I believe the best music is what we’ve memorized. I’m reminded of this when I listen to Bach’s cello suites, especially, the ebullient “Prelude” of Suite No. 1 in G-major. I’d like to believe – rather, I hope and would wish for everyone a piece of music with which to sing along in the morning. There’s something hopeful about it, even to a skeptical malcontent.
I don’t know what happens in my brain when I hum familiar melodies or harmonies with music heard in real time. It’s different from silent listening, I’ll wager. (I doubt there are any neuroscientists reading this; but if so, please chime in.) At least, it feels different from listening and, to me, it’s more satisfying. I wish it weren’t annoying to others – and it is, I’ve been told – but it’s something I can get away with early in the morning while I’m making coffee while the household sleeps.
The “Prelude” is pure sunrise, evoking image upon image of all the best sun-risings Mary and I have seen for the past three years while riding bicycles along Corpus Christi and Oso bays. There’s nothing predawn about it. It’s all full-disk revelation, as the Sun seems to “come forth like a bridegroom out of his chamber.” (Psalm 19.5) The final half-dozen measures choke me up almost every time I hear it, and that’s when the humming stops and something else takes over, perhaps something “spiritual,” but certainly something more than the sum of its parts. If God there be, then I guess God be that; and, if not, then it be Beauty writ deeply upon what might be called one’s soul.
There’s more, another dimension, I think, and that’s a kind of nostalgia – from two Greek morphemes, literally meaning “homecoming ache or pain” – a category of experience with which I’ve become more familiar day by day since passing my 70th year. It has to do with our story, Mary’s and mine, which we’ve been composing and recomposing since the late summer of 1983. Thirteen years into our marriage, we decided to live apart so she could move to College Station to pursue a doctorate while I continued to work at The Caller-Times. We sold our home, and I moved into an apartment behind my parents’ home while Mary became an Aggie.
Almost every morning for the next three years, I played the cello suites as morning music. Some movements of that Suite No. 1 are achingly evocative on that most achingly beautiful of stringed instruments. Personally, the music evoked longing I felt in those days on several fronts: to be with Mary, of course, but also to fulfill my vocation in the Church as a layman or, perhaps, as a deposed priest restored to active pastoral ministry. Such longing is a kind of hope, or so it seems in retrospect. It was reasonable to hope that Mary and I would get back together, someday, and we did; however, that other longing turns out to have been, let us say, at least a learning experience if not a deepening of self-awareness. Nevertheless, the nostalgia is real as it deepens my appreciation for at least three values I believe are universal: Beauty, Hope and Meaning.
We’re inclined to be glib about Beauty. I suspect we’re glib because we recognize that it’s a Universal, a category so broad and deep that it’s dauntingly incomprehensible; not just “in the eye of the beholder” or “more than skin deep.” After all, every human culture since The Dawn has generated ideas about what is beautiful; however, it’s always particular in human experience, intensely subjective and hardly ever the same over time and place. My appreciation of Bach’s cello suites, conditioned by my time and place in history, is a matter of opinion with which others surely disagree. My particular experience of the suite is mine alone, because of its nostalgic associations as well as its immediate impact on my life. I wouldn’t dream of trying to universalize my experience into an absolute statement about the beauty of this music. All I can say with certainty is that I believe there’s beauty in every note rooted in a quarter century of experience, which I remember nostalgically – the solemn joy and the excruciating pain of all those 25 years. In a sense, my hearing of the cello suites is a continuing though nonlinear commentary on the state of my soul, something I value as much as anything else in my daily life.
Hope, too, is an elusive concept, I guess because it’s manifested in ideas about the future, which is always unknown and unknowable. Hope, too, is as broad and deep as Beauty as a spiritual or philosophical category, but it’s always an abstraction. I can’t point to anything that is “hope” per se, although I’m certainly familiar with being hopeful or embracing Hope as a value that invigorates me, my community, my nation and the world. I’m willing to be wrong about this, but I’m not talking about “hoping for” something in the future; rather, I propose that Hope embraces the contingency of human existence with ideas that may or may not bear fruit, but which affirms existence itself as showing forth Hope as a value. For what? I don’t know, but if the Yiddish proverb is true, that we make plans and God laughs, then Hope is of the essence of our specific, particular daily existence, an inherent human value to be cultivated as an indefatigable quality of life. Hope, I believe, inspires resilience, as we’re witnessing in Kentucky and other states recently crushed to bits by tornadoes.
Meaning, too, is an abstraction, but it’s something about which every person has thoughts, feelings and aspirations. Meaning touches everything large and small on humanity’s scale of values, from the existence of all there is, including life itself, to the dynamics of particle physics; indeed, the smallest things we know of – quarks, for example – may be the most meaningful things of all. As for the universe, the largest thing we might consider, meanings abound as we hope one day to fathom time, space, gravity and “dark matter.”
What does it all mean? Well, that’s debatable, the most debatable of all things our minds conceive as Beauty and Hope. Meaning, then, may be applied in general to all things, but it’s also an investment we humans make in particular, such that every story is one-of-a-kind, and even meaninglessness is a topic for discussion. Bach’s Cello Suite in G is full of meaning for me and the story of my life. It may be – indeed, it probably is – meaningless to someone else whose story is animated by different but no less beautiful morning music.
Beauty, Hope and Meaning operate most powerfully in memory, which is also the locus of whatever might be “spiritual” about a human mind capable of internal dialogue, reflection and grasping the persistent illusion of Time as past, present and future. A good friend and professor once described such things as “perspectival activities,” and these three are by no means all there are. Nothing of which gives us an account of how the right and left hemispheres of the human brain operate, relate and condition each other. They are constructs toward something even more debatable – Truth, which mystics and philosophers tell us remains inarticulable as an Absolute.
In particular, of course, we’re each entitled to our own idea of Truth, especially when it comes to morning music.
The pelican papers 