demanded two things of her she was no longer prepared to give: admiration for the usurper of her identity (tenuous as this was) and agreement to the operation. So, at the same time as she remained by his side despite everything—because love exercises a reign superior to the reasons used by intelligence to disparage it—Tatiana offered a growing resistance, and used the flame of her hate as the key element of her individuation. She became cynical and, in public, allowed herself cutting comments and belittling remarks such as: “I know his true self all too well.”
Faced with this state of things, and with the greatest delicacy, Alexander’s circle of friends suggested to him the convenience of distancing himself a bit from a woman who seemed to have applied the better part of her energies to making his life miserable. The curious thing—the curious thing for these friends—was that my uncle stubbornly rejected these ideas. In his pupil’s harshness he seemed to find the material for a shameful satisfaction. So his friends went silent or themselves avoided being present for further scenes of the uncomfortable performance. Especially because after a while, these displays of feminine irritation, which these friends tolerated only because they seemed to have become a requirement for approaching or staying close to Scriabin, took on the form of unwanted confidences. Tatiana had modified her form of behavior, and rather than confront him directly, she availed herself of Alexander’s friends as the repositories of her disappointment, the witnesses to her everlasting suffering. As if it hadn’t been enough to openly harass and belittle him, she now used them to complain. Some of these friends, equipped with a reasonable share of subtlety, saw a certain degree of progress in this change. If rage had begun to give way to grievance, then once its litany had been exhausted, it could yield to some form of reconciliation. But this didn’t seem to happen, or at least not immediately. The grievance extended over time, and in Tatiana’s voice it sounded like a high-pitched noise, not projected but natural, a perpetual piercing sound that drilled into their eardrums and their patience. During this period, many friends moved away from my uncle, alleging he’d been hypnotized by a Medea capable of ruining everything. Others denounced the effect of my uncle’s vanity, in negative: Tatiana spun around him at the rhythm of her accusations, and in the dark waters churned up by her insolence, my uncle found the dregs of an unequaled devotion.
One night, however . . .
As they did every night at the same time, the circle of intimates had gathered in the big living room, hoping Alexander would perform something new from what he was working on. Instead, as was usual now, they received only his silence, a silence that looked thoughtful but was oppressive, and was accompanied by the sharp contrast of Tatiana’s commentaries. The moment was despicable; Tatiana revealed the wounds of unsuccessful love as she’d never dared before with such rawness; her usual biting criticisms were accompanied by dredged-up intimacies: she said the ardor my uncle offered the world, the torrent of the music that sent dupes and music lovers into ecstasy, motivating hope or overwhelming them with the promise of an infinite deluge, was actually a leftover trickle of energy limited to expansion in a single direction, because—and here Tatiana raised her tone of voice, went pale, and hitting sternum with right thumb, presented herself as testament and proof—she knew well the price to pay for the composition of these fatuous enchantments, a mere mélange of hysterical chords and capricious arabesques (the hysterical arabesque of his capricious chord), was the withdrawal of the author from every human contact. Tired of putting up with his fussy behavior and prudishness, she could no longer conceal the fact that Alexander spent days, weeks, even months showing signs of terminal exhaustion: he lay beside her as if he were a dead man. His supposed absorbing passion, which led him to fill one sheet of music paper after another, after another, with his scribbles, thus represented a gift that cloaked a shameful farce, the overblown lyrical imitation of an impotent Casanova. Obviously, sometimes—here Tatiana rushed to dismiss an objection no one had formulated—Alexander attempted to lurch himself out of inaction; abandoning his position as a living mummy, he’d sometimes lean toward her, make a move in search of her love, but at those moments she’d reject him with anger and disgust. Why did she do that? Why not accept these tokens of effort? Not because it was far too late: she’d already offered enough demonstrations of her patience, her personal sacrifice for him, a sacrifice by now part of her deepest past, tucked away in a pouch of the most gorgeous and expensive velvet, kept in a glass jewelry box in the most isolated corner of the museum of her naïveté. Of course, it would never have been too late if Alexander were operating sincerely. But alas, she knew him: in his every dying bishop’s gesture to appeal to her as a companion and woman, there was nothing but fear and calculation; calculation of the advantages and disadvantages of keeping or losing her, and fear his rejection of a normal and regular contact would at some point force her to declare, precisely as she was doing now, the impossibility of maintaining a link of convenience in which she’d given everything to the point of exhaustion, until she was a wreck, whereas he hadn’t given anything in the slightest. Nothing. Not a thing, not the slightest damn thing. Have I explained myself, do I need to say any more, or do you understand me now?
