Chapter 7: Alexandre the Great

Thomas Couture, “Young Italian Street Musician,” 1877.

In fact I hadn’t learned all that much. Alexandre made me realize this. I had consumed a lot of material, but it was done in quite a general way, without a real eye toward forming a direct intuitive relationship with art needed for one’s flesh to become a great poem, without any representational mediation through critic-approved apparatuses.

Alexandre was an antagonist to my brain. I would say something and he would contradict it immediately, offering up something I disagreed with but which I never found to be fake and hollow, always equally true and exhilarating. His whole worldview was so different from any I’d ever encountered. For one, he was a French speaker: I had never found someone so thoroughly outside the scope of the Anglosphere and its inherent dogmatisms, like the primacy of the market and the progressiveness of the protestant-scientific worldview; not even the Spanish speakers I knew were so free of the Anglo-American imperial mindset. He viewed the arc of modern history as a decline even more than I did: he did not believe modern times represented any kind of progress over the 1600s, and felt that, despite the conveniences and knowledge brought on by modern science, it was all so much plebeian fare, and the world would be better off if England never defeated the continent and we were all still speaking French. “The modern day salon is where I live,” he reassured a thread of us “lowly” American posters as we shitposted about being dissolute artists wishing for access to decadent salons. “I'll send you pictures tomorrow. I have Récamier couches, a grand piano, persian rugs, curules, baroque furniture and gold trimmed shit everywhere.” And sure enough he was telling the truth.

I thought he was the child of Parisian aristocrats; I remember calling him a “sheltered baroque child” and asking him where the hell he came from, and remarking how funny it was to see such a throwback individual react positively to Lil B and Modern Warfare 2. He wrote so differently, very measured and exact, with strange use of punctuation. This kid, who was just slightly older than me, discoursed on Musset’s Confessions of a Child of the Century, the poems of Nerval, Nelligan, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, and Verlaine, the prose of Proust, and classical music with a style that exceeded most professionals I’d read. Yet at the same time he held to a libertinist philosophy that the only point to life was pleasure. In these days, he would often quote Montherlant, the fascist dandy writer, who said he would never choose literature over life if there was pleasure to be had; the reading and writing of novels would only be resumed when there was nothing else going on.

Alexandre would brag that he got paid in alcohol for teaching a 20-year-old girl music theory on his patio, a girl he met at a bar, uploading a photo she took of him wearing a white blazer over his bare chest, peering at sheet music through his long black curly hair. He looked almost Latin American; I always thought he had some native blood. I laughed hard, thinking about this Miami Vice-looking character, coke habit and all, analyzing baroque counterpoint and talking Pascal. He would brag about cheating on his girlfriend with another 25-year-old whom he wooed through discussing the copy of Baudelaire she was buying at a store. When CLT or I would call him bullshit on these stories, he would implore: “perhaps in Anglo countries women are plebeian, but where I’m from this is quite common; culture is wedded freely with the female sex and with nightlife, it does not take away from it.” I would learn later that this magical place was not in fact Paris, not the Old World, but Québec, the Canadian province just a few hundred miles from my house up the interstate highway that coursed through the crappy rundown sportsbars of New York State. And he was not in fact Old Money, but rather the only child of a community college professor mother and a city planner father, divorced boomer parents like all the rest of us. But I wanted to keep the myth alive; I wanted to believe he was this superwealthy child with connections to a whole world of people who would introduce me to a universe as poetic as the novels I read from a long-gone earth. And in some ways he did.

One way you could look at this was that I was always looking for a brother. I grew up with one sibling, my sister, and often felt that I was “stuck” with women when I would have to go on endless errands with her and my mother at “the store,” that phrase so menacing and ominous for a young boy’s ears, a euphemism for a thousand department stores up and down the highway. In elementary school, I was envious of friends who had older brothers. Around the same age in life and experiencing the same things, they could sound off their individuality and hear it reverberate back, serving as a wellspring of confidence and self-reinforcement. Or they had constant access to competitiveness and shittalking, which are the pastimes of any healthy young man. I believe this is why I was so preoccupied with finding friends, and why I would take what they’d say so seriously.

I didn’t understand music theory, and I couldn’t figure out what Alexandre or CLT were talking about half the time as they plunged into arguments about chromatic chords or whatever it was. But I enjoyed what they had to say nonetheless. While CLT would focus on the opponent’s soul-plebeianism and lack of understanding, Alexandre would adopt a strident tone and deploy 19^th century vulgarities. “Bernstein cannot be subtle and treats this piece like an old whore you'd fuck for 5$,” he’d respond to a user who linked to a Berlioz performance. “jesus christ,” they replied. “Bernstein perfectly ruins this piece. God damn what a faggot,” he went on. “When the idée fixe arrives, you'll understand the difference. The muted bow tip strings are written pianissimo. Bernstein plays them mezzo-forte.”

