Believers
and Non-believers
1.1 Atheism,
for some, is not merely disbelief in God...it is belief in no god.
1.2 The
possibility of "God" is strange and interesting, worthy of late-night
conversations. The impossibility of God is compelling, too, but it is
more a thing to discuss in the late morning, over breakfast, or in the Tuesday
carpool.
1.3 The
possibility and the impossibility of God are common preoccupations. The
possibility of godlessness, by contrast, is an underestimated conversation,
entirely unknown to most, and quite worth keeping within reach all day long; it
can usurp meals, sex, and sleep with equal force, causing some very young and
very old people to rise at ungodly hours, shaking their bedfellows into
head-ache-y complicity, at the very thought of it. That "there is no
common denominator; nothing holds it all together, nothing watches over us all
with pervasive care or purpose." It causes some to sing jubilantly.
"When there is no god--no singular and 'deep' ultimate source of meaning
and being--then we, as humans, will be urged into accountability for our
relationships on their own terms!" a tallish youngster shouted
incredulously one morning just before 6:00 am volleyball practice;
"relationships are the only thing by which we are defined and measured!"
squealed a jittery old man at a supermarket just before noon the next day.
2.1 To
many, being left with the universe as a disorganized collection of
relationships is just as scary as trying to walk out onto the surface of a
large body of water. What lies beneath? What's the deep "bottom line"
of morality? What will happen after we're done talking about God? In the
cynical shadows of those nervous questions, many people linger, doubting the
existence of godlessness.
We all have our moments of weakness. We desperately want God to exist in order
to account for something, to Create Agreement where none would otherwise be
possible, to have His Promises about the future. It's easy to fall back on
God.
2.2 Nevertheless,
those who are spiritually strong enough will accept the truth that surely we
all know in our hearts, even before birth. That no force of will is without its
imperfections, that nothing moves through the world without encountering resistance.
Nothing answers everything. There is a reality much larger than our
worldly hopes and desires for A God, there is a reality that transcends the
questions of those who fear death and meaninglessness. A swirling universe is
around us, ill-defined, more like a slippery forest of seaweed than a
symmetrical peacock's tail, much more like the
corporate-dairy-growth-hormone-enhanced breasts of a 21st-century American
teenager than the pulsing nervous system of a cosmically wise blue whale.
2.3 Belief
in "no god" requires faith...to have this faith, we have to accept a
godless universe as a sufficient condition for human experience. Faith is not
easy, but it is within reach. Don't ask for proof; just strive, in each new
blessed day, to accept ambiguity as your personal savior. Believe.
3.1 Godlessness
is right-side-up in every direction. The stories you remember aren't from
the past, and the things you strive for are not in the future. Your dreams,
with all their missing edges, false anatomies, and unbalanced non-sequiturs,
are all that you need to know about the truth, but you needn't spend daylight
hours rectifying their aesthetics, twisting them into a semblance of the
sensible. And your daytime illusions--all those perfect whistling notes
and whispered words that turn themselves around in your inner ear -- they are
not anything to be embarrassed of. You are not insane. In the very moment of
your most forgettable experience, you are acutely aware of the shallowness of
deep thinking, and you know, probably better than I do, about the impossibly
infinite depth of all first impressions.
From
"Piano Music, 1999-2001"
I've
written two pieces meant to explore tangents to the line of thinking above. The
first, Coda: "You are not I" concerns sentiments, expressed by Paul Bowles and others,
about problems of the afterlife and our bizarre capacity for "faith"
about the future. The first is titled in the complete-but-verbless sentence"
'Fors seulement...', for seulement condition." ; it reflects the troubles of anchoring a
love-relationship in the story of the connection between humanity and divinity.
Coda:
"You Are Not I" (1999)
"I often feel that something is about to happen, and when I do, I stay
perfectly still and let it go ahead." Ñfrom Paul Bowles' "You Are Not
I."
for
Paul Bowles, on November 19, 1999, on the occasion of his death the night
before.
