The Inexperienced

The following is a miniplay which emphasizes the central conflicts in today's aesthetics, and academia, focusing on the realm of music to carry its message:

DR. PATRICK SILK, 51, professor and director of musical composition at Princeharvnell University.

An early April evening in 2005, within the hundred-year-old office of PROFESSOR SILK, lined with wall panels and furniture of a finely carved but faded dark wood. An equally antique grand piano, having been turned into a condition of ideal sound, stands in the center of the room, alongside a Spartan black-painted box-shaped bench and two plush, minimalist bright scarlet-painted leather chairs without armrests. Within one sits PATRICK SILK, three-time Grammy Award winner and recipient of the new “Official Leader of the Avant-Garde” Hollywood-granted title. He is a balding gray-haired man with deep creases separating his chin from his jackal-resembling jaw, dressed in an unbuttoned raspberry-colored suit with a yellow-brown turtleneck underneath. 120 degrees from him, also facing the piano, ATHENA MILTON is leaning forward, with her long, slender fingers, conspicuously lacking any artificial polishings or embellishments, entwined around a trim, pointed chin. Her face resembles that of her namesake Goddess, except that it is sharper and exhibits higher cheekbones and slight hollows that do not permit her face to be termed precisely planar. Her lengthy golden hair is left to flow down freely, yet in a manner that its width cannot by nature exceed that of her face.

SILK (standing and heading toward a cabinet among many): Miss Milton, I am glad to see you. Want a biscuit? (He opens the cabinet at a leisurely pace and removes a package.)

ATHENA (struggling to retain her composure): Oh, yes. (She had not eaten for over a day, having just yesterday struggled through the net of college bureaucracy to accommodate the monthly payment of her full tuition and room feels to the vaults of Princeharvnell’s Minority Equal Opportunity Assistance Fund.) Thank you, Professor. (She nibbles on the biscuit to savor every crumb, though noticeably withholding the temptation to devour it in one piece in hopes of alleviating her hunger.)

SILK: I have invited you, Miss Milton, because I find your reputation here to be quite intriguing. Tell me, what are you studying for your major?

SILK: My, that’s fancy! Biotechnology! Who could have expected? Athena Milton sorting test tubes and decoding genomes with who knows what high-tech computers. (He slaps his cheek lazily to free himself from this spell of apparently soothing fantasizing.) Well, do you plan to pursue that as a career?

ATHENA: Part of it. I am a fine student, and Dr. Spelton has even arranged for my employment in his laboratory. Not a poor beginning, and I find the field quite fascinating. You may be aware of the colossal project that occupies much of his time.

SILK: Ah, yes, the genetic disease purging endeavor with (shifting to a tone of thoroughly satiated hauteur) extreme uncertainty in outcome and great controversy in methods. Well, it seems to fit you, Miss Milton, during the day yearning to cure grown men of ailments as old as and as much a part of them as their hearts, and at night staging those… very peculiar… performances… of… similar aesthetic longings. (Pause.) Another biscuit? (She sweeps it out of his hand.) Good girl. And I was about to think you anorexic. Well, that is one fault of our image-obsessed materialistic culture that I cannot attribute to you. So, does Spelton frequent your performances?

SILK: I am the gentleman in the high-collared overcoat, top hat, and sunglasses, who sits in the back of the Caf? Jefferson, ceaselessly smoking a single cigar while observing you play. Quite a sight indeed! You on the stage, oblivious to anything but the ringing of the keys in front of you. Then there is Dr. Spelton, a supposedly respectably, experienced researcher, swamped in a pile of papers which he had brought along, occasionally looking up intently at your piano, only to find himself in the company of the rightist radicals, boys obsessed with extremist dogmas and robber-baron era clothing, who cannot but keep their eyes madly fixated on you. They, who had never even cared to ask a girl out in their entire prior lives, now succeed your performance with the exclamations of “Muse!” and even “Goddess!”

ATHENA (as if stating a well-known fact or an elementary logical proposition): It is true.

SILK (startled and hesitating for a moment as he scrambles to tactfully respond): You are… skilled, I must admit. But why is it that you have not applied to take musical composition courses here, if that is where your aptitudes lie? I would have liked to have you in my class.

