Apples & Oranges

noxrpm:

I find myself telling others (and sometimes my disbelieving self) that I’m currently going through, or have just gone through, a Sebald phase. Either I am perpetually lying or the duration of my “Sebald phase” is a lifelong one. Yesterday, on the train to work, I read an essay from Campo Santo called “To the Brothel by Way of Switzerland (on Kafka’s Travel Diaries),” which, to my surprise and delight, I couldn’t remember having read before. The essay exemplifies the best of Sebald - casually but probingly digressive, and impelled by mysteriously convergent coincidences - and it begins with Sebald’s account of his Dutch friend’s journey from Prague to Nuremberg.

Sebald’s friend recounts that during her train ride, she alternated between reading Kafka’s travel diaries and gazing at the snowflakes through the windows for hours, before adding, rather bizarrely, that the ruffle-curtained window of the dining car of her train - tinted red by the lamplight - reminded her of the windows of a small Bohemian brothel she had once seen. She then mentions witnessing a passenger picking between his teeth with a corner of a visiting card, which should have been unremarkable except for the fact that she notices this passenger merely a few pages after she has read Kafka mention in his diaries of seeing a passenger picking through his teeth with a visiting card: an uncanny moment of Sebaldian entrechat, suspended in time.

This triggers something in Sebald, as he mentions that certain details from a particular journey that Kafka had made with Max Brod in September of 1911, from Prague to Paris, resurrected “great tracts of the memory” of a journey he himself had taken with his father in 1948, traveling to Sebald’s grandparents’ house in Plattling from Wertach after his father returned from the POW camp. And thus, Sebald layers and grafts his recollections of different journeys he himself has taken onto Kafka’s travelogue, until the palimpsestic narrative converges into a dialogue that Kafka had with Max Brod in a coffee house in the cathedral square in Milan, where they discuss death and pains in the region of the heart. Sebald adds -

Mahler, notes Kafka, had expected those pains in the heart, too. He had died only a few months earlier, on May 18, at the Löw Sanatorium as a thunderstorm broke over the town…

May 18. There is a reason why the date couldn’t have escaped Sebald’s attention - it is the date of his own birth, and the date recurs in various contexts throughout his prose works. I wrote about it previously, but May 18 is also my own birthday, and reading my post again, I’m a bit startled to find that I also noted the date as the day of Mahler’s death.

Back to Sebald’s essay: while looking at a photograph album of Mahler in an undisclosed northern German town, Sebald listens to three Lithuanian street performers play music with an accordion, “a battered tuba,” and a double bass. Sebald says he couldn’t tear himself away from this music, which reminds him of his favorite passages from Mahler’s music, those that sound like Jewish village musicians playing in the distance. Then follows what is simply the most devastating invocation of Adorno I’ve ever read -

As I listened, hardly able to tear myself away, I understood why Wiesengrund once wrote of Mahler that his music was the cardiogram of a breaking heart.

I believe I wrote about her on this blog before, but there was a girl I knew once, back in the nineties, when I was bumming off an assortment of friends in Koreatown of Los Angeles. She was just an acquaintance, and I knew her but for a briefest span of time. She was in her early 20s, and she spoke Korean with a heavy regional dialect from the Jeolla province. It was never a shameful secret, at least among my friends, that she made the money she liked to squander quickly by working for an escort service; none of us looked at her askance for what she did, because each of us was busy flushing ourselves down in different, but no less dishonorable shitholes.

One night, my friend D was supposed to pick her up from a market after she was done grocery-shopping, but asked me to take his car and pick her up in his stead. So I did. She got in the car, but instead of going home to put away her groceries, she wanted to go to a club. I told her I had no money and she told me that wasn’t an issue so stop being a bitch. At the almost-empty club (it was a weeknight), she reserved a big booth for just the two of us, which was like $300 minimum to reserve. Then drank Johnny Black like water for about two hours, twitched frenetically on the dance floor to some Korean techno, then told me to stop being a downer and get up and dance. Two of us danced like crazy on the otherwise-deserted dance floor for the rest of that night, which I remember as having been mostly fun. Mostly…

At the end of the night, I was doubtlessly drunk but still drove her back to her apartment. For the most part of the ride, she was giddy and loud, but when I parked the car in front of her apartment, she looked suddenly disconsolate. Then we kissed, and she moved her hand down to my crotch before saying to me in Korean -

Now, what are we going to do about this?

- which should have been a comical thing to hear from my end, especially given the context plus the delivery of her thick, slurring country dialect? But it wasn’t. In fact, it had an opposite effect, sobered me up to a state resembling profound loneliness: from the tenor and heartbreak in her voice, I realized she wasn’t talking to me. She regained her composure, wiped the tears from her face, then apologized to me that her roommate and her boyfriend were in the apartment, and walked out of the car. Which is the last I saw of her.

Near the end of “To the Brothel by Way of Switzerland,” Sebald returns to Kafka’s travel diaries, particularly to an entry in which Kafka records his visit to a Parisian brothel. Kafka notes that it was difficult to see all the girls closely, except for this one girl -

who was standing straight in front of me. She had gaps in her teeth, stood very upright, held her dress together with her clenched fist over her pudenda, and rapidly opened and closed her large eyes and her large mouth.

After Paris, Max Brod returns to Prague but Kafka spends a week in the sanatorium at the natural spa in Zurich. Sebald notes that Kafka took an evening stroll in the darkening garden of the sanatorium, then noticed next morning that there were -

morning gymnastic exercises to the sound of a song from Des Knaben Wunderhorn played by someone on a cornet.

And that is how Sebald ends the essay. He doesn’t mention which Wunderhorn song Kafka might have heard in Zurich that morning, but attached is an audio file of “Wo Die Schönen Trompeten Blasen,” a song from Mahler’s Des Knaben Wunderhorn which I can not only imagine Sebald would have liked, but is also a song that recalls to my memory the voice of that strange girl, long time ago, one night.

(Images, respectively: 1. a still from a BBC news footage 2. by Walmor Correa 3. by William Gedney)

P.S. - Going forward, almost everything I write about music-related topics will likely be posted on a site called Phono Franca, a tumblr I’ve started with my homeboy Marc and a few others. We just went live, and the only post up so far is my take on Anderszewski’s Bach. In the future, though, there will be crazy rants on The Kinks, Procol Harum, late Schumann, etc. etc… so please follow Phono Franca and meet us there.