The Last Rectangle Read online

  As the chord froze without a resolution and waiting for something to happen, Hani took off on an exposition all on his own supported lightly by the drummer. The melody Hani played was based on the same four intervals in the chord. The melody went through ascents and descents, spurting out marvelous new sets of intervals but not without thought. Hani played out his solo under a steady beat in 4 sets of 9 bars each, a total of 36 bars. The first two bars of every one of these 4 sets had a short melody that Hani made up and which consisted of intervals selected at random from the strange chord and no others. He would then improvise the remaining 7 bars based on the first 2 in that set by inverting, doubling or shuffling the intervals never straying too far from the strange chord nor from the melody of the first 2 bars. In his mind, he was working on the complements of 9 which are pairs of digits that sum up to 9. He was reminded of this by the simple fact that a rising interval such as a fifth gave the same end note as a falling interval which was its 9’s complement, i.e., the falling fourth. The 2 and 7 bars established the horizontal structure. The number 36 was made up of 3 and 6. The 4 intervals of the 5 instruments were also complements of 9. By the middle of the third set, Hani was going through runs on his oboe that neither a clarinet nor a soprano sax would dare broach. As the 36 bars were drawing to a close, Hani started looking at his friends one by one indicating that the exposition was coming to an end and that he expected one of them to join him.

  There was a hesitation in their eyes obviously due to their total involvement in the development of the music. Finally and on the very last two bars, Hani saw the trombonist raise his horn and get ready to jump in. The trombonist would not need to be told that the next set would also be 4 by 9 bars. Hani stuck to his 2 by 7 sets as the trombonist slid on top and below Hani’s notes using intervals which were hand picked from what went before. The trombonist was obviously a historian but it made Hani choke a few times and miss a few notes as he saw the beauty unfolding behind him. He picked up and rushed on. He felt that tonight he knew everything and he could do anything and that there was not a phrase, nor a harmony nor a beat that he could not hear in his mind and push right onto his oboe. The memory of the music just played was looming large. As the details lost their edge, the overall form stood out and was slowly dictating its terms to the two musicians. They felt that though they were still in control, they had to juggle a hundred and one strands to keep the intensity of the drive from crumbling under its own weight. With the successful pairing of the oboe and the trombone, the pianist joined in the third set of 4 by 9 bars nodding his head to insist on the trombone to stay on. He played soft chords, two to the bar, always working out carpet like sounds that eased the tension still being built by the oboe and the trombone. With the third set of 4 by 9 over, it was the turn of the saxophone to join. Having been used to center stage, the saxophone found it challenging to merge with the rest but did something which contributed to the overall creativity of the piece though sadly not his own. As Hani was still on his 2 by 7 bars, the saxophone followed Hani by echoing his intervals, one interval later but instead of playing the same intervals, he chose to play their complement. If the last interval played by Hani was a rising fifth, the saxophone played a rising fourth creating a complex harmony that could not have been agreed upon on paper. So far, the 4 sets of 9 bars were still being played at a slow but steady beat. The drummer had not done any hard work but was slowly visualizing the structure of the music he was hearing. As the last few bars of the set with the saxophonist were coming to a close, Hani nodded to the drummer who was half expecting it and they all stopped to let him play his 4 sets of 9 bars on his own. He had noted in his mind the last 9 intervals played by Hani. He violently upset the rhythm by playing a drum solo of 9 bars so that each bar had a number of beats corresponding to the size of the interval in those last 9 intervals. Though it was their intention to give him the full 36 bars on his own, they were in one mind when they heard what he was doing. They jumped in at the start of the second set of 9 bars with their braided melodies keeping to the jagged beat of the first 9 bars. When the second set of 9 bars finished, the drummer was so thrilled they had caught on to what he was doing, that he screamed with joy and jumped up in his seat. They continued with this dramatic change of rhythm for 2 more sets of 9 bars. Finally, the bass joined in leaving his light line and giving a massive dose of music. They were all expecting a standard solo with light drumming and some piano when with murderous eyes he urged them all to stay on and continue what they were doing. Throughout the 4 sets of the bassist, they maintained the logic of the drummer’s beat with that of Hani’s 2 by 7 bar improvisations. The bassist chose to double their tempo with a melody which was totally formed by the 4 intervals of the strange chord. By now, the music would have been totally imperceptible to anyone except those playing it and even then, just barely. The last set of 9 bars saw them creating waves of 5 notes which slapped into the coast line and receded backwards as their wind died down. They approached the end of the 36 bars of the bass with the certain knowledge that they were to resolve on the strange chord. During another 9 bars, the drummer lowered his dynamics but stuck to the structure of the 9 bars he had derived earlier. They recapped the various chords they had played in the exposition until they reached the strange chord one last time whereby Hani spun his single note, this time more distant, almost as if it came from the next room in the club. They played out their instruments leaving him to his solitary note.