ATHENA: I do not share your view that the proper way to compose can best be taught within a classroom. A class can inform one of musical theory or the distinguishing features of the styles of composers past, but it cannot undertake in place of the autonomous individual that process of systematic discovery which every person must fathom and undergo on her own, whenever she sits at the piano, her fingers probing the keys for a combination not before tried, a pattern that exists in the realm on untapped possibilities only, that, among the billions of such formations, is the best and thus the only means of concretizing the subject of one’s piece.

ATHENA: What one wants to portray, what one bears in mind as one’s intent before beginning the composition.

SILK: Why does one need to have (contemptuously) an intent? Can one just not feel her way through the music?

ATHENA: On what basis can one state that his feelings are consistent with-- and worthy of being included in-- a composition?

SILK: Now, you remember, Miss, what Emerson said about consistency… I think that, as experience comes to you, you will understand it. For now, why don’t you play one of your pieces for me? Then we’ll discuss it. How about “The Skyscraper?”

ATHENA transfers herself onto the bench with the nimble agility of an athlete. This quite surprises SILK, who had long before noted ATHENA’s malnourished state and expected her none of her typical energy. She begins to play, suddenly becoming unconscious of SILK’s presence and his scrutinizing, flaw-hunting, narrowed eyes.

The melody starts softly but rapidly, with constant upward shifts in the right hand, that, however, are not left unresolved. The melody eventually manages to come downward, as if reflecting the rays of sunlight that had beforehand struck and illuminated a pavement of even-textured concrete. Then, just as ATHENA finishes the passage on a note of reduced volume, she launches, surprisingly, into a booming, colossal upward progression of chords in both hands, sometimes managing to play eight or nine notes simultaneously, all in perfect harmony. Every chord is undiluted major, yet each subsequent one is made seem even more radiantly happy and confident than the last. In the meantime, Athena stretches both of her hands until her little finger and thumb form a 180-degree angle; that is the extent which her later chords span. No matter in which direction the drift of the melody—and ATHENA must direct it in both to accomplish a structurally sound outcome—it is evident that the depiction of the subject, the skyscraper, is shifting its orientation toward the skies throughout. Toward the end, the girl’s fingertips are almost floating off the keys, though she manages to play as firmly as ever; her hands descend to the piano like a hawk’s talons, and she lifts them ever higher following each subsequent chord. Her head is raised to the ceiling, neck muscles tensed and the trigonal plane on the underside of her jaw becoming parallel with the floor. Her ordinarily mildly curious green eyes now widen dramatically and assume an uncommon gleam that imparts upon them an almost neon coloring. They resemble two prodigiously advanced sources of light, each shining a piercingly bright, concentrated beam at the monumental structure envisioned in her mind.

Upon the final, ceaselessly shifting, breathtaking crescendo of chords, her head suddenly jerks upward even higher, as if observing a towering span of antenna. She finishes on a five-note C-major chord stretching from the G in the second octave to the C in the fourth, while her left hand’s fingers race into a low tremolo, as if streaming down the sides of the sides of the structure to present a last-minute snapshot overview. As her hands leave the keys, she lets out a light, half-smiling breath of exhilaration. Blood rushes en masse into her tight-strung cheeks, and her mouth curves upward ecstatically, in automatic reaction to the pleasantly cool tingle that this phenomenon produces. Then her eyes suddenly narrow as she realizes that she is in fact staring at the flaky white ceiling of DR. SILK’s office. The blood is drained from her cheeks, which become frigidly pale as she struggles to regain her composure.

SILK (after a considerable pause): I have… too… written works about skyscrapers. Might you be familiar with them?

SILK: I did them for films; I write many of my pieces for films. Yes, I can see how you probably would not know them; many are sheer depiction of imagery with musical accompaniment—no characters, no plot, no unified theme, just wonderful camera work and vivid symbolism in both sounds and sights. They are not quite at the peak of popularity, but what of the avant-garde is? I am sure that they will be the height of fashion within another decade.(After pausing briefly to ruminate over that prospect) I am given a picture or a sequence already created, and then I must make up something that represents the general feel of the (hesitatingly) subject. But that is not the same as where your preferences lie, is it?

SILK: You dislike being given a ready-made image and needing to adapt your work to it.

SILK: I expected that. Well, let us talk about this (stretching his voice) work of yours, which is derived solely from the images originated in your private, sequestered, unmitigated mind. It is too clear-cut.

