It was an odd choice of music for a birth, but her mind was made up: Phyllis Bataille had recorded the piece onto the cassette months beforehand. The cassette stayed in a canvas bag, along with the small gray tabletop tape player, slung over the front doorknob, except when she removed the player to check the batteries, or opened the jewel case to make sure the tape was still in there, or loaded the tape and hit play and pressed the speaker against her belly. She wanted him to know it was coming. There was no other music she wanted her son to hear the moment he emerged into the world.
Bach wrote Tocatta and Fugue in D minor in the eighteenth century, and although it’s widely regarded as one of his masterworks, it’s admittedly not very relaxing. Gerald Bataille thought his wife’s choice was ridiculous. To Gerald’s ear, the piece began like Halloween, overdramatic and spooky, then built a bad chord of mashed-up organ notes that sounded like a car accident—after which the organ started hyperventilating. He wasn’t sure if the hyperventilating part was the tocatta, or if it was the fugue, but he didn’t think it would go so well with blood and screaming. He tried to reason against it, but reason didn’t make a dent. He was prepared for fuguing, blood and screaming.
But Phyllis hadn’t picked the piece based on reason. She chose it because it felt right, not because the choice was defensible: it was, according to her, the only proper soundtrack for the coming moment in which these two angles of reality—that of the world, and that of her son—converged.
“It’s not very soothing, is it?” Gerald commented, weeks before the due date, as they sat in their sweltering house, he on the couch, she precariously perched at the kitchen table on a stool, using her core for support.
No, Phyllis admitted: Tocatta and Fugue is not soothing. And it’s not supposed to be. It did plenty of things other than soothe.
From the small gray tape recorder between them on the kitchen floor, a blind German organist flogged away, the sound tinny and small.
“Oh?” Gerald said. “Like what? What things?”
“It inspires awe,” she said. “And mystery.” She was going to add immanence, but Gerald had already hoisted an eyebrow.
“It does,” Gerald said, “but for the birth, in this context…”
She stiffened. Gerald waited a minute, and then said it anyway.
“It sounds like mad scientist music,” he said.
They listened. It did sound like mad scientist music. But it also inspired immanence, a fact which Phyllis now planned to keep to herself.
“What about Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring?” Gerald said, “or Vivaldi?”
Vivaldi?
No son of hers would ever be born listening to fucking Vivaldi—cartoonish, high-fructose Vivaldi. The feminist in her wouldn’t tolerate it.
“For the birth,” Gerald added, to ensure she didn’t think he was simply mentioning offhand a general appreciation for Vivaldi.
But Phyllis’ mind had long been made up. For nearly fifteen years, actually, since long before the pregnancy, and long before Gerald—long before even thoughts of pregnancy, or Gerald. It was the one: Phyllis didn’t believe in God, but to her, Tocatta and Fugue was the sound of God, and Tocatta and Fugue was the color of blood. It was a cathedral, and it was the sun, and it was perfect.
It was one late summer afternoon in Paris that did it, standing in Notre Dame, seventeen years old, alone in Europe, nearing the end of her year between high school and university. Late light slanted in through the cathedral door and the rose window’s stained glass, the blues and reds variegated fire, the color deep and perfect, while Phyllis stood amid the polyphonic hush of people and listened to the deep-throated organ fill the cathedral to its corners, the music so loud and full it seemed to be projecting from inside her own gut—it was an unknown organist, playing desperately, with passion, as if their life existed only within the gyres of notes. In a way, it did, as they were auditioning to become the principal organist at Notre Dame.
It seemed, she’d written in her journal, that something had to tear—the music, the player, the organ, the universe. Or me.
Phyllis didn’t know if the organist got the job, but they sure got her. That moment—eyes closed, swaying, the sun blood-red through her eyelids, Notre Dame, Tocatta and Fugue—had seared into her like a brand, and thus when she learned that she was going to have a child, the knowledge that they would emerge to the sounds of Bach was close to follow.