  The Festival of Laughter

  1. The Funny Dream

  I woke up one morning laughing hard, not making a sound. The laughter was internal. I had been dreaming and as I started disentangling the dream from my waking reality, I realized that the joke was in the dream itself. My friends had come to see me. They had climbed the stairs up to my flat, one that I had lived in a long time earlier. They came in and left with my furniture. One carried a table lamp while another two carried a chest of drawers. As they descended the stairs, I got very angry with them. Then I caught the eye of one of them who had a strange smirk on his face. I immediately realized my error. They were not going down the stairs. They were actually ascending the stairs backwards. This meant that they had actually brought me the furniture as presents. They wanted to fool me into thinking that they were taking my furniture away. Their trick succeeded and we all laughed. I was happy to receive them and their presents. As they walked into the flat, I woke up.

  As I turned over the events in the dream, I started seeing how the mechanism of dreaming worked. There were inversions, inventions, omissions and displacements. These mechanisms resulted in my initial anger. The dream inverted my ownership since my friends were carrying new furniture and not my old stuff. I never had a lamp nor did I have a chest of drawers. I thought these were mine and were being taken away. The dream invented their coming in and then their leaving with my furniture whereas they had only come in once. The dream omitted the way I came to know that they were on the stairs. Presumably, they must have rung the bell at the entrance of the building. Of course, because of this omission, I had no option but to think that they were leaving and not coming. The dream displaced the direction of their bodies making me believe that my friends were leaving instead of coming in.

  I looked out of the window and realized that it was still 4 in the morning. I tried to go back to sleep, even to restart the dream as sometimes happened to me and found myself fully entangled in the analysis of my dream. What bothered me was not the workings of the dream and the distance of such mechanisms from my open eyed reality. I had accepted that long time ago. My surprise was that the mechanism of humor was invariant. It threw me back to Einstein who was very worried about the constancy of his beloved physical laws in different frames of reference. Would the same laws work within a moving train as well as within the framework of someone observing the train from a long distance? In other words, will things behave the same way they do in real life as when observed from another standpoint? Poor man, he had to giv
e up an absolutism so important to his 19th century thinking when he realized that under some circumstances, physical laws were different. The only invariant was the speed of light and some other universal constants. But here, we had something totally different. The constants of my life, the furniture, the friends, their comings and goings were being inverted, omitted, displaced with new constants invented but the mechanism of their activities was invariant: I had found the joke funny in both the dream and my waking hours. I was not working at that time and did not have to get up.

