The Opened Door

Today, or tomorrow, I did some thing,

Which, like most things,

Has its importance swallowed away so quickly

By a blink of the mind:

Like rustling in the middle of the night which

Sounds like the footsteps of God

To your half-dreaming ears—

Like a moment on the street, when you catch a

Leaf upon your shoulder while you’re whispering

To fate…or a friend…

Or both.

But so this thing I did, right now and always,

Had opened up a door for you:

I guided my hand from the knob to the

White painted wood edge, fingers curled—

And you walked right through, like

A pebble entering a pool, no splash,

Just gravity and momentum,

Only faint ripples for me to gather like an earthquake,

As I tried to remember that all opened doors

Must close eventually,

Before the rest of the world walks in.

Easy & Fun: The Glittery Life of Jeff Koons

“The American artist doesn’t feel as though they need permission,” Koons says on the BBC Late Show. “They’re like a little kid who will just grab and do anything it wants, because it’s really about seeking spiritual salvation—it doesn’t feel like it has to perform in a good manner.” He smiles like a televangelist, with white teeth and open love. His words are tender with innocent excitement, gushing with cliche phraseology and a syrupy cadence. “That’s the strength, that’s the heroicness of American art in the 20th century,” he says. One of the panelists retort, “Isn’t that just about monstrous confidence?”

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On 12 November 2013, Jeff Koons breaks the record for the most expensive artwork sold at auction by a living artist—his Balloon Dog (Orange), goes to an anonymous bidder for a cool $58.4 million.

Yes, this thing.

As one of the wealthiest living artists today, it would be hard for Koons to avoid the spotlight—that is, if he even wanted to. He enjoys the public eye, collaborating with popular figures and brands such as Lady Gaga and Louis Vuitton. His best known works include his shiny sculptures (including Balloon Dog) from Celebration, reproductions of pop culture icons (like Popeye, Hulk, and Pink Panther), as well as the controversial series Made in Heaven which features explicitly pornographic images of him and his ex-wife. Art historians and the public alike remain divided on Koons. While supporters see his art as powerful, affirmative statements on modern American life, critics accuse him of being a cynical, self-merchandising con artist, with his work being shallow and kitschy.

As an artist, Koons seems to have little of the proverbial angst and personal struggle that people in his profession seem predisposed to have. He seems to have none of van Gogh’s madness, Pollock’s alcoholism, Rothko’s depression. He says didactic things like, “art to me is a humanitarian act, and I believe that there is a responsibility that art should somehow be able to affect mankind, to make the world a better place,” as he did to Klaus Ottman back in 1986. Perhaps opponents might want to diagnose him with delusions of self-grandeur. But either way, Jeff Koons is an important, quintessentially American artist with an American life story.

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Jeff Koons was born into the small town of York, Pennsylvania in 1955. His father, Henry, was a furniture dealer and interior decorator. Koons first learned about aesthetics through his father’s store, admitting that he really “did not know fine art as a child.” He was, however, enamoured enough by Salvador Dali that, as a teenager, he went to the St. Regis Hotel in New York City just to meet him. After attending the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and the Maryland Institute College of Art, Koons moved to New York City, working at the membership desk of MoMA.

To finance his own art, Koons began working as a Wall Street commodities broker 1980, which he did for six years before becoming a full time artist. “I could make exactly what art I wanted to make,” he told Angelika Muthesius. The art he made reflected that very decade: Reaganomics, the end of the Cold War, American rebirth, rampant corporate growth, and materialistic optimism. His first major show, The New, opened in 1980. Along with commercial billboards and advertisements, the exhibit most prominently featured a whole bunch of Hoover vacuum cleaners installed with fluorescent lights. He was consciously moving away from the movements of Abstract Expressionism and other subjective types of art. “I wanted to move into the objective. I did not want to paint what I dreamt the night before; I wanted to be involved in a more universal vocabulary.”

He found that language in the legacy of ready-made art, reminiscent of Duchamp or Warhol. However, Koons removes the blatant irony, the overt social critique. The Hoovers are meant to be intoxicating and exciting. More than just asking questions as Duchamp or Warhol did about the definition and value of art, Koons hints at answers. By presenting the newness of the age with “integrity,” Koons shows the extravagance and thrill of materialism without critiquing it, leaving us to judge it as we please. He remarked with pleasure that people were coming into the exhibit off the streets to buy vacuum cleaners, to the annoyance of the security guards—such was the commercial allure of the show.

Very seductive, indeed.

