Marie Antoinette Eats cake, parts 681 - 684

681. Now you may think I am joking about my notes about those peasant slang words like "stonmitz" and "katunz", but I am not, on the contrary the use of those words was very indicative of something at work in the royal families of Europe in the years leading up to the French Revolution. The aristocratic families were infected with a desire to use words that were more real and earthy than the formal court jargon handed down for generations.

682. In 1750 Austrian aristocrats more often than not used the french language for conversation, and for formal documents, and the same was true in Russia, where most royals could speak only French. The fact of the matter was, aristocratic formal language was so stilted that slang peasant words and phrases became all the rage for children in the time of Marie Antoinette.

683. But this is all no matter, we have to concern ourselves with little Marie, only ten years old, taxed with learning to play a difficult piece of keyboard music when her tutor knew that she was having difficulty mastering the 18th century version of 'Mary had a Little Lamb'. A week went by, Marie made no progress, the music tutor was fired and replaced, Mozart's visit was put off for another month.

684. The new tutor was an overweight Italian whose expertise was Opera; he had a great reputation as a teacher. He had an interview with the Empress; she said to him, "I want Marie to learn to play  Bach by the end of the month. If she will not work hard I want to be informed, if she will not practice she will be punished." To make her point she slapped the palm of her hand with her letter opener. The new Italian tutor raised his eyes and pursed his lips but said nothing.

Marie Antoinette Eats Cake, parts 677 - 680

677. Maria Teresa was curious about the Bach fugues that the ten year old Mozart person was able to play so she asked the director of her music library to bring her a copy of some of Bach's keyboard works. The music library director brought her a work titled Anna Magdelana Bach's lesson book, and she opened it to the first page. What she saw was simple minuet that even she could play, and she was not an accomplished player.

678. "See here", she said to the librarian who was standing next to the music tutor, "This is just another example of a calf with three heads. So what if Mozart can play this simple garbage, anyone with half a brain could play it. "But Most Revered Holy Imperial Madame, I humbly beg you to consider that you don't know stonmitz about this." (Stonmitz was a peasant expression of the time meaning goat excrement.)

679. It was very dangerous to contradict the Empress, especially about the subject of music, but the tutor made so bold as to correct her. "There are some Bach Fugues that are much more complicated than these, look at this for example," and he unfolded a score of a more complicated work. What the Empress saw was a score that looked like an aunt hill of swarming black notes. "What the stonmitz is this?"  she muttered.

680. The Empress handed the Bach scores to the music tutor and demanded that he teach little Marie to master at least some of  the easier pieces in a few weeks in time to be ready for the visit of Mozart to the court which was scheduled for the end of the month. The Empress was confident that her royal daughter would have no difficult impressing everyone with her abilities, but the music tutor had his doubts.

Marie Antoinette Eats Cake, parts 673 - 676

673. You probably did not know this, but  Marie and Amadeus were only a few months apart in age, and the stories the Empress was hearing about the little Mozart had given her a very misguided notion of what could be expected of Marie Antoinette.  She thought to herself, "My Marie is of royal birth, therefore she has royal abilities as her birthright. How can you compare royal abilities to the abilities or ordinary people."

674. Furthermore the Empress did not even believe all of the stories floating around about Mozart, and she was sure they were just impossible exaggerations. Just the previous month she had visited a village to have a look at a three headed calf, which turned out to be only an ordinary two headed calf. She was used to rumors and exaggerations and often said, "Look, until they invent photography you can't trust anything anyone says."

675. And her advisers agreed with her saying that the eventual invention of photography would not solve anything because of photo-shop. You just had to trust your own judgment. And when it came to the question of five year old prodigies playing Bach fugues, she just did not believe it. Furthermore she really did not like Bach's music all that much, having heard him play the organ once when she was a child.

676. "I heard that Bach person playing the organ in Salzburg when I was a child", she exclaimed, "He should have stuck to making mechanisms for cuckoo clocks and not bothered with music composition but what can you expect from  heretic Lutheran fanatics."

Marie Antoinette Eats Cake, parts 669 - 672

669. The argument between Buboni and the Duck always took different forms, but I think it boiled down to this, the Duck loved life and the world, so he had to believe in a wonderful God who creates and enjoys it all, because the Duck was a happy soul. And Buboni was a bitter old man angry with God, and looking to pick a fight with him. I thought it best to change the subject so I said, "Tell me Duck what has all of this got to do with Marie Antoinette."

670. "Marie Antoinette, my God what a subject," said the Duck, "But before we get to that, let me say this to you Buboni. Ten years of a life may have no meaning, even twenty, but eventually comes a day  that is worth a lifetime. So it was with Coromo and the Decameron, so it was with Richard when he cast his hand in plaster, so it was for you when you left your job in England and fled to France, and so for me... once... But now, about Marie Antoinette.

