the claim of dictatorship. Hegemony. In our turn, always we’ll be having to pick up the baggage taking from experience what’s good, discarding what’s conned us into prizing, if it’s destructive.’
Dream has no sequence as we know it, this following that. This over, that beginning. You can be making love with someone unrecognised, picking up coins spilled in the street, giving a speech at a board meeting, pursued naked in a shopping mall, without the necessary displacements of sequence. Whether the guests were serving themselves – the others, Anthony and Edward – and whether they were talking between mouthfuls and those swallows of wine or water which precede what one’s going to say at table, I was mistaken in my logic of one still living, that they were continuing their exchange of the responsibilities for 9/11, the Tsunami, famine in Darfur, elections in Iraq, the Ukraine, student riots against youth employment restrictions in Paris, a rape charge in court indicting a member of government in my country: preoccupations of my own living present or recent months, years; naturally all one to them. What was I doing there in Susan’s Chinese restaurant, anyway?
It is news they’re exchanging of what they’re engaged in. Now. Edward’s being urged to tell something that at least explains to me his certain distance from Susan’s perceptions of the developments (at whatever stage these might have been when she left access to newspapers, television, inside informants) in the Middle East. He’s just completed a piano concerto. I can’t resist putting in with delight ‘For two pianos’. The Said apartment on the Upper West Side in New York had what you’d never expect to walk in on, two grand pianos taking up one of the living rooms. Edward once remarked to me, if affectionately, ‘You have the writing but I have the writing and the music.’ An amateur pianist of concert performance level, he’d played with an orchestra under the baton of his friend Daniel Barenboim.
Here was his acknowledging smile of having once led me into that exotically furnished living room; maybe a brush of his hand. Touch isn’t always felt, in dream. There was a scholar, a politico-philosophical intellect, an enquirer of international morality in the order of the world, a life whose driving motivation was not chosen but placed upon him: Palestinian. An existential destiny, among his worldly others. It’s cast in the foundations, the academic chairs, honours endowed in the name. All that. But death’s the discarder he didn’t mention. Edward Said is a composer. There’s also the baggage you do take. Two grand pianos. Among the living, it’s Carlos Fuentes who asks if music is not the ‘true fig leaf of our shames, the final sublimation – beyond death – of our mortal visibility: body of words’. Is only music ‘free of visible ties, the purification and illusions of our bodily misery’?
Edward. A composer. What he always was, should have been; but there was too much demand upon him from the threatening outer world? It’s a symphony Edward Said’s working on now.
‘What’s the theme, what are you giving us?’ Susan is never afraid to be insistent, her passion for all creation so strong this justifies intrusion.
‘I don’t have to tell you that the movements of a symphony are in sum just that, a resolution, symphonically.’ Edward is paying an aside tribute to her non-performer’s love and knowledge of music. ‘It’s still – what should I say—’
‘You hear it, you play it? It’s in your fingers?’ Susan is relentless in pursuit of the process, from one who’s been an eloquent man of words people haven’t always wanted to hear.
He lifts his shoulders and considers. Doesn’t she know that’s the way, equivalent of scribbled phrases, jotted half-sentences, essential single words spoken into a recording gadget, which preceded the books she’s written, the books he wrote. The symphony he’s – hearing? playing? transposing to the art’s hieroglyphics? – it’s based on Jewish folk songs and Palestinian laments or chants.
Ours is a choir of enthusiasm. When will the work be completed. How far along realised. ‘It’s done,’ Edward says. Ready. ‘For the orchestra,’ and spreads palms and forearms wide from elbows pressed at his sides. I read his mind as the dreamer can: just unfortunate Barenboim can’t be ready to conduct the work; isn’t here yet.
These are people who are accustomed to being engaged by the directions taken by one another, ideas, thought and action. No small table talk. Anthony Sampson takes the opportunity, simply because he hasn’t