I’d feel despair that I wasn’t tutored like them, but when I look back, I think, who really cares? I didn’t really want to know any of that; what I wanted to learn from them was why was this worldview so goddamn powerful? As I explained, Alexandre introduced me to an entirely new notion: the total condemnation of modern values, not in a Varg way, but from an aristocratic perspective. For him, the pristine quality of a form was to be valued higher than what societal problem it was commentating upon or what new innovation it was achieving with abrasive experimentation. While Alexandre thought my avant-garde music was “degenerate garbage” and only permitted classical music and pop, a point on which I vehemently disagreed, I nevertheless conceded that this music was superior to anything I had listened to previously. The sensations produced were incomparable to anything else to the point that I had to surmise it was due to the metaphysical world outlook these pre-modern composers had. This music revealed, as Renaissance art historian Graham-Dixon calls it by way of Petrarch, “the pure radiance of the past.”

To educate myself one summer, I decided to start from the very beginning with medieval plain chant and listen all the way up to the present. I logged onto the Russian pirating website I used and found “Aurora Surgit,” a female choir. From researching them I discovered Hildegard von Bingen, the “Sybil of the Rhine” from the 11^th century who received mystic visions. Reading about her online, I was impressed to find that someone from the “dark ages” was a polymath: she authored texts on theology and her personal ecstatic experiences of God as well as treatises on botany, history, and rhetoric. I would gaze at illuminated manuscripts from the period, drifting into the beyond while listening to these transcendent meditations.

I proceeded into CLT’s recommendations of the composers that came after this era. One piece in particular, Perotin’s Viderunt Omnes, blew my mind. I read that it was performed on Christmas Day in Notre-Dame. The only music I had known like this was Popol Vuh, but listening to this was different because you knew that the people who made it were from a cosmological paradigm utterly distinct from our own, with so pure and innocent an access that it was effectively real for them. I pictured flocks of ardent believers, simple peasants, pouring into the church on Christmas, the still-rural landscape of Gothic Paris blanketed in pearly white snow, the sky a gray woolen blanket of peace, the sunrays of a loving but grave God reaching them through the words of the chant, a range of different singers piously pleading with their voices for their Creator to grant some peace on them.

I became obsessed with the story of Carlo Gesualdo, a renaissance prince-composer who murdered his wife and her lover in a fit of rage, and composed darkly passionate madrigals on his wracked soul. I began to write a novel about it, a project I abandoned for the time but kept with me, bookmarked for a later date. I kept trying to write at this point, but couldn’t muster anything of true power, and so continued to just read and listen to thousands and thousands of works. I kept a journal and wrote verses like Rimbaud’s or Baudelaire’s about the moon and the night, inspired by J.M.W. Turner and not by Novalis, who I discovered only later. I was a romantic without having read much romanticism—it wasn’t inspired by what we call “romanticism,” but the actual experience of the Romantic that those writers had felt surging up at them from the wellsprings of the cold lunar woods of post-God Europe: a longing for the medieval, renaissance, and baroque pasts when God was still Great and mankind had a sure purpose in a profound, teleological universe, with the earth in the center and Christendom’s path certain and true. This may have been an illusion, if we consult the historians, who will tell us all about the wars of religion and various courtly turmoil. But I didn’t care about any of that. What spoke to me was the sense of absolute certainty regarding the Truth these composers had, over and above what some sinners on earth might be doing, and how this certainty allowed them to compose harmonious, symmetrical art to celebrate the Creator, in the case of Claudio Monteverdi’s glorious aural cathedral Vespro della Beata Vergine, or to lament the crucifixion of Christ, in the case of Heinrich Ignaz Franz Biber’s Rosenkranzsonaten or Dietrich Buxtehude’s Membra Jesu Nostri.

I also loved the summertime balcony pieces of Arcangelo Corelli, imagining the aristocrats who were regaled by these pieces on calm August nights as they colonized the earth and waged war with the lives of hundreds of thousands, the masses and the democratic-capitalist meddlers held by the balls through the Church. Or the country escapades of Francesco Maria Veracini with the rustic sounds of Tuscan fields blending into the high technical mastery of the mid-millennia divinely Calculus’d European mind. Guys like Veracini were employed by nobles and princes all over Europe to make music for stage-dramas of Grecco-Roman myth. Imagine all the intrigue and conniving found in Hollywood showbiz fused into the very same sceptres wielded by men who owned literal cities and countries (our richest billionaires today can only own houses, like all of us), who in between enjoying snuff and courtesans and martial conquests—no one absolutely no one, not priests not women not peasants, could tell these guys what to do—wanted to see pageants of high art, commissioning sculptures to adorn their stages on which people would enact scenes from Ovid, accompanied by music written by geniuses who had been studying since birth. Total power, total mastery of the mind, total perfection of form, the complete harvest of God’s creation to reward the spirit and the senses.

