Caught up in the swirl of Le Chat Noir, Satie slips into the orbit of one Joséphin Péladan and his occult group the Ordre de la Rose-Croix Catholique du Temple et du Graal. Péladan is the son of the Chevalier Adrien Péladan, founder of something called the Cult of the Wound in the Left Shoulder of Our Lord Jesus Christ; he owns a vast library of hermetic works inherited from his brother, who died of poisoning from a self-concocted alchemical tincture. Péladan himself will pass in 1918, having imbibed a tainted oyster. (Does this family sound like a great lost Borges story, or what?)
Another of Penman’s fragmented almost-biography cultural essays, following on from the superb FASSBINDER THOUSANDS OF MIRRORS.
This time, Penman looks at Erik Satie, and it’s a shattered mosaic of the thing, Penman picking up shards and examining them before putting each in one of three pots.
Not sure I was aware that Satie invented ambient music.
We wish to establish a form of music designed to satisfy “utility” requirements. Art does not come into these requirements. “Furniture Music” creates vibrations; it has no other purpose; it fills the same role as light, warmth and comfort in all its forms.
Like the Fassbinder book, it’s stupidly quotable:
The morse code of sunlight playing against a sluggish green river on a summer afternoon, when we were young; before all the ghosts came.
It has a lot more of Benjamin’s Arcades Project to it than FASSBINDER, it doesn’t have the sustained attack of the previous book. It’s far more of a wander, notes scribbled on scraps of paper (as Satie himself used to do).
In 1970, Australian pianist Peter Evans had to abandon a solo performance of (Satie’s) Vexations after 595 repetitions because he felt that ‘evil thoughts’ were overtaking him and observed ‘strange creatures emerging from the sheet music’.
It places Satie — eccentric, mysterious, multi-disciplinary and perhaps even a living artwork (his uniform and peculiar schedule evokes Gilbert & George for me) – as constantly a few years ahead of the centre of 20th Century art, and still somehow soundtracking the 21st. Satie himself is made fascinating and maddening, the ghost inside European culture and Magritte’s bowler hat, and, for me, this book could have gone on forever.
I love books like this, where a person is offered convincingly as the secret key to the world.
…he takes aside his young friend Max Fontaine and, with an amused expression and whispering so as not to be overheard by the nuns, confesses: ‘Last night I dreamed I had two willies! You can’t imagine how many things you can do with that thingamajig.’