  2. The Festival of Laughter

  I remained in bed open eyed till the latter parts of the morning. I finally got up, showered and drove up to a café on top of the hill where I had a coffee and a croissant as I read the papers. I flipped over to the culture page. The whole section was devoted to the Italian Film Week at the CineClub. I walked around the area where I lived, looked into a few bookstores and tried to shake my dream out but could not. The joke kept breaking out and I smiled to myself on several occasions. At 3 in the afternoon, I went to see Fellini’s Satyricon. As I got involved with the film, I was still riding on my dream. Fellini’s Satyricon was a dream in itself. I was in good company. Having seen the film over 6 times, I concentrated on undoing the effects of repetition that force you to gloss over things. A few times in the film, Encolpio breaks into a smirk, a kind of punch line at his own misfortunes. This was Fellini’s response to the tragic that often swells in the film only to be deflated by humor. I had seen that smirk many times and it had never been too important to the film. Then came the Festival of Laughter, with the prince whose nose started its incline from the top of his forehead. This beautiful tableau was always one of the highlights of the film for me. Encolpio was brought to the brink of death by the Theseus substitute only to be released as a friend. He was tricked like I was. Encolpio was the sacrifice made to the God of Laughter. The prince laughed and so did his subjects: taka taka tak, taka taka tak. This time, I saw the scene differently. This was not a ruling ideology. This was not a group of employees laughing up to their boss. They were both laughing as a true ritual. Their equality with the prince was unmistakable. Here was a force of nature, humor, treating all humans the same, much like death and birth but for once, initiated by humans themselves. I wallowed in the scene. Of course, the film went on its way and I could not follow it, so disturbed was I with the strength of the Festival. It had its own God. Was I becoming religious again? I left the film in the middle and walked along the lush green line of Ficus trees of a cool April evening. The greenery was in stark contrast with the desert of the Festival of Laughter. It reminded me of the chasm between the very subjective and turbulent nature of humor in my dream and the placid uniformity across a wide social spectrum in the Festival of Laughter. My mind started working again.

  3. Approaching the Agency

  I had been out of work for a long time and was anxious to get back into professional surroundings. I was also eager to leave my previous training as a teacher and enter into something very original and challenging. I started inventing new job definitions that would suit my temperament but that would also be special and unusual, but I could tell real soon that no one would offer me such jobs. With the punctuated laughter of the Festival still ringing in my ears, I knew I wanted to stay near to humor. I threw out comedy. I was not funny. I could create an atmosphere of laughter and I could make people laugh because I knew how jokes were constructed. But I was not comic, people did not start laughing the moment they saw me as you would when you saw Chaplin or John Cleese. I needed something related to humor and I found it.

  After 2 days, I approached the agency, dressed in a dark blue suit with a Bordeaux colored necktie. I carried a laptop though I knew they would not let me use it. I put on fake glasses to give me that extra sense of earnestness I needed in a presentation. I was so sure I will get an audience that I brought my own little laser pointer with me. The agency always sought out their own recruits and tested them before any major interviews so they were startled when I suggested that I could be of use to them. What made them listen was when I slipped in a hint that what I had could be turned over into a new method for crowd control. They made a few calls around the agency and I had what I wanted: one hour in a fully equipped conference room and a large showing. I slipped my diskette containing the full presentation into their PC which was connected to the projector and started my presentation. I was dying to make them laugh but realized that I would lose them since I had not built up enough credibility with them so far. If I had not built up the credibility, they were doing it themselves. I was almost sure that during the time when the conference room was being readied, someone was running a search through some database somewhere to check up on me. When I was finally introduced to the audience, I could tell that I had passed some kind of credibility threshold. A different set of stock phrases were now being used than those used earlier on when the telephone calls were being made. It relaxed everyone and they started treating me with importance and not simply like they treat a new recruit.

  I started the presentation by a single slide stating my case: humor has been disregarded by most agencies, if not by all of them. They agreed. I jumped ahead by 3 or 4 slides on the PC. The light on the disk drive was flashing even when I was not flipping slides. It was clear to me that they were copying my presentation to some server deep in their jungle. Still, I was not worried. The chances are very high that the whole presentation will be archived on some jukebox in some underground cellar never to be analyzed again.