Equilibrium appeared in 1985. It featured bronze inflatables, basketball posters, basketballs inside tanks of chemically altered water that allowed the balls to float within the solution. Koons reached out to Nobel Prize winning physicist Richard Feynman in order to create these tanks, which Koons likened to “an embryo within the womb.” Jeffrey Deitch, calling Koons an “astute student of sociology,” said that the theme of basketball reflects the sport’s symbolism of aspiration and potential for social mobility.

In 1988, Koons revealed Banality, an entire show dedicated to sculptures of trinkets and toys, blown up in size as if to monumentalize them. Among them is Michael Jackson and Bubbles, a tacky, golden porcelain sculpture of the two titular figures. Others include Popples, a plump, cutesy porcelain sculpture of a stuffed animal, and Bear and Policeman, a life-sized sculpture of a cartoonish bear with its arm around a policeman’s shoulder. The Whitney Museum, which held a major retrospective of Koons in 2014, described Banality as “aimed at freeing us to embrace without embarrassment our childhood affection for toys or the trinkets lining our grandparents’ shelves.” Koons added, in an interview with Elena Cue, “I was trying to communicate to people is that they are perfect. That everything about their cultural history, everything about their own personal history is perfect.”

Embarrassed about liking this? Jeff Koons says, “Don’t be.”

1989 came Koons’ arguably most controversial work: Made in Heaven. Initially conceived as a feature film starring himself and pornstar Ilona Staller (La Cicciolina), Koons ended up marrying her and producing a whole series of explicit pieces with her. Twinned with kitschy sculptures of kittens and flowers, Made in Heaven is polarizing to this day, challenging the line between pornography and art the basic line of decency in the gallery setting. While some have praised the series as creating a sort of “modern day Adam and Eve,” art critics such as William Feaver as disparaged it as “lacking all the breath of fresh art.” While Koons insists that the project was to make us more accepting of our deepest, shameful desires, Made in Heaven has left a legacy of mixed reception and marked a peak of shock art.

But controversial as it was in itself, Made in Heaven took a darker, personal turn when Staller left Koons abruptly, taking their toddler son Ludwig with her. In the midst of a custody battle that cost millions of dollars and the divorce proceedings, Koons destroyed most of Made in Heaven. And with the exception of Puppy, a 40 foot sculpture of a dog covered with flowers, Koons disappeared from the art world for most of the 90’s.

Celebration marked his comeback—albeit a belated one, since delays and budgetary problems forced a 1996 show at the Guggenheim exhibit in New York to be cancelled. With the aid of a few faithful investors, Koons was able to produce some of his now most enduring works: Hanging Heart, Play-Doh, Diamond, and of course, Balloon Dog. The series marked Koons’ return from personal hardship as well as a continuing dedication to objective, optimistic art. Koons said that his fascination with mirror-finish stainless steel—the material for many of the Celebration pieces—stems from the belief that art takes place in the viewer: the reflection of the viewer onto the work itself serves as a reminder of that belief. Celebration has also contained Koons’ most materially successful works. Balloon Dog, of course, remains the most expensive sculpture ever sold by a living artist. Tulips, another colorful, mirror-finish sculpture, sold for $33.6 million in 2012. Diamond (Blue) sold for $11.8 million, while Balloon Flower (Magenta) went for $25.7 million.

The Tulip Mania of 1637 has nothing on this $33.6 million flower.

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“No other artist so lends himself to a caricature of the indecently rich ravening after the vulgarly bright and shiny,” writer Peter Schjeldahl says. “But mockery comes harder when, approaching the work with eyes and mind open, you encounter Koons’s formidable aesthetic intelligence.”

Koons is a perfectionist. “Each painting takes about two years. Sculptures take, on average, three years.” He has a workshop in Chelsea, Manhattan, where he employs around 125 assistants to execute his work. “I’m basically the idea person,” he tells Klaus Ottman. “I’m not physically involved in the production. I don’t have the necessary abilities, so I go to the top people. [But] I’m always trying to maintain the integrity of the work.” The products are always impeccable objects that glisten and defy regular workmanship. His paintings, massive and photorealistic, are the painstaking labors of assistants working from a digital plan made by Koons, and following a color-by-numbers system. The place bears some resemblance to Andy Warhol’s Factory, but instead of cheap mass-produced works, Koons insists on the highest quality, often destroying pieces that don’t live up to his vision.

“For a lot of Jeff’s work, he has to wait for industry to catch up,” says Scott Rothkopf, chief curator at the Whitney Museum. Play-Doh, for example, took twenty years to complete. Gorilla, an 8 foot high granite sculpture, required significant technology to create. They had to render a wax figure, digitally collect the data, and then use a sophisticated milling machine to carve the actual stone. Koons’ extensive use of stainless steel, reflects what he feels to be a “proletariat” spirit, something both common but enduring that is meant to—like Greek and Roman statues of antiquity—last literally thousands of years. That too, takes exceptional use of technology, as well as a lot of polishing.

