By Stuart Mitchner
Music is an open sky
—Sonny Rollins
It is a name that people always remember and it is a very strong name.
—Viktoria Tolstoy
On Friday morning, the 25th anniversary of the World Trade Center attack, I opened my copy of Diaries, 1910-1923, to find that on September 11, 1912, Franz Kafka recorded a dream in which he and “several people” he “hardly knew” were in New York Harbor. “The sky was grey, but of a constant brightness. I moved back and forth in my seat, freely exposed to the air on all sides, in order to be able to see everything. In the direction of New York my glance slanted downwards a little, in the direction of the sea it slanted upwards.” After some “high waves on which was borne a great cosmopolitan traffic,” the dream ended with Kafka saying, “Really. This is even more interesting than the traffic on a Parisian boulevard.”
A year before in Paris, September 11, 1911, Kafka noted, “Motor-cars are easier to steer on asphalt surfaces, but also harder to bring to a stop,” which is why “such a motor-car, on the point of turning off into a side-street and while yet on the large square, runs into a tricycle” but does “little damage,” having “only stepped on its toe, as it were.” His account of the accident’s aftermath includes the rider of the tricycle (a “baker’s boy”); the motorist (“a brisk, educated man”); and various observers, who find enjoyment in the “details of the statement-taking” by a policeman who keeps losing his place. Not only does he need “to keep turning the paper around over and over again to persuade himself of his having incorrectly begun the statements,” he “cannot tell — without much unfolding and careful scrutiny of the paper — where is the right place for him to go on.”
Somehow I doubt that any writer anywhere in the world but one with Kafka’s sense of humor and humanity would have this much to offer on a date 90 years before the event that made it cosmically significant. As much as I distrust the word “Kafkaesque,” here it fits.
Follow the Numbers
The curious coinciding of a 9/11 dream a year after a 9/11 accident makes me think that “the right place to go on” for me is to follow the September numbers to the saxophone colossus born on the 7th, the great author born on the 9th, and the historic event manifested on the 11th — all part of a September song inspired by the author of Amerika, whose vision of the Statue of Liberty holds a sword instead of a torch.
Sonny Rollins
Television reports about New Yorkers residing near Ground Zero mentioned “an elderly black man carrying a saxophone case” among those being evacuated. According to Jazz Times, “Sonny Rollins had been home in his Manhattan apartment, six blocks north of the World Trade Center, when the attacks occurred. From the street, he watched the second tower go down.”
Interviewed on September 11, 2019, Rollins, who died at 95 this past Memorial Day, commented: “When that second plane hit, it was like snowfall coming down. And that snow, of course, was just toxic stuff. Anyway, I gulped some of it down. We were waiting until the next day to be evacuated, so I picked up my horn to play, man. I took a deep breath and felt that stuff down to my stomach. I said, ‘Oh, wow, no practicing today.’ … So yeah, it’s been conjectured that that’s part of what happened to me.” He’s referring to the pulmonary fibrosis that ended his playing days in 2012. As he put it in an NPR interview, “I had to go through quite a period of adjustment after I realized that I couldn’t blow my horn anymore.”
Open Sky
When Sonny Rollins was awarded the 16th annual Polar Music Prize at a nationally televised ceremony from the Royal Stockholm Philharmonic Orchestra’s concert hall on May 2007, the musicians providing entertainment at the event included Leo Tolstoy’s great-great-granddaughter, the Swedish-born jazz singer Viktoria Tolstoy.
When I think of War and Peace, I think of Natasha Rostov, who is so thrilled during a hunt that “she screamed joyously, ecstatically, and so piercingly that it set everyone’s ears tingling. By that shriek she expressed what the others expressed by all talking at once.” There’s something of her undaunted spirit in Tolstoy’s singing.
And when I think of Sonny Rollins, who once called music “an open sky,” I remember the moment during the chaos of the battle of Austerlitz after Prince Andrew has been knocked on his back: “He opened his eyes, hoping to see how the struggle of the Frenchmen with the gunners ended, whether the red-haired gunner had been killed or not and whether the cannon had been captured or saved. But he saw nothing. Above him there was now nothing but the sky — the lofty sky, not clear yet still immeasurably lofty, with gray clouds gliding slowly across it. ‘How quiet, peaceful, and solemn; not at all as I ran,’ thought Prince Andrew — ‘not as we ran, shouting and fighting … how differently do those clouds glide across that lofty infinite sky! How was it I did not see that lofty sky before? And how happy I am to have found it at last! Yes! All is vanity, all falsehood, except that infinite sky. There is nothing, nothing, but that.”
“Little Pretty”
The first songs I heard Viktoria Tolstoy sing — John Lennon’s “Jealous Guy” and the tune from the Broadway hit Kismet, “Stranger in Paradise” — were impressive enough. “Little Pretty” made me anxious to know more about the singer, and once I began to fathom the lyrics of this haunting Russian folk song, they seemed to be alerting a child to future nightmares like 9/11. Follow the words Tolstoy’s singing and the “little pretty” of the lullaby is not being lulled to sleep but urged to “run until you find some answers.” Couplets like “Hear droplets glistening, you will never guess who’s listening” are not meant for pleasant dreaming, and when Tolstoy raises the stakes an octave, it’s to “come join the chorus / sing a little folly for us and keep running until you find” — what? Instead of “some answers” it’s a blank like the “nothing” of the sky Andrew sees. The next verse is hardly consoling, “Goosebumps and trembles / Watchers in the night assemble.” So “keep running little one until you find her,” but who is “her”? Next verse it’s darker still: “Wind through the shutters / Who is hiding in the cupboard?” Then it’s “Sleep little lovely / Maybe you’ll be dreaming of me.” But as the song ends, its run run run run run until you find” — fill in the blank.
Strangest yet is the music Tolstoy is singing to, a maddeningly familiar theme of Tchaikovsky’s I have yet to identify. You can hear it in the beat of the line “Sleep little lovely / Maybe you’ll be dreaming of me.” Trying to find some reference to the music, I followed it to the 9/11 Memorial Museum’s recent acquisition of the stuffed Peter Rabbit that belonged to the youngest victim, 2-and-a-half-year-old Christine Lee Hanson.
Uli
In his journal for September 1899, Leo Tolstoy asks himself, “What is this faculty connecting separate beings in time, into one? …. I have to manifest myself and know myself in time — for communion with other beings and for influencing them.”
Tolstoy’s thoughts on “connecting separate beings in time,” bring to mind Princeton University Emeritus Professor Ulrich (Uli) Knoepflmacher, who died on Friday, September 4, at the age of 95. In an email from the coronovirus October of 2020, he identified himself as a “fellow-connector of texts and films,” noting that “connectivity is indeed what links us as expositors of literary and cinematic relations…. I’m sure that you enjoy creating unexpected links as much as I did when I kept yoking all sorts of texts. You and I may well be the only ones who rummage through the birthdates of dead authors, composers, politicians yet also enjoy linking Coleridge’s Man from Porlock to Orson Welles as Citizen Kane. It would be nice for us to have a cup of coffee in a post-virus existence. But as Hemingway suggests at the end of his best novel, ‘nice’ futures can also turn out to be mere wishfulness.”