Beethoven – piano sonata no.31, op.110 (3rd movement)
by richibi
“Woman Reading in a Garden“ (1902-03)
_______
perhaps my best teacher ever was
my father, others never questioned
the orthodoxy, spewing out the
curriculum like it was sacred, dead,
untouchable, depriving it of its very
worth
my father was a philosopher, God
was a question, not an answer, I,
at the time, needed an answer
we were sent to a Catholic school,
my sister and I, where God was in
everything, everywhere, omnipotent,
omniscient, and, like a father then,
autocratic, industrious, demanding,
not unopposed to punishment
sins against the Father could be
summarized, at that age, briefly,
do not kill, do not lie, do not
disobey your parents, do not
cheat on your husband, wife,
and follow all the rituals of the
Church, the Ten Christian
Commandments, brought to
none of these graded offences
applied to me, really, then, but
lying, and disobeying one’s
parents, the others were all so
remote as to be inconsequential,
though the Church kept up on
our family’s abrogations of
religious rites – non-attendance
at Sunday mass, eating meat
on Fridays, worse – while
nevertheless tending dutifully
to our wayward souls, they told
us, holding out for a final repentant
confession
we never lied at home, I’d lied about
something once, and was so daunted
when my father probed, I sweated,
must’ve turned purple, not just red,
of embarrassment, I knew I couldn’t
use that tactic again, I’d inexorably
blush, flush
who put the Brylcreem on the dog,
he’d queried
not me, I trembled
my sister stood beside me, might
not have even known anything
about it, I can’t remember, though
I recall her dismay, I think, at having
been so blithely thrown under the
bus, or maybe that’s just me
extrapolating
my dad turned back to what he’d
been doing, having, I’d understood,
got his answer, proving himself to
be to me thereby omniscient, I’d
have no chance, I gathered, against
something like that, this turned me
into a good, an at least conscientious,
person
my teachers, paradoxically, only
ever took marks off for technical
stuff, Math, History, French, they
never taught me lessons
a teacher, once, had asked me to
stand at the head of the class and
read a passage from Shakespeare,
be Romeo, Mark Antony, Lear, I
can’t remember which
“O, pardon me, thou bleeding
piece of earth, / That I am meek
and gentle with these butchers!”,
I uttered, fraught with emotion,
“Thou art the ruins of the noblest
man / That ever lived in the tide
of times”
in my mind and in my body I was
Mark Antony there, shot through
with the weight of his friend’s
brutal death, his own irretrievable
loss
my teacher laughed
what, I asked
you’re right into it, aren’t you, he
replied, and shut me up right there
to any public display of expression
I didn’t stop reading Shakespeare
though, but by myself
later I read Homer, Ovid, Proust,
others, did the same with music
and art, made countless lifelong
friends thereby, people I’ve always
been able to turn to, even just in
ruminative thought as their stories
still pervaded me, diligently leading
still the way, like guardian angels,
maybe
Richard
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