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Many accuse Koons of pandering and playing the art market, making his millions off of billionaire collectors. But “Rubens had his kings [supporting him], Bernini had his cardinals,” Curator Norman Rosenthal says. “Jeff Koons—he’s supported by the kings and cardinals of his time. And thank God for that.” Koons does obliquely address the gross economics of his art. He says, “I love the gallery, the arena of representation. It’s a commercial world, and morality is based generally around economics, and that’s taking place in the art gallery. I like the tension of accessibility and inaccessibility, and the morality in the art gallery.” It’s unclear if Koons means to admit to to a level of immorality in his art, or if he wants us to take into account the egregious amount of money spent on his works when confronting them.

Critic Christopher Knight says Koons’ work brings out a “distinctly American set of conventional middle-class values.” Of course, the slight irony is that on the surface, Jeff Koons appears most appreciated by everyone other than the middle class. The rich and super-rich seem to value his work very much, with orders coming in and collectors scrambling to get a hold of one piece or another. On the other hand, Koons’ work, kitschy as it is, has an immediacy to it that especially spellbinds children and the innocent. Peter Schjeldahl provides this anecdote:

I remember my first encounter, in Germany, in 1992, with Koons’s “Puppy.” As I was judiciously taking descriptive and analytical notes, a bus arrived bearing a group of severely disabled children in wheelchairs. They went wild with delight. Abruptly feeling absurd, I shut my notebook and took instruction from the kids’ unequivocal verdict.

And in response to criticisms about his art being pure, unabashed kitsch, Koons simply says, “Kitsch is a word that I really don’t believe in.” Kitsch: art, objects, or design considered to be in poor taste because of excessive garishness or sentimentality, according to Oxford Dictionary. It seems apt enough to describe many of Koons’ work, but for Koons, his art as far away from poor taste and garishness as possible: it’s supposed to be philosophical, even metaphysical. He advocates for “removing judgment and practicing acceptance.” And certainly it would be easier to see the balloon dogs and porcelain figures as philosophical if one could simply accept it as is, and not scoff at the plain reality that these objects are in many ways just glorified everyday objects. A friend told me, “it really all depends. You either see it as bullshit, or you see it as something philosophical. It just depends on you.” And Koons, who strongly believes in the power of the viewer to decide, would probably be okay with that.

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Jeff Koons lives in a Manhattan townhouse with his wife, Justine Wheeler, and their six children. Wheeler was a former assistant in Koons’ studio, who had written her thesis on her future husband’s art and then met him at a bar in SoHo. Koons often mentions his kids as inspirations for his work. Once his toddler son made a small mound of play-doh, and when Koons approached him, he put it in from of him, spread out his arms with pride and exclaimed, “wallah!” Now Koons often takes photo-ops in that exact “wallah!” pose, inviting us to receive his works with a similarly childlike glee.

Wallah!

At age 62, Koons looks young and energetic. He’s busy promoting his work, through conferences, collaborations, and public works. He recently unveiled Seated Ballerina in Rockefeller Center in support of the International Centre for Missing & Exploited Children. He released his own line of Louis Vuitton bags, which are admittedly very tacky looking: purses with Rubens and Van Gogh paintings printed on, with a matching gold JK initial opposite the LV logo. He just unveiled a 40 foot tall Balloon Dog for Jay-Z’s festival tour. Koons’ mastery of the artist-as-celebrity role is impressive in a way unequaled since his childhood idol, Salvador Dali, captured the public eye with his eccentricity and mustache. But while Dali gained public notoriety through antics, Koons has elevated himself through careful—and to some, cynical—self-promotion.

One of Koons’ most recent work is his Gazing Ball series. He takes iconic sculptures and paintings—works by Titian, Raphael, Manet, and Da Vinci—carefully reproduce them, and then place a shiny, blue orb is in front of it. Like this:

I know what you’re thinking. The original Mona Lisa is indeed smaller than that.

Critics have predictably blasted this series as unoriginal, simple plagiarism, “a brilliant scam,” as one online commenter put it. There is something easy about it, something too effortless about putting a blue orb in front of old masterpieces. Still, this isn’t the first time that the Mona Lisa has be reappropriated by artists. Duchamp drew a funny mustache on the Da Vinci classic, making it into L.H.O.O.Q. Andy Warhol reproduced the painting onto colored silkscreen prints. For Koons, the gazing ball series is about “your desires, your interests, your participation, your relationship with this image.” The orb itself “represents the vastness of the universe and at the same time the intimacy of right here, right now.” If that’s pretentious artspeak, then the Gazing Ball series at least brings freshness to the famous works it duplicates, giving the works a sense of nowness and renewed relevance.

