Remember Me by David Stacton Read Free Book Online Page A

loved, the fragile, the precious, the transparent, the infinitely rare, the cherished individuality of life, had no place in Wagner’s world at all. Ludwig could not take them there with him, for in that world the particular did not exist. That dates the operas badly; for only those things which usually escape the attention of others survive contact with the ineffable, only those grasses too tiny to be trampled underfoot, those moments too swift to be shared.
    And yet it was May. Ludwig was bewildered. The world was so kind, that it seemed impossible that the men and women in it could be cruel. The little inexperienced white buds of apple trees popped into day and found it wet. The most transparent of invisible snails, street cleaners of the lake, were scavenging the water. Bushes, shrubs, grass, and anything that had roots, had grown one sixty-fourth of an inch. A stream, running too rapidly, jumped its banks and obliterated a meadow with flowers, which settled in clouds like dusting powder after a cold bath. The woods turned themselves to a loving statement of that detail which Wagner could not cherish. It was their reparation to a king too young to grieve.
    It seemed to Ludwig that there were angels in the wood, and that they spoke to him. When the natural world was kind or understanding, he always felt an immense joy. But he could not give that joy a name, and it did not occur to him that joy could be a form of consolation . He hurried on to meet Wagner, suppressing an emotion which, from passion, had almost turned to dread. And that dread had swept over him so suddenly, that he scarcely realized its nature.
    He looked around him at the wood. But angels are invisible. Only in art can we draw the likeness of what cannot be seen. He was alone. He had realized something .
    Wagner’s metaphysics was built on flesh and would not survive its foundations. Wagner could never understand the cool, sand-swept cities of the androgynous, where the sexless hold their silver rites like grave children or infant Ptolemies. That was the trouble between them. Ludwig knew that. Wagner could treat an erotic boy only as he would treat a woman. He could never cast his being into those great waves of consciousness whichbreak on no shore, where the sexless swim like charming dolphins, loyal only to the advent of an Arion. Ludwig demanded a Mozart, to whom sex was merely, and justly, a parable. Wagner knew nothing about parables. He had only a myth, and it had taken him long enough to find even that.
    Not for an instant had he been willing to accept Ludwig as anything but walking surety at the local bank. Ludwig knew that as soon as he learned that the Master had sent for his whole performing circus of disciples, for Hans von Bülow, and for Hans von Bülow’s wife. Wagner’s lungs were too small to breathe the air even of those mountains he cast up. He had to have creature comforts adapted to the plain.
    It was not pleasant and Ludwig was badly shaken. Wagner had been unwilling to stay at Starnberg, so Ludwig had bought him a house in the Briennerstrasse, in Munich. Whenever he went there he felt appalled, and he soon came to avoid it. Art was solitary and pure, and now there were all these people between him and it. The house was vulgar and ostentatious. He could not find Wagner in it anywhere. It reeked of women. The house his grandfather had built for Lola Montes, the actress, must have looked like this, but at least Lola Montes had been a woman, and a lovely one at that, with the dark face of a spider. Wagner was not a woman. Why, therefore, did he live like one? His house was like the apartment of a fashionable actress. It was kitsch.
    Artists were supposed to be naked, noble, and severe. Art was a religious exercise, a preparation for enlightenment . This house was like a vestry after mass. It stank of attar of roses and rose de Bengale. Ludwig blinked and longed for the woods.
    He picked up a bibelot from an end table and wonderedwhat