It was becoming hard to enjoy contemporary things… And the term “contemporary” extended quite far. Alexandre’s chief hatred was of romantic music, not the subtleties of Chopin or the gracefulness of Mendelssohn, but the bombastic muck of sounds one finds in Tchaikovsky, Wagner, Mahler, Dvorak, and so on. Whenever anyone would post these composers, he would respond with images of firetrucks. At first, we thought this simply referred to how their music sounded like a fire engine, blaringly loud, without form, not knowing when to end; but he later informed us that it was actually an old term of derision in French culture: l’art pompier. It was a play on words, linking the pompous (pompeux) nature of bourgeois academic art, with its overblown style of presentation and its excessive use of anachronistic mythology and religion, to the firemen (pompier) of Paris who wore helmets like the action figures in their insincere paintings. On the one hand, there was Chopin, who “was discussing with the Sein all day long on his piano”; on the other hand, there were the firemen, who all amounted to Disney music, comprised of “unison string sections, bland melodies, pompous orchestrastion, post-romanticish progressions, and unoriginality.”

When someone claimed these terms didn’t mean anything, he’d elaborate: “Sounds like a drunken Strauss is laughing at his most cliché’d compositions, generic shit anybody could have written.” One poster was insistent, lauding the soundtracks of Star Wars, Jaws, Indiana Jones, Jurassic Park, and Schindler’s List. “Kitsch having attained physical form. Nothing else. The people, the dregs, they like kitsch. They breathe kitsch. They live and die for kitsch. Give them all the kitsch you want, it ain't for me,” he replied. He then explained his definition of good music: “I was teaching the basis of music theory to a girl, once, and she asked me, —how do you tell what's good music? Remember that we're French. I answered with the worst southern accent you've ever heard: “If it ain't got no imitative counterpoint, well it ain't no music.”” Elitist through and through.

And then, finally, there was the crown jewel, Mozart, and his Clarinet Concerto above all things. “This is the best music,” Alexandre assured me as he sent it over. Just flatly, the “best music” ever. And this music did soar, it swept into the highest solar halos and cerulean patches of faultless sky, dribbling on the borders of heavenly silver clouds before zooming back down to earth for giddy quick dances in stretches of bountiful grass and wheat at summer festivals of wine and girls. It was Olympic, versatile; as Whitman says, it contained multitudes, from the divine piety of Perotin to the rascality of the chansons of des Prez to the country rolling hills of Veracini, tracking up to the technical theologies of Bach and espying the sublime panoramas of Beethoven; this was a music for past and future; it wizened and it bloomed; it was “like a sea on whose surface sunlight plays gaily, and occasionally it flattens to reveal grave abysses, before covering itself back over,” as Alexandre said once.

As much as he could exhaustively explain music on a technical level, he also unironically loved nonobscure, harmonious music like The Killers, Timber Timbre, and The Doors. The first step toward good taste was to transgress against “perfect taste.” It’d be a form of tastelessness to only like what was immaculate or abrasive and be inflexible in the face of a good time.

We wanted to talk about philosophy and literature and life in addition to music, but the anons hated this and said we were derailing the threads. The posters were starting to get too annoying, so we added each other on Facebook. That winter he wrote a short story which won a local contest, and he translated it into English for me to read. It gave a window into his life, how he thought about things and what he was getting up to in the snow-ensconced city of Québec.

“It had been sold to me as MDMA under capsule form, but, as precised, in rather high doses,” it began. “Thus had I been recommended, having myself never taken any of this drug, to remove some quantity from the capsule – I didn't. Maybe forty-five minutes later, I felt what I may only qualify of ineffable lightness; my steps felt as if they were flying over the wet snow sometimes brow in the cars' tracks; the colours and lights around me exacerbated felt almost violent yet gentle; the wind and the rain, in this too cold April’s end, softness beading on my skin.”