“Vivaldi?” she said.
“That’s what I’d choose,” he said.
Phyllis labored to her feet and began making slow progress towards the bathroom, her huge belly a blunt bowsprit. “Well, it’s not your baby, is it?” she said.
Gerald opened his mouth to protest. Technically, it was his baby. Theirs. But he said nothing. He let her declaration hang in the air, appreciating its heaviness and finality, this laying of claim that he could now return to like an oasis for blanket exoneration.
But the tape didn’t play on the day of the birth, and her son never got to hear it. Phyllis only listened to it once more after the boy was in the world, in secret, years after he was born, on a muggy spring night while standing barefoot on the driveway’s cracked asphalt, holding the tape recorder and listening with the sound turned way down low, so quiet the crickets nearly drowned it out, her wondrous moment in Notre Dame—when it seemed the inception of anything might follow—galaxies away.
Joe Bataille, at his moment of birth, did not hear Tocatta and Fugue.
What he did hear was the last intelligible sentence his mother was able to form, the one just prior to the window-rattling shriek that heralded his entrance into the world:
“My god, Gerald, he’s coming out!”
(More specifically: she heralded his entrance into the Volvo.)
Her contrivance for him started herniating early—or, depending on how you look at it, right on time.
It’s tempting to say that his spirit was always meant to be peregrine because the baby decided—against the will of mother, father, and birth plan—to be born there, in the car, straight into his mother’s hands as she wailed in the passenger seat, as Gerald continued to drive laser-straight, 65 mph, even as he reached across the emergency break with his dominant hand to try and help Phyllis get her pants down. But it probably didn’t mean anything. It just happened.
This had not been the plan. But it turned out that the state highway’s slow lane, amid a hazy ocean of new corn that stretched and fell cleanly away over the far repose of the horizon, was as good a place as any. Not according to the baby—the baby didn’t know a thing, save for warm suspension, muffled voices, the aquatic symphony of the womb, and repeated in utero lashings from J.S. Bach. Since nothing went wrong, though, the slow lane worked just the same as any other birthing site would have, like the hospital in Defiance, the one they wouldn’t reach until the deed was done. It seemed, at that moment, that the highway had always been the inevitable location, because in that June landscape, the ticking of mile markers and the ghosts of distant cities slow-creeping backwards across the earth like cargo ships are the only references, and the machine-straight rows of corn flicker like a filmreel, and time doesn’t seem to move, and with no holdfast for the eyes you can floor the accelerator and still feel like you’re standing still.
He came out pasty, cried briefly, and did it all correct: he breathed.
“It’s alright,” Gerald said, “it’s alright.” He scanned the roadside for a place to pull over, but then decided against it. They were almost to the hospital anyway.
“My god, Gerald, we just had our baby in the car,” she said, her eyes wide, watery, flat as tin.
“Well, if it’s crying, it’s breathing,” he countered.
But then the tiny thing stopped crying. It lay in her hands and stared at the ceiling, as if transfixed, and she could not tell if the thing breathed.
Phyllis began shrieking all over again.
For the first time in his life, Gerald Bataille punched his foot to the floor and sped, just like Steve McQueen in Bullitt, if Steve McQueen in Bullitt had driven a fastidiously maintained 1983 gold Volvo stationwagon.
#
Phyllis didn’t like that he was born in the car—she’d envisioned a life optimized from start to finish, and she’d done her part with the vitamins and the Mozart (in addition to Bach, for good measure), and optimization included minimizing the risk of infection, having highly-trained people and expensive machines around, etcetera.
Gerald didn’t like it either—later that night, when things settled down, he stole away to the Piggly Wiggly, bought a box of Clabber Girl, dumped the whole thing on the seat, and worked it mournfully into the dark tongue of birth material with his toothbrush by the light of the moon.
