Review: "Ich Steh' Mit Einem Huf Im Grabe" by axxuy · 10:46pm Nov 9th, 2022
Review: Ich Steh' Mit Einem Huf Im Grabe (I Stand with One Hoof in the Grave, the title of a Bach cantata)
by axxuy
May 2021, 1,345 words
Tragic Octa-scratch, but with Vinyl as a background pony
Octavia has one ambition: to play one musical work, once, perfectly. She strives for nothing but this goal, with all her effort, mind, and time.
She knows that if she achieves it, there will be nothing left for her. "Every song had a proper place to end. To continue it past then made a lesser song." Continuing her life after that moment would be pointless and pathetic. And yet she must not for that reason hold back: "A deliberate flaw remained an unthinkable act of violence. If she maimed one work of art to save another, what had she gained but an even guiltier conscience?"
Goethe or Byron might have written something like it, but probably in a more-histrionic 19th-century Romantic style. I'm reviewing its content, not its style. The style is suitable, both for the content and for Octavia. Axxuy's Octavia isn't a despairing Young Werther, but a cool, collected, sophisticated philosopher of beauty and death.
The story's tragic mood comes from the seeming paradox that what makes Octavia's life worth living to her is her hope of playing that piece perfectly, and yet attaining that hope would make her life worthless to her.
We can read this as an actual paradox, in which case we get a Greek tragedy [3]: Octavia is doomed through no fault of her own, but by fate / the gods / the nature of the universe. Or we can read it as a false paradox, created by Octavia's error in imagining that perfection is a coherent and desirable thing, in which case we get a modern tragedy: Octavia is doomed by her own error.
I read it the second way. Before Plato, the concept of "perfection" existed only in Sanskrit. It's absurd if you stop and think about it for a few seconds: is there really, even as a hypothetical ideal, a perfect woman? A perfect evening? A perfect performance of a song? Obviously not. It would be pretentious to say that spring or fall is the best season, that male or female is the best sex, Beethoven or Bach the greater composer, or mysteries or adventures the best stories. For anything worth doing or being, there are many good, radically different, and mutually exclusive ways of doing or being it.
But few people ever stop and question anything everyone else accepts without question, even for a few seconds. They persist in imagining, deep down in their subconscious, that there could be a "perfect" instance or way of doing something, an eternal ideal Form which all instances must attempt to emulate, and which, if achieved, would render all other instances obsolete. Octavia, in this story, takes this far enough to miss the "point" [1] of her very life.
I don't mean that everything is equally good, but I think that picking "the best" or "the most-important" among things that are all different and all excellent—as in arguing for butter pecan over rocky road, Leonard Cohen's version of "Hallelujah" over Jeff Buckley's, or liberty over community—is missing the point of, well, literally everything good in life. A man who says he likes Halloween better than Christmas is autistic, lacking a theory of mind of others, if he imagines he's telling us something about Halloween and Christmas rather than about himself. [2] Yet precisely such absolutist distinctions lurk deep in the minds of all Westerners, and drive our most-popular political, religious, and artistic movements.
I can read this story as Octavia's personal tragedy, brought about by believing the lie of perfection. You can't play music if you seek perfection. You can accurately play a series of notes, in a dictated pattern, with a given tempo and dynamics. But you can't play. Can you imagine Louie Armstrong trying to play something "perfectly?" He'd rather play, man. The joy of play, and of infinite, open-ended growth and exploration, is ruled out by the belief in "perfection". There's no more play then, only "right" and "wrong", or more precisely, "True/Real" and "False".
(And everything is False.)
I can read the story as a metaphor for art in general. The belief in perfection (telos, the ancient Greek word which Plato twisted to express his concept "perfect", but which originally meant "mature" or "complete") is the basis of the recurrent claim, by lazy, untalented, or stupid artists, that some form is "played out": that there is nothing left to do with rhymed, metered, or even properly punctuated poetry, realistic novels, representational painting, or harmonic music, because they have already attained their true mature Form, which they may not go beyond. Yet this is what the entire fine-art industry proclaims loudly and uniformly. And we see that doing so has destroyed these arts and given us little in return.
I can even read this story as a metaphor for Western civilization's love of death. Its moral prophets so often despise life and its messiness because they childishly demand "perfection". The belief in perfection leads to embracing death, because it assumes from the start that evolution, which is necessary for life, is both impossible and undesirable. Every species, culture, and individual is expected to grow to just its telic destiny, and no further. Anything more than that is impious. To contemplate being more, or to realize there are many different ways of being good, is unholy, blasphemous. Everyone who seeks "perfection" ultimately embraces death, because perfection is by definition static and unchanging, and hence a kind of death.
Technology has now progressed to the point where this is literally true. Western scientists are on the verge of curing aging and striking a mighty blow against death, and Western civilization is fighting them tooth and claw, clinging to their beloved death as a moral necessity, without which the narratives they've lived by will be meaningless. Fools wouldn't claim that aging is right and proper if they didn't believe that human life was defined by an eternal perfect Form with a fixed lifespan, and that we would no longer be "human", whatever that is, if we went beyond it—and that this somehow matters.
Tell people about the world's hundreds of thousands trudging daily into the dragon's maw, and they might nod in agreement, but they won't feel it. Show them one mare strangling her potential and throwing away her life, and they might. That's the power of story and myth.
Am I advocating my own worst enemy, the didactic (educational) story? Well… maybe. I have written some, though usually not on purpose. But I think Axxuy is innocent of didacticism. The story doesn't judge. It just shows you this mare. Several readers, in their comments, nodded in agreement with Octavia, and I can't tell whether Axxuy agrees with them. Like Shakespeare, we can't read him in his story.
[1] When I talk about the "point" of life, I don't mean the "purpose" of life. It's the difference between a good way of spending one's life, and an obligatory one.
[2] There's a great old SF short-short story called "The Aliens Who Knew, Like, Everything" in which aliens conquer Earth by moving in quietly and politely, and then driving all their Earthling neighbors crazy by constantly telling them what's the best flower, the best month, the best musical instrument, and so on.
[3] I define "modern tragedy" using something like Aristotle's definition of tragedy, which I think doesn't apply to Greek tragedies very well, but applies better to modern and "early modern" (Renaissance) tragedies.
There's also something great about how you feature the story link so prominently, when I go to read your review it's easy to go to the story by mistake.
Which is fine and good, really! If you were instead reviewing a bad story I shouldn't read, then...well, you probably wouldn't review a story like that anyway.
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