ATHENA (dismayed): It is a skyscraper! Try building a wobbly, murky, or ambiguous one!

SILK (soothingly): Now, now, hear me out; maybe you will grasp what I am trying to say. (He graciously hands her another biscuit.) I am not implying that you need to create a dissonant, patternless work, just as I am not suggesting that skyscrapers are built without a fathomable, precise, and strictly delimited scheme. I am Silk, not Schoenberg. But you do need to consider some of the finer, softer, less conspicuous microelements of, say, a skyscraper’s texture or its interaction with its environment—all this you can feel and grasp with your senses when you see such a building. No matter how elegantly or rigidly built, every skyscraper ages with time; its beams rust, its walls get stained or creased, and, though I am sure it will be difficult for you to imagine this, its windows do get broken. I have once had to provide accompaniment for shots of a whole block of abandoned buildings with smashed windows—you know—the ones they are about to demolish?

ATHENA (with indignation): And that is what you consider metaphysically significant about a skyscraper? That is what you want me to accommodate for?

SILK: I didn’t think you would understand. Too young, I’m afraid, too inexperienced… With time you will come to realize that it is those little things, sometimes disparagingly called minutiae, that make up the essence of real life.

ATHENA: And how can I realize that when it is not logically conceivable? The accidents or petty insignificances of the elements or mild human error cannot be the essentials of anything. How do they detract from the purpose and functionality of a skyscraper? Does it thereby become any less grand or ingenious or invaluable because some rivet was driven in too far and created a slight crack on the outer wall of the seventy-third floor, or that some ragged vandal had destroyed one window out of a thousand, that can be easily replaced besides?

SILK: Well, if I agree with you that such errata, even when present in conspicuously large quantities, do not damage the structural integrity or the (probing for the word) appeal of the building, what is the harm of including them and informing your audience that they do, in fact, exist? Would not the message then be: it is not perfect, but need it be perfect to be wonderful?

ATHENA: By the very fact of your inclusion of these minutiae, you infer their significance in your mind. No work of art can depict its subject photographically, with microscopic correspondence to a given concrete. What aspects of its subject it does portray depend on the value-premises of the artist. One only has a limited amount of time in a composition, as well as a restricted physical capacity, but so, so much to portray! There is such a plethora of detail and impression that one must only select the most significant—and fundamental, those aspects which infer the rest. When one titles a work “The Skyscraper,” one must transmit that depiction which is most sweeping and universal, which every man will comprehend in his reception as that which it is intended to portray, and relate to precisely what he had once observed, no matter what concrete had grazed across his eyes, no matter what chance flaws or follies had caught his eyes for a fleeting, forgotten moment. What he has, then, to gain from the artist is the evaluation, the analysis, of that essence. No, perfection is not required for an admirable building, but if that structure can be presented with perfection, is this not an attribute to strive for?

SILK: But who gets this raw essence in real life, amid the chaotic jumble of everyday experience?

ATHENA: It is only a chaotic jumble if one knows not by what method to study it.

SILK: But is it not important, sometimes, to portray the jumble itself? That feeling of confusion, disorientation, not knowing what to seek—would there not be a catharsis if it is depicted?

ATHENA: It may be prudent to analyze it, to discover its causes and consequences, to identify it for the purpose of eliminating it, but to portray it for its own sake in a work of art is intellectual sloth, like flaunting one’s dirty clothing instead of washing it. (She momentarily scans her own garment. Despite the fact that her financial condition leaves much to be desired, ATHENA’s simple short-sleeved solid white dress is stainless.)

SILK: You always wish to cleanse everything, Miss Milton. I can recall some of the more memorable titles of your pieces: “Purification,” “Unfettered Liberty,” “The Sparkling Fountain.” But why can’t you just let something be? Isn’t merely understanding enough, so that you can then just relax and “smell the roses,” so to speak? ATHENA: No. One must also live. To live, a man needs to act. To act, he must think. To think, he must exhibit unflinching confidence. And for that he must know the essentials of every topic which concerns every facet of his existence.

