The Absolute, page 31
Badmayev, who had less intense sexual appetites or more diversified interests, observed that Rasputin’s brutal conduct did nothing but fuel the conditions for their near disgrace, and so he applied himself to looking for a solution that favored them. Especially since the latest political and military setbacks had struck a severe blow to the general belief in monarchy by divine right. To sum up: it was a situation that guaranteed life to nobody, much less this couple of outsiders. It isn’t strange that in his desperate search for protection, after running around several government offices requesting endorsements from functionaries who days later were riddled with bullets or blown to pieces, Badmayev thought of Alexander Scriabin.
The Tibetan doctor presented himself before my uncle with the justification that he wanted to commission a piece celebrating the court gardener’s birthday. My uncle, despite having heard a few things about his visitor, didn’t show much interest in the offer. Alarmed by the curt reception, Badmayev scrapped his excuses and revealed his true aim:
“My dear Alexander Nikolayevich, I come like a pilgrim begging you to hear his supplications. I have detailed information about your recent trip and have been able to make an accurate evaluation of the planes on which your current preoccupations unfold, and so I know well—better even than you do!—the dimensions and reach of your future concerns.”
“What are you talking about?” said my uncle.
“My dear Alexander Nikolayevich! Of all the current composers, you are the only one who understands music to be a superior revelation transfused with invisible energy that could influence the world of phenomena; you are the only inheritor of ancient knowledge. This is why I have dared bother you with a request that might seem an absurdity, nearly an infamy, but that at heart is directly linked to the development of your labors. It involves protecting the earthly sheath of a soul that is holy, though in appearance wayward, along with, of course, my own . . . I need . . . it’s a small thing to ask of you, but it would be a miracle to obtain it . . . I need a harmony, a specific vibration appropriate for that soul, something like a chord of the pleroma, a kind of plenitude able to modify the rules of the physical universe and grant invulnerability to the person to whom the harmony corresponds. Is it possible to achieve this?”
“Are you asking me for a personal aura made out of music?” asked Scriabin.
Noticing a mocking lilt in the tone of my uncle’s voice, Badmayev stood up and coldly responded:
“Honor among mystics . . . If some reincarnation of your Greek maestro were present, I’d ask him for this favor. Since that is impossible, I’m asking it of you. And of course, your efforts will be splendidly compensated. In this and other worlds.”
And with a gesture more elegant than might be expected from someone of his physique and appearance, he let go of his visiting card, which gave three turns in the air (Alexander heard its journey as a succession of fourth intervals in different variations), before it dropped with a clean flutter onto a pewter tray gathering the ashes of a fragrant incense stick from India.
12
No more than a week had passed since the visit before my uncle decided to study the contents of Badmayev’s offer. Perhaps, as the doctor claimed, the proposal was in line with his interests and pointed toward the development of the traditional knowledge he’d renewed contact with during his trip. In addition, something about Badmayev was very familiar to him . . . Could he think of him as a pale Asian version of Madame Blavatsky, come back as one of her multifaceted mirrors to give him another shove toward some form of truth?
The period of collaboration between Alexander Scriabin, P. Badmayev and Grigori Rasputin is a little-known chapter in the history of music and Russian mysticism. Generally, my uncle tends to be thought about as yet another victim to the forceful magnetism of the Tsarina’s protégé. Truth is, Rasputin was little more to him than a freakish laboratory specimen and object of curiosity, whom he had the good judgment to keep away from his home. But he was intrigued by the monk’s unkempt and slovenly appearance, by his fascination with the tedious ceremonies of dissolute life, by his apathy toward the joys of the intelligence.
“My thoughts are like birds in the sky, they flit this way and that, and I can’t do anything to stop it,” said Rasputin.
He was a man who read badly, wrote lopsidedly and was ignorant of the rules of orthography, not to mention one who never memorized his acquaintances’ last names—after submitting women to his instincts, he’d refer to them by nicknames like Beauty, Little Star, Baby Bee, Curls or Gorgeous, just to avoid mix-ups. He was a theatrical show-off, the kind of feminine male who needed to reaffirm his personality by making himself the permanent center of attention.
“Everybody wants to be on top, but only one manages it,” he told my uncle the day Badmayev introduced them. Then he showed him around his rooms and gave him a tour of his properties: “I had a filthy shack and now just look at the big house I’ve laid my hands on. This pillow costs six hundred rubles and this gold crucifix is priceless, because the Tsar gave it to me as a mark of distinction. See? It has N, N for Nicholas, engraved into it with a blowtorch. And this portrait of me, what do you think? What burning eyes! Don’t think I’m picking bits of food from my beard while the artist paints me. I’m thinking. I have so much to think about. You’d be astonished if I told you just one of my thoughts. Do you see these Easter icons, these miniature golden eggs? If you turn a crank, you can split the ruby down the middle so a diamond-studded carriage pops out. Inside are the Tsar and Tsarina and the children, and I am that little doll doing turns as it waves, blessing the world. Look, look at this letter from Alexandra Feodorovna! She gave it to me herself, from her own hand. What do you say? Can you read? I don’t know where I left my glasses . . .”
