Beethoven Was One-Sixteenth Black Read Online Free PDF

hand. Touch isn’t always felt, in dream. There was a scholar, a politico-philosophical intellect, an enquirer of international morality in the order of the world, a life whose driving motivation was not chosen but placed upon him: Palestinian. An existential destiny, among his worldly others. It’s cast in the foundations, the academic chairs, honours endowed in the name. All that. But death’s the discarder he didn’t mention. Edward Said is a composer. There’s also the baggage you do take. Two grand pianos. Among the living, it’s Carlos Fuentes who asks if music is not the ‘true fig leaf of our shames, the final sublimation—beyond death—of our mortal visibility: body of words’. Is only music ‘free of visible ties, the purification and illusions of our bodily misery’?
    Edward. A composer. What he always was, should have been; but there was too much demand upon him from the threatening outer world? It’s a symphony Edward Said’s working on now.
    â€˜What’s the theme, what are you giving us?’ Susan is never afraid to be insistent, her passion for all creation so strong this justifies intrusion.
    â€˜I don’t have to tell you that the movements of a symphony are in sum just that, a resolution, symphonically.’ Edward is paying an aside tribute to her non-performer’s love and knowledge of music. ‘It’s still—what should I say—’
    â€˜You hear it, you play it? It’s in your fingers?’ Susan is relentlessin pursuit of the process, from one who’s been an eloquent man of words people haven’t always wanted to hear.
    He lifts his shoulders and considers. Doesn’t she know that’s the way, equivalent of scribbled phrases, jotted half-sentences, essential single words spoken into a recording gadget, which preceded the books she’s written, the books he wrote. The symphony he’s—hearing? playing? transposing to the art’s hieroglyphics?—it’s based on Jewish folk songs and Palestinian laments or chants.
    Ours is a choir of enthusiasm. When will the work be completed. How far along realised. ‘It’s done’ Edward says. Ready. ‘For the orchestra’ and spreads palms and forearms wide from elbows pressed at his sides. I read his mind as the dreamer can: just unfortunate Barenboim can’t be ready to conduct the work; isn’t here yet.
    These are people who are accustomed to being engaged by the directions taken by one another, ideas, thought and action. No small table talk. Anthony Sampson takes the opportunity, simply because he hasn’t before been able to acknowledge to Susan she shamed the complacent acceptance of suffering as no-one else has done. Since Goya!
    Susan gives her splendid congratulatory, deprecatory laugh, and in response quotes what confronts TV onlookers ‘still in Time, the pictures will not go away: that is the nature of the digital world’. Not long dead, she hasn’t quite vacated it: this comes from one of her last looks at the world, the book which Anthony is praising,
Regarding the Pain of Others.
    But that’s for the memory museum left behind as if it were the phenomenon that, for a while, the hair of the dead continues to grow. Susan has brought with her the sword of wordsshe has always flashed skilfully in defence of the disarmed. She’s taken up the defence of men.
    â€˜You!’ Edward appreciates what surely will be a new style of feminist foil. We’re all laughing anticipation. But Susan Sontag is no Quixote, wearing a barber’s basin as the helmet of battledress.
    â€˜What has made them powerless to live fully? Never mind Huntington and his clash of civilisations. The clash of the sexes has brought about subjection of the heterosexual male. We women have achieved the last result, surely, as emancipated beings, we wanted? A reversal of roles of oppressor and oppressed, the