SILK: But does one need to act in this way everywhere? That is, in every part of one’s life? Sure, one needs to do something, to work and analyze to a certain extent. I am Silk, not Siddhartha. But to dissect everything, every moment, every impression, just to extract your treasured essence—that is just tedious and inhuman. Human beings are good—they can be quite ambitious, successful, and (smiling slyly and subtly) well-adjusted. (ATHENA flinches.) But striving for a perfect grasp, a perfect image, reduced to only causes and consequences, is impractical and impossible.

ATHENA: And an individual’s quest to create and discover, to bring into her knowledge something never before tapped or devised, is that not real? Or is the immediately given, the ready-made and already thought of by someone else, the only reality life has to offer? If anything can be called constricted, that latter mindset is.

SILK (taken aback, handing ATHENA a biscuit almost in a frenzy): Well, if you would consider my mentality constricted, you should first observe its consequences and the impressions they evoke in you. Hear now my perspective on skyscrapers.

SILK kneels onto the bench and gradually allows his feet to slide underneath the instrument. His fingers are of only slightly above-average length, though light and maneuvering quickly within winding passages composed of proximate notes. His music does not, however, precisely approach the quality of such ornate swiftness. It is lighter than ATHENA’s and mostly occurs in a slightly minor key, or, more accurately, several of them, as the same melody is often transposed two steps higher or two lower, depending on SILK’s fancy, which notably lacks any pattern to its exertions. The melody is protracted over a time not merited by its structure or complexity. Exact repetition is ceaseless, and not of the classical sort, where a part played at the beginning of a piece might have concluded it as well, but rather of the side-by-side variant, wherein a brief passage, played once, reiterates itself note for note three to five additional times.

There is an occasional semblance of harmony, but the listener’s ears can never quite catch a development, culmination, and conclusion to any passage; the droning monotony resembles a broken record which the perceiver, ATHENA especially, is eager to force beyond the jamming point. The general sensation prevalent throughout SILK’s work is a static, but scattered, and thoroughly debilitating, tension. To further this immobile daze, SILK introduces an element of dissonance precisely where the listener, after having waddled through two hundred measures of a barely altered single motive, expects at last to either rise or descend conclusively into the final chord. This is a combination of an ultra-high F-natural and F-sharp in the right hand with the same E-minor passage played low by the left. What results is either a squeak, a screech, or the sound of a rock rumbling through broken glass. As ATHENA resumes listening, with Herculean effort restraining her eyes from wandering around the room, she notes how, gradually, over the next fifty measures, so that the average listener would become mesmerized into not noticing it, the melody in the left hand fades away into nothingness, and only the discord, now also blended with a G-sharp and G-natural, is pounded with accelerating frequency and fervor. Somewhere after the twenty-third repetition of this, the piece abruptly terminates with a single G-sharp octave that does not resolve the melody, though it comes tauntingly close.

ATHENA (the words exiting her lips like machine-gun bullets): Play Measure 45 again and stop afterward. (SILK complies, not anticipating the girl’s descent onto the bench alongside him.) Now, this is a promising first quarter of a four-measure development. (Her fingers extrapolate the rest within a matter of seconds, while also managing to add a more dynamic succession of accompanying notes in the right hand, which presents the impression of specks of light rushing in zigzags along the glossy, lustrous surface of the glass that had been broken in SILK’s original.) And from there we can move on to another sequence—let us render it in G-major to move the entire melody one step closer to a purity and confidence of an Olympian level, which this firm, imperturbable product of man’s accomplishment requires for an accurate portrayal.

She carries the melody further, creating as a result the impression of sunlight gathering on the uppermost windows of the structure, reached by the focus of the listener’s attention after the latter is lifted from the shadowy minor of the lower stories. A true harmony, evidenced not only by particular sound combinations but also by the very structured and dynamic progression of the work, comes into being.

SILK (unable anymore to tolerate the allegedly unthinkable effrontery of Athena’s reformation of his award-winning music, especially once she has begun to translate the melody into chords, with a slight flavor of major protruding through the prevalent minor of the original): It’s become yours now, Miss Milton. Whatever you have done to it, you have left none of my creativity and originality in place.

ATHENA: Did your “creativity” consist of blending the promising with the bland, or even the horrific, and working those elements through to their inexorable culmination, Professor?