Had they both been natural optimists, they might have looked at it differently: it was the perfect birth. Because straight away, the rolling tires and rushing wind killed any illusion of stasis, security, and predictability his parents had intended to create. It was the perfect introduction to a world whose narrative is constantly rupturing in unexpected directions, in which nothing seems to stay put—a world in which Joe Bataille, along with everyone else, would remain forever running in order to keep up with the changing world and everything in it.
Bach wrote Tocatta and Fugue in D minor in the eighteenth century, and although it’s widely regarded as one of his masterworks, it’s admittedly not very relaxing. Gerald Bataille thought his wife’s choice was ridiculous. To Gerald’s ear, the piece began like Halloween, overdramatic and spooky, then built a bad chord of mashed-up organ notes that sounded like a car accident—after which the organ started hyperventilating. He wasn’t sure if the hyperventilating part was the tocatta, or if it was the fugue, but he didn’t think it would go so well with blood and screaming. He tried to reason against it, but reason didn’t make a dent. He was prepared for fuguing, blood and screaming.
But Phyllis hadn’t picked the piece based on reason. She chose it because it felt right, not because the choice was defensible: it was, according to her, the only proper soundtrack for the coming moment in which these two angles of reality—that of the world, and that of her son—converged.
“It’s not very soothing, is it?” Gerald commented, weeks before the due date, as they sat in their sweltering house, he on the couch, she precariously perched at the kitchen table on a stool, using her core for support.
No, Phyllis admitted: Tocatta and Fugue is not soothing. And it’s not supposed to be. It did plenty of things other than soothe.
From the small gray tape recorder between them on the kitchen floor, a blind German organist flogged away, the sound tinny and small.
“Oh?” Gerald said. “Like what? What things?”
“It inspires awe,” she said. “And mystery.” She was going to add immanence, but Gerald had already hoisted an eyebrow.
“It does,” Gerald said, “but for the birth, in this context…”
She stiffened. Gerald waited a minute, and then said it anyway.
“It sounds like mad scientist music,” he said.
They listened. It did sound like mad scientist music. But it also inspired immanence, a fact which Phyllis now planned to keep to herself.
“What about Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring?” Gerald said, “or Vivaldi?”
Vivaldi?
No son of hers would ever be born listening to fucking Vivaldi—cartoonish, high-fructose Vivaldi. The feminist in her wouldn’t tolerate it.
“For the birth,” Gerald added, to ensure she didn’t think he was simply mentioning offhand a general appreciation for Vivaldi.
But Phyllis’ mind had long been made up. For nearly fifteen years, actually, since long before the pregnancy, and long before Gerald—long before even thoughts of pregnancy, or Gerald. It was the one: Phyllis didn’t believe in God, but to her, Tocatta and Fugue was the sound of God, and Tocatta and Fugue was the color of blood. It was a cathedral, and it was the sun, and it was perfect.
It was one late summer afternoon in Paris that did it, standing in Notre Dame, seventeen years old, alone in Europe, nearing the end of her year between high school and university. Late light slanted in through the cathedral door and the rose window’s stained glass, the blues and reds variegated fire, the color deep and perfect, while Phyllis stood amid the polyphonic hush of people and listened to the deep-throated organ fill the cathedral to its corners, the music so loud and full it seemed to be projecting from inside her own gut—it was an unknown organist, playing desperately, with passion, as if their life existed only within the gyres of notes. In a way, it did, as they were auditioning to become the principal organist at Notre Dame.
It seemed, she’d written in her journal, that something had to tear—the music, the player, the organ, the universe. Or me.
Phyllis didn’t know if the organist got the job, but they sure got her. That moment—eyes closed, swaying, the sun blood-red through her eyelids, Notre Dame, Tocatta and Fugue—had seared into her like a brand, and thus when she learned that she was going to have a child, the knowledge that they would emerge to the sounds of Bach was close to follow.
“Vivaldi?” she said.
“That’s what I’d choose,” he said.
Phyllis labored to her feet and began making slow progress towards the bathroom, her huge belly a blunt bowsprit. “Well, it’s not your baby, is it?” she said.
