what we are, what we know and understand, is always more considered. This language aims to teach, to celebrate our knowledge rather than our wonder. It also implies that we, and those like us, are at least as wonderful as the work we know so much about.
The language that we share before the emblem of what we lack, however, as fractious and inconsequent as it often seems, creates a new society. It is nothing more or less than the kiss that makes us equal—and had George Sand lived to read the story her friend wrote for her, I think she would have understood this. Or, more precisely, she would have felt the thorn in the rose her friend offered up to her and recognized, in the very title of the story, Un couer simple, a repudiation of le couer sensible (the feeling heart) that stood as an emblem for the cult of sensibilité of which Sand was the natural inheritor. As you will remember, this cult (or culture) of sensibilité defined virtue in terms of one’s superior ability to empathize with those less fortunate than one’s self. What those “less fortunates” might themselves have been feeling was (as W.H. Auden shrewdly pointed out) simply beside the point. Because then, as now, the cult of sensibilité defined itself as an aristocracy of feeling, wholly dedicated to the connoisseurship of its own virtuous empathy.
What Flaubert proposes in place of this refined aristocracy of virtuous identity—and what I continue to propose—is just democracy: a society of the imperfect and incomplete, whose citizens routinely discuss, disdain, hire, vote for and invest in a wide variety of parrots to represent their desires in various fields of discourse—who elect the representatives of their desire and occasionally re-elect them. Thus, unconcerned with class, culture, and identity, this society is perpetually created and re-created in non-exclusive, overlapping communities of desire that organize themselves around a multiplicity of gorgeous parrots. Unfortunately, this democracy of simple hearts is founded on the dangerous assumption that gorgeous parrots, hewn from what we lack (as Salammbo blossoms out to fill the arctic absences of Madame Bovary), will continue to make themselves visible and available to us. But this is not necessarily so. Flaubert is dead, and the disciplines of desire have lost their urgency in the grand salons of comfort and privilege we have created for the arts. The self-congratulatory rhetoric of sensibilité continues to perpetuate itself, and in place of gorgeous parrots, we now content ourselves with the ghostly successors of Marie Antoinette’s peasant village, tastefully installed within the walls of Versailles.
SHINING HOURS / FORGIVING RHYME
On a Saturday morning when I was eight or nine years old, my dad and I set out in our old Chevrolet to play some music at a friend’s house. Actually, my dad was going to play music, but he let me carry his horn cases, and both of us were decked out in jazz-dude apparel: penny loafers, khakis, and Hawaiian shirts with the tails out. First, though, we had to pick up our new neighbor, Magda, who had only moved to Texas about three months before. We had become friends with her because people left their windows open back then, and we heard each other playing Duke Ellington 78s. Now, Magda and my mother went shopping together and hung out, so I knew her as this nice, relaxed German lady who sat around in the kitchen with Mom, dicing things.
When Dad beeped the horn in front of her house, however, a different Magda came out. She was all gussied up, with her hair in a bun, wearing this black voile dress, a rhinestone pin, and little, rimless spectacles that I associate to this day with “looking European.” She was also carrying an armload of sheet music, and as she approached the car I whispered to my dad that this must be Magda’s first jam session—because nobody looked at sheets at a jam session. Dad said to shut up, dammit, that Magda was a refugee, that she was a Jew who fled the Nazis, first to London and then, after the war, down here to Texas. So cool it! he whispered, and I cooled it. Problems with the Nazis were credentials enough for me. I hopped in the back seat, let her ride up front with Dad.
Then we had to stop and pick up Diego, who worked at the Jiffy Dry Cleaners where we took our clothes. We beeped, and Diego came trotting out with his bongo drums in a paper sack—a really cool-looking guy, I thought, with his thin black mustache and his electric-blue, fitted shirt with bloused sleeves. Usually, Diego played percussion in Latino bands on the North Side, but he loved to sing jazz, so he was fairly bouncing with excitement as he ducked into the back seat beside me. Then all the way out to Ron’s, he flirted so outrageously with Magda that my dad and I kept cracking up.
Magda blushed down into her dress, but she seemed not to mind Diego’s attention. At one point, she turned around and scolded him good-naturedly: “Herr Diego,” she said, shaking her finger at him, “You are a stinker!” And that cracked us up too, so we laughed all the way out to South Fort Worth where Ron lived in this redneck subdivision, in a ranch-style house with a post-oak in the lawn. As we pulled up in front, two black guys, Butch and Julius, were advancing warily across the lawn. They were dressed in white dress shirts and high-waisted zoot-suit slacks, carrying instrument cases, and glancing around them at the neighborhood.
Butch and Julius were beboppers, but, like my dad and Ron, they played pick-up gigs with dance bands around town, so I saw them all the time. I waved, and Butch, who was carrying a guitar case, waved back. Julius was lugging his stand-up bass, so he just grinned, and Ron, who stood in the front door holding the screen, waved too. Ronno was my dad’s best friend, and as usual, he was barefoot, wearing a sleeveless Marine Corps T-shirt and camouflage fatigues. “Not many jazz fans in this neighborhood,” Butch remarked when we were all in the living room. Ron allowed there weren’t, but the VA had approved his loan so he took it. Julius just smiled and took his bass out of its case. Then he took a Prince Albert tin out of the string pocket inside it, flopped down in Ron’s easy chair and began rolling a joint.
Magda’s eyes got big at this, but I could tell she wasn’t upset. She was tickled to death. You could almost hear her thinking, "Oh boy! I have made it all the way from Birkenstrasse to this! I am out in the Wild West—at an American Jazz session with Negroes smoking marijuana!" To cover her excitement, she marched over to Ron’s baby grand, set her music on it and began striking octaves and fifths, checking the tuning. Butch gave her an appraising sideways glance. Julius just grinned and lit up his reefer. After he had taken a couple of hits, Ron’s wife Mary stuck her head out of the kitchen, sniffing the air. “Guess y’all are gonna be wantin’ cookies,” she said. “I am!” I said, and everybody laughed.
Ron took a hit from Julius’s reefer and climbed behind his drum kit, clanging his ride cymbal as he did. Butch and Diego took up positions on the couch—Butch with his Gretsch guitar, Diego with his bongos between his thighs. My dad opened his horn cases on the floor. He fiddled with the saxophone, then took out his clarinet, wet the reed and leaned back against the piano with his ankles crossed, examining the instrument, blowing lint off the pads. They all tweaked and twanged for a minute, getting in tune, then Ron counted off Artie Shaw’s “At Sundown.” Magda was really shaky at first, pale with fear, but Diego just kept grinning at her and nodding, and she started to firm up.
Then, Dad swung around, aimed his clarinet at her, and she seemed to wake up. In less than a bar, she found herself and started hitting the note, crisply; and the lady had some chops, you know. She could play jazz music, but it was strange to watch, because here in this smoky, shadowy room full of swaying, agitated beboppers was this nice German-Jewish lady in a black voile dress with her back rigid and her eyes glued to the sheet, her wrists lifted in perfect position, playing in such a way that, if you couldn’t hear the music, you would have guessed Schumann or something like that. But Magda was really rapping it out, and she had such great attack that Diego had to sit up straight to sing the choruses. Mary even came to the kitchen door to listen, which she rarely did.
After that, Magda got into it, even bouncing her bottom on the bench once or twice (much to Butch’s whimsical delight). But she wouldn’t solo. They would give her the space, nod in her direction and say, “Take it, Maggie!” but she would shake her head and vamp through her sixteen bars. Then Butch or Dad would come in and solo. But I was really proud of them. They always gave her the space—in case she changed her mind. And I was proud of Magda too, for
