The Requiem is Always in Style is a UDism. It is a thing UD says… and she… hold on… yes. She invented the saying. No one else says it. I mean, Google doesn’t show anything like the sentence The Requiem is Always in Style.
The requiem UD has in mind is Mozart’s, and the idea she has in mind is that since someone’s always dying, the requiem is always in style… In fact, veteran readers of University Diaries know that UD has a tradition of hitting the baby grand and belting out one or another number from this piece when someone who meant something to her dies.
And so tonight she played and sang through Number 3, Tuba mirum, in memory of Elizabeth Edwards, who, you might or might not know, was not only an English major at Chapel Hill, but also did a bit of grad school in English there, before switching to law school. She eloquently quotes Emily Dickinson – among other poets – in her book about her son’s death.
Poetry, you know, is a very strange thing, and very few people quote it or read it or love it. Poetry is very morbid, most of it. Here’s a poem, by Charles Baxter. Appeared in this month’s Poetry magazine.
Please Marry Me
Please marry me. Your mother likes me.
—Line spoken by an unknown woman, in a dream
We are stretched out on a dingy sofa, and I think
I must be barefoot because a woman whom no one knows
Is massaging the ankle of one leg of mine and the instep
Of the other, all this toward morning, and I have that
Occasional epiphany one has while still asleep
That I am floating down a river
Because I am so happy and all the dismal issues
Have been made tractable at last, and so I say to her
That the late symphonies of Gustav Mahler
Are more lucid if you’re sitting close to, and above,
The orchestra, so that you can see the contrapuntal
Lines moving from strings to woodwinds
And then back again, whereupon this woman,
Sitting (I now realize) at my feet, says, in the full
Heat of our dream life, and in that happiness,
“Please marry me. Your mother likes me,”
And so I wake, not laughing, although my mother
Has been dead for over thirty years, but in wonderment
Over what quality this dream-woman must have owned
To have pleased my mother so that she,
My late mother, would have said, despite her ban
On ordinary pleasantries, that she had liked someone,
Anyone, who might have cared for me, and as I lie
In bed I think of the last movement of Mahler’s Ninth
When the melodic lines go quiet for minute after minute
In a prolonged farewell to music and to life,
Which my mother would attend to in her bathrobe
Late at night, the stereo turned up, blended whiskey
In her highball glass mixed with milk as a disguise,
Leaning back, hand over eyes, silent-movie style
Like Norma Desmond listening as Von Stroheim plays
The organ wearing his white gloves. No, it wasn’t
Mahler, it was Schoenberg, Verklärte Nacht,
Moon-drunk music, mad and inconsolable.
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So some guy remembers a dream he had; he was happy in the dream though he’s basically a sad person — all the dismal issues… Prominent among his dismal issues is the bewildering, unassimilable emotional legacy left by his alcoholic mother.
He was happy in the dream because he’d sort of reanimated her by interfusing her music, her Mahler, with his dream. In the dream his suffering bewilderment about his mother’s life becomes lucid joy:
the late symphonies of Gustav Mahler
Are more lucid if you’re sitting close to, and above,
The orchestra, so that you can see the contrapuntal
Lines moving from strings to woodwinds
And then back again
If you sit up smartly and peer closely at a bewildering thing, you can see how it works! You can see the particular mix that makes that thing that thing…
In his second stanza he peers closely at the bewildering mix that was his mother – her blended whiskey, and then the whiskey blended again, with milk, mother’s milk, to confuse her onlooker, her son. Her obscure contrapuntal liquid, her milky witchery, her alcoholic alchemy…
Yet the dream’s given him this wonderful epiphany: So that’s what she was about! I see it now! I see how the sections worked together to create her counterpoint!
***********************************
Or do I? Sentimentally, he evokes the famous last section of Mahler’s Ninth:
When the melodic lines go quiet for minute after minute
In a prolonged farewell to music and to life,
Quiet. His mother sits in a silent movie, her drink milky white, the organist wearing white gloves…
Pretty picture; but he’s idealizing. He’s idealizing his mother’s despair as a form of acceptance, a Mahlerian dissolving, a slow, slow, delicate movement toward peace.
And his now wide-awake consciousness won’t let him get away with it:
No, it wasn’t
Mahler, it was Schoenberg, Verklärte Nacht,
Moon-drunk music, mad and inconsolable.