Paul
Bowles died on November 18, 1999; National Public Radio told the news of his
passing the next day. After the
obituary, an archived radio interview with Terri Gross was re-broadcast. She
had asked Bowles if he believed in an afterlife. "Why?" he replied,
plainly, and would not elaborate when pressed. I wrote Coda: "You Are
Not I" in response to Bowles' persona in the interview: throughout the converstion, he seemed
to discover, with some anxiety, how little he knew about his own beliefs and
emotions. At the same time, his refusal to offer insight on matters unclear to
him was almost religious in its consistency.
Paul
BowlesÕ story "You Are Not I" (1950) is a short meditation on identity, told from the
perspective of an institutionalized woman who, in a crisis, slowly and
cautiously develops a plan to trade lives and bodies with her sister, who lives
in a nearby city. She succeeds,
during a surprise visit home, by forcing a stone into her sisterÕs mouth, perhaps
symbolically unloading the voiceless-ness of mental illness from one body to
another, reconfiguring her own memory of whose body is whose. She doubts the
transformation, though, because little details in her environmentÑinterior
decoration in her sister's home and landmarks on a return trip to the mental
hospitalÑfail to compare sensibly with her precise expectations. This woman, a strange mixture of
inflexible goals and a perpetually uncertain sense of the world around her, is
the character that came to mind when I heard BowlesÕ and GrossÕ recorded voices
trembling on my car radio. ("Éwhy afterlife (?), why 'why?' (?), why that
question (?), why now (?)É")
***
Coda:
"You Are Not I" was also a response to my other experiences of
November 19. I paid attention to unrelated
events, and remembered them:
(1)
It was the day that the Venezuelan baseball team, on a goodwill mission led by
their prime minister/pitcher Hugo Chavez, played against Castro's beloved
national team in Cuba.
(2)
Later that afternoon, a French breach of sanctions against Iraq was noticed
with displeasure by the US and Britain.
(3) 11-19-1999 was also the last date,
until the first day of the year 3111, that could be spelled completely without
even digits.
Finally,
a striking photograph was taken in November of 1999, and printed in the New
York Times Sunday Magazine
("What They Were Thinking" September 10, 2000), long after my work on
this composition. At some distance
from the subject, we see round glasses, thinning grey wispy hair, and nondescript
clothing; the woman shown has a largish body and an androgynous face. Some of her features are in shadow, and
most of her torso and legs are overexposed in the strong blurry sunlight of a
nearby window. It is an
image we are supposed to pity. The
caption reads, in part:
Karen
Edna Wallstein, Camphill Village U.S.A. [ a managed care facility ], Copake,
N.Y., November 1999
"I
came to Camphill Village when I was 20.
Now I'm 58 É Usually I smile, but in that photograph I was just waking
up from my rest hour. I read, and
I listen to my radio, and I sleep, sleep, sleep, sleep É Some people can go and
live in the city on their own and nothing happens to them.
I'm pretty weak to live on my own and get around on my own because I
don't know what will happen. I just don't know why some people can do
better than other people. Why is
that?"
(Emphasis
mine, interview by Catherine Saint Louis.)
Karen
Wallstein and Bowles' fictional character (whose parallel sentiments are in the
epigraph at top) feel bewildered and intimidated by the freedom and the
competancy of outsiders, especially with regard to the elusive skill of knowing
a kind of flowchart for one's daily environment. Bowles himself provides
another link between them with his defiant one-word manifesto
("why?") against speculation about the future. (The question was
about the afterlife, but his answer seemed to protest an enemy of greater
breadth.) In expressions that seemed to converge in a singularly potent
November moment, these three personas display an admirable humility. All three
lack the false confidence that enables "common sense" questions, and
the "everday" practices that separate sanity from illness. But this
tentative agreement brings new problems. Giving up our well-established private
pretenses--our sane "knowing what will happen"--means letting go of
myths about the self and the soul -- dismissing all the comforts that we build
on those foundations.
In
Coda: "You Are Not I" (11-19-1999), structures of rhythm and
voice consciously resist the formation of expectations about the immediate
future. Instead of such expectatations, an abundance of "present
moments" should emerge, which suggest multiple and contradictory
reinterpretations of the immediate past. I hope the melodic voice that emerges
from within this texture will reflect a common failure to know oneÕs own
memory, and past, as a reliable basis for identity. But the struggle is a quiet
one, and it is also meant to provide opportunities for release and freedom,
putting curiosity and openness in place of too-comfortable knowledge about
"what comes next."
performance (John Mark Harris, 2001)
***
"Fors
seulement...", fors seulement condition.
