Cosmic Music

What do we mean when we call a person "musical"? A tune can be musical, like a symphonic melody; sounds can be musical, like running water or birdsong or the wind in the gutters. How is a person musical? Is it simply someone who likes music, or invests in equipment in the service of home sound reproduction? Or is it a person who actually plays an instrument? No matter - I consider myself among the first, an audiophile within a limited range of musical genres, ranging from Paganini, Palestrini, Puccini and Purcell and through (roughly) Schubert, Strauss and Shostakovich - what I consider the sirloin of musical history. I should in all fairness (and devotion) include Bach, Beethoven, Brahms and Bruch. I could go through the alphabet (Handel, Haydn) but you get the idea.

So I am not at all musical in the sense of playing any instrument, the explanation for that deficiency being quite simple; when I was in elementary school the opportunity arose to join the school band and take the first steps as a participant in the history of music. I mentioned this at the family hearth one evening; my father, with his customary heavy-handed patriarchalism, suggested that I might enjoy learning the cornet, an instrument that he had played twenty years earlier in his high school band. As he had suggested it with some force, I silently demurred. I have never learned to play an instrument.

In all fairness my father was the one who instilled in me a love of classical music. Every Sunday ('Sabbath' in our house), he would slip a stack of red vinyl 45 rpm's over the post in our 'hi-fi', each disc dropping with a splat onto the next as the symphonic movements developed and ceded to the next - Rachmaninoff and Schumann and Lizst and Mozart and Brahms - the Romantics figured large in our Sunday morning pre-roast beef concerts. Eventually he upgraded to LP's and the clack-and-slap of the 45 was heard no more in the land.

The Romantics were what my father knew and approved, and hence they were welcome of a Sabbath in a Calvinist Presbyterian household. The  pipe organ may have been another matter, smacking of it did of European cathredals and Catholicism and (even) Episcopalianism. And so I knew nothing of the symphonic powers of a single person until I was in my 30s and long freed of the encumbrances of Calvin. As it happens, the single instrument I would have ever wished to play. But an instrument having three keyboards and two ranks of pedals (not to mention two banks of stops) and looking like a commercial airliner cockpit, was more than I could ever master. I can still ride a bicycle but can barely add three words of Spanish to my vocabulary in a six-month.

My first introduction to its sublimity came late; in the 1970s I was living in a decrepit northeastern city whose manufacturing was dying or moving south but whose Catholic parishes were still numerous, ethnically arranged, and still maintained their well-kept parish churches with proper organs. I walked into a bar (well, no, that was subsequently and frequently). I was introduced to a priest, a large-souled, raffish and bibulous fellow, in short, all the qualities which serve to make a good pipe organist. He had, in his short tenure as a cleric, instituted a series of organ recitals throughout the various parish churches and managed to attract some well-known organists (admittedly within those constrained circles) to fill his bill of events. 

He was himself a fair, if not very disciplined musician. In those years I was living in the third floor of an old and very tall Victorian, not far, or not far enough, from the rectory of St. John the Evangelist where he resided. Some long departed tenant had installed an old iron bell outside my window, attatched to a rope which hung within reach of any vagrant, pedestrian or convivial cleric who happened by, and frequently I was awakened in the wee hours by a discreet ding. He would mount the stairs, proffer a half-full bottle of Chartreuse, and off we would go on foot to any nearby church to which he had been vouchsafed a key - usually it was St. John but not always.

The massive church door would creak open, we would walk in unceremoniously, clatter up the central aisle and ascend the narrow stairs above the nave to the organ loft. Side by side on the polished bench we would sit. He would open the lid to the stacked ranks of ivory keys, turn on the distant hum of an air pump, and strike the first cord into the deep silence of a dark firmament. I would sit beside him, back to keyboard, light a Camel straight, and feel the reverberations, through air and wood and solid stone, through the dark of vaulted space above, peals of Widor, Cesar Franck, of Jehan Alain's Litanies, of Bach's Toccata in D Minor. The cigarette smoke followed the music upward to the high roof. I was hooked.