“I am incapable of making any decision, Grigori, without having consulted you first; I will always ask you everything . . . Even if they all rise up against you, I shall not abandon you,” read my uncle.
“Mama loves me a lot,” Rasputin shed a false tear. Then he put away the letter and showed him to his favorite tavern, where they spent most of the night. While Alexander looked on, the monk drank, shrieked as he danced, clicked his heels, yelled, hugged the balalaika players, threw glasses into the air, stomped on them with his reindeer-fur boots and opened his shirt to bare his hairy chest. Then, exhausted, he sat down next to my uncle and confided in him:
“Although some think I’m acting, I’m not a clown. Ever since I was a boy, I’ve understood there’s an enormous force inside me and I have no power over it. The only thing I know is all that one needs to know in life: how to impress others. If you want to create a strong effect, you have to speak little, restricting yourself to pronouncing brief, clipped, even incomprehensible phrases. No need to worry about meaning; the rest will take it upon themselves to find it. The less people understand something, the more value they give to it. Idiots are everywhere and the Spirit blows where it pleases. I’m aware what you’re thinking, my dear . . . ! Where’s Badmayev? Sometimes, I suspect that instead of giving me Tibetan medicines he stocks me with chemical products. At least, the smell . . . What’s doing turns through that little head of yours? I’d like you to hug me! You’re my friend, aren’t you? The people suffer greatly and no day or hour goes by that their Little Father doesn’t think of them. War would be insanity. I behold red seas. Our army isn’t prepared for confrontation. Much less against a precise, machine-like Germany. In battle we’ll know only how to generously spill our Slavic blood. War is brutal slaughter, and there’s no truth or beauty in it. While drinking, I talk about our country, but I never let slip anything a foreign power might use. Of course, I accept any contribution to the cause of peace. Etch this on your brain: soon, very soon, there will be a tremendous fire. It will engulf everything. If before you finish your work, I am the victim of a criminal attempt, I want you to make it known that the intellectual author of the event was not our poor Tsar but those nasty red bugs. Do politics interest you? To conquer a walled fort and conquer a woman requires the same strategy. One must treat ladies like whores and whores like ladies: that’s the key to success in love. What differentiates a lady from a whore? Money and position. Everyone is equal and nobody’s a nobody. And who am I? Father Grigori, he who lets Russia speak from his mouth. You must protect me, because if I were to die, the catastrophe would be to our land. Embrace me! Are you my friend or not?”
After that long night that ended with the staretz baptizing the sawdust on the floor with his vomit, my uncle accepted Badmayev’s request. Even though the Tibetan doctor had offered him an astronomical figure for the creation of an effective musical carapace, my uncle was moved not by an interest in the money, but by the fact that in the request he’d glimpsed an element, as old as it was new, that would turn out to be of central importance when plotting the coordinates of the Mysterium.
Of course, there will be those who point out a certain contradiction in the fact that a work like this one, whose purpose and results have no comparison in the entire history of humanity, found a point of origin in Rasputin. Why him instead of any other? Why surround that beast with a protective aura?
Beyond the fact that the blend of the crude and the sublime forms a part of the aesthetic panorama in this period, it remains understandable that because of the life he lived, the dissolute monk embodied an interesting figure for my uncle; in a sense, he could be compared with a Judas of the tavern, a representative of our degraded species. As such, to rescue him from the darkness with the fiery magic of his art would be a Promethean task or, to continue the comparison and extend the use of hyperbole, would mean his transformation into a new Jesus.11
Now Alexander faced the problem of making good on the request. Badmayev’s assignment hadn’t been a mere allegory but a desperate plea. Badmayev was convinced of the possibility that music could “materialize.” And after all . . . if Pythagoras had said that the Universe vibrated in C, why wouldn’t it be possible to create a musical field around a body . . . ? A specific vibration at a specific frequency could produce physical results. The chords on Piano A that reverberate on Piano B in another room (“sympathetic resonance”). The contralto breaking a crystal glass with her high pitch, a B note. Obviously those were easy exercises. But Badmayev had turned to him precisely for that reason: to go beyond this, to make the difficult possible until the unlikely became real. Now then, what notes or sounds might work to protect Rasputin from a murder, turning him into someone invulnerable or perhaps invisible?
Determined not to let himself be consumed by uncertainty, my uncle chose to advance in his hypothesis that the “carapace” had to respond somehow to the essence of Rasputin, to express, through musical notation, the very being of the monk, which should begin to vibrate when the melodies, harmonies and chords specially chosen for him were performed. His idea, although it evoked the new discoveries about electrical current, possesses more affinities with certain experiments carried out by entomologists of the period, who had come to the conclusion that chitinous surface coverings typically found on cockroaches, dung beetles, snails and ladybugs were not the product of the chance phenomena that evolutionary fates incorporate into the development of a species, but the result of a programmed internal secretion: as if these brainless critters were an integral part of a plan that included the perfection of their natural defenses, for the benefit of their survival and preservation. Obviously the process could be measured in millennia, in millions of years, and he didn’t have that much time to help the Tsarina’s favorite: he had to quickly find the few carapace-notes equivalent to the monk’s crude individual substance. If my uncle was wrong about the appropriate notation, and when the chord was performed, Rasputin’s being vibrated at an erroneous frequency, then the monk (among others) would run the risk of dissolving into a puddle of water.