“Art is a vehicle of acceptance,” Koons reiterates, again and again. It’s been his mantra since the beginning of his career: accepting materialism, accepting sexuality, accepting childhood fantasies, accepting history. And accepting yourself. Jeff Koons certainly has. “If you have vision, you can do anything,” he says. It sounds like truism, but for Koons, that’s how he lives and makes art. And while we can continue debating his vision, he’s realizing it, smiling all the way.

The Snail, by Henri Matisse

Matisse made this artwork towards the end of his life, in 1953. It is a cut-out, made out of twenty pieces of paper, glued on like a collage of colors. Suffering from arthritis and other physical ailments, Matisse had put down the brush in favor of scissors. If not for its enormous size, spanning over nine feet in width and height, its simplicity and bright colors are more akin to some preschool project, like an exercise in cutting and pasting.

Many great artists, composers, and writers underwent radical stylistic changes towards the end of their lives. Beethoven and his late quartets; Goya and his Black Paintings; Turner and his increasingly abstract and expressionistic landscapes; there are countless more examples, but for the most part the common thread is an obsession with darkness, mortality—the futility of man, the powerlessness of humanity against fate and nature. Matisse’s late work seems, then, an anomaly in some sense. The Snail hardly seems a reflection on anything related to death; its vibrant colors and solid geometry appear youthful, unassuming, and confident. It’s playful, daring the audience ask about its medium, its intentions. The composition is beautiful: the colors are balanced, the formal structure both dynamic and in equilibrium.

Yet in its brightness, I think there’s some nostalgia and melancholy in The Snail. Perhaps I am too eager to read into historical context and search for hidden darkness. Maybe the work is no more than the individual pieces of paper dancing upon the canvas, its humility containing no grander meaning. However, I can’t help but thinking that it speaks of a mind full of vigor that lacks finesse, like an energetic youth who hasn’t learned to harness his talents to its full extent. But Matisse isn’t pretending to be young. He simply can’t paint anymore. His body is frail, and he is confined to a medium that’s infantile in appearance. Perhaps that is its meaning, to convey the eloquence of childhood that he has now refound. Instead of lamenting the imminence of death, he expresses the poetic symmetry of life, the odd and beautiful ways in which we return to the pangs of infant helplessness in old age.

The Snail is by someone who not only makes art, but lives it. Imagine Matisse in his studio, alone, scissors in hand, slowly cutting pieces of paper and gluing each one tactfully and delicately onto the canvas. He doesn’t do it out of boredom, but because that’s what he has done all his life. He thinks about the war years, those tense months and years under the Vichy regime, when his art was but a silent testament to his anxieties and fears. He thinks back to the first two decades of the twentieth century, spent in smoky Parisian cafes, with long conversations with bohemian artists and late-night drinks and the great anticipations of artistic liberation and a grand future. Matisse is 83 now. His hands shake. He walks with difficulty. His art is that of a man whose body has betrayed him, whose style has been outdated, whose memory is hazier with nostalgia every day, but whose genius and restless creativity refuses to cease. It comes naturally. The colors continue to give him happiness, a sense of quiet purpose. Death is close, but he chooses not to think about it too much. He’s in no rush, in no sense of desperate urgency. He’s simply living art, so that his art can keep him alive today.

Spilt Coffee

I had been sitting in the Pembroke library for around three hours, firstly finishing an assignment and then switching back and forth between listening to Bruckner symphonies and reading George Eliot’s Middlemarch. Eventually I decided to temporarily quit on the overly long late-19th century works and go for a walk. After vacillating for a bit while walking across the library courtyard, turning around in circles several times under the warm, cloudy sky, I finally decided that sitting in my room until dinnertime was not going to be conducive to short term and long term happiness.

Before I departed for destinations farther than one block, I ducked into Fitzbillies, a snug little coffee shop on the corner across Pembroke College. The floors and tables were light-colored wood, the walls a soft, welcoming white. The counter area was cozy enough to be considered crowded by the presence of three or four customers. I ordered an iced coffee, which came out on the counter in a clear plastic cup, the type more frequently seen on the side of water coolers. In my attempt to get a cap on, I overestimated the sturdiness of thin plastic, and the cup, heretofore brimming with cold, dark liquid, kind of collapsed in on itself: a quarter of the cup’s content geysered out onto the counter, floor, hand, and sleeve. My face must have spelled 40% surprise and 60% embarrassment, accompanied by an expectation of a typically British expression of contempt from the barista. I quickly picked up some napkins to begin covering the spill, supplementing my attempt to cover up the evidence of my accident with a few awkward sorry’s.