Gerald opened his mouth to protest. Technically, it was his baby. Theirs. But he said nothing. He let her declaration hang in the air, appreciating its heaviness and finality, this laying of claim that he could now return to like an oasis for blanket exoneration.
But the tape didn’t play on the day of the birth, and her son never got to hear it. Phyllis only listened to it once more after the boy was in the world, in secret, years after he was born, on a muggy spring night while standing barefoot on the driveway’s cracked asphalt, holding the tape recorder and listening with the sound turned way down low, so quiet the crickets nearly drowned it out, her wondrous moment in Notre Dame—when it seemed the inception of anything might follow—galaxies away.
Joe Bataille, at his moment of birth, did not hear Tocatta and Fugue.
What he did hear was the last intelligible sentence his mother was able to form, the one just prior to the window-rattling shriek that heralded his entrance into the world:
“My god, Gerald, he’s coming out!”
(More specifically: she heralded his entrance into the Volvo.)
Her contrivance for him started herniating early—or, depending on how you look at it, right on time.
It’s tempting to say that his spirit was always meant to be peregrine because the baby decided—against the will of mother, father, and birth plan—to be born there, in the car, straight into his mother’s hands as she wailed in the passenger seat, as Gerald continued to drive laser-straight, 65 mph, even as he reached across the emergency break with his dominant hand to try and help Phyllis get her pants down. But it probably didn’t mean anything. It just happened.
This had not been the plan. But it turned out that the state highway’s slow lane, amid a hazy ocean of new corn that stretched and fell cleanly away over the far repose of the horizon, was as good a place as any. Not according to the baby—the baby didn’t know a thing, save for warm suspension, muffled voices, the aquatic symphony of the womb, and repeated in utero lashings from J.S. Bach. Since nothing went wrong, though, the slow lane worked just the same as any other birthing site would have, like the hospital in Defiance, the one they wouldn’t reach until the deed was done. It seemed, at that moment, that the highway had always been the inevitable location, because in that June landscape, the ticking of mile markers and the ghosts of distant cities slow-creeping backwards across the earth like cargo ships are the only references, and the machine-straight rows of corn flicker like a filmreel, and time doesn’t seem to move, and with no holdfast for the eyes you can floor the accelerator and still feel like you’re standing still.
He came out pasty, cried briefly, and did it all correct: he breathed.
“It’s alright,” Gerald said, “it’s alright.” He scanned the roadside for a place to pull over, but then decided against it. They were almost to the hospital anyway.
“My god, Gerald, we just had our baby in the car,” she said, her eyes wide, watery, flat as tin.
“Well, if it’s crying, it’s breathing,” he countered.
But then the tiny thing stopped crying. It lay in her hands and stared at the ceiling, as if transfixed, and she could not tell if the thing breathed.
Phyllis began shrieking all over again.
For the first time in his life, Gerald Bataille punched his foot to the floor and sped, just like Steve McQueen in Bullitt, if Steve McQueen in Bullitt had driven a fastidiously maintained 1983 gold Volvo stationwagon.
#
Phyllis didn’t like that he was born in the car—she’d envisioned a life optimized from start to finish, and she’d done her part with the vitamins and the Mozart (in addition to Bach, for good measure), and optimization included minimizing the risk of infection, having highly-trained people and expensive machines around, etcetera.
Gerald didn’t like it either—later that night, when things settled down, he stole away to the Piggly Wiggly, bought a box of Clabber Girl, dumped the whole thing on the seat, and worked it mournfully into the dark tongue of birth material with his toothbrush by the light of the moon.
Had they both been natural optimists, they might have looked at it differently: it was the perfect birth. Because straight away, the rolling tires and rushing wind killed any illusion of stasis, security, and predictability his parents had intended to create. It was the perfect introduction to a world whose narrative is constantly rupturing in unexpected directions, in which nothing seems to stay put—a world in which Joe Bataille, along with everyone else, would remain forever running in order to keep up with the changing world and everything in it.