The question was, at what frequency did the chords of this individual’s soul vibrate? Scrupulous historians might ask whether the tragic end of the staretz put Rasputin’s assassin, Prince Felix Yusupov, in a role as unexpected as it was fearsome: if he became the musical critic of Alexander Scriabin’s attempts. But this would be a myopic perspective for reflecting on the course of events.
For some time, my uncle tried to complete the assignment. He followed Rasputin everywhere, studying his gestures, behavior, relationships. Yet he sensed a dark energy in him, something untamable, a kind of internal shield or low emanation that blocked any scrutiny of his interior. In fact, there are still some who believe the mystic chord
(C/FK/BL/E/A/D) was a failed and provisional attempt to express the monk’s diabolical character. The only thing certain is that my uncle made a series of attempts, and these didn’t give the best results. When he communicated to Badmayev that the soul or essence of Rasputin had the opacity of a latrine and it was time to abandon him to his fate, the Tibetan doctor didn’t formulate any objection. With a sad and somewhat enigmatic smile, he answered that although Alexander could not appreciate it at the moment, his efforts would bear fruit in the course of time.12
* * *
11 Of course, just a short time later, driven by unhappiness, my uncle would notice that the balance necessary to preserve the microcosmos of every individual from catastrophe is correlated with the one indispensable for sustaining the macrocosmos. In this respect, we can now reveal that the most well-known aspect of his work, the “mystic chord,” expresses at a human level what the Mysterium does at a universal one. And it’s because of this difference in magnitude that the chord produces a practically instantaneous effect, while the Mysterium is a work that must develop over time, so its benefit spreads through all of Creation.
12 Did Badmayev have premonitions? Was the Tibetan doctor a master of the anticipatory arts? The fact he turned to my uncle demonstrates he possessed at least enough knowledge of physics and acoustics to know that objects vibrate at specific frequencies, and that given two sensitive objects of the same frequency, near each other or connected in space, a vibration of one will produce a vibration in the other as echo or response. Strictly speaking, knowledge about these matters does not imply any particular hermetic knowledge: the newspapers in those days, for instance, reported that a scientist from the United States had built a “phonautographic ear” using a stalk of hay, at the end of which he’d placed the ear of a dead man. When the scientist spoke into the ear, the hay traced sound waves over the surface of a piece of tinted glass. The result seemed to imitate fog waves over water.
Were Badmayev and Alexander Scriabin aware of further details about this experiment? What we do know is that the unusual combination throws a certain light on the purpose of the Mysterium: a composition, a vibration (or rather, an organized combination of vibrations) whose ultimate aim was to contrive a rippling series of modifications over the whole profane epidermis of the Universe.
13
Saint Petersburg is at the height of its glory. The sound of bells cleanses the air. Gold domes of orthodox churches, the sparkle of snow, ice skaters tracing arabesques over the frozen surface of the Neva River, which will soon hide the crazy monk’s dead body under its white cape. After a day spent on composition, Alexander celebrates the evening’s beauties by playing piano with his son Julian. Life spills like liquid honey over a crunchy slice of black bread, spread thick with butter. They entertain each other performing some very difficult pieces for four hands. Julian is a young genius, a musical phenomenon at his age, and, of course, my uncle is convinced that with the years his fame will eclipse that of Mozart. Although this isn’t his first born, only with him has he discovered the joys of paternity, owing to no fault in the children from his marriage with Vera, whose absence continues to cut him to the quick. But he was too busy with his own concerns at the start of his artistic vocation and heard the shouts and sobs and complaints as a disturbance to his work, while now, he no longer minds giving up the use of his hours. There’s an incomparable pleasure in witnessing the growth of offspring from our own blood, as we learn to cultivate the virtues of our own disappearance. Julian: his sallow skin, his gray steel eyes, his clear gaze, his dark ringlets like those of an Arab . . . His clear laugh. Arpeggios.
The seasons pass. We will speak only a few more words about this boy, my cousin, although the rest of this chronicle dedicated to Alexander Scriabin is marked by his breath. Summer. Tatiana (a Tatiana incredibly reconciled to her fate; a loving mother, a tender and faithful wife) prepares him for an outing with his classmates (lunch and afternoon snack on the banks of the Dnieper). Little sailor suit, short pants, blue and white jacket over dark blue shirt (linen and pearl buttons), black leather shoes, white socks pulled up to his knees. Tie? No. A straw hat circled by a black velvet ribbon, to protect him from the glare. Tremolo of leaves. Birches. Julian sets out onboard a steaming modern machine called an auto mobile. He arrives to medallions of light and shadow, snaking waterways. There’s a small boat anchored in the cove, unexpected in the landscape. The boys are naughty. Julian has just composed his four preludes for piano (even today they can be acquired in a rather sedate version played by Evgeny Zarafiants). He and a couple of friends climb into the boat, pushed by the gentle governess. There’s no wind; it’s a flotation toy. Slow, then presto. A ripple. Pointillism in the landscape. Bubbles.