SILK (hesitantly): Well, that’s what distinguishes me from you, doesn’t it? My choice of what to include…

ATHENA: And what remained at the end? Could your original melody, however redundant, have survived as dissonance began to intrude upon it? Could the two elements have coexisted in their irreconcilable antagonism? Or was the finale of your work necessitated by your choice to include the insignificant while leaving out so many radiant and logical possibilities?

SILK: And you say you took out the insignificant. What have you really taken out?

ATHENA: The window-shattering for one, along with the movement-inhibiting repetition that prevented the exposition of the entire essential subject.

SILK: And you have thus turned the melody from a tranquil, value-neutral rumination into one of your trademark odes to ceaseless striving. I am Silk, not Faust. I do not always consider "movement" to be necessary. What about rest and rejuvenation, or just a chance encounter with something, aside from any further exhaustingly profound discoveries?

ATHENA: Even in rest the rational man will learn something. He will progress from one stage to another in his mind at least. Even if this occurs in a dream, a right-thinking beholder will perceive the subconsciously systematized unfolding of his value-premises. A work can be calm and soothing, but at the same time exhibit evident, masterful movement. For cases in point, hear Chopin, Massenet, and Rachmaninoff. Another piece can be loud and pounding, but lack any direction or orientation whatsoever, just dawdling in place and bludgeoning the same auditory mantras into the listener. For a more than ample demonstration, try any of today's rap, hip-hop, and "new jazz" cacophonies.

SILK: But if I just want to thoroughly convey a certain impression, does repetition not help the audience learn it?

ATHENA: Skillful repetition helps you learn. Skillful repetition helps you learn. Skillful repetition helps you learn. Skillful repetition helps you learn. Skillful repetition helps you learn. Skillful repetition helps you learn. Skillful repetition helps you learn. Annoying, is it not? Or, more precisely, haunting the audience with the specter of an idea which has long ago been tapped fully and has no more living, dynamic matter to offer that particular listener. No single insight is so conclusive that it can stand as the substitute for all further examination and discovery. Even something as all-encompassing as "A is A" will remain but a tautology if it is not extrapolated upon and applied to various contexts. Music must be harmonious, because reality is logical and A is A. That is skillful repetition.

ATHENA: Absolutely. That is why, if you desire to produce a chord containing an A-flat, you must devise a way to move from the A chord, or vice versa, in order to obtain it in a proper context.

SILK: You are a fan of logic; I can see that. You even manage to find a way to carry human emotion through logic. Many people, myself included, will tell you that this is impossible.

ATHENA: It is only impossible when one's emotions are arbitrary, unsubstantiated whims.

SILK: Perhaps you are right, and perhaps, though I am being amply generous here, your theories are not marred by any substantial flaws. My question is: So what? What practical advantages does it gain you in life?

SILK (chuckling): Biscuit? (ATHENA grabs the food from his hand and slumps deep into the chair, leaving SILK the full opportunity to press his remarks.) Who is handing them out here? Who is world-famous and well-established, despite his purportedly flawed theories, and whose stomach here hungers before does her soul? You are familiar, of course, with Maslow's hierarchy of needs and realize that, before you can actualize your full potential, you must sate your basic survival necessities. The pocket change thrown to you at the Café Jefferson by boys mostly just as… financially unfortunate as yourself, along with the meager lab assistant payments you receive from Spelton, will not be nearly enough to pay for your next month's tuition, let alone your sustenance, your shelter, and washing that angelic little dress of yours. Where will you put your compositions then? You can't shove them into your mouth, can you?

SILK pauses and eyes ATHENA with a condescendingly compassionate face, which he manages to assume by wrinkling every portion of it above the creases of his upper jaw.

SILK (continuing): Now I am a (grinning) generous man with my time and money, true, but even more so with my advice, formed from the thirty-two years of experience in which I have an edge on you. The best guidance I can give you is summarized in a single word: compromise. Get people, all people, to accept you. Get along with them! Fit in! Then you'll get by. I am not—so don't take me wrongly—telling you to relinquish your individuality. There are people who find your performance skill and… unique stylistic flair… quite admirable. But what about those who are searching for something different, or something besides? Shouldn't you try to get on their good sides as well, make them accept you and recommend you for a job, or give you payment for your services. Remember what Forster said: "Only connect." Find appreciation for premises and techniques other than those that your own judgment imposes upon you, act upon those stimuli when it boosts your social capital with the people around you.