It was to my great benefit and relief that the barista was not at all contemptuous (to my knowledge) and immediately offered to make me a new drink. At the same time another employee came over with paper towels and pointed me towards the bathroom (or simply “toilet,” as they are popularly referred to as on the other side of the pond) in case I needed it, which I politely declined, instead content to stand there and do my best to help the cleaning process. As the barista brought out the second attempt at my iced coffee, she put on the cap beforehand—though she also struggled with it for a few good seconds, which offered me some consolation and solidarity that partially dispelled of my personal ineptitude.

With a drink firmly in hand, I walked up Trumpington Street towards King’s College. The entire way there was saturated with people, uniformed bunches of schoolchildren, over-eager tourists, annoyed locals, occasional duos and triplets with familiar PKP lanyards. I turned into King’s College, its gate guarded by a man and a woman dressed in white shirt and black vest, turning away any adventurous tourists who might have wanted a peek into the grandiose courtyard that I had just now entered. The grass shone with immaculate green, clean-cut like a fairway. To my right stood the King’s College Chapel, its row of flying buttresses lining the north side of the courtyard. I walked further inwards to a second courtyard, this one formed by the front of the chapel, an even more expansive field of short grass, and the River Cam. It was towards the river that I came to: a quaint arch bridge that stood, half covered by the shade of nearby trees, its masoned stones providing a landmark for the boats that drifted by. I stood on the bridge, leaning forward on the side watching the crowded waterway: relaxed couples being ferried by young lanky British men who punted with ease, and bemused families watching members struggle with the long, metal pole that was supposed to propel and steer them along the river.

The sun had come a little bit out now, making the chapel in the distance shine. Boats continued to pass below at a leisurely pace, and a slight breeze came through just then. I heard the faint rustle of leaves mixed in with indistinct chatter, and then I caught the smell of coffee from my jacket sleeve. I smiled at this play of light hearted fortune, the quick shifts between embarrassments and moments capable of sweeping any embarrassment aside. I finished the iced coffee on the bridge, that cup which had brought me the allotted excitement for the day. After taking one more good survey of the view that my place had gifted me, I began walking back.

December 1952, by Earle Brown

I woke up, middle of the night to the roar of what I knew was a supernova—I could feel the heat in my head, lurching beyond my dreams into my skull. A flash of light struck me and elevated me. That is, until I sat up straight and came to, and found myself within another dream. The explosion had slowed down to a halt, a ball of fire, like a miniature sun, floating in front of me at the foot of the bed. My eyes watered. Outside, a snowstorm was on pause too—snowflakes hung in the air, glittering against streetlights. I stood up erect on my bed so that my head almost touched the ceiling. My gaze was locked onto the static orb, which continued to growl, as if straining to contain all its energy within its bounds. I wondered if anyone else was home; an odd thought, considering I lived alone. I felt an urge to check the time, but I could not peel my eyes away. Another flash.

I am in the middle of the road outside my house. Snow falls gently but persistently. I wear my winter coat and a fur hat and gloves. I have been walking down this road for many hours. I pass by my house every twenty minutes or so, even though I have been walking in the same direction. I cannot feel my feet. It is still nighttime, and some of the streetlights have stopped working, or flicker from time to time. There are no stoplights anywhere. I see neighbors in the windows, their silhouettes demarcated by the yellow lights in living rooms and bedrooms. They watch me with invisible judgment. You are one of them, though I cannot tell which one. I am walking towards the light I cannot see. I remember an explosion. The death of a star. It is not snow that is falling, but the ashes of the sun. Is this real? I think. A dream, a dream. A dream within a dream, within a dream, within the dream of a star within the dream of a dying man, a dream’s dream…I walk on and on, until the photons have decayed, and my body made into dust by the breeze.

My alarm sounded now, 7AM. I sat up and looked outside. The sky was clear, and the sun had already began melting the fresh snowfall. The morning was sweet and young, and I drank my coffee with thanks in my heart and a song in the air, and as I walked out to my car, I knew I had died last night, like every other night, and that today and every day was a new heaven, for me and not for you.

Chatter

Chatter away—who’s listening?

Chatter away, you strange elements, the haunts

Of my exterior: the global conscience that surrounds me.

Chatter away, friend.

Remind me of my loneliness.

