The Musical Brain: And Other Stories Read Free Page A

a perpetual present, which would be completely impractical. Even so, it’s
sad to realize how much has been lost: not only the capacity to absorb the world in
its fullness, with all its riches and nuances, but also the material absorbed during
that phase, a treasure that has vanished because it wasn’t stored away in
retrievable frames.
    Dr. Schachtel’s book, so persuasive in its dry, scientific eloquence, avoids what, in
this context, could only be a false poetry. It also avoids giving examples, which
would lead inevitably to poetic falsification. Poetry is made of words, and every
word in a poem is an example of that particular word in its everyday use. To give a
truly adequate example, every word would have to be accompanied by a chaotic
enumeration encompassing, or at least suggesting, the entire universe. We see a bird
flying, and at once the adult mind says “bird.” The child, by contrast, sees
something that not only does not have a name but is not even a nameless thing: it is
(although the verb
to be
should be used with caution here) a limitless
continuum involving the air, the trees, the time of day, movement, temperature, the
mother’s voice, the color of the sky, almost everything. The same goes for all
objects and events, or what we call objects and events. It could almost be an
artistic project, or the model or matrix from which all artistic projects are
derived. What’s more, when thought attempts to examine its own roots, perhaps it is
trying, unwittingly, to return to a time before it existed, or at least trying to
dismantle itself piece by piece, to see what riches it conceals.
    This would change the meaning of nostalgia for the “green paradise” of childhood:
perhaps the object of longing is not so much (or not at all) an innocent state of
nature, but an incomparably richer, more subtle and developed intellectual life.
    It is my belief that all the lost memories of my early years are recorded in the two
thousand films I saw in that time. I will try to illuminate the nature of that vast
archive by describing an invention that Miguel and I came up with. I said that
North by Northwest
—or
International
Intrigue
, as we knew it—made an impression on us, no more perhaps
than many other films, but in a different way. The day after seeing it, we decided
to create a secret society dedicated to international intrigue. Now that I think of
it, the sound of those two words might have been what triggered our initiative:
intrigue
, an intriguing word in itself, which could refer to just about
anything; and
international,
indicating importance, the world beyond
Pringles. Without secrecy, of course, there would have been no point. Secrecy was at
the center of it all.
    We were possessed of the easiest and safest means of keeping secrets, simply by being
children and letting the adults think, rightly, that there was no need to
investigate our games because they belonged to a sphere apart, separate from their
reality. We must have known—it was obvious—that nothing we could do
would be of the slightest interest to adults, which devalued our secrecy. In order
for a secret to be a secret, it had to kept from someone. Since we had no one else,
we would have to keep it from ourselves. We had to find a way to split ourselves in
two, but that was not impossible in the world of play.
    We named our society the “ISI” (for International Secret Intrigue), and its
operations began immediately. The principle rule, as I said, was secrecy. We weren’t
allowed to talk to each other about the ISI; I wasn’t supposed to find out that
Miguel was a member, and vice versa. Communication was to take place via anonymous
written messages placed in a “letter box” to be agreed upon. We agreed that it would
be one of the cracks in the wooden door of a derelict house on a corner. Once we had
established these rules, we pretended to have forgotten all about the ISI and
started playing another game, although our heads were