And those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music.
-Friedrich Nietzsche
No great mind has ever existed without a touch of madness.
-Aristotle
Somedays I am haunted by ghosts who find a way to get their tribute if I ignore them for too long. My ghost this week was Robert Schumann. Schumann’s spirit led me to think about a man named John Daverio and a rapturously crazy man I watched when I was in Laguna Beach.
I wonder on the gap between supposedly rational thought and giving one’s self over to ghostly music. Is there a boundary between what I hear and you don’t? Perhaps we fool ourselves into thinking of free will as a wall against madness, when it is just a porous membrane letting the ethereal leak in and lead us in a dance if we let it. Robert Schumann, composer, a friend of Brahms, husband of Clara had his rationality flow away like the frozen Rhine he jumped into to try and end his life. After his failed suicide attempt, Schumann begged his wife to have him committed to a hospital where he died two years later. Before he died in 1846 at the age of 46, Schumann’s “angels” played music for him which he dutifully transcribed. The scores are somewhat obscure but are known as the “Ghost Variations.” I imagine Schumann at a German asylum, kissing Clara goodbye and then, silence? What did he bring with him? What notes were ringing in his ears as he stepped away? Did he escape the dance there?
One night I walked back to my hotel in Laguna Beach in near silence except for the thrum and hiss of waves breaking nearby. It was beach town, mid-week quiet, and as I strolled along, I could see a person up ahead, dancing near a bus stop. From a distance, I assumed he was listening to music on headphones, but as I moved closer, I noticed no earbuds, just him dancing to sounds only he could hear. He was mad with whatever he was hearing. The man was jumping and swaying; his arms were swinging great circles. I watched him leap onto a bench and hold his arms high, palms out, facing the water as if he was accepting the enthusiastic cheers of an audience. I made a plan to cross over to the other side of the street out of a bit of fear, but then seeing the look on his face, I stopped and started to think I heard the music too. I don’t think I have ever seen someone that unguardedly happy. When I last saw him, he was shining in a pool of light outside a store, dancing with his reflection in the shopfront glass. I wonder on the joy of giving over reality to a song no one else can hear. For all the apparent craziness, his dancing was a profoundly conscious, intimately brave act.
You can read some about Schumann’s “Ghost Variations” in John Daverio’s “Robert Schumann: Herald of a New Poetic Age.” John was a distinguished Professor at Boston University and one of the world’s foremost Schumann scholars. Security cameras show him leaving his office on a cold March night in 2003 carrying a white bag containing what Police think was a book. Did he hear music as he walked? They never found the bag or the book he might have been carrying, but they did find his body a month later floating in the Charles River near the DeWolfe Boathouse. Maybe it was just an accident, a misstep on an icy bridge.
Falling is an elemental form of a dance, really; falling in love, from grace, falling into madness or just slipping in the snow. All falls share loose joints, twists, a twirl or two, and loss of control. The control was probably an illusion anyway. Make an unplanned step and gravity, music and ghosts take over. Maybe creativity is just going along for someones else’s ride. Clara, protective of Schumann’s legacy, did not want the “Ghost Variations” published. She was kept away from the hospital until just before he died. John Daviero left his wallet and his briefcase behind in his office. My dancing friend in Laguna beach seemed to have given up his place in society. All of them seemed to have moved “outside the pool of common meaning” as a dear friend has told me on more than one occasion. The stories sound morose, but the surrenders, the giving into the music, there is some wonder in that.
Schumann was later heard to say that the angels he heard were demons, but to me, he was complaining about the physics of a fall after he was already in the air. The key is perhaps to give the ghost the tribute, to be led to the abyss but not over; to keep company with singing angels, and dance, dance, dance near the water’s edge.