Talk the words which slip through

My mind’s broken netting;

Saturate the air with thoughts which

Dissolve into the past, as it dissolves

With my stunted empathy:

The ceaseless chatter which brushes by

My soul, and echoes through the empty streets.

I eat last night’s regrets for breakfast, lunch, and dinner;

And still I hunger through the course of day,

My stomach a cracked bowl, or a broken heart,

Stuffed with coarse sand and darkened anguish,

Mixtures of dangerous chemicals, water which dries my throat:

A pit of pity—a vessel to carry what never was.

My food colludes against me, and I die of poisoning

Every night.

And I have lost one final thing:

Lost, like a beloved sweater, a single sock

Lost, like forgotten dreams

Lost, like a nostalgia for a fantasy

Lost, like the final step of love—

I lost the chatter, the warm syllables

Which tether objects to each other.

I feed myself with silence and

Starve the nonessentials from my being

Until I am left with, of course, nothing.

Winterreise

Dad decided to die on a Friday so the rest of the family had the entire weekend to grieve. It was a grotesque arrangement, if not considerate in his own personal and brutal way. Though saying that it was his decision may have been a stretch. He thought he had enough, and told us to remember him, but to forget the parts when he was drunk and mean. And then he died. The funeral was short and intimate; I had to leave early for a rehearsal. I knew Dad wouldn’t have minded.

I recently cut my hair short so mornings would be easier. I had never been a morning person, and I hated going to rehearsals or meetings with my face and hair looking so frazzled, as if I could never get my shit together. It was a common trend with us musicians, but of course I didn’t want to confine myself to that image. I played piano and composed. I wrote mostly piano music, sometimes for various chamber ensembles, occasionally arranging for orchestra. I played in clubs and accompanied soloists for money. People told me that I should teach, but I could never do that, at least not now. I didn’t dream of fame, or playing in front of large crowds with world-renowned orchestras. I only wanted to create art—channeling myself through music. I’ve always been an idealist. I stopped caring that the world was against people like me.

I came over to my parent’s house the following weekend to see Mom, and to take some of Dad’s possessions that were no longer wanted there. I didn’t have the key to the house, so I rang the doorbell and waited outside for five minutes, and rang the doorbell two more times before my older brother Adrian opened up with a look of surprise.

“Oh hey, I didn’t know you were coming. Mom—”

I walked in and felt like I was in my early twenties again. Like I was a former self in this old familiar space, and simultaneously a stranger, feeling strange in a inscrutable environment. I didn’t want to go into my room and break the nostalgia. I went straight to the upright piano in the living room and sat down on the bench. I let my hands hover over the keys for a second, before returning them onto my lap. Adrian came over next to me and smiled and glanced behind him.

“How are you?” he asked in a small voice.

“I’m alright,” I said. I looked down at the piano keys. I absentmindedly played the right hand of the first two bars of Schubert’s “Der Lindenbaum.”

“I don’t think it’s been tuned since you graduated,” Adrian said.

I shrugged. The dissonance wavered in the air. I played the three lowest octaves of C, and it sounded like a ship sinking. Once the sound died out, the room felt awfully quiet. Adrian had gone and sat down on the living room couch, looking at his phone.

“When did you get here?” I asked with bland curiosity.

He raised his head and lowered his phone with minimal effort. “I’ve been here since Wednesday,” he said as if it were obvious. But I didn’t know that. My mind was on music, as always. Schubert’s Winterreise had been circling in my head constantly since Dad died. I imagined the piano timbre creating a snow cover as the tenor trudged barely above with the melody. I could see the frosty black notes dissolving into chilling sound, wrapping around my body. Without realizing until several seconds later, Mom was in front of me and had finished asking a question and was staring at me with hazy eyes.

I woke up the next morning and realized I was unable to play tonal music. It was the oddest thing, but when I sat down at the piano my fingers shifted into positions and keys that pierced together, resisting—and perhaps fearing—resolution. I had no choice but to write it down. I spent the next three hours jotting down this jagged landscape: the staves were almost crooked, like the pencil marks had a ragged madness to them that translated directly into the sound. I went back and forth between moving my hands across the keyboard and scribbling on the pages with a panicked ferocity, as if I was going to die any moment then. And when I had finished, with a sparse, airy chord wisping up to the ceiling as I kept the pedal down, I felt completely empty, but strangely not alone.

When I was young, Dad would sit me down at the piano and made me drill scales and etudes until I cried, and then after I finished crying, he would make me play for at least an hour longer, and then he’d get me ice cream and tell me that I was going to be the best pianist in the country, that it was okay to be frustrated as long as I persisted. He talked endlessly about how music was like painting that went directly to your soul (he was an art teacher), and made comparisons between artists and composers that made no sense to me until one day when I was a high school senior I finally began to understand and I started to feel like I was doing something more than playing an instrument. He was driving me back from a lesson, and we were initially talking about auditions for conservatories.

