In love with your ghost*
As I was at the piano, massacring Bach last night, it got me thinking on our relationship with the past. I don’t mean our own pasts, which are thorny enough in themselves, but our relationship with personages whom we have relegated to the dead and done – or to some of religious persuasion, to the “to be reborn” and “not at all done” file - but you see the tangent of my thoughts, either way. It was jarring, at that instance (ok, many) of missed notes, that poor old J.S. Bach might have been unaware of the ravages that, not exactly time, but rather amateurs would wreak on his work. Would he mind, so much? What if he knew my reverence for the sublime passages, my thrill in the mathematical niceness – would that lessen his wincing, were he to hear me? I think it must, if he’s anything like me.
But it’s difficult to think of Bach as anything like me. We remember him, not as a man, exactly, but as a thriller of souls and a tester of digital dexterity. He is both more and less than the man who lived. We imbue him with holiness, or as a conduit to divinity; but, in so doing, we disregard the humanity essential to him, the humanity that is precisely the reason we revere him.
I think we do the same to great writers of the past: we see Jane Austen, Dorothy Sayers, P.G. Wodehouse et al. through the inimitable wit of their characters. But we do not see them as people. We imbue these past figures with a sort of inhumanity, in our acts of embalming them in the amber of their genius. Would they mind? Could we do it any other way?
And what of others from the past, those who held a closer sway on our hearts?
I was folding the laundry tonight and came to a dishcloth that my Grandmother had used. I’ve possessed said dishcloth for more than six months, using it happily and happily connecting it with my Grandmother. Tonight was the first time that my possession and use of it floored me, astounding me by the connection that it gave to her. We were never particularly close, but I loved her, and I respected the life that she had led. I hoped in that moment of connection that she would be proud of me, for the woman I’ve become.
I suppose asking Bach et al. to be proud of me is a bit much; I hardly think of them as humans capable of that emotion. I hope, at the least, that they are not chagrined by my woman-handling of their works; at best, that their souls rejoice that they have allowed mine to revel in divinity.
[*Name that tune!]
Howard van der Sluis said,
February 12, 2010 at 2:15 pm
I have a violin that belonged to my mother for years. I used it for a few years when I played in an orchestra in Ohio and would think of her from time to time as I played it. One day it occurred to me that since that violin is over two hundred years old, it has seen at least several careers and lifetimes and been many people’s violin. Many people have held it and maybe thought of it as their special violin for literally a lifetime and yet all of that is erased and unknowable… When I’m gone, nobody will know it was my mother’s violin and that it had an alligator case for 40 years, sat on the back of our living room piano etc. It will all be lost “like tears in the rain”, and nobody will ever guess that that bit of wood connects two piles of bones miles apart!