(DON’T) STOP, THIEF !
or
SOMEBODY STOLE MY KNAPSACK
by
Tammy Pon
introduced by
Veronica C. Testaguna
Every artist, in every time and country, is driven by two impulses – the urge to communicate, to be
understood, and the desire to impart the uniqueness of his experience, to be original.
In the interest of comprehensibility the artist employs a language of conventions, a set of signs agreed to
possess fixed meanings. In the name of personal expression he expands upon or distorts these, or
abandons them for innovations.
The art of a relatively stable culture will abound in conventions, and a genius, in such circumstances, can
take advantage of the easy accessibility they afford and fill the accepted forms with nuances and
subtleties, creating broadly appreciated “masterpieces” such as those we ascribe to Bach (Friedmann, I
mean) and Mozart (Leopold, of course).
The art of an unstable culture will celebrate novelty and proliferate innovative techniques, often resulting
in widespread incomprehension, and attended, variously, by anger, boredom or anxiety.
In the early twenty first century, with our meta-narratives debunked and our identities fractured to so many
competing voices, we are confronted with an super-abundance of information of which we understand so
little, though, as artists, we’re still driven by those twin impulses – to communicate clearly and to express the
essence of our experience. But how should we proceed?
One strategy is to impose a mask – a distancing, objectifying or ironizing persona – between writer and
reader, composer and audience. Through this technique the source of the work attains artificiality,
becomes a stylized self-portrait or mirror-image, an alter-ego who may prove more reliable than the natural
self – at least it allows us to dispense with the pretence of self-knowledge.
Some say that’s what Ofterdingen is – a fiction through which the Geselllschaft editors speak, a prism
through which their thoughts are refracted. Others would go further and claim the entire constituency,
from its founder, Peter Ceniti, down to its janitorial staff, is but the stuff of dreams.
A few have even claimed such dreamers are themselves the dream of a brooding, poetic god, himself a
dream…
In the end nobody’s safe, and even I, Veronica C. Testaguna, newest member of the Gesellschaft
(already gaining a reputation for perspicacity, voluptuousness, treachery, etc.) – even I stand accused of
impersonating a female, while it is asserted that in actuality I am none other than Peter Ceniti himself,
rejuvenated and transformed!
Indeed, such claims may possess some truth: this labyrinth is deep and I seem to have lost my bearings. No
matter: such ambivalence frees me from facile preconceptions, and enables me to present our readership
(our elite, our miniscule readership) in an open-minded manner with a most interesting article by an author
whose acquaintance I recently made – I speak of (Don’t) Stop, Thief! by Professor Tamara Pantiadonis,
or (as she is known in Italy) Tammy Pannetone, or (as the Chinese call her) Tam Pon.
She looks (beneath that luxurious wig) like Pelle Bono (our dear friend and former colleague, missing for
some years now and presumed “lost”). She sounds like Pelle Bono. She even smells like Pelle Bono. Her
style, her quirky humor, those piquant turns of phrase (already receiving attention as “pantiadonicisms”) –
are all familiar. But is she says her name is Tammy I’m calling her Tammy.
The meaning of her monograph, to no one’s surprise, lies hidden beneath the surface narrative, beguiling,
psychologically probing and sociologically significant as that narrative may be. The “stolen knapsack,” the
musical fragments contained therein, the protagonists of this tale are…Well, why should I spoil your
enjoyment?
V. C. T.
(P.C.?)
SOMEBODY STLOLE MY KNAPSACK THIS morning. Took it right out from the
back seat of my car, in uptown Manhattan while I stood on line at Dunkin’ Donuts waiting for my apple /
cranberry muffin with butter to warm.
I’m excited about this, and consider it a positive sign, despite the inconvenience of losing a number of
personal items I habitually carry there (asthma – puffer, large toenail clipper, dried apricots) and some
student papers that needed correcting (for which I now have a legitimate excuse not to return!).
It seems obvious this theft, probably a long time in planning, with numerous “dry – runs,” had as its
objective the procurement of certain musical sketches I’ve been busying myself with, ultimately intended to
take shape as a Fantasia quasi una Sonata for violoncello and piano. The inescapable conclusion of this
circumstance is that, beneath the visible impression of a vulgar, grimy metropolis, there teems in these
streets a spiritual longing so intense that jealous musicians would resort to robbery, would risk
incarceration, would even contemplate murder, in the name of beauty, in the hope of artistic fame.
But my readers (my impatient, my devoted readers, whom I see in my mind’s eye) are beset with questions:
Who is the composer of these sketches really? In what state did I discover them, and where, and when?
How far had I progressed in their fleshing out, and to what degree could the final product have been
considered authentic? And what designs do my enemies have, beyond thwarting my efforts? Do they
seek to usurp my task, and if so would they credit the “original” composer? Or do they hope to pass the
piece off as their own?
I trust no one will be disappointed if I answer with a gnostic fable (embedding, as did Novalis, within one
fantastic tale a second, even more fantastic tale). And I will leave it to my (discerning, erudite) readers to
decide – or not to decide – which of these tales is allegory and which is merely fact.
Once upon a time, when God was thinking about making the world, but before he did, he decided to
organize his fondest ideas into little sketches, so that he wouldn’t risk forgetting anything, what with all the
time he had on his hands. So he drew up plans, and not just for the shape of things and how they’d be
ordered in space, but also and especially for their sequence in time. To his surprise he found both
beginning and ending rather daunting, but was very pleased with certain things he envisioned for the middle,
and, had anyone existed to witness it, he could have been heard exclaiming, “Just so!” and “This is good –
right there, before this and directly after that!” For he took great care to insure that the flow of events
possessed, as he thought of it, “just the right balance of form and fantasy” so that each new event seemed
somehow both
“logically fulfilling and wondrously strange.”
That’s not to say that those people, places and things he planned and organized necessarily would have
been aware of their purpose, or of the presence of this grand and flexible design, nor is it to deny that they
(the people, at least) might eventually attain to such esoteric wisdom: the main point was, he could
appreciate it, and when it was complete, maybe they would too.
All was going well, progressing very steadily in those pre-cosmic times, when, one fine day, the Evil One, or
Beelzebub, or Roofridge, or the Old Serpent, or whatever you want to call him, came skulking along and
stole those sketches right our from under the Divine Nose.
What was he thinking? To take over the heavens and the earth? To nurture and nurse the nascent
universe, only to bully and enslave it later on? To rise from sterility and spite, and redeem himself in
surrogate kindness? Maybe some of each, and probably he wasn’t sure.
What’s certain is, whatever his intentions, he lacked the skill and the patience, the imagination and the
discipline, for the job: he screwed it up royally.
That’s the world – our world, yours and mine. Socrates and Siddhartha, Stalin and Hitler, Abercrombie
and Fitch. And since man’s a microcosm of the world (as one of those gentlemen said), that’s you and that’
s me! Feet in the mud, head in the stars.
But there’s more, as everyone knows from experience. Once God recognized he’d been cheated, he
began a high speed, long term pursuit of the Evil One. So, from the moment things came into being, the
world’s been left on its own, those two being otherwise occupied.
Eventually, though, curiosity got the better of both wrath and fear respectively, and they could be seen to
glance down in the midst of the chase, which had the effect of slowing their pace.
And to their surprise they found us here in a state which can be explained neither as the realization of the
original, flawless plan, nor as its antithesis, a complete and utter mess.
For, once made, things took on a will of their own, and developed along lines neither of them had
predicted. Now God and Satan sit up there with their legs crossed, side by side like little boys, and watch
as the spectacle unfolds.