“Just two contrasting pieces, huh?” he said.

“Yeah. I was thinking the Bach g minor and the Prokofiev.”

“But they’re so similar.”

“What do you mean? One of them’s Baroque, the other is Modern.”

“That’s true,” he said in slow deliberate tones. “But they have similar colors. Like—like a dark maroon against navy blue, I think. Do you see that?”

“I guess?” I said hesitantly, unsure but not wanting to dismiss his bizarre claim.

Looking back, Dad probably had synesthesia, which made him associate colors with certain pitches. He always thought middle C was black, but that was probably just him.

I lived in a small apartment in the Mission District, so I could walk over to the Conservatory and Symphony Hall if I needed to. I lived by myself, but I was surrounded by artists of all sorts, free spirit types that didn’t mind me practicing late into the night. The Sunday afternoon was chilly but not cold, the January coastline wind brushing through. I was walking up and down the streets with Walter, a late-twenties actor/video editor/waiter who lived below me, who probably liked me but was too shy to do anything. He had a rough, uneven beard, more to create a mature disposition than to keep warm in a mild San Francisco winter.

“I wrote something this morning,” I said.

“Oh?”

“Yeah. For piano. Maybe you could tell me what you think.”

“Absolutely. Of course.”

“I think it’s the saddest thing I’ve ever written.”

“I’m sorry—I mean, is that even a bad thing?”

“I don’t know. It just is,” I said.

“Yeah. Yeah,” he said.

Mom called in the evening. Did I pick up? Yes, I did. Did she ask me if I was ok? Indeed. Did I return the question? Only phrased differently. Did I pay attention as she disintegrated into choked tears, slowly, painfully, as her lungs and soul drained out through the phone line, a lifetime of hurt transmitted through her gasping voice, while she asked me if I was happy, that she would be happy if I was happy, and that she felt sorry for everything but nothing in particular, just a general sense of guilt, of loss, of something missing, a hole of silence upon the polluted skies? No. But I told her everything would be ok, and she seemed to be placated, and then I hung up.

Later on, close to midnight, I pulled out the three sheets of paper that I had written the music on. It was wrinkled, close to illegible, like the work of an old arthritic man’s last words, rushed against death. I could still read it though, the sounds were still in my ears; I placed the music gingerly in front of the piano and danced my hands across the keyboard. I could hear the entire piece in my head; I dared not play a note out loud, lest it ruin the perfect sound in my head. The silence rang throughout the dark room, undercut only sporadically by gusts of cars going by in the streets below. I took a pencil and scrawled on the top of the piece, “for Dad,” and I continued to sit there until I couldn’t tell if my eyes were closed, and the harmonies in my heart sang involuntarily.

The following weeks I kept up my schedule of gigs and rehearsals and concerts, but I did not write a single note more. The spaces between my playing Bach, jazz, and cheap and easy accompanying pieces were filled with the same atonal, haunted soundscape that I had written on that peculiar morning. The only thing that varied was the tempo: sometimes fast enough that it sounded like a violent, churning ocean; sometimes so slow that each chord could string together all the stars in the sky.

My brother Adrian called one morning to ask how I was doing, something that he never did. I said I was doing just fine. That’s not what people are telling me, he said. What people? I demanded. He wouldn’t say, and remained silent over the line without hanging up. The question lingered until he said it didn’t matter, to call him if I needed anything, and he said good luck with everything and then hung up.

That night, my mind finally once again turned to Schubert’s Winterreise—Winter Journey. A song cycle for piano and tenor, set by 24 poems. I found myself fixated on the last song in the cycle, “Der Leiermann”: The Hurdy-Gurdy Man. The song opens with with a pair of deep ominous 5ths in the piano, with a grace note, like funeral bells, like trudging through deep snow alone. The right hand enters with a whispering, troubled melody, shifting between questions and laments. The tenor sings his verses between the pianist’s interjections, melancholy but matter of fact, as if totally resigned to travel forever in the cold. The song ends with a question in forte, full of pain, before dying out into a soft, fading minor chord.

There, behind the village,
stands a hurdy-gurdy-man,
And with numb fingers
he plays the best he can.

Barefoot on the ice,
he staggers back and forth,
And his little plate
remains ever empty.

No one wants to hear him,
no one looks at him,
And the hounds snarl
at the old man.

And he lets it all go by,
everything as it will,
He plays, and his hurdy-gurdy
is never still.

