should be the first to concede that the abjection to which jail — a far worse place than prison — reduced me is tremendously funny. All in all, I am glad I can still find the recollection of the sheer erasure of human dignity so full of mirth, as I discovered in talking of the ordeal one recent morning with another prisoner who had been there at the same time I was, and for almost as long. From the remove of our very relative, entirely comparative safety, we could laugh, with the terribly energetic hilarity of relief, at the common, indelible memories. Memories of waking long before dawn from hunger pangs, in the purple half-light that glowered all night, only to await like dogs, with inane anticipation, the plastic trays bearing a breakfast consisting of a single egg, a single cup of porridge, three slices of “brown” bread, a half-pint of milk, and the junk I never ate — the margarine and packets of sugar and drink flavouring. Of the ravenous, animal hope that the oatmeal would be thick, followed by disappointment when it was as thin as saliva. Of yet how rapidly that disappointment would give way to greedy, animal satisfaction in scraping every drooling iota of gruel off the tray. Of grovelling with just the right mixture of effortful plaintiveness and amicability for an extra leftover sack lunch.Memories of thanking departing prisoners for the foul gift of their used sheets, to be traded in on the weekly exchange so I might have two with which to ward off the cold. Of frantic desperation in trying to get the attention of the functionary who was sent, after months of prisoners’ complaints about the frigid cells in which we shivered, to take the temperature, but who officiously measured it — the face so bland, so warm — in the toasty, hot core of the building where the guards ate takeout and cackled. Of the obese, porcine body and stolid visage of the senior administrator with the ridiculous rank of major, who received without a trace of irony the solicitous words of a judge about the excellence of the facility and the difficulty of his constraints. Of spending the entire hour permitted outside the cell in the shower, to keep warm. Doing it all naturally, complaisantly, as though dignity were something that did not exist.
This may not seem quite entirely funny. The humour may be, to some, a touch elusive. The comedy comes from the droll reversal by which brutality assumes the mantle of righteousness precisely by the victory of its own insensibility, or rather, its imbecile sensibility. It abides in the constant ironic suppression of outrage in an environment in which the irony will never be perceived, and the constant acceptance of unacceptable cruelty that will never be recognized as such because it is established — it is the absolute entrenchment of evil among human beings too banal to recognize it as such. I can laugh at all this, until my stomach contorts into iron knots, in much the same way that I laughed uncontrollably one day after the recitation of an impeccably mannered young graduate student teaching sociology, who delivered in her well-constructed paragraphs, with the aptest expressions of face, voice, and word as cues of moral disapproval, an account of the plight of the mentally ill in Soviet asylums, held in cages and blasted with icy water from hoses as they protested incoherently. The laughter mixed relief at being removed from such futility and suffering, and a sense of power in having the capacity to perceive its abjection. Since I have a far happier conscience when laughing at cruelty directed at myself, I find my own memories even funnier — however much I might want to disapprove.
know now, better than I should like, my bare requirements for a life recognizably human, perhaps recognizably mine: the seclusion of the single cell; the adequate food; the blessed if imperfect earplugs; the books, papers, and music; the tenuous strands of hope that ravage what they sustain. I know that prison is not a space for understanding freedom, but a place of creeping corruption. What I love nonetheless in Gould’s words is that they sound a tune to which our ears are unaccustomed — one that promises of perfections not yet imaginable, of freedoms as yet unconscious, even if they are not here. Life is problematic; something is missing; ardour is of it.I am tempted to think that Gould came to comprehend why prison could not have given him the understanding he sought. The paradox of freedom through toil, in toil, is perhaps never more vivid and yet more consummately vindicated than in the performance of written music. The pianist is asked to train in sinew and nerve to reproduce with exactitude a score not of his own devising — to maintain fidelity to this text. Yet this feat is achieved not merely when the technical difficulty of the work is no longer an obstacle, but when the score is so thoroughly absorbed that it belongs completely to the performer. The performer then becomes an interpreter and comes at last to share in the inner texture of the relationship with that ineffable other with which the composer was engaged when composing the work. Just as we do not originate the language we speak, but nevertheless by learning it liberate our individual power of expression, so learning a piece of music does not make the pianist merely a slave to the composer. There is no question of struggling against the composer to express oneself. Rather, the very chains of the composition become the means for expression, and the space of freedom for the imagination.
Gould was the paragon of a creative interpreter, and in the years after his breakthrough record his playing continued to develop. His recordings eschewed wilful romantic extravagance without ever ceasing to be personal or poignant. In the essay he wrote early on to accompany his recording of the unsurpassable last three piano sonatas of Beethoven — Beethoven, who claimed that music is a higher revelation than all of wisdom and philosophy — he avoids hyperbole to emphasize instead their subtler charms and quieter satisfactions. Nabokov was impishly fond of puncturing clichés about the opposing cultures of science and art (both, in his view, philistine) by extolling the passion of pure science and the precision of poetry; the best of Gould’s recordings annihilate any sense of contradiction. In these interpretations, analytic clarity and absolute control become inextricable from and indispensable to originality of expression and imaginative freedom. Nothing is merely wayward; nothing is for effect. He serves the composition, and it serves him in a beautiful equipoise.
A quarter century after that first celebrated recording, Gould was moved to record The Goldberg Variations again. He could not have known that it would be his final record. In one of his last interviews, he explained his dissatisfaction with what he now considered the faults of his earlier interpretation. “The purpose of art is not the release of a momentary ejection of adrenaline,” he finally averred, “but is, rather, the gradual, lifelong construction of a state of wonder and serenity.” A state of wonder and serenity — nothing is so far removed from prison’s unhallowed halls.
And yet prison is not, after all, without its cruel, special illuminations. Reverence, that rarest of virtues, peeks out from time to time. If the hanged man on the gallows holds the entire world in balance, so does the prisoner have a free view. Sisyphus is indeed of most interest precisely at the moment of leisure, in repose before the toil begins anew. In the silent moments of darkness, after the lights go out, when a gleam lights a page or headphones resound, nowhere so much as in prison do the pejorative connotations of the term “escapism” lose their point — if not, perhaps, all their sting. The work of art is more than luxury or decoration in prison; it can become the substance of life itself. Here, in the very pit of crude fatuity and dull compulsion, those works of human frailty, those arts that were once the privilege of liber — the free, the rich, and the mostly happy — assume an overwhelming and astonishing significance for the wretched, as if their inmost savour and secret, the elusive quality of their perfection, had been hidden away undisclosed, awaiting this only too human need.
I must imagine it some consolation still — only not happily, nor, happily, ever after.