  My second point was more difficult to make. Humor was an unleashed power, but not a positive force. Violence, restriction, subjugation, bribery were all positive forces since they started at one point and achieved an aim. Humor was a pervasive force, not a prod, nor a poke. To demonstrate that, I flashed in quick succession several jokes: one liners or cartoons or extended 5 minute texts. They had mixed reactions to these jokes, mostly laughter here and there, but some anger manifested by booing when ethnic jokes were flashed or groans when painful puns were made. They got the point. I was climbing a hard hill as my third and major issue was to convince them that my plan would be of use to the agency. It was silly of me to imagine that they would give me a hard time on that one. They raced ahead of me with tens of ideas. I really found it difficult to reject them politely without losing their faith in me. I suddenly became their consultant deciding on this or that project, slashing this, promoting that. I succeeded in shifting several projects out of the way by comically nudging my elbows in the air and giving them a big wink while saying that such and such a project belonged to “that other department”. This was a master stroke on my part for not only it gave them the idea that I knew the structure of the agency, which of course I did not, but I got to know the structure since on mention of that “other department”, the department head himself would shuffle in his seat and flash a silly grin around while everyone swiveled around in theirs to stare at him with an equally senseless grin, the kind you see when a dirty innuendo is spotted.

  I was having a great time. I rejected other projects on account of their high costs and that pleased them. No projects were rejected because of implicit risks or because such projects would result in some loss of life. I had skillfully managed to convince them to retain the projects that I had thought of to start with. Of course, by now, they were convinced that these projects were their own making so I had to skip through more slides in the presentation where I had expanded on these projects.

  So now the next step of the project was funding. An accountant was brought in and I had 3 different sessions with him and the direct responsible of each of the 3 projects that were finally accepted. Funds were allocated. Budgets were shuffled and when necessary, black boxes were created on the spot presumably to be filled with funds of unknown origins, funds that the accountants kept referring to as “funds that traveled wide circles”. I let them work the way they knew best and left them with one of the two faces I was goi
ng to wear from now on. I danced down the steps of the agency, raced to the car pack, dumped my laptop on the back seat and before I got into my seat, I flashed my arms in the air, the right one up, the left one down, palms and fingers completely extended imitating a comedian who has just shot a great punch line: tarraaah. I had a job.

  4. Developing the Project

  My first project was to develop comedians. I attended plays by our national comedian, Shooshoo, and was stunned by his power to hold his audience in a frenzied coma. By the end of the show, your jaws hurt from so much laughter. Anyone else would have fallen into the straight thinking of harnessing the comedian’s power to suppress the public or even direct it. But this was not my project. I recognized Shooshoo’s genius and went backstage to meet him. His 25 cm wide mustache was twirled at the ends and shivered with his nervous talk as he chain smoked and drank his black coffee. He would stay awake for around 5 hours after the end of the show. He was kind and made fun of my necktie to such an extent that we almost had another show back stage. Each time I came back to see him, he would shout: Make way for the dangling necktie and everyone broke down with laughter. I began to love him. I could not stay too long without his whiny voice but had to proceed with my project which was slowly making me see him less as a star than as a victim. One evening, I took a banker backstage with me. I introduced him to Shooshoo. A banker? Shooshoo was not sure whether this was a joke on my part to pay back for his necktie quip or not. He looked at me several times with questioning eyes. I stared back without a sign. It was when the banker offered to sponsor a full season by Shooshoo that Shooshoo finally called out to me so everyone could hear: I am supposed to be the fool here, not your friend. Does your fool know what he is wasting his money on? Everyone laughed, including the fool who was kind enough to say, yes I am the fool and why should you care how I spend my money? Shooshoo was drawn in. The banker explained the scheme. He said that a group of financial giants had recognized his genius and value to society and that one way to combat the left with their promise of food and shelter was to enhance the spirit of the people, especially by humor. They can then get up in the morning feeling better and have the ability and strength to improve their life on their own and without the help of political parties. The scheme was simple: Shooshoo would have no financial worries from now on. The financial group would cover the costs of the theater, the actors, the props and the advertising. Any income from the show would be totally reaped by Shooshoo and his troupe. This arrangement would go on for one year without any strings attached.