Strange old man,
shall I go with you?
Will you play your hurdy-gurdy
to my songs?

I couldn’t find a venue to play my new piece. I didn’t think clubs would want something so modern—and personal, for lack of a better word. I thought of contacting some of my composer friends to try and put together a new music concert, or asking to play at a chamber music recital. But I didn’t do any of those things. I thought it was vain, and despicably so, to market my piece like that. As if to sell off my grief with a performance.

Once on a Sunday afternoon, I was sitting with Walter on a grassy hill at Dolores Park. The place was swarming with people. We were drinking beer and breathing in the weak sunlight. We talked about nothing in particular, just letting odd thoughts roll off our tongues.

“I’m working on a TV show now,” he said.

“Hm. About what?” I was watching the white clouds drift over downtown San Francisco.

“It’s pretty stupid, really. It’s another one of those dysfunctional family comedies: the dad’s like a depressed, morose professor and the mom’s this semi-naive schoolteacher, and the kids are all over the place.”

“Wow.”

“But it pays well, and—I mean, I need the money, and the work isn’t all bad.” He took a large gulp of beer. “What have you been up to? You have that piano piece, right?”

“Yeah, yeah. It hasn’t been performed yet though. Probably sometime soon though.”

“That’s good.”

“Other than that, things have been the same really, for the most part.”

“So you’re doing alright?”

“Yeah, I’m fine, why?” I probably sounded more accusatory than I meant to be.

“I don’t know, I believe you. You’re just a little more quiet than usual, I guess.”

I was unsure of what to say, even though I knew that I was just confirming his observation. I put my beer down and stood up.

“Are you going?” he asked. He sounded surprised, and perhaps a little disappointed.

“I don’t know, maybe,” I said without looking at him, my eyes fixed on the clouds.

The next day, I drove back down to the South Bay to have dinner with Mom at a dimly lit Thai restaurant. She seemed absolutely unable to ask me anything specific, as if she didn’t want to disturb the imaginary life she created for me, afraid of finding out how I was really spending my time. Instead she kept on reminding me—probably three or four times within a half hour—that she was always feeling cold at home, and ate out a lot more now.

“Is that a waste of money? I mean, I think that—” She sounded genuinely concerned.

I took a few seconds to swallow. “I don’t know, Mom. If it makes you happy.” I knew that I was being curt with my replies. My eyes were lowered on my plate.

“Oh things just seem so—I’m not sure—just so blurry. So confusing.” Her food was barely touched. Her words sounded hazy too. I wanted to reach over the table and squeeze her hand, but I just leaned forward a little, folded my arms, and smiled sympathetically.

I was accompanying a few violin students for a recital. It was exactly two months after Dad died. After it was over, their teacher came up to me and thanked me. I said it was no problem, and she walked away slowly. I stayed by the piano, watching parents and shy kids filter out of the hall. Once the last person was gone, I leaned over to my bag and carefully pulled out three pieces of paper, now mangled and stained, and laid it on the stand. I looked at the notes, the lacerated emotions behind them. I thought of the hurdy-gurdy man and his empty plate. I breathed in the silence. Then I played.

My last conversation with Dad ventured onto the topic of love. It seemed only natural. He said he barely loved anymore. He figured it was the only way he could die well, if he stopped loving. I sat by his bedside silently. He reflected on what he just said, and then reached for me with playful urgency. I only meant that theoretically, he said. I mean, how could anyone live without loving something? Anything? He laughed, amused by his own philosophical musings. Minutes passed without a word.

“Do you want anything?” I asked.

“I’ll be fine,” he said contently. “I wish you could play me something on the piano again. Maybe some Bach, or some Schubert. Something simple.” But he was in the hospital, and there was virtually no way to get a piano, or even a keyboard in there.

“Maybe I could write a piece for you,” I said. His eyes brightened for a moment before he slackened back into a familiar, tired smile.

“I would say you shouldn’t. But I can already hear it.” The conversation seemed to end then, and he laid back deep into his pillow and closed his eyes to sleep. I remained still, and listened to the fan hovering above chopping the air, the lights buzzing, the dampened hospital noises outside.

The sound stretched wistfully to the dark walls of the hall, unencumbered by people. My heart melted into the melody, a singular soul enclosed. No one was there to applaud at the end. There was only the empty silence of desolate peace. I sat in front of the piano and wondered if I should just play it again. An encore for the dead. But I didn’t. No one was there to listen, I knew that. But of course music was still music if no one listened. I had no need for people to sit out there like statues. I was playing to something beyond those walls. Of course music was still music if no one listened. Of course it was.