671. As I hope you know, Marie Antoinette was the daughter of Maria Teresa, Empress of Austria, and one of 15 children.  Hers was a typical royal upbringing. Her tutors schooled her in several languages, drawing and painting, and especially music from an early age. Little Marie was very precocious and did well in all of these subjects except for music. It is not that she had no musical ability, but she was an average child when it came to learning to play an instrument.

673. Music was important to the Empress and she saw to it that Marie had the best teachers, but as one of the music masters informed her, "A ten year old  cannot be expected to play Bach fugues."  The Empress would not listen to negative pronouncements about her daughter and replied, "They say Mozart is ten and is not only playing Bach fugues, but composing them as well you 'katunz'. (Katunz was a German word used by peasants to describe a blockhead.)

Marie Antoinette Eats Cake, parts 665 - 668

665. Do you think nature is blind and deaf and has created her beauties to be considered only by the dumb. In the jungle a baboon turns his face to the evening light that brings out the intensity of his color, and no one will ever see it, not for a single second, but God sees it and not only enjoys it, but remembers it  for all eternity.

666. Somewhere in the bushes a man with a Nikon Camera takes a shot of that self same baboon, and rushed home to load it to his computer, posts it to his blog,  pins it on Pinterest.  Such images are a pathetic remembrance of the actual work of art and it takes an effort of will to care about it, it is only pixels on a screen. It may stay posted to the internet for a hundred years, and the actual event may have lasted a millisecond, but the actual event is the work of art, and the other a fading echo.

667. "But," said Buboni, "From what angle, and what point of view has this nature of yours looked at that landscape; with what apparatus does it file it into a memory. A landscape can be viewed from infinite points of view, and it changes, atom by atom, every millisecond, therefore this god of your imagination manages to remember, and also 'swoon' over an infinite times infinite set of images, multiplied by the infinity that the passage of time contributes.

668. I am sure this god of yours is keeping track of the other things going on in the universe down to dust floating in the sunlight, so he must come down with terrible migraines now and then, since none of that information, images, or events, ever leads to any conclusion, has a plot or a climax that would have made it worthwhile to recall.  Just a lot of effort to no purpose. We know you think the sun thinks a lot of itself, and mountains shed tears, but I think it is a crock.

Marie Antoinette Eats Cake, parts 661 - 664

661. Creation was all so natural in our childhood. We built forts in the woods, and stood looking at out handy-work in rapt admiration, created plastic models of war ships,  built snow forts, and cardboard condos out of refrigerator boxes, soap boxes with roller skates and two by fours, and painted faces on our hands and made our hand say stupid things. When we were children all our pleasures came from the things we created, judging everything by Picasso's rule - I made it so it is great, period.

662. But then I went to work in the post office, and for thirty years never did a single thing that meant anything to me, and when I retired, I was beset by this restless longing to make something  but everything I managed to do seemed so cheap and tawdry and pointless compared to the so called "great artists", that the powers that be keep telling us are so important. Anything a person like I might do must therefore be of no consequence.

663. Those were my self deprecatory thoughts as I drifted off in my own mind as Buboni was talking, but I was brought to attention when the Duck interrupted him in his didactic way, and, like he always did, threw the discussion in a different direction, giving it a broader and deeper significance. "People" he said, "long to be creative, in imitation of nature which is the only truly great creator of art.

664. Let us consider a grand landscape stretching back for a hundred miles complete with rivers, lakes, sloping hills and all of the distance dissolving into mist. Nature creates this panorama of infinite complexity and furthermore, alters it with subtle precision every second bringing in more sunlight to caress it with a touch only light can bestow, or with a few clouds casts a foreboding darkness. What you never realize is that nature observes this creation and swoons with delight over it.

Marie Antoinette Eats Cake, parts 660 - 663

660. Now look at this piece of pottery made thousands of years later by some ancient Greek, also covered with similar patterns.  I am  saying  that all of these people had a pancreas, they all had earlobes, and they all had a desire to cover surfaces with geometric decoration; but the truth is they had no choice about it. They had to cover these objects with decoration because doing so is a physical necessity which if ignored leads to depression, thoughts of suicide, and the endless hours of watching television.

661. "The watching of television programs in the vain hope that the vicarious consumption of seeing others do things that have a temporary sort of meaning will fill the void in the human soul that comes from never creating anything of any sort for yourself."

662. And worst of all is that the vicarious consumption of television drama is yet twice removed, because the actors in a television drama are not doing anything but acting the part of a meaningful life, instead of living it. Seinfeld had only imaginary friends who pay him imaginary visits, and the actors on....So Buboni went on with his lecture as he so often did, and I drifted off for a few moments into my own world.

663. This is not to say I was not interested in what Buboni was saying, on the contrary I was stung by it. I saw clearly the inescapable point he was raising, which applied to my entire life. Creativity is a physical necessity essential for a meaningful life. It can not be suppressed of ignored, but it is often put off for an entire life time, only to re-emerge in old age as a pathetic desire to do something, anything, that has some meaning.