My friend is dead now. I enjoy the music when I can, rarer of access now than it was then. But I have never savored it so deeply as when we were in a darkened and vaulted church, seated on a wooden bench, feeling the vibrations coursing through the bench, through my legs and backbone, lifting into the dark and uncluttered cosmos.

The Eternal Smile

It is a small head, about the size of my smallish fist. The face holds a subtle and pleasant smile, a Buddha smile, because it is a Buddha's head. It has the large, long-lobed and oddly rectangular Buddha ears. A distinctly Japanese Buddha. It sits on a bookshelf in my room; a bookshelf has been its perch since my earliest memories of it. The head once formed the finial of a stone post, I was told, and was snapped off and carted away by a twenty-something U.S. Navy sailor from the Pacific fleet, away from the boat on shore leave in Okinawa during the Occupation in 1945. I am certain it was not an act of drunken stupidity (only one in an astonishing constellation of stupidities), because this sailor only began his drinking career in abstemious neighborhood cocktail hours several years after I, his more bibulous firstborn, had begun mine.

It was in his effects at his death, the only one of his effects that I had any desire to cart away to my own bookshelf. So, spying it in a box, I did just that. And there it now sits with its eternal smile, its bald Buddha head smoothed by generations of adherents giving it a passing rub for fortune. Better had he been left in place but nothing lasts, not even peace.

It constitutes a bit of the furniture of my childhood. In childish fashion I once asked what it was and was told that it was an "idol." I knew what an idol was because part of my early family regimen was to hear my father reading us tales from the Old Testament, the only novel with which he was remotely acquainted. So I knew of Baal, and of Molok, the hollow iron image within which a roaring fire was built and firstborn babes (like me) placed in the glowing arms as sacrificial offerings. Given the range and depth of human depravity, I consider this one of the only facts to be garnered from the book. But this little stone head didn't seem, to me at any rate, to be an idol quite on the scale of Molok. 

I decided, at the age of about seven I suppose, to do a little theological investigation. So, gathering my sister and brother in the living room, I placed it on the floor in the middle of our small circle, and told (or dared) them to bow down to it (explaining first what I supposed idols were and probable consequences of any signs of obeisance). I forget now whether there was compliance or demurral, but I nonetheless got on my knees and touched my head to the floor, this being my rather standard idea of religious devotion. I wasn't certain what I expected might follow upon this blasphemy - probably some peculiarly antedeluvian scourge like leprosy or the clap. I remained unscathed, of course, but not unaffected - it was my first small foray into ecumenicity, a venture I am convinced none of my forebears had ever made. Atheism, as I see it, is ecumenicity in its broadest form. 

I don't think the young sailor who snapped the head from its place along the street thought of his act as one of vandalism. Possibly it was (knowing him as I did in later years) a kind of subliminal act of theological ravaging. The Okinawan Japanese were culturally inferior because they were pagans (ones who had recently lost a war) and pagans were idolators and ipso facto submerged in falsehoods of all sorts (the Old Testament being the real stuff). He was no more interested in their salvation than he was in their prosperity or happiness following on the Navy's departure from their heathen shores. It wasn't by itself an act of evangelical zeal so much as an act of cultural indifference. The zeal, the hidebound refusal of ecumenicism, the willful ignorance of difference, the evangelical's monopoly on truth, all of these hardened in later years. In that, he was a good American.

So the little Buddha head (I cannot think of him as mine, he belongs to himself and the world) is permanently displaced to a country that has scarcely known anything of harmony. Of the standard trinity of eternal sages, no one ever listened to Socrates; Jesus seems a facile fellow, co-opted to sanctify any passing brutal strain of nationalist primacy; and Buddha, remaining silent, merely smiles an eternal smile and awaits a visit from some solitary wandering soul who wonders what this is all about.