There are several steps that you will need to take in order to accomplish this. First of all, you must specialize. The era of universal geniuses, dilettantes into multiple fields, has gone the way of Leonardo, Leibniz, Goethe, and Borodin. It has died over a century ago. And don't you think that any variant of living has not already been tried, analyzed, and assimilated or rejected by the common wisdom on that basis. People have developed specializations and set, standardized, unidirectional career paths from centuries of experience. Learn to adapt to and accept your findings. Do you really think that, however ingenious you may be, you can change or even challenge that accumulation of the collective will? You, who are inevitably a product a product of that will?

SILK: Now, please calm yourself. Listening and civilly interacting with others are skills that you have yet to improve. Continuing on, you need to focus on a single field of study and trust others, which is an essential part of compromise, to completely take care of everything that remains outside of your specialty. I would recommend for you to pursue the area in which your greatest aptitudes lie, musical composition. Drop biotechnology, shift your major, and come into my class. You will become too occupied to work as a lab assistant anymore, but I can pay you plentifully, and recommend to you places where you will become further financially endowed, in exchange for your actual, autonomous work! You compose, you perform, sometimes at the same concerts where I will be heading so that you can (vainly) give your career a jump-start from my reputation. But that entails the next step of compromise which you will need to take, this time in aesthetics itself. Every work you create from hereon forward will need to undergo a cooperative revision session by a committee including myself and a few other distinguished modern composers. Don't worry, we won't turn you into the next Stravinsky. (Whispering slyly out of a corner of his mouth) We have plenty of other youths who would willingly fill that role in your stead. In revising your work, we may soften a few parts, perhaps render the melody simpler and more… accessible… to the layman listener, at times add a few repetitions, colorful contrasts, synthesizer accompaniment—those sorts of things. We have experience with what will appeal to the tastes of the audiences of the here and now, and we have quite the foresight, and influence, to (snickering) foretell their leanings in the near future. We can help you out so that your talent is put to good use.

Moreover, I can… arrange it… so that the entirety of the money which you earn will go squarely into your own pockets, not those of Princeharvnell University. I realize that long-standing government affirmative action mandates have disqualified you from the opportunity to acquire merit aid. (Haughtily) No quality schools subscribe to that antiquated notion anymore! But there is—and very much in fashion—a little thing called need aid, which is handed out to struggling poor students, though, I must admit, not automatically, but rather selectively, given that certain qualifying considerations are met. Being a minority is one, but you can do nothing about that. Having a physical disability, being locally born, or being an alumni legacy are some of the others, but you are healthy as a nymph, you come from who knows where, and the identity of your parents is as much a mystery to you as to anyone else. But I can remove those apparently insurmountable barriers by putting in a kind word for you in the Financial Assistance Office. I am quite well-connected and can elementarily accomplish this task. So, what do you think?

ATHENA: I did not compromise in the dire poverty of my childhood, when I put a knife to the neck of the leading gangster of my slum district and forced him to permit me to the use of a derelict piano in a bar that he controlled, where I eventually taught myself to play. I did not compromise with the stumbling, raucous drunkards in that bar, who were stolidly oblivious to my work and wished instead to drag me into one of their grotesque revels. I did not compromise with the government when I refused to ferment in an orphanage until my caretakers decided I was old enough to be assigned a job as a day laborer. I did not compromise with the advertisements at the music store where I purchased, and listened to, compact disks of Beethoven and Chopin, instead of Britney Spears and Eminem, using my scant discretionary earnings. And I did not compromise with the University Admissions Office, choosing not to sacrifice the only time during which I could earn my sustenance for the sake of "community service" to bums, alcoholics, drug addicts, and slothful imbeciles, all for a promise of a more prestigious record. Those whom I did not compromise with had either accepted me, or I rejected them. I do not yearn for the approbation of the unenlightened lowest common denominator, nor for the funds that pandering to its whims will gain me, not if it entails the loss of the sole mechanism that can ever elevate my earning capacity, my autonomous, rational mind. I have not compromised, and my position is presently a paradise compared to where I had begun. In a year I will have completed my accelerated Bachelor's Degree program in biotechnology, whereafter Dr. Spelton, in urgent need of personnel with that level of training., will promote me to manager of his project, and I shall reap a considerable enough income to record and market my first unedited, un-tampered, unassisted CD album.

