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We Await Silent Tristero’s Empire

Now that Digby has informed everyone that “Tristero” is in fact the renowned composer Richard Einhorn, and Richard Einhorn has confirmed the fact that he is Tristero, I thought I’d reveal the related fact that Richard Einhorn and Tristero are the same person.

Didn’t see that one coming, did you?  And just wait ‘til we find out that Digby is also Richard Einhorn.

No, that’s probably not true.  I met Richard in New York last week, and over lunch, even after I spiked his San Pellegrino with veritaserum, he told me he still doesn’t know who Digby is, even after guest-blogging at Hullabaloo for months.  But it would be fun to start the rumor that Einhorn is Digby anyway—and it would be fitting, too, because I first met Richard Einhorn through some Wacky and Daffy Postmodern Internets Hijinx eighteen months ago.

Here’s the setup.  First, I wrote this post on September 7, 2004, just after the Republican National Convention, during which I passed myself off for three and a half nights as one of those “I used to be a Democrat, but since 9/11, I’m furious that the Supreme Court took prayer out of the schools” converts.  The occasion of the September 7 post was a characteristically batshit-insane Weekly Standard essay by David Gelernter, in which Gelernter not only complained of Democrats’ “racist hatred of uppity white conservatives, who have developed the cheek to threaten the left’s cultural power,” but also spun out an extended analogy between Iraq and Kitty Genovese, accusing The Left® of ignoring Iraq’s cries for help.  (In an aside, I wrote, “Surely Gelernter remembers the travesties of the early 1980s, when Donald Rumsfeld’s organization, ‘Conservatives for Peace in the Middle East,’ held a candlelight vigil for Saddam’s victims while Jimmy ‘Friend to Thugs’ Carter snuck into Baghdad in a daring pre-dawn mission and gave Saddam caches of chemical weapons while the rest of the left rolled over and went back to sleep.”)

OK, so Mr. Tristero came across this post later that day, and decided it would be really funny to praise my “postmodern” blogging.  So he claimed that I made up both the Gelernter essay and the Weekly Standard website, and closed his reply by saying,

But what a tour de farce! The perfectly faked Weekly Standard site, the pitch-perfect rhetorical parodies, the properly amazed and bemused comments from the “real” Michael Bérubé, blogger. . . . For a while there, I was totally sucked in. I really thought Gelernter had actually gone completely off his rocker.

Goddamn, I thought to myself at the time.  This guy’s even more convoluted and pomo than I am!  Hey . . . maybe that’s why his name is Tristero! 

So there was nothing I could do but play along.  I followed up with a post in which I “admitted” that the David Gelernter essay was a hoax:

OK, so Tristero nailed me.  No hallowed skein of stars can ward, I trow, who’s once been set his tryst with Tristero!  But, dear readers, even though I know some of you are tired of finding layer after layer of annoying postmodern irony on this humble blog, I confess that I really thought I could pull this one off with impunity. . . .  So with a little help from my English Department colleague Charles Kinbote, I downloaded the Eystein Reality Generator, an open-source device that tinges any website simulacrum with an eerie pale fire, and put together my elaborate Weekly Standard parody in the course of an afternoon.

And I would’ve gotten away with it, too, if it weren’t for you meddling kids and your weird “Don’t Ever Antagonize The Horn” cult!!!

Then I complained that Tristero’s discovery had set the Weekly Standard’s attorneys on me, and that I’d received a “cease and desist” letter from the legal firm of Warpe, Wistfull, Kubitschek and McMingus, signed by somebody named Metzger.

Well, by this point people were plenty confused—even my friends and regular readers.  One commenter, under the nom de web Lowlife, wrote in:

I believed your original post.  When Tristero (whose blog is daily fare at Chez LowLife) revealed the fake I believed his post.  Now, with this post, I am convinced that Tristero was wrong and the original was right and true.  I’ll never trust you again.  I will, however, continue to read you everyday.

And Chris Robinson wrote,

This is better than “The Crying Game.” Camera pans downward to reveal Tristero is Michael Berube who is really David Gelernter who is, of course (and we discerning readers should have seen it all along) Karl Rove. Hopefully the real Berube, duct taped to a radiator in a dark closet, will escape in time to save us all from this right wing, android-driven, conspiracy. Let us pray.

Folks, I’d had me some fun with the Internets before, but until then, I never realized that blogs could be so infinitely recursive in a loopy Borgesian kinda way.  And I owe it all to Richard Einhorn.

