Vain Art of the Fugue

Dumitru Tsepeneag

As I stepped onto the bus I felt an urge to look back, as if someone had called out to me or tapped me on the shoulder or perhaps just looked at me, the way you look at a person who seems familiar and whose name you want to call out (what name?), or the way you stand at the window or the garden gate, gripping the green or black bars, and follow someone with your eyes as long as possible as he walks away, and--for no real reason, knowing he'll turn around anyway--you feel a tightness in your chest as you will him to look back, focusing on the nape of his neck or a point between his shoulders, not thinking of anything so that people might say you were staring into space down a street that'll soon be empty, where a dog sneaks along the side of the house, and a woman looks vacantly towards the man who's turned the corner, hurriedly walking along with his head slightly bent, clutching a bunch of flowers rather awkwardly, slowing almost to a stop to look at a front yard, unsure of himself, then starting up again, crossing one street and another, approaching the stop where the bus is already about to leave, running the last few yards, jumping onto the step, and glancing back: I couldn't resist the temptation and therefore moved my head with a sense of shame because I couldn't control myself, no one had called out to me, no one was behind me, and then the wheels of the bus began to turn, I climbed the next and final step, felt in my pocket for some change, and the flowers got squashed a little against the ticket-seller's counter.

A fish was passing, in flight above the garden.

I wanted to write a thought imitating the style of Vain Art of the Fugue but this is not the place for that. I have never read a piece that had so much of the form of music. Tsepeneag's story is really a one-chapter story that is told thirty times, but never quite the same. It's not a story being told and retold from different perspectives, although it encompasses that, but it's a story being told differently thirty times. Tsepeneag repeats certain notes, maybe at different octaves, but certainly the same notes, in each revision of the story. I did not think the conventions of plot and story could be disregarded so blatantly with such success. Vain Art of the Fugue is a challening read, but more rewarding than many things I have read recently. It is an entirely different way of telling a story with an emphasis on the things in the story rather than the story as a whole. In a way it is the opposite of what Steinbeck tried to do in his story-play Burning Bright. Where Steinbeck took the broader story of his piece and repeated and expanded it with different pieces, Tsepeneag places the emphasis on the continuity of the pieces though the story may be different. As with anything that is associated with GEB, there's math somewhere nearby.