After saying all of this, Tatiana went quiet, exhausted and also a little frightened. What she’d said had broken something; her excess had courted the specter of the irreparable. Alexander, who throughout the whole of the woman’s monologue had kept silent, jaw resting gravely on his chest, now lifted his head and remarked in a casual tone:
“For some time now, I’ve felt the need to travel.”
After these words, his friends made their excuses and left. This time it was Tatiana who visited my uncle’s bedroom. She stayed all night long.
10
Branded by many as an “aspiring aristocrat,” my uncle set off on a journey identical to those so beloved by the nomadic mysticism of the Russian peasantry. These aren’t about clothes worn or deities worshipped but the idea of abandoning everything, of cutting ties from a previous existence and symbolically “dying” for one’s fellow man. The outer path, the pilgrimage, becomes the inner path, and the pilgrim, the restless dead man, is a stranniki . . .
This period of wandering is one of the most fascinating and least known periods of his life. The lack of precise information and contradictory versions locate it on the narrow fringe between myth and legend.10 His trip was drawn out in time and spread out in space. He contracted malaria in Bukhara, dysentery in Balochistan, scurvy in Kurdistan, bedinka in Aschkabadian and dropsy in Tibet. He met priests, engineers, doctors and princes, people who stood out due to not only their appearances but also their vigor, self-control and compassion. He traveled for part of his journey with some of them. Rocky wildernesses, inaccessible locations. Some of this, especially in places where the nature had a desolate splendor, transmitted itself to him as a vibration of the material, as sound. Here was the truth of Madame Blavatsky’s words, now as firsthand evidence. This vibration, which went from the world to the Universe, or maybe from the Universe to the world, ricocheted against his own body, or reverberated through it, in accordance with his height and tonality. The intense yet delicate experience, of an extremely refined subtlety, united him with physical things even as it detached him from his being, separated him into an infinite number of slender psychic layers and recomposed him, folding him into a totality while preserving his difference from it.
In Tabriz, he learned the secrets of hypnosis, a skill he promised never to use. He traveled through Turkistan, Orenburg, Sverdlovsk, Merv, Kafiristan, the Gobi Desert. He followed the golden path to Samarkand. At some point, he visited the monastery of Sarmoung, and walked around the three main patios (which represent the exoteric, mesoteric and esoteric circles of humanity). Although it’s probable that this visit occurred only on the allegorical plane, or that he gained admission to its patios and cloisters by the privileged route granted to some eminent men through the door of dream, what’s certain is that he was present for the demonstrations of sacred dances. At the monastery, Sufis introduced him to the knowledge of the mehkeness, and Talmudists enlightened him about the mysteries of the Merkabah. One night, under a full moon, an old priest supplied him with a concoction that produced mydriasis: with his pupil dilated to the level of absurdity, and his visual and auditory sensations increased, he experienced colors, tones, reflections, iridescences he’d never dreamed possible. The real world and its miseries and torments disappeared from his mind as a truly divine atmosphere surrounded him. Scriabin understands what his compositions have been missing until now; his task as an artist is only getting started. Projected against a background of black sky, the lustrous stars tremble and begin to move as matter loses reality to become essence.
Then he loses himself in Asia. Some travelers see him circulating amid the gymnosophists of Gedrosia, the koinobis of Egypt and the rishis of Kashmir. It’s said that he makes a pilgrimage with the monks of India called Hossein, and that he seeks the worshippers of the fire of Zoroaster and the Persian and Chaldean magicians, who want to impose primeval truth by reading the uncorrupted original version of Zend Avesta. In the mountain chain that borders the Tibetan Plateau, he discovers that under the scrubland of dry grass and slopes of sand, ancient civilizations are buried that competed in pomp with Babylon. At the edge of the oasis of Tchertchen he stumbles across the ruins of immense cities, destroyed in the tenth century by Mongols. The wind, which blows endlessly, sweeps through to conceal and reveal copper coins, shards of broken glass, coffins that hold the perfectly conserved mummified remains of tall men with thick heads of hair, their skin ravaged by psoriasis. Alexander finds the real Nofretamon, a smiling young man with eyes closed by gold discs.