More seriously, that encounter introduced me to a great contemporary composer, whose work will shortly be included in David Horowitz’s forthcoming book, The 101 Most Dangerous Classical Composers in America Today.  Last May, I had the chance to attend a performance of his 1994 masterwork, Voices of Light, which he wrote in response to (and as a score or parallel text for) Carl Dreyer’s stunning 1928 film, The Passion of Joan of Arc.  I filed my review the next day, and demanded that all of you buy the DVD of Joan / Voices without delay.  Over the past nine months, I’ve noticed that a couple of you have delayed.  Stop delaying now.

Funny thing is (and I mean this in a completely unpostmodern kind of way), I was just re-watching Joan / Voices the other week, and I confirmed something I wasn’t quite sure of at first.  As I mentioned last May, I was struck by the violin solo two-thirds of the way through, which stands in such stark contrast to the more overpowering moments of the piece.  The vulnerability and tenuousness of that solo—at least up to the 1:30 mark (it’s right here in my personal stereo)—make perfect sense, because Joan is alone and defeated, having just signed her confession under great duress.  But then something strange happens: the music, which up to that point has been largely appropriate to the period (medieval chant, the first fumblings at polyphony, motets; the libretto is composed of texts written by female mystics of the period as well as the letters Joan dictated, all of which are sung in the original languages—Latin, Old and Middle French, Italian), gets wildly and weirdly anachronistic.  Just as Joan realizes that she’s made a terrible mistake, just when she decides to recant her confession and go to her death at the stake, the violin strikes a strained, dissonant chord, and then proceeds into the kind of impressionistic fury that won’t be heard in Western classical music until the nineteenth century.

It’s as if Einhorn is marking this moment as distinctly and indelibly modern, a moment of individual subjectivity that cannot be captured by the musical modes available at the time.  Now, the entire composition of Voices of Light is the work of genius, but this little musical frame-breaking strikes me as extra extra genius.

Of course, Joan’s antinomianism is at once heroic and fateful: one strand of it leads to the Reformation, and from the Reformation eventually to the Enlightenment; another strand leads to the belief that individuals can receive direct revelation from God, and gives us the American tradition that runs from Anne Hutchinson to Joseph Smith to David Koresh.  All the more appropriate, then, that her moment of martyrdom be marked by such a wrenching and multivalent chord.

So go buy the DVD already.  And let’s thank Richard Ein– er, I mean, Tristero– for all his fine work as a dangerous composer and a dangerous blogger.

Posted by on 02/21 at 02:22 PM

  1. Ok. Einhorn’s a luddite. I’ll buy that.

    Posted by  on  02/21  at  04:04 PM

  2. All the great artists belong to us.

    Posted by  on  02/21  at  04:09 PM

  3. Well, not quite true, Rich.  After all, they have Roger L. Simon.

    Posted by  on  02/21  at  04:17 PM

  4. Pynchon references are lame.

    Posted by  on  02/21  at  04:49 PM

  5. Quoth Michael: “It’s as if Einhorn is marking this moment as distinctly and indelibly modern, a moment of individual subjectivity that cannot be captured by the musical modes available at the time.”

    Sort of like a mirror image of the moment in Alban Berg’s opera Wozzeck, which is largely atonal, when the heroine starts praying for forgiveness shortly before her death. Her prayer, set in tonal harmony, sounds oddly anachronistic in the context of the opera. One can’t help but wonder: Does she honestly think prayer is still a viable mode of communication?

    Posted by  on  02/21  at  05:19 PM

  6. I am he as you are he as you are me
    and we are all together.

    Posted by  on  02/21  at  06:28 PM

  7. So that’s what that means!  Thanks, Walrus.  And thanks to Rachel for the mirror image moment in Berg’s Wozzeck, too.

    Posted by Michael  on  02/21  at  06:49 PM

  8. My head hurts.

    Posted by Chris Clarke  on  02/21  at  07:11 PM

  9. So, does this all mean that *Pale Fire* was actually written by Thomas Flatman?

    Posted by  on  02/21  at  07:51 PM

  10. You know, I think that the late, much lamented Media Horse--gone, but not forgotten, MHO--is Digby. One quit about the time the other got going. Doesn’t help much. Never knew who the Horse was, anyway.

    Posted by  on  02/21  at  08:16 PM

  11. Hi, my mom sent me a link to your blog because she reads it regularly and was surprised to see your mentions of Voices of Light. I just performed in the NYC shows of the film last weekend at the World Financial Center! We played with the amazing vocal group Anonymous 4. I’m a 23-year-old violinist, and both my parents work at PSU in genetics (in the Carpenter building).
    I’m very glad to read how you connected with the music and film, and I think the whole orchestra and certainly the ny audience felt the same way. After about 30 minutes the performance becomes very meditative and trancelike.
    Now I’ve got to see the film without having to turn my neck painfully far to catch glimpses of it in between playing!