SILK: Not if all the record stores are closed to you, all the concert halls perceive you as a (scowling) inexperienced amateur, if all the critics to whom the masses flock for expert advice and assistance, present in your regard the treatment more merciless and severe than even the most scathing slander and denunciation—absolute silence. I can wield my influence in the… precautionary direction as well.

ATHENA: I suppose, then, that I shall have to interact solely with men impervious to your influence.

SILK: And where will you find those men? The Café Jefferson? But they are not men, I forgot. They are inexperienced young pups.

ATHENA: Oh, they have experienced a vaster share of life thanyou will ever be able to conceive of in a hundred fad-riding careers such as yours. Are you truly so naïve as think that they are alone? Every man who has every glimpsed inside his mind, compared its state to that of the general culture, and averted himself from the latter in disgust, every prodigious young student rejected with contempt by his sniveling, screeching peers, every intellectual, musical performer, and layman alike, who has gazed in marvel upon the artistic feats of a better past, and wondered why the present has not only not developed them, but abandoned them altogether—they shall look to me to claim what can again be theirs—the sounds, the images, the unwavering projections of the New Renaissance. To them my work shall be ambrosia, and I shall be their muse. (She rises to leave.)

SILK (roaring): No! You will stay! (He pushes her by the shoulders into the seat and stuffs a biscuit into her mouth.) You will listen to me, and you will listen carefully. Do you think that I am just bluffing? Or is it that I can do just what I have promised, but that a world-famous composer like myself will have too many other more significant engagements to ever consider giving an experienced pompous upstart a reality check? If you think that I have a vestige of rational egoism in me that will compel me to mind my own literal business, you are quite mistaken. You see, Miss Milton, I can never allow composers like you into the market. For, under the prolifically frenzied Faustian circumstances that you will bring about, I shall soon be sitting on those welfare rolls that my intellectual predecessors have managed to institutionalize… by compromising with the socialists. I have found many youths with that same latent extravagance of yours, eagerly willing to take my courses, anticipating a sharpening of their technical skills. The majority of them, composed of the more practical and less ruthlessly consistent ones, had concurred with my methodology of compromise and has spoken of me with commendation ever since. Those students are still spreading the earnest word that I had granted them a "whole new perspective on things." The more adamant and rigid ones were eventually hammered down with grade penalties and my trademark suspensions for "expression offensive to the sensitivities of others." But you, Miss Milton, are a unique case entirely in that you are not in my classes; I cannot put forth a record of the either flagrant or chronic offenses that you did not commit. So I must—and, trust me, I will—employ more comprehensive and expansive means to disarm you, unless, that is, you are willing to resolve this… difference… of ours humanely, with a compromise of mutual part-gain, part-surrender.

ATHENA: I am afraid that you will have to do without my charity and mend your ways to compete with me, or find yourself a more rational occupation.

SILK is now fuming, but the despairing expansion of his eyes evidences that he is disarmed.

ATHENA (standing again and firmly striding toward the door): And be sure to continue monitoring me at the café. I am inviting you, no disguise necessary. And bring some of your goons along, too. As a matter of fact, bring as many as possible, so that their entrance fees can enrich me further. So long as they behave civilly, I find no problem in hosting them. And, believe me, my friends will ensure that behave civilly they shall. (She leaves.)

SILK reclines into his chair with weary resignation. He reaches into the box of biscuits, seeking one to quench his abominable hunger. After feebly ruffling through, he discovers it empty.

G. Stolyarov II is a science fiction novelist, independent philosophical essayist, poet, amateur mathematician and composer, contributor to Enter Stage Right and SoloHQ, writer for Objective Medicine, and Editor-in-Chief of The Rational Argumentator. He can be contacted at gennadystolyarovii@yahoo.com.

1 posted on 08/28/2003 12:05:10 PM PDT by G. Stolyarov II

Receive updates from the world of Reason, Rights, and Progress. Sign up for The Rational Argumentator's FREE mailing list at http://www.geocities.com/rationalargumentator/registrationform.html

Visit TRA's newest issue at http://www.geocities.com/rationalargumentator/index17.html

2 posted on 08/28/2003 12:05:56 PM PDT by G. Stolyarov II (http://www.geocities.com/rationalargumentator/index17.html)

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.