There are some who calculate that in earthly terms, this entire period of spiritual initiation should be measured in years. The near exact authentic figure, however, can be deduced from the fact that Julian Scriabin was born a few days after my uncle returned to Saint Petersburg.
The arrival of a son seemed to ease the couple’s tensions. With Tatiana busy breastfeeding, Alexander could at last go back to composing and giving concerts without greater disturbances. Of course, this claim is relative, given the serenity of the environment found itself somewhat altered: the use of the trill, which in my uncle’s works abandons all decorative function to repeat with dramatic insistence, should be read in direct relation with the protests of the baby, who was born with certain digestive disorders. The use he makes of this circumstance shows him to be a mature artist capable of incorporating any element, even the most unlikely, into the development of his work. And it’s precisely during this period that Alexander notes the possibility his work might have a “use” different from the expressive and aesthetic intentions that produced it.
This discovery was a consequence of his link to a couple of infamous personalities.
* * *
10 Imprecise and vague as it was, this journey was powerfully inspiring for a good part of the Russian intelligentsia, especially the “exoticists” of various kinds. His influence grew to fever pitch in the case of George Ivanovich Gurdjieff, who in his invented autobiography Meetings with Remarkable Men attributes to himself each and every one of my uncle’s vital experiences.
Mimetically following this journey, the self-proclaimed “maestro of the Fourth Way” also claims to possess abilities as a composer, inspired by his disciple and companion, the pianist Thomas de Hartmann, who studied with Arensky and Taneyev and had my uncle’s work strongly recommended to him. Strictly speaking, all the Gurdjieffian hot air about a supposed “System” of his invention, his convoluted Law of Seven and Law of Three, and his “Ray of Creation” that transforms the Universe into a cosmological musical scale (“do” as God, “si” as Universe, “la” as Milky Way, “sol” as Sun, “fa” as planets of the Sun, “mi” as Earth and “re” as Moon) can be understood as a gaudy vulgarization of Alexander Scriabin’s work.
11
P. Badmayev, a famous doctor or unscrupulous fraud who claimed to have a solid grasp of Tibetan medicine, was the one who supplied Grigori Yefimovich Rasputin with the herbs, perfumes and poultices he used to treat the hysteria of the Tsarina and the hemophilia of the heir Prince Alexei. The crooked staretz and his dealer had become an influential pair in the private life of the imperial family. Of the two, Rasputin functioned as the prima donna, the public figure, while Badmayev served as the power behind the throne. Through their actions, both of them had earned the hate of the most undeviating Slavophile sectors of the Russian army, which accused them of being spies in the service of foreign powers, ironic because if the foolish Nicholas II had paid attention to the lewd monk’s warnings when the time came, Russia wouldn’t have got involved in the war against Germany that resulted in the October Revolution or the massacre that liquidated the Romanov dynasty, broke up its imperial army and installed the Bolshevik leadership in the Kremlin, which was manipulated by William of Prussia’s intelligence services and ended up signing away a good part of its territory to German barbarians at Brest-Litovsk. It’s true that, being the sort they were, only the idiot of the Tsar and the cretin of his imported wife could believe in the sincerity and purity of intention of the miracle-working duo, which demonstrates that stupidity hits the mark more often than good judgment. In effect, although they got together “with the political dregs of Saint Petersburg” (the phrase belongs to the delicate Prince Yusupov), formed by characters like the journalist Manasevich-Manuylov and the prince M. M. Andronikov, in political terms Rasputin and Badmayev looked out only for the superior interests of the nation and its monarch. Of course, this doesn’t conceal the flagrant fact that they took advantage of the autocrat’s gifts to grow rich with impunity. In addition, the royal affection made them arrogant and vulgar. Rasputin didn’t hush up his opinion that the aristocracy lacked Russian blood, calling its members dogs and accusing them of being parasites implanted in a generous soil that at any point might brutally cull them, while he defined himself as “the truth of the future and the lion of two worlds that will save them from revolutionary catastrophe.” In fact, in the court’s strained atmosphere, there weren’t lacking those who argued that his unbearable conduct, baffling fragmentary statements and incorrect speech had to be understood as a sign of the new times, to which nobles had to adapt for the sake of their own survival. And for this reason, they adored him even as they loathed him, and gave him their daughters, mothers, wives and lovers.