    Posted by  on  02/21  at  09:01 PM

  12. Brian C.B., I think you are right, because I used to hear rumors that the Horse was a woman, and I *also* hear rumors that Digby is a woman.  Therefore they must be same person!

    Posted by  on  02/21  at  09:08 PM

  13. I must repeat my endorsement of Voice of Light as a life-changing experience. I don’t know of anything like it. Certainly not any other attempts at scoring silent films—Alloy Orchestra is cute but way too chintzy. And let’s not mention Giorgio Moroder. And I’m also speaking as a philistine who has no truck with orchestra mumbo-jumbo. Seriously—what else is there to do while waiting for the show to come to my town again?

    And if Mr. Einhorn is reading—Thank you.

    Posted by  on  02/22  at  12:08 AM

  14. Professor Berube

    In your penultimate paragraph you seem to indicate that the “Enlightenment strand” that comes from Joan is the “heroic” one and that the “direct revelation” strand is the “fateful” one.  As a self-described “pomo” human (as well as a John Shade devotee and mucho, Mucho Maas) wouldn’t you agree that the Enlightenment is just as “fateful” as personal revelation, since postmodernist thought views Enlightenment programs and divine revelation with the same critical eye?  This may be a time to use the old standby “both/and.” Also, the equation of Joseph Smith with David Koresh is about as flattering to Mormons as the equation of Roger Ebert with Bin Laden is to Leftists (and maybe as inaccurate).  Anyway, great post, not at all WASTEful; I’m going to track down the recommended DVD’s right now.

    Posted by  on  02/22  at  03:05 PM

  15. Right, yes, fine. Today’s to-do list now includes “buy DVD” and “buy DVD player.” Credit cards gonna see some exercise.

    After reading the lost-then-reconstructed-then-
    lost-again history of this silent film (hyperlinks still rock), I gotta ask: anybody else curious about what other items were stashed in that janitor’s closet?

    Posted by  on  02/22  at  04:17 PM

  16. I hope Rhett isn’t suggesting that Mormon’s suddenly rise up burn the PA statehouse, as well as several PSU buildings in protest of the characterization of Smith with Koresh.  I would think that the Koresh followers would be more annoyed, in that David never pretended to find tablets (made in the Smith family basement) delivered by some archangel. 

    The fires of empire that consumed Joan and David, and the bullets of the vengeful that took out Joe and Hyrum, seem sadly to represent too much about a nation that was ostensibly founded on Enlightenment principles.  I would think that Wilhelm Reich would have been another.

    Posted by  on  02/22  at  05:03 PM

  17. Rhett, I don’t equate Joseph Smith with David Koresh, or either with Anne Hutchinson.  I’m simply remarking on the fact that they all inhabit an American antinomian tradition in which individuals claim direct revelation from God; they proceed, of course, to do different things with their revelations.

    And this postmodern blog has often critiqued postmodernism’s critiques of the Enlightenment, never more succinctly than here.

    Posted by  on  02/22  at  05:59 PM

  18. Einhorn isn’t Tristero.  Einhorn is Finkel.

    Posted by  on  02/22  at  07:36 PM

  19. "Of course, Joan’s antinomianism is at once heroic and fateful: one strand of it leads to the Reformation, and from the Reformation eventually to the Enlightenment; another strand leads to the belief that individuals can receive direct revelation from God, and gives us the American tradition that runs from Anne Hutchinson to Joseph Smith to David Koresh.”

    It’s good to have several strands available. In America, as opposed to say Bhutan (the only constitutionally Buddhist country in the world), it is frowned upon for a citizen to be forcibly deported for being Hindu, or to have his or her citizenship revoked for being Christian.

    And individuals that do not want to receive direct revelation from the guru--and instead want to pursue a skeptical inquiry--are not--as was Gendun Chopel in the 1940s--thrown into dungeons by the current Dalai Lama (holder of the Nobel Peace Prize, by the way)--on charges of heresy.

    Similarly, if one does not want to pay unquestioning fealty to the Japanese Emperor, one is not subject to charges of heresy and lese-majeste, as one was in the 1940s in Japan. Or, if one wants to expose anti-semitic hate crimes and Pan-Asian imperialist militarism among the majority of Zen Buddhist lineage holders during world war II, one is not deported from Japan for anti-government activities, as was Professor Brian Victoria, author of *Zen at War* and *Zen War Stories* in 1975.