The monologue mentions “saluting passerbys with a smile” and gazing at an old Nestlé advertisement in his father’s apartment stairwell depicting a young girl “crushed by foxy hair” drinking milk with cats, which he stares at happily; the narrator follows himself into his bedroom where he puts on Chopin’s nocturnes before laying with arms crossed on his bed, letting the music “languish” him as he “watched the ceiling dance in his forms he seemedn't grow tired of reproducing.” The narrator pulls away from the story to comment on the way people in our time take MDMA to dance to techno in “bestial behavior.” By contrast, he talks about the wonders it reveals if you instead use it to listen to baroque. First, he listens to the Agnus Dei of Bach’s Mass in B minor, never having appreciated the “contrapuntal intricacies” as much as now. Then, he “basculed” over to Vivaldi’s Stabat Mater, Latin for “Standing Mother,” the Venetian’s take on an old Catholic Mass that had roots stretching back to the Middle Ages, based on a hymn about Mary weeping over her son on the cross. The narrator, while weeping to the haute-contre voice emerging over trilling violins, says he grasped what it was all about.

“I was seeing her, the mother, seeing powerless her son dieing [sic] on the cross, and Him descending his contrite gaze upon her face, sending her hope. In Stabat Mater, we find the idea of standing : she stands there, facing absurdity, man's madness concretized, whilst speaking not – the music swells, swells, swells : then resolves on this heavy minor chord; […] there, mother, is what I offer you, and what I offer mankind, through my undue yet necessary suffering […] on me, on thee, on the mother, on all mothers, on all fathers and their children : I offer you salvation, I offer you grace : accept me and I shall accept you in my breast how the sea's amniotic depths swallow back the volcanic islands which under the fortuity of some eruption, had arisen from these abysses to lay down for a brief instant upon the blue's surface in a short pelagic spurt.”

The story concludes with his girlfriend Natasha walking in and finding a “recumbent asshole” who is “absolutely stoned.” She yells at him for ruining their plans to go out as a couple. The narrator mercilessly denies himself any “decadentist” arguments of justification. They walk through the city streets anyway, toward a bar, Natacha judging him and condemning him; he looks into the windows of apartments with parties going on or television screens, and he longs to be with those people who’d be his friend or at least watch a “retarded-ass program” with him. Natacha asks him for a cigarette, his hand slithers into his pocket, and then she asks him another question: “Why do you do this?” “Why did I do this?” he asks. “No need to use the past.” The story ends there.

It was around this time that Alexandre began to get a bit depressed, deciding to only watch dumb anime films and drink alone. “I can't do anything anymore,” he wrote to me on Facebook. “I'm bored to death. everything looks disgusting. I don't even want to see my gf anymore. I don't know what I want. I feel like watching anime and drinking until I die.”

But he still had fire in him, and after I roused him out of this depression, he began reading Jack Kerouac’s On the Road with fervor. He had read it previously, I believe; he said he loved American literature and thought it was impossible for anyone to hate, because it was unpretentious and free. This book was his real tonic, and he implored me to read it myself. “We must hang out, mate,” he’d say (for some reason, 4chan had adopted the British use of the word “mate”). “We have much to discuss.”

In a fragment from a notebook of mine at the time, I wrote: “only after all of this could I have been given the angry spark of the gods, fused with the comic elitism of Alexandre and the fervor of poetry, that lent me the liberty to transcend the herd and lead my fate.” It is interesting how it was the development of the faculty of aesthetic judgment, not the rejection of God or of the political establishment as it was in earlier epochs, that I felt to have liberated my mind from social pressure and delivered me control over my decisions. By putting the job of artistic evaluation squarely in my own hands, rather than the mainstream press, my friends, or a subculture, or anyone, I by extension became capable of developing my own criteria of evaluation regarding life, different kinds of life and modes of ethics, and therewith granted my own will the confidence to reject anything, no matter how powerful or legitimate according to the contemporaries, if it did not match up to what I esteemed with my own soul.

Alexandre had intentions of becoming a composer. “Classical is a sleeping beauty. They put it to sleep before the masses arrived and spoiled it during the 20th, only to be awakened by a trve knight of the Sein,” he said once. These days saw the first budding of our mission to become great artists, and the birth of the concept of the “True Sanskrit,” the highest criterion… but mostly, again, only through a negative view, through the rants against kitsch and l’art pompier. I had already attained the full scope of the problem of taste before meeting Alexandre, and had read a good deal of the classics; the introduction of Alexandre gave a face and an actor to the concept of aesthetic mastery, to make it real in a person, a composer and a poet with style and the lifestyle of a life-affirmer, for me to grapple with the concept in a manner reminiscent of the Greeks grappling with “Hubris” in the form of the tragic heroes or the medievals grappling with “Logos” in the form of Christ.