"The
term symbiosisÉis a metaphorÉit does not describe what actually happens between
two separate individuals of distinct species. It describes that state of undifferentiationÉin
which inside and outside are only gradually coming to be sensed as
different." ÐMargaret S. Mahler
for
Jacob Boehme (1575-1624)
The
chanson "Fors seulement l'attente que je meureÉ" ("If not for
thoughts of deathÉ")
originates in a musical tradition that can be credited with the invention of
Romantic loveÑa kind of love which resembles the erotic but which is supposed
to be entirely different. Courtly
loveÑas the troubadours portray it, drawing upon Christian notions of selflessness
and sacrificeÑoften meant devout faith in the ultimate importance of something
unknowable and intangible. Likewise, then and now, truly 'romantic' lovers are
supposed to dismiss as insignificant all that is sensual and corporeal. The element of devotion, the refutation
of world, self, and body, and the narratorÕs acutely passionate sorrow about
the loss of his beloved, are demonstrations of the kind of love Christians are
supposed to share with God and Christ.
In
the era of Ockeghem (1410-1497) and Josquin (1440-1521), imbedding secular
music in sacred compositions was an uncontroversial and standard activity, but
there has rarely been a more layered and fecund textual practice. Although the profane words (for example
Òa beautiful and merciless woman has defeated the body of LancelotÉÓ) are not
actually pronounced with the tongue, they attach themselves to sacred pronunciations, in the
fragmented but recognizable vehicle of profane sounds (e.g. the melody about
the (sexual) defeat of Lancelot). In this way they might reinforce the
ÔpassionÕ of sacred texts while complicating their religious emphasis on
disembodiment. These semantics might move in the opposite direction as well,
because poems of courtly affection were inclined to a Christian metaphysics,
aspiring in the first place to the same devotional and transcendent state. So, Western heartache is distinctly
'Christian'Éprofane and sacred are not, as we might assume, exactly
oppositesÉcould chanson melodies become icons of spirit that compete with the
liturgy for cultural attention? Or
is each a condition for
the other's ecstasy? (As in the
chanson: "If not forÓ/Óapart fromÓ the one, Òthere would be no hope leftÉÓ for the other. ) My translation of the antiquated French is
not what you would call scholarly:
|
Fors seulement lÕattente que je meure En mon las coueur nul espoir ne demeure Car mon malheur si trŽs fort me tormente QuÕil nÕest douleur que par vous je ne sente, Pour ce que suys de vous perdre bien seure. Vostre rigeur se trŽs fort me court seure QuÕen ce parti il fault que je mÕasseure Donc je nÕay bien qui en rien me contente, Car mon malheur se trŽs fort me tormente, Fors seulement lÕattente que je meure. Mon desconfort toute seulle je pleure En mauldissant sur ma foy a toute heure Ma loyaultŽ qui tant me fait dolente, Laz!
Que je suys de vivre mal contente, Quant de par vous nÕest riens me sequere. |
Apart from just waiting to die ThereÕs no hope left in my tired heart. For your sake I am so infected with sadness That no kind of suffering is absent. I am ended; I am sure to lose myself in you. When I can cry, I am alone in crying When IÕve given of myself, from
then on, I resent it in misery I am not truly living, not truly hoping Apart from just waiting to die. Your angry incisions are predicted by nothing Nothing that I could know, except, surely that,
to begin with, I have nothing to hope for, Apart from just waiting to die. |
We can't easily say
what meaning 15th- and 16th- century worshippersÑwho are
the mute (but resonating) bodies of this whole affairÑwould invest in secular
tunes emerging amidst a polyphonic Sanctus or Agnus Dei. The combination does invite us to
draw associations between similar kinds of glory (Romance and Salvation), but
they also draw each into a closer relationship with its limitations. Because of their shared dependence on
disembodiment and mind-body separation, especially in this song, the romantic
and the soteriological come together not competitively but symbiotically. (Strictly: "I would die without you.")