    Posted by bonzo  on  02/23  at  04:56 AM

  20. Your use of the work antinomian confuses me. I understand it to mean the “heretical doctrine that Christians are exempt from the obligations of moral law,” as the Catholic encyclopedia defines it. That is, they feel exempt because “saved” and assured of their place in heaven and thus free to sin as much as they want. This is arguably the heresy of Bush and the Christian fundamentalists who follow him, as well as of some other cult leaders, but. I don’t see how it applies to Joan of Arc. But perhaps the word has usages I am unaware of.

    Incidentally, the gothic horror novel on this theme by the Scottish writer James Hogg (1770-1835) “Confessions of a Justified Sinner” still packs a pretty pretty powerful punch, if anyone is curious to read it.

    Posted by  on  02/23  at  10:18 PM

  21. Hi, Harold.  Sorry for the confusion—I was using the term “antinomian” in this sense, namely, with reference to the antinomian crisis in early New England.

    Posted by  on  02/24  at  03:47 PM

  22. With all due respect, I think your source misuses the word, which the dictionary defines as “Opposed to or denying the fixed meaning or universal applicability of moral law.” Your source even puts “antinomian” in quotes, indicating either an ideosyncratic meaning, or that the writer considers the charge of antinomianism made against his/her subject, Anne Hutchinson, to be untrue.

    What I think is meant, just off the bat, is a claim of direct revelation by the Holy Spirit, which is not by itself necessarily heretical (and which is a foundation of Quakerism and Pentacostalism, for example).

    On the other hand, those who claimed direct revelation were routinely accused of antinominanism. Most such accusations (i.e., of ignoring moral law) against “heretics” were probably spurious. Though there appear to have been some rather radical libertarian and/or hippie-like communitarians (ranters, diggers, and Bretheren of the Free Spirit)in the early reformation. Most of what we know about them, however, comes from their enemies.

    Posted by  on  02/24  at  05:50 PM

  23. Actually, it’s not just my source.  Google “Antinomian Crisis” and “Antinomian Controversy” and you’ll find that the term has a specific meaning in the context of American religious and cultural history, quite apart from its dictionary definition.  But you’re right, it also has a much older history as well.  And yes, those who claimed direct relevation were accused of antinomianism.  See the moment in The Passion of Joan of Arc in which her interrogators ask her if she is in a state of grace, and Joan answers, deftly, “if I am not, may God grant me one, and if I am, may God keep me there.”

    Posted by Michael  on  02/24  at  06:11 PM

  24. Well, as the story of Joan of Arc proves, yesterday’s Antinomian is today’s Saint. Your link to the “much older tradition” is the very same Catholic Encyclopedia article whose first sentence I quoted in my first post (essentially giving the same definition as the dictionary). It also says that Luther (in the fine triangulating spirit with which Protestantism began) called his fellow reformer Agricola an antinomian, “accusing him of beliefs which he probably didn’t hold” (Calvin, similarly, got his religion started by burning the Unitarian, Servetus, but that is another story). 

    Thank you for enlightening me about the the Antinomian Crisis / Controversy in American history, which I did google, as you suggested. In least one article I looked up, the author, Jeffrey M. Kahl, puts “antinomian” in quotations in his first use of it, indicating (at least to me) his awareness of the usual meaning of the term. Hutchinson, et al, were of course accused of antinomianism by their Puritan persecutors and so are termed “antinomians” by specialist historians as a convenience, but anyone who has read “Confessions of a Justified Sinner” would recoil at calling them that. It seems that they were just Baptists—or anabaptists, if you will.

    It seems to me rather more appropriate to call Joan of Arc, who lived well before Ann Hutchinson (and even Luther), a mystic.

    It is a fascinating topic, and a great book on the subject (wrong perhaps in some particulars, but a page-turning “great read") is Norman Cohn’s The Pursuit of the Millenium which I would recommend to anyone.

    Posted by  on  02/25  at  12:35 AM

  25. who is, of course (and we discerning readers should have seen it all along) Karl Rove.

    You know, I think you might be on to something there.  Perhpas this was all just a Roveian plot, like when Capt. Picard was going to send a paradox to the Borg.  Here Rove plants a post with a neverending downward spiral of self-referential post moderist irony.  Then we deconstruct it until we simply vanish if a puff of existentialist angst.

    Good thing we caught it in time.

    Posted by  on  02/26  at  06:56 PM

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