So here's another obituary for the cellist Jacqueline DuPré.
And it's about art again.
It's called a "Lament for Cellists and Jacqueline DuPré"
When the beautiful cellist Jacqueline DuPré died
of multiple sclerosis at 42, all the cellists grieved.
And one fell on her instrument, not as a sacrifice
but as an accident if there are such accidents.
She was hysterical, but there was no damage to the tone
and it only cost $1,000 to fix.
Remember, a cello is a beautiful shape
of air set in the right box and played by strings.
Played by strings, the player plays.
A cellist can't get close to it the way
a violinist does, feeling the air play the wood,
play the bones of his or her head as the violinist joins
the music to the brain with wood.
That's why some cellists dance with it like Yo-Yo Ma
because it is an outside music that they have to join,
as athletes of a different air.
So when Jacqueline DuPré died young,
her muscles dying on her first, it got to the cellists
in their very art.
Because they're distant from their instruments.
It can't go to their heads like violins.
With her, the music started distantly then it
got more distant.
Then the distance got to be the infinity of cello death.
The way a cellist I knew would drape his tux
around his instrument before he went
to sleep after a performance in a strange town.
So the cello could be the cellist through the night,
dead silence with a black bow tie around its neck,
so he could joke away the horrors that way."